Journeyman: The Force of the Gods: Part I

by Tuson, Mark

  ‘You will understand,’ he said, without any of the pomp or formality of a few moments ago. ‘You can get dressed and have something to eat. But you’ll be under guard all the time –‘

  He didn’t have a chance to finish, because Peter punched him in the face which made his hand go numb. ‘You twat,’ he said. ‘What the fuck kind of trial is this? Or is it some perverted tradition?’ He went to punch the Steward in the face again, but one of the guards caught his fist, giving him a sensation of extreme heat as though he had immersed his hand in molten lead.

  The Steward ignored the spot of blood forming at the corner of his mouth and continued, in a more clipped tone. ‘You will be under guard all the time. You will be sent through a portal to an island which the Guild owns and manages. This does not mean you will be safe. It only means that you will have chances to find ways to survive.’ He then walked away.

  Peter had a sudden sense that he had nearly cost himself this chance, and was struck by a wholesale shipment of remorse and guilt. But it was the Guild’s fault: they had woken him up abruptly and brought him here to stand trial, and frankly he didn’t give two tin shits whether it was a genuine trial or a tradition. It was a pain in the arse and it was humiliating. He hadn’t even been given a chance to get dressed, and they had done this to him.

  He was escorted back to his room, where he went to dress in what seemed most practical, though he knew that whatever he wore would probably not survive, even if he did. He settled on the same jeans and shirt he had been wearing when Eric had first found him, that evening three years before. He was then escorted to the refectory where he ate the same breakfast he usually ate, and was then taken to the entrance of the Guild.

  The same people were waiting there as had been at his trial, standing in a horseshoe with the Steward at the head. The two guards stood next to him, one on either side, and the open end of the horseshoe closed around them to form a circle, with Peter and the Steward standing opposite one another.

  ‘Peter Iain Rutherford, you have accepted the judgment against you. What have you to say before it is executed?’

  Peter was still angry, and he wanted to make a point. He stepped forward and smirked around at everyone.

  ‘Fuck you.’ He gambolled through the portal, determined not to let anyone see how thoroughly terrified he was.

  Almost as soon as he had stepped forward, he was somewhere else, surrounded by young trees.

  ‘Well,’ he said loudly. ‘That’s that.’

  The gentle breeze floating through the trees dropped a sycamore leaf on his shoulder in reply. The effect of the sudden and total solitude was immediate and immersive. There was nobody here, let alone anyone who might give a dam whether he lived or died.

  He stood around for a good ten minutes, partly getting used to the feeling, and partly not knowing what else to do. Eventually, he set about thinking about what he needed to do to survive. With a terrifying start, he realized that nobody had given him the knife he had been promised; he would need that for making some other basic tools, but then he felt a lump in his pocket which must have been it: one of the guards must have slipped it into his jeans pocket while they were so roughly moving him between one place and the next. He took it out of his pocket. Nothing fancy: an Opinel No. 8, with its distinctive red beech handle and blade marked ‘INOX.’

  He walked off in no particular direction, with a view to finding water. Once he had found a brook or a river, he would have water. Even if he found the edge of the island he might be able to purify the water, somehow. Once he had water, he would set about building a dwelling there.

  As he walked, the Sun was growing hotter, and he was growing ever-more grateful for the canopy of leaves overhead. The only sounds he heard were his own footsteps in the earth as he walked, and the breeze, and the birds. He watched the trees as he walked, hoping to find a straight and knotless branch to use to make a wand, but while all of these trees were young, they were old enough to have very few young shoot-like branches that might be suitable.

  A branch with knots might be useable, he supposed, but that wasn’t the point: for a wand to work properly he would need to be able to get to know the grain of the wood intimately very quickly, and knots made for a lot of grain that his magical sense would have to spend a lot of time following and learning how to make connections through. All-in-all, it would be prohibitively difficult.

  It took him a little over an hour to find the edge of the island, with a narrow beach at the edge of the wood, down a small cliff, where the trees and their roots abruptly ended, and the earth had been washed away. Standing on the precipice, he could see that the island was large, and apparently out at sea: nothing was visible over the horizon except endless water. The beach here was very slightly concave, and he could see a few bamboo-like reeds on the other side of the curve. He wondered idly for a moment if a piece taken from between the knots of a reed would be suitable for making a wand.

  He supposed not; it was hollow. It might, however, be suitable for making a two-stick, which would be a good start. He might possibly even be able to enchant a piece of it to use as a straw to magically purify water to drink.

