The Wordsmiths and the Warguild (19 page)

       
Something came questing
up out of the rubble.

       
A metal tentacle!

       
Togura went scampering
up the new-born scree slope, and found himself in the room with the fire
burning in the center. A lot of rock had spilt into the room, crushing some of
the old men; he could hear someone moaning under the rubble. All the survivors
had fled, but for one - the speechmaking dwarf, who, incoherent with rage,
grappled with him.

       
Togura smashed him.

       
Then picked him up and
threw him in the fire.

       
The dwarf writhed and
screamed, his agony rising to a frenzy as the brisk flames licked away his
skin. Togura picked up chunks of rock and hurled them at his victim, shouting
with unholy joy. Then, as the dwarf subsided, unconscious or dead, Togura
snatched up a burning brand and strode down the corridor to the outer world.

       
Outside, to his
astonishment, he found a revolution in progress. The sight of the old men
panicking out of the wrecked beehive, many of them cut, bruised and bleeding,
had been enough to trigger off an uprising. The balance of power had changed
more swiftly than the weather.

       
Togura, who had no
experience of revolutionary politics, was amazed at the transformation of the
people. He knew them only as sullen but reliable servants of the ruling regime.
Now they had gone beserk. Before his very eyes, the young women who had so
diligently hunted him down in the swamps were mobbing the old men to death.
Children of both sexes, giving vent to high, hysterical, manic laughter, were
helping with the slaughter. The community's handful of young men, no longer
sleep walking, had crippled one greybeard and were now kicking him to pulp.

       
"This is
excessive," said Togura. "This is insane."

       
He was rapidly becoming
experienced in the more bloodthirsty aspects of revolution. Despite hunger,
fatigue, shock and terror, his mind was still acute enough the realise that
there might be a lot to said for the idea of getting out of town - and fast.
The crowd would soon run out of old men to murder, but their bloodlust would
still be running high and hot, and there was no telling what they might do
then.

       
Togura padded through a
mixture of blood and brains to the nearest doorway, which led to female
quarters he had never entered. They were empty, as everyone had joined the
slaughter. He bound up his self-inflicted wounds with a bit of bark and some
cordage, found a set of clothes and clogs and dressed himself, then exited the
building through a door on the far side, well away from the administration of
revolutionary justice.

       
As the screams of hate
and agony faded away behind him, he walked click-clock through deserted streets
to the swamp. There he stole a punt and poled away.

       
As Togura poled through
the swamp, his wound started bleeding again, despite his attempt to bandage it.
He tore away his makeshift dressing, salvaged some spiderweb from some swamp
vegetation, and used that on the wound. It stopped the bleeding. When he halted
toward evening, he felt very weak, perhaps as a consequence of losing so much
blood. But he knew he would live.

Chapter 14

       
It took Togura three
days to get out of the swamp. He never once relaxed during those whole three
days. He would sleep, but only lightly, waking for any unusual sound. Finally,
he found himself on a stream, which became a creek, which he followed down to
the sea.

       
By the sea was a tiny
hamlet housing thirty-two fisherfolk. When they saw him approaching in his
clothes of moss and bark and lichen, wearing his birds' nest headgear, they
fled screaming; perhaps they were not entirely unaware of the abominations
practised until so recently in the swamps of the hinterland.

       
Togura looted their
houses shamelessly, dressing himself in sealskin clothes, and loading what food
he could carry into baskets of woven flax. Then he left, hurrying off before
they could gather their courage and come back to kill him.

       
He had not been able to
steal any proper shoes, but the clogs he wore were hateful to him, contaminated
as they were with bad dreams and claustrophobic memories. Two days along the
coast, he tossed them into the sea. They bobbed up and down in the waves; he
imagined he heard them over the thunder of the surf, walking the waters with a
steady tromp-cho-tromp; he watched until they were out of sight, floating away,
perhaps, to the smudged, hazy distances where the horizon was burdened with
cloud, or by an island, or by, perhaps ,the coast of the continent of Argan.

       
Then he marched on,
barefoot.

Chapter 15

       
In his early childhood,
Togura Poulaan had once visited the coast in the company of his parents. They
must have gone there on business connected with the Warguild, for the baron
would seldom stir from his estate for any other reason. Or perhaps that had
been the year of the plague, and they had fled to the coast for their health.
That was long, long ago, back in the days before his mother had gone mad and
died, back in the days before his little brother Stoat had died of rabies.

       
From that visit of long
ago, Togura had dim, distant memories of a quayside clatter and of a hot,
clamorous harbour where boats like broken insects sculled to the leering hulks
floating in a stifling calm. On that hot, hot summer's day, the harbour had
been filled with simmering sewage; he had spent an entire afternoon on the
quayside, stoning helpless turds to death.

       
That was how he
remembered the coast.

       
Here, however, there were
no close-shouldering houses loud with voices and barking dogs; there were no
cobblestone streets reeking of fish nets and onions; there were no vendors
offeering cockles, whelks and whitebait for sale; there was no putrefying mass
of enclosed harbour waters, quiescent as a jellyfish.

       
Instead, there were open
shores of rock and sand; there were cliffs, headlands, inlets and bays; there
were creeks, streams, and rifts of coastal marshland alive with herons, shags
and nameless stilt-legged birds; there were sheltered dells, fragrant with
herbs, lumberous with bees, swamped with heat in the noonday summer sun; there
were rolling hillsides and uprearing cliffs, a mix of stunted trees, wild roses
and impoverished coastal grasslands; there were wide, wild vistas, bare of
habitation, where even the slightest summer breeze hinted at the possibility of
summeer storm.

