Beguilers (15 page)

It was freezing up there. My breath was like a dragon’s, leaving me in great smoky plumes which dispersed in the air above my head. But the jumper that Marik had lent me meant that I could afford to take the shawl from around my shoulders, at least for a while. As I took it off and straightened it out, I moved nonchalantly, the way I would if I was sneaking up on a young lamb that was reluctant to be caught. The beguiler continued with its dance as I began to prepare the shawl. The gut was already out of it, tied securely to my ankle. I unwrapped the little leather bag and tied it by its thongs around my wrist, so that the four corners of the shawl were empty. As casually as I could, so as not to arouse the beguiler’s suspicions, I laid the stick aside. Without looking, I made four hard snowballs and knotted them into the corners of the shawl. Then I took one in each hand and waited until the beguiler’s dance brought it right before my eyes. As it darted away again, I threw the shawl up and over it.

I swear my aim was good. The cloth covered the beguiler and hid it for a moment. My mind was inflated by triumph, then flattened as it was confronted with the impossible. The beguiler came straight through the shawl as though it hadn’t been there at all. It hovered before me again, disdainful of my foolish tricks. In a combination of rage and desperation I leapt up and made a grab for it. When I imagine it now, I see the light being squeezed out between my fingers like soap-nut bubbles. But that wasn’t what happened. It just came through my hands the way it had come through the cloth of the shawl, pure spirit seeping through the mesh of matter.

Could nothing hold it? I was seized by a sudden, overwhelming fury and all caution left me. I lunged at the beguiler again and came crashing down on to my face as the gut caught me in mid-air. I was ten feet from where I had started and badly winded. I had taken a knock on the head and my chest was bruised from the fall, but I was alive. As I came to my senses I realised that I wouldn’t have been if it weren’t for the gut. And, more importantly, I knew that I had deceived myself about the beguiler’s power over me. I had thought I could resist it, play with it, take chances, but I had been dangerously wrong. As though to prove my point it came and danced engagingly before my eyes, then did a swooping circle around the ankle which was tied before taking up position in front of me again.

My heart filled with yearning as I looked into its golden eyes. It was so beautiful and I had deceived it; tried to take it captive, as though it wasn’t already. I held a terrible weight of responsibility, having brought this spirit creature from the cloud mountain, but I was failing it, every hour that I remained alive. It wasn’t mine. I couldn’t hold it, and yet I was holding it, just by being there. I was gripped by a powerful longing to release it, and be released myself from this misery. All I had to do was to cut that stupid piece of gut, then all my ties with the earth would fall away. We would be liberated, both of us.

But for what? The emptiness beyond the edge of the precipice filled me with dread. It would be free fall, into nothingness, into the unknown. What if nothing existed beyond that? Who could ever know where the beguilers go once they have reclaimed the soul that is owed to them? This existence of mine was full of pain and confusion, but it was all I could be sure of. I might feel that life was not worth living, but what was the value of dying?

The white mountain stretched up above me, glistening in the early light. I don’t know how, but I was aware that Marik was awake. He said nothing, but there was communication even in our silence. Some inner vision that he had enabled him to understand me in a way that no sighted person did. And, I realised, I understood him in the same way. We had recognised it the first time we met. Despite the complexities of our natures and differences in our origins, there was something that connected us.

As I tied the scarf between us again, ready for the next stage of the journey, the little bag rattled at my wrist. I decided to leave it there so that I could get at it easily. The beguiler had already shown me how cunning it could be and I was determined not to take anything for granted.

‘W
HAT ARE YOU GOING
to do with it?’ said Marik. ‘When you get there?’

‘I don’t know.’ Now that I had his help some of my most immediate worries had receded. But that one remained at the back of my mind like a great black hole. I didn’t like thinking about it.

‘Any ideas?’ I said.

He shook his head. We were walking briskly down the other side of the pass now and beyond the white snows, still hidden by morning clouds, lay the forests and the drowning pool and the village. I told him all I knew about Dabbo and Shirsha and his face took on a look of concern. He felt along the scarf and, just briefly, took my hand in his.

