Grail of the Summer Stars (Aetherial Tales)

by Freda Warrington

  He looked up and saw gulls wheeling in the air currents, the only sign of life above the empty beach. His memories flickered, like a silent film projected onto fog—lives lived by someone else—yet he remembered everything.

  In a previous existence, he’d thought himself to be a man called Adam who’d endured a hundred years of suffering, ended by a cliff fall. Yet he hadn’t found death, exactly, but a sea change. So he wasn’t human after all. He was Aetherial, a creature of the Aelyr race.

  Only a few hours ago, he’d been rolling on the ocean bed at the tide’s mercy. His sense of being dead, yet aware and all-seeing, had seemed natural. It was said that the resting soul-essence of each Aelyr spread throughout space and time, and he believed it. He’d found peace.

  And then came the wrench. All the scattered parts of him rushed together and he surged back to life, fighting the cold weight of the ocean, exploding upwards through the foam into a world of violent sensation.

  Reborn in his true Aetherial form. Washed clean by the sea.

  A long swim from the ocean depths had drained him and his legs felt too heavy to bear him up. His eyes dazzled and stung. His heart labored, the raw air hurt his lungs … and yet it felt so good to be alive. He relished every sensation, even the wet cling of his clothes and the sea breeze drying salt on his skin. Mistangamesh stood poised on the threshold between land and sea, between surface world and Spiral, life and death.

  And there was no sign of Rufus.

  This was the first time he’d ever felt free of his eternal tormentor, his brother, Rufus Dionys Ephenaestus. For thousands of years they’d feuded, beginning in the lost glory of their Aetherial past and continuing through human history. Now, at last, he had the choice to walk away, vanish, never to see his brother’s beautiful, cruel face again. For a second or two, his heart soared.

  Mist pushed back dripping hair from his face and groaned.

  “Not free,” he said to the sky. “As long as Rufus is out in the world, it’s still my duty to find him and stop him.”

  The thought of his brother was vivid and hard-edged. Their eternal feud: sharp images of betrayal, blood and grief: obsession, tangled in coils of love and loathing … so much business unfinished. Every time Mist thought the game was over, it began again.

  Perhaps, he thought, this time on my terms.

  He turned and began to walk along the shore.

  * * *

  Reality bit as he found a steep path to take him up the cliffs. Aetheric energy and the altered reality of the Dusklands had cocooned him when he first rose from the tide. Now clouds obliterated the sunset and he felt winter in the bitter, salty wind.

  The climb brought him to a bleak landscape of hills coated with heather and stunted shrubs. All was grey. The ocean roared softly behind him. Ahead lay distant, dark lines of conifers.

  His awakening Aelyr senses suggested that he was still in Scotland, albeit many miles from where he had fallen and drowned. He had no urge to return to Cairndonan House, where, in mortal form, he had lived for a time. Cairndonan was in the past.

  He was different now. Someone new, yet ancient. And because Mist knew himself to be Aetherial, not human, he didn’t pause to worry that he was wet and frozen and looked like a shipwreck survivor, or that he had no money and no means of transport except his bare feet. He was above such concerns. He had strength enough simply to walk until he caught the skeins of Rufus’s aura.

  And where was Rufus? Was he still doggedly searching, or had he given up at last? The harsh truth was that he was bound to find Mist eventually. He always did.

  For that reason alone, Mist needed to find Rufus first. It wasn’t a question of revenge. His duty was a promise made thousands of years ago, a vow to halt Rufus’s endless rampage of destruction. If Mist did not try, no one would.

  Where to start? In the vast, darkening landscape he was lost, but if he kept the coastline on his right and kept walking, he would be traveling south, towards England and the big cities that Rufus had always loved.

  His brother could be anywhere by now. Paris, Vienna, Moscow—who knew? London was the obvious place to begin.

  Once he found Rufus, then he would know what to do next.

  Mist walked in a trance, suffering the shock of rebirth and not considering that a walk of five hundred miles or more was unrealistic, even for an Aetherial. How long had passed since they’d been together? It might have been days or months. Did Rufus actually believe him to be dead this time?

