The Moonshawl: A Wraeththu Mythos Novel (30 page)

‘Rey said the same,’ Myv
murmured bitterly. ‘Then he was gone.’

I paused for a moment, then asked.
‘Myv... have you noticed anything strange at home recently, similar to the
woman you just saw?’

‘There has always been...
strange things,’ he replied.

‘What like?’

He shrugged. ‘Feelings, mostly,
not all of them good. Sometimes I see shadows that move, or pale things moving
within shadow. Rey told me they were part of the past, that I shouldn’t mind
them.’

‘And he told you not to speak
about them as well?’

Myv nodded. ‘It’s best the
others don’t know. I know my hostling worries a lot. He hides it, but I can
hear him thinking. He dreams badly too.’

‘Can you see his dreams?’

‘Only by accident sometimes. I
don’t try to, because they’re horrible. Monsters without faces that can
scream.’

‘Has he always had these
dreams?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think he
remembers them when he’s awake.’

‘Let’s hope not.’ I took Myv’s
shoulders in a strong hold. ‘Listen to me: I’d like you to take extra care at
home now. Did Rey teach you anything about self-protection?’

Myv looked almost insulted.
‘Tiahaar, I have
always
done that.’ He paused. ‘Is something going to
happen?’

‘Yes, I think it is. I’m going
to see your hura, Medoc, tomorrow. Again, please don’t mention this to anyhar. I’ll
tell you what I can afterwards. I know this involves your family, Myv, and I
won’t hide things from you if I can possibly help it.’

The harling’s eyes had widened,
excited. ‘Is it to do with that woman upstairs?’

‘Yes, I believe so. She has
something she wants to tell us about your family’s history, and I’m hoping that
will help us deal with what’s building up now.’

‘It’s me, isn’t it?’ Myv said,
his shoulders slumping. ‘Rey warned me things might change as I grew older.’

‘Yes, I think you’re part of it,
through no fault of your own. But I also believe it isn’t something we can’t
deal with. Do you trust me?’

Myv drew in his breath,
straightened on his chair. ‘Wyva asked the dehara for a hienama. You came to us.
I
have
to trust you.’

Although I’d planned to ride part of the way home
with Myv, I now let him leave the tower ahead of me, mainly because I knew he’d
want to ask more questions about what he’d seen and about his family’s past. I
didn’t want to deal with this because I didn’t want to lie to him, but neither
would I feel comfortable confiding in him fully just yet. It was his right to
know, of course, but he was still so young and what I’d sensed in the Mynd, and
in the landscape itself at certain times, was cruel and strong. I’d prefer not
to have Myv tested by that at such an early stage in his training. Something
had awoken and had come inside the Mynd, perhaps
back
inside. I watched
from the kitchen window as Myv rode his pony back into the forest. He was a
sturdy soul. I hoped this was enough to keep him safe.

Rinawne arrived early, and despite our air-clearing
at the weekend, I could tell he was trying to disguise a fretful state of mind.
I reminded myself he was my ally and friend. He wanted more than I was prepared
to give him, but appeared to have accepted that situation gracefully. He
deserved my full attention. Yet even so, I had to fight the sly little thoughts
that slipped through the cracks in my mind, which selfishly wanted only to
think about Nytethorne Whitemane. It was a difficult evening.

Over dinner, we made plans to
visit Medoc the following day – the Wyvern domain was around a two-hour ride
from Gwyllion if we went at a steady pace and didn’t exhaust the horses. Wyva
would be fully occupied with his community meeting until mid-evening. After
farming out all his daily chores, Rinawne would have the entire day to himself.
But behind our light-hearted discussions I could sense that Rinawne’s
discomfort lay brooding. He merely played with his food, eating little. I
decided to tell him about the woman I’d seen – but for now omitting to mention
Myv had seen her too – and my idea for drawing her out. ‘She must know
everything,’ I said.

Rinawne frowned at me, a fork
drooping from his hand. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about her before?’

I spoke without hesitation, and
gilded my words with a white lie. ‘Well, I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but I
glimpsed her again earlier. I’ve never sensed her during the day before. Maybe
she’s the obvious key to everything, which I’ve overlooked.’

‘Well, yes, I’d say she sounds
pretty important! Can we go to the bathroom later? See if she’ll show herself to
me?’

‘I think – if you’re serious
about that – you should go alone. Two living energies would be too much. I
sense she’s tenuous, even if her ability to manifest is strengthening.’ I
smiled at Rinawne over the table. ‘I take it your scepticism has taken
something of a beating?’

He grimaced, nibbled a morsel of
food. ‘You could say that.’

