Bloodmind (10 page)

Moon Moor stretches for perhaps thirty
lai
along the edge of the mountains, before the scrub turns to the bare earth of the foothills. It takes a day to cross on mur-back, longer if the
mist comes down from the mountains. We were perhaps a third of the way across when the attack came.

They were a band of northern clans: wild people, rumoured to live on lines of dark energy and eat human flesh. When I rode with our warband, I believed this, but later, when I had lived a
little, I thought that they probably believed the same about us. They rode swift mur, the coats mottled black and white to blend in with the northern forests. Even against this thorny scrub, they
were well disguised due to the sprinkling of snow, and they were as fast as ghosts.

And they had dreamcallers with them. We found that out soon enough, but I felt them before I saw them. Their dreams prickled at the edges of mine and I threw a wall of shivering illusions into
the air, but they were stronger than I was. I sent out a silent call to our other dreamcallers, further up the line, but it was too late: I’d been snapped. One moment I was facing a brake of
scrub, sharp with thorns and frost, and the next, I was in a wasteland of the dead. Everyone around me was dead: corpses torn to pieces and the air thick with the smoke from the funeral pyres. I
started to choke on it, even as a small cool voice at the back of my mind told me that it wasn’t real. The mountain wall drifted into view through the smoke: we were still on Moon Moor. I
turned with a flush of hope. I wanted to know if I could find my sister. But one of the corpses sat up and spoke to me, its jaw clicking back into place as it did so. It was another woman, a
warrior like me, with the curve of pregnancy just visible beneath her battle dress. I could see the litter squirming within, as though she had become transparent.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the dead warrior said. ‘You’re still alive.’

‘I can conjure dreams. I’m lost in someone else’s. Where is this supposed to be? Is this Eresthahan?’

‘The land of the dead? Of course not. This is Moon Moor. Past and future meet here. By the way, someone’s trying to kill you.’

She opened her mouth wide and the dreamcaller’s song came pouring from it like the smoke from the pyres, visible and glittering against the charnel air. I’d got a hold on it now, a
mesh. I could see the warrior behind her, sword upraised, real, and I raised the big bow with its notched arrow and shot him in the gut before he could come any closer. He dropped, screaming, and
the sound cleared my head. The battlefield of the past vanished, along with the pregnant warrior, and I was back on Moon Moor with my own warband.

I took out another girl with an arrow, but the enemy dreamcallers hadn’t finished yet. I could see them up on the high ground, protected behind a wall of bowmen. They stood in their ritual
postures, mimicking the flight of birds, calling illusions up out of the frosty air. Puffs of the hallucinogenic dust that they used to enhance their natural abilities came from their mouths as
they incanted, and the bowmen in front of them, their own warband, wore elaborate face masks attached to their helmets, in order to avoid the effects. We didn’t use that sort of shit; it
rotted your brain in the end. I had to get to them, because they were causing such havoc among the warband: people staggering to and fro, getting cut down as easily as winter-fat waterfowl, not
even noticing their own dying in the mists of conjured visions. I ran towards the dreamcallers, zigzagging across the moor. There were wider tunnels underneath that ridge: I remembered them from
childhood. We hadn’t used them much, because they were big enough for predators to follow us in and we had preferred the narrow, child-hiding tunnels. But they led out to the back of the
ridge, a hive-comb of passageways. If I could slink up behind the enemy dreamcallers and cast an illusion of my own . . .

As I drew nearer, the invading visions started to creep back. I breathed shallowly, pulling my collar over my face, but the pregnant warrior was pacing beside me now. Her ruined face was
amused.

‘It doesn’t matter, you know,’ she said. ‘Everyone dies.’

‘But it isn’t my time. Our clan satahrach looked at the stars, did a tide-reading. I’m not supposed to die now.’

One eyebrow, the one not buried in clotted blood, arched. ‘You believe all that?’

‘I won’t doubt the satahrach. She knows what she’s talking about.’

