Hallsfoot's Battle (44 page)

Shaking aside the snare of his memories and
the crushing expectations of those he was with, the Lost One took a
firmer grip on the mind-cane that felt like a sleeping wild animal
in his hand. This time he felt a strange energy pass between them
and blinked. Then he laid the cane as gently as he could onto the
dead boy’s face.

At once, he was surrounded in darkness and an
impression of mauve, the landscape of Talus’ mind. It swallowed him
up and left him empty and winded. Was this death? Shaking his head
to rid himself of the thoughts that bound him, he stepped forward
into the void and became aware the cane’s carved top was glowing
silver in his hand. It was for this reason the blackness was
lightened to mauve.

He couldn’t do this on his own.

Simon knelt down, laying the cane across his
knees and allowing his fingers to travel up its ebony smoothness to
the silver glitter. Though he’d expected the carving to be warm, it
was as cold as the snow he’d just left behind and he drew in a
sharp breath.

Words filled his mind. Talus, where are you?
You have gone, but you cannot be far. Surely the spirit of a person
cannot vanish so quickly when the night falls?

A flash of white fire and the power from the
mind-cane filled him. Not like before, when the strength of it had
been a mere glancing blow to his soul, but to the full, every drop
of blood, every bone, the totality of his skin. It tore him apart
and knitted him together again. It was as wild as the wolves he’d
feared all his life, and yet as gentle as the smallest of summer
streams in the land of his birth. It drew blood from his head and
his hands, his belly and his feet, and at the same time soothed
those wounds with the softest of ointments. Winter lavender and
thorn, briar and lemongrass. He was floating on air and at the
mercy of the storm. He was alive. Then he was gone, dead like
Talus, the bitter taste of fire and regret on his tongue. He was no
one and he was everyone. All who had lived and died across the
lands, from the beginning of the great time-cycle until now. From
now until the far distant future when the Spirit would gather up
the soil and trees, air, water, rock—people, too—and take them to a
place no one had ever seen, though many had dreamt it. A place of
bright streams and healing, of golden skies and singing so
harmonious it could change a man or woman forever. A place where
all the writings of the Lost One’s world would finally be fulfilled
in how they would live, how they would feel, how they would
see.

Simon lived through this for a time-cycle
beyond the counting and which, afterwards, he could never describe,
not even in the sanctuary of his inner place.

When he woke, he opened his eyes to a world
of soft purples and violets, greys and almost-blues. He could see
hills and trees and grasses, and a distant view of the sea. In his
mind he could feel bleakness with a hidden strength as yet
unchannelled and unsung, and a centre of such stillness as he had
never known.

He rose to a sitting position and saw the
body of Talus lying at his right side. Reaching out to touch him,
something stayed his hand and he realised the boy was breathing.
The colours he’d seen were flowing from the young child’s thoughts,
creating a world strong enough to protect them both.

The Lost One smiled, gazing at the new scars
on his body and at the mind-cane where it lay as quiet as the boy
it had saved.

A voice in his thoughts spoke into the
quietness. Take the boy and return to the place you came from.

But where will you be? How can I find you
like this and then you ask us to leave? The questions rose unbidden
into the scribe’s mind, but he knew he could not have denied them.
This place was more than anything he had imagined it would be. He
did not know how he could bear the loss of it.

I am with you when you need me to be so, the
words not his answered him. And you will see me again, one day. But
the time is not right for you or for the boy. Now, go. Your friends
are waiting.

Simon closed his eyes for a moment. Then he
nodded, though at what or whom he could not precisely tell. He got
up, lifting the boy as lightly in his arms as if he were nothing
but air. The mind-cane nestled at his waist. He began to walk.

Chapter Thirteen: Resolution

Annyeke

She watched the Lost One as his body became
still. Annyeke had the impression he was somehow absent from
himself. Of course, she’d been there when other mind-journeys had
taken place amongst her people, but never when it was a question of
life or death. With all her being, she longed to reach out, touch
Talus, try to bring back his spirit herself if she had to, but the
power was not hers to taste.

