As quickly as it had begun, it was over. Purloch lowered his arm, and his breath caught in his throat.
The child was cloaked in ravens. They buried her, perching on her shoulders and arms: a mantle of dark feathers. They surrounded her, too, a thick carpet of the creatures. Dozens more perched in the branches nearby. Now and then one of them stirred, preening under a wing or shuffling position; but all of them watched him with their dreadful black, beady eyes.
Purloch was dumbstruck with terror.
‘What did you want to take?’ Lucia asked softly. Her expression and tone reflected none of the malevolence the ravens projected.
Purloch swallowed. He was aware of nothing more than the ravens. The birds were protecting her. And he knew, with a fearful certainty, that they would tear him to bloody rags at a thought from the child.
He tried to speak, but nothing came out. He swallowed and tried again. ‘A . . . a lock of your hair, my lady. Nothing more.’ He looked down at the dagger still in his hand, and realised that his haste to get his prize and escape had made him foolish. He should not have drawn the blade.
Lucia walked slowly towards him, the ravens shuffling aside to let her pass. Purloch stared at her in naked fear, this monster of a child. What was she?
And yet what he saw in her pale blue gaze was anything but monstrous. She knew he was not a killer. She did not think him evil; she felt sympathy for him, not hate. And beneath it all was a kind of sadness, an acceptance of something inevitable that he did not understand.
Gently, she took the dagger from his hand, and with it cut away a curl of her blonde, tumbling hair. She pressed it into his palm.
‘Go back to your masters,’ she said quietly, the ravens stirring at her shoulder. ‘Begin what must be begun.’
Purloch drew a shuddering breath and bowed his head, still kneeling. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, humbled. And then he was gone, disappearing into the trees, with Lucia watching after and wondering what would come of what she had done.
FOUR
It was four days after the murder of her family that Kaiku was found. The one who discovered her was a young acolyte of the earth goddess Enyu, returning to the temple from a frustrating day of failed meditation. His name was Tane tu Jeribos.
He had almost missed her as he passed by, buried as she was under a drift of leaves at the base of a thick-boled kiji tree. His mind was on other things. That, he supposed, was the whole problem. The priests had taught him the theory behind attuning himself to nature, letting himself become blank and empty so he could hear the slow heart of the forest. Yes, he understood the theory well. It was just that putting it into practice was proving next to impossible.
You cannot feel the presence of Enyu and her daughters until you are calm inside. It was the infuriating mantra that Master Olec droned at him every time he became agitated. But how calm could he be? He had relaxed to the best of his ability, evacuated his mind of all the clutter, but it was never enough. Doubly frustrating, for he excelled at his other studies, and his masters were pleased with his progress. This lesson seemed to elude him, and he could not understand why.
He was turning over sullen thoughts in his mind when he saw the shape buried beneath the leaves. The sight made him jump. His first reaction was to reach for the rifle slung across his back. Then he saw what it was: a young woman, lying still. Cautiously he approached. Though he saw no threat from her, he had lived his whole life in the forests of Saramyr, and he knew enough to assume everything was dangerous until proven otherwise. Spirits took many forms, and not all of them were friendly. In fact, it seemed they were getting more and more hostile as the seasons glided by, and the animals grew wilder by the day.
He reached out and poked the girl in the shoulder, ready to jump back if she moved suddenly. When she did not respond, he shoved her again. This time she stirred, making a soft moan.
‘Do you hear me?’ he asked, but the girl did not reply. He shook her again, and her eyes flickered open: fevered, roving. She looked at him, but did not seem to see. Instead she sighed something incoherent, and murmured her way back to sleep again.
Tane looked around for some clue about her, but he could see nothing in the balmy evening light except the thick forest. She seemed starved, exhausted and sick. He brushed back her tangled brown hair and laid a hand on her forehead. Her skin burned. Her eyes moved restlessly beneath their lids.
