Firesong (28 page)

The barge rode on, out into the open sea. As it crossed the bar it lurched violently, forcing its human cargo to cling to the hatch-handles and straps. Once past the confluence of the waters the rocking settled down again, to a new motion, a long regular swell.

‘You see that dirty smudge ahead?’ said Albard, pointing with one finger. ‘North-west of us, on the horizon?’

Bowman and Kestrel looked through the curtain of snow in the direction he was pointing, and just made out a low shape that was a deeper grey than the clouds above.

‘That’s Sirene,’ said Albard. ‘Damn fool place, full of damn fool people.’

Kestrel looked at Jumper and found that he too was gazing towards the island. He looked young again.

Bowman stared and stared.

‘Sirene,’ he murmured. ‘At last.’

16

Ira sees the future

T
he snow fell on the column of the Manth people as they toiled up the mountainside. The track that they followed was narrow, and climbed steeply. Beneath its coating of snow the sparse earth had been scraped from the stones by the hooves of goats, and the beat of their passing had formed the ground into narrow steps, all of different sizes. It was hard going, treading up this irregular stairway, between the snow-laden trees.

As the mountainside became steeper still, the travellers faced a second hazard. Rollo Shim brushed a loose stone with his limping foot, and sent a shower of debris tumbling down on those below. One larger stone, gathering speed as it tumbled, triggered a small avalanche, a rush of snow that was heavy enough to knock Fin Marish over and send her rolling back down the track. Miller Marish and Lolo Mimilith clambered down to her aid; and the entire party was forced to wait while they carried the child back up.

Rollo Shim cursed his wounded leg, but he was glad of the enforced rest. The climb was hard: most of all for the horses, who hauled Ira Hath on one litter and Mrs Chirish on the other. They felt their way with nervous hoof-fall, plodding on up the track, their sweating coats melting the snow as it settled on them. The cows too were a matter for concern. They followed the column willingly enough, but time and again came to an exhausted standstill, their breath steaming through the falling snow. At such times Creoth waited with them, calling ahead to Hanno,

‘Pause a while!’

After a few moments the cows would shiver their hides and set off again, knowing this was no place to stop. Creoth would cry out,

‘On our way!’

The whole column, grateful for the rest, would set off once more up the stony staircase of the mountainside.

Hanno walked beside his wife as she was jolted along in her litter. They had covered her up with blankets against the snow, so that nothing of her could be seen except, beneath a projecting peak of cloth, her familiar eyes. Now as he watched her he saw that most of the time her eyes were closed. Whenever they stopped to rest he would kneel down so that his face was close by hers, and they would speak, but her voice was weak. He never asked her how she was feeling, it only annoyed her. He told her what was happening, and how far they were from the mountain’s ridge.

‘Will we reach the top before dark?’ she asked.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. Then, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Not this evening, then,’ she murmured. ‘Tomorrow evening.’

He knew that she was thinking of the sunset, and the red sky she had seen in her dream.

‘Most likely tomorrow evening,’ he said.

‘Help Pinto,’ she told him. ‘The child needs you.’

Hanno knew at once that she was right. In his anxiety over the climb, and Fin Marish’s fall, and the waning day, and his wife’s all too visible decline, he had forgotten about Pinto. She had struggled on with the rest, quiet and uncomplaining: too quiet, in fact. It struck Hanno now that she had barely spoken a word since they had left the frozen lake.

When the column resumed the wearying climb, he left Ira’s side and tramped up the track to find Pinto. For several minutes he climbed the mountain by her side without speaking, letting her adjust to his nearness. This was one of Hanno’s habits. He believed it was always a mistake to open a conversation cold; more than a mistake, a kind of assault. It took time, he felt, for two people to organise their feelings about each other, to bring them up out of store, before it was appropriate to speak the first words.

The falling snow matched his mood. A constant motion between him and his daughter, but not a distraction, it soothed them both. In a little while, he felt her turning towards him. He felt her fear and her uncertainty. He said nothing. He let her feel his love and his patience. He listened.

So it was Pinto who spoke first; and they were already in mid-conversation.

