Silvermay

by James Moloney

  I did the same. With the first shock washing out of me, I took in the whole picture and was startled all over again. The bundle I’d noticed in the woman’s arms was a newborn baby wrapped tightly in a sheet, just as I’d first seen Lucien. To find Nerigold’s face copied so perfectly in the tiny stones was astounding enough, but a child as well! I knew now why Arnou Dessar’s missing assistant had known Lucien was Nerigold’s baby, not mine, and why his wonder had doubled when she took him in her arms.

  For the miners who held the torches, the comparison was too much to resist. Their heads turned continually from the wall to Nerigold’s face and back again. Some began to murmur to their companions and, in such a space, their voices swelled and echoed.

  ‘Quiet!’ their master called to his men. When this had little effect, he made them hand the torches to Tamlyn and Ryall and wait for us outside.

  Birdie had always told me that the best antidote to fear is knowledge.

  ‘How did Nerigold’s face turn up in this cave?’ I asked, repeating her question.

  ‘Is it a trick of some kind?’ said Tamlyn.

  ‘How could it be a trick?’ Master Dessar responded calmly. ‘You arrived here only minutes ago. Until today, we had no idea there was a real woman who matched this likeness.’

  ‘Then explain the picture,’ Tamlyn demanded.

  ‘I can’t. All I can tell you is what I’ve learned and you may not want to hear it.’

  ‘Tell us!’ snapped Nerigold, fixing him with a glare that seemed too strong for such a frail body.

  He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment, as though suddenly more tired than he’d wanted to admit. ‘We were sent here after some miners found the carvings in the rock that I’ve already shown you. They were looking for places to mine for silver and thought they might save themselves sweat and toil if King Chatiny rewarded them for what they’d found instead. No one knew this chamber was here until we uncovered it three months ago. Most of what you see outside has been buried for centuries; how many I can only guess. Five hundred years, perhaps a thousand, certainly more than we guessed at first. Whoever created this picture lived a long time ago. As for who they were, I simply don’t know. There is magic here, I’m sure of it, but the carvings and these pictures are mystical more than magical. I wish I could tell you more …’

  There was real regret in his voice. Even Tamlyn fell silent and Master Dessar took advantage of this to ask questions of his own.

  ‘Who are you, young lady?’ he said to Nerigold. ‘I know your name, but where do you come from? Who is your father?’

  ‘A shopkeeper, nothing more,’ she answered. ‘Our village is ten miles from Vonne and no different from a hundred others.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why your face is drawn so perfectly on this wall?’

  Nerigold shook her head. ‘I’m as surprised as anyone else.’

  ‘Your father is a shopkeeper, you say. Tell me, Nerigold …’ He hesitated, making his question all the more unsettling before it had even been asked. ‘Is there … magic in your family? A grandfather, an aunt?’

  We all knew what he was asking and why he had paused at the crucial moment. He wanted to know if there was Wyrdborn blood in her veins.

  ‘No, none at all,’ Nerigold answered quickly and he seemed relieved.

  Ryall had grown restless and, using the torch given to him by one of the miners, had begun to explore the rest of the chamber. Nerigold’s image wasn’t the only picture adorning the walls, it seemed. As the light from Ryall’s torch played along the rock, I saw that every inch was decorated in the same coloured fragments.

  Then Ryall stopped and recoiled a step towards the centre of the chamber.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Dead people, lots of them.’

  Tamlyn and I went to see for ourselves. Nerigold didn’t join us. She needed to rest and lowered herself gingerly to sit with her back against the wall, the same wall that showed her own face. It was the only place in the entire room where she didn’t have to look at it.

  Ryall hadn’t been exaggerating. He held the torch so that it shed as much light as possible on the scene he’d found and there they were: seven, eight, a dozen bodies lying in a tangled heap, the blood-red stones placed haphazardly into the design leaving no doubt how they had died. Near the corpses, others stood wailing, their bodies unnaturally thin and their clothing no more than rags.

  With his own torch Tamlyn began to examine the rest of the wall. More scenes of death and misery emerged from the darkness: fierce fighting and a figure calling down lightning bolts to set a village ablaze. Further still, strange and terrible beasts threatened a huddled band of commonfolk.