As he was examining her, his hand brushed across the leaves that were covering her, and he paused to pick one up. It was fresh-fallen. In fact, all of them were. The tree had shed them on the girl as she lay, not more than half a day past. He smiled to himself. No tree-spirit would harbour an evil thing in such a way. He straightened and bowed.
‘Thank you, spirit of the tree, for sheltering this girl,’ he said. ‘Please convey my gratitude to your mistress Aspinis, daughter of Enyu.’
The tree made no response; but then, they never did. These were young trees, not like the ancient ipi. Barely aware, all but senseless. Like newborn children.
Tane gathered up the girl in his arms. She was a little heavier than he had expected, but by her lithe figure it was apparent that it was muscle and not fat. Though Tane was no great size himself, forest life had toughened him and tautened his own muscles, and he had no trouble carrying her. It was a short walk to the temple, and she did not wake.
The temple was buried deep in the forest, situated on the banks of the River Kerryn. The river flowed from the mountains to the north-east, winding through the heart of the Forest of Yuna before curving westward and heading to the capital. The building itself was a low, elegant affair, with little ostentation to overshadow the scenery all around. Temples to Enyu and her daughters were intentionally kept simple out of humility, except in the cities where gaudiness was a virtual prerequisite for a place of worship. It was decorated in simple shades of cream and white, supported by beams of black ash, artfully describing lines and perimeters across the structure. It was two storeys high, the second one built further back than the first to take advantage of the slant of the hill. Gentle invocations were inscribed in the henge-shaped frame of the main doors, picked out in unvarnished wood, a mantra to the goddess of nature that was as simple and peaceful as the temple itself. A prayer-bell hung above a small shrine just to one side of the doors, a cairn of stones with bowls of smouldering incense inside. Long-stemmed lilies and fruit were laid out on a ledge before an icon of Enyu: a carved wooden bear statuette, with one mighty paw circling a cub.
A curving bridge arced from one side of the Kerryn to the other. Carven pillars etched with all manner of bird, beast and fish sunk deep into the river bed. The river was a deep, melancholy blue, its natural transparency made doleful by the salts and minerals it carried down from the Tchamil Mountains. It threw back the sun in fins of purple-edged brightness, dappling the smooth underside of the bridge with an endless play of shifting water-light. The effect, intentionally, was that of calm and beauty and idyll.
Tane consulted with his masters, and an aged priest examined her. He concluded that she was starving and fevered, much as Tane had said, but there were no more serious afflictions. She would recover with care.
‘She is your responsibility,’ Master Olec told him. ‘See if you can keep your mind on something for a change.’
Tane knew Olec’s withered old tongue too well to be offended. He put her in a guest room on the upper storey. The room was spare and white, with a sleeping-mat in a corner beneath the wide, square windows. The shutters were locked open against the heat of oncoming summer. Like most windows in Saramyr, there was no need for glass – much of the year it was too hot, and shutters worked just as well against adverse weather.
As evening wore on to a dark red sunset, Tane brewed a tea of boneset, yarrow and echinacea for her fever. He made her sip and swallow it as hot as he dared, half a cup every two hours. She muttered and flinched, and she did not wake, but she did drink it down. He brought a bucket of cool water and mopped her brow,
cleaned her face and cheeks. He examined her tongue, gently holding her mouth open. He checked the flutter of her pulse at her throat and wrist. When he had done all he could, he settled himself on a wicker mat and watched her sleep.
The priests had undressed her – it was necessary to determine if she had suffered from poison thorns, insect bites, anything that might influence her recovery – and given her a sleeping-robe of light green. Now she lay with a thin sheet twined through her legs and resting on her ribs, pushed out of place by her stirrings. It was too hot to lie under anyway, especially with her fever, but Tane had been obliged to provide it out of respect for her modesty. He had cared for the sick before, young and old, male and female, and the priests knew it and trusted him. But this one interested him more than most. Where had she come from, and how had she got into the state she was in? Her very helplessness provoked in him the need to help her. She was incapacitated and utterly alone. The spirits knew what kind of ordeals she had gone through wandering in the forest; she was lucky even to be alive.
