“Are you afraid to go to sleep?”
“Yes.”
Her next action seemed inevitable, like the succession of time, like the pervasive rhythm of flute and voice. She bent forward.
He had abstained from drink during the evening; she had tried several kinds. A rich, decayed sweetness remained on her breath. He tasted it as she hovered over him. They were separated only by the last remnant of her uncertainty, a narrow stream of darkness that was part of the larger night: secret, private, utterly quiet.
Trembling lightly, she touched his lips. The pressure of her flesh, miraculously subtle, was such that he could not tell precisely when the kiss had begun: he knew only that it was happening. As she became more confident her mouth opened a little; yet still she hesitated before crossing the last shred of darkness. Gehan hesitated too. Above all else he wanted to succumb, to acknowledge that he and Ika were of the same. She was perfect, golden, immaculate. She had, in the village today, glimpsed the frontier of the will, the vision of Gehan First, the frontier beyond which stretched the limitless sea of absolute freedom. She alone was worthy to join him on that awesome beach where he had dwelt in solitude for so many years.
He felt her hair fall across his face. In the villages, anywhere else, it would not matter that they were brother and sister. But he was the son of Gehan Fourth: he was the master of Brennis, the Flint Lord. And this was weakness.
He pushed her away. “Go back to your room.”
“What is it?”
“This is wrong.”
“No, this is right.” She leaned forward again and whispered. “We can do anything we want to. You proved that today.”
“Go.”
“Let me rest beside you, if nothing else.”
“You must go.”
“You want me to stay.”
“I want you to go.”
When she had returned to her room, Gehan tried to compose himself for sleep. Again he breathed the herbal scent. And suddenly he saw an image of sun-coloured flowers and smelled pungent green leaves, and he recalled that in his boyhood the house-slaves had hidden sprigs of tansy among the most valuable fleeces. It was supposed to deter insects. He strove to recall more clearly the clusters of flowers like little buttons, the spreading fernlike leaves; and he saw again a bright window ledge, a lonely playroom, and a barren view of hillside and sea. Ika had been a mere baby. At the age of six she had been sent to the homelands, while Gehan’s days had been shaped to some other purpose, filled with discipline, schooling, instruction. Somehow, standing on tiptoe and peeping out, the empty vista beyond the playroom window had contained no explanation of it at all.
In the early hours, resigning himself to another night without sleep, he went to the shutters and opened them. The night was freezing hard.
Over a mile away to the south-west, and two hundred and fifty feet below his window, he saw a twinkle of light. It disappeared and returned, disappeared and returned, sometimes disappearing for such a long period that he thought it had gone out. At this range the buildings of Fernbed could not be distinguished, but among them somewhere a fire was still burning, and he knew it was not the pyre his men had made, but a memorial flame at the altar. The priest would have lit it to mark the mourning of the village and the passage of three more souls to the gates of the Far Land.
Gehan barred the shutters and rested his head against them. He stood like that for a moment, turned, and went back to his bed.
3
The snow deepened; for fifteen days the sun was not seen. Everyone in the camp who was not hunting was put to work, mending, sewing, making boots and mittens and clothing, cutting pelts and curing skins to make water carriers, packing food, binding spears and axes and hammers and knives, shaving arrows, carving bows and spear-slings. All spare leather and fur had been commandeered: those who stayed behind would be cold as well as hungry.
From nine tribes Tagart had selected a hundred men of fighting age and forty women who wanted to join the march to Valdoe. Only the very old and the very young, or those who could not be spared, had been forbidden to go.
Each day he calculated again how many people he might expect from the other camps, and when they would arrive. Sometimes he felt there would be none, that the envoys would fail; at other times he thought they would come, but too late. He counted the days needed for the envoys to reach the camps, to persuade the chiefs, for the preparations to be made, for the journey to the Shode Valley, added time to allow for the difficulty of travelling in the snow, subtracted it for the loyalty of this or that tribe which he knew to be friendly and helpful, added it again for those chiefs who were said to be uncooperative or who were likely to be indifferent to the troubles of the tribes in the south; and each day arrived at a different answer.
