The Dark City (8 page)

The men tied it up and went inside.

Flat behind low scrub, I looked the place over. Not a village, as I’d feared, but a house, isolated. Maybe fewer than ten people. Abruptly the door opened; the two men were back, women with them, an old man, children. They fed the horse an apple, walked around it, slapped its legs admiringly. A small girl in a tattered dress was lifted onto its back.

There were dogs, of course. Two. I was downwind, which was just as well, but they terrified me. Dogs you can never trust. Then I saw the saddlebags were open. Bit by bit, my food supplies went into the house. I saw them holding up my clothes, surprised, and managed a sour laugh. I was small, even for a girl. What were they thinking now?

Finally, when I’d almost wriggled away and given up, they all went in. I slid forward quickly, through the marshy tussocks. Frustration broke out—suddenly I was reckless and fierce. I’d lost so much time; if I was to act it had to be now, before they came back!

With the thought I was up, running, head bent low, into the muddy yard. The horse whinnied; I slashed the rope and was on its back kicking my heels in hard; we were halfway through the gate when the shouts erupted. I didn’t look back but drove the beast hard, mud splashing high, cows scattering. Barking and yells and the whistle of a shot smacked from somewhere, but we were slithering down the red bank into the water; I shouted and kicked anxiously.

The river was sluggish; boulders choked the peat-brown water, the shingle underneath soft and treacherous. The horse sank in it; a splash and a bark behind warned me, and turning I saw a dog close, its white teeth snapping at the horse’s tail.

That probably helped. The horse kicked. Then its hooves grounded in firm soil; I felt it and whooped with delight as we raced over the grass and into the tree cover beyond, a steady joyous run with the wet mane flicking drops into my face like diamonds. Defiant, I sat up. Another bolt splintered bark a meter to my left, but by then I was too reckless to care, and in seconds the trees were around us, and I had to slow the horse.

It took me an hour to calm down.

When I did, I was tired and hungry, and suddenly cold. The wood had petered out; I found myself climbing the slopes of a high bare landscape of chalk, the turf cropped low, and the huge sun in a furnace of gathering cloud. Rain began, drizzling lightly. There was nothing to eat, and no shelter.

Coming carefully over the skyline, I sat still, watching the clouds gather. The empty country stretched out below; dark, smooth green slopes. Pulling the bags off, I let the horse rest, pulled out this book, and wrote. I’m lucky to still have it.

Harn must be far from here by now. He must be out in the middle of these downlands, somewhere. I sit silent, writing, and the horse crops the grass. The tearing of the stalks is loud in the drizzle.

10

Flain the Tall built a tower, and he called it the House of Trees. This was because the trees gave their wood for it freely, without pain. All the trees of the wood offered a branch, and the House was fragrant with calarna and yew and oak, pale willow, red hazel, dark mahogany.

“This,” he said, “will be the court of the Makers; without guile, without hardship.”

And the battlements were living branches, woven tight in a web.

Book of the Seven Moons

“
W
HAT ARE THEY?” Raffi whispered.

“Burial places.” Galen didn’t turn. He was staring out at the strange country before them, the short grass, the hard white stony track that led away so clearly they could see it mount the ridge and vanish over the top. The sky was immense, Raffi thought, pale blue, as if he could brush it with his hand.

“But are they safe?”

Galen glared at him. “Don’t fear the dead. They’re not our enemies.” Carefully he poured the last drop of red wine into the cleared circle of chalk; it sank into the dry rubble, as if the ground was thirsty, and the small ring of pebbles seemed charged for an instant with clarity. Far ahead the green downs brightened.

They had stayed on the island a day and a night, resting. Nowhere else was safer and, despite Galen’s restlessness, he knew they’d needed it. Raffi had fished, mostly. Galen had eaten little and then gone off on his own, and hours later Raffi had come across him sitting in the ruined house, deep in trance, his fingers moving over the black and green awen-beads.