  ‘Sorcery,’ I gasped.

  ‘Of the worst kind,’ Tamlyn added. ‘An evil magic. Look what it’s done to the countryside.’

  He stood back to give the torch’s dancing flame a wider scope. Though this weakened the light, we could see enough to recognise an age of suffering and despair.

  ‘What do these pictures mean?’ I called to Master Dessar. ‘Is this what happened to the abandoned city you’re digging out of the earth?’

  ‘That might be what it shows,’ he answered, but there was no conviction in his voice.

  ‘You don’t think so yourself, do you?’

  ‘Pictures made with stones like these are called mosaics. They are used when the artists want their images to last a long time, thousands of years in fact, because the colours never fade. They even survive floods and fires. It’s what you would do if your images depicted the future and you wanted generations not yet born to see them,’ he said.

  Tamlyn backed away from the wall and turned his torch onto the man’s face. ‘No one can know what hasn’t happened yet.’

  Arnou Dessar shrugged and said coolly, ‘Not without magic, no.’

  ‘Wyrdborn magic,’ I whispered, although in this chamber a whisper was as good as a shout.

  ‘No, Silvermay,’ Tamlyn insisted. ‘The Wyrdborn don’t have such a gift.’

  Master Dessar eyed Tamlyn with the interest of a scholar. ‘Quite right, but there was magic before the Wyrdborn, young man. There are whole books written about it in the ancient tales.’

  ‘The same ancient tales you called myths only a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Myths that somehow knew this city existed,’ he replied.

  Tamlyn went back to the worst of the images we’d found and, horrible though they were, I followed.

  ‘It’s time we left,’ said Master Dessar.

  When we didn’t move towards the passage, he called to us again. He didn’t want us to see any more, I realised. He’d been honest so far, I was sure of it, but that didn’t mean he had told us all he could.

  ‘Why is Nerigold’s face here among so much death and misery?’ I asked him.

  ‘That question has troubled me from the beginning, Silvermay. Her face is out of place here; the only beauty and innocence you’ll find anywhere in this room. That mystery is just one of a hundred I don’t understand about this cave — and now this young woman appears out of nowhere.’ He nodded briefly towards Nerigold sitting quietly beneath her own portrait. ‘You’ve brought me more questions but no answers.’

  Lucien stirred on my back. He was waking from his long sleep and I knew what that meant. It would be best to get Nerigold out into the fresh air before she fed him. But another idea came to me. Arnou Dessar thought Lucien was mine. I’d let him think as much to please myself, but what would he say when he knew the truth?

  ‘Nerigold,’ I called. ‘Lucien needs you.’

  She stood up as quickly as her weariness would allow and took him from me. With the stone picture so close behind her, the similarity could not be mistaken, and one glance at Arnou Dessar showed me he hadn’t missed it.

  ‘But I thought … You mean this baby is yours?’ he said to Nerigold. ‘Lucien. Your child is a boy!’

  When Gabbet had taken in Nerigold and Lucien together, there had been a glow of exc
itement to his wonder. Not so with the old scholar. He was dumbfounded, there was no doubt about that, but mixed in amongst it wasn’t the joy of discovery but a heavy dose of dread.

  ‘What is it, Master Dessar?’ said Tamlyn, who saw the change in him as much as I did. ‘You look frightened.’

  ‘No, no, it’s nothing,’ he said, desperately trying to recover.

  ‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘Everything you’ve told us up till now has been true, but you’re a poor liar.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ he admitted. ‘There’s more I should tell you, it’s true; something there was no need for you to know before. But I can’t tell you with this young woman present.’ He nodded again at Nerigold.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ she snapped at him. ‘This wall shows my face. I have more right to know than any of you.’

  ‘Even if it brings you pain? More pain than you can imagine?’

  Nerigold stood clutching Lucien tightly to her chest. She’d known nothing but pain since the day he was born, yet she hadn’t yielded for a moment. And she wouldn’t now.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said in a voice stiffened with steel. ‘Evil men want my son. I won’t let them have him, but we can’t stop them unless we know why Lucien is so important. There’s nothing you can say that will hurt me more than to lose my son. Tell me, Master Dessar; tell us all.’

