by Katy Moran
I come to Maelan from the front so I do not fright her, whispering into her ear to stay hushed, my pretty. I pray none of the other horse-kind do wake. But that infernal luck that used to guide me through the streets of my city beyond reach of the guard stays with me, and I get the rug and saddle onto Maelan’s back with barely a sound.
I surprise myself by feeling fair guilty about stealing these waterskins and the dry sticks. Well, at least I do not take any food. They shall not starve because of me. Glancing over my shoulder at the sleepers, I lead Maelan to the road. By the time I reach it, my feet are wet and the insides of my boots squelch with water. Cursed bog. The glowing cracks in the banked-down fire have seared bright lines across the inside of my eyelids so that even with my eyes closed, I still see them.
“Wait!”
I slide my foot into the stirrup and mount in an ungainly rush. For the love of Christ, what is she doing? I see the shadowy outline of a girl running towards me. Thorn slips and rights herself with a boggy splash. I’ll be caught, and all because of this sulky wench. I lean forward, squeezing Maelan’s sides with my knees – I have not galloped in years and I am like to break my neck trying it on this road with its great mountains of mud, and in the dark, but she has given me no choice.
“Wait!” Thorn moves faster than I expect – she’s on the road now too, and I know I should be off back towards Londonwick as if the devil himself were on my tail, but there is something in her voice that makes me stay. It is something desperate and sad, and for my sins, I stop, tugging soft on the reins. I mutter an apology to Maelan, who merely ducks her head again and starts tugging up mouthfuls of grass, the greedy bitch.
Thorn takes my hand where I’m holding the bridle and grips it so hard I am sure she is about to crush my fingers. “Cai!” At least she has the sense not to speak in a whisper, which is the most carrying talk in the world, but just in a low, quiet voice. “Cai, please don’t—”
I shake her hand away. If I were talking, and not trying to escape, I’d be treating her now to such a stream of curses as she’d never heard in all her life. Stupid, stupid—
“Take me with you,” Thorn says. There is such a sorrow in her – I can see it writ in every line and curve of her face.
She is like me. We are of a kind.
Thorn gets up behind me and I feel her arms around my waist. She whispers in my ear, “Go!”
She does not need to tell me that.
We creep down the road so slow it feels as if each of Maelan’s steps is only a hand span long, but I cannot risk a gallop yet lest the others are woken by the noise. I must wait, till when I look back, I can barely see the stand of hawthorn trees on the horizon. And then we shall ride, by God, till there are enough miles between the Devil’s Cub and me that I can breathe easy. How far that will be? He will be pleased in his heart to see me go: fate took me to his hall and fate has now taken me away again, and he must trouble himself about it no longer. Should he wake and find me gone, once I’m out of his sight he will but shrug his shoulders, I’m sure.
But what of Thorn? If I am chased down like a rat because of her… Ah, why did I wait and take her up? I’m a fool. My shoulders are all over prickles – I glance back again, nudging Thorn so she leans out of the way. I can still see the hawthorns – crabbed, black shadows clutching at the silvery night – but that is all. There is no sign of movement. No sign of another man in this marsh as far as I look.
Maelan is riding fresh, picking up her feet and putting her nose forward as though she’s yearning to go quick. The strangeness of this silvery night-ride has stirred her up like a man who has drunk too much wine. The wind races faster and faster across the night; I feel it tugging the hair back from my face, and I hear it hissing through the trees, tearing over this infernal bog like a flock of devils. I look back and the hawthorns are now so small they look like saplings. To hell with it – I give with the reins and dig my heels against Maelan’s flanks, and in my mind I hear Tasik’s voice: Do you let the horse think it’s her choice to gallop – you must just put the thought of it into her head, and there you’ll be.
Maybe soon I will have talk with him again, now that I am letting my spirit leave go of my body. Why have I not seen Tecca in such ages, even though I barely eat? Tecca must lead me to the rest of them. She has to.
