Hallsfoot's Battle Read online

  Show me the justice and anger in your fear of the raven, he said in his thoughts.

  No. Her refusal was instinctive but, even before its echo had died away, she sensed her resolve vanishing. What gave her the right to assume that only she knew the road to their destination? When she stared at the scribe, she could see he was shaking, but at least he’d had the courage to share his mind with her. She, Annyeke Hallsfoot, was not going to let a day pass when a man had acted in a braver fashion than herself. Not while she still breathed.

  “Perhaps you are right then,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “I will tell you. Though I cannot see how the themes of the Second Legend can fit with my own simple tale—one of childishness and cowardice, I should warn you.”

  Her companion smiled. “Believe me, I’m used to both those attributes.”

  She thought he might be about to say something else, but when the silence drifted back, she nodded and drew up a stool to the table. For telling one’s life to a near stranger, it was always important to be comfortable.

  As she arranged her skirts and prepared herself, she gazed round at the familiar surroundings of her cooking place. Green and yellow walls, shelves of herbs and spices—most empty now, unstocked since the war and the land’s despair—a scattering of pots and dishes for baking, some that had once belonged to her mother. She liked the direct simplicity of it. In the past, Johan had sometimes wondered why she didn’t change it to keep up with the latest Gathandrian fashions, in the days when fashion had been deemed important, but Annyeke marched to a different beat. The ease of her kitchen and, indeed, of her whole home, gave her the freedom to be herself. Besides, she had never yet allowed a man to dictate to her in matters of style—only, perhaps, in matters of the mind or the heart.

  I think you shouldn’t tell your story out loud, Simon said. I think you should tell me directly.

  That must have been what he’d wanted to say in the silence, she thought, and smiled as he nodded his agreement.

  As you wish, she answered him. It begins like this… And then, suddenly, and without fully expecting it, she was there, back in her early childhood memories, back with her hatred of birds.

  *****

  Annyeke’s first memory was not of her parents, but of her grandmother. Her name had also been Annyeke, a name that meant song of grace in the old languages. Unlike Annyeke herself, her grandmother had always been known as Yeke. Song. A word the woman had never lived up to, and neither had Annyeke, whose singing voice could, at best, be described as gravelly. But at least she’d kept the true length of her name. She felt she deserved it.

  Yeke had been born in the Region of the Winemakers in the city but had moved to live with Annyeke’s parents in the area of the Chair-Makers before Annyeke was born. That house was only a few streets away from where she was living now, but had been destroyed early on in the War. She could not fully grasp her response to that loss, even now. It was not, after all, as if it had been personal; her parents had been dead for five year-cycles by then. They had not been young when she was born. The deepest impression Annyeke had taken from her childhood was the power of her grandmother and how much they had clashed together during the early part of her life.

  Her first memory was of pain in her arm and a spark of fire in her mind, as if she was being crushed by something red. She could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen moon-cycles old. When she opened her eyes, she could see two fierce-looking eyes, rivers of green, but the fire that came from them was of the darkest crimson. Annyeke did the first thing that came to mind. She opened her mouth to scream and, at once, strong hands that brooked no gainsaying picked her up and held her tight. But the voice that crooned in the unread depths of her child’s mind was not one that aimed to soothe, but to command.

  Be quiet, little Annyeke. Now is not the time for crying. You will wake your mother. She needs to rest.

  Heart beating fast and struggling to respond to the shock of hearing another in her thoughts for the first time, Annyeke held herself rigid against the woman’s body. She remembered thinking how odd it was that, in the warmth of her home, she could suddenly feel so chilled. The next moment she was colder still for the woman swept her out of the shelter of her room, through the front door with its glass carved top and into the early morning garden.

  The wind was bitter through her thin night tunic.

  Little granddaughter, what will you be? What will you be?

