Hallsfoot's Battle Read online

  Shaking aside the snare of his memories and the crushing expectations of those he was with, the Lost One took a firmer grip on the mind-cane that felt like a sleeping wild animal in his hand. This time he felt a strange energy pass between them and blinked. Then he laid the cane as gently as he could onto the dead boy’s face.

  At once, he was surrounded in darkness and an impression of mauve, the landscape of Talus’ mind. It swallowed him up and left him empty and winded. Was this death? Shaking his head to rid himself of the thoughts that bound him, he stepped forward into the void and became aware the cane’s carved top was glowing silver in his hand. It was for this reason the blackness was lightened to mauve.

  He couldn’t do this on his own.

  Simon knelt down, laying the cane across his knees and allowing his fingers to travel up its ebony smoothness to the silver glitter. Though he’d expected the carving to be warm, it was as cold as the snow he’d just left behind and he drew in a sharp breath.

  Words filled his mind. Talus, where are you? You have gone, but you cannot be far. Surely the spirit of a person cannot vanish so quickly when the night falls?

  A flash of white fire and the power from the mind-cane filled him. Not like before, when the strength of it had been a mere glancing blow to his soul, but to the full, every drop of blood, every bone, the totality of his skin. It tore him apart and knitted him together again. It was as wild as the wolves he’d feared all his life, and yet as gentle as the smallest of summer streams in the land of his birth. It drew blood from his head and his hands, his belly and his feet, and at the same time soothed those wounds with the softest of ointments. Winter lavender and thorn, briar and lemongrass. He was floating on air and at the mercy of the storm. He was alive. Then he was gone, dead like Talus, the bitter taste of fire and regret on his tongue. He was no one and he was everyone. All who had lived and died across the lands, from the beginning of the great time-cycle until now. From now until the far distant future when the Spirit would gather up the soil and trees, air, water, rock—people, too—and take them to a place no one had ever seen, though many had dreamt it. A place of bright streams and healing, of golden skies and singing so harmonious it could change a man or woman forever. A place where all the writings of the Lost One’s world would finally be fulfilled in how they would live, how they would feel, how they would see.

  Simon lived through this for a time-cycle beyond the counting and which, afterwards, he could never describe, not even in the sanctuary of his inner place.

  When he woke, he opened his eyes to a world of soft purples and violets, greys and almost-blues. He could see hills and trees and grasses, and a distant view of the sea. In his mind he could feel bleakness with a hidden strength as yet unchannelled and unsung, and a centre of such stillness as he had never known.

  He rose to a sitting position and saw the body of Talus lying at his right side. Reaching out to touch him, something stayed his hand and he realised the boy was breathing. The colours he’d seen were flowing from the young child’s thoughts, creating a world strong enough to protect them both.

  The Lost One smiled, gazing at the new scars on his body and at the mind-cane where it lay as quiet as the boy it had saved.

  A voice in his thoughts spoke into the quietness. Take the boy and return to the place you came from.

  But where will you be? How can I find you like this and then you ask us to leave? The questions rose unbidden into the scribe’s mind, but he knew he could not have denied them. This place was more than anything he had imagined it would be. He did not know how he could bear the loss of it.

  I am with you when you need me to be so, the words not his answered him. And you will see me again, one day. But the time is not right for you or for the boy. Now, go. Your friends are waiting.

  Simon closed his eyes for a moment. Then he nodded, though at what or whom he could not precisely tell. He got up, lifting the boy as lightly in his arms as if he were nothing but air. The mind-cane nestled at his waist. He began to walk.

  Chapter Thirteen: Resolution

  Annyeke

  She watched the Lost One as his body became still. Annyeke had the impression he was somehow absent from himself. Of course, she’d been there when other mind-journeys had taken place amongst her people, but never when it was a question of life or death. With all her being, she longed to reach out, touch Talus, try to bring back his spirit herself if she had to, but the power was not hers to taste.

  And, at the back of her mind, the knowledge of the mind-executioner’s blood on her skin and memory overshadowed her. Would she ever be clean of it? She could not tell. Even so, she would not change what she had done. She would never regret it. For Talus and for her people, she would do it again a thousand times over.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. Johan. She turned to face him at once, searching his eyes for some kind of hope.

  “He’s done this before, hasn’t he?” she whispered, wanting above everything his reassurance. “The scribe, the Lost One. He’s brought a boy back from the dead.”

  He nodded, taking her into his arms. But she could feel the clouded darkness of his mind, wondered if she was foolish to hope at all.

  She could sense something else in him, something rich and golden and deep. It called to her and she felt her thoughts rise to meet him. The unexpected power of it made her blink.

  “I love you,” she said. “No matter what I have done, or what happens now—though I think the worst will tear my skin from my bones—I love you.”

  In answer, he placed his hands on either side of her face, gazing into her eyes as if he would understand all the things she understood.

  “Know this, Annyeke Hallsfoot,” he said as if he were declaring a solemn promise to her in the place of joining. “I have found today that I love you. I think I always have, though I have not known it until now. And what you have done is the bravest act of any of our elders. The executioner had to die; it was impossible for him to live.”