  Aetherials called themselves semi-mortal, since they couldn’t fathom the strange paths of their lives. If they were physically killed, the flesh might heal and return to life, but more often the soul-essence would flee the corpse and rest in elemental form for years or centuries. Some would gradually take on solid form again, while others would be literally reborn. One might even be born into a human family and not know any different, never awaken to his deeper self. Or he might morph into animal shape, or fade into the Otherworld. Nothing was predictable.

  Mist had experienced nearly all of those incarnations.

  Not many went on and on unchanged, as Rufus had.

  Let him believe I’m gone, thought Mist. I spent centuries trying to escape him. Was the effort all for nothing? Can I watch him like a spy, without him ever knowing I’m there? And if he’s still causing mischief … somehow I must avenge our father and mother, and all the countless others he has destroyed.

  Helena.

  When Mist’s way was blocked by a sea loch, he turned and walked inland until the waterway was narrow enough to swim across. Soaked again, he went onwards over rocks and heath. He had no need of food, rest or physical comfort. He was Aelyr, indestructible.

  Mountains rose on either side, their rounded snowy peaks vanishing into thick cloud. Presently he reached a narrow road that felt like iron beneath his feet. Freezing air blasted into his face and he was utterly alone amid the desolation. Keep moving. Nothing else matters.

  The long bitter night passed. When flat grey daylight returned he was still walking, like a machine. The asphalt was brutal but grass was worse, the blades so tough it was like stepping on tiny knives.

  Now and then a car roared past, startling him. As Mistangamesh, he’d lived in a time long before motor vehicles, but he also retained Adam’s more recent memories. So, although the world was strange, it wasn’t wholly unfamiliar.

  It didn’t occur to him to hitch a ride, but as a second evening fell, a huge truck rumbled to a halt beside him. A bearded driver in a red flannel shirt leaned towards the open window and called out amiably, “Hey, d’ye need a lift, pal? Where are you headed?”

  Mist’s face was so solid with cold that he could barely speak. The driver began to frown. At last he forced out the words, “Anywhere. South. London.”

  “London?” The driver gave a gruff laugh. “Ye’ll be lucky. I can take ye tae Carlisle.”

  As Mist climbed in, the driver stared in shock and asked what the devil had happened to him. He struggled to find an answer. Somehow his cool, Aelyr self found the words. “It’s a long story. I got lost, and caught in the sleet.”

  The driver put the truck into gear and it moved off with a deep, shuddering growl. “Your car broken down? Anyone needing help back there?”

  “No, only me.”

  “You English tourists!” the driver exclaimed, as if this explained everything. “Ye wouldnae believe the idiots who go mountain-walking in the middle of bloody winter! Ye sure you’re okay?”

  Mist affirmed that he was and the man shrugged, accepting his word. The cab was stifling hot, the air rank with diesel, sweat and stale food. Mist sat staring out through the windshield, watching sheets of rain being swept away into a clear semicircle by the wiper blades, again and again.

  The driver—a big man, blunt and easygoing—showed no sign of being offended by his silence. When Mist offered no reason for walking barefoot in the middle of nowhere, the driver constructed his own explanation—that he’d fought with his wife or
girlfriend, and she’d thrown him out of the car on a highland pass to make his own way back to civilization. “Either that, or you got lost up a mountain and you’re too embarrassed tae admit it!”

  Mist said nothing to contradict him. Amused by his own tale, the driver produced a lunch box and offered him half an egg-and-bacon sandwich. Mist ate without appetite, accepted a drink from a bottle of fizzy orange liquid. The taste was chemically sweet and revolting, yet he felt better after a few sips. He’d needed food after all.

  He fell asleep for a time, but memories kept jolting him awake, like electric shocks.

  The driver tuned the radio to a talk station. Several commentators hotly debated restoring the death penalty for murder. After a while, Mist found himself asking softly, “Do you believe in the death penalty?”

  “Oh, aye,” said the driver. “Hang the bastards! Cut down on the prison population. Me, I’d have ’em taken out the courtroom and shot.”

  “How many crimes, though? How many last chances do you give them?”

