The Revenants (19 page)

Thewson went calmly about the business of packing and was ready to go while Medlo and Jasmine were still fumbling and casting about for whatever it was they were sure they had misplaced. Finally Thewson tapped his spear on a stone, expelling held breath in an impatient ‘Chaiii!’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Medlo. ‘I’m coming. I don’t want to go toward Murgin. That’s the last place in the known world I want to go, but…’

Thewson led them away.

They walked the day away, down forested halls as the sun moved in the empty sky toward dusk. They lay side by side in night’s shadow, lost in the sound of water, watching the endless dance of their fire. In a strange quiet between despair and despair they slept, only to rise and walk another day away. The land sloped upward, gently, endlessly, across meadows edged with saplings, along tumbling streams, in groves of pines which held great branches above them like green clouds, their feet wading in puddles of dead needles in the tang of sun-warmed resin. They walked through green-trunked beech groves, light spattering through boughs like a shower of gold tossed by charitable hands. They plunged through gullies leveled by drifts of old oak leaves, and found evening there among the moss-hung oaks, and slept once more.

So went two more days, and on the evening of the fourth day since Leona had left them they heard the sound of axes. Thewson’s head went up, listening. His spear went up, too, circling toward the sky in a ritual to a god the others did not know. Jasmine stared at the spear, at the narrow shaft, the leather thongs which bound it to the blade, the blade coloured and shaped like a leaf of grass with a curled base. A man of ordinary size could have used the blade for a sword. She closed her eyes at the hypnotic circling and slumped. Medlo caught her as she fell.

‘It is too late to go on tonight.’

Thewson came to himself abruptly. ‘Yes. Almost the dark has come. We will stay here. Tomorrow we will catch a black robe for Leona. Or the next day.’

The next day they followed the sound of axes to find the place where all the trees had been killed, where the trunks stood silver on the sterile earth in a belt of death around the stony plain. In the middle of the pave, miles wide, hard and hot in the sun, loomed the darkness of Murgin, a black pile out of which no light showed, above which no pennant waved. The bulk of a monstrous, squat tower grew out of the mass, and from the top of this came glints of reflected light as though lenses turned this way and that to keep watch on the plain and the forest. Medlo turned away, his face bleak.

They found a tangle of felled timber at the top of a low hill which overlooked the place the black robes were working and yet hid them from the distant tower. They heard the rumble of iron wheels coming and going from Murgin, and the endless sound of the axes, but nothing else. The acolytes of Gahl did not sing at their work.

Medlo and Jasmine lay in the tangle, staring at the blind sky and amusing themselves with stories. Medlo spoke of Sud-Akwith and the Sword of Power, gift of the Firelord to the Northking at a time of great peril. ‘The end of it was that he grew very proud and crochety, and his son told him that he should be more humble since he had conquered by the Sword, not by his own strength alone. So he fell into a fury, cursed his son, and took all the court to the lip of that great chasm near Seathe and cast the Sword into it. As the Sword fell, he fell, quite dead.’

‘And that was the end of that.’

‘No. Some creature lived in the chasm, some nameless cavern dweller, who brought the sword out of the chasm. In one of the libraries in Tiles a very old book says that the Sword came into the hands of the Axe King and was lost by him in the Southern wars.’

Jasmine talked of the Girdle of Chu-Namu, singing in a quiet voice the ‘Lamentation’ which was among the notes given her by the Library Sister. Shortly thereafter, Thewson returned to ask if they wanted the black robe brought. ‘Do you want it now?’ he asked, as though he were taking orders for breakfast. ‘Or later?’

‘I don’t want one at all,’ murmured Jasmine. ‘Not at all.’

‘Whenever,’ said Medlo firmly. ‘So that it will be here when Leona returns.’ Yet when Thewson returned with a limp burden over his shoulder and Medlo started to make a gag for it, he turned from it, retching. ‘Take it away, Thewson.’

‘Is it dead?’

‘No. But it has no tongue. The tongue has been cut out. Leona will need one that can speak.’

Thewson made an exclamation of disgust, then spoke a litany of some kind in his own language. ‘Ya! Fomun luxufus, ya zhoanu. Ya! Fua Foxomol, sar luxufus.’

‘Do you know what he’s saying?’ asked Jasmine.

