Hallsfoot's Battle Read online

  She felt clarity easing through her thoughts. Nothing more to say. Nothing more she could tell them.

  A silence.

  Then, as if from nowhere, a vast shout, heard in the air and in the mind.

  Yes.

  The word was magnified countless times. The echo of it filled the Square of Meeting. It reached the trees and all but ruined yellow grasses of the park. It sang through the broken glass and broken buildings of the city. Even guessing at everything that might be to come, Annyeke smiled. It was enough—for now.

  The First Gathandrian Legend: Fortitude and Lust

  Simon

  All this was bigger than he’d imagined. The earlier scenes at what Johan had called the Square of Meeting had swept through the scribe and he couldn’t rid himself of the taste. It should have made him more confident. The fact that the people of Gathandria had accepted Annyeke’s leadership and, by default, his own presence here should have helped. He knew that.

  But it didn’t. It made him feel overwhelmed. How could he possibly live up to what they might expect of him? With his history of betrayal, murder and downright cowardice, how could he really help? Still, he mustn’t think like that. He’d changed since leaving the Lammas Lands. He wasn’t the same man, so he must find a new way of meditating about himself. The past remained, but today he could not mend what he had done. Other pressing matters called him.

  On the floor next to him, the mind-cane quivered and began to whine. Simon shook his head to displace his thoughts and tried to imagine nothing. After a moment, the high-pitched noise stopped and he breathed again. Odd how the artefact picked up so strongly on his own emotions; at times he felt as if it was nothing more than an extension of himself. A dangerous thing—he was never sure whether the cane would attack him or defend him. Moreover, it seemed to be too easy to make it angry and so hard to know what it wanted or how he might be supposed to work with it. He still couldn’t believe he’d used it to attack and almost defeat Duncan Gelahn only a few day-cycles ago. That didn’t feel like something he would do.

  He gazed round the room he sat in, glad that Annyeke had brought him here. She called it her work area in the Sub-Council of Meditation. To him, it seemed to be a room of two distinct halves—the calm tidiness of Johan’s area, which made him smile, and the creative muddle of Annyeke’s. The walls were mainly bare stone, apart from three small glass engravings of the park, whose surface was scored with tiny lines, the aftermath of the mind-battles. As a result, their beauty had long since vanished and Annyeke had told him the damage could not be repaired. There was a faint smell of lavender and apples in the air. Being a scribe, Simon’s working area, in those lucky times he’d actually had one, had consisted of wherever he happened to be living. He closed his eyes for a moment or two and imagined how it would be if he had a work area of his very own, somewhere he could go to and escape from his real life, somewhere he could have control of, where he’d be safe. He could sit and think and write, and there’d be no need to take long journeys to strange places, meet members of his family he’d never met before, or fight mysterious battles. Oh yes, by the gods and stars, that would be the nearest to perfection he could envisage. He was a scribe, not a soldier.

  Even as these thoughts flowed through his blood, the scribe became aware of a deep silence around him. When he opened his eyes, the table, the walls, the room and even Annyeke were gone and all he could see was a vast expanse of water shimmering blue and silver, and above only empty sky. He gasped and tried to stand but it was impossible. He was kneeling on what looked to be a beach, similar to the one he’d seen with Johan before travelling through the Kingdom of the Water. His limbs wouldn’t obey the commands of his thought. The air smelt of winter lilac, a memory he’d not had since youth.

  Glancing from side to side, heart beating fast, he could see a line of trees to the right. He fell to his hands and tried to crawl towards them. A sound like rushing waters filled his ears.

  The trees were moving, swaying in his direction. Elms, he thought. Despite the fact they were a field’s length away he recoiled, this time scrabbling backwards, away from them. The sound became a roar. It was coming from the trees. A cloud passed over them, shot through with streaks of pink as if it were evening, but the rest of the sky remained a vibrant blue. It obscured the trees, diving down towards the scribe where he cowered transfixed on sand as if it were a wolf seeking his prey. The wild howling pierced his mind. Unable to think, unable even to breathe, Simon buried his head in his hands, his whole body shaking.

  As the howling swept over him, two words crystallised into something he could understand. Learn well.

  Crying out, he fell sideways and found his hands clasping something solid, grainy, that dug into his skin.

  “Simon? Simon? Are you all right?”

  Blinking, he looked up at Annyeke. She was shaking his shoulder from across the desk. The desk that he was gripping as if he feared he was about to drown. He gazed round for reassurance. Yes, this was Annyeke’s work area, where he’d been before…before whatever had just happened. He could see the piled up papers on her table, the gleaming array of four quills angled in a writing-pot, those nearly bare walls, and the broken window overlooking the park.

  He could also hear the hum of the mind-cane, not only outwardly but also in his thoughts. With a groan, he glanced beyond Annyeke, at the snow-raven perched on a stool at the corner of the room. The great bird spread his wings, gave one brief and raucous cry and the cane fell silent.

