Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (38 page)

There was a freshening breeze
as he'd started to climb. As he climbed higher the wind blew
stronger. On reaching the top it had become a howling gale and the
view he'd hoped to see was obscured by low cloud and wisps of fog.
He sat down with his back to a rock watching the cloud and fog
swirl past him. Shapes and colours billowed around, patterns and
stories, visions of new paths and new journeys. A mist vision –
gifted only to shamans.

The new har had returned to his
tribe knowing his name and his purpose. His tribesmates came to
greet him with wonder for he was greatly changed. Gone was the
short-spiked tawny hair, replaced by a mist-coloured cloud and his
eyes, once blue, had become all-seeing obsidian.

Mist pulled away gently. “Your
first breath-vision,” he smiled. “Now you try.”

Clumsily, erratically, Raven
showed Mist the story of his own name. He showed how as a child his
mother had taken him on her lap and told him the story of his
naming. Shortly after his birth, as soon as she was able, she had
taken herself and her precious bundle up into the forest. She'd sat
beneath her favourite tree, the one beneath which she was now
buried, and awaited inspiration. A black, glossy bird swooped down
and stood before her feet. He bowed low, offering her a gift of
fruit. As she accepted, the bird began a capering dance, stretching
his wings and drumming his feet.

“Raven,” she'd said. The bird
bowed once again and flew away.

She had been both pleased and
disturbed by this experience. Raven was a proud name associated
with warriors but she had also been raised on stories of the
Raven-Mockers. These were witches of indeterminate sex who the
tribe believed robbed the dying of life, feasting on their hearts
to add length to their own lives. In time she had begun to think of
Wraeththu as the Raven-Mockers and grew fearful for her son.

Mist drew away. “We do not eat
hearts,” he said, sadly.

“Nor do you steal lives to add
length to your own. You add to the lives of others,” Raven told
him. “Now finish what you've started and seal my changes with aruna
– for I am Raven and will not be mocked!”

Mist laughed uproariously,
flinging Raven onto his back.

“As you wish,” he said. “I hope
in aruna you find what you seek.” He breathed a single breath down
the length of Raven’s chest and belly, following it with the
lightest of touches with his fingers, igniting every nerve cell
along its path.

Raven gave him a look that
said, “If you don’t do something now, I’m going to explode.”

Mist laughed again, piercing
him, and Raven’s spirit was catapulted high into the sky, looking
down on the camp and over the mountains. He was momentarily
disorientated.

Beside him Mist said, “Come and
fly with me.”

Over the treetops, above the
resinous mists, away from the forests towards grassy plains and the
sea and then beyond, Raven and Mist’s essences coiled around each
other. On, across the lapping waves to a necklace of islands, long
drawn out ribbons of sand where long ago the forests had found
their way and made their home. Through the trees, across the sands,
past crazy wooden houses that reached up to the sky and tumbling in
the surf, free of the shackles of flesh Raven and Mist became lost
in each other and the landscape around them.

Then climax and a return to
flesh.

Mist pushed his own
sweat-soaked hair away from his face and turned to Raven.

“Better than before?”

Raven nodded.

“That place, the islands.
They’re important to you.”

Raven shook his head, “I’ve
never been there.”

“Then they will be important to
you sometime in the future.”

“Can aruna do that? Show you
the future?”

“It can. It can take you out of
time, all times become one, all places become one.”

“Amazing!” Raven grinned.
“That’s going to take some thinking about. But right now… can we do
it again?”

Mist laughed. “Give me a moment
would you?”

Raven settled down quickly into
his new life. The band of Sulh he had joined were information
gatherers, herbalists, anthropologists, and historians. Batalha was
the group’s memory.

They foraged for food, kept a
few hens in a portable run, made craft goods to sell and trade,
living as lightly on the land as they could. It was a way of life
that resonated strongly with Raven’s own.

Many days were spent with
Batalha roaming the forests, observing how the land and that which
lived upon it worked together. Raven told him the myths of his
people, the herbs they used for healing, the magical rites they
practiced to ensure success and longevity. All the while Batalha
hummed and sang softly to himself.

