Vansha caught her again, by the shoulders this time. ‘What’s this?’
‘It was Alya I heard first!’ put in one of the women who had worked with him.
‘Only after I’d called!’ insisted Vansha. ‘I, I was first! You, girl, would you make me lose face before the whole village?’
He shook Savi in his anger. Alya sprang forward, but she raked her nails into Vansha’s arms, hard, and he let her go, cursing. ‘What does your fool’s face matter?’ she shouted. ‘People have died! And you, you did not see it! Alya did and you didn’t! Alya, tell them!’
‘I wish I’d seen more, or more clearly!’ said Alya grimly. ‘Last night, in – in a dream. Nothing clear – just a confusion, a turmoil in a narrow place. Bodies. I saw no when, no where for it. Would that I had!’
‘But I saw it clearly!’ snapped Vansha, in desperate triumph. ‘A great sudden flood, racing down the stream’s cut!’
‘So clearly?’ demanded Alya, furious. ‘Then by heaven and earth, Vansha, why did you say nothing sooner?’
Vansha stood very still, his eyes flickering from side to side, as the watchers gathered around them and murmured. Alya looked at him suddenly, more keenly. With Seer’s eyes, perhaps; or simply the eyes of a rival.
‘Unless … Vansha, you never did see it, did you? Not by yourself; nothing clear, anyhow. It was your father who saw; and he told you of it secretly, to warn us! To make you look like a good Seer, worthy to succeed him!’
Then sudden horrified understanding came upon Alya, and he blurted out, ‘But you – you wanted to make a show of it! So you delayed to the last moment. Then you came upon Savi and me. And you forgot …’
Vansha’s face went suddenly dark with fury. ‘You! You little bastard brat! Who are you, to say what I did and didn’t do? Come crawling up out of your wilderness ditch, sneaking among us, stirring things up, sniffing after the women’s backsides!’
He rounded upon the villagers with fists clenched, knuckles white. ‘All of you! Do you believe this little pissing puppy, any of you? Him, rather than me? Me, you’ve known all your lives, me – me?’ He was almost screaming in his rage, as if he could blast the doubts out of their minds, and perhaps his own. ‘Any of you?’
Savi drew herself up. ‘I heard and I saw. I believe him.’
Vansha’s voice was a wild dog’s snarl. ‘So. It’s like that. Steal a man’s girl, poison her mind against him! Well played, puppy! But I’ll send your skinny scut back where you came from—’
He rushed on Alya, arms flailing, as if to sweep him out of sight by sheer speed. Alya had barely a moment to brace himself, to fling up his own arms against a rain of blows. He staggered under the impact; but not as far back as he might have, or as badly. It was Vansha who reeled back, only momentarily. Then he flung himself forward again, to bear Alya down. Alya met him, grappling with him as his father had taught him, and they stumbled and rocked back and forth across the stony platform.
Saviyal was screaming at them to stop, but neither listened. Vansha was screaming and spitting, his face contorted and suffused with blood. But though Alya’s arms and shoulders filled with pain, he found himself hanging on, clutching tighter with wiry strength. Vansha yelled and threshed, in pain rather than anger now, and slammed up a knee. Alya’s father had taught him the counter to that; he twisted, took the blow on his taut thigh, and while Vansha was still off balance, threw his weight against him. The taller boy’s leg twisted in its socket, and he screamed aloud. In pain and panic then it came to Alya that he might even be the stronger man, as he was the Seer. Alya tore free an arm, and punched his enemy twice in the face.
Vansha howled, and threw his arms around him again, in a grip that was truly crushing. Alya grappled with him, and Vansha gave way; they whirled back across the open shelf. Suddenly Vansha’s face sagged and he reeled back. Alya was dizzy with burgeoning strength. Vansha was afraid of him! He had won—
Saviyal cried out again, other voices with her. The chieftain, shouting. A foot skidding, a stone rolling beneath him, another. He was on a scree slide, he had been manoeuvred there; and Vansha’s streaming face hard against his, Vansha heaving at his arms, hissing words in his ear, straining violently to break their bond. He could not. Alya was the stronger!