His strategy would depend on the amount of support he received. As his estimates varied so did he evolve and discard a dozen battle-plans, retrieve some, examine them afresh, and then in a fit of doubt or depression reject them all. At such moments he wondered whether perhaps Bubeck was right. Tagart would be committing all his people to fighting something that might not be killed by spears alone. He had been to Valdoe; he had seen what sort of men were there; he had seen the villages along the coast. Thousands of farmers relied on the Flint Lord: if they came to his defence there would be no hope.
But, on the fifteenth day after the envoys had left, a hundred and nineteen people arrived from the Cloud camp in the east. The next day Fodich arrived. He had brought nearly a hundred and fifty from the Lightning camp in the north: all that remained was the arrival of those from the Mountain camp in the west.
Tagart sent for Klay. Since his trial he had been given lowly duties and kept within the boundary of the camp. As Tagart revealed to him what his part in the march was to be, Klay saw why he had been reprieved. He listened with growing dismay to Tagart’s instructions. This was worse than the original sentence.
He was given food and appropriate clothing and allowed to make his farewells to Yulin and his children. If he carried out his mission with honour they would be pardoned. They would no longer be considered tribeless, and his own sentence would be rescinded in full.
But it was with a heavy heart that Klay crossed the bridging logs and left the camp behind.
* * *
The stone bowl, supported by three squat legs, was half filled with charcoal which sent smokeless heat up into the rafters. Lamps burned on poles set round the bowl. They projected distorted shadows of the Divine as she finished her prayer.
Gehan watched from the darkness. The Divine, Thille, had read the sky that day and from the flight of crows had learned that portents for the campaign had changed. All six hundred soldiers had been landed; the army was ready to leave. But the omens were bad. For confirmation, she had taken a dry brier branch and on it, with a magpie quill, had inscribed seven runes.
“Fire, fire, speak to Thille! Fire, fire, do thy will!”
She threw the branch into the bowl. It lay on the charcoal, stubbornly refusing to ignite. And then at one end spitting flame crackled and scorched some of the runes. “Aih has been burned,” she said. “The weather will hold.” The flames cleft into prongs and spread along the branch, wavering and fluttering, while Thille circled the bowl and studied their progress. Her feet shuffled on the stone floor. Next to Gehan came the asthmatic breathing of Bohod Zein.
The agent leaned closer. “Your divine would be prized in the homelands. Is she a native?”
“The daughter of a slave, born here in my grandfather’s time.”
“She has a gift.”
“She has second sight.”
“Is she ever wrong?”
Gehan shook his head.
The brier branch had been consumed, reduced to a worm of grey ash. Taking a linden spoon, Thille scraped it up and deposited it in a small leather pouch. Her attendant came forward and covered the bowl with a heavy stone lid; she arranged on the lid a precarious tripod of three bone wands, their feet in some pat
tern that only she could memorize.
The attendant lit the rest of the lamps in the divination chamber.
“My lord,” said the Divine. Her robes were green; she wore yellow slippers. She was old and bent, but her eyes were direct. “My lord, the fire has spoken. The flame was slow: there will be delay, and this is propitious. It will avoid disaster. Aih was burned first: the weather will aid you. Tsoaul glowed and was enwrapped by blue flame: your enemy will be strong, but you will surround him. Gauhm burned yellow and will take no part. The brier crackled, and so the fighting will be very fierce. For every crackle a man will be slain. This was foretold by the crows.”
“But what will be the outcome?”
“In our question to the fire we spoke only of the savages. The answer is confused, as though you had another enemy, a more powerful one. There will be much killing and suffering. Order will be overthrown. By the shape of the ash and the burning of the four outer runes, the portent is bad. The fire begs you to think again. No purpose will be served.”
“But you say the savages will not defeat me?”
“There is neither defeat nor victory here, my lord.”
