The Paper Sword (9 page)

The Ruse

S
aheli
woke Tharfen for the last watch just before dawn. The pain in the back of Tharfen's thighs was severe and she wanted to scratch it, but when she did it hurt too much. So she arose, quietly surrendering Chiricoru to Saheli. She stood outside in the grey light of the forest and let the wind soothe her as much as possible. She was worried about her mother. She reminded herself to be hard like her mother and she took comfort in the thought that her mother was probably being hard right now about her. The whole process of being hard was a lot harder than she had thought.

There were a lot of acorns on the ground, so Tharfen retrieved some of them and began firing them into the forest with her slingshot. When she set her eyes on a target it satisfied her that she rarely missed. There were regular impacts of acorns against trees for the next hour, until the first flickering rays of dawn filtered through the high branches of the trees and she went back into the veranda. Somehow Torgee had rolled into the place where she had been sleeping, right up against Saheli and Chiricoru. Xemion lay on the other side of the swan, leaving space in front of the door.

Quietly she trod over the first two sleepers and stood over Xemion, looking down into his face, her own features reflecting the complexity of her thoughts about him. For a while she toyed with the idea of waking him, just so he could see how closely Torgee was lying to Saheli, but instead she did something she didn't quite understand. She turned the handle on the door to the cabin and softly opened it. The first flickers of morning had just then entered the opposite window, allowing her to see the interior, though only barely.

The place was very dusty and in one spot long strands of some kind of stringy grey lichen hung down from the ceiling. Barely visible behind a thick veil of cobwebs that draped the walls were numerous shelves upon which sat all manner of upside-down glass tubes, bottles, and various metal crucibles. Against one wall there was some kind of device made out of wire mesh or wicker. There was a crank handle on one end and it looked a bit like a butter churn, except the container where the butter would have been was conically shaped, its narrow end at the bottom. Above it a framed picture affixed to the wall was also buried in cobwebs. Intrigued, Tharfen trod across the dusty room and pulled the webbing away. Quietly and absentmindedly she began to turn the crank handle on the device as she peered closer at the picture. At first she'd thought it was a silhouette or a portrait of someone entirely in shadow but now she realized that what she'd taken for shadow was actually a full head of long black hair. It was a portrait of the back of someone's head. Tharfen shook her head and wrinkled her nose in distaste as the crank handle squeaked and an eerie feeling came over her.

“Strange.”

“Tharfen, what are you doing in there?” Xemion stood at the door, and behind him Saheli peered over his shoulder.

“What's strange?” she asked, a slight tone of horror in her voice.

There was one more squeak from the crank handle as Xemion walked over to Tharfen. She pointed at the portrait with amusement. “I thought a painter was supposed to paint the front of someone's head —”

Tharfen never finished her sentence. All the fear Saheli felt in her nightmare last night sprang up out of her and, clutching Chiricoru so tightly the bird began to squawk, she screamed, “Tharfen, stop! Stop! Stop turning the handle and get out of there!”

Disobediently, Tharfen gave the handle one more squeaking turn. Saheli screamed again, “Get out of there! Get out of there now!” She backed away from the door and stood off a ways in the clearing trying to control her rising sense of panic.

Torgee, who had only just awoken but was already diligently spreading the last of the red pepper and fishhooks around the porch, took Saheli's place at the threshold and gazed into the room. Xemion was just then looking up at what he'd thought was grey lichen hanging from the ceiling. Tharfen's eyes followed his up and the two of them spied at the lichen's epicentre the face of a very old man looking down at them with half-dead, half-living eyes. But it wasn't lichen; it was his ancient beard extending almost to the floor. Tharfen's heart almost jumped out of her chest. With a scream of terror she turned and fled. Hearing her bolt out of the house, Saheli's panic took hold and she too began to run, and the two of them, with Saheli out in front, headed for the forest. Xemion was frightened, too, but he managed to back out of the house slowly, taking in the details of the scene as best he could.

“What is it?” Torgee asked, not daring to venture farther into the house to look for himself.

“There's some kind of old man up on the ceiling —” Xemion began, trying to keep his voice as calm as possible, but before he finished his sentence that eerie cry from last night came from inside the cabin. It was so sudden and ghoulish that the two of them nearly scrambled over each other in their haste to get away. They were almost across the clearing by the time the cry began to taper, but the laughter it ended on was louder with the dawn and lingered on long after they had hurled themselves into the forest.

Soon soaked to the bone by the water that had accumulated in the canopy during last night's rainfall, the four of them now ran full tilt along the bare forest floor until they came to the remains of an old stairway that had been cut into the side of the precipice.

Saheli was already about twenty steps down the incline, Tharfen not far behind her, when Torgee and then Xemion arrived. The boys paused briefly at the top to survey the territory ahead. Far below, extending from the foot of the precipice was the long, narrow plateau Xemion and Saheli had seen by moonlight from their perch on the promontory the night before. It was riven on all sides by the openings of steep and very narrow ravines. The top of the plateau was intermittently covered in tall golden grasses now in full flower, but at its far end, easily a league off, there stood a great dolmen-shaped stone that looked as if it must have been carved long ago by the monument builders and abandoned here in some emergency. Xemion shouted from the top of the stairs down to Saheli: “Head for the big stone. That's the one Vallaine said leads to the coast road.” Xemion pointed to the distant stone.

