Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (13 page)

“Well, Aedan,” she would say. “You worked well
today and showed a much better attitude. I was really pleased to see you pulled
yourself together and did a better job of sweeping the porch. I think we are
improving you well. Tomorrow I want to see you doing even better than today,
and I want to see you smiling as you work. It’s not just the results, but the
attitude too. Smiling is the key. Sometimes humming a song. I’ll be watching
and listening for those tomorrow. But you are doing very well, very well
indeed.”

This was harder to bear than her anger. She was
really just exulting in her domination, securing her rule over him.

Aedan came very close several times to smashing
the broom across the table. This house was becoming a jail. If he hobbled out
for a walk, he would be confronted on his return with a tapping foot and a
demand to know what he had been doing.

But he had to depend on her too for the medicinal
herbs her garden provided, the massaging of his stiff and shrunken legs – in which
she showed more skill than his mother – his food, his bed and, at times, the
arm that helped to steady his tottering steps. She was an attentive nurse.
Having to lean on her arm undermined his right to complain, or rather, his urge
to scream. He wished he did not have to depend on her so, but what choice did
he have? Gratitude and suffocation held each other in place, but it was the
latter that was growing.

Harriet told everyone with obvious triumph that her
efforts were turning this delinquent into a more polished and respectable boy. Aedan
was convinced she was trying to turn him into a girl. She seemed to have done
the same with her husband who, big as he was, quailed under her stare and took
orders as meekly as a chambermaid.

Aedan found some comfort in being able to slice a
few earthworms into the stew on occasion, any spiders he found got dangled on Harriet’s
chair, and where else to put that smelly dead frog than in one of her spare
boots?

By listening to Harriet’s instructions and then
disregarding them and doing whatever he felt like, he actually learned to cook
quite well. Harriet generally shook her head in disapproval when she tasted his
dishes. “Underdone” was the usual pronouncement of judgement along with “not enough
salt” and “badly sliced”. Then she would down her portion and help herself to
seconds.

After a few weeks, Aedan arrived late at the
dinner table and a fairly typical scene played out.

“What did I tell you about being late?” Harriet
snapped.

“I was getting my boots on. Couldn’t find the
one.”

“Well you should have put it where it could be
found, now shouldn’t you?”

Aedan grumbled something about putting them on the
sill to dry and one falling out, but he said it too softly. He didn’t really
want to be explaining himself to her.

“Excuse me! Don’t you mumble at me, my boy.”

Nessa and Borr cringed. Clauman picked up his bowl
and headed out to the porch, something he had taken to doing in such moments.
When his temper was roused, he could be terrifying, but walking out on
conversations was another thing he was practiced at. He showed particular
contempt for these petty squabbles. Harriet followed his back with her eyes
before returning to Aedan. He was staring at his bowl, trying to hide within
himself, to find some quiet corner where his presence would not be offensive.
He just wanted to be left in peace.

“Are you sulking?” Harriet demanded.

“No.”

“Look at me when you speak to me.”

Aedan looked at her and sighed.

“Did you sigh? Ha! So you are sulking. Gave
yourself away, didn’t you? Don’t you turn your head away.” She waited for Aedan
to turn back. “Sighing is the first mark of sulking, and if there’s one thing I
know, it’s how to put an end to sulking. Now you snap out of this and fix a
smile on your face this instant or you’ll be scrubbing floors till midnight.”

He could no sooner have smiled than sprouted
feathers and begun laying eggs. So he scrubbed.

He began doing things poorly. Why, he was not
entirely sure. Perhaps it was a desperate attempt to keep some part of himself
from Harriet’s conquest of him.

It was this very imprisonment that sparked something
in Aedan. In a dusty part of his mind he began to remember that he was not a
mule – a drudge without mind or soul. He began to realise that he missed the
freedom of wandering through the trees, of racing the wind and laughing in the
exhilaration of a rabbit-chase, of searching the hills for mysteries and
listening to the forest for secrets, of climbing so high that he was afraid and
then casting his eye over a world far wider than it had appeared from the
ground, of wondering what lay in a direction and setting out to discover – of
pursuing a course that was his own.

