Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (6 page)

‘No, you cannot. But since you are not, why did you agree to bring me that miniature?’

‘I told you, your father was kind to me in Galtryf.’

I made the fire while Leo rested. Finally I said, ‘So you knew my father in Galtryf.’

‘I already told you so.’ He had laid his lute aside and sprawled full-length on the ground.

‘And what is ”Galtryf”?’

‘It is an old castle used by the Brotherhood as their command post.’

‘How did you come to be there?’

‘I was captured in the war we wage with Soulvine Moor.’

We had come to the information I wanted. Hunter returned with a rabbit and I took it from him, drawing out my knife and making a great show of skinning the rabbit so that Leo did not have to. I wanted him to feel in my debt.

I said, ‘What was your part in the war?’

Leo took a long time to answer me. ‘I was a decoy.’

‘A decoy?’

‘You don’t know how the war is waged, do you, Roger?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I cannot tell you much because I don’t know much. Until I was approached by the Brotherhood, I lived at the manor house of Lord Jasper Vincent, at the northwestern edge of The Queendom, in the mountains near the border with the country of Queen Isabelle. I was musician there. And a kitchen boy and jack-of-all-work; whatever was deemed within the feeble powers of a weakling like me.’ His voice held bitterness.

I could picture the remote, rough-country manor house. The pages and young lords, as wild as the landscape, would not have used a boy like Leo gently.

‘Was that where the badger fighting took place?’

‘Yes. There was a wedding, my lady Judith with a rich lout from Her Grace Isabelle’s queendom. The feasting and drinking went on for three days. The night of the third day the merry sweet lads … they …’ His fingers, as if of their own volition, touched the scar on his face.

‘Leo, did the older nobles not recognize your talent? Not treasure it?’

‘That lot could not recognize any talents but fighting and whoring. Except Lady Judith. She was married against her will to that … that oaf … she with her sweet heart and beautiful …’

Hs voice had dropped in pitch, full of emotion. I knew what I was hearing; I had once felt it myself. Leo Tollers, kicked and ridiculed, the butt of vicious pranks, had loved a high-born girl he could never have.

I said, ‘Why did you not cross over to escape the badger?’

‘I did. But this was before the breach between the lands of the living and the Dead had crumbled enough to permit
hisafs
to cross bodily. My body remained behind, and so I was maimed. And crossing over … I hate it. I always have. How can you do it so blithely? The passage through the grave ….’ He shuddered.

‘Doesn’t that make you an odd recruit to your Brotherhood of
hisafs
?’

‘They saved my life,’ he said sharply. ‘One of them chanced to be at Lord Jasper’s manor; he stopped the lordling’s sport and saved my life. A week later more arrived with a spare horse and took me away.’

‘Then how did you end up in Galtryf?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ He bent over his lute, strumming and tuning the strings. I reached out and put my hand across the fret.

‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, Leo. But I must know. I don’t understand this war, and now that the Brotherhood has found me, I must. Why were you sent to me? I do not wish to take part in the conflict, and the web women have told me I should not.’

Leo spat a curse, so filthy it startled me. ‘The ”web women”! Those old hags! They would lose us this war with their prattle about the web of life and death and their cowardly reluctance to kill anything!’

It seemed an odd statement, given that Leo did not seem very brave, but perhaps he did not see himself as a coward. Men seldom did. I ignored his anger about the web women and returned to my question.

‘What is the Brotherhood trying to do? And why are you with me?’ Certainly it was not as protection.

In the dimming light under the willow tree he gazed at me a long time. Finally he said, ‘The Brotherhood is trying to kill all the
hisafs
who are making the obscenities performed on Soulvine Moor possible. You know about those, I think. You have been there.’

I had. Twice. The second time I had barely escaped
with my life. ‘How many
hisafs
have sided with Soulvine Moor?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How many have the Brotherhood succeeded in killing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do they want with me?’

‘They only want to know where you are.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You brought me this marker so that I may be located at any moment, and yet you don’t know why?’