‘You mustn’t end up like them,’ he said.

‘I don’t intend to. Not if I can avoid it.’

‘You will,’ he said. ‘I know you will.’

I wished I had as much faith in myself as he seemed to have.

‘Will you stay with me, Marik? Until I work out what to do?’

His face clouded. ‘I wish I could. But if I don’t go back and pick up that load I’ll never work again.’

He reeled me in urgently as I began to drift towards a nearby overhang, then went on, ‘It wouldn’t matter to me so much if I thought there was anything else I could do. I made my mind up, you see, that I would never allow my blindness to make me helpless. I wasn’t going to spend my life dependent upon others. When I told my father I intended to be a porter like him he laughed at me. Everyone did. But I proved that I could do it. It’s all I’ve got.’

‘Then you have to go back,’ I said, doing my best to keep my disappointment out of my voice. ‘You can turn back any time, you know? I can manage.’

‘I’ll take you as far as the snow-line,’ he said. ‘I can get back tonight and I’ll catch them up at the market before they set out again tomorrow.’

‘You’ll miss your rest day.’

He grinned broadly. ‘That’s one thing I have in my favour. I’m as strong as two yaks.’

He could have let me go long before he did. After another hour of walking the worst of the danger was behind us, and the path fell smoothly away towards the valley with no more precipitous drops. But I was in no hurry to lose him and my anxiety increased with every step of the way.

I thought of how I might try and persuade him to stay. My trees would certainly create enough income for two of us, and he could carry the nuts to the plains for me, and later, if I branched out, he could deliver my milk. But somehow I knew that we were neither close enough nor distant enough to come to an agreement like that. He wouldn’t accept a gift of partnership, I knew, and nor could I offer to be his employer without offending him.

And there was another thing, too. I was growing fond of Marik; I wanted him to be a friend forever. But although he had helped me, saved my life perhaps, he wasn’t responsible for my problem. I had embarked upon this mission alone and, one way or another, I had to find a way to finish it. If I succeeded, then Marik and I could start afresh.

If.

All too soon we descended into thinner snow. Stones and dormant vegetation began to show through on the path, and Marik had to slow down and pick his way more carefully. I hadn’t done it on purpose, but I noticed that I was taking the lead more and more often and, if I had stopped to think, I might have realised that I needed Marik’s help more than ever. But I didn’t. It seemed to him that he was not needed any more, and before we reached the snow-line he stopped in the path and told me that it was time for him to go back.

I could have cried. Instead I turned towards him and began to untie the scarf that bound us together.

‘Will you stop in the village on your way back?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’

He gave me the money from his pocket. I tried to persuade him to keep some of it, but he wouldn’t.

‘Next time,’ I said.

‘Next time,’ he said.

Suddenly we were in each other’s arms, and it felt to me as though I had spent my life searching for that moment. The brief embrace was home and safety and warmth, and it exposed my closely guarded heart the way a wing-tail digs out a ground plum; gently, without damaging it. For a few glowing moments I felt on top of the world. Then we broke apart, Marik turned back to the trail, and the beguiler moved in.

I felt its sinister influence the minute Marik began to move away from me. It was broad daylight and I couldn’t see it at all, but I could sense it dragging at me, tapping in to my exposed feelings, exerting a terrifying downward drag upon my spirit.

I wanted to call out to Marik; bring him back to me before it was too late. But he had already risked too much to help me. I was struck by the thought that if he came back, I would somehow be allowing the beguiler to enslave him as well; indirectly perhaps, but no less decisively. I couldn’t let that happen.

So I stood up and began to stumble down the path. The going was treacherously steep, but although I tried to take my time, I found myself racing and slithering over the ice. I put it down to tiredness and lack of co-ordination, but I ought to have known that it was more than that. I ought to have had more sense.