‘Who are you, then?’ he asked softly, fascinated.
His eyes ranged over the lines of her cheekbones, a little too pronounced now but they would soften with the return of her health. He watched her lips press together as she spoke half-formed dream-words. The light from outside began to fade, and still he stayed, and wondered about her.
The fever broke two days later, yet there was no immediate recovery. She had beaten the illness, but she had not overcome whatever it was that plagued her waking hours and haunted her dreams. For a week she was nearly catatonic with misery, unable to lift herself from the bed, crying almost constantly. Very little of what she said made sense, and the priests began to doubt her sanity. Tane believed otherwise. He had sat by her while she sobbed and raved, and the few fragments of what he could understand led him to the conclusion that she had suffered some terrible tragedy, endured loss such as no human should have to undergo.
He was excused from some of his less pressing duties while he cared for his patient, though there was little he could do for her now that she was physically well again. He made her eat, though she had no appetite. He prepared a mild sedative – a tincture of blue cohosh and motherwort – and gave it to her to gentle down some of her worse fits of grief. He made an infusion of hops, skullcap and valerian to put her to sleep at night. And he sat with her.
Then one morning, as he came into her room with a breakfast of duck eggs and wheatcakes, he found her at the window, looking out over the Kerryn to the trees beyond. Insects hummed in the morning air. He paused in the doorway.
‘Daygreet,’ he said automatically. She turned with a start. ‘Are you feeling better?’
‘You are the one who has been looking after me,’ she said. ‘Tane?’
He smiled slightly and bowed. ‘Would you like to eat?’
Kaiku nodded and sat down cross-legged on her mat, arranging her sleeping-robe about her. She had little recollection of the past two weeks. She could remember impressions, unpleasant moments of fright or hunger or sadness, but not the circumstances that attended them. She remembered this face, though: this bald, shaven head, those even, tanned features, the pale green eyes and the light beige robes he always wore. She had never imagined a young priest – to her, they had always been old and snappy, hiding their wisdom inside a shell of cantankerousness. This one had some of the air of gravity she usually associated with the holy orders, but she remembered moments of light-heartedness too, when he had made jokes and laughed at them himself when she did not. By his speech, she guessed he had come from a moderately affluent family, somewhere above the peasantry though probably still local. While he was educated, he was certainly not high-born. The complexities of the Saramyrrhic language meant it was possible to guess at a person’s origins simply by the way they used it. Tane’s speech was looser and less ruthlessly elocuted than hers.
‘How long has it been?’ she asked, as she slowly ate.
‘Ten days since we found you. You were wandering for some time before that,’ Tane replied.
‘Ten days? Spirits, it seems like it was forever. I thought it would never pass. I thought . . .’ She looked up at him. ‘I thought I could never stop crying.’
‘The heart heals, given time,’ Tane said. ‘Tears dry.’
‘My family are gone,’ she said suddenly. She had needed to say it aloud, to test herself, to see if she could. The words provoked no new pain in her. She had mastered her grief, sickened of it; though it had taken a long time, her natural wilfulness would not let her be kept down. Her sorrow had spent itself, and while she doubted it would ever leave her entirely, it would not swallow her again. ‘They were murdered,’ she added.
‘Ah,’ said Tane. He could not think of anything else to say.
‘The mask,’ she said. ‘I had a mask with me . . . I think.’
‘It was in your pack,’ said Tane. ‘It is safe.’
She handed her plate back to him, having eaten only a little. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For taking care of me. I would like to rest.’
‘It was my honour,’ he replied, getting up. ‘Would you like a tea to help you sleep?’
‘I do not think I will need it, now,’ she said.
He retreated to the door, but before he reached it he stopped.
‘I don’t know your name . . .’
‘Kaiku tu Makaima,’ came the reply.