  “Perhaps,” she whispered back and felt the beginnings of wetness on her cheeks. “But I did not think his death would come by my hand.”

  Next to her, a deep sighing, like a river beginning to come into full spate. Slipping from Johan’s protection, she swung back to see the Lost One draw a long breath and open his eyes. He gazed right at her and held out his arms.

  Talus coughed.

  Annyeke couldn’t help the cry of joy that sprang from her lips. She gathered the boy from the Lost One’s grasp as close to her bosom as she could get him, rocking him like a restless child, though she was the one most in need of comfort. He coughed again and opened his eyes. She found herself laughing and choking on unnecessary tears, her whole body shaking. She couldn’t have stood up if she’d tried to. She rejoiced in the new warmth of his small frame against hers, at the miracle that somehow had happened here today, when her faith in the mere existence of miracles had grown so weak.

  “Thank you, thank you,” she mouthed at Simon over and over again. “Thank you.”

  Annyeke only stopped when Talus moaned against her torn dress. “You’re hurting me.”

  And then she laughed and cried again.

  Simon

  The red-haired woman had her child again and the land’s harmony was restored. Or it was on the way to being so. A sudden flash of sunlight pierced the scribe’s eye and pushed the night fully away. He could feel the shake of his breath and the slight tremble of his body, the ache in his fresh scars, but none of that mattered.

  Simon gazed round and saw the aftermath of battle, blood and bones and silence, grief and the knowledge everything was different now. Those Gathandrians who could still walk, limped away or collapsed, shaking with tears, under the trees. Others tried to help the men and women who had fallen although for many there was nothing they could do. The smell of death was everywhere. But something else, too. The scent of the trees, the earth, the promise of water lingered, a chance to live where no chance had been looked for.

/>   A flash of emerald drew his eye. The Lammas Lord scrabbled at the ground. For a moment, Simon had no idea what he was doing, then he saw the jewels Ralph held in his hand.

  He cried out a wild denial and tried to get to his feet, but the effort was beyond him.

  Ralph

  It is over and he has no place here. Destruction has been visited upon Gathandria both by means of the executioner and the soldiers he took from the dead. Ralph’s soldiers. Gelahn’s use of his own armies. And the Overlord has done so little to stop him. It is Simon and the Gathandrians who have saved themselves at the cost of so many dead, dying or wounded.

  What has the war been for? The mind-executioner promised Ralph power once, but he stopped believing in that a long time ago. He even stopped wanting it.

  It’s time to go. And even though he senses he belongs nowhere, the concept of home is the nearest refuge he has.

  His fingers search for the Tregannon emeralds even before he realises he’s made the decision. The executioner’s still warm blood and the stillness of his flesh cuts through Ralph, but he forces himself onwards. Yes. He has one of the precious jewels, then three and four of them in the palm of his hand.

  The scribe’s sudden cry makes him stumble and a fifth jewel of the original seven rolls away from his grasp. When he looks at Simon, Ralph knows the scribe sees the danger, perhaps even wants him to stay, but the Overlord has travelled beyond him now into another kind of a valley.

  As Ralph throws the gems upward and allows his mind to track the wild arc of their rising, he sees the undead soldiers are beginning to shatter. Their frames collapse to mere skeleton and bone. Without Gelahn’s magic, the mountain dogs, too, thicken into nothing but rock and fragments of stone, and tumble broken across the earth. The killing power of corpse and hound are no more.

  It is fitting, but no matter. The green circle is barely there, lines stretched thin across morning air between each jewel. Perhaps it not enough to carry him back to the Lammas Lands, but still he must try. Let what may happen do whatever it will.

  He takes his first step into the emerald sphere, and everything vanishes away.

  Simon

  Simon found he was weeping. Kneeling like a child at the place where the Lammas Lord had disappeared. The four jewels Ralph took back had gone with him, but Simon knew there was no guarantee the journey would have been a safe one.

  Mindlessly, he gathered together the rest of the emeralds—the three Ralph had left behind in his desperation to get away and those two that Annyeke had suffered to give to them—and placed them in the executioner’s velvet pouch. The scribe’s fingers trembled only slightly when he unfastened the bag from the dead man’s waist and retied it to his own.

  No, he said to himself, the word an echo of the warning he’d given to Ralph, but also with something of affirmation in it. No, it’s not over yet, my good Lammas Lord, no matter where you are or what you might think.

  Then he took in the exhaustion and also the relief of the people as it passed over him in waves from all directions of the city. He looked at Johan, his face and body scarred but the wounds not life-threatening, and at Annyeke, understood the source of their happiness, and his own still foolish grief. Just as the snow-raven alighted like the softest of breezes at his side, he knew what needed to be done.

  Annyeke

  The snow had stopped falling when the final battle had turned to silence. Annyeke wondered if she’d ever be able to stop hearing the noise of the dying in her dreams or whether that was a necessary remembrance. So many Gathandrians dead, the First Elder amongst them. The sheer scale, the terrifying uproar and horror of what she and Johan had witnessed had pierced her to the core. The year-cycles of the war of attrition before the Lost One returned to them had, in themselves, been marked with pain and loss, but had taken place over a period of moons, not all at once as in this most recent war. And it had mainly been played out in the mind, not the body.