  The cliff was maybe twenty feet straight down, and under it were a few large flat rocks and a patch of wet sand. He looked left and right to see if there was a way to climb down. There wasn’t. His only option would be to jump. His heart began to hammer at the thought, and he was scared sick of hurting himself if he landed wrong. But there would be no other way to get down, unless he wanted to fart around trying to find vines to make a rope.

  He stepped closer and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath in a vain attempt to calm and steel himself. He jumped.

  As he landed his left foot gave way and he collapsed sideways, hitting his head on one of the flat rocks. His head spun sickeningly and he swallowed back a strong urge to vomit. After giving himself a few minutes to recover himself a little, he carefully sat up and then stood up, focusing on the bamboo a hundred or so yards away.

  There was no canopy of leaves here, and Peter rapidly grew very hot. By the position of the Sun in the sky, it must have been coming to around midday. He groaned: he had been here less than two hours and already he had fallen and hurt himself, was hot, sweaty, and thirsty. This was not going to be a very good year, and for the first time he actually took seriously the notion that he might die during this exile.

  He reached the reeds and cut one down with his knife. It was around seven feet long, and he cut it into sections, using the knots as dividing marks: each piece was between a third and a half of an inch thick, and between nine and fifteen inches long. Except for one, he then slipped all the sections into one of his pockets.

  The piece he still had in his hand, he split into four flattish lengths, and evened them a little with his knife. Then, holding them tight together, attempted to cast a small spell with them, using them as a two-stick: a spell to make one of the other pieces levitate slightly for a few seconds.

  Having to hold the sticks together made it difficult to cast with his improvised two-stick, but it was better than nothing: now he had a means to cast simple spells. He took one of the other bamboo tubes out of his pocket and poked the pith out of it with one of the thinner sticks, and rested it on the sand, kneeling over it as he slowly and carefully began his attempt to make a purifying straw out of it.

  He was working on the fly, with a tool that was very far from ideal, but Peter had an idea how the spell might work and how he might implement it. After spending ten minutes planning and polishing, he spent nearly half an hour casting, getting it wrong, scrubbing it all, and starting over. Eventually, however, he was confident that it had worked, and he went to the edge of the sand to test it.

  Leaning over the edge, he put one end of the straw into the water and one into his mouth, and sucked. The water tasted clean enough; at any rate it didn’t taste salty. He drank desperately for a moment, and then remembered himself and stopped. He stood up and slid the straw into a
nother pocket, so as to know it was that one – and not one of the others –with which it was safe to drink.

  He knew he needed to find food as well, which would be a bit more of a problem because he wasn’t entirely sure what kinds of plants grew here other than the trees he had already seen, and none of those were fruit-bearing trees. Likewise, he didn’t know what kinds of animals would live here, which meant he may have to resort to catching fish from the sea. In a way, he was excited by the idea, but he also appreciated that it wasn’t just going to be a couple of weeks that he was going to be here.

  He started to walk around the island. He found a way back up the cliff soon enough, and as he walked he kept his eyes open for anything that might be viable as a food: he was now getting to the point of feeling hunger rather than just accepting its inevitability.

  There wasn’t much he could find right at that moment, however, and it was going to start getting dark soon. Just as he didn’t know what he might use for food, he didn’t know what might come out at night. Food would have to wait until morning; if nothing else there would be fish in the sea. In the meantime, however, he needed some kind of shelter: there were vague noises in the growing night and he didn’t particularly want to find out what they were.

  Never before had Peter known fear like this. Not long-term fear; the closest he had ever come to this before was in his old life, when letters came from the bank telling him he didn’t have any money – a sort of “what am I going to do” feeling with a little “shit, I’m going to be dead by morning” thrown in.

  He stood still, looking around: no more progress was to be made moving around than standing and gathering his thoughts. He wondered if he might be able to make a few crude walls out of branches, and spun on the spot slowly, looking for any branches that might be long enough. He was feeling weak with hunger now, and his fear was getting a deeper grip on him, but he had to make sure he was going to be safe before anything else.

  There was another sound, much closer. It sounded like something between a howl and a scream, and in a fraction of a moment all thoughts of food and shelter were driven out of Peter’s mind: he broke into a sprint. As soon as he saw one that looked suitable, he climbed up a tree as high as he could, and stayed there.