       
And there was the
wide-shouldering sea, booming in from the far-flung horizons. The sea! The sea,
the ultimate cuspidor, here running clean and empty, bare leagues of
weather-water where the white-whip winds scoured away to the distance.

       
Togura was fascinated,
watching blue rolling upon green upon grey as the lumbering billows swayed
switch-back onto the shore to break - break! - with a coruscating roar of
turbulent thunder, a roar swiftly dissolving to a clattering rush of baubling
light shimmering over pebble sand and rock, ending with a final hiss, that hiss
itself annunciating the start of the sea suck which would haul back all in an
incoherent jumble of rock-sliding shale and snake-sliding light.

       
The sound of the sea was
always with him as he tramped along the coast for day upon day. At nights,
sometimes he slept in caves high above the sealskin rocks, or laid himself down
beneath a fallen log, or rested beneath the open sky on a patch of pebbly sand
on a scrubby beach nestled between high-pitched headlands.

       
He was almost alarmed to
find himself free.

       
For the time being, his
march along the coast provided him with necessities which liberated him from
the problems of free will. Dealing with the demands of the march and the day to
day difficulties of survival, he did not have to trouble his head about the
probable political situation in Keep, or about where he stood in the conflict
between his father and the Suets, or about what, if anything, he should do
about the quest he had promised to undertake for the Wordsmiths.

       
He was at peace.

       
His peace was
interrupted when he sighted a tower on a promentary in the distance. He
approached with circumspection, and, drawing near, he laid himself down in the
sea-heather while he puzzled out his next move. The tower was of white stone
which dazzled in the sealight. It appeared to be octagonal. Concluding that it
was deserted, Togura approached, and walked round the tower.

       
Each side was pierced by
a single doorway. As there were no doors to bar the way, he entered. Inside,
the stone floor was bare but for a few broken snail shales; there were no
windows, but it was bright with doorlight and sunlight.

       
Togura looked up - and
up - and up - and saw above him an octagon of day. This building had no roof.
Remembering the torture pit inside the stone beehive, he imagined that he smelt
an intolerable stench of decay. Half-singing voices yakkered and laughed. A
tentacle clutched for him.

       
He staggered outside,
fleeing from the tower, screaming as he ran. Then, panting, he stopped. He
shuddered, and looked back. The tower rose, high, white and graceful, gleaming
in the bright, clean light. He could see through one door and out through
another. It was an open place which could imprison nothing. He shook his head
at his own foolishness.

       
Then, to give himself
time to recover completely, he sat himself down on a convenient rock, breathed
slowly and deeply, and watched the thick brown slubbery kelp rising and falling
in the sea surge. Waves came billowing in, drenching over the rocks, flinging
spray to the sky. When the waves withdrew, bright fish scales of sunlight
glittered on the rocks; pebbles, momentarily gemstones, gleamed with smooth
satisfaction. Out across the ocean, two gulls tangled in the sky, contending
for possession of a fish.

       
"This is a good
place," said Togura.

       
Calmed, he returned to
the tower, and laid his cheek against the dry skin of its whitewashed masonry.
The rock underfoot was warm, but the tower was cool.

       
"Forgive me,"
he said.

       
Then he entered its
hospitality. With eight open doorways and no roof, it hardly offered him much
shelter against bad weather, but he was minded to stay. It had frightened him
at first, but he was starting to realise that for a long time a great many
inconsequential things might alarm him.

       
"I will be happy
here," he said, coming to a decision.

       
And, with his flight
along the coast at an end, he explored the promontory and the hinterland
beyond, singing makeshift little songs to himself, peculiar melodies which he invented
on the spur of the moment, thinking himself very musical.

       
Deep in the hinterland,
amidst thickets of conifers loud with clicketing insects, he found a dry, deep
cave half-concealed by tumbledown rocks. It was not very dark, for flaws in the
roof admitted shafts of daylight. They would also admit rain, in season, and
the cave would be draughty. Nevertheless, someone had once lived here for many
years, carving a stone sleeping platform out of one side of the cave. On a
stone shelf, there were half a dozen stone jars, in which were the blackened
husks of some food now many years dead.

       
"I will stay
here," said Togura.

       
He lived there for many
days. He made snares to catch rabbits and birds and traps to catch fish. The
sea gave him the rotting wreck of a whale; it was foul beyond eating, but he
salvaged bones which he later sharpened against rock. He made a stabbing spear,
a bow, and arrows without fletching. He plaited the intestines of animals to
make cordage. He ate seaweeds, frogs and butterflies, raw fish, raw meats, wild
mushrooms, limpets gathered from the rocks, snails, grassland grubs and
incautious beetles.

       
He repeatedly tried to
make fire, rubbing sticks together, trying to build a fire drill, and, finally,
trying to conjure wood to flame by force of will alone. Although he failed, he
was not unhappy. He cut fish and flesh to thin strips and dried it in the
summer sun, arranging black rocks in a sheltered spot to form a suntrap. When
he got bored, he found a cliff which was difficult but not quite suicidal, and
climbed it, or swam in the surf, coming out shuddering from the cold of the
summer sea.

       
But he was not often
bored, for he had so many things to do. They were things which properly
belonged to childhood, yet he did them shamelessly, for there was no-one to
disparage his play. He investigated the close-coiling shells of the sea, the
articulation of the claws of the crab, the quill-pen feathers of the gull. He
built a sand castle, and thought it an original invention. He sorted sand from
pebble and sifted it through his hands, letting it drift down to make patterns
on flat black rocks.