  Everything was different. A full day-cycle on from when the battle had ended, she could sense the mood of the people, which echoed her own thoughts—the greyness of shock, like a river in winter, the sharp orange of pain, as bitter as an unguarded tongue of flame, and the beginnings of grief, something between blue and green, shadowed by cloud. But she sensed more—a white-streaked relief and the emptiness as of a great trial being complete.

  Perhaps, then, it was not the best time to enact a ritual of joy? Or perhaps it was. Besides, she was here now and glad of it. The Lost One’s suggestion—no, more than that, his command—had been as a too bright morning after a winter night, overpowering but beautiful. Annyeke’s heart beat fast, but the rhythm of her breathing was steady.

  Around her, the ruins of the Great Library showed jagged against the late afternoon sky. She could hear the faint calls of weaver birds as they flew over the cypresses on the edge of the park land. She felt her throat grow tight and her eyes fill with an emotion so enriched with a variety of colours and shades she could barely name it. She was being ridiculous, and too female, something she abhorred. A touch on her arm, accompanied by an echo in her mind, drew her attention back to the present.

  “On the contrary, First Elder,” the Lost One said, “tears are the most natural response of all, as far as I can see, especially after so much darkness.”

  Annyeke gazed at the man standing in front of her. At first sight, she could almost believe nothing had changed in Simon’s appearance. A slight man, his expressions tentative, the aura around him a shifting blue, sometimes so pale that sunlight obliterated it altogether. But now he had shadows in his eyes that had not been there before, and scars on his flesh from his ordeal with young Talus. Then again, so had Johan. So had they all, though it was remarkable that her own sight was unaltered from before. The marks on her loved one’s face would heal, but the impression of them would remain forever, as would the wound at his side. None of this mattered to Annyeke. Besides, it was somehow fitting, and they had indeed been lucky. Shadows of loss and shadows of strength, the two senses forming a mirror image of each other. The beginnings of wisdom for them all perhaps? In the Lost One’s right hand lay the mind-cane, like a sleeping animal, its colours now the customary black and silver—no longer a weapon of war. At his left on a nearby scattering of skeleton and stone that had once been the undead Lammas soldiers and Gelahn’s mountain dogs, the snow-raven perched, its watchful eye turned towards the scribe. The bird looked as if it would follow him forever.

  “You are right,” said Annyeke. “For a man, that is itself unusual. Still…”

  “Still, it is a day such as you have not experienced before and we are glad of it.”

  In an unexpected gesture, the Lost One pulled her into a brief hug, taking care to keep the mind-cane away from her skin. The new First Elder of Gathandria was grateful for that. Now that Simon had begun to open his mind to the artefact, allowing its deep strength to guide his journey, she had no way of telling how the cane would respond to the sudden contact with another’s thoughts. The scribe and the mind-cane needed to consolidate their fragile relationship without hindrance. She hoped he would be granted the time to do it.

  Perhaps, indeed, that was what they should have done at the very start. There had been no need for any of them, her least of all, to concern themselves with the scribe’s mind-training. The cane had its own purposes and had probably carried them in secret all along, waiting only for the chance to speak in full to its new master.

  One day, Annyeke thought, this tale might well be a legend many in Gathandria and beyond would read.

  Simon released her and laughed, the sound causing the silver carving on the cane to sparkle in the bright air.

  “You may well be right,” he said. “But that is for later, much later. Now is for you and Johan.”

  Annyeke turned in the direction of the Lost One’s gaze. Through the faces and minds of the gathered people, focused in the preparatory silence of ritual, she could see her beloved had arrived at last.

  Th
e first thing she noticed about him was what she always did, the utter deep blue glory of his eyes. Not sky blue—they had never been so, but a blue like the depths of the vast seas that surrounded the city. He was dressed in a tunic and cloak of pure gold and he was smiling. Next to him Talus, in his role of groom companion and looking for all the world as if his recent taste of death had been nothing, was walking, his young face solemn and his hair smoothed down. Annyeke wondered how long that had taken Johan to achieve and how long it would last.

  It didn’t matter.

  The crowd parted for him. And, for the first time in her life, she understood that here and now was where she should be, and there was nowhere else better in the whole of Gathandria or even the skies themselves.

  Simon led them both in the few words of commitment customary on such occasions. He had learned them well and quickly and the ancient words flowed from his mouth as if he had always known them. In fact, it was Annyeke who stumbled. From the moment Johan had appeared, everything around her seemed brighter, and the words she knew so well filled her thoughts with colours beyond her understanding. She was glad of the ease of his mind linked to hers, and the way his heart somehow reached into her very centre and made her stronger, or at least that was how it felt.

  After all the words were over and the Lost One had given them the blessing of the Spirit of Gathandria, Johan leaned forward, touching the side of Annyeke’s face so the tips of his fingers brushed against her hair, and kissed her. His lips felt soft and she knew she was smiling.

  Yesterday was behind them. Even in spite of it, today, she knew, had become a good day, but what about tomorrow? For them all?

  Chapter Fourteen: The parting of the ways