by Prue Batten
It was as if Ana’s flagrant support of him in the face of the Traveller’s dislike added grist to his mill and she could see he was determined not to let her disturb his equanimity. She worried on though, like a dog with a bone. ‘Once more and you are within your rights to demand your forfeit. It is the way of the Others, is it not?’ Acid tainted her voice.
‘Yes. It is the way.’
‘Shall you then?’
Liam sighed, ever the bored dilettante. ‘Well, Adelina, that depends on two things. Firstly that Ana should need saving. And secondly, that I should want to call in the forfeit.’
‘Oh come now, I’ve seen the way you look at her. There can’t be any doubt.’ Adelina’s voice held a touch of scorn.
‘You may think so.’
She ground her teeth. Still no point to her, not yet anyway.
***
And so, my friend, for I think you are that now you have come this far with me, you can see how the game began to sharpen, that Liam and I had truly sized each other up. And he was good, so good!
But you and I, we have come to the end of this latest book. Conceal it in its hiding place and seek the little Raji man with his hand upraised and curled as if to hold something. He of the striped red and yellow silk pantaloons and the red fez.
I shall tell you something. Ana made him. It breaks my heart to see him because he reminds me of her and of Kholi. You see, Kholi Khatoun had told us the story of Aladdin’s Lamp and Ana decided to make a stumpwork Aladdin and of course she used Kholi as the model. Although I must say Kholi is... was... much more beauteous.
You will notice I speak in the past tense about him. Remember that. It is why I sigh and cry as I tell you to gently remove the little fez and feel inside for another book. It is a red one. Red silk. Red, the colour of marriage in the Raj...
Chapter Fourteen
The journey took on a domestic rhythm for Ana as she gathered food, cooked and cleaned. Then as they travelled along the tracks and trails of the Barrow Hills, she would take her own sewing basket, a gift from her mentor, and assist in basic embroidery.
The Traveller had unfolded a length of rose coloured taffeta and cut it into the pieces of a gentleman’s vest and she and Ana were now working a design of fruit and beetles down the lapels on either side. The beetles of course needed intricate skill beyond Ana’s simple expertise but she was quite able to stitch the beautiful fruits and leaves Adelina required. Many an hour was spent in quiet contemplation of wires, silken threads and needles. But sometimes the two companions sat together on the van’s wide step, embroidery lying in a heap by their sides, watching Ajax’s vast bay rump swinging from side to side, their eyes straying further afield to stare at the men in their company or to admire the scenery. Both activities engendered feelings of contentment.
It was almost possible to forget Liam was Other. He had not disappeared since the episode with the dunters and he set about chores just like a mortal, complaining if the animals were un-obliging or if he was hungry, delighting in the food given to him at meals, telling stories of his travels. He removed any mystic references in the telling and he chatted in a typically masculine way with Kholi about horses and races and money. It was indeed believably normal.
Adelina and Kholi slept in the pavilion at night, Ana slept in the van and Liam, by his own preference, slept rolled in a swag under the night sky and by the fire. If it drizzled in the evening, he would roll his swag under the van and sleep there. For the first time in a long while he was content. This night he lay gazing at the diamond light playing in the heavens. Beside him the fire crackled in a desultory way, sparks drifting skywards. From the pavilion came the sound of whispers and Liam could not help listening to what he presumed would be the mortal language of love. Rather disturbingly, it proved otherwise.
‘I tell you, Kholi, I am still concerned. There’s something about him...’
‘Hush now, Adelina. You don’t want him to hear.’
She lowered her voice further and Liam stood up and crept closer to the pavilion. ‘How many stories do I have to tell you about the Faeran to convince you he is no different.’
‘Quite a lot it would appear, sweet one.’ Kholi’s dry response brought a faint curve to Liam’s lips. By the spirits that woman was a worthy adversary! He thought of the game of possession that had begun all this. Pawns on a board and possession. After all, in essence that was all that shatranj was, a game of possession. He listened again as Adelina ploughed on regardless of Kholi's sigh.
