Hallsfoot's Battle (10 page)

“Wh-What’s wrong?” Simon stuttered. “What’s
happened?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. But…”

She remembered the land, its harmony, the way
she and all Gathandrian children learned their legends, how they
learned to be themselves. And then she understood the way to
communicate their truths to this man.

“That’s it.”

“What? What is it, Annyeke?”

“The song of the land,” she sprang to her
feet and hurried round the table to grasp his arm. He stared up at
her, the frown easing away. “That’s how your training will
commence, and how you will learn about the Spirit. It’s how we all
learn when we’re young. There’s no reason not to use those same
methods with you now. Gathandria has a harmony of its own,
something ancient born before any of the land itself. It’s what was
lost during the wars with Gelahn, but when you and…and Johan
started your journey here, the harmony began to return, our plants
and flowers, too. But very, very slowly. Even now there is another
leaf on the lemon tree in my garden, and small signs of others, but
no more. So there is hope. Perhaps that’s where we have to
start.”

However, as she spoke the words, Annyeke felt
the impossibility of what she was trying to convey. Was she right?
Or was it simply desperate optimism overcoming practicality? It
might well be beyond the scribe to learn something which took the
whole of a Gathandrian childhood to learn. How could she…?

The snow-raven stretched its wings and flew
towards them. A heartbeat’s panic before he landed on the table,
his right wing brushing against Annyeke’s face. She shivered. The
bird gazed at her, opened its beak and spoke forth a single crisp
note that somehow brightened the day.

She squared her shoulders. Yes, she thought,
I’m right. This is how it must be.

Taking her chair, she drew it up to sit next
to Simon. He blinked at her and she saw his lips tighten. She
reached out towards his forehead and he flinched.

“You’re going to join your thoughts with my
mind, aren’t you?” he said.

Her turn to blink now. “It’ll be easier that
way, Simon. You’ll see more clearly what I’m trying to tell
you.”

He sighed. “Yes, I know. It’s what Johan
says, and I suppose it’s what I know, too, in my heart. Believe me,
it’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t know you as well as I
came to know Johan before our minds touched. I understand I’ve
heard a story in your way before—told one, too—but sometimes I
wonder if things would be simpler if I could just hear the words
out loud. I’m a scribe by trade, not just a mind-dweller. When you
speak, I can hear the words in my blood, too, almost as if I’d
written them myself.”

She brought her hand back to her side and
watched the tension fade from the scribe’s face. She thought about
what he had said for a few moments. No more time than it took for
two strangers to establish a viable mind-link together. Joining one
Gathandrian’s thoughts to another’s was a simple act here, one
nobody questioned. It was part of their heritage—as easy as eating
or drinking, and as enjoyable, too. It was a way of explaining
things at a deeper level. But perhaps other people, other lands did
not think like that? She herself had never travelled beyond the
city. Perhaps, then, her understanding, like Simon’s, was limited,
but in another way.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll only use words.
I’ll tell you the first Gathandrian legend out loud, although the
song cannot be replicated outside the mind. It is beyond the voice,
certainly beyond my voice. If you agree to that, of course, and if
you’re ready for it by then?”

Unexpectedly, he smiled. “You’re very
different from Johan.”

“Oh?” Annyeke shook her head, trying to keep
up with this sudden change of direction. “In what way?”

“He would have persuaded me to do it, in the
most courteous manner, of course. Convinced me his way was the only
way. It’s nice to see another side to Gathandrians. Perhaps my
White Lands blood isn’t entirely bad, after all.”

Trying not to smile at her companion’s astute
assessment of the man she loved, Annyeke only dared a brief
response.

“Perhaps it is not,” she said. Then, “the
first Gathandrian legend and song is a tale of fortitude and lust.
It is this:

*****

“Many generational cycles ago,” Annyeke said,
“all the lands were dark. There was no Gathandria, no Lammas Lands,
nor any of their neighbours. Neither was there any of the Kingdoms
of the Mountains, the Air, the Desert or the Sea, none of which I,
Annyeke Hallsfoot, have experienced. But I know and understand they
are there for I have seen them in the minds of my people. Our
legends also tell us our history. I have no reason to disbelieve
what has gone before.