  “What? One’s enough. One strike and you’re out, eh?”

  “But when it’s been going on so long, you’ve lost count … and you’re dealing with someone who can’t die … What’s the worst crime? Wiping out a whole civilization? Or a single, cruel killing, for the hell of it?”

  “Och, I don’t know. That’s what war crimes tribunals are for. However many murders he’s committed, you can only hang the bastard once.”

  “Rufus didn’t mean me to die. I don’t think he meant Helena to die, either, but he didn’t care.” As Mist’s thoughts unspooled, he barely realized he was saying them out loud. “Yes, he drove himself mad with guilt for centuries, trying to bring me back to life again. But I didn’t want to come back. It’s because he didn’t care about her that I can’t forgive him. She was human, truly dead forever. And Rufus never got it.”

  The driver turned up the radio, an unsubtle hint that Mist’s rambling was interfering with his concentration.

  Mist murmured on, “I meant to stay in elemental form, so that Rufus could never touch me again. But I came back as a human—I don’t know how, strange things happen to us that we can’t control—and for years I thought I was a man called Adam Montague. Adam had two sisters who loved him. He wanted to be a priest, but instead he got sent to the trenches and witnessed all his friends killed in the mud around him … and he was never well again. Then Rufus came, and saw Adam, and kidnapped him. He inflicted ninety years of torture, as he tried to wake up poor Adam and turn him back into me.”

  Mist sighed, rubbed his forehead. “He couldn’t do it. Only the sea could do it. What Adam’s disappearance did to his family—that’s another story. But Rufus enjoyed their pain. How can you reason with someone like that?”

  Mist was half-aware that the driver was giving him alarmed sideways looks. “Hey, why don’t you take a wee doze? Long road yet, and you’re nae making a lotta sense. Tired and cold will do that.”

  “What would you do,” he asked, undeterred, “if this monster, this war criminal and murderer, was your brother?”

  “Ma brother?”

  “Would you give him up to the police? Would you still want him taken out and shot?”

  “Man, that’s deep. Family’s different.”

  “Is it? So would you protect him? You know he’s a lost cause, but part of you still loves him … but if he’s hurt people you love?”

  “Well, that’d be different. Say if he’d hurt ma wife or bairns, I’d kill him with ma bare hands.”

  “So if you knew he was guilty, but the courts let him go free and he vanished—would you let him go, or hunt him down?”

  “This conversation’s doing my head in, pal. Reach behind your seat; there’s an old jacket and boots. They’re a wee bit skanky, but you take ’em. Better than walking around in rags.”

  Mist found the items; the jacket, once green, was grey and oil-stained, the boots stiff with age, yet to him they were a priceless gift. “Thank you.”

  “All the thanks I want is for you to shut up, because I’ve zero patience with hitchhikers’ weird life stories. Okay?”

  Mist stared out into the sleet. The road grew broader, traffic increasing. In the distance, city lights sparkled like a lake of stars cupped within bleak surrounding hills. Weird? No, the driver misunderstood because he didn’t know Mist was Aetherial, didn’t know what he’d been through.

  “Sometimes I’m so angry with Rufus that I could strangle him, but that’s emotion, not justice. To be honest, he still frightens me. But that’s Adam’s fear, not mine. All I ask is the wisdom to deal fairly with him when I find him. I don’t know how humans experience death, but for me it was a sudden striking out of existence, like a curtain falling midscene in a play. Then waking up somewhere dim, peaceful and strange … peaceful until the memories come back, because you know it’s too late to change anything. I can’t leap back in time to prevent the horrors happening. It’s like being severed. First from my true self, three, four hundred years ago? And severed again from being Adam. But you wake up again and the journey goes on.”

  “No fer much longer,” the driver muttered.

  Mist paused, remembering Adam’s beloved sisters, who’d devoted their lives and sanity to searching for him after he’d been abducted by Rufus. They were long dead. And he thought of those who’d helped him when he’d escaped after decades of captivity. Juliana Flagg, the artist who’d inherited Cairndonan House, her niece Gill and their scarlet-haired friend Peta … Mist smiled sadly at the memories. He couldn’t go back, because Cairndonan was in the past and he was someone different now. Had they grieved for Adam at all?