‘Why us?’ she asked.

‘You,’ said Hanno. ‘Not me.’

‘Do you mind?’

‘No. I’m proud.’

Hanno knew well that the gifts and burdens of the prophet came through his wife’s kin. He had married into the line of Ira Manth. He had no gifts himself.

‘Why are some people different?’ asked Pinto.

‘How are you different, my darling?’

‘I can do things.’

‘Then I expect you’re different so that you will do those things.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Does it make you feel afraid?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid of – of being the one who does things.’

‘You don’t need to be afraid. In a way, it isn’t you that will do the things you’ll do.’

At this point in their climb the track was running close to a mountain stream, a narrow fast-moving thread of icy water that raced down the mountainside over a shiny stream bed. Here and there the ground dropped away beneath the stream, and the water hurled itself out in a miniature waterfall, to land seething in a pool below, before tumbling on its way. Hanno Hath pointed out one such jet of sparkling water, as he tried to explain to his younger daughter how her new-found powers were hers and not hers at the same time.

‘You see how the water makes a curve in the air? That arch of shining water – you see it?’

‘Yes, pa.’

‘You’re like that waterfall. All the power, everything that makes it leap out from the stream bed and hover in mid-air like that, it all comes from the water flowing down the mountain. The water in the waterfall is changing all the time. But the waterfall stays the same. Do you see?’

‘Yes, pa.’

‘So you don’t have to be afraid, my darling. The power doesn’t come from you, or belong to you. It flows through you, and makes you the shape you are.’

She listened gravely as his soft words came to her through the falling snow, and young as she was, she understood.

‘Is it like that for Bo and Kess?’

‘I believe so, yes.’

‘And ma?’

‘Yes.’

‘So we don’t really do anything at all. We get done to.’

‘No, darling. You can do many things. You can refuse the power you feel in you now. You can take it for yourself. You can fight it. You can throw it away. But whatever you choose to do, know that the power doesn’t begin with you, or end with you.’

‘I don’t want to do any of those things you said. I want – I want – to make things right.’

‘Then so you shall.’

‘Is it so easy?’

‘Not easy. Not easy at all. Think how much is wanting to make things wrong. All the fear in the world, and the violence that comes from the fear, and the hatred that comes from the violence, and the loneliness that comes from the hatred. All the unhappiness, all the cruelty, it gathers like clouds in the air, and grows dark and cold and heavy, and falls like grey snow in thick layers over the land. Then the world is all muffled and numb, and no one can hear each other or feel each other. Think how sad and lonely that must be.’

‘Yes,’ said Pinto, feeling it just as her father described it. ‘Yes.’

They tramped on without speaking for a while. Then Pinto said,

‘You know so much, pa. I think you must have the power too.’

‘No, my darling. I have no powers at all. I can’t prophesy, like Ira. I can’t read thoughts, like Kestrel, or strike with my mind, like Bowman. I can’t talk with wolves. All I can do is listen, and learn. Read, and learn. Think over what I’ve heard and read, and learn.’

‘That’s how you know so much. We don’t know the things you know. Not even ma.’

‘I wish knowing was enough,’ said Hanno, sighing. ‘I’m not even sure how useful it is. It’s how I am. I like to try to puzzle things out. But all my knowledge can’t help me, now that –’

He fell silent.

‘Now that Bo and Kess are gone. Now that ma is dying.’

‘You have changed,’ he said quietly.

‘We all know. We just don’t talk about it.’

Hanno turned and looked back down the track, through the veil of falling snow to the horse pulling his wife on her litter.

‘I don’t know what I shall do without her,’ he said. He spoke simply, without self-pity, and Pinto knew he was telling her a plain truth. He couldn’t imagine a future without his wife. Then he added,

‘But of course, when it happens, I’ll find out.’

The light in the sky was dimmed by the heavy clouds, and by the falling snow, and it was not easy to tell how long they had been climbing, except by the aching in their legs. But in time it became clear that night was falling. The snow, which hadn’t ceased all day, now came down more heavily than ever. With visibility shrinking by the minute, and no means of knowing how close they were to the top, the Manth marchers decided they must make camp for the night.