“There will be no defeat?”
“Not at the savages’ hands, my lord.”
Bohod Zein turned to him. “If there is no defeat there must be victory.”
“I agree,” Gehan said, “since we are to take the offensive. There must be some confusion in the ash. Is that possible, Thille?”
“Perhaps, my lord.”
“You speak of another enemy. Who could it be?”
“I cannot say, my lord. It is … forgive me, my lord.”
“It is what?”
“It is as if the enemy were yourself.”
Bohod Zein whispered in his ear. “Preposterous!”
“What does the fire tell us about the delay?” Gehan said. “Will it be long?”
“It urges you to wait till the moon wanes.”
Bohod Zein said, “The full moon is seven days hence.”
“We have been delayed too long already.”
Thille said, “There will be certain disaster if you start in a waxing moon, my lord.”
“Of what sort?”
“On the march. There will be disaster on the march.”
“Does the fire say any more?”
“It speaks of the sea. I do not understand it.”
“The sea? The question has nothing to do with the sea.”
Bohod Zein revolved the white marble ring on his forefinger. “The prophecy seems somewhat nebulous and inconclusive,” he said to Gehan. “You say she is never mistaken. Could it be, Thille, that we posed our question wrongly?”
“I cannot say. I tell only what the fire tells me, and the fire gives a bad omen. I say again, order will be overthrown.”
“A matter of opinion,” said Bohod Zein with an incipient smile, which died the moment he saw Gehan’s face.
“Leave us, Thille,” Gehan said.
She bowed and, taking the leather pouch of ash, was followed by her attendant from the room.
Gehan rubbed his forehead. “Another seven days! I must speak to Larr.”
“The delay is probably wise, and the General will concur,” said Bohod Zein, thinking of the extra rations the soldiers would consume, and wondering how much might be charged for them. “The Divine was quite specific on that point. But as for the rest of it …”
Gehan stood up; Bohod Zein did likewise. “There is nothing ambiguous in Thille’s words,” Gehan said. “As a child she taught me how to view a prophecy. If you do not understand it at first, you must absorb it into your thoughts. Intuition will give you the meaning.”
Bohod Zein hitched his robe over his shoulder. “Our divines in the homeland are much less reticent.”
“And much less accurate.”
The agent stepped aside and allowed Gehan to be first through the door.
It was after dusk; stone cressets, set in the walls or suspended from roof-beams, gave their dismal glow to the next rooms. These were hawk mews which, together with the divining chamber, an office for the astronomer priest, and a room of maps and charts, made a single block set inside the main palisade on its northern side. There was only one exit: to reach it they had to pass through the mews.
One of the falconers was present, attending to a sea eagle which sat hunched on a padded perch, its head covered with a hood. As Gehan and Bohod Zein entered, the falconer saluted.
Gehan stopped to exchange a few words with him. “Is that Larr’s eagle?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Is he ill?”
“He is hunger traced, Lord Brennis.” He indicated the folded wing.
“Let me see,” Gehan said, but even as he reached out the eagle unfurled vast wings and from the hood came an anguished cry. Its wings flapped once, twice, thrice, and the pressure of wind lifted it from the perch. Leather straps arrested its ascent; it fell forward and dangled by its legs, shrieking and twisting its head. The great wings hung awkwardly, brushing the flagstones, and three dark pinions broke away and fluttered to the floor.
Gehan and Bohod Zein departed at once, to leave the man and his charge in peace.
“It means nothing,” said Bohod Zein, unnerved by the incident and by Gehan’s glowering silence. They were crossing the enclosure towards the inner palisade and Gehan’s residence. “A sick bird, my lord. An eagle in a bate.”
“A sea eagle,” Gehan said, strangely.
