Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (11 page)

The
hisaf
bound the woman’s hands behind her and carried her to the closest hut. The other men did the same, catching and carrying women and children into the same hut. I heard one woman shout ‘Run!’ and two older children vanished into the woods. The men did not chase them. Screaming continued to come from the hut, so at least the men were not slaughtering their captives. Instead they methodically carried something from that hut, from all the huts. At first I thought they were stealing more supplies, but the bundles were not food.

They were infants.

‘What are they doing?’ Rawnie cried. ‘Let me up!’

‘If you move,’ Leo said, ‘I will hit you.’

‘I don’t care!’ Rawnie said.

Scuffling behind me, but then Charlotte’s voice shrilled high-pitched with fear. ‘If you don’t stay still, you know what I shall do!’

No more scuffling. The men below had imprisoned everyone in the hut. In the area between huts, worn to bare earth by many feet over much time, they carried six infants. The babes’ wails sounded thin and high on the errant breeze. Straik and two others vanished.

I knew where they had gone. No matter the punishment from Kelif, I bit my tongue and crossed over.

Darkness—

Cold—

Dirt choking my mouth—

Worms in my eyes—

Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—

Kelif and I stood in the Country of the Dead. Huts, goat shed, screaming women had all been left behind. In the dell, under the unvarying dim light of this side, sat a circle of the Dead. Beyond them the fog was thick as soup, although the air surrounding the circle was clear. Each of the unliving heads was obscured by more thick, vibrating grey fog, and in the centre of the circle spun a humming vortex. Faster, faster …

Three
hisafs
appeared, each with an infant on either arm. I could barely glimpse them through the fog. Then a clap of noise like thunder, light brighter than the sun, and the Dead vanished, sucked into the vortex.

That was all I had time to see. Kelif gave a great bellow, seized me, and we were again back in that terrible place between countries, that eternal grave. This time it seemed to go on for ever, although probably that was only my own horror. Then we were back in the wagon, peering
over the side. A moment later the
hisafs
reappeared, infants still in their arms. The babes’ cries had ceased. The
hisafs
laid them, inert and tranquil, in a circle on the ground.

Kelif cuffed me on the side of the head and I staggered against the side of the wagon, unable to fall because of the chain between us. The blow hurt, but not as much as what I had just seen.

So it was true, what Mother Chilton had told me so long ago. ‘
Don’t you understand? Life and death are both part of the web of being, and both have power. When power is made to flow unnaturally from death back to life, as Soulvine Moor is doing, there must also be a flow in the opposite direction. Or else the whole web will become more and more disturbed, until it is destroyed. There are terrible times coming, more terrible than you can imagine
.’

That time was here. I had just seen it. Soulvine Moor had sucked the power of the eternal Dead into themselves, to use in their quest to live for ever. They had thereby robbed eternity from the Dead in that circle. To balance their theft, they had taken life from the infants, putting the babes into the unchanging, quiescent trance of the Dead. That was why the Country of the Dead had not been disturbed into storms and quakes, as it had when I had brought back the Blue army. Soulvine was preserving the balance in the web of being, so they could go on plundering it for their own gain. ‘
Everything has a cost
,’ Mother Chilton had said, but she had not said the most monstrous part. Sometimes the cost is paid by the innocent.

Which did not include me. If I had not meddled with death, if I had not brought back Bat and Cecilia and the Blue army, if I had not carried Tom and Jee and the princess across the grave – then would any of this even be possible? Mother Chilton had told me that the war
with Soulvine Moor began even before I was born – but how much had I advanced it?

All those infants, neither dead nor alive … all those grieving parents …

Behind me Charlotte said tremulously, ‘Roger?’

Kelif growled, ‘Get back down, ye.’

Leo said anxiously, as well as with rage that she was a cause for anxiety, ‘Rawnie, I would not really hit you.’ Which meant,
Don’t tell Straik I threatened to do so!

Rawnie said in her new, warm, lying tone towards Leo, ‘That’s all right. I’m sorry.’

I was back in the world of captives, of complicated politics, of solid wagon and hard-edged trees, of clear unfogged summer air. But I had seen what Soulvine Moor was doing. My father’s
hisafs
and the web women – whatever they were doing to stop Soulvine Moor was not, apparently, succeeding. I did not see how it could. Life and death, both, were under siege.