  Annyeke frowned.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Simon shook his head. “I was here and then I was…somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  He tried to think how to explain, glad she was using speech and not contacting him directly. His mind felt too shaky for that. “Near water. On sand. The water stretched beyond what the eye could see and there were trees to my left. For a moment, everything was peaceful, and I…I wanted to be there even though I couldn’t get up. I was kneeling on the sand. Then, a cloud appeared above the trees and began to race towards me. I knew it would overpower me, swallow me up, but I couldn’t run. I screamed but it was too late. The cloud was upon me and then…”

  “Then…?”

  “I heard a voice saying, Learn well. And then I was here once more. Annyeke, what does it mean?”

  She sighed, turned and made her way back behind the table. “I don’t know. What we’re doing here isn’t anything we’ve done before, Simon. I have nothing to compare it with, no wise advice to give. All I would say is this—hold onto any visions you have as we prepare for Gelahn’s second attack on us. Ponder them in your heart. They may mean something, but this is too new for me to know what that might be.”

  “What about the voice?”

  Annyeke gestured, as if plucking words out of air. At the same time, the raven flapped his way towards the window and perched precariously on a stool next to it. As he spread his wings, the fate of further papers piled up on a shelf hung in the balance. Annyeke glanced at the bird and flinched, but obviously chose to ignore the situation.

  “Well then,” she said. “Could the voice have been your own?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  His companion cleared her throat. It looked as if his training was about to begin, but there was more he needed to know. A question plucking at his mind, creating an itch he had no choice but to satisfy. He didn’t know where it came from.

  “What is the Spirit of Gathandria?” he said.

  Annyeke

  The red-haired woman settled herself on her familiar work area chair and gazed at the scribe opposite her. She hadn’t expected him to ask that, but he was a man and half Gathandrian so she should have realised the impossibility of predicting what he might do or say next. She wished now that she’d connected to his full thoughts anyway, without permission, although that would be the height of rudeness. Even so, it might have prepared her for such a question
. Not only that, there were actions she needed to take, and soon, but she had sensed it was more important to give Simon a purpose before his unsteady resolve was shaken further.

  This wasn’t made any easier by the presence of the mind-cane, nor by the bright shape of the snow-raven near the window. All of which meant, of course, that in the room with them were the scribe’s most feared object and her own. The snow-raven currently perched on a small stool, the bulk of his wings threatening to topple her fragile pile of meditation records. The bird gazed outside and even Annyeke, in the muddle of impressions she gained from the raven, was overwhelmed by his sense of longing. She, too, wished he would fly back to the Kingdom of the Air, but for very different reasons.

  “The Gathandrian Spirit?” she ventured. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m not sure. You spoke of it to the people, and the phrase was suddenly there, in my head. I couldn’t deny it.”

  “I see.”

  But she didn’t. Not really. The Spirit of Gathandria wasn’t understood, or even known about, by those outside the City. From the day-cycles before written records began, the elders had guarded that secret first, above all others. And here was the Lost One gazing at her, with the words he’d spoken hovering between them.

  What in the gods’ and stars’ names should she do now? Well, perhaps this, too, would turn out to be part of Simon’s essential mind-practice.

  “It’s hard to explain,” she said at last. “The Spirit is part of who we are. It’s something we’re born with and we come to know more fully as we mature. Amongst those who aren’t Gathandrian, it’s not really spoken of.”

  “Why not?”

  Good question. And not one she’d had to consider before. The scribe might be, in some manner she couldn’t fully comprehend, the answer to all their problems and pain, but it was obvious that didn’t mean the journey would be a smooth one.

  She struggled to answer him. “Tradition, I suppose, and the assumption that people who don’t live here wouldn’t understand, and so there’s little point in talking about it.”

  “That sounds…”

  “…patronising. Yes, I could see it even as I was saying it,” she laughed. “I’m sorry. The truth is I’m not sure how to explain.”

  Simon smiled back before coughing, throwing a swift glance at the cane and speaking again. “I can understand that. I’m never sure how to explain things either. So, then, what do we need to do about it?”

  Still puzzling over how to broach the power of her country’s myth, Annyeke imagined that allowing her companion to sense the words bond with the mind-cane, open yourself to the raven and then we’re ready weren’t likely to be welcome. She wished it was that simple. But her years in Gathandria, and certainly her years as a Gathandrian woman, had taught her that simplicity was always desired but rarely achieved. Instead, she cast about her mind for some of the answers. No, if she were honest, even the questions would be good.

  As she opened her mouth, the snow-raven turned his head and looked at her. She couldn’t remember the bird gazing at her in that way before. An impression of flight, a blur of cloud and a series of ascending notes filled her head. She heard herself gasp out loud. Simon leaned forward frowning, and her fingers grasped the solid wood of her chair. A moment later, her mind was her own again. A trickle of sweat rolled down her face and she wiped it away, trembling.

