The Executioner's Cane (22 page)

“You are welcome here,” she said. “Now, for
the rest of you, tell us your names so all of us here may know
them. For I too, who have lived so long at the castle, do not know
every one of you.”

For a while the small gang of rebels talked,
telling their names and something of their history. Jemelda
realised one of the farmers, Matthus, and the young boy too had
been amongst her regular customers for the left-over bread and
cakes from her kitchen. She had never liked the practice in other
countries with lesser lords of merely leaving the waste food
outside for people to take it, so she had put the abandoned morsels
on the central table and left the kitchen curtains open, even in
winter, so they might come in and take some warmth from the hearth
before eating what they might. As they spoke, the boy haltingly,
she recognised them although they were far thinner, and the man
greyer also, than they had been. Then again, the war had changed
everyone, hadn’t it?

Others of the Lammas folk she found familiar
also, particularly the women whom she must have seen on market days
back in the day-cycles they had been held, but she had not known
their names until this afternoon.

Thomas the Blacksmith, spoke last, even
though he had no real need to do so as all knew who he was.

“My name is Thomas,” he said, “but that is
not the most important fact about me. No, what matters is this: I
have come with Jemelda to fight the evil man who has returned to us
and I will continue to fight him and his murderous magic until he
is dead, or until I myself die. There are no other options for
me.”

When he finished speaking, the silence around
them seemed heavier and more menacing and Jemelda shivered.

“There are no other options for any of us,”
she said. “This is what we will do.”

Simon

When he woke, he didn’t recognise his
surroundings, at least not at first. Whatever he was lying on was
soft and he felt warm and, above, he could see a strange pattern of
sky and wood and stone. He couldn’t understand why he was not
colder, if he could see the sky as the great snows were not yet
over. Or they had not been when he had last noticed them.

Pictures danced and swirled across his mind
but he couldn’t make sense of them: rope; the toughness of wood
carved onto his back; the anger of men, and women too. He stirred
and groaned and, at once, he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder
easing him back on to the bed, as bed it must be.

With that touch, a hundred other pictures:
armour and bones; a man dressed in a cloak with strange symbols;
another man who smiled at him but whose beauty was ravaged by
grief; then a raven as white as snow; and the mind-cane. The
mind-cane.

Simon woke for certain with a gasp, arms
flailing, pain tracking through his bones. Let me up, I must have
the cane.

He spoke without the need for a voice, his
thoughts crystallising in a surge of mind-power which brought him
half-risen on the bed and all but fighting the man who tried to
hold him down. At the same time-cycle, his companion’s mind
collapsed beneath the sudden onslaught from his own and in the
midst of the pain he was unaccountably causing he caught one word
only: Simon.

He let go at once, still gasping, still
fighting for possession of the cane. Ralph? The Lammas Lord was
kneeling half-on half-off the bed, his hand continuing to grasp
Simon’s shoulder, but his thoughts scattering away to the stars and
beyond, if that were possible, as he ran in his mind from Simon’s
unwitting attack.

“Forgive me,” the Lost One spoke aloud this
time, fearing to cause more damage to the floundering man. For a
heartbeat, maybe more, he didn’t know what to do or how to remedy
his actions but then the mind-cane, which must have been there with
him all along but he had not linked with its voice, fell like a
homing bird into his palm and he felt something like a rush of
water flowing through him.

With his other hand, he touched Ralph’s
forehead, acknowledging the man’s sweat and fear on his fingers,
and mind-delved further until he was standing at the very centre of
the Lammas Lord’s thoughts. How familiar the landscape was to him:
salty sand and stormy sky with fire-filled clouds. Trying to ignore
the fact the last time he had been allowed here, the two of them
had been lovers, he called back the spiralling sparks of Ralph’s
broken mind, using his own, feeble as it was, as a beacon. He was
slow in this, his own thoughts trembling and his limbs aching, but
he put his weakness to one side and concentrated on undoing such
havoc as he had caused.