Maelan lays her head to one side at first, ears lying flat, as if she’s saying, Ah, but why? It’s nice enough walking along all quiet and peaceful. But then I grip harder with my knees and her ears prick forward, and we go, and I’m leaning hard over the pommel, her mane flying in my face, and Thorn is clutching me, her arms warm around my waist. It feels like being at sea in a storm, this galloping, but the speed of it whips me up into a thrill the like of which I’ve not had for a long while, and it’s like running and leaping through the night in the City of the Rising Moon, so free and wild do I feel. No one can catch me. Thorn is breathing hard, and she laughs, the sound tugged away on the wind. It is just me and her, and we have our freedom at last out here in the marshlands. We have our freedom if nothing else.
Travelling
THEY LIED to me; that’s why I hate them so much.” Thorn says.
The greyness of the sky makes my head spin – it is so many drifting shades of ash. I long for the skies at home, high and blue above my city.
“They promised I should go home for a spell – it’s been more than two years! But now something’s happened with the Northumbrians and I can’t be let go.” A sort of sobbing gasp creeps into her voice. “They make a great show of saying I’m one of their kin, that I’m like another daughter, but really I’m a hostage, and I can’t go home because they need the Wolf Folk in their thrall against the north.” She laughs, harshly. “Not that the Wolf Folk care much about me. Wulfhere should have got himself a worthier captive. What good am I, with my mother and father both dead before I was even old enough to remember their faces?”
So she is an orphan. I pass the waterskin back to Thorn and hear her taking great, splashy gulps.
She swallows, then says, “If you really have just come off some slave ship you don’t know where we’re going. I’ve a plan, though. We’re but two or three days’ ride from my real home and I say we go there. Once I come back, they can’t send me away again straight away. And listen, Cai!” Thorn’s voice brims with the thrill of what she’s about to say. “I’ll wager no one’s told you this, for all they seem so kind, but my guardian at home is … well, she means a lot to you too – if you are who you say you are. Cenry and I thought you’d just heard the songs about Essa and Wulf, and lied about the Halfling Witch being your father. But now I wonder – Wulf and Anwen are so sure, and so I don’t think you lie any more.”
The Halfling Witch? If Tasik were here now I should kick him. What manner of secrets did he take with him to the next world?
I look round and stare at Thorn. Her eyes are bright and the gold-dusty freckles are standing out against her pale skin. She reaches for the reins, grabs both my hands and squeezes them in hers. She is so warm. Her hands feel hot, like she’s been roasting them by the fire, and the shock of it makes me gasp.
“Oh! You’re cold,” she says. “I’ve a misgiving you’re not well. Which is all the more reason we must hurry. But Cai, my guardian is your grandmother! Your father’s mother! Don’t you know the tale?”
I shake my head.
“They really told you nothing? When I… When I was left an orphan, your father and mother found me and took me all the way to Bedricsworth monastery and left me there with your grandmother. They rescued me. I was just a baby, so I don’t recall but it’s true. And now you’re here. Isn’t that strange? It’s the wyrd, the working of fate.” Thorn falls silent. She thinks she’s said too much. Why? And as it turns out this talk of a grandmother is nothing I’ve not heard before – I recall the Devil’s Cub saying I had one somewhere out east. I just did not know she was also Thorn’s guardian. I did not know Mama and Tasik had rescued a child and taken it to her.
Why did they tell us so little about the past?
How can I go to this grandmother of mine, anyhow? She’ll not want me when she hears how I served her son. I twist with the need to see her, though, for she’s all the blood I have left. But I cannot. I know what I’ll do: I shall take Thorn to this place, and then go away. I can’t leave a girl out here in the wild marshes to shift for herself.
Thorn falls quiet, and even though my head spins with hunger and I am hardly able to keep my hands on the reins; I still can’t escape the sense she hides something from me, that there’s some part of her tale she’s chosen not to tell. Which is odd – I make no reply to anything she says, so she may as well be talking to herself. But it’s clear enough there’s something Thorn’s seen fit not to speak of.
I’m so weary I don’t even care.