But the warrior only grinned, her shattered jaw flapping, and I ran on, dodging under the bowmen’s gaze. I couldn’t see their eyes behind the elaborate metal masks, but I could hear
their laboured breath. An arrow sang past my ear and buried itself in a shower of black earth, but I was through the bushes that shrouded the tunnels’ mouth and into cool darkness.

The sounds of the skirmish were immediately cut off. I had no time to bask in the lovely quiet, but pushed on through overhanging roots and out-juts of stone. Old curls and coils in the rock
betrayed the presence of things that were long dead and they spoke to me, of ancient rolling seas, life that was nothing like the lives of the
now.
I wanted to listen to their voices, until
the memories of the screams of warriors and mur no longer echoed in my ears, but I did not stop. Onward, following the smell of air through this cradle of earth, seeking the other side. I was too
intent on the back of the ridge, of reaching it. I should have watched my footing instead, for when the earth gave way beneath me in a slip and shower, I felt only a quiver of surprise before I
fell.

I shouldn’t have been able to see light, and my first thought was that the enemy dreamcallers had reached me and trapped me in illusion again. But
this wasn’t the battleground of Eresthahan, with the sun breaking through smouldering clouds. This was a soft, blue, dim light, like the light you see on fungi in the depths of winter,
picking up the light of the snow and reflecting it back at twilight. But this place did not smell like the forest. I’d never smelled anything like it before: it was too clean, and at the same
time, moist.

I checked for injuries and found few. I’d twisted my ankle, but it wasn’t broken or even sprained and I was able to clamber to my feet and walk without much pain. A few minutes later
and I’d forgotten that the ankle even existed. Away from the rupture that had brought me here, the earth above my head was packed and solid, as though it had been moulded. I had to get back
to the warband, but the hole through which I had fallen was too high up and there was no way to climb up to it. Maybe there was another way out.

The light was coming from a short distance ahead, and I followed it, half expecting to come out into fresh air. But further down the passage, the earlier clean scent changed – this air was not
fresh at all: it smelled dead, if air can die. A moment of walking and then the passage was opening out into a network of chambers: I could see them extending into the distance, but then movement
attracted my attention and I saw that I was facing my own reflection.

I confess to studying it with some interest. I’d never seen myself full length before: a tall, thin woman dressed in layers of black, her hair caught back in the severe warriors’
knot, looped to one side so that I could more easily pluck an arrow from the shoulder quiver. And I saw for the first time, without the burnish of metal or the shiver of water to get in the way,
that I really was beautiful, just as they said. I noted this with surprise, not satisfaction. No time for vanity now, however. I had to find out where I was.

The chamber was round, and led into another round chamber. It gleamed, faintly, and it wasn’t made of stone, nor metal, either. I could not tell what it was made from. It must be durable,
to last so long under the earth, even though it had picked up a sheen of moisture that beaded itself over the curving walls and ceiling. I couldn’t tell where the light was coming from. There
was no sign of any furniture: all the chambers were empty. I went from one to another and found that there were ten of them. All of them had a depression in the floor, bowl-shaped like the marks on
the rocks of the seashore. I marked each chamber with a little smear of my blood, taken from one of the scrapes I’d sustained in the skirmish. I didn’t trust these round rooms. I wanted
to be able to get out again.

In the tenth room, I was turning to leave when there was a flicker of movement. I stood still, expecting to see my own reflection, but it wasn’t myself that I had glimpsed. Something was
rising from the depression in the floor, floating in a column of light. I nearly ran but I made myself stand still and watch.

It was a child. But it didn’t look quite like the children of the clan, or the litter to which I myself had given birth. Its face was too narrow and elongated, more like an animal’s
muzzle. As I stared, however, the muzzle withdrew, back into its face, and now it looked human. It was naked, but showed no sign of a sex: the place between its small legs was bare and smooth.
There was something repulsive about this, something unreal. It grew, stretching, the limbs extending, until it was almost my own height. The peaceful face changed too, becoming adult, but the
muzzle was back again and now the limbs were changing, bending back upon impossible joints, until the creature stood on all fours like a mur. The face was something like a mur’s, too; the
long sharp skull and sharper teeth. Then human once more. The satahrach of my clan had once told me that mur and human shared a common ancestry, that the riding beasts had a language of their own
which they would not speak before humans, although some people seemed able to understand it. I had never believed this, though certainly the mur seemed cleverer than other animals and more
malevolent, too. But now, looking at this shifting, changing, sexless thing, I wondered what it meant and whether the satahrach had been right after all.