  The mind-words, though whispered to a tune she’d heard her mother sing, somehow managed to pierce her thoughts with more of the strange cruelty of red, and Annyeke drummed her small fists on her grandmother’s deep green gown.

  At this, her grandmother laughed and this time, when she spoke, it was aloud also. “Ah, little Annyeke, you’ll be a fighter, then. Come what may.”

  Desperate to escape, Annyeke managed to squirm round in those encompassing arms and face the grass and cedar trees, herbs and rock roses of her parents’ garden. She opened her mouth and, despite her grandmother’s disapproval, began to scream.

  Just at that moment, a forest owl swooped up from where it had been hiding in the long grasses near the roses. Annyeke’s small angry cries must have disturbed it. She could remember great talons stretched towards her, the stink of bitter feathers and the glancing blow as the bird’s beak caught her on her left ear. She screamed yet louder. Then the earth came up to meet her and there was nothing.

  When she woke later, with a scarlet headache that seemed to overshadow her whole body, she could feel the gentle comfort of her mother’s hands on her head, beyond that, her grandmother’s words.

  The child is too fearful. It was only a bird. It would not have harmed her.

  Annyeke did not hear her mother’s response, though in the moon- and year-cycles to come, she grew to understand her grandmother’s power and her mother’s loving weakness. All that then filled her mind was the reality that her fear had been there even before the bird. Fear of the strange woman who had taken her from the comfort of home and into the chill of the garden. The owl had only deepened it. When she was able to put a name to what she felt that day, she would call it injustice, and anger, too, at her grandmother’s assumption. What remained with her was the slight scar on the side of her head, and the fear.

  From that day forward, the untamed strength both of birds and of her grandmother was forever linked in a red haze of memory in her blood, and she never lost her wariness of either.

  *****

  “Did it not help,” Simon asked, “to have the knowledge of this? You understood where your fear started. Can your mind-skills not overcome it?”

  She shook her head. “No. Because there is more to the tale. That is only the beginning.”

  “Tell me then, Annyeke.”

  *****

  It was as if he had given her permission. Strange how she had told no one of this, not even Johan, through all the seasons until now because Yeke had never understood her granddaughter’s fear or how it was bound up with herself. In that moment, when Annyeke had experienced mind-contact for the first time, she had also discovered how to hide her privacy. Some of the crimson of Yeke’s mind stayed with her always since that first unwanted link, and she found she had no need to attend to the later childhood lessons of how to hide her thoughts from others. She already knew; the crimson was a curtain beyond which few were permitted entry.

  Her grandmother took it upon herself to tease Annyeke into courage. Now, in the calmer light of adulthood, Annyeke told herself that it had been done in good faith, but at the time she had been beaten down, almost defeated by it. Each glimpse of weakness Annyeke let slip from her mind would be taken up and shaped into a lesson in how to be brave. She soon learned how to keep things hidden, or how to deal with them alone. Her mother proved to be an ineffective ally, although she never fully acknowledged that fact until later. It was her grandmother who ruled the household.

  The most terrible fact of all was her fear of birds. Annyeke could never hide
it from anyone. How could she when she was unable to understand or control it herself? No matter how often she told herself to remain calm, not to give in to the blanket of red and black that overpowered her thoughts, she did not have the strength or the ability to do so. Yeke always found her out.

  And, in finding her out, her grandmother tried to cure her. Two or three times in a summer week-cycle, when lessons were done, Yeke would take the small girl out for a walk in order, ostensibly, to give Annyeke’s parents a chance to be by themselves. But such walks would always lead to encounters with birds, and little Annyeke grew to dread them. So much so that sometimes she would hide in the garden or under bedding, in the foolish hope that she would not be found. It was impossible, of course, for a child, unskilled in the protection of the mind-net, not to be found. At other times, she would pretend to be ill or tired, and sometimes that worked, but no one can be ill forever.

  In the end, therefore, Yeke would always win.

