Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (15 page)

‘Just John and Tarf. But now we have all these other stupid people guarding us.’

‘Did Leo, or anybody else, say where we’re going?’

‘No.’

‘Or when we will arrive?’

‘No.’

‘Or—’

‘Nobody told me anything, Roger! Nobody ever does! They think I can’t—She’s coming back!’

Rawnie stuffed the wretched mouse back into her pack just as Charlotte climbed into the wagon. Charlotte sagged with exhaustion but nonetheless tried hard to smile at her daughter, now innocently sitting with her hands folded in her lap.

‘Roger, you’re awake – does your head pain you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let me bathe it with a little cool water. I wish I had some semintha leaves, those are good for pain.’ She dabbed at my head with a cloth moistened with water from the waterbag. It made no difference at all. But as
she leaned close to my face she breathed, ‘We arrive at Galtryf tomorrow morning.’

‘And then—’

But she only shook her head, and tears filled her eyes before she blinked them away. ‘I tried to talk Leo into freeing Rawnie. She is but a child, no threat to anyone. He said no.’

‘They want you – both of you – as hostages to compel Rawley.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said. But neither of us knew what they wished to compel my father to do. And I – I didn’t believe that was my purpose in being carried to Galtryf. I was not a woman nor a child, I was a man grown. Leo and the Brotherhood had something else in mind for me: ‘
Let him see what awaits him
.’

What could it be?

Tomorrow I would find out.

All day my vision blurred and my head throbbed, like hammers hitting directly on my brain. I drifted in and out of sleep, all of it uneasy and none of it restorative. At one point late in the afternoon, I woke to find only John and I in the moving wagon. Charlotte and Rawnie must be walking again. The back of the wagon had been left down, and I watched boulders and stunted trees blur past.

A moor cur followed the wagon, just at the edge of my vision. At least I think it was a moor cur; it might have been a wolf (if there were wolves here), or a dog, or even a delusion. But from the way it kept behind rocks and bushes, I guessed it was a cur, attracted by the smell of the food in the supply wagon. Or perhaps by the blood on my head.

My head hurt so! How long could this headache last? I wanted to escape the relentless, pounding pain, escape
myself, escape everything, go somewhere else. But if my body crossed over, John would come, too. And there was nowhere else to go.

Climbing up a well instead of falling down into it …

Carefully, as if an effort of will might jar my body, I pictured that well and myself wedged into it, a metre from the top, my back braced against the curved side of the well and my good hand extended to hold myself in place. Above me loomed the dirty-silver fur of the moor cur. Climb, climb by inching my body upward—Now do it more—

A scent in my nostrils, a black-and-grey landscape alive with smells, food food food danger danger food—

I gasped and pulled back, and instantly my headache was thrice as bad, so bad that I nearly fainted with pain. So this was the agony felt by the
hisaf
I had found in the Country of the Dead, unable to breathe from the effort of returning from inhabiting one of the grey dogs. This, too, the agony of the web women who had become diving raptors, afterwards left gasping and barely alive from the effort. And I had scarcely touched the mind of the moor cur.

But I
had
touched it. I couldn’t do so when I’d tried before – what was different now? Was it that I was in so much pain? Charlotte had mentioned nothing about pain being needed to cross into the dogs, only the agony and risk of returning. So what else was different?

I lay the rest of the afternoon, pondering this, pretending to sleep. No answers came to me. Gradually my headache returned to what it had been at first, which was terrible enough but now, in contrast, seemed bearable. So does greater pain reconcile us to lesser.

As evening fell the wagons halted. John hauled me down to sit with the rest around the fire, but I could not get warm. My head did not stop blazing with pain.
I couldn’t eat, although Charlotte urged me to do so. I could not even listen to Leo, who boasted about ‘his’ victory over the
hisafs
who had tried to rescue us.

Finally one of the Soulviners, a young man whose green eyes had grown sharp enough to cut glass, said in the accent of the uplands, ‘T’wasn’t your victory, but ours.’

‘I am in command,’ Leo said, ‘by order of—’

‘Hush,’ a young woman said. ‘We don’t speak his name.’

