Blood Ties (39 page)

“You were miles away,” Mabry said.

“Yes, a long way away. But I’m glad to be back!”

They smiled at him, even Martine, although her eyes speculated on what thoughts had distracted him so thoroughly. Gytha and Drema were clearing the table so the others moved back to the fire.

“Give us a poem, lad,” Martine said.

He nodded, seeing the women turn eagerly and Mabry sit forward on his chair.

“This is called ‘The Homecoming,’” he said, smiling. “It’s a song from the far north coast, about a sailor coming back from a fishing trip where he was nearly killed.

From the black eye of the storm

From the keen knife of the wind

From the long sharp fingers of the sprites of ice

From the pressure of the deep

From the terror of the waves

Seal Mother has delivered me . . .

And I am sailing home . . .

I am sailing home . . .

In his mind the music broke into the joyful swell of the song, and beneath it he could hear the creaking of the mast, the slap and thud of the waves breaking against the bow, the
crack
as an iceberg calved. Though he had never been that far north, and never been on a boat with sails. The song delivered the world of its maker sharp into his mind, clear as a memory of his own.

The songs had never come alive before, and he wondered why it was happening now. Because he had chosen the song to suit his own mood, and not to please someone else? He couldn’t remember ever having done that before. But then, he’d only just started reciting the words of songs at all, with Martine.

“Oh, that was wonderful!” Gytha said, breathless. “It was like I was really there. Do another, go on!”

So he chose another, a song from the south, a ballad about a girl searching through the forest for her brother, because he felt he was searching for the truth to something, and this song fitted his mood, too. And, like the sailing song, as he said the words he heard the wind soughing in the pines, smelled the sharp scent of a fox as it flitted past, tasted the salt in the girl’s tears as she cried in loneliness and despair. Then he felt the extraordinary surge of thankfulness and joy as she found him.

They applauded again and asked for more.

This time he chose songs he thought they would like; and nothing gave flight to the words but his own voice.

He tried to think it over later, alone in his blankets by the fire. Martine was in the only guest room, no more than a cubby-hole formed in the passage that used to lead to the back door. The door now led to a new room in the farmhouse that Mabry had built for Elva, the baby and himself. “So we won’t be kept awake all night with the young one crying,” Drema had said, in a stern voice, but with her hand gentling Elva’s hair.

It was the first time since they had left Turvite that Ash had had time and solitude to think, and he knew that he should carefully go over everything that had happened. But his tiredness, the evening, the fellowship, the warmth, had left him swimming in a soft fog of comfort, and he decided not to spoil it. Instead, he curled up with his back to the solid warmth of the banked embers, laid his head on one of Gytha’s felt cushions and slept dreamlessly all night.

Almost all the night. In the very early morning, in the gray light before dawn, Martine and Elva woke him and they went to see the gods.

Ash was familiar with the gods, of course. Every Traveler visited the sacred stones on their journeys, made sacrifices, prayed. His father had been very devout, but his mother less so.

“They don’t really care much about people, you know,” Swallow had said once, as Ash’s father had prepared a gift for the local gods outside Carlion.

Rowan had shrugged. “But they are there, and deserve our worship.”

“Maybe.”

As a child, Ash had imagined that he heard the gods talking to him, but their voices were so faint that he could hardly hear them. That was until Turvite, and the black stone under the oak tree. He wondered, following Martine across the dew-soaked field, what he would hear now.

As they approached the stone he felt the hair on the back of his neck lift. They were here.

“They are always here,” Elva said to him, as though replying directly to his thought.

Her eyes, colorless in the gray light, had lost their focus. She lowered herself awkwardly next to the stone and laid one hand on it, then her head dropped back and came up again.

Her voice, which had been high and a little thready, was now deep and sure. “We warn you,” it said. The gods.

The gods were speaking through Elva.

Martine was pale, but it was obvious that she had seen it before and had expected it. “About what?” she asked.