Uneasy, Raffi had retreated to the fire and eaten the rest of the fish. He knew Galen like this. He just had to wait, sleeping on and off, sitting up to stare anxiously into the dark.

At last, late on the second night, the keeper had stumbled through the nettles, thrown himself down, and slept. Raffi sat up and looked at him. He was exhausted, soaked with sweat. Tugging the blanket over him, Raffi curled up in his own worry. Galen was killing himself. The constant struggle, the useless desperate search for his lost power was driving him to madness. They had to get some help! And with Galen’s magic gone, all their defenses against the Watch had dwindled to his own sense-lines, frailer the farther he sent them.

Rubbing the bee sting, he wondered what more he could do. Someone had followed them down that path. That overgrown, unused path.

NOW, HIGH ON THE DOWNS, he thought of it again. “I don’t like traveling in daylight.”

“Maybe, but the woman is right. Here, daylight is best.” Galen had shouldered the pack, his long hair tied back in a knot of string. “Keep the lines out.”

“You don’t have to tell me that!”

Abruptly Galen caught up his stick; Raffi jerked back but the Relic Master gave a sour laugh. “Come on.”

They walked all morning, quickly, not speaking. The track climbed the smooth slopes easily, the grass green and short, spattered with rabbit dung. Distant flocks of fat sheep grazed.

On the top of the ridge they lay low, till Galen was sure no one was near; they crept over, not straightening till they were well below the skyline. The stone they had seen from the valley leaned beside the white track, glinting with quartz.

“Sekoi,” Raffi said, seeing the carved spirals.

Galen grunted, walked around it. Then he touched it, feeling for the bands of energy, but Raffi knew by the way he turned away that he had failed.

“What’s that?”

It was a small red flower, lying propped against the stone. Galen picked it up. “Not from here. It’s been brought.”

“Alberic’s Sekoi! He’s come past here—and not too long ago. It’s still fresh.”

Galen nodded, then tossed it down. “Then I hope the creature puts on speed. I want Tasceron, not him.”

It was a bare place, green to the world’s end, and the sky blue and empty. Trudging, Raffi felt exposed, open to attack, and through the eyes of the one circling hawk high up he managed to see himself briefly, a tiny dusty figure, hot and tired and thirsty, moving with infinite slowness over the green hollows. The bird swooped and swerved; giddily he came back to himself, stumbling over a stone.

Then they came to the tombs. A few loomed up, huge, on each side of the track, smooth humps of grass, some with ditches around them, one with a rowan tree sprouting from the top. For each Galen spoke prayers, chanting under his breath, mile after mile. It was a dry country, incredibly still, with only a sudden arrowbird darting up to break the crisp silence.

Raffi trudged on. The tombs oppressed him; their silence was a weight on his shoulders. He wondered if Galen felt it. Unlike the cromlech, these kept their dead, and passing one he saw for a moment the hidden dark chamber under the grass, the scrawled spirals on the long bones.

Ahead, a ridge rose up. To the left of it a single treeclump stood, dark tops moving in the breeze. Rooks flapped and cawed above it, a black, restless colony.

Galen stopped. He looked up at the trees, his face stern. Then he stepped off the track. “This way.”

Raffi stared. “Why over there?”

“Where I go, you go.” He hadn’t slowed. Raffi had to hurry to catch him.

“But why?”

“Because I say so.”

“That’s not enough. It’s not enough!” Suddenly angry, Raffi grabbed his sleeve and forced him around. Galen stared at him, eyes black. Raffi forced himself not to step back. Then he said, “I have to look after us both. I have to read the signs, as well as I can. You can’t do it. You wouldn’t know, if anything was wrong.” He let go of the keeper’s sleeve and said quietly, “You have to let me warn you, Galen.”

Galen didn’t move. It was the truth, but Raffi knew he felt it like a blow to the face.

“So what is wrong?” he growled.

“The tombs. They’re watching us.”

“And the tree?”

He shrugged. “It feels strange.”

Galen stabbed the ground with his stick. Then he said, “Listen. Yesterday, I had a dream. The only dream I’ve had for months. Faintly, in all the pain and the darkness, I saw this place. Those trees up there. Nothing else.”