The thing was growing old, withering down into bent age. I remember watching the process with revulsion, knowing that I’d come to that as well, if I lived through the warband. And then it
died, but it collapsed in upon itself, neither human nor animal, only something small and skeletal and strange. Its face remained peaceful until the last and then the thing was gone, along with the
light. I waited for an uneasy moment, but the chamber was still and quiet. I did not understand what I had seen. I turned and followed the clues of my own blood, out of the chamber and back to the
starting place. From there, I took the other side of the passage, which led into further caves and – at last! – a place where the earth had crumbled away in stages.

It took me an hour to clamber up the wall to the second hole. I hauled myself over the lip of the tunnel, expecting a waiting group of enemy soldiers, but there was just another passage beneath
the rock, with fresh air blowing through it. As I hastened along the passage, bending double in some places, I saw and heard no one. The passage was shattering in its silence. I kept thinking about
what lay beneath my feet, preoccupied and wondering, and when I finally glimpsed a change in the light and stepped cautiously out on the further side of the ridge, I found that it was dusk and I
was quite alone.

This was all wrong. When I had gone in under the ridge, it had been much earlier. I was certain that I hadn’t been knocked out: a little dazed, maybe, but not unconscious. Nor had I spent
much time exploring the chambers, and yet here I was, a whole day later with the ghaiths rising in a cloud over the remains on the battlefield, carrion birds squabbling and battling over scraps of
human flesh. There was no sign of dreamcallers or warriors, only an emblem stabbed at an angle into the black earth of Moon Moor.

I had to search for the warband. At first I was afraid they’d all been killed, but a quick examination of the corpses revealed an almost equal number of enemy and my own folk. I tracked
them across the moor, following blood and mur-prints and boot-prints and broken scrub. They’d gone fast but not, I thought, fleeing.

I eventually caught up with them just as dark was falling over the moor, the moons already rising in a blue-stained sky and catching the clouds in a web of light. They were camped up in a knoll
of rock, celebrating an unexpected victory: the enemy leader’s mask had failed and he had become subject to his own dreamcallers’ illusions, running amok and killing some of his own
band. My people had fallen upon them in the confusion and they had fled. The warband had followed them for a distance, but they had vanished into the foothills, following tracks known only to
themselves. It would make a good story for the winter fires; I wished I’d witnessed it. My clan leader said he’d never seen anything funnier and everyone was sorry I’d missed
it.

I told them what had happened to my own self, the truth of it, with no small shame. But I did not tell them about the round gleaming room, nor the thing I had seen. I wasn’t sure if it
only had been a dreamcaller’s conjuring, or that they would think me mad. I was a dreamcaller myself, after all, even if I wasn’t a very strong one. They teased me enough as it was.

I slept badly that night, dreaming it all over again, and waking stiff in the morning to find the dawn coming up over Moon Moor and the warband ready to move on.

I am a weapon,
or so the old woman had told me. But I am more than that. I am a creator.

I don’t know what made me come up with the idea of the lodge. Maybe one of the visions whispered it to me out of the darkness and the flying shadows, or maybe it was simply that I was
growing up and wanted a place of my own. After all, I’d never had one: first the place of heat, then the caves where we’d hidden, and then the journey to Muspell. Then I’d lived
with the others, with the women’s clans in their brochs. But now, Sull had proven something to me; my coming-of-age, if you like, my own personal ingsgaldir. I could work alone, I needed no
one. But I wanted a house.

So I found one. It was in the deep forest, but oddly, not in Morvern. Instead, it was not far from Hetla: in a region so close to civilization that no one bothered going there. A small lodge, in
a clearing in the forest.