So one afternoon, while Harriet was burning something
for supper, he slipped out and asked his father if he could join the men, then
hobbled out into the yard where he worked beside them on the jobs that his
crutches permitted, getting himself as dirty as he knew how. When Harriet found
him, she threw a mighty tantrum and ordered him to clean himself and get back
into the house where he belonged. Aedan’s reply was strategic: “My father said
I could work with him.”

Harriet glared at Clauman who looked back without
expression. Neither said anything and she stormed back into the house. Aedan
released a small sigh, wondering how long the respite would last. When he
turned, he saw his father was looking at him with a hint of amusement.

As soon as the work was done, Aedan limped out
into the trees, in search of the solitude he had so desperately craved for the
past weeks. It was difficult going. His left leg had healed enough to take
weight, but there was something wrong with his right. The pain when he stood on
it was acute, mostly in the knee. He hoped it only needed more time, but there
was a niggling worry at the back of his mind; the whole limb appeared slightly
shrivelled.

He moved through the woods and his thoughts soon
began to tug in other directions. After covering a very painful mile, he found
an isolated spot where the birch trees grew thickly and he could sit and let
his mind loose without fear of interruption. He had kept his feelings deep,
guarding them well from Harriet’s prying. Now they tumbled out.

Sadness over the events in the Mistyvales, the
invasion and destruction of peaceful lives, had gradually been giving way to
anger, a white hot anger that rose in him now and caused his breath to come
quickly.

For mere profit, men had brought death to the gentlest
and kindest person he had ever known.

He would repay Quin with a fitting violence, a
fitting justice. And not just Quin.

Lekrau, the nation that had been no more than a
rumoured threat had entered his life and torn half his heart from him. Lekrau
had become his personal enemy.

He realised how much he hated tyrants, the strong
who stood on the weak. If he had only been stronger … It was a thought that had
returned to him often in the past weeks. He needed to learn to face up to men.
He needed to grow strong, stronger than the tyrants that marched over his life –
Quin, Dresbourn, and even the one man who had begun it all …

Then, once he was able to keep his feet before
even the strongest of men, he would avenge her. And after that he would avenge
every person that had fallen to that hateful nation. Before he died, Lekrau
would know the sting of its own whips, its slave ships would find the bottom of
the sea, and chains would be turned on their masters. If no army was bound that
way, he would raise it. There was no solace to be found in hoping these traders
would avoid him, that they would pick another place, another town. That was no
better than wishing tragedy on others. There was a time when the hunter had to
be hunted.

One day.

Suddenly the thoughts were no longer idle ideas. The
images seared, fixed themselves in his mind. It was not the purpose he had
expected to hold, perhaps not the purpose his parents or even Kalry would have
wanted, but as he pictured burning ships and slavers hurled into their own dungeons,
there was a fierce stirring in him, a hunger that demanded action. No, she
probably wouldn’t have wanted this, but every time he thought of her – and he
knew it would happen often in the years to come, for how could he ever forget
her – every time, he would see those flames, and he would let them grow.

It had to start now.

Fighting against the pain, he got to his feet and
worked his way up to the top of a knoll that faced west, that faced Lekrau. He dropped
both crutches and grimaced as he took weight on the shrivelled right leg. Then,
throwing his fist in the air, he let out a scream of defiance that tumbled
through the valley and echoed between the rugged crags. It might have seemed a
small thing – the raging of a mere boy – perhaps even something a man might
have laughed at, yet there was flint behind it, flint that could one day set
whole nations alight.

The echoes faded, but in Aedan’s head they seemed
to grow louder, building, growling, sparking. When he returned to the house,
his step was firmer, his face grimmer, and something flashed in his glance.

He did not work in the house again and instead
remained with his father and Borr. Harriet voiced her growing concerns – that
he was losing all the ground he had gained, that he had slipped down the ladder
again into reckless, filthy and shameful ways. Aedan began to realise that
there were some people whose good opinion he actually didn’t want.

