The Revenants (22 page)

Jasmine cast around her, confused, i need to cut it up, and to squeeze the juice out. I need fire to boil it down. That’s all. I will mix it with the cordial in my flask. The nuns in Lak Island gave it to me, and I have never touched it.’

They minced the root and squeezed its milky juices in a twist of cloth while the endless screaming went on and on. Jasmine tried not to hear it as she boiled the juices. At last she took the pan from the fire and poured the contents into her flask. This she took to the screaming bundle, almost dropping it when she turned the blanket back and confronted the bulging eyes and gaping mouth.

Terascouros came to her side. ‘Let me. Go, sit down. I’ll do it.’ She began to drip the liquid between Jaer’s torn lips, drop by slow drop, pausing to stroke the corded throat until she felt a swallowing motion beneath her hand, then dripping the mixture once more. ‘How much? How much is safe to use?’

‘A spoonful, perhaps. That much, and then wait. If that is not enough, then another few drops and wait again. Each root is different, and they vary with the seasons.’

Terascouros went on with the slow administration, drop by drop. There was some change in the meadow, some shift of light or movement of cloud – then they realized it was the fall of silence. The screaming had stopped. Beneath Terascouros’s gnarled old hands Jaer’s eyes had closed and the bloodied lips grown still.

‘Have I killed her?’ asked Jasmine.

‘No. She is asleep again. As she was when she was brought out of Murgin by Leona – and where is Leona now?’

They looked about them, without real interest or concern, then sprawled down by Jaer’s body. Only Terascouros stayed alert enough to see Leona emerge from the distant copse and walked naked across the meadow to join them, her arms and sides cut with long, deep gashes closed by clotted blood. Terascouros found her clothing among the packs and helped her dress after washing the wounds with the mixture Jasmine had made. Leona said nothing, only lay beside them and let her eyes fall closed. All slept. Above them the mist began to gather, and from the fringes of the wood behind them long tendrils of searching white curled across the meadow. When they woke at last, it was evening, and the battalions of vapour hung about them like amorphous creatures of the sea, writhing and curling toward them and away. The fire was long since dead.

Jaer still slept, and Terascouros thought that the torn lips looked less swollen, though it was hard to tell in the grey light. She stood to confront Thewson. ‘Do we eat first and have hot food, or do we go and eat cold food as we walk?’

‘Grandmother,’ he said, ‘be very still and look about us. Use your vision. What is it you see?’

Terascouros peered into the fog, stilling herself with an internal command, a practiced quieting of mental scurrying. She instructed herself to
see
, and she saw. About them stood an army of white, silent figures, robed in fog, motionless as though blind and deaf, all turned toward them and massed one behind the other to the far edge of the meadow at the circling trees.

‘Ghosts,’ she whispered. ‘Ghosts of Keepers, of those in Murgin, blind and seeking. What do they seek?’

No one answered.

At Thewson’s instructions they built up the fire so that it [ burned brightly, drawing the white forms even closer, then followed him away. As they went through the ghosts they felt a tingling, horrid and premonitory, a clammy intimacy as though they were embraced by something not living. They, the living, passed through the gathered forms to go away north, leaving that great host centred upon the abandoned fire.

‘How did you know?’ Terascouros asked, in a whisper.

‘I saw them, early this day, in starlight. They were white on the dark sky, watching for fire. I think perhaps they find warmth? Perhaps they are sent to find warmth? Wa’osu. We have in my land a great sin. We have few sins, but this is one. It is called xoxa-nah luxufuzh, gathering of shadows. Those dead in Murgin, they do not sleep in their bones. Here are their shadows come after us. For what? What can shadows do? Voal yoa: away from evil. Ulum, hara-ah-ya! Lord, deliver us.’

Terascouros was shaken. She looked back down the slope they climbed to see the meadow full of white forms, still, still, still, focused upon the fading glimmer of the fire. ‘We must hide from them. Somehow.’ She walked beside Leona who paced beside them almost as blindly as the ghosts, though her wounds no longer bled.

They walked throughout the night. It was mountainous land which rose before them and plunged before them so that they were always climbing up or staggering down. They lost sight of Gerenhodh for long hours only to see it loom before them at the end of some long black line of mountains and then lose it again as they dropped down into a wooded valley. At last the horizon above the mountains turned pale green at the east and light crept into the world. Jaer had half wakened twice throughout the long hours. Each time, Jasmine’s medicine had sent her again into deep sleep. It seemed that Jaer breathed easier, too, but Terascouros derided herself for imagining it.