  His shoulders slumped, making him seem suddenly older. ‘Every child should have a mother as brave as you,’ he said. ‘You’ll need every part of your courage, too.’

  He raised his torch and moved towards Nerigold, making her back away a step. ‘The pictures you’ve already seen are part of a story,’ he said in a heavy tone. ‘This entire chamber was hollowed out of the rock to tell it. That much was clear the first time I saw it. Bring your torch here,’ he called to Ryall. With both lights trained on Nerigold’s stony image, he went on. ‘The story begins here and continues round the chamber. See for yourselves what it shows.’

  I followed the images with my eyes and saw that the child, no longer a newborn, was being handed from one person to another, like a prize offered and received. There were words above the images, but I had never been taught my letters.

  ‘What do those words say?’ I asked Tamlyn.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not a language I recognise.’

  We looked towards Arnou Dessar, who shook his head. ‘I don’t know it, either.’

  He moved to the right, illuminating the next group of pictures.

  ‘It’s the same child, now a boy of about ten years old,’ I said once I’d taken in the first scene. There was no mistaking the connection.

  Arnou nodded and held his torch closer. A sword was being offered to the young boy whose hand stretched to take hold of it. My own hand flew to my mouth. In the next scene, he had used the sword to fell a fully grown man. More than that, he’d butchered him savagely.

  As we moved along the wall, the boy grew to be a man. And the savagery continued, sometimes caused by the blade of his sword, sometimes by more sinister means. The dark magic we’d seen already began here. There was no doubt the man was a Wyrdborn. He wore armour now, topped by an elaborate helmet that kept his face hidden.

  A second figure appeared in many of the scenes, watching the destruction. I looked back and saw it was he who had first handed the boy his sword. Now he seemed to command the fierce warrior. But once we turned the corner and made our way slowly along the second wall, I didn’t think of the armoured figure as a warrior any longer.

  ‘He’s a marauding beast in the body of a man,’ I said.

  No one disagreed.

  It was on the last wall that my fear and horror became unbearable. We saw again the scenes of bloodshed and senseless destruction; villages burned, commonfolk cowered before the faceless monster. Finally, he had utter dominion over a land of misery and starvation.

  Tamlyn broke his silence. ‘Everything till now has been done against commonfolk. But these are Wyrdborn, I’m sure of it,’ he said, touching the stones that depicted the tangled corpses. ‘And that’s impossible. A Wyrdborn can defeat one of his own kind, yes, but never two. They are all born too evenly matched in their powers.’

  I knew this, too. It was the first thing my father had told me about the Wyrdborn. It was how they were kept in check. As long as commonfolk played one Wyrdborn off against another, their own jealousies and suspicions kept them working only for themselves and so none rose above the rest.

  ‘This Wyrdborn is different,’ I said. ‘He fights alone, yet none can stand against him.’

  The result was plain enough, set out in the intricate mosaics of coloured stone.

  I have little memory of how we left that macabre chamber and found our way into the daylight. It is a time my mind doesn’t want to recall. Nerigold could hardly place one foot in front of another but she refused to surrender Lucien into my care. I doubt Tamlyn or even a hundred of his kind could have pried her arms from around him. I remember a firm grip on my own arm, part support, part guide, until we were outside. It must have been Ryall’s. I shouldn’t have been so hard on him.

  The miners slept in tents close by the cave entrance but Arnou Dessar had his cosy cabin, where he kept his books, his drawings and his notes dry, and his old bones too, he said with a laugh at himself that none of us could share. He generously turned the hut over to Nerigold. Just as well because clouds were gathering. I stayed with her while she fed Lucien; and when it was done, she simply fell on her side and wept until sleep swallowed up her pain.

  I envied her. Sleep meant escape from what we’d seen.