  Had Rufus left them alive?

  Mist’s breathing quickened. The cab’s heat was suffocating and he began wrenching at a handle, trying to crack the window. Instead, the door came open.

  The driver braked, bringing the truck to a violent halt at the side of the road. “All right, pal, that’s it. I cannae take ye any further. Get out.”

  “What?”

  “You’re too weird, even for me! We’re nearly in Glasgow. Last stop before I hit the motorway. Ye can get help here, and man, do you need it. Guid luck, pal.”

  Shaken, Mist thanked him, obediently climbed down from the cab and resumed his walk under the vast grey sky. His feet throbbed inside the ill-fitting boots. The jacket stank, giving bare protection from the wind. Dimly he was aware of gnawing hunger, but he didn’t fight his bodily discomfort, any more than he’d questioned how mad his rambling must have sounded to the driver. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t understand.

  All around him were concrete roads roaring with vehicles. The cityscape was festooned with long ropes of metal, and ugly buildings poured smoke or steam into the sky. Wild hills were still visible in the far distance as he walked into the heart of the city. Mist ignored the exhaustion that was beginning to overwhelm him. His thoughts dissolved into a waking dream, in which roads became murky canals. At some point, he fell.

  A huge deafening sound awoke him. It was like an earthquake above, filled with the rattle and squeal of metal. He found himself lying on cold damp concrete beneath the arch of a railway bridge. Weak street lighting spilled into the darkness.

  “Are ye awright, mate?”

  A grizzled face peered into his, sour alcohol fumes wafting from a snaggle-toothed mouth. The accent, slurred, was almost impenetrable.

  Mist’s first thought was that the old man was after money. Laughing weakly, he tried to pull out the linings of his pockets to show he had nothing. The vagrant stayed his hand, making gravel-voiced protests. “Nae, what, ye think Ah’m going tae rob ye? Wait. Wait. You stay there. Ah’m going tae call the ambulance.”

  This was unreal. Mist’s voice emerged as a faint rasp. “No. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m looking for…”

  “You’re no druggie or alky, that’s plain as day,” the man whispered. Mist realized that his rescuer wasn’t old after all; no more than forty. “There’s
a light around ye. Ah know the hidden folk when I see one. God strike me down dead if I don’t get ye some help.”

  * * *

  Mist dreamed that he stood on the edge of the world. Islands rose like grey walls from the ocean; beyond, there lay no land between him and the coast of North America, only thousands of miles of sea and sky.

  Next he was walking. Endlessly walking.

  Rows of town houses loomed on either side of a canal. Venice? Trees lined the banks and there were cobbles beneath his feet … No, not Venice. Amsterdam. He was going to meet someone and it was urgent. Helena. He would take flowers to her, tulips like soft bright cups of paint, red and peach and bright yellow.

  Mist saw multiple images. First he watched the human thread of Adam’s memories, like images flickering on a spool of film: two beloved sisters who were long gone; mud and blood and shell-fire all around him, a bullet entering his gut … then a long nightmare of abduction into the Otherworld by Rufus and his heartless, beautiful friends, held prisoner while Rufus tried every technique of pleasure or pain he could devise to make Adam admit he was really Mistangamesh Poectis Ephenaestus. After he escaped, he enjoyed a short time of safety until Rufus came after him once more … and then the bullet completed its journey. It tore through his body and sent him plummeting into the waves.

  The memory of Rufus’s face—passionate, obsessive, devoid of empathy—sent shivers through him. So close … yet they couldn’t reach each other.

  Time meant little in the Otherworld, but it meant everything on Earth. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Mistangamesh was hurrying along the canalside towards Helena’s house. He was panicking in pure terror as if the world was collapsing.

  His memories wound back in time. He recalled a nightmare, in which his sister was trapped in a strange house and calling his name, but he could never find her … What came before that? A gulf of darkness. He was staring down a tunnel of whispering phantoms. A point of golden light shone at the far end but he dared not look too hard. Seeing would be like diving into the sun.