Just as the dawn broke full in the eastern sky, they saw the tendrils of searching mist break through the trees at the top of the hill down which they had just come. Leona seemed to see them for the first time. ‘What is it?’ she asked through dry lips. ‘That is not fog. Fog does not act like that.’

‘No,’ said Terascouros. ‘It hunts for us, Leona. It hunts for us, and it finds us.’

Thewson laid Jaer down and went to gather wood, moving wearily, woodenly, his feet dragging. ‘Fire once more,’ he said, ‘to hold the ghost warriors here while we go on.’

Terascouros stopped him. ‘No, Thewson. You may have the strength to go on. I do not. We must rest, and if the ghosts will gather around us again, then they must gather.’ She stared around them, thinking that they must be within short miles of the Sisterhood. A line of mountains looked familiar, the shape of a cliff, but she could not remember more than that. It had been years since she and Sybil had parted, one to stay and rule the Sisterhood with iron mind and will of adamant, one to go out into the world in pursuit of a legend. Terascouros sighed. She could be within yards of the refuge and not know it. They stood, a ragged, weary line, watching the approach of the fog which advanced ominously down the hills, flowing among the trees, unstoppable.

Jasmine began to cry.

From behind them a voice came from the trees. ‘Well, Sister. I had not thought to see you again in this life.’

Terascouros turned, astonished to hear a voice she had once resolved never to hear again.

‘Sybil?’ she cried. ‘Is that you?’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE SISTERHOOD

Year 1169-Winter

Weary as they were, it seemed to the travellers that Sybil greeted them with a kind of contemptuous amusement, though whether this appearance was put on for Terascouros’s benefit or was Sybil’s usual pattern, they were too tired to care. She dealt with their needs efficiently enough. Four strong, quiet men brought a litter onto which Thewson laid Jaer with tenderness and relief. They followed the litter-bearers a short way among rocks, around barriers, behind a lacy fall of water into wide, sand-strewn corridors which led upward into the hills. Deep clefts in the rock had been glazed to let in the light, and from these they could look back and down to the meadow they had left. There the mists gathered, circling, swirling in a slow spiral of searching movement.

Smooth-walled side caverns were carpeted with rugs of creamy wool, patterned in green, amber, and brown. Men and women dressed in these colours stood talking among themselves as they passed or scurried away at Sybil’s curt instructions. She left them in a cavern furnished with cots and a steaming pool, saying that others would attend to them. As she left, she lifted the robes which concealed Jaer’s mutilated form and said some casual words about the man appearing uninjured, going out before they could answer.

Jasmine drew the robe away and stared in disbelief. For a moment she thought that Jaer’s body had been stolen, taken away by the litter-bearers, that another had been substituted. This figure was not wounded, not bloodied, but whole. She exclaimed, only to have Terascouros grip her shoulder, signalling silence.

Voices chattered in the doorway, and a dozen green-clad women entered with flagons and pitchers of steaming water. As one of them drew the robes away from the litter, an agonized moan came from the figure there. ‘They seek me. They seek Jaer. Let me be someone else. Let me be – anyone. Send me away before they find me …’

Medlo fell to his knees beside the litter, running dirty fingers through his hair in frantic thought. He began to talk to Rhees, of meadows and lawns, of long tunnels of willow over wandering canals, of the smell of hay and the sound of high summer, of anything and everything away from the place where they were in the forests of Ban Morrish at the foot of Gerenhodh.

‘It
is
Jaer. Is it?’ Jasmine wondered.

‘Shush,’ said Terascouros. ‘Let them wash your hands and face.’ The women were clucking over them, undressing them. At Leona’s side, two women raised their voices in dismay at the long lines of new pink flesh which filled the ugly lacerations along her sides. Leona herself was staring at them incredulously.

‘What is this?’ she whispered. ‘I had thought almost to die of these.’ She turned to Terascouros pleadingly. ‘I do not understand.’

‘Shush, shush,’ begged Terascouros. ‘When we have had time to rest a little, Leona. Wait, please. Jasmine, please …’ She spoke to the women. ‘Sisters. Ask Sybil to grant us a few moments. There is a warning we should give.’