Within an hour I had left the snow-line behind and skidded and stumbled down the scree into the druze. My descent became more and more reckless. I burst through the undergrowth, tumbled down banks, and didn’t stop until I rolled, exhausted, on to a level, swampy ledge. My heart was pounding and my breathing rasped in my throat, quite uselessly it seemed, because I couldn’t get enough air.

I pulled the folded shawl around my shoulders, for comfort rather than warmth. As I snuggled down to rest, or to die, or to see what happened next, I realised that there were an awful lot of things I didn’t know. Like the satisfaction people got from living normal lives. Like the wisdom of the elders in persuading people not to go off hunting beguilers.

As my mind began to drift again, I felt the leather bag resting against the heel of my hand, still bound to my wrist. Perhaps it was now? Perhaps the beguilers’ eyes were the only things that could release me from this horror? I began to fumble with the thongs, no longer caring whether the time was right or not. I wanted to save myself, and to save the village below me from the horror that I was about to visit upon them. But the knots were too tight, my fingers were too thick and stiff, and my mind was drifting into a kind of a daze.

Derisive voices were in the air around me.

‘Not her parents’ fault. Decent people.

‘… child like that should have been drowned at birth.’

‘… saved everyone a lot of trouble.’

Temma was screaming. I wanted to tell her it was all right; it was just me, just me, the same as ever …

‘By the power invested in us by the Books …’

‘… because it is not the demon you have brought, but the demon you are.’

I was climbing up out of the well, dragging myself like some slow, cold-blooded thing which left a slimy trail behind it.

I was terrified into alertness again and was immediately plagued by a gnawing hunger, as though my famished body had started living off tissue that couldn’t be spared. I would have to find food but I was too afraid to move. I lay among the druze and listened for sounds of life around me. There were none.

Until my beguiler shrieked. The sound stiffened my blood in its course. I hadn’t slept, I was sure of that, but in some other way time had passed without my awareness and I had been overtaken by darkness. I groped around for the gut coil; searched every corner of the shawl ten times over, convinced each time that one of them must be evading me, until eventually I had to face the truth. The cord was gone. I could picture it still tied to the rock at my last camp, but I couldn’t remember whether I had removed it from there or not.

The beguiler gave its plaintive call again and the sound clutched at my innards, giving me a physical pain like a cramp. I pulled the shawl over my head but the beguiler came and hovered above me and I could see its light through the weave of the cloth, stronger than it had ever been. With a sense of dreadful hopelessness I knew that I no longer had the strength to resist.

I got up slowly, into the darkness that lies upon the earth before the moon rises. The beguiler danced triumphantly, shooting high up above the gloomy druze and diving down again. Then it steadied itself and began to lead the way downhill. As I followed I realised that, if it came to the crunch, I might still be able to resist the final fall, whatever it might be. I still had the bag with the beguilers’ eyes. There was hope. If I was following the beguiler now it was because I had made the decision to do so, not because I was beyond control. I could still change my mind.

Or so I believed. When the dawn came I was still following, heading directly down-hill. I had passed through the rhododendrons and entered the forest proper, but although I was aware that there must be birds and insects all around I couldn’t see any. Perhaps they were all hiding from me, terrified by my despair or the noise I was making as I crashed through the undergrowth. For I was travelling fast. The beguiler was exerting too strong an influence for me to work out a gentler descent for myself in a series of zig-zags. I was plunging straight down the mountainside, sliding at times on the fallen leaves or running to keep my balance, and sometimes even stumbling and rolling. I had long since lost my bearings and I passed no landmarks that would give me a clue to exactly where I was on the mountain.

But if I’d had my wits about me, I would have known. There was only one place that I could be.

As the sun rose the beguiler became invisible to me. But it was still there and it had built up a terrific momentum. I wanted to stop; kept telling myself that if I could rest for a while and take my bearings, I would find that I wasn’t far from the village. But I didn’t stop, even though my knees and calves were in agony from the battering they were taking. I just kept hurtling down the hill, dodging trees, jumping brambles, skirting patches of undergrowth.