“There is evil,” said the gods. “Human evil. Great.”

“The calling up of the dead?”

“The wall between living and dead may not be breached without harm to both. You must stop it.”

“Us? Why
us?
” Ash cried.

Elva’s sightless eyes turned toward him. “She will tell you.”

“Elva?” Martine asked.

“The Well of Secrets.”

“We must go to the Well of Secrets?” Ash asked.

“When the first thaw comes.”

“Why not now?” he demanded.

But Elva’s head had fallen back again and when she raised it her eyes were her own again.

“Oh, bugger,” she said comfortably, as if just a little annoyed. “I wanted to find out if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“What?” Ash said.

“I thought they might stay a little bit longer so I could ask them about the baby.”

He was speechless. The whole world was in danger and she wanted to ask the gods questions about a
baby
.

Martine was amused. “Elva can’t change the future or the past, Ash,” she said. “She’s used to being the . . . the instrument through which the gods speak. And she really did want to know about the baby.”

He shook his head. There was something here about the difference between men and women. He wanted to
act,
to
do
something immediately. The women seemed more interested in the coming birth than in the fate of the world.

When they went back to the farmhouse they told Mabry and his sisters the story of the ghosts and what the gods had said.

They heard the story quietly, then Mabry nodded. “We’d better tell the village voice,” he said, “so she can warn everyone.”

That was all.

Then Drema and Gytha simply went quietly about their business again.

Over the next few weeks, as winter settled into the valley, it began to really worry Ash that the others didn’t want to discuss what was going to happen.

“They told us to wait,” Martine said. “It’s hard, but no good ever came of disobeying the gods.”

Only Mabry, when Ash was helping him around the farm, would talk it over, and then just to ask Ash questions about the ghosts and what they could do. Half the work they were doing, Ash realized, was not ordinary farmwork, but Mabry’s preparations in case the ghosts came.

“They couldn’t get through the doors, you say?” he asked Ash, and went about repairing and putting up the heavy storm shutters. Others in the village were doing the same, but not all. Many villagers still thought Elva unchancy and wanted nothing to do with her or the family.

“They only had bronze weapons, you say?” Mabry asked, and he sharpened his steel knives and scythes and his axe, and kept at least one weapon to hand no matter where he was.

“You might not be able to kill them,” he observed, “but if they’re solid you ought to be able to cut off their arms.”

Ash nodded. “If they can’t hold a weapon there’s a limit to the damage they can do.”

Hesitantly, Ash offered to teach Mabry singlestave and fighting, and he was grateful for it. Soon there was a class in the small barn most afternoons, with a few friends of Mabry’s joining in. Ash was surprised to find how much he knew; watching Mabry, a strong, able man, fumble with his stick and hit himself over the head with it made him realize that he was, in fact, quite accomplished. Although he still wouldn’t have backed himself in a serious fight against someone like Dufe, or the Dung brothers.

The best of the village bunch was Mabry’s tall dark-haired friend, Barley, who wielded the singlestave with ferocious determination and had shoulders like an ox.

“I used to be a ferryman,” he said briefly, when Ash commented on his strength. “But I’m a potter now.”

Barley turned back to his practice, squaring up to his opponent, one of the boys from the farm next door, half his size but quick as an eel.

For the first time Ash felt part of something; it was the first time, he realized, that he’d ever
been
part of a group of just men, working together. It was a solid, comforting feeling and he relished it all the more because he knew he’d have to leave come spring.

Bramble

B
RAMBLE MOVED
along the branch until she had a better foothold. She waited until Leof’s party had had plenty of time to move off, and then scrambled as fast as cramped legs, tired arms and sore hands would let her. She went back for the horses. She had considered leaving them behind, just letting them loose to forage, but it would have felt like Thegan had beaten her in some way if she did, so she took them, despite the risk. Besides, later on she’d need them, she figured, to get over the pass into the Last Domain, the most northerly of the Eleven Domains, where the Well of Secrets was living.