But his feet scrabbled beneath him, and there was a sudden, sickening falling away, a rustle and rattle of stone. Vansha’s words – ‘I’ll break you before her, you bitch’s whelp—’
A thunderclap slashed the sky from end to end. The breath blasted from his breast in a great snapping spike of pain. A crack, like dry wood. Lightning lanced through his body, keener even than the pain, in every part of him wildly beyond bearing.
Then the pain was different, duller, and he was still alive, awake even, staring up at the sky. Faces over him – the chieftain’s, bloodless and grim; women, pressing round. Vansha, blood-smeared and blustering, as if he was about to weep. Saviyal, weeping incoherently; that old swine’s snout Ushaya, greyer-faced than ever, asking if he could feel anything.
Old goat! Of course he couldn’t; it was too painful. Everything hurt, his head, his arms, his back; at least his legs didn’t. It hurt as they swayed him back to his hut on a hide; he wanted to ask if it was the same hide, but he couldn’t speak properly somehow. Ushaya was fussing over him; but he was the healer, of course. Serve him right if it had been his own son. Why was he looking so sick, like that? Why was the air so hot, the sky singing?
When he woke next, it was days later, and he was feeble and thirsty. He had drifted off into something deeper than sleep. Ushaya, squatting by his mat, told him frankly enough that he had not expected him to live. And when Alya, startled, struggled to sit up, he felt first that branching lightning stab, then, save its tingling echo, nothing. He could not stir his legs; he could not even feel them, not properly. He knew they were there, but they were dead weight.
He had fallen on a rocky outcrop, said Ushaya, looking away. He had broken his back. He might live many years, and there was much to hope for; men with such injuries had often walked again, often. Eventually.
So Ushaya said, not without some compassion in his withered heart, made keener by the burden of his son’s deep guilt. But he remembered then that he was speaking to a fellow Seer; and under Alya’s gaze he knew better than to lie.
CHAPTER 3
The Strength of the Earth
SO began the long night of Alya’s life, in which every minute seemed a weary age, leading to only one hopeless end. Yet its dawn was to come, but in no way that even he could foresee, fearful and terrible; and destined to leave him in a predicament almost as great, and incomparably more strange.
From that first terrible moment, as he lay helpless on his mat, he wished often that Ushaya had been less skilful in his care, and simply let him die. But the old man did not, if only to ease his son’s ill deed. He tended Alya with uncommon skill, even bracing the single cracked bone in his back with fine gold wire and rigid splints to help it heal firmly once again. But as Ushaya had admitted, even when the bruising faded, leaving only a slight scar, it was too late. That small wound had somehow frayed the delicate cord linking body and mind.
Once or twice Alya’s arrows had done that to the rabbits and other beasts he hunted. He remembered them dragging their legs helplessly, screaming. Sickened, he had ended their misery swiftly. And now he saw himself the same – severed from himself, no more than half a man, a living ruin.
His legs recovered a little feeling, a faint perpetual tickle or tingle that often grew to stabbing pain. They might twitch when he sought to move them, or kick in meaningless spasm like a baby’s. Then all too often bladder or bowels would fail him, though those at least he could normally control. So he no longer even tried. When he had to move, he crawled on his hands, just like the rabbits; and like them, though silently, he screamed.
But most of the time he simply sat. He could labour in the fields a little, for his arms grew much stronger than before; but he had to be carrie
d there, hard work for the scant help he could give. The villagers soon ceased to bother, leaving him increasingly to himself, to do nothing much; and in that life, to do nothing was to be nothing.
In fine weather he sat on the doorstone of his hut, in worse weather on a wooden seat within, a smooth-barked section of log. He sat always bolt upright, head erect, though not without pain and effort, for the shred of dignity it gave him. Sometimes he might whittle and carve spoons and pegs and the like, when they brought him wood; but he had no great gift for it. More often he simply watched the flow of life go by; and it went, increasingly, without heeding him. For he grew bitter and hard to speak with, so that fewer and fewer of the villagers sought him out. At best they would wave a greeting they did not expect him to return.
Even the chieftain no longer came near. He was not an unkind man, his sorrow for Alya was real. He had taken the boy in, for better or for worse; and it was another of his village who had done this. The village would see him fed and cared for, as best it could afford. But Alya was no longer any use to him. His hopes were disappointed, his worries renewed. He could spare no time for failure, but must look to his folk and their future.