From then on, things changed quickly. He brushed from
his mind the dull passivity that had gathered there. He ate well and started to
exercise his shrunken right leg, overdoing it at first and causing enough pain to
rob himself of sleep for two nights. But when he found a bearable routine of
flexing, stretching and slow walking, he began to build the muscles without
damaging them. The leg still hurt, and sometimes he was forced to use a crutch,
but he was at least able to walk again. He took full advantage of this,
disappearing for hours at a time into the woods.

There had always been a wildness to him, but it
was like it had been uncaged and now grew by the day, despite Harriet’s frantic
efforts to tame him. Eventually she abandoned her project and regarded him with
surly disappointment.

As his evenings were freed, Aedan found he had the
time to resume his lessons with his mother. They read to each other from the
store of books Nessa had managed to slip in between her belongings while
packing. When the others retired, the two of them would translate stories and
jokes into Orunean, talking and laughing late into the night. Instead of making
him tired, Aedan found these times reviving his mind in the same way exercise
was reviving his body.

As Aedan’s strength increased, so did his father’s
restlessness. One afternoon, Aedan spotted a column of grey smoke a few days journey
back along the trail they had taken. When he reported it, Clauman dashed from
the house and ran to the nearest vantage point. He returned pale and tense.

“Time is up,” he said. “We leave at first light
tomorrow.”

The women were seated at the table when Clauman,
followed by Borr and Aedan, rushed into the house. Clauman told his wife in
clipped terms what he had seen, and informed her that they were to begin
packing immediately.

“But who is it?” Nessa asked.

“No way to tell at this distance. And we are not
waiting to find out.”

“Do you think they are after Aedan?”

Clauman’s expression shifted and his eyes turned
back to her as if he had been thinking something very different. “Aedan? Yes …
of course. Who else?”

Aedan felt his skin turn cold at the idea of being
dragged before a court with Dresbourn as judge.

“Is it more of that hullabaloo from the
Mistyvales?” Harriet asked in the way a nanny speaks to a tale-spinning child.

Clauman raised an eyebrow at her tone. He replied
without expression, “It seems they aren’t satisfied with our exile.”

There was a heavy silence in the room.

“Castath, you say?” asked Harriet.

Clauman nodded.

“Borr and I have been talking. We’ve had enough of
being marooned out here on our own. This was supposed to become a busy road. Instead
it’s been forgotten. So we would like to come along and start over at Castath
too.”

Aedan muttered something rude under his breath.

“We will take the DinEilan road, east of Vallendal,”
said Clauman. “Through the territory of Kultûhm.”

Nessa paled and Aedan shuddered as they now remembered
the original plan.

“Then we cannot join you,” said Borr, whose eyes
were large with disbelief. “How could you even consider that route? Haven’t you
heard what –”

“Oh hush!” said Harriet. “The quantity of stories
only proves that they are all nonsense. That’s always the way it works. The
more stories there are about something the more certain you can be that none of
them are true, or haven’t you learned that yet?” It was the nanny tone.

Borr dropped his head. Everyone else shifted
uncomfortably.

“Anyway,” Harriet continued, “that is the shortest
route from here, and I don’t want to be travelling when the baby gets bigger.”
She patted her belly and winked. Realisation didn’t come immediately, but when
it struck, Nessa leapt off her chair and threw her arms around her friend.

The men exchanged a silent handshake.

Aedan slipped away and, after checking that nobody
was watching, retrieved the little leather case from under the stairs, hung it
around his neck and tucked it under his shirt.

Borr and Harriet had a large wagon drawn by a
ponderous carthorse. They had to pack and unpack several times through the
night before they were satisfied. Finally, Borr strapped a few chicken coops on
top and tied a dozen goats to the back while the rest were freed. Clauman
groaned as Snore flapped his way up the luggage and settled himself bravely
beside the hens.

Borr and Harriet lingered a while as the other
wagon moved off. When they joined the trail, their faces reflected the thoughtfulness
of leaving home.

Clauman doubled back to cover the tracks and to
pin a note to the door. Aedan had watched over his mother’s shoulder as she
wrote what her husband dictated. The note invited visitors to make themselves
at home until the owners returned from a two week long gold-scouting trail. Aedan
hoped that one of the visitors would be literate. Anyone would wait a long time
for news of gold.

