Full Circle (5 page)

He was the water, the bucket, the swinging arm. The centre which moved.

He was the River’s way.

B
RAMBLE DIDN’T
believe they were in the Weeping Caverns. There were too many stories about them — the entrance was supposed to move, certainly,
but it was always on the surface. This was just a large cave with water in it. She looked over at Medric, “So, if no one can
get out, how did the stories get told?”

He had no answer for that, but his hands shook as they slowly climbed down the rock wall to the floor of the cavern.

As she moved down the solid rock face with her saddlebags over her shoulder, she could feel Acton’s bones shift and slide
with each step. The movement unsettled her as nothing in her life had ever done. She had tried to pack them tightly but they
shook loose, as though Acton was determined in death, as he had been in life, not to be trammelled. As though at every step
he tapped her on the back, saying, “Remember me?”

It was bad enough to bear her grief for him; to bear his bones as well, to be a packhorse for his remains, was too much. She
wanted to be rid of them. Wanted fiercely to see him again, even as a ghost, and also wanted fiercely not to see him as a
ghost, pale and insubstantial. She thought it was a good thing the gods were driving her, because if it had been up to her
she was not sure whether she would have brought him back.

But she would complete her task and stop Saker. Kill him, too, if the gods were kind. And then, only then, could she stop
and consider what Obsidian Lake had done to her, and who she might be afterwards.

So if Lady Death tried to stop her, too bad for the Lady.

They reached the cavern floor with legs and arms shaking, and collapsed on a damp rock. When they had recovered they drank
water from one of the clear pools, water that tasted of nothing except, faintly, chalk.

“Follow the air,” Medric said again, and the air seemed to be curving around the high wall to their left, so that was the
way they walked, picking their steps between shallow pools and small spires of rock, past pillars and grotesque shapes that
looked, again and again, as though a hunched human figure had been turned to stone by the endlessly dripping water. Yet it
was beautiful. There were wings of rock, and towers and colours that glowed in the candlelight: cream and ochre and orange
and green. And everywhere, the murmuring sigh of water and air.

“Who brings light into the darkness?” a voice boomed from above them. “Who disturbs this holy place?” The echoes took the
words and grew them into an accusation, a promise of punishment, a death knell.

“Oh, Swith!” Medric whispered, but Bramble peered further ahead, holding the light high, although her heart was beating fast.
This was one of those times, she thought, when other people feared, but she had never been on good terms with fear and she
wasn’t planning to start now.

“Who wants to know?” she demanded.

“Oh, hells, Bramble, you might at least squeal!” It was Ash’s voice, coming from a platform of rock to their right.

Bramble laughed, as she felt the gods smile in her head and leave her to stream towards Ash. He was staring at her with a
broad grin, looking fitter and happier than when she had last seen him.

“I don’t squeal,” she said. “How did you get here?”

He shrugged as he walked to the edge to help them climb up. “The same way you did,” he said casually. “Enchantment.”

She nodded and let it go. If he wanted to tell her more, he would. She handed the candle to Medric and surprised herself by
embracing Ash. “This is Medric,” she said, stepping back. “He was a miner — helped me find the place I had to go.”

Medric stared at Ash. “Like scaring people, do you?” he asked.

“It was a fair question,” Ash replied absently, “I couldn’t see who you were.” He turned and waved someone forward from the
gloom.

Medric held the candle higher to reveal an old man walking towards them, making no sound.

Bramble felt a slight shock — he was dressed the way Acton’s people had dressed a thousand years ago: leggings and tunic,
long hair with beaded braids in the front, sheepskin boots with the fleece still inside. All that was missing was a beard.

He reached the circle of candlelight and smiled at them. “Greetings,” he said. “We are well met, it seems.”

A wave of cold went over her and she began to shake. She knew that voice. Surely she knew it, would know it to her grave.

“This is the Prowman,” Ash said to her. “Prowman, this is Bramble.”

The old man’s eyes were puzzled as she stood there in silence. She swallowed the lump in her throat and forced herself to
talk, although there were tears gathering in her eyes and her legs were still shaking. She had to force herself not to embrace
him, not to throw herself at him as she would have at Maryrose, or her grandfather. He didn’t know her, after all.

