The Heretic Land (8 page)

He pulled his cart through the ruined vale and the object rocked on the cart’s bed, its protruding parts tapping like fingertips on a wooden table. Past the vale he entered the narrowing valley, beyond which he passed through the fallen shoulder between mountains. That was the hardest part of the journey, when
much of the time he was lifting and manhandling the cart rather than pulling it. The solid wooden wheels, though braced, bore some considerable damage on the fallen scree of boulders and sharp rocks, and Venden worked all through the day to make his way east.

As darkness fell, he found a relatively flat area in which to camp. In the flickering campfire light he saw pairs of eyes watching him.

He sighed, hand stealing to the knife in his belt. Venden – a genius, a silent boy, a searcher – was a stranger in a strange land, and there was never any telling how these meetings might end.

Some of them crawled, though their limbs looked little different from their brethren’s. Some loped, stooping low. A couple still walked tall. Those who were not naked wore old, torn clothing. They were dirty, scarred, their muscles knotty and worn. The women’s breasts hung empty and sad like drained water sacs, and the men’s genitals were withered and thin. Venden had once encountered a group of these mutant Skythians rutting beside a lake, and aside from the violence of the group act, it was the apparent lack of success that had shocked him most.

In the forbidden books he had viewed before leaving Alderia at the age of thirteen, images of Skythians showed them as tall, proud and cultured. Their clothing had been beautifully woven, their hair worn in long, intricate braids. They’d been a head taller than most Alderians, and their art-and science-based culture was much more advanced, and less troubled.

We did this to them
, Venden thought, though the damage had been done six centuries before his birth. There were others he had encountered who had seemed to haul themselves forward somewhat,
establishing camps and even attempting to farm the land. But they were the minority. Skythians today were a wild breed, and Venden found their fall so depressing.

Resting one hand on his knife handle, he raised the other, palm out. The Skythians paused, one woman scurrying forward to within a few steps. She raised her head and sniffed at the air.

‘I’m Venden Ugane, no threat to you,’ Venden said. ‘You know me. You’ve seen me before.’ He tapped his cart, trying to jog the Skythe woman’s memory.

She sniffed some more, edging a step closer. ‘Venden,’ she rasped. She looked at the thing in the bed of the cart, her eyes going wide. They were bloodshot and weeping. She scampered back and cried something else, her voice a high whistle that seemed to contain little sense, and the few Skythians with her drew back as well, a sigh passing amongst them. It was not quite fear, and Venden had seen it before.

‘It’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he said, still holding out one hand. He watched the way they moved, hunkered down on splayed limbs like dogs waiting to leap. Fear seemed to lower them. Evolution was a debatable theory, and for the most devout of the Ald – Alderia’s ruling sect and unelected government – it was a blasphemy, because it denied the creation of things by the seven Alderian gods of the Fade. But most intelligent people, whatever their depth of belief in the Fade, accepted evolution as part of what made things the way they were. In these Skythians, Venden could see distinct evidence of devolution. And that made him sad, because it was man-made.

He sat down close to the fire to eat. They would not join him, but he knew that they would hang back in the darkness to watch. He would leave them some food when he left in the morning.

* * *

Dawn brought a light
sheen of rain that painted rainbows on the eastern skies. Venden remembered a story the Fade priests told children about Shore, the Fade goddess of the air, who cavorted with the sun and moon and sighed rainbows of delight when Venthia, the god of water, cast his seed through her. It had been an innocent tale of gods and dancing for the children, but its connotations had become more apparent the older Venden became. Rainbows were the ecstatic emissions of the gods. As he stood beside the dying fire, he looked at the colours and smiled. They were beautiful, but they were factors of light and water, little more. Venden did not understand the science of rainbows, but that did not mean he had to ascribe them godliness.