I sank down against the side of the wagon, turned my face to the rough wood, and spoke to no one for the rest of the day.

9

It was twilight before we halted for the night. Probably Straik wanted to put as much distance as possible between the Brotherhood and the farm plundered of its babies’ life force. The first stars had already appeared. A half moon rose, buttery yellow. The horses had been labouring all day as they climbed uphill and now they stood, panting and covered with foam, as men rubbed them down and watered them. Leafy trees had given way almost entirely to tall pines and then to more scrubby ones, and I knew we were nearing the end of the Unclaimed Lands and the beginning of Soulvine Moor.

Straik and his men, including Leo, were in a jubilant mood. They built cooking fires. They bathed naked in a frigid mountain stream, shouting and laughing, men who acted as if victory were close at hand. In contrast, Charlotte and I barely spoke nor moved, avoiding each other’s eyes. Charlotte sat by the fire with her head down and her hands clasped tightly together. She seemed frozen with fear.

Not so Rawnie. She concentrated on Leo, watching him so intently that my gaze, too, was drawn to him, and I saw things I had not noticed before. His swagger and self-importance I had set down to an actor’s confidence, but now I saw that some of the other men – not all, but some – deferred to him as well. They listened as he talked and laughed. The talk was light: of women, of inns in The Queendom, of ale and wine. But Leo was listened to, and when he interrupted
another’s speech, the other man instantly fell quiet.

I remembered what Leo had said to Straik: ‘
I would be in command here but for your–
’ Your what?

Straik said, ‘Leo, give us a song.’

‘Perhaps later.’

‘Now,’ Straik said, and it was an unmistakable order.

The two men locked gazes, and it was Leo who looked away first. Sulkily, all laughter gone, he unwrapped his instrument. His head bent over it as he sang, so that I could not see his face.

Although you to the hills do flee,

My love you can’t escape.

Your heart, my sweet, belongs to me

Though you may change its shape.

Never, never will I cease

To follow where you go,

And ever, ever will I be

The hound upon your doe.

Do what you will and what you can,

Employ the arts you know—

Ever, ever will I be

The hound upon your doe.

His voice was as clear and strong as when he’d sung the song to me, and the words as chilling. But when Leo raised his head, it was not me he stared at but Straik, and the look was a challenge.

Straik laughed. ‘A pleasant enough tune. If we fail in this war, you can always earn your living singing for pennies in alehouses.’

Leo flushed. ‘I’m no alehouse singer. I was an actor.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you were very fine,’ Straik said jeeringly.
‘For now, you’d best escort Mistress Rawnie to the woods again. She is squirming.’

Anger blazed in Leo’s eyes. One of the older men frowned, clearly uneasy with Straik’s bullying, although he said nothing. I had the sense that the Brotherhood had a rigid order of succession of leadership but that not everyone was happy about it. Could I somehow use that to my advantage? I did not see how.

Rawnie looked uncharacteristically frightened, although only for a moment. She had indeed been squirming in her place around the fire, but not for the reason Straik suggested. Rawnie had been trying to get something out of the pack on the ground beside her, or possibly put something back in, without being noticed. Now all eyes turned to her.

Charlotte put out her hand, as if to give her daughter a gentle shove, and let it fall atop whatever the thing was. ‘Go with Leo, dearest. You will be more comfortable.’

They left, Leo flushed with anger, Rawnie unembarrassed but looking thoughtful. No one watched Charlotte, except me. A pink twitching tail suddenly poked from between her fingers. I glimpsed the mouse as she swept it back into Rawnie’s pack and drew the drawstring tight.

Charlotte had seen my gaze. She sat cross-legged on the ground, and now she bent her head forward as if to tighten the laces on her boot. With her face thus hidden she said so softly that Kelif could not hear, ‘Don’t tell. Her pet of two months now. The only way I can compel her obedience.’

So that was what Charlotte had meant when she’d told Rawnie to obey ‘or you know what I will do!’ And Rawnie believed that her mother would deprive her of her pet. That suggested a steeliness in Charlotte that I had not yet seen, as well as a certain desperation about controlling her daughter. Two months – how
long did mice live? If the rodent died, how would Charlotte discipline Rawnie?