For ten days they travelled east, Clauman pushing
for speed, seething at every obstruction, peering back from the top of every
rise. The terrain grew more rugged and the land wilder by the league. Often in
the night, Aedan woke to the noises of nearby sniffing and the leafy crunch of
padded feet. Once, the camp erupted in a furious squawking and flapping. The
yells of the men and screams of the women were enough to frighten away whatever
had applied its very sharp teeth to the hutches, as deep grooves told in the
morning light. The next evening there was another attack. This time the growls
were deeper and the wagon shook with some violence, but by the time the men
approached with flaming branches there was no predator to be seen. It was only
when the sun rose that they discovered three of the goats were missing. From
then on they kept the fire burning high all night. Whoever was on watch had the
responsibility of adding wood whenever the flames dipped. They lost another
four goats when Harriet dozed off.

Near the end of the second week they reached a split.
Left led to a pass in the mountains and eventually to Rasmun. It was the old Orunean
road, forgotten and overgrown. They turned right, onto what was little more
than a vague suggestion of wagon ruts.

Mostly they were not sure if what they had was the
road or a deer track. Times beyond count they had to double back and find
detours around gullies or thickets the wagons could not cross. Twice they came
upon stone bridges spanning deep ravines. Clauman walked up onto the first of
them alone while the others watched in tense silence. Aedan could see his
father stepping across holes where rocks had lost their grip and plunged into
the churning river below. When Clauman came back he shook his head and opted
for a long detour. The second bridge was in better condition, though it spanned
a far more terrifying gorge. This time the detour would have been too long.
They led the wagons over one at a time, and all released deep sighs of relief
when the last wheels rattled off the stones onto the grassy earth.

At the foot of the bridge, Aedan found a stone
pillar engraved with symbols he had never seen. He scraped away some of the
lichen and peered at this remnant from a distant time. The edges of the script
were weather-scarred in a way that told of great age, but the symbols
themselves told nothing until he began to look more carefully. Some of the
shapes were almost like pictures – waves, fire, the moon, a bird – and he began
to wonder if it might actually be possible to understand something of the
meaning. He pored over it, full of imaginings, until voices called him back to
the present and to the receding wagons.

More and more regularly, Clauman sent Aedan ahead
to scout and find where the dwindling marks reappeared. When Harriet objected
to a child being given that responsibility, Clauman’s reply was terse: “I
taught him. He can manage.” Then he turned to Aedan and whispered, “If there’s
one thing she knows, it’s not to be found out here.”

Aedan laughed and his heart swelled. It was a
sudden togetherness, a sharing, and he knew how much he had missed working
beside his father. Clauman was often distant, even when near. But in that
little shared secret, that moment of understanding, the magic of a father-and-son
bond was rekindled. From then on, Aedan scouted with a will, dashing off when
sent and cutting across any terrain to reach a vantage point from where he
could discover the best route.

Hills grew around them as they approached the
constantly rising DinEilan Mountains. When they reached the foothills, the
colossal peaks filled a great portion of the eastern sky. Mornings were now
cloaked in a dreamy shade, and dew remained long on the grass until the sun was
able to clear the spine of the range.

The trail rose and fell steeply over the many
valleys and sometimes wound along the contours of great mountain slopes that
pushed out between the hills. Aedan often found his eyes drifting from the road,
drawn up the grassy banks that rose higher and steeper until at last, when it
looked as if they would fall back on themselves, they gave way to sheer walls
of grey rock. The precipices were stern in aspect and bewildering in size –
when they could be seen – for they were lost more often than not in mist and cloud.
It was the first time he had been at the foot of one of the great mountains,
and he knew now why there were so many poems about them. He also knew, without
bothering to attempt it, that it would never be possible to squeeze them into
words.

The shapes of the peaks, oddly enough, were more
obscure from close. They hardly resembled the names they must have been given
from a distance – the Red Fist, the Bullhorns, the Chariot, the Three Sisters.
The horns looked as blunt as the fist from here and the sisters were nothing
alike. This, however, did not take away from their impressiveness, as each day
they soared higher and higher over the approaching travellers.

The wagons splashed and clattered over rocky beds
of young, shallow rivers and creaked up the ridges where the tough stalks of
dense tussock grass sighed in the wind.