On all sides they were being hailed and saluted. The enclosure was crowded with leather tents, each occupied by five men waiting their turn to go inside the barracks to be fed. Every foot of space in the Trundle was full: the two barrack-houses, the armoury; soldiers had been billeted in the dwellings of the craftsmen and in the overseers’ quarters; vacant animal sheds had been taken over; even a spare cell in the prison had been appropriated. Some of the mine-slaves, whose cages were always kept outside the Trundle, had been taken from the chalk face and put to work in teams, helping the soldiers to carry skins of water up the hill from the river, for the reservoirs inside the fort were inadequate to the needs of a thousand men. Other slaves stoked cooking fires, stirred cauldrons, carried trays of steaming coarse bread; and others yet dragged sledges up from the sheds at Apuldram, where the rest of the stores and supplies had been unloaded.
The Trundle had been designed as two separate forts, one inside the other. The outer palisade, twenty feet high, with its guard-towers and ditch, carried a parapet from which projectiles could be rained upon rebellious slaves or besieging brigands.
The gallery below this parapet was used to store a variety of ingenious equipment, some of it dating from the first days of the Trundle and conceived by Gehan First himself. The two gates of the fort, at north-east and south-west, swung on armoured hinges and were barred with enormous beams of oak, to which could be added sloping buttresses fitted into oak-lined pits. Constant vigil was kept from each of the sixteen guard-towers: Valdoe Hill had been cleared of trees, so there would always be ample warning, in daylight at least, of approaching danger – even in the unlikely circumstances that neither of the neighbouring forts at Eartham and Bow Hill was able to send signals or render aid.
The inner fort was the Flint Lord’s residence, enclosed by another palisade of greater strength than the first. It had one gate, and a single wooden building on two storeys – three, counting a platform for the signal-station. Part of the building formed the barrack for his personal guard, trusted men who received double pay and the best rations. The rest was divided into chambers for sleeping and eating and storage, on the upper floor; and much of the lower floor was taken up by one large day-room. There were side chambers for stores of emergency rations, a small armoury, and a cistern of drinking water which was renewed by rain-pipes from the roof.
In theory the gate of the inner enclosure was to be kept open whenever the Flint Lord was not present, and locked when he was inside; in practice it was locked only at night.
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None of the Trundlemen, the freemen who managed the various workings of Valdoe – the mines, the slaves, the harbour, and the fort itself – slept in the inner enclosure. Their quarters were situated just outside its gate. Apart from the Flint Lord’s retinue, bodyguards, and members of his family, only the General of Valdoe was allowed free access to the residence. Even guests were expected to sleep in the main enclosure, although in the case of important visitors such as Bohod Zein an exception was occasionally made.
He had been given the principal guest chamber, a room four yards by three, furnished with sumptuous hangings of umber and scarlet. Above the bed was a mural on whose cracked surface a family of seals, hauled out on a sandbar far from land, basked in peaceful sunshine that had been faded by age.
After a long evening in the company of Lord Brennis, Bohod Zein retired for the night. He was washed and changed by the two women who had been appointed as his body-slaves for the duration of his stay. The women finished tying his robe and left the dressing room; Bohod Zein fastened the catch behind them and passed into the sleeping chamber.
Altheme was already in the bed. She had entered by another door. Earlier in the evening Bohod Zein had intimated to Gehan that her presence would again be welcome.
“I hoped you would come,” Bohod Zein said. He put out all the lamps except one at the bedside and pulled back the covers.
She was lying supine, staring fixedly at the ceiling. To Bohod Zein it seemed that her pale skin and abundant dark hair had been invested with a new and healthier beauty, as if the past nights, when she had manifested signs of revulsion and repugnance, had after all secretly pleased and agreed with her. If it was possible, she had become even more desirable: not only was she the wife of the most powerful man in the island country, but now she was beginning to respond to his expert nocturnal tutoring.
Suppress it as she might through pride – and he found her feigned contempt a source of additional stimulation – the evidence was in her face. Soon she would yield openly, willingly; what passions might then be released? At bottom, like all her kind, she was a harlot. When at last the floodgates opened, he knew his teachings would be richly repaid.
The Flint Lord Page 10