She took their feed bags off and led them to water, which was not hard to find so close to the Lake, as all the streams converged. Every moment made her dance with impatience, but she knew that fed and watered horses were less likely to be noisy or troublesome. Finally they raised their dripping muzzles from the stream. She led them across, and made straight for the Lake, heading into a surprisingly thick mist.

It didn’t take long. They came to the first reed bed, which emerged spikily out of the mist, after only half an hour. That meant they were safely across the border. She couldn’t relax, though. The forest came right down to the shores of the Lake here, with pines perched on the few rocks, and a variety of trees growing where the sun could reach, with their roots in the water. The leaves of willows, alders, laurels were turning every color imaginable, flaming defiance to the cold wind. Bramble took it as a sign of hope.

She took stock, too. There were three ways across the Lake, if you didn’t have a boat. There was a ferry at the neck of the Lake, where it emptied itself into the river that ran to Mitchen. The ferry was surrounded by Baluchston — founded by Baluch, one of Acton’s fifty companions — and the second of the free towns, after Turvite. It was small, for a free town, existing mostly to provide the needs of travelers and traders operating on and around the Lake, and, of course, to charge a hefty toll to use the ferry. Baluchston could charge the toll because the river fell two trees’ height into a narrow canyon, and was impassable.

It was a prosperous little town and Bramble wouldn’t have given a copper for its chance of staying free once Thegan had taken the Lake Domain. But since it was still a free town, Thegan’s men were as safe there as she was, and would be watching for her.

The second way to cross the Lake was to swim it. It had been done, once or twice, out of bravado or greed or sheer desperation. But for every man who had made it across, twenty had died in the attempt. The worst thing was, no one knew why. It
looked
safe, the Lake — once you were past the reed beds around the edges it was unruffled, shining water. The lake current was strong, of course, but men had also swum the river itself.

But Bramble had heard the stories of swimmers setting out in high hope and full fitness, simply stopping halfway across and disappearing. Sucked down, pulled down, who knew? The local gods would only say that there were no water sprites in the Lake, which in itself was worrying, when everyone knew they were everywhere in the Sharp River, which fed the Lake. So what kept them out? Something nastier than water sprites. Bramble shivered at the thought. Swimming was one risk she wouldn’t take.

Which left the third way: the Lake Dwellers. And she had to head there anyway, to deliver Sorn’s note.

Bramble had always been fascinated by the Lake Dwellers. When she was small she had pestered her grandfather to tell her all the Travelers’ tales about them. They were the same people who had lived on the Lake in Acton’s time: no invasion, no landtaken, had ever dislodged them. If they were threatened — and they had been threatened, time after time — they simply disappeared to the hidden islands in the vast reed beds that covered the northwestern end of the Lake. And anyone who went after them disappeared also.

Camps or towns set up around the edges of the Lake went up in flames. Farms were flooded as the Lake waters mysteriously rose over dry fields. Fishermen washed up on the shore, occasionally alive, and talked about monsters from the deep. And any attempt at building a bridge failed spectacularly, usually in flames and with a lot of screaming. The dwellers believed the Lake was alive, a being of some kind, and she didn’t like being shackled by bridges.

Baluch had negotiated with them for the free town and the ferry. The ferrymen were all from two families. When the town was set up, their ancestors had been taken away into the reeds by the Lake Dwellers and brought back a couple of days later. They refused to talk about what they had seen, but they began to refer to the Lake as “She.” At puberty, both boys and girls from those families were still taken into the reeds by the Lake Dwellers, and they still returned closemouthed about what they had seen.

She would have to go farther west and north to find the Lake Dwellers. Or, she could ask the Lake for help . . .