From here they were finally able to look out over
the great expanse of Lake Vallendal, a body of water so vast as to be more of
an inland sea. Aedan had often heard of the great lake. Many myths and
adventures surrounded it, some of which played out in his imagination as his
eyes took in the great reaches, like the fleet of fishing boats that sank in a
storm and were said to now sail beneath the water, searching for the harbour.
When the lake was still, it was a giant mirror cracked only by the occasional
breaching fish or a busy fleet of ducks, but when the wind was restless, the
choppy water looked dark and deep and full of mysteries.

The mood of the party grew heavier as they progressed.
Clauman’s eyes cast about in all directions, not just behind. They were now in
the heart of DinEilan – the territory of bears and wolves said to be unusually
bold and vicious, and soon they would enter the lost realm of Kultûhm.

Travelling so near to the peaks, they often woke in
thick mist that would slip off the rim of the mountains and glide down through
the valleys during the night, swallowing the slopes and woods in a murk of
quiet secrecy. It made travel far more dangerous. Aedan never ventured far
ahead in these conditions for fear of getting lost in the vastness of dim,
shrouded hills.

The day was just beginning to clear when Nessa
exclaimed and pointed to a stand of trees a few miles up the valley they were
crossing.

“Look! They are as big as the pearlnut tree.”

Even at a distance it was clear that the trees
were giants, swaying with ponderous gravity in the wind that caused lesser
trees to shake and shiver. It was not just the trees that were oversized – even
the surrounding scrub and wildflowers stood as thick and tall as reeds. The
island of strange growth reminded Aedan of the way grass springs up near a seep
or over a patch of rich soil, but he had never known water and compost to
produce such growth.

Aedan wanted to explore, but Clauman kept him
back, eager to push on and leave the area by nightfall.

Aedan slept fitfully that night. It was a little
before dawn when something drew him from sleep. He sat up and listened. A
chattering river leapt down its rocky bed nearby, a few crickets creaked, there
was a muffled pop from the sleeping coals in the fireplace – somebody, probably
Harriet, had let it die out again.

That was not good. He listened now with a sense of
alarm. It had been something else, something that had not belonged …

A huge sound filled the air. He jumped to his
feet. The distant reverberations of something between a bellow and a howl shook
in his chest. The tone was floating and mournful, but full-throated, deep and
resonant.

Clauman had his head cocked. He was listening too.
Nessa’s eyes were wide open.

“What is it?” Aedan whispered.

It boomed again. Far away, yet loud enough to
rouse any sleeper. Borr and Harriet, however, slumbered on.

“The pattern of the call reminds me of a woodland
fox,” Clauman said, not whispering, “but it’s obviously too deep, too big. It
must be something like a bear, though I don’t know any that call in this way.
It is probably an animal that we don’t see further west, and it’s definitely
something with a big throat.”

“It sounds lonely,” said Aedan.

Though it was dark, the embers illuminated Clauman
well enough to reveal a hard look.

“Don’t you get any ideas about going out there.
It’s probably a lonely stomach and you’ll fill it nicely. This is not the
Mistyvales. We don’t know this area and some of the stories just might … You
stay put.”

With that, Clauman got up and began to rouse the
fire and boil water, stamping his feet and cracking branches as loudly as he
could. Sleeping on the watch was something he was not prepared to accommodate. Aedan
knew there would be no point lying down again, so he rolled up his blanket and
sat on it in front of the reviving flames as a grey dawn crept in. But that did
nothing for his restlessness, so he climbed a tree, hoping to see through the
holes that were torn in the mist from time to time. All he could make out were
leaves and a few tree tops. When he was slick with an icy film of gathered mist,
he dropped down through the branches and tucked into a breakfast of boiled maize
crush – a simple porridge, but delicious.

The deep hooting call ceased, but Aedan could not
shake a feeling that made him want to constantly check behind him. As soon as
his bowl was cleaned and his blanket packed, he scuttled up the tree again in
the hope of glimpsing the strange animal. But as he hung in the mist, another
thought crept towards him – the fortress of Kultûhm could not be far ahead.