Rawnie and Leo returned to the fire. Straik was holding forth with some tale of casting dice at a country inn. Rawnie stepped in front of him and said loudly, ‘Leo is going to act for us!’

‘I think not,’ Straik said, his feigned amusement not quite masking his real annoyance.

‘Oh, yes, he is!’ Rawnie cried, all childish excitement. ‘And he’s going to give “The Hero of Carday” because both John and Tarf love it so! Don’t you?’

Two men looked up. I hadn’t even known their names, although I had noticed their open-mouthed pleasure in Leo’s lute song. Both faces now brightened into uncertain eagerness. They glanced at Straik, at Leo, at Rawnie. I guessed that they harboured a hunger for stories, that polished entertainment had rarely come their way, and that were they not born
hisafs
, they would still be doing simple work somewhere, ill used by the sharper wits around them.

‘Don’t you love that tale?’ Rawnie insisted to the two men. ‘Isn’t it wonderful to hear about heroes?’

‘Heroes,’ John said, with a pleading look at Straik. ‘You said
we
be heroes.’

Tarf begged, ‘Leo be an actor. He played at court!’

Straik chose lordly indulgence. He waved his hand negligently. ‘If you must. Begin then, Leo.’

So his hold upon his men was not as firm as he wished. If it had been, he would not have given way. This bit of information, too, I turned over and over in my mind like a bright stone.

Leo strode into the firelight. The others shifted to face him, taking places on the ground behind Rawnie, Charlotte, Kelif and me, so that we all became an audience. Only Straik stayed on the other side of the fire, so that
Leo’s back was to him and Straik would see nothing of the performance.

I had seen Leo change from a timid and scarred waif to a confident swaggerer. That should have prepared me for how thoroughly he could transform himself. It did not. As he stood beside the fire, one side of his face illuminated by its flames and one side in shadow, he seemed to grow taller and broader. His stance took on gravity. Nothing moved but his eyes, and they burned with the fire of idealism and sacrifice.

‘The Hero of Carday’ is one of The Queendom’s most beloved epics. The poorest band of troubadours knows the play, and they give it often. But this was no alehouse recitation, chosen so that the richness of the words might disguise the poverty of the performance. Leo
became
Prince Channing, Lord of Fire. He stood not in a wooded mountain clearing but on the ramparts of a castle, as he prepared to trade his life for that of his people. Leo’s voice quivered with feeling, the controlled emotion of a man choosing death for a greater good.

But let me be remembered.

This is all I ask – to be remembered

As I was. Remembered in the morning

At the rising of another day,

Remembered in the evening

In the ache of weary bones

Glad of weary duty. Remembered—

The faces around the fire were rapt. Even I was swept up in the speech – I, who faced death soon, and not with Prince Channing’s noble courage. Even though I knew full well that there was nothing noble about sitting for centuries, mindless, in the Country of the Dead. The play was a lie, but in Leo’s rendition it was a lie of
overwhelming power and beauty. Such words could never—

Aaaiiieeee
—

A scream, deep and agonized, abruptly cut off. And a snarling and tearing of flesh such as I had heard too often before. Men leapt to their feet, shouting. A moment later the crack of a
gun
, and the terrible sounds ceased.

‘Jol got him!’

‘Who—’

‘How—’

A string of curses. Confusion, shouting, men thrashing off into the dark woods. Kelif leaped to his feet and ran around the fire, dragging me with him.

Straik lay in the firelight, his throat torn out, blood everywhere. Atop him lay a grey dog, shot through the head. Both were dead.

John dropped to his knees and began to cry.

This seemed to turn the rest of the Brotherhood either stony or angry. Tarf tried to pull John to his feet. ‘Stop that!’ John, his simple face contorted by grief, shoved Tarf away. Everyone began to talk.

‘They know where we are!’

‘Find the
hisaf
!’

‘You know we’ll never find him.’

‘Double our speed to—’

‘Safe in Galtryf—’

‘I said we needed dogs! I told Straik from the beginning!’