Crusader (8 page)

Of the others, only DareWing had enough memories of the old Achar to truly understand what Faraday alluded to.

“You speak of the old god of Achar,” he said, then paused to cough violently. “Artor the Ploughman.”

“Artor was evil!” Leagh and Gwendylyr both said together.

“Yes,” Faraday said, “but perhaps we should not disregard the influence Artor would have had on the literal physical realm of Achar, as also the influence that that would have had on our power.”

She paused, trying to sort out her thoughts. “Of the five of us, it is DareWing who is sick. He has a mixture of blood,
Icarii and Acharite…and maybe the Artor influence that—possibly—exists in all of us has sickened him nigh unto death.”

“I thought DragonStar said it was ground fever,” Gwendylyr said, frowning.

“Ground fever is the outward face of the sickness,” Goldman said, catching Faraday’s train of thought, “but the stain on DareWing’s spirit is the Artorite stain. It would affect him far more than any of us.”

“And is that why this field has not yet flowered?” Leagh said. “And why DareWing cannot get better? We must expel the remaining influence of Artor?”

“Yes!” Faraday said, and the others all smiled, for the explanation felt good to them. “Yes. We must reject the rib and ridge of the ploughed earth.”

“How?” said Gwendylyr, ever concerned with the practical.

There was a silence.

“We must ask ourselves a question,” Goldman said. “What is it that remains within us of Artor the Plough God?”

Another silence.

“Faraday,” DareWing said, his voice now nearly a death whisper, “of all of us here, you have been the only one who has been thoroughly taught in the ways of Artor the Ploughman. I only fought against it, and Goldman…”

“Was but a boy of twelve when Azhure ran Artor into his grave,” Goldman said. “Faraday, what can you tell us?”

Faraday sat in silence for a while, remembering her childhood lessons in the Way of the Plough, and her allegiance to, and love for, Artor the Ploughman. The months, months that, in all, amounted to years, she’d spent studying the Book of Field and Furrow. How blind I was, she thought.

But the faith of the Plough was so comforting. Why?

“We loathed and feared the landscape,” she eventually said, “and Artor gave us a face and a name for that fear.
Untamed landscape, mountain, forest and marsh, was the haunt of evil creatures—the Forbidden—who were undoubtedly planning to swarm over all that was good and beautiful…all over
us
.”

DareWing’s mouth curled in a bitter smile, and he turned his head aside.

“Having defined our fear—the wild landscape and all that lived within it—we felt comforted, and so we took to the forests with our axes, and to the mountains with our armies, and to the marshes with our engineers, and we pushed back the wild landscape as far as we could. We tamed the earth and made it our slave.”

“We enslaved it with the plough,” Gwendylyr said.

“Yes,” Faraday said, “with the plough, and the neat square fields, and the straight and tightly-controlled furrow.”

“‘Furrow wide, furrow deep’,” Goldman said. “I remember my father saying that constantly.”

“Must we make amends?” Gwendylyr asked.

Faraday looked to DareWing. “Must we?”

“No,” he eventually said. “Not as such. The earth does not require ‘amends’.”

“It merely requires us to let go our hatred and our fear,” Goldman said.

“But I don’t hate and fear the landscape!” Leagh said.

“There is still something deep within each of us,” Faraday said, “that corrupts us. It is the legacy of a thousand generations of unthinking worship of Artor. We must let that corruption go.”

“How?” Leagh said. She looked about at the other witches in the circle, then down at DareWing. He looked worse than she’d ever seen him, and Leagh realised that they must correct whatever was wrong very shortly.

Faraday smiled. “I think I know,” she said, and in the ploughed field DragonStar raised his head and smiled also.

“We still fear some aspect of the landscape,” Faraday said. “All of us. We must confront the fear, and let it go.”

“But—” Gwendylyr began.

“We all fear some aspect of the landscape,” Faraday said again, and looked at Gwendylyr steadily. “All of us.”