  Sometimes, though, her grandmother was merciful and the two of them would walk through the theatre region of the city towards the lines of elms and wind-poplars where the actors rehearsed their dramas in fine weather. Here, Annyeke would feel the most at ease with her grandmother. The song of the poplars would lull her thoughts and she loved to hear the players learning their lines. More than anything, however, the birds here were tree dwellers, smaller by far than the river fowl or the raptor that had first terrified her. They did not approach too closely. No matter how much Yeke would try to coax the elm-larks to her hand, she was never patient enough to bond with them.

  It was the times when their steps took them to the park and its two small lakes that Annyeke found her skin growing hot and clammy and her mind becoming more heated and darkly coloured. For here, the wild swans lived in abundance, accompanied by wood geese and always the distant cry of the ravens and dawn owls, some of whom drank from the lake during daylight hours. She was always afraid they might touch her.

  Because of this, her grandmother drew her to the water, splashed her fingers into the shallows and sparked the birds’ attention, bringing them flocking for food or purely out of curiosity. Yeke carried a pouch of stale bread for the purpose of giving courage to her grandchild. Because of this, Annyeke did all she could not to go near the waterside. She pretended interest in the games of the babies and younger children who were not allowed as near to the water’s edge as she was. She found much to occupy her amongst the trees or in watching the actors whenever they strolled by.

  None of these ruses helped her.

  For in the end, Yeke would insist that she feed the bread to the creatures she feared above all others. There had never been any question of disobedience to her grandmother’s rule—rebellion came later on in Annyeke’s life and was precious for that reason. But, as a young child, she had to do as she was commanded in the end. If she did not, then that strange crimson shadow would pass over her mind and Annyeke knew she could not fight against it. So she forced herself to breathe slowly, take the slimy bread from Yeke’s hand and stretch out her fingers to the hot, strange feathers and beaks that sprang towards her. On most of these occasions, she managed somehow neither to scream nor to cry, but once or twice her small store of courage deserted her and she would run, wailing like a wounded puppy, past the children and theatricals and into the safety of trees.

  It was no use. Yeke would catch up with her, the daggers in her voice tearing through Annyeke’s thoughts, and drag her back to finish her reluctant communion with the birds. There seemed to be no end to it. Only with the onset of winter did those evening walks begin to diminish, and often not even then. The following year-cycle, Annyeke would be older, more able to hide her fear.

  All through those seasons of water and terror, she kept the sense of an injustice done buried deeply within her thoughts. Not that she could have explained it then, or why she allowed her anger to grow and burn inside as it did, but that was the truth of it.

  The worst of all her memories took place when she was six summers old. It was the resting day and the family were together in the garden as was their custom when the sun was kind. Her mother was altering one of her father’s over-tunics, her father himself was clearing the herb area of weeds, and her grandmother was basking in the sun. Annyeke was concentrating on being as quiet as possible and ignoring the constant hum of the birds.

  A sudden clash of small claws and feathers above her, near the flowering limes, made her gasp and peer upwards, pressing her nails into the palms of her hands in order to keep still. She would do anything to avoid Yeke noticing her.

  It was too late.

  “Little one, for the stars’ sakes, they are only birds!” her grandmother snorted. “When will you learn to be sensible?”

  Her father tut-tutted at Yeke’s casual blasphemy but said no more, instead turning back to his weeding and ignoring the developing family drama.

  “Don’t worry, Annyeke,” her mother frowned, intent on her sewing. “They won’t hurt you.”

  Annyeke didn’t reply to that. Meanwhile, the two birds above her, an apple sparrow resplendent in its green summer plumage, and a dull brown woodlark, continued their furious battle. As Annyeke began to tremble, two feathers, one green and one brown, floated down to rest on the ground next to her feet. More than anything she wanted to run but couldn’t begin to think where she could go that might be safe. The city was full of birds.