It took the length of a summer story, the
longest of all the seasons’ tales, but at last it was done. In
time-cycles past, Simon would have desired nothing more than to
stay and enjoy the Lammas Lord’s mind to the full, but he could not
be as he once was. As they had been, now.

So he turned away and spun his thoughts back
to where his body waited for them, in the Lammas Lord’s bedroom. He
realised this for the first time, and swallowed. One heartbeat,
then another, and he was where he had been, but not quite as he
remembered himself.

Because everything had changed, hadn’t it?
He’d given himself over to the villagers’ anger, he’d died and
somehow he’d been reborn again. Oh yes, he remembered it all. He
even remembered how he’d been taken down from the Tree of Execution
and found himself in the castle kitchen. None of this was the usual
arc to a Lammasser’s life, or even a half-Gathandrian, as he was.
He sighed and felt Ralph stir. Slowly he took his hand away from
his companion’s forehead and felt the slight click in his thoughts
as they disconnected. By the gods, he already missed it.

Ralph stood, not confidently but holding
himself steady by means of the nearest stonework.

“You are stronger than any of us
anticipated,” he said. “Thank you for putting me together again. It
seems you were always adept at that in some fashion.”

Simon had no answer, but perhaps Ralph
expected none as he turned and reached for something on a nearby
table. When he turned back again, he held a beaker of water in his
hand, which he offered to Simon.

“Drink,” he said. “You will have need of
it.”

The Lost One did so. It appeared the subject
of what had just taken place was now closed in the Lammas Lord’s
mind; how easily Ralph left behind the aspects of his life which
worried him.

“Thank you,” Simon said when he had finished
the water. “Tell me, how did I get here?”

The Lammas Lord misunderstood and began
speaking of the villagers and the tree, but Simon interrupted him.
“No, you mistake me. That I remember well enough. I meant how did I
get here, in your chambers? I can remember being in the kitchen
below and then nothing.”

Ralph hesitated before replying. “The cook’s
husband, Frankel, and I carried you upstairs. We thought you would
find more comfort here. I have no experience of it myself, but I
would imagine the kitchen table is not the best place for a man who
has died and lives again.”

“No, I suppose it is not.” Simon wanted to
say more, about the memories, both good and bad, which being here
brought to his mind, but he could not find the words. Instead, he
chose a rather safer avenue of conversation. “I came here to save
the Lammas Lands as best I could, Lord Tregannon, and the task is
not yet finished. The land is wounded, and the people too. There is
much to do and I must be strong to achieve it. If I need rest, I
will take it, but after that we must work for the good of the
lands, Lammas and Gathandria and the rest, before it is too late
for any of us to recover.”

“Bah!” Ralph made a dismissive gesture,
almost knocking the empty water-beaker out of Simon’s grasp. “So
you say, and how easy it is for you to talk of such matters! It is
a miracle even that you are alive, and the powers you possess have
surpassed all our knowledge and legends. Who knows what you might
do after this? Neither do you need to remind me of the crimes I
have committed, though it seems you have forgotten your part in
them also, Simon the Scribe. You have moreover forgotten one
essential fact about Lammas. It is I who am the Lord of it, not
you, and when you arrive here with your miracles and your plans,
know this: I will not be seduced by them. Not this time. This time,
I will make my own decisions for the good of my people and not be
swayed by the desires and unknown mission of another. Yes, we must
work together, Simon. I am not a fool, though I have been one in
the past. But any decisions taken here will be mine and mine alone.
So tell this to your mind-cane and live with it.”

With that, while Simon was still struggling
for words to respond, Ralph turned in a swirl of threadbare, once
noble, cloak, stalked out of the room and was gone.

The conversation had not gone as he’d
anticipated. All the mind-power in the world could not easily
handle Lord Tregannon. In his hand, the cane bucked, as if
objecting to his thought, but the Lost One clasped it harder and
the trembling subsided. He had not intended with his plans, spoken
aloud for the first time, to rile the Lammas Lord, but perhaps
Ralph was unused to him being in any way a decision-maker; he had
not been so when they were together. Still, all things were new
from this day-cycle onwards, and each of them would have to learn
to bear it. While he recovered from death, he needed to think what
the gods and stars would wish to happen next and how he could bring
that about.

