Consorts of Heaven (16 page)

The wind dropped when they grew level with the remaining wisps of cloud and the air became thick and moist. The lower slopes supported stunted trees, their trunks covered in dripping moss, and the ground between them was carpeted with ferns, forming a miraculous land of soft, damp green.

That night they camped in the thick forest on the lower slopes, amongst more trees than Kerin thought could exist in the whole of Creation.

The next morning Kerin woke to music: a melodious twittering that filled the air.
Birdsong.
Back in Dangwern she had heard the harsh cries of ravens and hawks, and occasionally the high trill of a moorlark. Neithion had told her that birds were everywhere in the lowlands, and how they sang to greet the dawn. She thought it the most beautiful sound she had ever heard.

Standing up after relieving herself behind a tree she came face to face with a small red-furred creature, somewhat larger than a vole, and with a twitching, bushy tail. It clung, head down, to the tree, regarding her with beady black eyes. When she put a hand out towards it, it turned on the spot and shot back up the trunk.

‘Kerin!’

She recognised the panic in Huw’s voice and rushed back towards the camp. Was Damaru in trouble? But as she came out of the trees she saw Huw standing by the cart where Sais lay, and her heart dropped like a stone. After all she had done, if the Mothers had taken him while her back was turned, if he had died alone—

She ran to Sais, who was drawing deep heaving breaths, his back arching. Huw looked at her as if she should know what to do; she wished she did. Suddenly Sais took a great gulp of air and fell back.

Kerin’s own breath filled her body, fit to burst, to scream, to pray—

Sais gave a feeble cough, and opened his eyes. The whites were unstained. Kerin leaned over him, smiling so hard her chapped lips cracked. He blinked, and looked up at her.

He would live.

When he’d first awakened in Kerin’s hut he’d clawed his way up from darkness into an unknown and frightening world. This time, there had been a merciful lack of nightmares, though he retained odd flashes of awareness from his illness - paralysing cold, Kerin’s face blotting out the starlight, the feel of her body against his while dust pattered down on his face. This time, when he woke up, he knew he was with Kerin and the drovers.

He was surprised to see trees above him, and shocked when Kerin said he’d been unconscious for nine days, the whole journey through the drylands. ‘You did not miss much,’ she said. ‘I would not have minded sleeping through that myself.’

He remained weak, and continued to ride on the cart for the next two days, walking for brief periods to get his strength back. It rained almost constantly, and he soon decided that the one thing worse than walking all day through rain was spending all day sitting on a damp cart being rained on.

On the third day, the rain finally stopped. Sais, still too weak to be much help, went for a walk while the men made camp. As darkness fell, he looked up through the tree branches to see a pair of moons emerging from tattered clouds, one a bright crescent, thin as a wire, the other just under a quarter full, pale grey in colour. He guessed the thin bright one was silvermoon, the other cloudmoon.

Staring at the moons he realised that everything he came across fell into one of three categories: things he knew about without being told, like clothes and eating utensils; things like the moons, that he didn’t know about, but which made sense to him, or which he could work out with a little help; and finally, abstract concepts like the Skymothers and their Traditions, which meant nothing at all to him.

He looked down to see what appeared to be a small patch of brighter moonlight coming through the trees. He stood hurriedly.

The light was a lantern, carried by a portly man wearing robes. His bald head was tattooed with dark swirling lines that looked like stylised writing. Even as Sais remembered the priest he had met at the bottom of Piper’s Steps his gaze was drawn to the cold, white light in the man’s hand. He knew he’d seen lights like that before.

‘Good evening, Chilwar,’ said the priest as he approached.

Sais had no idea what
Chilwar
meant. ‘Good evening,’ he said.

After a moment’s silence the priest said, ‘Ah, tis true then.’

‘What is?’ asked Sais carefully.

‘The drovers told me you have lost your memory. That you did not greet me correctly confirms this.’

Sais tried not to let his dismay at having screwed up in front of a priest show. Fortunately the man sounded more intrigued than offended. ‘They’re not wrong,’ he admitted.