‘Kaiku, there was someone you mentioned several times in your delirium,’ he said, turning his shoulder to look at her. ‘Someone you said was with you in the woods. Asara. Perhaps she is still—’
‘A demon killed her,’ Kaiku replied, her eyes on the floor. ‘She is gone.’
‘I see,’ Tane replied. ‘I’ll come back soon.’ And with that he left.
A demon killed her, Kaiku thought. And I am that demon.
She did rest for a time, for she was weakened by her ordeal. She felt more drained than she had ever thought it was possible to feel, more exhausted than she could ever remember. The feeling spurred a memory that she had not come across for months, a random jag of pain that emerged to worry at the fresh wound of her loss. She steeled herself against it. She would not forget. Some things were worth remembering.
It had been at Mishani’s summer house by the coast, where she and her brother Machim often stayed. They had always been competitive, and growing up with a brother had left her with some hopelessly unfeminine tendencies – one of which was a stubbornness that verged on mule-headed. One morning, she and Machim had become embroiled in their usual game of boasting who was better at what. The stakes were raised and raised until between them they had devised an endurance course involving archery, swimming, cliff-climbing, running and shooting that was far beyond the capacity of most athletes, let alone two youths who had rarely tasted hardship. Out of sheer unwillingness to concede, they both agreed to attempt it.
The archery they handled easily – they had to shoot ten arrows, and a bullseye meant that they could run down to the beach and swim across the bay to the cliffs. Machim succeeded before she did. The swimming was hard work, for she was trying to catch up with her brother and narrow his head start. She gained ground on the cliffs, but by now the ache in their bodies was evident, and their muscles were trembling. Machim was flagging badly, and he barely made it over the top before collapsing in a panting heap. Kaiku could have given up then and claimed the victory; but it was not enough for her. She began to run back along the cliff top to Mishani’s house, where they had set up a makeshift rifle range. Her body burned, her vision blurred, she wanted to be sick, but she would not let herself stop. She reached the house, but the effort of picking up the rifle was too much for her, and she fainted.
She was put to bed then, and until now she had never felt anything like the exhaustion she had experienced on that day. The challenge had taken everything out of her, and it seemed like there was barely enough left to go on surviving. Mishani chided her for her stubbornness. Her brother sneaked in and
congratulated her on her victory when nobody else was around.
But however bad that had been, this was worse. Her very soul felt exhausted, used up in the effort to expel the grief of her family’s death. She found that thinking of her brother now brought no tears, only a dull ache. Well, she could endure that, if she must.
It was not only the loss of her family that troubled her, however. It was the power . . . the terrible force that had claimed Asara’s life in the forest. Something had come from within her, something agonising and evil, a thing of raw destruction and flame. Was she a demon? Or had she one inside her? Could she even let herself be around other people, after what she had done to—
‘No,’ she said aloud, to add authority to her denial. It was useless to think that way. She had fled from the horror once already; now she had to face it. Whatever was the cause of Asara’s death, it would not be exorcised by hiding herself away from the world. Besides, it had shown no sign of reoccurring in the time since that first cataclysmic event. She felt a hard coil of determination growing inside her. Suddenly she resented the presence of this side of herself that she had never known before. She would understand it, learn about it, and destroy it if necessary. She would not carry around this unnamed evil for the rest of her life. She refused to.
Asara. She had been the key. She had spoke of a cause. They had been watching her father, hoping to persuade him to join them. And they had been watching her, for two whole years.
Mostly it was because of you, Kaiku. Your condition.
Condition? Could she have meant the cruel flame that took her life? How long had it slumbered inside her, then, since Asara had come to her two years before this condition ever manifested itself? She thought back to the circumstances that might have attended her arrival. One of her previous handmaidens had disappeared without word or warning, that was true. Was there anything suspicious in that? Not at the time – after all, she was only a servant – but in retrospect it made her uneasy. No, she had to think before that.
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil Page 4