There was no sign of the Skythians, but he knew they were still watching. They watched him on every journey. He broke camp and went to pick up the cart’s reins, and then noticed a strange thing. The light rain did not seem to touch the pale object. It lay upon dampened boards, but its surface seemed dry. He placed his palm on the smooth body, ran a finger along one of the short, thin limbs, and it was untouched.

He frowned. Perhaps the water soaked in so quickly that the thing could not feel wet. But as with the rainbows, his lack of understanding did not drive him to the gods. Its mystery was not divine.

When he moved on, the Skythians emerged from their hiding places and took the food he had left for them. They followed him for a while, as he knew they would. They mumbled and muttered amongst themselves, and in their language he could hear nothing of the wondrous Skythe tongue he had studied in those books and parchments. So much had been lost.

The rain persisted, but the soaking did not dampen his spirits. The Skythians soon disappeared, and he was alone once more, pulling
the cart with the reins over each shoulder. By midday he was close to where he had made his camp, in the fertile land at the junction of two mountain ridges where the river found its source. The flow here was more a series of trickling streams, the land between them boggy, and Venden followed a route he had taken many times before. It involved a steep climb, but then a level, mostly dry path across the mountainside to the sheltered area he called home. Here was the rocky overhang beneath which he lived. Here, too, was the remnant.

He glanced across the clearing to his camp, and for a moment the change did not register. He frowned, trying to perceive the difference, and because it was something taken away instead of added, he had to search further.

It’s dropped
, he thought. He released the reins in reaction to this, leaning back against the cart, because even from here he could see what the remnant had become.

The first time he’d seen it, he’d thought it was a fallen tree. Eight times as long as he was tall, it arced out of the ground from the foot of another dead tree’s stump and pointed north, lifting and dropping again so that he could just pass underneath it without stooping. Graceful and horrible, its surface was speckled and pocked, and close to one end it changed from pale brown to black. He’d shivered and leaned back against a living tree’s trunk, eager to touch something not so dead.

He had decided to stay there for a while, camped beneath the overhang, before even looking at the thing again.
Such a delicate remnant
, he’d thought, naming the object without realising it right then.

Now it had relaxed. The action of the remnant’s highest point lowering towards the ground had pushed out both extremes, tilting the dead tree at one end, and gouging an uneven furrow
at the other. The five objects he had already brought here from across Skythe, and placed close to the remnant in positions that had somehow felt right, remained in place.

‘Someone has been here,’ Venden muttered, but he immediately knew there was more to it than that. Though there were those on Skythe who would think nothing of invading his space and stealing anything of use – the south coast was home to several settlements where those banished here had chosen to make their homes, and they were wild and lawless places – they rarely ventured this far north. Those who travelled usually did so for reasons more complicated than simple theft or vandalism.

There were no footprints in the long grass, no signs that anyone had been here. He had been away for eleven days searching for the latest object, true, and much could have happened which the weather might have covered in the meantime. But the clearing had the sense of having remained uninterrupted. Untouched. There was a wildness here that he had sensed in many places across Skythe, as if the land had shrugged off all memory of human interaction and returned to its primal state. Even though he had lived here for almost three years, the cave and surrounding area managed to retain that feeling.

Venden had often thought it strange. Now it was stranger still.

He stepped from the trees’ shade and crossed the grassy clearing, unafraid, cautious. He listened for any sounds out of place, sniffed the air, remained alert, but he was as alone as ever. When he reached the remnant and held out his hand to touch it, something moved.

Venden fell and struck the ground hard, one hand held out to break his fall, the shadow deep inside him rolling with apparent delight.
The wet grass stroked across his face. Everything had moved but for the remnant. It was as if the land had shrugged, the sky shimmered, and the falling rain wavered at the audacity of Venden’s touch. The only solidity was the remnant and those objects he had brought to it – the objects he had been guided to by the shadow he carried inside – and he was struck with a certainty that if he had been touching it, he would not have fallen.

The trees were still, and there were no sounds of panicked wildlife or falling rocks. The world had moved for him alone.