‘Then have you heard what happened to the Baron of Pymm? He was married to the one love of his life and the day before their wedding anniversary, he rode out into the Forest of Fenian on Pymm to find white fritillaria that he knew the Baroness adored. He rode for two or three hours and became thirsty, so stopped by a Fenian rill to drink. As he sipped the cold, clear water, a Korrigan appeared and you no doubt know Korrigan are Faeran cousins. She was beyond beautiful and brought all her persuasion to bear. The Korrigan claim the lakes, streams and fountains are all theirs and this beauty demanded payment for the Baron's drink. The price was that he should sleep with her. He, being desperately in love with his wife, refused outright and the Korrigan cursed him as he rode away, dooming him to his death within three days. He laughed as he left and the Korrigan cursed his wife as well. And so, do you know what happened?' Adelina's voice had become more audible as she spoke with passion. 'He choked, poor man, on a fishbone at his anniversary banquet, and the distraught Baroness succumbed to a broken heart not long after and was buried next to her husband.’
‘A sad story, dear one.’
Adelina take a huge breath. ‘My point is that the Korrigan is symptomatic of the rest of the Faeran - selfish, cold and infinitely dangerous.’
‘Adelina, I can see you may be right. I had heard vague rumours of the Baron’s death. But I do think we would be hasty to attribute such mannerisms to Liam as he has done nothing yet of which we can accuse him. Time will tell, don’t you think?’
Liam heard Adelina humph and he returned to his place by the fire. She was right of course. The Korrigan had damned the Baron to an early death, it was well known. Part of him couldn’t give a fig for the lovelorn man, but a tiny part of him wanted these mortals into whose lives he had inveigled himself, to trust him just a little, maybe to like him... to believe that he could never act as the Korrigan had done. He wrapped himself in his swag and lay back. From the van came the sound of Ana’s tiny music box, its exquisite tune tinkling out into the night air. It sounded like a Faeran gittern and he was dragged, much against his will, to remember the people he tried so hard to banish from his life.
Liam was a second son. One would think that under normal circumstances being a second son is an undemanding thing; there is no inherited sinecure so there is no pressure. Not so for Liam. Born into a noble Faeran family, the family must bear itself in a certain way. If that wasn’t enough, his brother had vanished as a babe. Nothing was said but Liam had heard malicious talk. His mother had partaken of one of the eldritch progressions through Eirie, those that the mortals called a rade. Tired of the demands of pregnancy followed by a babe, desperate to play, she had been determined to join this progress. And so against her husband’s orders she had gone, stowing the infant in one of the panniers carried by the musicians’ horses.
In the beginning she had been quite resolute; feeding the child, seeing to its needs before her own; all the things a good mother should do. But the Faeran are selfish and soon she began to neglect the infant in favour of good times. This little babe, Liam’s sibling, was placid beyond belief, rarely crying. Thus the mother all but forgot about it. Which culminated most sadly in the babe being left behind one day as the progress continued; a common enough event amongst the Faeran, for self-indulgence often caused children to be misplaced. Liam’s father was wrathful and searched fruitlessly for the child but it truly seemed to have vanished into thin air. In a fit of rage and to the mother's despair and horror, he got another c
hild on her almost immediately.
It is well known that all Faeran have banes, be they met at fifty years or five hundred. If they did not considering they are immortal, the world would be over-run with these exceptional people. It was the mother’s misfortune that her bane was her second son. She died in childbirth, mourned only by her mother. The heartless husband cared only that he had another son to carry the family name. This babe was Liam and his father, to make up for the dilatory behaviour of the mother, would watch the son like a hawk. As Liam grew older, he felt like prey; tracked and trapped. And so as a grown man he would disappear as often as his father’s back was turned. He would wander the mortal world of Eirie, seeking some amusement and compensation to give his life the dimension he believed it lacked. He strayed from Faeran for long periods, disinterested in the fecklessness of his peers and on his return he would engage in a fruitless and often violent brawl with his father over nothing and everything. Most recently he had stayed away longer than ever, distance proving a panacea to his ills. On this last return, he found that his father had met his own bane. A moth alighting on the man’s hand had left some of its precious wing dust behind... and that, by virtue of its poisonous qualities, did for his father. Unusually, because in Faeran there are no moths, only butterflies.