How many hours have passed since we stole away from the camp of the Devil’s Cub? I squint up to look at the sun, but since all I see is ever-shifting shades of grey, there’s no use in it. We’ve left the road now and are aiming towards what Thorn says is the east, though how she can tell that when the sun’s hiding I do not know. Maelan is slowing now, with her burden of two. She is tired, poor nag. I should not be serving her so.
What would happen if I just fell asleep? I draw the cloak tighter about my shoulders and breathe in the warmth of Thorn’s body against mine. I do not feel the cold as much now. It would be so easy to close my eyes – but I cannot.
Tecca is here.
At last, she has come. I sense her. I feel the heat of her smile before she laughs, her pulsing spirit: her life. She is so close. And then I hear her laughing again, so faint that the sound’s almost lost out here in the wild wide marshes.
Here she is, leaning against a crabbed-up tree the like of which I’ve not seen before. Even the trees are strangers on this cold island. Tecca’s hair is bright like the flames of the banked-down campfire we left behind.
Cai! Her voice comes to me as a whisper. She must be chilled to the bone, standing there in that thin blue tunic with no shoes, but she does not even shiver. Always Tecca loved the feel of the earth beneath her feet and managed to lose her slippers whenever Ma took her out to the Palace or to church, or one of the shrines.
Now she is closer, so close I could almost reach out and touch her, but I know not if she has moved or we have but ridden closer. Thorn makes no sign of having seen her. I feel the warm weight of her against my back. Her breathing has grown heavy, more regular, and I think she has fallen asleep, the daft wench.
Tecca, don’t go. I want to come with you—
My sister laughs again, and her dark eyes glint with mischief. Don’t be a fool – how can you? Cai, you must not call me any longer. I can’t keep coming to you.
Something slips through my hands, burning my palms, but I don’t care. Everything seems so dark. I thought it was day, but there is never any sun here, and I wonder that these barbarians can live in such a way, with this endless greyness and damp. Why does my body hurt so? I feel wet. I want to sleep. This is the trouble – I did not sleep enough, waiting through the dark hours till the time came for me to leave the campfire. I just need to sleep. We should rest: the Devil’s Cub shall not find us now—
Someone’s calling my name – but it’s not Tecca, so what do I care.
Come back, come back! I call to her. Let me go with you!
Life has taken a strange turn. It was always Tecca who wanted to follow me in the old days, and I who ran on ahead.
She is holding my hand; I can feel her holding my hand. Her touch is cold, but I do not care. I am not bound any longer to the earth.
A coldness rushes past me and I’m soaring through a thick mist that dampens my face. I look down and see droplets the size of ants clustering at the ends of the hairs on my arms. Tecca is laughing as we soar along, gripping my hand tight with her chilly little fingers. If this is what it is like to be dead I shall not mind it too much.
It’s warm again now, and I catch a breath of rose-water on the air, of ginger, stale wine, with that tang of rot and dung simmering beneath. I feel a hot dusty street beneath my bare feet and the sun on my back, and we are running up along one of those alleys near the Mese, back in the City of the Rising Moon.
Tecca is not meant to be out of the house with me, but she has begged me to take her for such a long age. She is just young enough that there shan’t be too much talk if she’s seen running wild through the streets like this. If I were a girl I should go crazy, for all they do is sit withindoors or in some shady spot in a garden embroidering silks and eating sugared quinces. Elflight would never come out with me – I ought not to, she says. Only think what would happen if I were seen! Our father has refused to betroth her even though most of the other girls her age have been betrothed for years, and Elflight thinks she will never find a husband. We are ten summers old, so why should she care? It’ll be two years most likely before she’s packed off – although I do recall my mother saying how foolish it was the silk merchant’s daughter had been wed at just eight.
Tecca’s hair is damp and sticking to her forehead in sweaty little curls. I’m tired now! She sits down suddenly in the shade of Saint Sebastian’s church, and I sink down beside her thinking it must be time I took her away back home – I don’t want to be seen out with Tecca because, after all, she is just a girl…
And now I’m cold again, soaring through this endless grey mist, and I can no longer feel the heat of my sister’s hand in mine – where is she? I have lost her. She does not know these streets; she could wander for years and not find her way home. But I cannot see my way either. I do not think I am in Constantinople at all. I am somewhere else, but I know not where.