Saheli didn't look up and gave no sign of having heard. She continued her rapid flight down the stairs, Chiricoru bouncing around on her back. Her speed doubled as her feet touched the ground of the plateau. All around her the tall grass, sometimes as high as her head, waved in the wind. She cut through it like the prow of a racing ship parting golden waters. She hadn't gone far when she suddenly came upon the narrow mouth of a small hidden ravine. In fact, she almost fell into it, for it was at its narrowest here and the grasses were so high about its edges she didn't see it till she was almost upon it, and then it was too late to stop, so she leapt over, barely making it to the other side. With a gasp, she looked back into the ravine she'd almost fallen into. It plummeted hundreds of feet straight down before its deeper fathoms were lost in their own stony shadows. On the other side of it Tharfen, who had stopped herself in time, also looked down in dread.

“Saheli, be careful,” Xemion shouted. She looked back at him and then beyond him up the stairway. “And don't forget you've got Chiricoru on your back. You should let one of us carry her for a while.” As he drew closer he could see that her face was utterly pale and that the haunted look she had arrived with four months ago had returned. Tharfen, trying to hide the trembling that shook her to the very root of her being, made her way around the end of the ravine and stood beside her.

“There are lots of these narrow openings,” Xemion said, pointing down into the depths of the ravine with a shudder. “We're going to have to be extra cautious. I think it will be safer if we run a little slower for a while.” As if to illustrate this, he walked around the edge of the ravine. But Torgee backed up a little, took a run at it, and nimbly leaped over so that both of them reached Saheli and Tharfen at the same time.

Still visibly shaken, Saheli slid the bag containing the bird off of her back.

“Quickly,” she said with some desperation, continually glancing back up the stairway in fear of pursuit as Xemion took the bag and set about securing it to his shoulders.

Above them they heard the rising cry beginning again. “Is that the old man up on the ceiling who was looking down at us?” Tharfen asked in a horrified voice.

Saheli looked terrified. “I don't know.” She put her hand over her mouth.

“Was it that backward man in the picture?”

Again Saheli answered “I don't know.” And then she asked Xemion, “Was there anyone else there?”

Xemion answered no and glared at Tharfen, quickly putting his finger up to his lips to signal her to be quiet. “Come on! We can talk later. The sooner we get to that big stone the sooner we get to the coast road and the sooner we get you back to your mother.”

“And the sooner we get away from whatever ghoul that is up there,” Torgee added. With that, the four of them, Xemion with Chiricoru on his back, set off at a pace only slightly slower then before.

It was nearly noon by the time they drew near the huge grey bulk of the monumental rock. A grove of Ildeberry bushes had sprung up in the shade behind it and about fifty yards beyond that the plateau ended, descending to the valley below through two final ravines about a hundred yards apart. As they passed the rock, Chiricoru began to honk and kick inside the bag. She forced her head out of the opening and before anyone could stop her she had squirmed halfway out and was in danger of falling. Xemion had no choice but to lower her to the ground.

“It's very hot,” Saheli said. “Perhaps we should give her a quick drink.”

“Well, we should stay here behind the stone then,” Torgee said, his long nose angled up into the wind blowing down from the heights behind them. “That way we'll at least be out of sight until we leave.”

“Can I water her?” Tharfen asked, apparently somewhat recovered from her scare. Saheli nodded. She was doing her best to calm down.

“It's very hot,” Saheli said, “but don't let her drink too fast.” She gave Tharfen Torgee's water bottle, and while Tharfen watered Chiricoru, Saheli and Xemion and Torgee took the time to pick some berries. Torgee's small supplies of food had been quickly exhausted and now they were hungry again.

As they picked the firm red berries, popping them immediately into their mouths, Saheli and Xemion drifted away from Torgee a little. Saheli gathered her hair behind her head and with three deft twists managed to tie it in a bun, leaving several strands to hang down her long neck. She looked at Xemion looking at her, then averted her eyes toward the sky and said very quietly, “I think I might have lived in that place. I think I'm starting to remember a face that might have been my mother's face. I don't know why, but she hurt me frequently.” She spoke these words without emotion, her face expressionless, but when she finished them she swallowed hard, that melody from last night once again quietly undulating at the back of her mind.

Torgee now drew closer, listening. “Do you think that was some kind of spell kone in there?” he asked cautiously.

Saheli shuddered. “I don't know. I can't bear to think of it. It reminds me of something awful, but I don't know what. I think I may have done something terrible.”

Xemion shook his head in disagreement.

“Not you,” Torgee said. Xemion could see him gawking at that diagonal scar over her left eyebrow.

Saheli shrugged and turned away. Xemion wanted to ask her all sorts of questions, but she'd just trusted him with more information than he'd ever thought he'd acquire, and besides, he didn't like Torgee listening in.

“I'm glad you've finally trusted us with your secret,” Torgee said gently.

She returned her own grim smile. “I've got amnesia. My whole life is a secret — even to me.” She said it like a joke, but there was a tone of despair there too.