“The darkness lasted for a time that cannot
be counted, as time did not exist then. From eternity we come and
to eternity we go. Our small life exists only in those boundaries.
Once, however, and at the beginning of it all, the Spirit of
Gathandria, which flows through all things and all people, visited
us and saw our eternal night. The Spirit comes only in the
daylight, and the night was an enemy to its purpose.

“The Spirit needn’t have stayed; there are
vast worlds of light elsewhere. But for whatever reason, it needed
us. Perhaps something of what we could become captured it, but it
is impossible to say. That part of the mystery will always be
unknowable.

“Still, wishing to live in the light, the
Spirit created that which it so desired. It stretched out its arms,
and the tips of its fingers began to glow. Slowly, so slowly that
it would be impossible to tell when the movement commenced and when
it ceased, that glow slipped the moorings of mythical skin and
flesh and floated out into the darkness. With each departure,
something of the Gathandrian Spirit also went with it. In the long
pauses of time as the glowings of light navigated their way through
nothingness, the Spirit also opened its mouth and began to
sing.

“It was the first of the ancient songs, and
my words fall far short of that splendour. If you can imagine
golden notes poured out over the brightest of water—as I know your
heart element is water, Simon—then all the best of your imaginings
will not echo even a hundredth of the Spirit’s song of creation. It
was so beautiful that no ear can hear it or even sense what it
might be.

“As the small specks of light from the
Spirit’s flesh began to break through the darkness, so the song’s
notes began to form the world we know and love—earth, sky and
water, rocks, trees and pastures, birds, fish, animals and insects.
All of it beautiful and created out of perfection, none of it
destroyed or damaged in the way we are today.

“At last, after an equally long period of
time that nobody can recount, the small lights from the Spirit’s
hands came together to form the sun and moon and stars, just as you
know them today, Simon—the owl, the fox, the oak and the wolf. Then
the river, the elm and the horseman. Finally, after all these came
the lovers, the lone man, and the vast, unknowable mountain, that
which can never be measured. All of these are our stars, just as
they are yours, although we do not trust ourselves to their destiny
as many of your people do or see them quite as you do.

“Meanwhile, the Spirit’s song created all
that was good around us, that which lives and moves amongst us and
is the form of our own spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These things
are not created by law, but by harmony, which is the meaning of the
song.

“And still our world was incomplete.

“Although, yes, all the lands were
there—Gathandria, where the Spirit first stood and from where all
things come, the four Kingdoms, the White Lands where you were
born, the Lammas Lands where you fell into darkness again and all
the neighbours between them. But it was not yet complete. What was
missing were men and women.

“The Spirit paused in its singing. The world
fell silent, but there was nobody to hear the silence. For a long
while, therefore, the Spirit wept at the loss that was no loss.
Then it opened its mouth again and the last note of the song was
heard, a note as golden and rich as a fertile river running to the
sea, a note to conjure all the magic around us, in all its beauty
and colour, and one that, if heard, would spoil you from hearing
anything ever again.

“This note filled the newly created air, and
the Spirit of Gathandria, moved by what it had done, reached out
and touched its perfection. At once, the note split, ravaged into a
thousand, thousand pieces, the fragments spinning outwards. The
force of the explosion flung these fragments into all the corners
of the world. Some fell in the sea and were lost forever, some fell
in the mountains or the rivers, some fell on the plains, in the
deserts or the woods. The Spirit cried out in grief and its sorrow
filled the world. The tears shed followed the fragments of the
notes, drawn to them by their mystery and magic, and fell likewise
into the sea, the mountains, the rivers, the plains, the deserts
and the woods. Harmony and tears were joined, melted together and
formed something new and equally magical, which was born out of joy
and sorrow, and lives to acknowledge both men and women. This is
how men and women were first made.”