“I know what
I
fear,” DareWing said, but Faraday would not let him finish, either.

She stopped him with a gentle hand, leaving her chair to kneel beside him. “DareWing, I think I know what you fear, and I think I know how strong that fear is.”

Faraday grinned, but sadly. “No wonder you have ground fever.” Then she raised her head and looked at the other three, keeping her hand on DareWing’s shoulder. “We must confront our fears first, and then, stronger, be ready to support DareWing. Goldman?”

“What? Oh…I, ah…” Goldman lapsed into silence, his eyes unfocused, then his mouth thinned and his hands clenched on his knees.

“I
loathe
dead ends,” he said, and Faraday nodded. Goldman was ever the aggressive, determinedly successful businessman.

“There is nothing worse,” Goldman said, and his eyes were now flinty and hard, “than walking through the countryside and finding yourself in some dead end gully, and having to retrace your steps to find another way forward. It’s so
time wasting
!”

“Non-productive,” Leagh said, understanding a little more the process they must all endure.

“Yes!” Goldman said, and he stood and paced about the dome. “Dead ends are so frustrating! So pointless!”

Faraday watched him carefully. It seemed almost as if hate consumed Goldman, and she realised that somewhere here was a deeper lesson they must all learn.

“So pointless,” Goldman said again, and then he vanished.

Goldman found himself standing before the infuriatingly calm—and very high and very steep—rock wall of the canyon, and he raged.

He had walked hours to get to this point, put in effort and time that could have been spent more profitably elsewhere.

He had walked and walked down this canyon, thinking it would lead him to a better life, more money, and even, perhaps, a profounder understanding of life itself, and all it had presented him with was a dead end, a rock wall, a point past which Goldman could not walk.

He raged. Was it possible to demolish the dead end? Perhaps a force of several hundred men armed with pickaxes and shovels could clear it in a week or so. Perhaps a smaller force of men armed with fire powder could destroy it in less time. Something had to be done to force this rock wall to give way to Goldman’s needs and ambitions and…

…
and Goldman quailed at the force of his rage. Why did he think such things? Why was he so angry?

He was railing at a stand of rock, for the Field’s sake!

Goldman stared at the rock wall and wondered how best to combat his inner frustration and anger.

You have walked to this rock wall, he thought, and thus there must needs be a purpose to this dead end. What is it?

He sat down cross-legged on the ground and stared at the rock.

“What do you have to teach me?” he asked, and instantly all his frustration and hate fell away and he felt a great joy fill him.

The rock absorbed the joy…and then it leaned forward and began to speak to Goldman in a very earnest manner.

Goldman dusted off his tunic, and smiled at the four faces staring at him.

“Your turn,” he said to Gwendylyr.

She was in the garden, almost incandescent with fury.

How long had she tended that hedge? How many hours had she pruned and clipped? How many days had she spent carefully digging in the soil about its roots to add light and air and fertiliser?

And the hedge was so necessary! Its (once) neatly-clipped length had tidily divided field from garden (and what a neat garden, with its carefully measured garden beds and precise rows of stakes), providing the line that everyone needed between order and disorder.

But now disorder had invaded the garden.

Disorder in the form of a rigorous ivy. It had taken over the hedge, weaving and creeping its way through the hedge’s dark interior spaces before bursting triumphantly through to wave long, gleeful tendrils into the bright summer air down the length of the hedge.

The hedge was ruined! It was doubtless dying! How could it support the parasitic ivy and still manage to keep—

Gwendylyr realised suddenly that she was very, very afraid. There was no dividing line between order and disorder,
was
there? It was all a lie. Disorder would win every time. It could never be kept at bay.

Gwendylyr backed slowly away, terrified that one of those tendrils would reach out and snatch at her at any moment. Where could she hide? Was there anywhere to hide? Perhaps the cellar…surely the dark would keep the ivy at bay…the dark would be safe…safe…

Gwendylyr stopped, appalled. She would hide herself in the dark the rest of her life to avoid disorder?