It might well include Vansha. For many months, as Alya, pale and grim, sat like a living reproof, the young man laboured under the heavy wrath of the village, and of his father. There was even talk among some, remembering the matter of the flood, of exiling him, to find another home or grapple with the unseen enemy in the wilderness. But the truth was lost in the confusion of the fight, and there were many to find excuses for him – that Alya had provoked him over Saviyal, that the fight had been fair between rivals, that Vansha had never intended what came to pass. Ushaya, furious as he was with his son, could hardly be blamed for clinging to these.
Alya knew better. He might have accepted it, if he had not felt himself manoeuvred to the slope, if he had not felt the older boy cunningly seek to tear free as he slipped. And if he had not heard that taut whisper. Vansha, looking over Alya’s shoulder, must have been able to see the rock sticking out of the scree-fall, and schemed to hurl him down upon it. To kill, without appearing to.
But that had been in the heat of the fight. Afterwards, the Seer’s son was deeply shocked and chastened by what befell – more so, maybe, than if he had managed to kill. Vansha summoned the courage to face Alya in his first painful days, to beat his forehead on the earth and swear his sorrow and regret, and that he would be a better man henceforth. And Alya did not wholly disbelieve; but forgiveness was far from him.
‘The hurt I might forgive one day, perhaps!’ he answered, though the words came hard. ‘But I am the last of my line, the survivor of my murdered kin. Their spirits will walk unavenged now. Of them I cannot quit you! Nor of my own unrest, if I die thus. Unless – yes. You are strong and brave, in your fashion. Unless you will take my burden of vengeance upon yourself.’
‘Your revenge?’ Vansha sat up and stared, startled out of his self-abasement. ‘Upon whom? Upon the Servants of the Ice? Upon the Eaters of Men? Man, what could you ever have done to them? What could I? I would only end my line along with yours, and in madness!’
Alya looked back at him, calm as the cold black lake about his heart. ‘Then you have no more to say to me. Go.’
Vansha went; but more than once he seemed to look back, to be bursting to speak more. But he stayed silent, and bowed his head.
Gradually, though, it began to lift, and his features lost their troubled furrows. Vansha busied himself hard in the village, forever making himself useful in ways large and small. His vigour and dash could not long be suppressed, and his skill in the hunt seemed redoubled, now he no longer had a rival. And although he acknowledged his fault readily enough, the old smile reappeared and was not quenched, and with it his belief in himself, though he was quieter about it. The village said he was a changed man, and came to rely upon him. And so, increasingly, did Saquavan.
Savi did not. That same night Alya fell, while Ushaya laboured to save his life, before all the village she bitterly rejected Vansha, utterly and forever. Saquavan thought that well enough, then; but now he was not so sure. For she showed no interest in any other, save the shell that had been Alya. While he lay abed she tended his every need. When he recovered, as far as he might, it was she who came most often to bring him his bowl of food and talk with him, to wash his few clothes, to trim and braid his long hair. It was she who struggled to help him to better places to sit, or even, with great effort, to join the villagers at their evening talk before the Great House. But he soon gave that up, and sought no other company; and before long he scarcely seemed even to welcome her. She would have curled up beside him, through the nights; but he would not let her.
‘Why?’ she demanded, both tearful and indignant, of the boy who sat rocklike before her. ‘In what am I to blame? Did I do this terrible thing? Do I not also suffer from it?’
Alya sighed, and looked down. His legs already seemed thinner, compared to the heavy arms that leaned upon them. ‘I am like a withering stalk … Yes, you too have suffered. Can’t you see that’s just what I don’t want? Bad enough I sit broken in body and spirit – but to see your life ruined …’
‘Fool!’ she breathed. ‘Say the word, and I’m your wife tomorrow! Just let my father try to gainsay it, and I’ll warm his ears for him!’
She startled even herself with the force of her words; and Alya almost laughed. ‘You’re no longer a child, sure enough,’ he said. ‘Ripe to lead some good man a hard time! But what can I do for you? I cannot put food in your bowl, nor children in your belly.’
‘Are you so sure?’ she demanded, archly.