Horsetail, bulrush, nalgrass, birdgrass . . . Along the edges of the Lake there were a dozen different kinds of reeds. She looked through the hardening autumn stalks to the cold mud beneath. This was not going to be pleasant. She considered removing her boots, but once, in her forest near Wooding, she had tried to climb through a reed bed to get to a stream, and had cut her feet badly. So she put her booted sole firmly down in the squelching mud and forced her way through the reeds.

She was waist-deep and beginning to turn blue with cold by the time she reached a patch of open water. She took great gulping breaths and rubbed her arms, trying to jump up and down to keep the blood moving. She almost lost a boot.

“Oh, shag it!” she said. Then she laughed. Could she have looked more ridiculous, standing waist-high in freezing water, swearing blindly, waiting for — what?

She laughed again, feeling exhilarated, as though she were setting off on a chase, soaring over fences and streams. Her laughter bubbled up and spread out over the water. There were no solemn words, no invocations to the gods that would help her now. All she had to offer was the truth.

“Oh, Lake, Lake, here I am, come to ask for help. Come to give help if I can. Please send the Lake Dwellers to me before I freeze to death.”

She laughed again. Was there ever a less elegant prayer? But around her the wind was rising, the mist was lifting, and she felt again the sense of freedom and joy rising in her, as it had when she rode the roan. It was not like the presence of the local gods, not steeped in holy terror, but it had the same
breadth,
as though her emotion were larger than she was — as her anger at Thegan had been not only hers, but also the gods’. Here, she shared her exhilaration with the Lake.

She was not surprised to hear the soft clucking of water beneath a boat, or to see the high black prow curving through the mist, or to feel hands under her shoulders pulling her up over the tightly bound bundles of reeds that formed the sides of the boat. She was, however, surprised to find that her three horses were already on board, huddled in a nervous group in the center of the boat’s flat bottom. She turned to the men who had lifted her aboard.

“The Lake told us where to look,” one of them said, and there was general laughing. “She likes you, that Lake.” He added a comment in his own language, and at that the whole crew — eight of them — dissolved into backslapping mirth.

Bramble laughed too, sitting on the deck with her back to the strong, tar-smelling reeds, a pool of water gradually seeping out around her.

They were tall men, and lean, and they all wore odd hats woven out of split reeds. They weren’t exactly hats, just rims that sat on their hair. Their hair and eyes were as black as Bramble’s own. Their skin was darker, though, and she thought that all Travelers must once have had skin like this, before interbreeding with Acton’s folk. It was like looking back through time, to before the landtaken. But these were real people, not noble relics from a distant past. One had acne scars all over his face, another had several teeth missing. One had the bowed legs that meant he’d had rickets as a child. That one looked at her the way most men looked: body first and face, a very late second.

The men went about their tasks single-mindedly, attending kindly to the horses, steering with the long pole that also moved them through the water, or busy with nets and craypots in the stern. Which left one, the oldest, to talk to her.

He was not that old — fifty, maybe. As he stood at the prow he looked stern and proud; her grandfather had talked about the Lake Dwellers’ legendary pride. His eyes were so dark they seemed unfathomable, but he turned to grin at her and a web of laughter lines sprang up around his eyes and mouth.

“She told us to come and get you, but She didn’t say why,” he said conversationally, a faint accent softening the ends of his words. “I am Eel. I speak your language. The others, not.”

“I’m Bramble,” she said.

The Lake had led these people to her. Presumably, She trusted them. Bramble reached inside her jacket for Sorn’s note and handed it to Eel. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to read it, anyway.

But he did, his eyebrows moving up. “So,” he said, and called out to the steersmen in a different language. The boat immediately began to swing around in a big curve, turning west.

“Um . . .” Bramble said. “I understand you want to take this to your council as soon as you can, but I need to get to the other side of the Lake.”

Eel nodded. “We are going to the other side.”

She settled back. They might end up a long way west, but at least Thegan’s men wouldn’t be looking for her there.
Let the Lake lead us,
she thought.