His temper flared. ‘I told you, I am here only because your father was kind to me! I don’t care about this war any more than you do, not really! But I must live and eat the same as any other beast!’ He picked up his lute and began to strum, harsh angry chords. I could see that he would tell me no more tonight. I left the willow to gather more wood.

As I hunted for dead branches, I considered Leo’s story. Some parts of it did not seem consistent. If he were really an intimate of my father at Galtryf, wouldn’t he know more than he professed to? And if the Brotherhood had rescued him once, from Lord Jasper’s manor, wouldn’t they continue to see that he could ‘live and eat like any other beast’ without setting him the task of bringing a marker to me – a task for which he seemed very ill suited? Dissatisfied with what he had told me, and insufficiently moved by pity for his helplessness, I was more determined than ever to shed him. Now. Tonight.

There was no moon, but the stars shone brightly: the Weeping Woman, the Cat, the Wagon Wheel, the Southern Star. Leo, exhausted by the day’s hurried pace, slept deeply. His concave chest rose and fell; a soft whistling
noise came from his thin nose above the mangled lips. Hunter, too, slept, curled up tightly as a coil of rope. But I knew that the second I stepped on a twig, or perhaps even rose, the dog would wake. So I left the only way I could. I jabbed my small shaving knife into my thigh, willed my passage, and crossed over.

Darkness—

Cold—

Dirt choking my mouth—

Worms in my eyes—

Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

And then I stood in the Country of the Dead. The landscape seemed exactly like the one I had left, except for the light fog, and even that seemed to diminish as I moved towards the road – or where it would be if this place had any roads. My plan was to walk for several hours across country. If Leo woke, he would not know in which direction I had gone in either landscape, even if he could steel himself enough to cross over after me. And by the time I returned to the land of the living, I would be too far away for Hunter to sniff me out.

As soon as I emerged from the woods onto a broad field, I came across the Dead. Widely scattered in ones and twos, they sat in the places where they had died. They gazed at nothing, their faces tranquil and calm. None of them were old women, who were usually the only ones I could rouse, and anyway they would not be able to tell me anything I wished to know. I trudged on.

The Country of the Dead is perpetually silent. Ordinarily I don’t mind it; ordinarily I don’t even think about it. But now the quiet felt leaden, as oppressive as the low grey sky and the dim, even light. I began to hum, and then to sing, and the words were the troubling ones of Leo’s song:

Never, never will I cease

To follow where you go,

And ever, ever will I be

The hound upon your doe.

Well, I had shaken my hounds – both of them – and in another week I would be with Maggie. I would hold her in my arms, feel her fair curls against my cheek, endure the deserved tongue-whipping she would give me for abandoning her – probably many tongue-whippings – and then we would make our life together with our son. Maggie, who had always loved me better than I deserved and—

Something flickered at the edge of my vision.

I stopped and peered through the pale fog. An object appeared on the ground in the middle distance, disappeared, appeared again. A small object, no larger than a pie. My heart began a low, hard thumping in my chest.

Should I cross back over? But I might not have walked far enough to be beyond Hunter’s ability to find me.

Cautiously I approached the object. Again it flickered out of existence. When I reached the place it had been, there was nothing there.

But there had been. Here, where nothing ever appeared except—

‘
Waaaaahhhhh!
’

My heart nearly jumped from my body as the thing reappeared, and this time there was no doubt what it was. A child, red-faced and screaming. Its blue eyes glared at me, the smell of its full diaper hit my nostrils, its indignant yells pierced my ears, and then it was gone again. And I understood.

This was an infant
hisaf
, unable as yet to control its coming and goings across the barrier of the grave. When I had been such a babe, such crossings had probably
happened mostly in my dreams. Back then
hisafs
had not been able to cross over bodily. There must have been times when my infant self lay asleep, restless and feverish from some childish illness, pain in my head or belly or throat. That’s what is required – pain, plus a kind of letting go that, paradoxically, is also an act of will. Babes cannot control their will, and I did not remember crossing over until I was six years old.