I want to call her name but when I open my mouth no sound comes out.
I am alone.
No: there is someone else here. I cannot see anyone, but I know there is someone. A man, I think. I hear mocking laughter.
A strange gift you have, cub. All is silent, but the words are clear – as if a bell tolls in my head and nowhere else. I cannot really see anything beyond this swirling greyness – hell’s teeth, I am so cold! – but I have a sense of a pair of black eyes that glimmer all dark like well water, and again that laughter. The eyes are the prints of my own and of my father’s.
Tasik—
Na. You will not find him here. The voice is not my tasik’s. I am so tired, and I cannot … I cannot hear so well now. The voice speaks again: This place is not for you – it is time and time again that you went back.
He is gone. Now there is just a great echoing emptiness. I am alone again in this cold and there is such a wrenching pain in my belly, and I want him, I want Tasik, but even though I call and call he does not come.
Everything is so dark. I have a sense of jolting and I swallow a burst of sick fear: I have woken again in that dream which was the boat. I am but drifting between different dreams all the while. I have dislodged myself from the world. What I thought was real is just a cloth woven of many colours, a jumble of shadows, and behind it are other, stranger places.
We are but prisoners in a cave. I hear Yannis as though he were next to me. All that we see is puppetry and the mere shadows of a long dream, lit by the flickering light of a fire. It is only when we break loose of our bindings and climb free of the cave that we see the world as it truly is… Ah, but you boys are too young for philosophy, so back to the Iliad we must go.
This place is not quite like the boat. There is no wall of stench, for one thing. It is only the way everything is moving that makes it seem as if I’m at sea. I am rocking from side to side. I’m so tired. I hear voices but I cannot make out the words: someone is shouting, another cries. I hear the rise and fall of sobbing, cut off quick. More shouting. Are they speaking Greek or Anglish? I want it to stop. Why will they not be quiet?
Tecca is gone. She will never come to me again. How do I know this? It’s more that I feel it. Somewhere at the back of my mind I see her walking away, hand in hand with a dar
k-haired man I do not know. They are getting further and further from me and my heart twists. Who is he? Even the brightness of her hair is fading. She is waving, her arm white against the darkness.
She is gone.
I AM WRAPPED in a blanket. It’s scratching my nose and it’s got the sunny warmness of dried herbs. Lavender and something else I don’t know. It’s gloomy here, but I can see the flickering light of a torch and smell burning pine-honey. I’m in a hall like the one in Londonwick but much bigger, with a great soaring roof. Birds fly from rafter to rafter. Did I come here in Anwen’s cart, sleeping as if dead all the while? There is someone sitting close by – I think it’s a woman for there’s a warm muskiness about them. I feel a hand shifting the damp hair from my forehead. The touch is gentle. It’s hard to open my eyes – everything aches – but now I can see her, a blurry, shadowy shape, a curtain of loose dark hair hanging down. It is Anwen.
So Wulf came for us, after all. The Ghost has been caught a second time.
“You’re safe now.” She rests a cool hand on my forehead.
Why does she say that? Did I cry out as I slept? I think she speaks the truth that I’m safe. I close my eyes and get none of the burning urge for a sprint that saved my skin so many times in Constantinople. Anyhow, I do not think I could sprint even if I was of a mind to try, which I’m not.
Her hand rests again on my forehead. “The fever’s breaking, any road.”
A great wave of loss rolls over me, as if I’d just woken to find one of my legs missing. Tecca will never come back. I’ll never see her again.
“She’s gone.” The words come out cracked and dry. “My sister.”
It was Elflight who said it back then, in the early dawn light, with the rattle and creaking of the market traders’ wagons rising up through the unshuttered window. We were all in Ma’s room: Ma, Tecca, Elflight, Asha and me. Towards midnight Tecca’s breathing had got shallower, more sparse, and in the flickery lamplight we could see her lips turning blue.