The Lammas snows would be over soon, as they
never lasted more than a four-week cycle before turning to rains
and winds which made men and women shiver in spite of the warmest
of fires and the thickest of cloaks. That said, the winds had come
from the mountain and now the mountain no longer existed, perhaps
nature too would be different, he could not tell. Not all the
wisdom of the mind-cane or the Tregannon emeralds had yet revealed
that to him, if they ever would. He closed his eyes briefly at the
memory of the mountain folk and their solidity which had in the end
availed them nothing, before turning his thoughts to other possible
projects.

The people needed to eat and, from the look
of them and Jemelda’s kitchen, food was scarcer than he’d
anticipated. Simon imagined the consequences of the mind-war had
been to blight the winter crops and perhaps to destroy the fields
completely. They needed to replant the crops but this had never
been attempted after the winter snows as the land had been too
waterlogged for any seed to take. Somehow they needed to make it
dry but Simon was no farmer. He was a scribe and a runaway who
could live off the land, yes, but he had never needed to plant what
he took. Until he met Ralph, there had never been time and after
that, well after that he had taken part in the feasting and
provisions owed to the Lammas Lord from his villagers.

Farming was a skill he needed to learn, and
quickly. If Ralph wished, as was his right, to be the final
decision-maker, then he too would need to learn those talents, and
Lord Tregannon had always been a soldier first and foremost. It was
why he fought Simon, but he would need to understand the old ways
were gone, and something entirely new was taking place.

If only the Lost One himself understood what
this might be, then the Lammas people and the surrounding countries
might yet live to the full. The mind-cane hummed and Simon felt a
sudden warmth flowing over his skin. Perhaps the cane wished to
give him some kind of knowledge? By the stars, he needed it, so he
closed his eyes and tried, in spite of his exhaustion, to
concentrate on the artefact and its wisdom, and to open his mind to
its truths.

Nothing. Only a sense of blankness and a
strange silence, perhaps a warning he couldn’t quite grasp. He
needed to rest again, in order to regain his energies, and then he
would be able to fulfil the purposes he’d returned to the land to
perform. The cane’s humming ceased and Simon faded to sleep. The
last question he had before he succumbed to exhaustion was what he
should do about his father.

Ralph

So far he has behaved neither with
hospitality to his former scribe nor with honour and it has
therefore not been an auspicious beginning to this strange new
world, and the possibility of hope. There is something about Simon
which disturbs him deeply and he is unable to keep reason at the
forefront of his dealings with him. By his father’s blood, the man
has died and been brought to life again for the sake of the Lammas
Lands, and Ralph has only argued with him and tried to assert his
own authority when the words he meant to speak should have been
those of gratitude and thanks. He is by all the stars a fool.

So he swears under his breath in his mother’s
tongue as he strides along the hallways towards the newly fragile
stairs but, as he reaches them, something snags at his thought and
he turns back. For a heartbeat he wonders if it is the scribe,
whose powers have always been beyond his mind-strength, but no it
is not, as he senses no other presence within him but his own.
Still, something is different or has become so in his angry retreat
from his bedroom, and he wrinkles his nose in order to pinpoint it
again.

He stares at the window onto the courtyard
which has been cracked and useless in keeping out the winds since
the war began. At first he sees no change but then he reaches out
and touches the edges of the stonework holding what is left of the
glass in place. It is this that has changed. Instead of the uneven
surface pocked by destruction, the blight that has affected almost
all of his once-loved home, Ralph sees the smoothness of the stone
as it meets the glass. Earlier it was not like this, he can swear
it, but as the light sinks over the ravaged woods, he knows it is
changed. The stonework is somehow mending itself, but how can that
be possible without the hard work of servants he no longer has, or
without the direct power of the mind-cane?