  “Wh-What’s wrong?” Simon stuttered. “What’s happened?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. But…”

  She remembered the land, its harmony, the way she and all Gathandrian children learned their legends, how they learned to be themselves. And then she understood the way to communicate their truths to this man.

  “That’s it.”

  “What? What is it, Annyeke?”

  “The song of the land,” she sprang to her feet and hurried round the table to grasp his arm. He stared up at her, the frown easing away. “That’s how your training will commence, and how you will learn about the Spirit. It’s how we all learn when we’re young. There’s no reason not to use those same methods with you now. Gathandria has a harmony of its own, something ancient born before any of the land itself. It’s what was lost during the wars with Gelahn, but when you and…and Johan started your journey here, the harmony began to return, our plants and flowers, too. But very, very slowly. Even now there is another leaf on the lemon tree in my garden, and small signs of others, but no more. So there is hope. Perhaps that’s where we have to start.”

  However, as she spoke the words, Annyeke felt the impossibility of what she was trying to convey. Was she right? Or was it simply desperate optimism overcoming practicality? It might well be beyond the scribe to learn something which took the whole of a Gathandrian childhood to learn. How could she…?

  The snow-raven stretched its wings and flew towards them. A heartbeat’s panic before he landed on the table, his right wing brushing against Annyeke’s face. She shivered. The bird gazed at her, opened its beak and spoke forth a single crisp note that somehow brightened the day.

  She squared her shoulders. Yes, she thought, I’m right. This is how it must be.

  Taking her chair, she drew it up to sit next to Simon. He blinked at her and she saw his lips tighten. She reached out towards his forehead and he flinched.

  “You’re going to join your thoughts with my mind, aren’t you?” he said.

  Her turn to blink now. “It’ll be easier that way, Simon. You’ll see more clearly what I’m trying to tell you.”

  He sighed. “Yes, I know. It’s what Johan says, and I suppose it’s what I know, too, in my heart. Believe me, it’s not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t know you as well as I came to know Johan before our minds touched. I understand I’ve heard a story in your way before—told one, too—but sometimes I wonder if things would be simpler if I could just hear the words out loud. I’m a scribe by trade, not just a mind-dweller. When you speak, I can hear the words in my blood, too, almost as if I’d written them myself.”

  She brought her hand back to her side and watched the tension fade from the scribe’s face. She thought about what he had said for a few moments. No more time than it took for two strangers to establish a viable mind-link together. Joining one Gathandrian’s thoughts to another’s was a simple act here, one nobody questioned. It was part of their heritage—as easy as eating or drinking, and as enjoyable, too. It was a way of explaining things at a deeper level. But perhaps other people, other lands did not think like that? She herself had never travelled beyond the city. Perhaps, then, her understanding, like Simon’s, was limited, but in another way.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll only use words. I’ll tell you the first Gathandrian legend out loud, although the song cannot be replicated outside the mind. It is beyond the voice, certainly beyond my voice. If you agree to that, of course, and if you’re ready for it by then?”

  Unexpectedly, he smiled. “You’re very different from Johan.”

  “Oh?” Annyeke shook her head, trying to keep up with this sudden change of direction. “In what way?”

  “He would have persuaded me to do it, in the most courteous manner, of course. Convinced me his way was the only way. It’s nice to see another side to Gathandrians. Perhaps my White Lands blood isn’t entirely bad, after all.”

  Trying not to smile at her companion’s astute assessment of the man she loved, Annyeke only dared a brief response.

  “Perhaps it is not,” she said. Then, “the first Gathandrian legend and song is a tale of fortitude and lust. It is this:

  *****

  “Many generational cycles ago,” Annyeke said, “all the lands were dark. There was no Gathandria, no Lammas Lands, nor any of their neighbours. Neither was there any of the Kingdoms of the Mountains, the Air, the Desert or the Sea, none of which I, Annyeke Hallsfoot, have experienced. But I know and understand they are there for I have seen them in the minds of my people. Our legends also tell us our history. I have no reason to disbelie
ve what has gone before.

  “The darkness lasted for a time that cannot be counted, as time did not exist then. From eternity we come and to eternity we go. Our small life exists only in those boundaries. Once, however, and at the beginning of it all, the Spirit of Gathandria, which flows through all things and all people, visited us and saw our eternal night. The Spirit comes only in the daylight, and the night was an enemy to its purpose.

  “The Spirit needn’t have stayed; there are vast worlds of light elsewhere. But for whatever reason, it needed us. Perhaps something of what we could become captured it, but it is impossible to say. That part of the mystery will always be unknowable.

  “Still, wishing to live in the light, the Spirit created that which it so desired. It stretched out its arms, and the tips of its fingers began to glow. Slowly, so slowly that it would be impossible to tell when the movement commenced and when it ceased, that glow slipped the moorings of mythical skin and flesh and floated out into the darkness. With each departure, something of the Gathandrian Spirit also went with it. In the long pauses of time as the glowings of light navigated their way through nothingness, the Spirit also opened its mouth and began to sing.