But my ghost didn’t want to meet
Rinawne. Although he spent nearly half an hour sitting in the dark there after
midnight, he saw and sensed nothing. We’d spent most of the evening in bed,
which had taken considerable effort on my part. I’d had to guard my thoughts,
and withhold myself during aruna, because all I could think about was
Nytethorne. Rinawne must have known I was holding back. I wasn’t happy with
myself over this.

I lay staring at the ceiling
while, a floor below me, Rinawne tried to commune with my peculiar visitor. I realised
that despite my best intentions, I wasn’t remaining as impartial and sensible
about Nytethorne as I’d so smugly thought. My muse? Ha! Where was this higher
feeling my teacher had spoken of so long ago? I didn’t want to be this har who
fell into love stupidly, as if unable to avoid bottomless pits along the path
of his life. I’d learned these passions led only to disruption and misery. When
I fell, I fell fully, headfirst, heedless of danger or consequence. These
passions, when they take a hold, have a life of their own and will not be
denied. They put their hands over their ears and sing loudly to themselves to
drown out the voice of reason. And now I could feel this creeping up on me, and
my sanity stood like a horrified bystander, watching the inevitable collision
draw close.

Rinawne left early, around one,
because of the fairly long ride ahead of us the next day. I went to bed after
clearing the kitchen, which didn’t take long. By half one I was asleep. By quarter
to two, I was wide awake, sitting up in my bed, my heart pounding as if I’d
been running. The air was still and watchful around me. I got out of bed and
faced the stairs.

Chapter Seventeen

I knew it was time. The tower didn’t speak to me;
it didn’t have to. In the stairwell, there was an underlying calm to the air,
yet also a subtle nuance of challenge. The light was bluish, the narrow windows
channelling starlight. The bathroom door stood ajar. There was no sound but the
ticking of the clocks, which in themselves created a strange orchestra. All
sound from outside was muted. She was there, waiting for me.

I pushed open the door, which
creaked alarmingly loudly, not a single creak but a series of small ones. I
heard a sigh that swept around the room like steam. She was lying in the bath.

I approached, my breath stilled.
All I could see was the back of her head and the dark water. She had cut her
wrists, of course. The image was in black and white, but then there were
splashes of dark crimson within it – the water itself remaining like ink. A
smudge of red upon her pale shoulder. A few scarlet spots on the black and
white tiles of the floor, and there the blade she’d used, with a rime of ruby
along its cutting edge. The clocks ticked on, marking the hour of her passing.
As she’d sunk from life, so her breath had matched the rhythm of the clocks,
but becoming slower as they had not.

I looked into her face – her
head had drooped onto her right shoulder. She had been lovely, as I thought.
What had driven her to this? The answer was of course the answer to everything,
or at least part of it. Then a whisper came to me, and I saw in fact that her
lips were moving.

‘I don’t want to stay here.’

I wondered why she’d been held,
in this moment between life and death. Had she done this to herself, or had
some other force inflicted it upon her? I knelt beside the bath, my knees in
her blood.  ‘If I can help you,’ I murmured, ‘I will.’

She said nothing more for some
moments, and I wondered whether I’d heard all I was going to hear, but then she
sighed again. ‘Cut it,’ she whispered. ‘Cut me free.’

‘Cut what?’

‘The cord of time.’

I knew this was
my
time,
and whatever suffering she’d endured had led to this moment, me kneeling beside
her in this room of red and black and white. ‘Speak to me,’ I said. ‘In order
to free you, I need to know about the past. Can you tell me what I need to
know?’

Her lips trembled, but her head
did not lift nor her eyes open. ‘Cut it... Can’t speak here in this midden... Don’t
want to...’

I had to steel myself, because
only a heartless torturer could do this without flinching. ‘You must tell me...
Who are you?’

For a moment there was only the
sounds of the clocks, and her shallow breath, which filled the whole room, felt
rather than heard.  Then: ‘Arianne.’ The beautiful word was horrible coming
from that broken body.

‘Arianne, I am Ysobi. Why did
you do this to yourself?’

There was a distant echo of sad
laughter – hers, although it did not derive from what was left of her in the
bath. And yet the voice, when it came, was stronger. It appeared to emerge from
what lay in the bath, and
was
her voice, yet the flesh did not shape the
words, it was merely a conduit. ‘Why does anyone? Certainly not because I am
happy and my life full of joy.’

‘Do you live at Meadow Mynd?’

‘Not any more. I did. Now I am
here, and now it is over. But I’m trapped. Cut it!
Cut it
!’