And, at the back of her mind, the knowledge
of the mind-executioner’s blood on her skin and memory overshadowed
her. Would she ever be clean of it? She could not tell. Even so,
she would not change what she had done. She would never regret it.
For Talus and for her people, she would do it again a thousand
times over.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. Johan. She
turned to face him at once, searching his eyes for some kind of
hope.

“He’s done this before, hasn’t he?” she
whispered, wanting above everything his reassurance. “The scribe,
the Lost One. He’s brought a boy back from the dead.”

He nodded, taking her into his arms. But she
could feel the clouded darkness of his mind, wondered if she was
foolish to hope at all.

She could sense something else in him,
something rich and golden and deep. It called to her and she felt
her thoughts rise to meet him. The unexpected power of it made her
blink.

“I love you,” she said. “No matter what I
have done, or what happens now—though I think the worst will tear
my skin from my bones—I love you.”

In answer, he placed his hands on either side
of her face, gazing into her eyes as if he would understand all the
things she understood.

“Know this, Annyeke Hallsfoot,” he said as if
he were declaring a solemn promise to her in the place of joining.
“I have found today that I love you. I think I always have, though
I have not known it until now. And what you have done is the
bravest act of any of our elders. The executioner had to die; it
was impossible for him to live.”

“Perhaps,” she whispered back and felt the
beginnings of wetness on her cheeks. “But I did not think his death
would come by my hand.”

Next to her, a deep sighing, like a river
beginning to come into full spate. Slipping from Johan’s
protection, she swung back to see the Lost One draw a long breath
and open his eyes. He gazed right at her and held out his arms.

Talus coughed.

Annyeke couldn’t help the cry of joy that
sprang from her lips. She gathered the boy from the Lost One’s
grasp as close to her bosom as she could get him, rocking him like
a restless child, though she was the one most in need of comfort.
He coughed again and opened his eyes. She found herself laughing
and choking on unnecessary tears, her whole body shaking. She
couldn’t have stood up if she’d tried to. She rejoiced in the new
warmth of his small frame against hers, at the miracle that somehow
had happened here today, when her faith in the mere existence of
miracles had grown so weak.

“Thank you, thank you,” she mouthed at Simon
over and over again. “Thank you.”

Annyeke only stopped when Talus moaned
against her torn dress. “You’re hurting me.”

And then she laughed and cried again.

Simon

The red-haired woman had her child again and
the land’s harmony was restored. Or it was on the way to being so.
A sudden flash of sunlight pierced the scribe’s eye and pushed the
night fully away. He could feel the shake of his breath and the
slight tremble of his body, the ache in his fresh scars, but none
of that mattered.

Simon gazed round and saw the aftermath of
battle, blood and bones and silence, grief and the knowledge
everything was different now. Those Gathandrians who could still
walk, limped away or collapsed, shaking with tears, under the
trees. Others tried to help the men and women who had fallen
although for many there was nothing they could do. The smell of
death was everywhere. But something else, too. The scent of the
trees, the earth, the promise of water lingered, a chance to live
where no chance had been looked for.

A flash of emerald drew his eye. The Lammas
Lord scrabbled at the ground. For a moment, Simon had no idea what
he was doing, then he saw the jewels Ralph held in his hand.

He cried out a wild denial and tried to get
to his feet, but the effort was beyond him.

Ralph

It is over and he has no place here.
Destruction has been visited upon Gathandria both by means of the
executioner and the soldiers he took from the dead. Ralph’s
soldiers. Gelahn’s use of his own armies. And the Overlord has done
so little to stop him. It is Simon and the Gathandrians who have
saved themselves at the cost of so many dead, dying or wounded.

What has the war been for? The
mind-executioner promised Ralph power once, but he stopped
believing in that a long time ago. He even stopped wanting it.

It’s time to go. And even though he senses he
belongs nowhere, the concept of home is the nearest refuge he
has.