‘So that was why you wished to call on my services?’

Sais tried to remember their brief conversation back before his illness and decided it was best just to agree.

‘Ah, good,’ the priest said, smiling. ‘I may be able to help you.’ He took a step closer. ‘I have received some training in a technique that can, ah, uncover the hidden corners of a man’s mind.’

Whilst that sounded like what Sais needed, he wasn’t sure he needed it from a priest he hardly knew. And if the dreams that had been haunting him were anything to go by, the hidden corners of his mind might contain some scary stuff. ‘Sounds interesting,’ he said evenly.

The priest nodded. ‘Aye, so it is. The technique, and the state you enter, is known as Cof Hlesmair. It is used by priests of my order to uncover memories thought lost. I wonder if you might permit me to, ah, to practise it upon you, to aid your recollection.’

‘What does it involve?’

‘I put you into a trance, and guide your memory back to the places it would not normally be able to go.’

Perhaps to places it didn’t want to go - with good reason.
But what was the alternative? His memory wasn’t coming back by itself. ‘I—Let me think about it.’

‘As you wish.’ The priest sounded disappointed. ‘Perhaps when you are stronger?’

‘Maybe. Thank you for the offer.’ Then he added, ‘That is a very fine lantern you have.’

‘Aye, Chilwar. Such devices are given to priests of the Tyr to light our path when we are abroad from Dinas Emrys.’ His tone implied that stuff like this wasn’t meant for ordinary men. Sais filed the information away for later consideration.

As he headed back towards the camp he met Kerin coming out to find him.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘I’ve just been talking to the priest. He kept calling me
Chilwar
but I wasn’t sure what he meant.’

‘Chilwar means penitent, or seeker. And you must call him Gwas, though his name is Einon.’ Then she added, ‘He has heard Damaru’s affirmation and says he will accompany him all the way to the City of Light.’ She didn’t sound enthusiastic at the prospect.

‘Instead of Fychan?’ Fychan was no longer avoiding Damaru - that afternoon he had helped Kerin coax the boy down from a tree he had taken it into his head to climb.

‘Oh no, Fychan is his appointed guardian and must accompany Damaru to his testing.’

‘Kerin, I’m confused,’ Sais admitted. ‘I assumed that when Howen took over as leader for the three villages, that made him Dangwern drove leader, and also Damaru’s guardian.’

‘The guardianship has nothing to do with being drove leader.’ Kerin sounded uncomfortable.

‘Then what is it to do with?’

‘I . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Tis something that is never spoken of in Dangwern.’ She sighed. ‘Sais, everyone I have ever met knows everything about me . . . About my family. People never speak of it, but it waits like a blade dropped in the mud.’

‘You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.’

‘No, this wound has festered long enough. We are no longer in Dangwern, and it is something you should know. May we sit down?’

‘Of course. Pull up a tree.’ He sat down on a knot of exposed tree-roots, glad to get off his feet.

Kerin hunkered down, leaning back against the tree opposite him. She started to speak, her voice a low whisper coming out of the shadows. ‘My mother’s father was a lay-priest. He was one of the gwas who wander between the villages preaching sermons and giving blessings in return for charity. My mother’s mother was unmarried, and he claimed the right of Gras Cenadol - the fleshly grace - from her. He never returned to Dangwern, and my grandmother died giving birth to my mother.

‘No one in the village had room for an orphan girl of low birth, so my mother was bonded to Loctar, the old chieftain. He had his pleasure of her even before she was old enough to bleed, and thereafter whenever he wished. Though Gwellys knew whose fault it was, when she saw that my mother was with child she beat her half to death. My mother ran away. I was born in the wilds, then left at the edge of the village.’

‘Wait a minute - you’re Arthen’s
sister
?’

‘Aye, half-sister anyway.’

‘Shit! But the way they treated you in the village—’

‘Tis shame. People are ashamed. Loctar was the chieftain. His crime could never be punished, or even spoken of, but to let me die would compound it, so I was fostered with a family who had lost their own baby.’