‘It’s a prayer. Something about, “God, if you made people so foolish, it’s your own fault.” I was on a ship once which touched at the Wal Thai delta where that tongue is spoken.’

They settled into depressed silence, finding it more difficult to speak of anything. Even breathing was too much effort. At last Thewson returned again, this time with a body which struggled and made strangled noises.

‘This one talks, all the time. This one is a boss.’

The Keeper turned to gaze at them, eyes full of a strangeness which Medlo could not identify. It was not precisely anger, nor hate. No, it was a kind of dim, fervid hollowing look, as though the creature had been burned away from the inside, leaving only a speaking shell. Gagged, it stared and burned at them.

They waited once more, silent except for the long, honing sound as Thewson sharpened his spear blade, a deadly whisper in the tangle. The sun dropped. Darkness gathered. They rose wearily, ready to find a sleeping place in the forest once more. Then they halted, listening to a thin, far crying.

‘Haii. Haii. Haii.’

‘It’s Terascouros,’ said Jasmine.

Leaving the Keeper tied in the tangle, they went toward the sound to find Terascouros stumbling along the edge of the trees, pausing to call out from time to time. She was exhausted.

‘Well,’ she whispered. ‘So you’re here. Well, so are we, in a manner of speaking. I had to find you first, because – because I had to tell you, Thewson, to give Medlo your spear and let him hide it somewhere. Leona says that. Please, she says.’

Thewson drew himself taller and said ominously, ‘I do not give my spear. And if Medlo takes it, grandmother, he will be a dead picker of flowers.’

‘Just for a little moment, Thewson. She says it is important. For the space of a few breaths, no more. Give him the spear, and let him hide it, then come with me.’

There was a long, hostile silence, but she looked so tiny and harmless that Thewson shook his head. The poor old grandmother was a pitiful sight; let them get this nonsense over with so that she could sleep. He tossed the spear to Medlo, sneering as Medlo staggered under the weight. He turned his back pointedly, as Medlo carried the spear into the dead forest and put it somewhere out of sight. The old woman turned away along the trees, among stumps and fells, up a little hill beside an outcropping of stone, ochre and dun in the failing light. She stopped, peering ahead, and there at the edge of the trees was the gryphon – huge, brazen, and terrible.

Thewson cried out, ‘Umarow,’ and again, ‘Great Beast.’ He flung himself forward, searching the ground for something to use as a weapon, and Terascouros tripped him so that he fell sprawling.

‘Wait,’ she cried, her shrill old voice like the cry of a hawk. ‘Wait. It’s not your Great Beast, warrior. It is Leona.’

Thewson sat up stupidly, his usual expression washed away by one of combined greed and wonder. He began to rant a long, complicated tumble of words in his own language, waving his arms. Terascouros sat down beside him, her head hanging with weariness.

‘Oh, I know. Yes. I know. I was there when she changed. Went into the north, we did. Found a place by a stream with the moon on the edge of the world. Stripped, she did. Told me to hold her clothes. There I was beside her, one moment she was there, the next moment she was gone. I was close enough to touch her, but I couldn’t see her. She kept calling. “Look at me,” but I couldn’t see her. I felt the wing knock me over like a great wind, and then I knew – I knew I needed a seeing spell, and I cried out to the Air-Spirit. I needed a spell, you know, to convince my eyes to see. I had to convince myself that there was something there. Too many years spent learning there’s nothing there, then suddenly having to learn there is something there after all…. But you, you saw her at once. Strange. Perhaps because you are all young. Well, I can see her now.’

The gryphon paced slowly forward into the waning light, huge beak opening and tongue vibrating with a metallic call, the call of a bell struck with a padded mallet, softly resonant dwindling to a hum. They stared and went on staring. The light dimmed as the tableau continued. At last Thewson rose.

‘It is Leona. Where are the dogs?’

‘She left them behind. Couldn’t carry all three of us through the sky. They’ll hunt; they’ll be all right. She’ll get them later.’

‘I need my spear.’

‘You’re not going to try to –’

‘No.’ He shook his massive head, the tails of his bound hair whipping the air in negation. ‘You say it is Leona. I know it is. We will do something now, and if we do something, I need my spear.’