  When she blinked at her grandmother, she could see Yeke’s hard green eyes piercing a way through her, body and soul. Yeke’s dark red hair gleamed brighter in the sun, almost the colour of blood. It made the strange crimson net in Annyeke’s mind twist and she gasped again.

  One last wild shriek from the woodlark, and the sparrow tumbled down to earth. Annyeke’s hands gripped the sides of the gardenseat, forcing herself not to move. She would not run, she would not. Because if she did, she could not begin to imagine what Yeke would do to ensure she would never run again.

  The dying bird fluttered around on the grass as the woodlark flew to the lime tree, perching halfway up and declaring its victory in liquid song. Annyeke didn’t care about that. Her attentions were focused simply on the sparrow. Its death dance brought it nearer to her seat and she found she couldn’t look away. If she looked away, she wouldn’t know what it was doing. It might come nearer. Touch her even. She couldn’t bear the thought of that. Every sense she possessed cowered away.

  “By the gods.”

  Yeke’s voice split the woodlark’s song and the bird flew away from the tree. Her father’s trowel clanged down in the soil, striking stone. At the same time, her grandmother pushed herself up from her sitting position and strode with unknown purpose to stand in front of Annyeke. For the length of a heartbeat, the bulk of her obscured the sun, then she hunkered down. Her hair glowed brighter again when she turned to Annyeke, but her expression was lost in darkness.

  “Women of our blood should never show fear,” she said.

  Before Annyeke could understand what was happening, Yeke scooped up the dying bird, took two steps forward and placed the tiny body on her granddaughter’s lap.

  Annyeke couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. The sparrow convulsed, its flesh warm against her leg, opened its eye and seemed to stare up at her. One green speckled wing lay at an angle downwards and she could see that some of the feathers had been ripped out. Blood spattered across the body from a rip in the throat the woodlark had made.

  She opened her mouth and screamed. The sound made her mother jump to her feet and her father gave a short, sharp cry. The scream continued. On and on, so that she thought she might be swallowed up by it entirely. Her mind felt as if a great black flood of fear was sweeping through and out of her and would carry her away, a flood of past and present terrors. All things only half expressed to her family until now launched themselves into the air within the scream’s strange power—her deep-seated horror of feather, talon and beak, her unacknowledged rage at Yeke and the injustice of the d
ying sparrow on her lap. She tried to get up, push the bird away, but her grandmother held her down.

  Be quiet. You must learn how to overcome your fears. Start with this dead bird. It cannot hurt you.

  Those words sparked crimson into the wild dark waters of her scream. It worsened the pain and she struggled against Yeke’s harsh grip.

  Don’t fight me.

  Annyeke could feel the concern flowing from her father and mother, and could see through the haze of swirling colours her mother’s face disfigured by a frown. She couldn’t see her father. Her mother was mouthing words she couldn’t hear, the sense of them lost in the protective mind-net her grandmother had flung round them both.

  She couldn’t escape it. She couldn’t escape Yeke. She would never be able to. That knowledge released her tongue.

  “Leave me alone,” she screamed, words suddenly escaping through the dark rush of fear. “I hate you.”

  As she flung her thought outwards at her tormentor, all the past reared up once more within her and the black waters filled her again. She could have spoken a thousand instances of Yeke’s injustice, her clumsy cruelty and, most of all these, the way that Annyeke was never adult enough to fight back. Could never be so. For as long as she lived, such phrases would always be just out of her reach.

  Instead, she grasped the now dead sparrow. Blood slicked her fingers and she had to swallow down the urge to vomit. Crushing the bird in her hand, she half stood up, aware of the surprise in her grandmother’s face and feeling that same surprise in her mind. The mind-net must have woven its spell across her young thoughts, too, must be keeping them from the woman in front of her. For a few moments only, Yeke didn’t know what she was going to do next. The realisation liberated her. Annyeke took the bird and pressed it against her grandmother’s face, smearing her with blood and feathers, across her skin, her mouth, her hair. Then she let it go.