Liam walked away from his father’s death with no sense of love or loss distorting into grief. Which was why he felt such prodigious amazement at the sensations he was experiencing in the mortal world. He endeavoured to see things through mortal eyes, pushing his senses to experience everything in the mortal way. The extremes, from pain to love, were almost masochistic. He reveled in them. For to be a Faeran was surely to have one’s senses dulled forever by excess.
And here was the nub of it and why he wanted to keep Ana in his sights. She fascinated him. Her dark pensiveness in the face of loss, her excitement at travelling, her innocent disgust at the sex so lately enjoyed in camp, it set a fire in Liam’s soul. Flames that were fanned further by Adelina’s blatant opposition. It was akin to the perfect game. He was leading two down, with the added excitement of removing Bellingham from the board. Come the third move and Ana required rescue again, he would indeed call in the forfeit.
Chapter Fifteen
Journeying through the Barrow Hills took some days as the formations undulated to the very edges of the Great Lakes. Winding down off the final Barrow, the companions found themselves by the edges of a mirror-form watery swathe. Scattered and dotted like so many puddles across the landscape, the pools seemed at once eye catching and troubling. They reflected the sky in its turbid, grey glory and it seemed to the companions as if they stared down on holes ripped in the fabric of the earth, that a window on an entire other world was opened before them. Behind the Lakes like the painted backdrop in a theatre, the beginning of the Goti mountain range crept upward and hidden in its jagged confines, bedecked by frost and snow, climbed that most famous of roads, the Celestine Stairway.
‘Ana,’ Adelina grabbed at Ana’s sleeve. ‘These lakes are renowned for the Nicker, for all manner of water wights, mostly all unseelie. The Cwn Annwn, the Brag, Urisks - Aine help us! You must promise me you will have your rowan crook by your side constantly until we make the safety of Star on the Stair. Promise me.’ The Traveller brooked no argument. Her fine brows drew together with concern and she squeezed Ana’s hands in her own, despite the fact Ana was working with a birchwood hoop, needle and thread at the time.
‘I will, I promise.’ The young woman laughed at Adelina’s protective angst. ‘Aine knows you have been tutoring me mercilessly about the unseelie out there.’ She gestured with her hoop. ‘Anyway, how long will it take to get to Star? Oh, Adelina, I’m so excited. To be at the foot of the Celestine Stairway. I never thought to reach this far in my whole life. It was always somewhere that held my imagination in Pa’s stories, some eldritch place where one could climb to the very stars.’
‘Trust me muirnin, the heights of which you speak are truly vertiginous and one wrong step and you may well be in your very own land of stars. And to answer your question... we are far enough away for you, indeed for us all to be in mortal peril wherever we turn. Now pack up your sewing. I need help to unload my silver charms and my special talismans. We must hang them all around the windows and doors of the van and over Ajax.’
Kholi Khatoun had heard this exchange and commented in a voice as dry as the desert sands. ‘Doveheart, I’ll wager you have more bells and whistles than a Raji orchestra in that van of yours. Why do we worry though? Have we not got an Other with us to protect us?’ He bowed towards Liam and touched his forehead and his chest. His cream and blue striped robes fell in folds down Mogu’s sides and wound themselves together with the saddle tassels into thick twists, forming ropes of thread and colour. Liam gave a courtly bow in return, looking sideways at Ana and winking.
‘Huh, yes, well...’ Adelina grumbled and swept up from the seat behind Ajax into the van, with her basket of threads trailing over her arm.
By afrits and djinns, Kholi thought, she draws me to her like water to a sponge. As he stared at her, seduced by the hint of a shapely calf disappearing into the van, he realised Liam had been talking to him. ‘A thousand pardons. What were you saying?’
‘You are badly struck, aren’t you?’ Liam laughed.
‘And you are not?’ Kholi responded as he gathered up the loose reins on either side of Mogu’s hairy neck.