Raffi was silenced. He knew the importance of dreams, knew that Galen would clutch at anything that might help him.

“I can’t ignore it, Raffi.”

“No,” he mumbled unhappily.

They climbed up. The turf was springy, studded with yellow gorse-bushes. Warm, Raffi loosened the fastening of his dark green coat for the first time in days. The slope was steep; Galen stumbled once and picked himself up stubbornly. The dark grove hung above them, the rooks clamoring, disturbed. Anyone for miles would hear them. Catching his breath, Raffi stopped and looked back.

The downs stretched endlessly to the horizon. Great cloud banks hung, hazed with sunlight; white darkening to ominous gray, their slow rain-curtains dragged across the green land.

He turned and walked into the gloom of the trees. Yet as he passed the outer trunks he realized that this was not many trees, but one, immensely old, its trunk fibrous and dark, centuries old, maybe even older than the barrows.

Coming closer, they saw the central trunk was hollow; split wide enough for a small room. Trunk upon trunk had grown out of it, root upon root; the bark was ridged and scored, and Raffi guessed that six or seven men couldn’t have joined hands around it. And yet it was alive. His feet sank in a thousand years of needles.

Around it, almost lost in gloom, stood three stones that might once have been some cairn or building. Pieces of rag hung from the branches. On one a piece of quartz swung and glinted in the sun.

“The Sekoi.”

“Again.”

Galen was bent under the thatch of branches. He put his hand on the central trunk. “How old this is. The secrets it knows. If I could . . .” He stopped himself. Then he sat down, closing his eyes.

“Galen,” Raffi said anxiously. “How long are we going to stay here? We should get on!” There was no answer. Shaking his head, he sat down himself, against one of the outer trunks.

By late afternoon he was still there, watching the rain come. The gray curtain swept toward him over the downs, it swallowed the barrows and was on him, the first drops pattering in the thick green growth above, but none of it came through to him; the great yew was like a hut, its central trunk and pillars, its meshed roof. With the rain came the darkness, early. The rooks cawed and settled into a cowed silence. Nothing but the pattering of drops disturbed him. Glancing back stiffly he saw Galen still meditating, a shadow.

There was no way of lighting a fire; they were so high up it would be seen, and besides, he felt the tree wouldn’t like it. Sitting there, against its back, he knew its hollows and veins and ridges; his fingers buried themselves in the woody debris, the crumbling rich stink of needles and grubs and tiny wriggling things that it nurtured. Nothing grew under here; it was too dark, but the tree’s roots spread far out under the ground, he could feel them, widening to the nearest tombs, groping deep in the chalk, to the hidden waterlines, the fractures and fissures of rock, the strange magic that moved there. And the tombs clustered around it; he saw that now. The Sekoi had put their dead here, to watch with the tree.

And deep in his mind the tree said to him,
Raffi, get up and come in.

He turned, thinking he’d misheard, but Galen was standing, looking at him, and though his face was in darkness there was something about him that gave Raffi a shiver of fear.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything.” The Relic Master stared at him in the gloom. His voice was dull with weariness.

“I thought . . . you said, ‘Get up and come in.’ ”

Galen stiffened; then he got down in the soft mulch and grabbed Raffi’s hood and hauled him closer. “It spoke to you!”

“I don’t . . I’m not sure.”

But Galen breathed out harshly. He turned to the inner trunk, the seamed split. “Sit there,” he hissed, pushing Raffi down.

Don’t fear me,
the tree said, and its voice was old, textured like wind and rain on stone, the knock of a hammerbird in wood.

“It says not to be afraid.”

“Afraid!” Galen had the threaded stones off his neck; he snapped the string, tipped them out, his long fingers arranging them hurriedly into patterns Raffi didn’t know. Then he looked up, and his face was sharp and eager and desperate all at once. “Ask it to come out. To show itself. Tell it I can’t see, or hear. Get it to come!”