At this moment, something
occurred to me, and I spoke from instinct. ‘You are dead to mortal life,
Arianne. There is no need to remain in this terrible moment. You are free to be
what you choose. I have seen you standing in this room. Get out of the bath.
Nothing’s holding you there.’

For some seconds, everything
stilled, even the clocks, as if holding their breath. I experienced a brief
stab of pain behind my eyes, and my sight was occluded for a couple of seconds.
Then it cleared, and I saw there was no one lying in the bath. Had I released
the poor creature before I’d interrogated her? I hadn’t thought she’d just
disappear like that. Then I became conscious of being watched and got to my
feet, turned round.

She stood at the window, illumined
by starlight; not a ghost, but a woman at the end of human days, dressed in
dark shirt and trousers, heavy boots, her long hair pinned up on her head,
somewhat unsuccessfully. I glanced back at the bath; it was empty and clean.
When I turned once more to her, she was gazing out of the window at the forest
below.

‘How beautiful the land is at
night,’ she said, one hand pressed against the glass.

‘Do you remember all that
happened?’

She laughed bitterly. ‘My curse
not to forget.’

‘Will you tell me about it?’

She stared at me. ‘This is
strange. I feel alive, a person, but I’m not, am I?’

I didn’t feel as if I were
conversing with a spirit, but a real living woman. The clocks were ticking
again, perhaps holding her together, anchoring her here. ‘To be honest with
you, Arianne, I can’t answer that. I wouldn’t say you’re a ghost as such, in
the traditional sense, because usually they can’t communicate so freely.
They’re generally just memories we can see. I think this room allows you to
talk with me, the part of you that still lives, perhaps the greatest part of
all, which we’re not meant to know about in our mortal lives. But that’s not
what I want to ask you about.’

She smiled sadly, gazed at me, a
woman conscious of her own beauty yet not vain about it. A natural. This
disturbed me, because I didn’t recognise traits of Wyvachi within her, but bizarrely
of Whitemane. Even by starlight, I could tell she was darker skinned than the
Wyvachi.

‘You’re one of them, aren’t
you?’ she said, matter-of-factly.

I knew what she meant. ‘Wraeththu?
Yes. But not one of the kind you ever saw. A hundred years or more have
passed.’

‘I can see that you’re
different, very different.’ She sat down on the tiles and patted those in front
of her. ‘Come here, by me.’

I sat down in front of her,
gazed into her dark eyes. Still that look of the Whitemanes about her, their rich,
sensual beauty. Was she an ancestor of theirs?

‘My name,’ she said, ‘is Arianne
Wyvern, widow of Tobias Wyvern. I came to their house from across the river,
because there is a bridge between our families.’

‘You were once of the
Whitemanes?’ I asked, somewhat breathlessly.

‘That wasn’t our family name.’
She frowned. ‘I find it hard to remember, because everything across the bridge
is hazy.’ She rubbed her face. ‘Let me think... My name... yes, it was once
Arianne Mantel.’

‘What happened to the Wyverns when
the Wraeththu came?’

Arianne shook her head.
‘Terrible things. My sons were taken, my husband killed, many others also. My
daughters...’ She pressed her hands to her eyes. ‘It was yesterday, yet a
hundred years ago, and it feels to me like both.’

‘We have all the time we need,’
I said. ‘I want to know... all of it.’

What she told I later wrote down, sitting up for
the remainder of the night, because I knew if I delayed the account through
sleep I would forget details. She talked for perhaps two hours, but in that
time, concisely, told me the history. Now it is a chronicle, in print.

The matriarch of the Wyvern family in the early
days of Wraeththu aggression was Vivyen Wyvern. She had been a great socialite
in her youth and was known as Vivi to friends and family. Her husband had died
when fairly young, through one of the diseases that ravaged humanity at that
time.  She had three sons: Vere, Tobias and Erling. Tobias, the middle son took
a wife – controversially – from ‘across the river’ from another land-owning
family, the Mantels, who were regarded locally as eccentric and wild. They were
not local people but had come from somewhere else. Arianne Wyvern, nee Mantel,
had six children with Tobias, four boys and two girls; this was a boon in days
when human fertility was waning. For this reason, Arianne was much loved and
revered by the Wyverns, and regarded in some way as sacred. It was commonly
assumed that Arianne’s husband would take over the family once Vivi passed on,
as the eldest son, Vere, was sickly. As well as physical illness he was
mentally delicate, and for years had had to be kept confined to the house
because of his occasional ravings and other eccentric behaviour.