The journey lasted all day, with the steersmen taking turns at propelling the boat along. They had headed straight for the middle of the Lake, so far that the southern shore disappeared and the northern shore was only a line in the distance. Bramble had heard about how large the Lake was, but being out on it — in what seemed, in that expanse, a tiny boat — was sobering. Astonishing. And exhilarating. It seemed to her that the freedom she had been seeking all her life, had sought on the Road, might be here, on this wide stretch of water. When the wind picked up from the east, pushing them faster against the westerly current, she laughed, and the boatmen laughed with her.

The horses weren’t amused. Bramble spent most of the trip soothing them. Trine alone was unconcerned.

The day was fine as the mist burned off. Autumn sun was warm on their faces and turned the Lake into slabs of polished steel. The boatmen shared their lunch with her: smoked fish, flat bread, dried fruit and sweet water drawn up from the Lake in a small bucket. Before they drank the water the men dipped their forefingers in their cups and drew a circle on the back of their hands. Bramble hesitated. Should she do likewise?

Eel saw her poise her finger uncertainly and shook his head, smiling. “Not yet,” he said. “When you have been properly introduced.”

She smiled back at him and drank. The water was clear and cold and tasted of snow, and something else, not quite a muddy taste, but a little bitter, like weak tea.

“The taste of the reeds,” Eel said. He patted the side of the boat.

It was made of very long bundles of reeds lashed together and then covered with bitumen on the outside to make it waterproof. Inside, the floor and the crevices between floor and side were tarred as well. It made the whole boat smell, but she could see that the combination of lightweight, buoyant reeds and waterproofing made the boat practically unsinkable. It was, however, like tinder waiting for a match. Worse: it would flame up faster than tinder, faster than wood soaked with liquor, faster than straw. Bramble thought of Sorn’s message:
Beware. He comes with fire.
She blanched, imagining it all too clearly. Thegan would smile as he set the boats alight. If he could find them.

Toward the end of the day they came to the northwestern reed flats. There was some talk between the men, with a couple of them gesticulating aggressively.

Finally, Eel came over to her reluctantly. “It is our custom not to let outsiders see the paths through the reeds. I know you are a friend of the Lake, but —”

She smiled and held up her hands soothingly. “It’s all right. Frankly, I’d rather not know. Then I can’t be a danger to you.”

He nodded with satisfaction and spoke over his shoulder to the others. They, too, nodded approvingly at her. One brought over a scarf, which they tied over her eyes. It smelled of fish. She leaned back against the solid bulwark of reeds and listened to the soft sounds of the boat: the gurgles from the steering blade, the bare feet of the men on the floor, the horses whickering as they caught the scent of land and fodder. The sides of the boat scraped gently against reeds, and the sounds of wind rubbing stalk against stalk and the squawking and flapping from ducks or geese disturbed by the boat surrounded her. The music of the Lake continued for a long time, while the light seeping under the edges of the scarf faded away. When she could see only a deep golden glow under the scarf, frogs began to call, a few at first, and then more and more, until the boat vibrated with the noise. It filled the world.

Eventually, the prow of the boat scraped against earth and Eel removed the scarf.

Bramble stood up, blinking her eyes. It was almost dark, with just faint tracks of gold and rose far down on the flat horizon that seemed to curve away. Every distance here was filled with the reeds, rustling, swaying, singing with the almost deafening frog chorus. There were houses built out of reeds, half circles seeming to cling to the ground, some the length of a small field. All the buildings were on stilts at the edges of a thin island, like a lace hem on a petticoat. There were boats everywhere, being poled along, tied up, repaired, some as big as the one she was on, others tiny, just big enough for one person.

The island — precious, arable land — was the domain of cattle and crops. Goats were being folded in for the night by young boys. They called to one another in high, carrying voices, and shouted instructions and, if tone was anything to go by, insults at their charges. The smell was rich and complex: reeds, mud, manure, smoke from the fires the boys were lighting near the cattle pens, and something bready cooking somewhere. That smelled delicious.