Though he couldn’t see Kerin’s expression, Sais could hear in her voice how hard she found it to talk about this. ‘So Fychan is Damaru’s cousin?’

‘Aye. And the Traditions have it that if a candidate’s father is dead, it must be another close blood-relative who stands guardian.’

Sais almost said,
You’re his mother: how much closer a relative do they want?
but he already knew his views about sexual equality didn’t match up to reality.

‘So,’ said Kerin, ‘now you know.’

He wanted to go over and give her a hug, and tell her that one person in the world did care that she’d had to pay the price for her mother’s rape, but she had stood up already and he could hear her moving off through the trees.

‘We should get back,’ she said softly.

Sais stood and followed her back to the camp.

 

The next morning the woodland gave way to rounded hills, a mixture of moorland and stony grassland, grazed by sheep. Around noon they came to a village surrounded by a stockade built of stone and wood. Huw told them the carters came from this village; the stockade was protection against outlaw bands, though they wouldn’t bother the drove, given it now numbered more than two hundred men.

‘It’s a veritable army,’ joked Sais - but Huw didn’t know the word.

Sais decided not to visit the village. Though he felt strong enough, he was uneasy about making social mistakes. But he accepted Huw’s offer to ask if anyone had seen him come this way.

He waited with Damaru while the others went into the village. People leaving the village to fetch water from the stream or work in the fields went out of their way to pass the dry-stone wall where Damaru squatted, obliviously tracing the lines of the stones with his fingers, but with Sais sitting next to him, no one approached too close. The dalesmen had the same wiry build as the uplanders, though they looked better fed. They were fairer in colouring, and instead of the drab browns and greys of Dangwern, their clothes were forest green or saffron yellow or ochre, and the women covered their hair with bleached white scarves.

Huw’s enquiries didn’t result in any useful information. If Sais
had
come this way, no one had seen him.

That night, camped outside the village, he asked Einon if this route was the only way up to the highlands. The priest said it wasn’t, but that the others - via the rocky Glaslyn Gorge or the chill northern reaches - were far harder paths.

Sais asked if he could have come from the far side of the uplands, but Einon shook his head. ‘Ah, no, Chilwar. There is nothing there.’ Then he added, ‘Wait here, I can show you.’

He went to his pack and brought back a hand-drawn map on a piece of thick off-white paper. Seeing how Einon handled the paper with careful reverence, Sais had a sudden moment of vertigo. Where he came from, such items weren’t ways of storing valuable knowledge, they were
art
. Information wasn’t shared using scraps of paper, but via books, which were sleek, clean boxes that displayed words - nothing like anything he’d seen here.

Einon, apparently oblivious of the effect his map was having on Sais, pointed out the mountains, symbolised by little upturned cones along the top and down the left-hand side; to the right, broken lines represented what he called the Great Waste, and along the bottom wavy lines showed fenlands. A stylised house marked Plas Aethnen. There were a few dozen such symbols on the map.

‘Is that the City of Light?’ asked Sais, pointing to a symbol like a spire with a cluster of tiny houses around its base. It was near the fenlands, to the south-east of Plas Aethnen.

‘Aye, Chilwar, it is.’

Though the map made sense once Einon had explained it, nothing on it looked remotely familiar to Sais.

 

For the next week the weather remained wet and evenings were spent huddling miserably under the awnings. They stopped briefly at each of the few villages they passed.

The land became softer, the valleys covered in a patchwork of fields, the heathland relegated to the tops of the hills. They took to stopping over at farms with large animal pens, presumably built to house the drove. Some of the farms let the drove leaders sleep in their barns, an invitation Einon extended to Sais - the priest subscribed to the view that Sais was a lowland noble who’d somehow found his way into the mountains. Kerin, whom the priest generally ignored, was not invited. Sais accepted on rainy nights; otherwise he stayed with the drove.

Sais began to enjoy talking to Einon: the priest was intelligent, curious, and eager for knowledge. Sais was also hoping for more moments like those he’d experienced with the priest’s light, and the map - flashes of insight that might point him back to his lost life. Unfortunately, nothing new got shaken loose.