The women assented, sent one of their number with the message while the rest went on with the cleaning and binding up and pouring of bowls of broth and wine. Soon they departed in a flurry, leaving the travellers clean, warmed, fed and exhausted. Moments later, Sybil returned to them.

‘Well, Teras?’ Her voice was cold and uninterested. ‘Is there something not to your liking?’

‘All is as the Sisterhood would have it, Sybil. I have no complaint, only a warning. We may be endangering you all. It would be best to keep those seeking mists away from the Hill, to hide from what hides in them, or guides them.’

‘A little fog? Not even unseasonable?’

‘Truly, Sybil, I think it is not fog.’

The woman laughed, scanned them all with a cold, arrogant eye. ‘You have not changed, Teras. Still determined upon your own way, your vivid imagination, your own interpretation of things. Still believing in your own strange convictions and persuasions. Well, if you wish to talk of it, you may speak to the Council. I would have had you come before Council in any case. Whatever the “danger” I’m sure it can wait until then.’ She smiled, a brief, chilly smile, and was gone.

Terascouros shook her head, tears brimming above her lower lids, biting her lip in vexation. ‘She has not changed. Hard. Sharp. No comfort in her. Well, it will be the Council then, and until then, rest. Thewson, if your strength will bear you further, stay here with Medlo. When he tires of telling stories into Jaer’s ears, send him to the next cavern to wake one of us and take a turn at storytelling yourself. Do you know what is needed?’

‘Surely, grandmother. It is needed to tell a wonderful tale of another person, another place, a story that a dreamer may live in to be other than he is. I know that. I will tell Jaer of the women of N’Gollo who dance on high pillars for the honour of the god.’ He stood over Medlo, face grey with fatigue, yet his spear was upright in his hand as though grafted there.

The three women lowered themselves onto cots in the adjacent room, trying to let muscles loosen with little exclamations of pain. Leona whispered, ‘Can you explain? I had wished to die from the pain of those cuts….’

Terascouros spoke through a haze of weakness. ‘Leona, tell me something of this search of yours – this thing you were looking for.’ When there was only an uncomprehending silence, she begged, ‘Please, tell me.’

‘The Vessel of Healing? It was said to have been a gift of the Thiene to the founder of the college of healers in Kra-Usthro. In the ruins of a dead city in Tharsh is a library, and in it I read that the ruins of Kra-Usthro lie on the River Sals, west of Palonhodh Pass. The college ended with the reign of Sud-Akwith.’

‘And what was it, this Vessel?’

‘Who knows? It was said to provide healing for any wound, any ill. When the founder was very old, of an age to return to Earthsoul, his students urged him to drink from the Vessel, but he refused, saying he longed to rejoin Earthsoul and that the Vessel should go with him into the loving soil.’

‘Was that done?’

‘The writing said he was buried at Kra-Usthro, but that the people of his home village stole the body away, saying that he should be buried in all honour in his birthplace. Then there was fighting between the two places, and decades of confusion. When all was done, the body was gone. The book I read said that his students had taken it to a religious house far in the east where it might have less honour and more respect, the Vessel of Healing with it. So it was written.’

‘Far in the east. It happens that Jasmine comes from the eastern edge of the settled lands. Is there not an ancient house of religion in Lak Island, Jasmine?’

Jasmine was unpinning her hair, letting the heavy, smoky grey of it tumble on her shoulders as she rubbed her aching head. ‘Oh, the nunnery? Yes, it is old. But old as it is, it is built on the foundations of a place older still. The place is so old that no one knows when it was built, or who built it, or what it was.’

‘And the nuns gave you something from the ancient buildings? Perhaps from the vaults? The cellars?’

Jasmine nodded. ‘From the cellars. The Sister said that it was very old.’ Hair pins fell from her mouth as she gaped. ‘Are you saying …’

Leona was already ripping the oddly shaped flask from the straps which held it to Jasmine’s pack, that battered, old flask into which the juices of the easeroot had been poured. Terascouros murmured from her cot, eyes closed, ‘Easeroot does not heal. Oh, it will ease pain, make dying easier, but it will not heal. Yet something healed. You are healed, Leona. Jaer is healed. Is there any sign on the flask, a name, a symbol?’