by David Wind
Next to Enaid, Roth looked at Mikaal and Areenna and paused between bites of food to point at three rolled sheaths sitting on the side table. “Those maps will lead you to the Island that was, thousands of years ago, the commercial center of the entire free world. It was the very first target of those who destroyed our world. It was a terrible thing.”
He took a drink before saying in a thoughtful voice, “Follow the maps closely. Try to stay within the routes I have marked. When you leave the dominion of Aldimore and enter the wastelands, tread carefully. It is wild country, left as such because of the destruction. It was the area hit the worst by the radiation that changed men and women into what we are today. But while most fled the area, there were many who did not. And there are still people there—if you choose to call them such—but they resemble nothing you are familiar with. Their mutations are different from ours. Their changes are physical as well as mental, and like those in the border lands, many of them are the minions of the evil from across the sea. Never forget this, not for one moment!”
Both Mikaal and Areenna nodded at Roth.
“We are asking a lot of you, more than we or anyone has the right to ask.”
“No, Sire,” Areenna cut in quickly. “You are High King. It is your right to ask anything and it is our duty to do our best to accomplish whatever it is you ask of us.” From the corner of her eyes, she saw her father nod. The proud look on his face helped mask the deep worry she saw in his eyes.
“And while your words find a home within my heart, it saddens me to have had to ask this of you two. I would prefer it be I who goes to the East, but there is no choice and I tremble for what awaits you.”
“Rest easier,” Mikaal said, reaching cross the table to cover his father’s hand with his own. “We will do what we must and return when it is time.”
Before Roth could respond, Enaid said in a sharp tone, “Cockiness will not work well where you go.”
Mikaal gazed into his mother’s eyes, his own eyes wide. “You misunderstand, Mother, it is far from cockiness. I cannot explain exactly what it is, but when we work together, Areenna and I become…something else.”
Enaid did not respond, instead she used a silver fork to lift a berry slowly from her plate to her mouth.
“There is one more thing,” Roth said. He looked at his wife and then at Mikaal and Areenna. “No one must learn of your powers, at least not yet. No man has ever had the powers you possess. When the people learn of this, there will be great danger. You will represent something fearful. And Mikaal, who you are…it will change our world. No one must know,” he repeated.
As if his warning was a signal, all five fell silent. They finished their meal, each lost in thought about what would happen when Mikaal and Areenna left Tolemac.
<><><>
“There’s a comfortable inn a few miles away,” Mikaal said only half in jest.
Areenna shook her head. “You know better. Besides, what would be the point of wearing these capes and hoods? The moment we enter the inn you would be recognized.”
“True, but after seven hours upon these monsters,” he said, slapping the side of his kraal’s neck affectionately, “a bed would be more welcome than the ground.”
She looked over her shoulder at the retiring sun, sat higher in the saddle and closed her eyes. A moment later she smiled and said, “Gaalrie has found us a nice spot to camp. This way,” she said and, guiding her kraal from the road, entered the edge of the forest. Soon, they were a quarter mile into the woods.
Areenna brought them to where the trees gave way to a small and pleasant clearing. A narrow stream bisected its edges, which were covered with soft, mossy grass. Although the trees surrounding the clearing were not thick, they would prevent anyone further than twenty or so yards from spotting the fire for their evening meal.
“This will do nicely,” Mikaal said, dismounting and kneeling on the soft grasses. “And it will be comfortable.”
Areenna laughed. “Only two days and we will be in Morvene. You can have a bed then.”
“True. But for now we should set up camp.”
Agreeing, they unsaddled their kraals. Using three panels of the woven silks rolled on the backs of their saddles, they created a lean-to with several large branches Mikaal had separated from the trees. After the set-up, Mikaal said, “I will hunt for dinner.”
Areenna smiled. “What would the prince like for dinner? A dar? A rabt?”
Mikaal’s eyebrows lifted. “Ah, the conjurer. Well even as hungry as I am, a dar is too much food. Perhaps a plump rabt will do.”
Areenna laughed gently. “As you wish.” She closed her eyes and said, “Your training starts now.” She reached out and took his hand. “Join me.”
With a deep breath, she drew him into her mind and at the same time, sent a thought to Gaalrie, creating a mind picture of the animal for Gaalrie to find. The vision of the rabt grew strong; its white and red fur glowed from the tips of its long ears to the long furry tail and powerful hind legs and thick front legs.
Find—Bring, was her direction to Gaalrie.
With Mikaal firmly anchored in her mind, she watched the treygone hunt for a rabt through the aoutem’s eyes. Five minutes after starting her search, the giant bird’s sharp eyes spotted one climbing out of its warren. Ten seconds later the rabt was being lifted from the ground, its neck broken.
During Gaalrie’s return, Areenna and Mikaal started gathering firewood. “That was strange,” Mikaal ventured, “seeing things through the eyes of a treygone, I never imagined…”
“It takes some getting used to, but it is important. You did not have the opportunity to have an aoutem. The time passed and you were unaware.”
“Had I been aware, how could I do so? It would be too obvious.”
“But if you had told your mother, she would have—”
“—smothered me, hidden me, and not allowed me to become myself.”