Water soaked through his clothing. He lay motionless, looking up at the falling raindrops. Those that struck him seemed suddenly warm.

From the cart came the sound of movement, and he rolled onto his side and lifted up on one elbow to look across the clearing. The object lay motionless where he had left it, yet he was certain he’d heard the sound of its many short limbs drumming against the wood. He gained his feet and walked back to the cart, nervous that the same sensation would strike him again, but he was steady and sure.

The object was almost weightless, motionless, in his hands, cool, and nothing like anything alive. It was only as he started across the clearing with the thing in his hands that the remnant began to move.

Days after Milian
Mu’s awakening in the cave, she catches her first food. Tiredness no longer preys upon her. Yet she is still weak and almost withered away, and it will be a while until she can move again.

There is no day and night, only the ebb and flow of the tide to time her slow heartbeats – five beats ebb, five beats flow. She has been sleeping and ageing with the land. The shard of Aeon has been resting with her, and perhaps dreaming as well, because she can feel it still inside like a forgotten memory.

She has been listening to skittering back and forth on the cave floor. Hearing the animal locates it in the dark, and the warmth of its meagre supply of blood has raised the temperature on Milian’s right side. She reaches out slowly and grabs the creature. There are waving, scabrous legs, a spiked carapace. She squeezes, and the sounds of breaking things echo. She puts it to her mouth as it still struggles, keen to feel its life against her lips. The dying animal moves against her mouth. There is no taste, only sensation, and she swallows because she
knows she must to grow strong. Her future awaits. The shard swells within her, a cold thing reminding her of where she came from, in preparation for where she must go.

She chews some more. The memory of hunger is a bloom of heat from a spreading fire, rumbling in her stomach, vibrations spreading along limbs she has not been able to feel since waking. The more she chews and swallows – soft innards, spiky shell and legs – the more awake she feels.

After finishing eating she sits for a while in the complete darkness, listening to the water washing against the shore outside the cave. She can almost feel the sun on her skin, the wind blowing abrading sand against her face, and she can taste much more than the crushed dead thing.

She remembers arriving, and wonders how much things outside have changed.

Another animal oozes between the rocks; she can smell it, and hear its moist skin flexing and releasing secretions that allow it to slip along. It is somewhere to her right, easing closer. She prises the thing from a narrow crack and brings it to her mouth, cool and slick. Her arm scrapes as she moves, heavy and weighed down.

How long have I been here?

The shard does not steer her or coerce, but it is aware. She can feel it watching, and has the idea that perhaps it has
always
watched, and kept her alive, and waited for …

Something.

Because it is merely a shard, not the whole. The remnant of a god.

Bon was exhausted. After seven days at sea with poor food, sickness, dirty water and a constant belief that his next breath might be his last, he’d had to swim half a mile to shore through vicious waves, with sea things doing their best to take bites from him. His arms
and legs no longer wished to function. His stomach was rumbling from the bread and meat, and he wondered whether Juda had succeeded in poisoning him, intentionally or not.

But the memory of the dreadful murder and mutilation he had seen on the beach drove him on. And after so long fearing the light and courting the dark, the realisation that he desperately wanted to live came as something of a revelation.

Juda led them from the small cave and into a narrow crawlspace that seemed to go on for ever. The oil lamp threw vague illumination, but it birthed shifting shadows that deepened crevasses and exposed the sharp ridges of broken rock, and after a few minutes’ crawling Bon had slashed his left thumb and right knee. Behind him Leki seemed to move soundlessly, a counterpoint to his gasps and struggles. She had grace. She enchanted and frightened him.

‘How far?’ he asked, but Juda did not answer, or did not hear.

‘Just crawl,’ Leki said from behind. ‘I think we can trust him.’

‘You think?’ Bon’s voice was muffled in the enclosed space. He wasn’t sure where he was, or why, and this journey had become something he had never expected.