Was that a life at all?

She swallowed, stepped forward, raised an arm, and took one of the waving tendrils gently in her hand.

“Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said.

“Likewise, I am sure,” said the ivy, and the sun exploded and showered both hedge and ivy and Gwendylyr in freedom.

“Leagh?” said Gwendylyr.

“No! No!” Leagh screamed, and grabbed at her belly.

It was completely flat. Barren.

As barren as the landscape about her. She ran, more than half-doubled over her empty belly, through a plain of hot red pebbles. A dry wind blew in her face, whipping her hair about her eyes.

The sky was dull and grey, full of leaden dreams.

“No, no,” she whispered. She was trapped in a land that had stolen her child to feed its own hopelessness. Both sky and ground were sterile, and both had trapped her.

“No.” Leagh sank to the ground, gasping in pain at the heat of the pebbles, and then ignoring the burns to curl up in a ball.

Nothing was left. Best to just give up. Best to die.

Nothing worth living for.

She cried, her breath jerking up through her chest and throat in great gouts of misery. She wanted to die. Why couldn’t she die? Wasn’t there anyone about who could help her to die? Why couldn’t someone just put a knife to her (hopelessly barren) belly and slide it in? The pain would be nothing compared to this…this horror that surrounded her.

This desert. This barrenness.

Leagh cried harder, and grabbed at a handful of pebbles, loathing them with an intensity she had never felt for anything or anyone before. She threw them viciously away from her, then grabbed at another handful, throwing them away as well.

When she grabbed at her third handful she stopped, aghast at her actions.

Why blame the land for her misfortunes? If she had lost the child she carried, then how could she blame this desert?

A cool breeze blew across and lifted the hair from her face.

A tiny rock squirrel inched across her hand, its tiny velvety nose investigating her palm for food.

Leagh smiled, and then laughed as she felt a welcome heaviness in her belly. She rested her hand over her stomach and felt the thudding of her child’s heart, then…

…then she gasped in wonder and scrabbled her other hand deep in among the pebbles about her.

A heartbeat thudded out from the belly of the earth as well, and it matched—

beat for beat

—
that of her child’s.

“What are you telling me?” she whispered, and then cried with utter rapture as the pebbles explained it to her.

Leagh raised her head and stared at the others. A hand rested on her belly, and a strange, powerful light shone from her eyes.

“Faraday,” she said.

Faraday knew what it was she would confront, but her prior knowledge did not comfort her at all within the reality of her vision.

She was trapped, as she had always been trapped (time after time after time). She had trusted—the trees this time—and they had turned their backs on her and left her to this.

A thicket of thorns.

Bands of thornbush enveloped her, pressing into the white flesh of arm and breast and belly and creeping between her legs and binding her to their own cruel purpose.

Thorns studded her throat and cheek so that whenever she breathed, blood spurted and the thorns dug deeper.

Must I always bleed, she thought, and must I always suffer the despair of entrapment?

“It’s a bitch of a job,” muttered a thorn close to her ear, “but someone’s got to do it.”

Yes, yes, Faraday thought, someone has got to do it. She had been so sure that she’d not succumb to the temptation of sacrifice any more, but here she was, embracing it again.

Someone would surely have to die if Tencendor was to be saved, and Faraday supposed she’d have to do it all over again.

Painfully.

Trapped, trapped by the land. Trapped by its need to live at her expense.

The thorns twisted and roped, and Faraday screamed.

It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.

“You have a choice,” said the thorns. “You can succumb and the pain will end…reasonably fast. Or you can fight and tear yourself apart in the effort to free yourself. Which will it be?”

“I…I…”

“Quick! The decision cannot take forever, you know!”

“I…”

“Quick! Quick! Time is running out!”

Faraday panicked. She opened her mouth to scream—and then stopped, very suddenly calm.