His fingers search for the Tregannon emeralds
even before he realises he’s made the decision. The executioner’s
still warm blood and the stillness of his flesh cuts through Ralph,
but he forces himself onwards. Yes. He has one of the precious
jewels, then three and four of them in the palm of his hand.

The scribe’s sudden cry makes him stumble and
a fifth jewel of the original seven rolls away from his grasp. When
he looks at Simon, Ralph knows the scribe sees the danger, perhaps
even wants him to stay, but the Overlord has travelled beyond him
now into another kind of a valley.

As Ralph throws the gems upward and allows
his mind to track the wild arc of their rising, he sees the undead
soldiers are beginning to shatter. Their frames collapse to mere
skeleton and bone. Without Gelahn’s magic, the mountain dogs, too,
thicken into nothing but rock and fragments of stone, and tumble
broken across the earth. The killing power of corpse and hound are
no more.

It is fitting, but no matter. The green
circle is barely there, lines stretched thin across morning air
between each jewel. Perhaps it not enough to carry him back to the
Lammas Lands, but still he must try. Let what may happen do
whatever it will.

He takes his first step into the emerald
sphere, and everything vanishes away.

Simon

Simon found he was weeping. Kneeling like a
child at the place where the Lammas Lord had disappeared. The four
jewels Ralph took back had gone with him, but Simon knew there was
no guarantee the journey would have been a safe one.

Mindlessly, he gathered together the rest of
the emeralds—the three Ralph had left behind in his desperation to
get away and those two that Annyeke had suffered to give to
them—and placed them in the executioner’s velvet pouch. The
scribe’s fingers trembled only slightly when he unfastened the bag
from the dead man’s waist and retied it to his own.

No, he said to himself, the word an echo of
the warning he’d given to Ralph, but also with something of
affirmation in it. No, it’s not over yet, my good Lammas Lord, no
matter where you are or what you might think.

Then he took in the exhaustion and also the
relief of the people as it passed over him in waves from all
directions of the city. He looked at Johan, his face and body
scarred but the wounds not life-threatening, and at Annyeke,
understood the source of their happiness, and his own still foolish
grief. Just as the snow-raven alighted like the softest of breezes
at his side, he knew what needed to be done.

Annyeke

The snow had stopped falling when the final
battle had turned to silence. Annyeke wondered if she’d ever be
able to stop hearing the noise of the dying in her dreams or
whether that was a necessary remembrance. So many Gathandrians
dead, the First Elder amongst them. The sheer scale, the terrifying
uproar and horror of what she and Johan had witnessed had pierced
her to the core. The year-cycles of the war of attrition before the
Lost One returned to them had, in themselves, been marked with pain
and loss, but had taken place over a period of moons, not all at
once as in this most recent war. And it had mainly been played out
in the mind, not the body.

Everything was different. A full day-cycle on
from when the battle had ended, she could sense the mood of the
people, which echoed her own thoughts—the greyness of shock, like a
river in winter, the sharp orange of pain, as bitter as an
unguarded tongue of flame, and the beginnings of grief, something
between blue and green, shadowed by cloud. But she sensed more—a
white-streaked relief and the emptiness as of a great trial being
complete.

Perhaps, then, it was not the best time to
enact a ritual of joy? Or perhaps it was. Besides, she was here now
and glad of it. The Lost One’s suggestion—no, more than that, his
command—had been as a too bright morning after a winter night,
overpowering but beautiful. Annyeke’s heart beat fast, but the
rhythm of her breathing was steady.

Around her, the ruins of the Great Library
showed jagged against the late afternoon sky. She could hear the
faint calls of weaver birds as they flew over the cypresses on the
edge of the park land. She felt her throat grow tight and her eyes
fill with an emotion so enriched with a variety of colours and
shades she could barely name it. She was being ridiculous, and too
female, something she abhorred. A touch on her arm, accompanied by
an echo in her mind, drew her attention back to the present.