‘Yes,’ said Alya flatly. ‘Not wholly dead, perhaps, but too lifeless to give life. And what I might father, I cannot feed. Shall our children beg of some other man? You are as young as the spring sun, and as warm; you should not have a cold bed. I can think of two or three good lads—’
‘Then do you marry them yourself, and leave me to choose my own covering!’ It was sharply spoken, but it ended in tears.
He cradled her beside him. She smelt like a summer harvest, but even her small breasts against his side did no more than feed his inner fires. And before long holding her thus awoke the pain in his back once more, sending spasms coursing up and down his limbs as though firebrands played across them. So painful were they that his eyes blurred, and, though he fought not to wince, Savi realised what was wrong, and pulled free. She would have had him lie down and be massaged, but he refused. ‘Pain is better than nothing!’ he said savagely. ‘Pain is feeling, feeling is freedom. Maybe along that road some healing lies.’
‘Maybe. But don’t forget I also feel the pain.’
‘I will not. Nor shall I be stupid enough to chase you from my side again. But we should not marry. If in time it became a burden, or your choice fell elsewhere—’
‘It will not! I would face the Ice for you!’
‘As I for you – if I could. Let us wait, Savi, and see what time brings.’
‘Should I be content with that? It’s not you who have rivals, it’s I! Every day you hug them to yourself more dearly than me – suffering, and pain!’
‘Perhaps!’ Alya said, and his voice was not that of a half-grown boy. ‘Perhaps I must embrace them, to stand them at all. Perhaps they give me strength. But without you they would overwhelm me, be sure of that! Savi, I beg you, come to me again, as long as it pleases you!’
Nonetheless he was uneasy, almost glad when she left him. His head still spun with the pain, but when he sought to move his legs in the slightest they failed him as before, and his innards also. He barely crawled to the door in time, and into the trees, to avoid humiliation. As he crawled back on knees bloodied yet numb, something stirred in him, in the back of his mind, a rising wave of darkness. Giddy, sick, he felt he was going to faint, and slumped forward over the threshold. For a moment he thought it was the old nightmare returning – the night of destruction, the walls of fire, the bodies and the f
lame. But it was more.
In the time he might draw a breath, he saw that the vision was reflected, distorted, in a crazed and faceted dark mirror. Without dance or mask, along a trail of suffering, he had reached the Wall.
Nine months, perhaps, passed since the harvest and his fall, and with them the long hard winter. Like many he had caught chills and agues then; but he was not yet wasted enough to die. Of what another winter might bring, he was less sure. For now, he could sit in the returning sun by day, even find some small tasks that made it worth carrying him up to the fields again, throwing stones to scare birds and suchlike. He was sorely tempted to hurl something larger at Vansha, bounding back from the hunt with all his former grace, but held himself back. That way lay folly, maybe madness.
Alya himself was almost seventeen now, also a man by his people’s reckoning, for in that harsh and ill-fed place the eldest rarely saw more than fifty summers. Saquavan, at forty, was ageing; Ushaya, at forty-eight, already growing old and stooped, rheumy and mumbling, no longer the forceful figure he had been, no longer the clear-eyed Seer. Vansha, almost nineteen, was a figure of young manhood. Savi, in her fifteenth summer, had been marriageable for six months now; and, to the village’s astonishment and her father’s growing displeasure, she had picked nobody.
Alya knew that something must happen soon. And, much as he liked Saquavan, he suspected that it might be the discovery of his own body on the valley floor, having no doubt fallen in accident or despair. So Savi would be freed to live her life once again, the chieftain would reason; and a sad burden removed from the village. But Alya knew now there was a way that he could prevent that evil destiny, if he could only achieve it in time. And throughout the dark hours he fought battles within himself to recapture that moment of vision.
So it was that one night, exhilarated, he plucked out the stone that had stayed shut for so long, scraped from within the dry cavity the soft skin bundle, and slid the weight of wood over his head once again. It felt more snug than before, still more a part of him; and when he crawled across the patch of moonlight flooding in through the hut door, he and it together cast a strangely uniform shadow, man becoming bird smoothly, without joint or hesitation. He hauled himself to the log, and pulled himself to his seat. And then, tapping the drum softly, he sat bolt upright.
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