But this child was not six, nor anywhere near it, and it was awake. Awake and in infant pain from hunger or its bowels or fear. And the abilities of
hisafs
had grown with the growing breach between the land of the living and the country of the Dead.

What was this babe’s mother seeing, as she cared for it? Did she know what her child was? Could she accept it? I could imagine the terrible pull between love of one’s child and fear of witchcraft. But, no – this baby’s father must have been a
hisaf
, too. The mother, like mine, must have known what her son would be.

I reached out my good hand towards the child, who screamed louder and then vanished. It did not reappear. His mother must have risen from her sleep, stumbled to the cradle I could not see, and tended to her son. On this side there were few Dead in sight; the parents of the little
hisaf
lived isolated from other people, perhaps the better to protect their child. So must my mother have once protected me.

Longing to see her again – alive as I remembered her at six years old, not as she was now – hit me so hard that my eyes watered. Then the longing for my mother, unseemly in one my age, became renewed longing for Maggie.
Soon
.

Another mile or two and the Dead became more numerous. There must be a village here, on the other side. Then, beside a swift downhill stream, I came to
something I had seen before and hoped never to see again.

A large circle of the Dead, thirty or thirty-five, all facing inward towards the centre of the ring. The Dead wore clothing from many different eras and seasons: coloured wool, linen shifts, heavy crude furs, old-fashioned farthingales, bronze armour, tattered night shirts. Old men, little girls, young women, half-grown boys, soldiers – each of their heads was densely shrouded in dark fog, obscuring their faces. In the middle of the circle spun a vortex of even darker fog. Faster and faster it spun, now starting to hum, now the hum rising to such a loud pitch that I clapped my hands over my ears even as I started to run forward.

‘No! Don’t!’ I screamed the words, but of course there was no one to hear. And the words were stupid anyway – as if I could stop the horror about to happen! The vortex spun faster, there was a huge clap of sound, like lightning striking the ground, and all the Dead disappeared, along with the vortex.

Gone. Just gone.

I sagged to the ground. The light, pervasive fog over the landscape had also disappeared. I could see for miles, along the mountains and valleys of the Country of the Dead. But there was nothing to see where these Dead had sat awaiting eternity. The grass was not even charred. It was as if nothing, and no one, had been here at all. The men and women of Soulvine Moor, present in the vortex in ways I did not understand, had sucked the power of the Dead unto themselves. They had annihilated bodies and souls both, so that these Dead existed no longer anywhere, their chance for eternity lost for ever.

Just as I had hurled my mad half-sister into such a vortex, depriving her of her own eternity. But that had been different. My sister had been used by Soulvine Moor
to kill innocent people, and would have been so used again. She had been stalking my unborn son. The people who had just vanished into the vortex had, in contrast, been blameless, tranquil and mindless Dead who threatened no one.

I don’t know how long I sat on the ground, gazing as sightlessly as the Dead themselves, but eventually I pulled myself together and stood. Behind me someone moaned.

I spun around so fast that I nearly lost balance. ‘Who’s there?’

Another moan, from close by. I followed it to a man lying behind a bush. I could not tell if he was asleep or very ill, but one thing was certain: he was not dead. I drew my big knife. If he was here and alive, he must be a
hisaf
– but for which side? A deep groan and he opened his eyes. They were bright green.

‘
A big man with black beard and green eyes … He witched our babes in Stonegreen
…’

The bearded man stared at me and groped for his weapon, but he could barely move his arm. I knelt beside him, swiftly found and confiscated two knives, and put my own blade at his throat. ‘Who are you?’

Glaring at me with hatred, he tried to speak but managed only a hoarse, unintelligible whisper.

Unbidden, words of Mother Chilton’s floated into my mind: ‘
Everything has a cost, Roger Kilbourne – when will you learn that
?’ She had meant the web women who became birds to rescue me and nearly died from their transforming effort. But
hisafs
could not become animals. Of what action was this man paying the cost? No
hisaf
was necessary for the spinning vortex to rob the Dead; I knew that much.