Areenna laughed openly. “So you think.”
“So I know, little princess. My mother has always been overprotective. My father and I had to sneak away in order to do things she did not approve of.”
“Things?”
“Training—physical training, sword, arrow, spear.”
“Why would she feel that way? It is the way life has always been. Men always train physically.”
“When I was not yet seven?”
“Oh…” Areenna said. Male training, like female training, started at the end of school. Before school, all children were educated in letters and groomed to be fit and athletic, but weaponry training did not begin until the fourteenth year—hunting, yes; fighting, no. It had become a tradition centuries before, when the people recognized how immature bodies were not equipped with the reflexes needed for self-protection during weapons training. The time needed to build the proper coordination and mental agility was something to be groomed during the pre-adolescent years when young male children were taught games to develop their dexterity.
As a result—and properly so, thought Areenna—the education in letters and in athletics became the earliest part of training. Once the coordination was mature and the mind as well, weapons training began in earnest. Over the centuries, the people had learned that when training was followed properly, boys matured into extraordinarily powerful fighters, soldiers, commanders, and kings.
A call warned her of Gaalrie’s approach. The treygone descended from the sky to lay the rabt at Areenna’s feet before ascending to a nearby tree branch.
Ten minutes later the rabt was cleaned and spitted above the fire while Areenna and Mikaal sat to one side. “The way you ordered Gaalrie to hunt was…interesting.”
Areenna looked into his deep gray eyes, trying to think of the best way to explain what she did. “I never order Gaalrie to do anything. It is not done in such a way. If I command her, she will not necessarily follow it. Did you not feel the asking I did?”
Mikaal shook his head.
“While I built my mind pictur
e, I also sent a little ‘push’. It was of an asking rather than an ordering, like so,” she said and pushed a mind picture of Mikaal holding a piece of wood he had been about to add to the fire. She ‘asked’ him to throw the piece behind him, and he nodded and started to do so. “No,” she said aloud. “Hold.”
Mikaal, his arm halfway back, stopped and stared at it. “You can tell people what to do?”
Areenna moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “No. But because you and I now have a connection, I was able to show you. Do you understand what I did?”
“I think I do. You…suggest, not order, but not really ask.”
“I suppose suggest is a better word,” Areenna agreed.
“But it doesn’t matter for me. I have no aoutem.”
“Animals and birds can be ‘touched’ even if it is not your aoutem. But it is not as solid a connection.”
Areenna turned the rabt and rose to her feet. “Come, let us take a walk.”
“To train?”
She nodded. “Watch, take in what I do, try to open yourself, but speak not.”
<><><>
Sitting near the fire, two hours after they had finished eating, Areenna gazed into the cloudless night sky. The array of stars was so intense it looked like thousands of tiny jewels sparkling upon a deep blanket.
“That group there,” Mikaal said, breaking into her reverie, “is called Orion”.
Areenna’s brow knitted. “Orion?”
“In my father’s time, before he left the earth, they had names for the groupings of stars. He calls them constellations. So the constellation…there,” he said, raising his arm and pointing at a grouping of stars, “is called Orion, and is made of several stars.” His finger shifted and pointed to the upper stars. “Those two stars are the shoulders, and the three bright ones in the middle are called Orion’s belt. The ones below, there and there,” he added, pointing to two stars below the belt, “are the feet, if you will.”
Areenna followed each movement of his fingers, studying the stars to which he pointed. His words fascinated her for she had never thought about putting names to the pinpoints of light she looked at each night.
“And there,” he added, shifting her view toward the north, “that bright star, the brightest in the night—you know it as the Northern Guide—is the beginning of what is called the Little Dipper, those seven stars. Do you see?”
She squinted at the stars Mikaal was describing. It took a few seconds for her eyes to recognize the pattern, but when she did, she saw the curve of a handle and then the cup of a water dipper. “Yes,” she said as the sky revealed itself as never before. She saw the little dipper and below it, the same pattern revealed itself in an even larger way. “There is another beneath it.”
“Yes,” Mikaal exclaimed, “the Big Dipper. Now look a little more to the left. There is another star, almost as bright as the Northern Guide. My father says in another two thousand or so years, the star, Alpha Cephi, will become the Northern Guide. It is in the constellation Cepheus.
Areenna shifted and lay back. She cradled her head in the palms of both hands and stared upward. “You are teaching me even as I teach you.”
Mikaal assumed the same position. “Have you thought much about what is ahead?”
“How can I when I have no idea what we seek?”
“How can you not?”
“Perhaps it is because I need to focus my energy on you. We have, at most, two weeks to give you years of training. Is that not reason enough?”
“Not really.”
“I… It will have to be,” she stated and rolled over and pushed herself up. “Time for sleep.”
Mikaal watched her walk into the woods for privacy and then to the stream, where she knelt at the edge and dipped her hands into the running water and rinsed her face before drinking some of the cool liquid.
Returning from the stream, she went to the lean-to, dropped the silk for privacy, and changed out of her traveling clothes and into a lighter coverall. “Are you going to sleep or stare at the sky all night,” she asked him.
“Stare for a while. Have a pleasant sleep.”