Liam was silent for a thoughtful minute and then he smiled. ‘Perhaps but it is difficult. We are not of a kind and to be truthful she rarely shows me any more than mild favour.’
‘Come now. I have seen more than mild favour when she has cast glances at you, surreptitious though she thinks they are.’ Kholi looked at Liam riding beside him, at the other-worldliness of his bearing, his looks, the depth of his eyes, the aura of strangeness and yet not about him. Stealthily, Kholi pinched himself, something he did a dozen times a day, to remind himself he was in the presence of an Other. In the Amritsands, few would believe him.
‘You think? She is more disdainful than any Other I can think of.’
Kholi ran his fingers briskly back and forth through the black hair that curled freely whilst on the road. He welcomed the thought of bathing in warm water at Star and lathering his head to release its curlicews. ‘Not at all, she is a fragile thing who is still grieving for her father and dealing with the after effects of a brutal assault. In truth it is a wonder she allows any man to talk to her, let alone touch her. Any bravado you might see, my friend, is merely that... bravado.’
Liam said nothing in reply and they rode companionably along, allowing the honking sounds of waterfowl to fill the silence between them.
‘Liam?’ said Kholi.
‘Yes, my friend?’ He sat easily in the saddle almost as if he were glued to the horse as Florien frisked sideways.
‘Adelina and I have become fond of her. She is by default our family. Have a care for her and beware of hurting her.’
‘I hear what you say.’ With that Liam dug his heels into his horse’s sides and set off at a canter round the edge of one of the lakes, his horse looking as if it was floating just above the ground in order to miss the mud and mire of the swampy surrounds.
The journeymen splashed through tiny pools secreted under silver button-grass and grey tussock. Occasionally, they trod through a shadowed passage of stone pines, the trees arching their odd buttress shape over their heads whilst neither Ajax’s nor Mogu’s feet made any sound on the scattered pine needles. It was a stealthy passing, as though they travelled on tiptoe so as not to disturb the inhabitants of the waters, for the waters themselves inspired watchfulness and discrimination. Kholi Khatoun and Adelina knew the dangers of the grey water; that hidden under the silvered reflection were any manner of water wights who could shape-change and deceive and then drown the unfortunate whose luck had run out. Like the Cabyll Ushtey or perhaps the Ceffyl-Dwr, that beautiful grey horse which leaped out of the water and grabbed any l
one traveller and by gripping hard would squeeze the prey to death and then kick and trample on them.
The sound of silver bells tinkled and mingled with the mournful cries of duck and water geese. Above them in v-form, a flock of black swans flew in solemn procession. Kholi performed the horn sign and Adelina shook the whip covered in bells over Ajax’s back. Ana merely remained quietly watchful, wondering more where Liam had gone than shivering at the ripples on the water or the sounds in the air.
A splash to their left engendered a heart pumping rush and heads turned in time to see water flick up in a spray of diamond drops. Something had dived in. Kholi sent a plea to the urisks to ask for their patronage, and where, Aine help them, was Liam? The mournful cries of waterfowl echoed out of the greyness and in the future Adelina would forever be reminded of the keen of the Caointeach - the small woman dressed in green who washed bloodstained linen by a stream, her woeful wails the harbinger of death and doom. The embroiderer shivered on the stoop of her van, the spasmodic cries setting her teeth on edge, little goosebumps racing each other up her arms to seethe in a cluster under her armpits. Her grip on the whip tightened and she could see Ajax’s ears laying flat against his skull as the normally mesmeric tail lashed left and right.
A sound cracked into the air, echoing like a harquebus shot. The van lurched sideways and Ajax skittered as the vehicle dragged precariously, the wheel split and broken. Kholi hissed and hustled Mogu to kneel, chafing at their position in the middle of this watery plateau that was as cold as a cemetery. A cry behind them curdled blood as Adelina leaped from the stoop. Time was of the essence and the day began to draw in as if someone pulled a drape across a window, blotting out light, depositing them in the middle of a shadow that smacked of things dangerous and dank.