Annyeke paused in her narration. It was a
long time since she had revisited the Gathandrian Creation Legend,
and she had almost forgotten its power, and the way it made her
feel connected to the earth and the life around her. She promised
herself she would try not to leave it so little remembered
again.

Glancing up from her posture of quasi
meditation, she saw Simon was gazing at her, his expression rapt.
Around him hung a strange glow, deep blue in shade, she thought,
though even as she looked at it, the impression of colour faded
away and she wondered if she’d seen it at all. The snow-raven, too,
gazed at her, perched on the end of the table, head cocked. Even
the mind-cane was silent. How could they know what she was saying?
Was it something in the harmony of the words themselves, spoken
aloud even without the mind-link?

“Go on,” the scribe whispered. “What happened
next?”

“The Spirit departed,” Annyeke continued, “to
travel to wherever it is that Spirits go. But it left something of
itself here, both in our people and in the world we live in. All
those generation-cycles ago, the people who came from tears and
light began to multiply and grow strong in number. At first,
everything was shared within the whole community, so that nobody
suffered lack and all beings were equal. Here in Gathandria, men
and women worked together, building great places of light and
beauty, both dwellings and for entertainment or command. That is
how the city was born, the first city of the world we live in.
There will never be another like it.

“Elsewhere, in the other Kingdoms, creatures
were echoing our ancestors’ progress, in all their different lives.
The Kingdom of the Sea teemed with fish and strange sea-monsters.
They filled the waters and subdued them, their power limited only
by the land that bordered their domain. In the desert, the desert
men and women grew tall and pale, their skin whitened by the need
to live their lives always seeking for the shade but blanched by
the sun. Once the desert was crowded with their homes and
communities, but now there is nothing left, their civilisation
destroyed by the mind-wars. At the same time, the snow-ravens
spread their wings across the Kingdom of the Air and made the skies
their own, scorning the lesser pleasures of the earth. Finally,
amongst the Kingdoms, the great mountains that border the Lammas
Lands swallowed up the men who fell there from the Spirit’s
fingers. Flesh became stone, and man melded into the earth.

“In this blessed time, Gathandria’s
neighbours also grew and prospered. Amongst the larger of them that
you know are these—the White Lands rich in the skills of writing,
the feudal comfort of the Lammas Lands and their Overlords and the
Marsh Lands where people can live from anything the water gives
them.

“After a while, though—and, again, no one can
measure how long the time was—factions began to appear, partly
based on the differences between man and man, and partly on the
areas they lived in, the different skills they possessed. People
began to fight each other, and every unnecessary violent death was
felt here in the City.”

“Why?” Simon interrupted. “Why did conflict
begin when they were accustomed to live in peace? The differences
you talk about. Surely they must have always been there. They would
be familiar, not dangerous. Why does everything have to end with
fighting?”

Annyeke took a moment to gather her mind
together before replying. The combination of the legend’s power and
her own semi-meditation could not be abandoned lightly. She could
also sense from the scribe’s aura how much he needed to know the
answer to his questions. With that understanding came
revelation—Simon was, at heart, a dreamer, although this trait was
buried so deep that he probably didn’t know it himself. Too many
years spent simply trying to survive and…

She shook her head; she had no right to pry,
especially since he had asked her not to. Blushing, she turned
away, still thinking about what to say.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Perhaps
it’s something no one will ever know. Even here in Gathandria, we
have to train our minds towards peace. So many years of doing that
and we thought everything was as it should be. But it wasn’t. And
all our preparation and meditation has not protected our
neighbours, or us, has it? Not in the end, not now. And, see, we
must turn to war to preserve it…”

Without warning, Annyeke found she couldn’t
continue. Her eyes filled with tears and the colours of her mind
were suffused with a deep crimson. Simon leaned forward and patted
her hand. His touch radiated uncertainty and compassion in equal
measure. The experience of red faded, as suddenly as it had begun.
At the window, the snow-raven flapped its wings and Simon glanced
at it, nodding as if the bird had spoken. Perhaps it had, she
thought, but not to her.