She nodded at him, opened her sleeping silks and slid between their welcoming embrace. Turning on her side, she was asleep a half minute later.
Mikaal watched until he was certain she slept and then gathered more firewood. He set a small amount on the fire and piled the rest for the morning before he, too, used the woods for a toilet and washed his hands and face in the stream.
When he climbed into his sleeping silks, he turned to Areenna. Her face was calm and her breathing even and he thought, not for the first time, how strong she was both in mindset and in body, and how beautiful: her hair was the color of winter wheat and her skin a soft tan. But he knew he had to hide such thoughts from her for it might interfere with the training he so badly needed. Yet, unlike Areenna’s seeming nonchalance, he was curious about what would happen when they reached the East. Curious yet at the same time fretful. His apprehension was not about the fighting that might lie ahead; rather it centered more on what was or was not within the grasp of his strange abilities and of what Areenna’s part was in bringing about those abilities.
With those thoughts, he fell asleep.
<><><>
The moon floated low in the sky: dawn was only a few hours away. The meadow Areenna and Mikaal slept within was quiet. Charka stood twenty feet from the lean-to, half asleep half alert. In the tree above the kraal rested the giant treygone, its long, thin, and tightly feathered tail wrapped around the branch, the bird’s sharp talons locked on its thickness, her wings folded neatly on her back. Treygones slept in snatches—a genetic trait for species preservation. No matter how large or fierce a treygone was, it had many enemies. At this moment Gaalrie was awake, her eyes fixed on the lean-to where Areenna slept. Something had disturbed the treygone, but she wasn’t yet sure of what.
A chill washed across the meadow; a dark cloud appeared above. Not a second later did the kraal, Charka, lift its head and snort sharply. He shifted and pawed at the ground. Behind him, Areenna’s kraal whinnied and backed away even as the larger kraal started toward the lean-to.
Gaalrie spread her wings and released her hold on the branch just as Charka charged the lean-to. Charka stopped three feet from the silks and reared on his back legs. An instant later it slammed its front hooves downward and let go with what could only pass as a groaning scream.
On the ground where the kraal’s front hooves had struck the earth was a ten foot long, thick-bodied snuck. Its pointy head and undulating body slithered toward the lean-to. The kraal rose again and slammed his hooves downward, catching the last foot of the snuck beneath a front hoof.
The snuck whirled, its head raising upward, its mouth open and baring four inch long fangs, its body arched. Venom dripped from the fang’s tips as it prepared to strike the kraal while Charka rose for another attack.
Before Charka could swing downward, before the snuck could uncoil at the kraal’s underbelly, Gaalrie launched herself at the snuck. The powerful beak set within her dragon-like head caught the snuck behind its head and sliced it from the rest of its body just as the kraal’s front hooves crushed the center of the body of the poisonous reptile.
<><><>
Areenna and Mikaal awakened instantly at the kraals’ first warning, throwing off their silks and racing out of the lean-to, Mikaal’s long-sword in his hand. Areenna gripped her short sword.
They stopped short when they saw Charka pawing at the snuck and Gaalrie standing on the ground not two feet from the kraal, the head of the snuck lying at her feet.
Recognizing what had happened, Areenna looked at Gaalrie and then at the kraal. She stared at the large kraal for several seconds before walking to it and stroking its long neck. As she did, she became aware of the kraal in a vastly different way and grasped what had really happened.
She turned to say something to Mikaal, but stayed silent as he scooped the snuck’s body upwa
rd with his sword to look at it. When Mikaal flung the body away, Areenna looked at Gaalrie. The treygone stared back and then Areenna went to her and knelt. She stroked Gaalrie’s head with her fingertips.
When she made physical contact, she read the bird’s emotions and got a mind picture of the kraal attacking the snuck. When she released Gaalrie, the treygone arched its wings and rose to the branch it had been perching upon.
Areenna looked at the sky and the remnants of the dark cloud breaking apart. She pushed her senses upward, as Enaid had trained her to do when she’d first started Areenna’s training, seeking what might be there. Something cold and dark and vile retreated when she touched it.
Her stomach twisted when she recognized the evil. It was the same as she had faced two days before.
“What?” Mikaal asked, breaking into her thoughts.
“They know.”
“Who knows?”
She met his questioning eyes and said, “They do, the dark ones—the one we fought.”
“How can that be?”
“I have no answer, but be assured, it was controlling the snuck.”
“Then we were lucky to have Charka and Gaalrie.” With that, he went to the pile of wood and began to rebuild the fire. “I think sleep is over for the night. We should start early.”
Areenna looked at the snuck’s head near her right foot. “I agree, sleep is done.”
<><><>
When dawn rose, bringing deep pinkish bands along the eastern horizon, they were dressed and eating the remnants of last night’s dinner.
“Was your kraal from the Tolemac herd?” Areenna asked Mikaal.
Mikaal shook his head. “No, Charka was wild. I found him caught within brambles, three years ago.”
“And he let you free him?”
“Yes,” he said and told Areenna the story of how he’d found and freed the kraal. When he finished, Areenna closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, she smiled. “That was a wonderful story.”