As human society continued to break down and the
first horrifying rumours of the Wraeththu began to circulate, many human
communities reverted to a kind of feudalism, since the remaining (very few) old
landed families were often prepared to take local people into their estates and
fortify them against threats. Generally, this threat was all too human; looters
were common. Both the Wyvern and Mantel estates became fortified in this way,
although there was much commerce between them. Differences were put aside in
the face of common peril. They made a vow to defend each other’s families, and
the people dependent upon them, from the specific threat of Wraeththu.

Family members from far-flung corners made their
way to these estates, seeking shelter and safety. Many had lost their homes.
Vere, like some demented prophet, told anyone who would listen that Wraeththu
would soon over-run the entire world and that all was lost for humanity. Vivi
refused to countenance this outrageous idea, believing Vere’s pronouncements to
be no more than fanatical drivel. She strengthened her land’s fortifications.
The Wyvern wall could be seen from far away. Beacon towers were built on both
sides of the river so that the Mantels and Wyverns could warn each other of
attacks and if necessary send aid. They had many fit and able fighters between
them, prepared to fight to the death for their land and homes.

For years, no Wraeththu presence
came close to their isolated corner of Alba Sulh, and some among the families
dared to think the plague had passed them by. They believed they were safe
within their walls and alliances. What they had not accounted for was the Call.

One midsummer, it came. The air
became very still, all animals and birds were silenced. Sentries on the estate
walls were alert for enemies creeping towards them. Great torches had been lit
so that none could hide in the immediate countryside. But no enemies revealed
themselves. Vivi herself patrolled the wall, her hunting hounds beside her, but
no one saw a thing. They just
felt
it. From the house came the eerie
chanting of Vere Wyvern, uttering prophecies of doom. Vivi is reputed to have
said to her estate steward, ‘Either you silence that boy in a civilised way or
I will do so permanently.’ (Vere was at this time over forty years old.)

Vere
was
silenced, not by violence but by a
drug that Arianne gave to him. The night passed without apparent incident, but
in the morning the beds of Arianne and Tobias’s sons were empty. Kinnard,
Medoc, Gwyven and Peredur: gone. No one had heard or seen anything. At first,
there was an intensive search, people believing the boys were hiding because
they’d been afraid, but they were not to be found. A rider came from across the
river to say that several of the Mantel boys had also disappeared, among them
Bryce, Thorne Mantel’s eldest son.

‘They will be found,’ Vivi
declared furiously. ‘If we have to scour every inch of this county, they will
be found.’

Arianne, silently, left the
family gathering and went to Vere’s room. She woke him and asked, ‘Were my sons
taken, Vere?’

He replied. ‘I don’t wish to
wake from the next sleep you give me, and pray you may gift your sons with a
similar release.’

This was all she needed to know.

Arianne returned to the family
and delivered the news. Predictably, Vivi would not believe it. The boys could
not be snatched from a secure stronghold in plain sight. There was no way
enemies could cross the wall unseen.

‘Then search for tunnels,’
Arianne said dully, but she sensed they had come by no means known to
humankind.

Vivi ordered a search of the
estate at once, as did the Mantel patriarch, but no trace of tunnels was found.

The Mantels were indeed eccentric and wild, and
also different to the Wyverns in other ways. They were not ‘old blood’ in a
nobility sense, and had come into money some time earlier, which had enabled
them to purchase their estate. They came from what Vivi regarded as
‘disreputable stock’, and because of this they did have means at their disposal
to conduct a different kind of search to anything the Wyverns could attempt.
Their wily scouts, underworld bred, reported that a large gathering of
Wraeththu was camped twenty miles or so beyond the borders of Wyvern and Mantel
land. It was clear they had been collecting recruits. The Wraeththu were
regarded as a sinister cult into which impressionable young boys were brainwashed.
Other rumours about certain ‘changes’ being made to converts Vivi dismissed as superstitious
nonsense. Both she and Thorne Mantel were determined to retrieve their boys.
They would launch a rescue mission when the Wraeththu next went hunting.

Careful surveillance by the Mantels’ subtle
trackers revealed when the camp was most vulnerable. The Wraeththu did not go
out daily to kidnap people, but appeared to venture forth less regularly on
small raiding parties, during which only a few would be captured. The Wraeththu
would then spend a couple of weeks enacting peculiar ceremonies with the
captives, which were presumed to be the technique through which these
unfortunates were indoctrinated.

When the news came that the camp
was emptier than usual, Vivi and Thorne knew they would have to respond quickly.
Vivi herself led her people north. Mindful of her own estate being left
vulnerable, everyone who could hold a weapon was stationed upon the walls or
ordered to patrol the perimeters, whatever age they were.