“He was a prowman once,” she said. “But his shipmates called him Baluch.”

Bramble stared into blue, blue eyes. Eyes that she remembered as clearly as she remembered Maryrose. Those eyes were bright
with interest and she could almost, almost hear the music that was no doubt going on behind them. Some kind of pipe music,
she’d be willing to bet, high and trilling. She was finding it hard to catch her breath.

Ash was standing very still, paler even than usual, as though he were looking at a puzzle that suddenly made sense but had
an answer he didn’t like. “You’re
Baluch?’
he asked.

The old man nodded, slowly, his face carefully blank.

Baluch.

Here. A thousand years later. Still here. Bramble was overwhelmed by a cascade of memories: Baluch as a toddler, reproving
Acton; Baluch as a young boy, a lad, a young man, a man full grown… Baluch whooping with laughter as Acton’s boat went
over the rapids. Baluch shouting with rage as his sword cut through his enemies. Baluch standing by the edge of the White
River, saying, “There’s something up north that calls me…”

“The Lake,” Bramble said, clutching at the only possible explanation so her head would stop swimming. “The Lake transported
you in time.”

Baluch’s eyes were alive with curiosity and a kind of pleasure, as though he enjoyed having someone know him.

“Often,” he said. “I come by my wrinkles honestly, but I’ve earned them in a dozen different times, whenever She had need
of me. I’ve skipped from time to time like a stone over water. But how did you know me?”

Trying to work out how to explain made her legs, finally, give out from under her. She sank down onto a rock, knees trembling.

“Thank the local gods,” she said eventually. “They showed me your face.” Which was true enough, even if it was woefully incomplete.
But how could she explain Obsidian Lake and her own, very different, travels in time? Baluch smiled as though some of what
she was thinking showed in her eyes and she smiled back, a rush of pleasure swamping her. Someone else who remembered .
. . It was a kind of homecoming, to look into Baluch’s blue eyes, as she had when she was Ragni, or even the girl on the mountain.

“Who is he?” Medric asked her softly, while Baluch went to talk quietly to Ash. Ash stood straight and disapproving, but listened.

Whatever Baluch said didn’t convince him. He shook his head, and Baluch slapped his own thigh, his voice growing louder. “I’ve
spent my whole life protecting the Lake People, from attack after attack!” he said. “Ask her!”

He paused for a moment, and waited. Finally, Ash nodded, but his face was still troubled. Bramble could understand that. Baluch
was, after all, implicated in everything Acton had done. It wasn’t easy to face your enemy and realise he wasn’t a monster,
after all.

Baluch clapped Ash on the shoulder, a gesture he and Acton had used often to each other. It made Bramble’s heart clench.

“Baluch. You know — from the old stories, Acton’s friend,” she said to Medric.

“Donkey dung!” Medric exclaimed. “He’s dead!”

“Apparently not.”

It was a bit much to take, she supposed, for someone whose life had until yesterday been as solidly sensible as a life could
be. But he was the man who had fallen in love with Fursey, so he
could
cope with oddity if he chose. He’d just have to. The trick was to keep him busy. And they should all be busy, because if
Ash were here and she were here… “I have the bones,” she called to Ash. A trembling began in her gut at the thought of
what they were about to do, but she ignored it and got up, forcing her knees to stay firm. “Do you have the songs?”

Ash hesitated, looking to Baluch, any remnants of hostility vanishing into a need for guidance.

“There are songs,” Ash said slowly. “But they don’t seem to be enough… in themselves.”

“When Tern the enchanter raised the ghosts of Turvite against Acton, she used her own blood,” Bramble said. “She sang the
song and then cut herself and scattered the blood on the corpses.”

Ash raised his eyebrows. “That’s not in the old story. It just says she raised the ghosts of Turvite to fight Acton, and failed,
then jumped off the cliff.”

“Her name was Tern?” Baluch said. “I remember her. But as Ash said, she failed.”

“She failed to give them fighting strength,” Bramble corrected him. “But she raised the ghosts well enough, which is what
we want to do.”

She knelt and took off her jacket, spreading it out on a flat piece of ground, and then slid her hand to the very bottom of
one saddlebag and pulled out the red scarf. It was the symbol of rebirth, and perhaps it would help, now, to bring him back.
She spread it on her jacket.