The first plan was to shelter under a row of pines that grew beside the track. But Creoth, leading his cows deeper into the trees in search of forage, found a better resting place.

‘Hanno!’ he called. ‘Come and see!’

It was a single, huge old oak, an evergreen oak, its rust-brown leaves still clinging to its branches. The snow had formed a dense canopy over the upper branches, but beneath, where they reached out from the massive trunk, there lay a high-vaulted dry-floored shelter, as big as a house.

Here the Manth people gathered, grateful to be out of the falling snow, with their cows and their horses. They stamped their feet and shook the snow off their coats and hats, and propped up the two litters by the great tree trunk. They unbundled their firewood and lit a fire in the most sheltered spot, while the young men scraped up the snow outside to form a wall round their house, to shut out the night wind. As the fire caught, and the yellow flames sent dancing flickers of light up to the ribbed branches that formed the ceiling, the darkness fell all round, and suddenly it was night. The heat of the fire warmed them, as they gathered round, and the food they had brought with them filled them and gave them strength. Within a surprisingly short time the chilled and weary marchers were feeling cheerful and full of hope. The rising heat of the fire melted the snow in the branches above, so that it dripped hissing onto the burning faggots, and threatened to douse the whole fire; so Miko Mimilith fashioned a canopy out of sticks and cloth, well soaked in snow. This canopy, erected high over the fire, caught the drips from above, but also sent the rising smoke of the fire swirling down to sting their eyes. To counter this, they made a second contraption, a frame of tied sticks over which they stretched a length of cloth, which could be flapped slowly back and forth, to send the smoke away to the far side of the under-tree hall.

In these ways and others, the Manth people turned their natural shelter into a comfortable home for the night. More than comfortable: it was beautiful. The firelight on the snow walls and on the tracery of the branches arching above made their house seem somehow ancestral, as if they had built it long ago, and had lived in it for generations. Beyond the heaped-up snow, beyond the living roof beams, there was nothing. All life was here, in this red and golden light. Firelight makes faces beautiful. The travellers looked at each other in wonder that they had come so far, and were still together. As for tomorrow –

‘Will it be tomorrow? Are we almost there? Will we see the homeland tomorrow?’

Only Ira Hath knew. Hanno had made her comfortable, and she had eaten a little bread, and was sitting bundled in blankets smiling at them all.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘Not long now.’

Hanno was happy to see her smiling, and to hear her voice. It was firmer and clearer than it had been all day.

‘You’re feeling better?’

‘Yes. I have some strength now. I must use it.’

‘No, no. Save your strength. We haven’t got there yet.’

‘Ah, Hannoka.’ She gave him a reproachful smile. ‘You know my strength is given me for getting there.’

Hanno frowned and looked down.

‘What is it you want to do?’

‘I must do what it’s given me to do. I must prophesy.’

‘No.’

Every time I touch the future I grow weaker. My gift is my disease. I shall die of prophecy.

The words of the prophet Ira Manth sounded in Hanno Hath’s ears every day now, as he watched his wife become thinner and quieter.

‘No,’ he said again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Before it’s too late.’

So Hanno bowed his head and accepted that it must be.

‘I shall listen.’

‘And the others. All of them.’

Hanno gathered the others round, twenty-seven of them, now that Bowman and Kestrel were gone. With Ira and himself, they made twenty-nine. Jet Marish, the youngest of them all, only six years old, was asleep in her father’s arms. Seldom Erth, the oldest, had his eyes closed, but was not asleep. They were all there to hear Ira Hath prophesy. Even the cows and the horses, drawn by curiosity, loomed out of the shadows and stood watching behind the circle of people.

For a few moments, Ira Hath was silent. The only sounds were the crackle of the fire, and the pat-pat-pat of melting snow dripping on the canopy.

‘I think we will see the homeland tomorrow,’ she said at last, ‘I think as the sun sets tomorrow, we will look down on the homeland at last. I feel its warmth on my face, stronger than the heat of the fire.’