“Back in Alba Sulh they’re
creating a library” Batalha told him “The Great Library of Kyme.
The Mountain People and all they knew will not be forgotten.”

Other times Raven worked with
the artisans making jewellery and leather goods. In this way the
artwork of the Mountain People became absorbed into that of the
Sulh.

Always Raven was aware of the
presence of the warrior phyle there to protect the tribe, each of
them with their curling woad tattoo. Fen particularly held his
attention. Raven watched him now, out of the corner of his eye,
sharing a joke with another tattooed warrior, Fen’s mouth split
wide as he barked with laughter. Although he no longer felt watched
or mistrusted Raven was constantly aware of the Waterlander’s
presence.

He asked Mist about it one
day.

“Waterlanders are like that,”
said Mist. “Strong soul energy. They suck you in.”

“I can’t imagine a land made of
water.”

“Ask Fen about it.”

“I couldn’t”

“Don’t be a coward!” Mist
laughed, “You fancy him! Do something about it.”

“I don’t!” Raven spluttered in
protest. Mist cocked an eyebrow at him.

“I do,” sighed Raven,
“Dammit!”

Later Raven found Fen sitting
on the same fallen branch by the lakeside the he himself had sat
on, a long time ago it seemed, the night he first came to the
tribe. Fen was smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings in the
air. He acknowledged Raven’s arrival with a nod of his head but
said nothing.

Raven sat down beside him.
“Mist and Batalha have been instructing me,” he began.

Fen nodded again but didn’t
look at him.

“About Alba Sulh and The
Waterlands to the east.”

Fen cocked his head and looked
sideways at him.

“I’ve lived in the mountains
all my life. I can’t imagine what waterland looks like.”

“It’s wet,” said Fen. “There’s
a lot of water.”

Raven began to babble, “Only I…
Er... Mist said I should talk to you...”

Fen’s face split into the
broadest grin Raven had ever seen.

“That’s the clumsiest request
for a snog I’ve ever heard in my life!” he hooted. “Come here, I’ll
show you.”

Raven had become used to the
higher vibrational energy of the Sulh, his encounters with Mist had
prepared him somewhat, but now he realised that Mist must have been
holding back. Either that or he’d underestimated the strength of
the soul energy possessed by The Waterlanders.

Fen’s kiss nearly knocked him
off the branch. On a blast of power he was transported to an alien
land, wholly flat. Reed-fringed strips of land barely encroaching
on the vast expanses of water that stretched away before him. He
was, he realised, inside Fen’s head, sharing an oft-visited memory.
The Waterlander stood upright in a coracle, kept in balance and
moved along solely by Fen’s will.

It was sunset. Streaks of
purple, orange and crimson smeared the sky and reflecting in the
water beneath. It was impossible to tell where sky ended and water
began and all the while the haunting call of a curlew urged him
onwards.

“Home,” said Fen, deep inside
Raven’s head. “And the call of the curlew, I’ve been following that
for years. I followed it to Curlew himself, then to Megalithica,
then here to this mountain and now to you.”

“How could you leave a place
like this? It’s magical.”

“There’s magic everywhere you
just have to look – you know that. There’s magic here in these
mountains of yours.”

Later, lying spent in Fen’s
bed, the tendrils of aruna still caressing them, Fen told Raven the
legend of Avalona, the first city of Alba Sulh.

“No-one really knows how it
came to be there. It lies southwest of The Waterlands. Some say it
fell, fully formed from another realm through a rift in the fabric
of reality. Others say that a great red-haired king and his
red-haired sister battled with magic over the swamp lands and
created the rift. It’s supposed to be an amazing place full of
twisting towers and flying creatures...”

“You’ve never been there?”
Raven asked, tracing the undulating tattoo down Fen’s chest.

“No, the only one of us ever to
visit was Curlew and he was weird for days after.”

“Weird? Sounds intriguing. Can
we go there?”

“What, you getting tired of
your precious mountains, Mountain Boy?”

Raven punched his arm.