  I looked down at Lucien, who seemed entirely content now that his mother had given him all she had to offer. He kicked his legs and waved his sausage arms. A burp brought bubbles of milk to the corner of his mouth. It was a sight that should melt any woman’s heart and, until only an hour before, mine would have dripped helplessly inside my chest as it had done so many times before.

  ‘It can’t be true,’ I whispered. ‘You are too beautiful, too perfect. How can a baby like you become a monster?’

  When he drifted off to sleep like his mother, I left them both and went out to join Tamlyn. Arnou Dessar was sitting with him. Ryall had gone off to collect firewood, with a promise that he would bring back something to cook on it as well, apparently. Food was the last thing on my mind at that time.

  The men stopped talking when I sat on a felled tree trunk opposite them. Tamlyn gazed at me, waiting for me to speak. I couldn’t, not with his eyes on me so expectantly. Since we’d emerged from the darkness, I’d focused every thought on the mother and her child in the cabin behind me. Now the panic I’d kept at bay came rushing towards me like a pack of hungry wolves. I hid my face in my hands and did my best not to cry.

  ‘There’s no doubt what the mosaic predicts,’ said Arnou. ‘Nerigold’s baby is destined to grow into an evil fiend who destroys all he encounters.’

  ‘I don’t believe in destiny, in a fate that can’t be changed,’ I said bitterly. ‘Those pictures might be a thousand years old. You said so yourself. I don’t care what magic put them there; Lucien couldn’t possibly do any of those things.’

  Even as I spoke, a different kind of fiend tormented me, a treacherous voice inside my head. Why, then, is he growing so quickly? it asked. And what happened to that squirrel?

  ‘Silvermay’s right,’ said Tamlyn. ‘Lucien’s future wasn’t worked out by some madmen a thousand years ago. He’ll make his own life.’

  I wondered how much he was speaking for himself. It was enough to make me weep, hearing him talk that way; tears of hope, not misery, this time.

  ‘Lucien is flesh and blood, he’s here and now,’ I said, not really knowing what I meant.

  ‘Perhaps he’ll defy his fate,’ said Master Dessar. ‘He has a strong mother — in spirit, anyway, if not in body — and he has you to help him, Tamlyn.’

  Our eyes shot towards him and he held up his hand calmly. ‘Oh yes, I know who yo
u are and a Wyrdborn, too. You live amid despair, like all of your kind, but there is hope here if you care to grasp it. I’ve found a lot of magic in these diggings, or the evidence of it, anyway, and much of that magic was good. Great sorcerers built this city, I’m sure of it; not the Wyrdborn but another race altogether, with different powers. If one of them possessed a particular gift that glimpsed the future, then that would explain the nightmare of the chamber. It doesn’t have to be the boy’s fate, but a warning of what might happen. Those pictures are no more than stones fixed to a wall, and what Silvermay says is the greatest hope you have: the child is living flesh. The two don’t have to become one.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand, Master Dessar. It’s not him.’ My voice was more a shout than a plea. ‘Those old magicians must have been driven mad by their own powers and their visions are crazy, too. I don’t care if the mother’s face looks so much like Nerigold; whoever those pictures show inside that room, it isn’t Lucien. He will never harm anyone.’

  ‘Forgive me, Silvermay,’ he said with a little bow. ‘I should have included you among the baby’s allies.’

  Despite the compliment, it was clear he didn’t agree with me. To him, that entire chamber was about Lucien and the only hope he saw lay in keeping him from his fate. Arnou Dessar was a scholar; the king called on him for advice. Who was Silvermay Hawker, a farmer’s daughter from Haywode, to claim she knew better?

  ‘If you know who I am, Master Dessar,’ said Tamlyn, ‘then you know who my father is. That’s what worries me more than anything. Those pictures show an older man nurturing the boy, then commanding his victories over other Wyrdborn. To rule over his own kind has been my father’s dream for as long as I’ve known his voice. No wonder he wants Lucien so much. He wants to command the boy’s power.’

  ‘But no one knows all of what I’ve found in that chamber, not even the king,’ he said.

  ‘The miners recognised Nerigold,’ Tamlyn pointed out. ‘Yes, but they have no idea what the rest of the pictures mean. No one knows what terrible powers they predict.’