Medlo went for the spear, grateful for the chance to move away alone. He saw, but did not believe what he saw. He believed, but did not know how he could believe. ‘Too much,’ he said. ‘Too much changing. Things happening. Strangeness.’ But he could not dwell on that, for the others came after him to pick up the black-robed one, bound and gagged as it was, and carry it back to the forest camp.

Later, none of them could make words to remember what happened then. They could recall only pictures of shapes and shadows.

There was firelight which was orange and amber, lighting and hiding, disclosing and shading. There was rock gleaming like metal, then as if furred with lichen. Trees, giving back the light from leaves in reflected fragments, then taking the light up into velvet darkness. All shifting, all wavering. Hard and soft, sharp and dull, real and imaginary, one following the other, one after the other, endless images.

There was the Keeper, or acolyte, or whatever it was or had been or titled itself. There was no hair on the Keeper anywhere. All the hair had been cut away. Only scars were there, thick and stiff, like the wax of candles poured layer on layer, angry red, as though the cutting had been done many times. It had no sex, only a roughness between the legs where the scars were, and a roughness on the chest where more scars were. No eyebrows. No hair beneath the arms. Only scars.

It could not say whether it was a woman or man, or had been girl or boy. It did not know. It knew only that the pain would end when it had been paid in kind, by another. When this one could ‘recruit’ another to suffer equally, then this one would be allowed to die, to go to that place it had been promised. But the account seemed never to be paid. It cried that it had brought others, more than one, many. Still the account was not balanced. They did not suffer enough. They had not yet lived long enough with the pain. So, this one said, it would go on bringing others – recruiting others – to Murgin.

At last the gryphon reached out and separated it from life with one great claw, and quiet came.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

INSIDE MURGIN

Year 1168-Winter

Jaer was drugged during most of the trip to Murgin. She came to herself from time to time to see the trunks of trees plunging past or to see firelight or to hear the clatter of hooves over stone. No one spoke to her. During most of the journey she dreamed.

She had come, she dreamed, with Medlo and Terascouros – there may have been others, shadowy at the edge of her vision, but it was hard to see—to a place near a great sea; a city, not ruined but old, placid, sun-warmed, and so quiet that the sound of voices was an interruption. There was a broad river, a bridge, and at the end of the bridge a domed building where Jaer stood and watched as figures moved in and out of a wide hall. The floor of it sloped down on every side to centre on a pit filled with flashing lights and metallic gleaming.

Jaer could see high, narrow tables among the flickering lights – six, seven. Men and women moved among them, speaking to one another with laughter and excitement.

‘Audilla, will you care for me still?’

‘Talurion, don’t act the fool at a time like this!’

Beside Jaer – and those other shadowy ones – stood a man and a woman, not looking at one another, their faces blanked with a kind of melancholy which Jaer, even in the dream, thought strange and out of place. The man was speaking in a soft tenor voice, not so high as to seem effeminate and yet with delicacy, Taniel, why won’t you join us?’

Taniel. Jaer remembered that name from lessons with Ephraim and Nathan. It was an important name, but Jaer could not remember why.

She who answered was slender, tall, dark hair gently curved around her ears and across level brows. She made a gesture of frustration. ‘Urlasthes, you have asked and asked, and I have said and said …’

His lips mocked a smile. Taniel of the Two Loves, is that it? Omburan, again?’

‘Omburan, still. You know how he feels about this!’

‘You know, my dear, eventually you must choose between us.’

‘You know, my dear, that I will not. That’s why I won’t take part in this … this thing you’re doing. I don’t want to be … so changed.’

‘Not even for the better?’ Urlasthes watched her face closely, reached out to stroke her hair. ‘No, I see you are not moved by the possibility of betterment. Well, when you have seen – perhaps?’

‘When I have seen. Perhaps, when he has seen, even Omburan…’

The other laughed, harshly. ‘I will be above jealousy soon, Taniel. Beyond it. At this moment, however, I can still feel it enough to resent that.’

‘If you will be above jealousy, Urlasthes, perhaps … you will be above love as well.’ She clung to him, and he calmed her as he might a child.

‘Nonsense. We will be able to love
more
. Well, now is not the time to argue it. They are ready. See, Audilla is beckoning. Wait for me here. I will see you … after.’