Leo smiled, a look tolerant of less civilized beings with their primitive superstitions. He didn’t even realize what a mistake he was making. The Soulviners gazed at him steadily, and it was not with contempt but with something more dangerous: doubt.

The young man with the cutting emerald eyes said, ‘Had it not been for us, ye would have lost all. As it be, ye lost the dogs.’

‘And they lost theirs!’ Leo retorted.

Rawnie said, ‘Leo, give us another play!’

Did she do it deliberately, to defuse tension? She looked all childish enthusiasm at the moment, but I did not believe that. Although why would Rawnie wish to lessen tension? She thrived on it. No, she was still trying to work her way into Leo’s approval, for reasons of her own.

‘Well,’ Leo said, ‘if I must—’

The Soulviners did not speak, any of them, but they could not keep flashes of interest from their faces. Possibly none of them had ever seen a play. But they knew Leo was an actor, and they were curious.

I suppose that if you hope to live for ever, you expect to have time to be curious about everything, including plays.

But I did not want to be again enthralled, half against my will, by a performance from Leo. With an aching
head, and sick at heart, I wanted only to sleep. I said to John, ‘I would sleep.’

‘Aye.’ He stood, pulling me up with him. Laboriously, my head throbbing at every movement, I got to my feet. We climbed into the wagon. Instantly John fell asleep, his mouth open, his slack features gone even duller than when awake. I heard Leo say imperiously, ‘Not a play tonight, I am not thus moved. A song, I think.’

I lay as far away from John as my chain would allow and thought of Maggie and my son. I would never see either again. I would never hold my child. Did he look like me, with my nondescript brown hair and eyes, or did he have Maggie’s fair hair and grey eyes? Was he, in infant
hisaf
dreams, flickering back and forth between the land of the living and the Country of the Dead? How was Maggie keeping that from her sister? Was she—

Rawnie’s pack stirred. Her mouse crept out.

I reached for it with my one hand, stirring the chain between John’s wrist and mine, but before either he could awake or I could grab the mouse, it was no longer there. Instead a woman lay full length beside me on the wagon bed.

‘
What—
’

She clamped a hand over my mouth and scowled, as my dazed mind tried to capture this new truth. Rawnie’s mouse was a web woman. As Mother Chilton had become a black swan, as Alysse had become a white rabbit.

I whispered, inanely, ‘But you were with her so
long—
’ Two months, Charlotte said, Rawnie had had her mouse – two months before this journey even began! Why wasn’t the web woman weak and nearly dying, as Alysse and that other girl had been when they became raptors and—

All at once I understood. A bird had not been Alysse’s
chosen ‘soul sharer’; a rabbit was. This woman was naturally a mouse. The word turned me giddy – ‘natural’ to become an animal! To become a—

‘Hush,’ the woman repeated, still scowling. ‘I must go. I cannot enter Galtryf with you. That would be possible only if I had assumed my soul-sharer shape while on the castle grounds, which I did not. But before I leave, I would tell you some things.’

John stirred in his sleep. By the fire Leo plucked a few notes on his lute, tuning it. I held my breath, half expecting the web woman to vanish. But then John only snored more deeply. And so we lay side by side in the wagon bed, stretched out under the stars above Soulvine Moor, the woman a slender half-glimpsed shadow against the rough side of the wagon. Only her hair, unbound and flowing towards me, seemed solid and real. Her words, too, showed me shadowy realities, glimpsed before but never understood, and beyond her words and woven into them was Leo’s music.

‘You have made grievous errors, Roger Kilbourne. You were told last winter not to cross back over, and yet you did so. You destroyed your sister. Katharine was—’

‘She was going to kill my son!’

‘—was the conduit,’ the woman continued, as if I had not spoken. ‘It was through her that the accumulated power of the Dead first could flow into the Soulvine watchers in their vortexes. Those living and those dead are connected, of course – how could it be otherwise, when the Dead were once alive and the alive must someday join the Dead? When Soulvine, with the help of the rogue
hisafs
, began to pervert that connection, it was through Katharine that the balance was maintained, because the life power of newborn babes could flow in the opposite direction, from the land of the living to the Country of the Dead. When you—’

‘That is not true!’ I whispered hotly. ‘My sister was not this “conduit”! She couldn’t have been because now she is gone, but the robbing babes of their souls still continues! I have seen it!’