High on a cliff edge Mist
smiled at the scene below. The two of them stripped to the waist,
red gold skin and a skin so pale as to be almost blue, the bluish
tinge heightened by the coiling tattoo. Mist was amused; clearly a
competition was underway; Mountain people methods verses the
Waterlander’s way. Raven lay on the stony bank of the gushing
river, arm plunged deep in the water, Fen a little way off,
perfectly still, spear poised in hand, a growing pile of fish
between the two of them. Whatever the outcome Mist recognised a
chesna bond in the making and acknowledged that the tribe would eat
well that night.

Raven lay on a mossy rock with
his hands behind his head, Fen by his side, both watching as
Batalha trudged along the ridge line above them. Batalha had
appeared pale and insubstantial when Raven first came to the Sulh,
and as the weeks passed he seemed to become increasingly
transparent, ghostlike even.

“Is Batalha ill?”

“Not exactly,” Fen sighed,
chewing on a stalk of grass.

“It’s what Sulh scribes
do.”

“I don’t understand,” said
Raven.

Fen sighed again. “They’re a
strange lot. They seem to flit between this reality and others. I’m
not sure if they truly exist here. They gather and absorb
information, storing it, making songs and stories of it. Ask him
anything and you’ll get the most complete answer you could wish
for. But holding it all takes its toll. He’s near to bursting. He
needs to take aruna with another scribe so that they can send all
they’ve discovered back to Kyme.”

“Kyme? Oh, yes – the Library.
So why don’t we have a second scribe? So that they can, I don’t
know, ship home, more often?”

“Smart boy! We did have. He was
killed in a raid by the Uigenna.”

“When?”

“Several months ago, before we
came here.” Fen stretched. “Batalha needs contact with another
scribe and soon. Otherwise he’ll die.”

“So we’ve got to find him
another scribe.”

“Yeah.”

It came as no surprise to Raven
when a day or two later Curlew announced that the tribe would be
moving on. Mist had been meditating for days and had picked up
another roving band of Sulh further north up the coast.

“Looks like you’ll get to
travel after all, Mountain Boy,” Fen teased.

Efficient in everything they
did, the tribe was ready to travel in a matter of hours. The
caravan, an assortment of hara on foot, pack horses and carts stood
ready to leave. Fen headed a group of warrior phyle at the front,
while a similar group brought up the rear. Batalha, now too weak to
walk any great distance, was carried on a litter. Mist walked
alongside Raven.

“We have plenty of food
prepared.” he said, “and many items to trade. That should buy us
safe passage through Colurastes territory.”

“Colurastes?”

“Another Wraeththu tribe.
Relax!” said Mist, catching Raven’s expression. “They’re far more
peaceable that the Uigenna.”

Day in, day out the routine was
the same. Travel by day, rest by night. They kept to the woodlands
fringing the coast, occasionally travelling inland to avoid the
rotting remains of a human settlement. For food, they ate dried
fish and meat supplemented by what they could forage along the path
and what could be caught fresh.

Raven began to miss the warmth
and resinous scents of his erstwhile home but was fascinated by the
altering landscape. The leaves took on hues of burnished copper and
gold before falling as the long summer gave way to autumn. As they
travelled north, the winds became increasingly bitter. They wrapped
Batalha in animal skins and fed him dried fruit.

“What will happen if we don’t
find another scribe in time?” Raven asked Fen one night as they
shared a cigarette.

“Not sure. He’ll die is all I
know. Personally if I was carrying all that knowledge around I
think my head would explode.”

Mist’s predictions proved
correct; they had little contact with the Colurastes, the so-called
“Snake People.” Curlew parleyed with tribal leaders, offering goods
for safe passage and seeking information. Raven found the
Colurastes odd, vain creatures; their snake-like moving hair
disturbed him.

“Freaks,” said Fen, but
quietly.

“Yes,” said a Colurastes leader
one day. “We have seen a group similar to yours, camped inland on
the banks of a river, about two days away.” Curlew paid him with
the sinuous beaded snake charm he’d taken a fancy to and, in
appreciation, the Colurastes chief made them a gift of persimmons
and dried peaches.

The phyle found the other Sulh
exactly where the Colurastes had directed them, in a clearing by a
great river: a collection of painted tents and covered wagons.
Wrapped in animal skins the tribe came to meet them.