Her heart faltered. Stuck to the scarf, in the folds, were hairs. Horse hairs, from the roan. She had brushed them off her
own clothes too often to mistake them. Gently, she brushed them together into a small pile. There were only a few, but it
was as though the roan were with her, encouraging her.

Unpacking the bones was next. She slid her fingers gently over the curve of his skull, a secret caress, and the only one she’d
ever have. Enough. She drew out the bones as though they were just anyone’s, and laid them on the scarf, placing the skull
over the roan’s hair, to keep it safe. It was the first time she’d looked at the bones closely in the light, even in the poor
candle glow. They seemed ridiculously small.

“I had to leaves the leg bones behind,” she said, almost in apology to Acton. “I couldn’t fit them.”

Baluch crouched next to the scarf and put his hand out to touch the skull. His hand shook. “Acton,” he whispered.

But of course there was no answer. Bramble turned aside. She knew too much of what Baluch was feeling, and it unsettled her.
She wondered how much he had changed, living his life in snatches, moving from time to time for a thousand years at the whim
of the Lake. His smile hadn’t changed, or his eyes. Or that voice.

Ash was staring at the bones like a rabbit stares at a weasel, eyes wide and stuck.

“
Ash
,” Bramble said sharply. He blinked and turned to her in relief. “Sing,” she said.

“I’m not sure…” He looked at Baluch and lowered his voice. “She’s given me a kind of pattern of song, but not the words
and not the exact melody.”

Baluch nodded. “There are some songs which must be sung new each time. You will have to find your own version of what she
has given you.”

Bramble wondered if “she” were the Lake, but the men clearly weren’t going to say. Fair enough. She had secrets of her own.

Ash fished his belt knife out of its sheath and held it a little uncertainly, and began to sing.

The first notes, harsh as rock grating on stone, startled Bramble and made her deeply uneasy. She’d heard this sound before,
when Safred tried to heal Cael. It was the sound of power, which should have been reassuring given what they were trying to
do, yet it wasn’t. It just felt wrong.

Ash seemed to feel that, too, because after a moment he fell silent, shaking his head. “It’s not right,” he said.

“That song felt old to me,” Baluch said mildly. “I think you have to make it new.” His head tilted to one side as though he
were listening to something, someone, else. “You have to make it
yours
,” he added.

Ash nodded, and knelt down beside the bones. He put his hand out, hesitating, over the skull, then slid it sideways and rested
his palm on the curve of the collarbone. “Acton,” he said quietly.

Bramble remembered something and dug quickly in the bottom of the other bag for Acton’s brooch. She had always meant to give
it back to Ash at some point. This seemed like a good time — it might help him as it had helped her.

She knelt beside him and put the brooch down next to Acton’s skull. Baluch gasped. His grandfather had made it, Bramble remembered.
Eric the Foreigner had made it for the chieftain Harald to give to his wife, who had given it in turn to her daughter Asa,
Acton’s mother. And Asa had given it to Acton. Acton’s murderer, Asgarn, had ripped it from Acton’s cloak as he lay dying
and given it to his accomplice, Red, the traitor. And from there, who knew whose hands it had passed through before it came
to Ash? A thousand years of ownership. This brooch had come to their time by the long road, as though it had walked slowly
through the undergrowth of a forest, while Baluch had, as it were, jumped from tree to tree.

Bramble weighed the brooch in her hand as if it should have grown heavier with each year. She placed it on the scarf, next
to Acton’s skull.

“I give this back to you,” she said, not sure if she were talking to Ash or to Acton.

Ash nodded gratefully and put his other hand on the brooch, shivering slightly as his fingers touched the cold metal. “Acton,
I call you back from the darkness beyond death,” he said, and began to sing in the voice of the healer.

His first notes faltered, but when Baluch came forward and placed a hand on his shoulder his voice gained strength, the notes
and the words building, gathering power and authority.

It felt irresistible. The words were unfamiliar to her, although she caught echoes of the languages that Gris and Asa and
Hawk had spoken. The notes were not really a melody — they seemed more like half a conversation, a chant rather than a song.