‘You don’t know what you have seen, and you must stay quiet now and let me finish. I have not much time.’

‘But—’

‘Hush!’ she said, at the same moment that Leo began to sing.

Although you to the hills do flee,

My love you can’t escape.

‘When you threw Katharine into the vortex, first we feared the entire web of being would break. When it did not, we thought as you do.
It is over
, we thought, and rejoiced. But Soulvine Moor has learned much, and the circles of Dead continued to disappear, and infants to be robbed of their life force. The web is further strained, almost to the breaking point.

‘And the
hisafs
, on both sides, have made it worse with these dogs. Soul arts grow and change, Roger Kilbourne, like all the rest of life. Thus your father was able to combine the gifts of a
hisaf
and the training of a woman of the soul arts, and so inhabit the dogs. But not all growth is necessarily good. It may instead be stunted, misshapen, a tumour upon the intentions of life. As is Soulvine’s quest to life for ever, and as are those dogs. A
hisaf
has no calling to cross into animals. The
hisafs
should keep to their gift, and we of the soul arts to ours.’

Your heart, my sweet, belongs to me

Though you may change its shape.

I said, ‘Are you sure you are not just jealous, now that
hisafs
are using your art?’

‘They are not “using” it, they are perverting it. Animals have their own web of being, and it must be respected. Try to understand, you obstinate boy! The—’

‘I am not a boy!’

‘—centre of the web is Galtryf. That has always been so. We women of the soul arts originated there, long ago when Galtryf was a force for good in the world. As did the
hisafs
. The city is very, very old. Now it lies in ruins, city and castle both, but it was the original source of all the transcendent arts, great and small. Galtryf is the shadow of The Queendom, that dark part that the oblivious farmers and blacksmiths and wheelwrights and courtiers have chosen not to acknowledge. Nonetheless, the shadow is there, in all of us. And in Galtryf, now, the perverted use of the soul arts is the shadow of the shadow.’

Never, never will I cease

To follow where you go,

And ever, ever will I be

The hound upon your doe.

I said, ‘But … but why can the circles persist and the babes be robbed when my sister is gone? I murdered her, I—’

‘I told you, Soulvine moor has learned to do many things, things no mortal should do. We do not know. But all may change again when your son is born. Your father had unusual powers from his mother, your grandmother. She was a very great practitioner of the soul arts.
You
have proved to be nothing unusual, but your son may be. We have reason to believe so. He is our last hope, because Galtryf is winning this war.’

Do what you will and what you can,

Employ the arts you know—

Ever, ever will I be

The hound upon your doe.

My grandmother was a web woman. I had not known that – how could I? My son was a ‘last hope’. My mind reeled. I started to say, ‘My son
has
been born,’ because clearly the woman did not know this. She had, after all, been a mouse for the last two months. But before I could speak, someone outside the wagon thumped it hard, crying, ‘John should hear this, he loves music – John!’

John awoke. And there was no one else beside me, just a small brown mouse, disappearing over the edge of the wagon with a flick of its long pink tail.

12

Rawnie was inconsolable at the loss of her mouse. Her grief took the form of rage. She pounded on the wagon bed and screamed until John casually reached out his huge hand that was not chained to mine and cuffed the side of her head. Rawnie stopped in mid-yell, stared at him with wide shocked eyes, and began to cry.

Charlotte leapt at John like an enraged she-bear. ‘Don’t you touch her!’ She pounded ineffectually with her soft fists on John, who looked at her with the astonishment of a man whose hat has been blown off by a slight breeze.

The din attracted Leo. ‘What goes on here? Charlotte, stop that. No, John!’

John had reached out to cuff Charlotte as he had Rawnie. At Leo’s command he halted, looking confused. He lowered his hand, raised it again, held it halfway to Charlotte’s head and gazed piteously at Leo. All at once I knew why John had never been selected to cross over into one of the dogs. The dog was smarter.

Charlotte cried, ‘He hit Rawnie!’

Rawnie, as if cued, sobbed harder. ‘He lost my mouse!’

‘Mouse? What mouse?’ Leo said. ‘John, you know that striking any of them is forbidden.’