  Peter didn’t sleep at all that night. When dawn broke, the combined sleep-deprivation and hunger made him feel as though he might faint at any moment. In fact, he wasn’t convinced that he hadn’t already, for a few seconds at least. He felt cold and scared, the same feeling he had had before, when he had been ill as a child.

  Eventually he convinced himself that there wasn’t anything waiting for him at the bottom of the tree, and he slowly began to lower himself out of the branches to the ground. The air was still and cold, but it had a heaviness, which suggested it was going to be hot, like it had been yesterday.

  He made his way back to the beach to get a drink of water, and while he was there he decided to see if he could find some fish to eat. He knew of a spell that might help him see small lifeforms such as fish, and another that might make it slightly easier to catch them, but he wasn’t entirely sure of how effectively he could cast them in his current state of sleep-deprivation.

  Maybe this time he would have to do it the old-fashioned way. So, after stumbling to a low-hanging branch a few tens of yards before reaching the cliff, he hacked a branch off what looked like some kind of pine tree with his knife, and sharpened one end to a point.

  ‘Rough, but it’ll have to do for now,’ he said to himself.

  He walked slowly, allowing himself to lean a little on his improvised spear as he hobbled along the cliff and looked for a gentler slope he could walk or slide down.

  After a few minutes, he found a place where he could slide down on his backside, and when he had he made straight for the water. He threw himself prostrate before the water and drew his straw from his pocket, and drank as though he might never drink again. He hadn’t even known he was this thirsty.

  When he felt like he had drunk enough, he sat up. He was going to have to go in, now, and look for fish. He took off his jeans and shoes and left them on the beach.

  It took him most of the day to find anything. By the time it was starting to grow dark again, he had only found a handful of small fish, but they looked like enough to keep him going. Once he had eaten and slept, he thought he might be able to work out some of the magic he would need to be able to find and catch them more efficiently.

  He wasn’t sure what kind of fish he had caught, but there were six of them impaled on his spear, and each one was about six inches long. Now he thought about it, that wouldn’t make a bad meal. Lifting himself out of the water, he stuck his spear in the ground next to his jeans and walked a short way to collect a few pieces of driftwood: he was grateful that putting light to wood was so easily, both magically and not magically.

  Within ten minutes, he had enough wood in a small pile a few feet from his spear and jeans and shoes, and had managed to execute a small spell to make them take light. A few minutes later the fire was crackling away happily, and he was roasting his fish over it, feeling very pleased with himself.

  As he ate, he felt his strength returning to him, little by little. He still felt light-headed from the tiredness, but now he wasn’t hungry any more, he felt like he actually could survive. Once he had eaten, he buried the bones and innards of the fish in the sand and put his jeans and shoes back on. It was getting dark again, and while he felt more human, he was still terrified of what might come out at night.

  At least he felt more capable. He stood and stretched his arms high above his head, and looked over toward the cliff. Maybe that was where he should build his shelter. If he put it there, he would have food and water within a short distance, and surely all he would need to do in that case would be simply to continue for a year.

  He climbed up one of the gentler slopes back up into the wood above the cliff, and started hacking ad tearing branches off trees. There were a number of familiar kinds of tree here, and he kept his eyes open for hazels and willows, because they had the long, more-or-less uniform branches he was looking for. In fact, looking at the willows, he suddenly realized that that wood might be ideal for making a wand that he wouldn’t need to spend a year studying in order to be able to use.

  By the time it was fully dark, Peter had gathered a healthy pile of wood, and had even found a piece ideal for making a wand. He wanted to build now, but he was too tired, and it was too dark. He was full of fear, and was almost not daring to allow himself to believe he might get through this ordeal.

  All he did know was that he had to at least try.

  The following day he awoke, noting the position of the tide for the first time: it was quite a way further out than he had noticed it being the previous day. He had slept in a foetal position on the sand, next to the wood he had collected, and his first thought was that he should build his shelter: this was now his third day here and he hadn’t yet built a place to live for the rest of the year he was to be exiled here.

  He went to the water for a drink, and then returned to his pile of wood, removing the bark from each piece and splitting it from one end to the other. He had enough wood here that he was going to be peeling and splitting it for a good hour or two, so he decided that eating once he had finished splitting it all would be a fairly good idea.

  By the time he had got half-way through it, however, he was already feeling hot and heavy and hungry. He was going to have to go and find food now, otherwise the feeling would distract him just enough that he wouldn’t be able to work efficiently.

  Using the spells he had thought about the previous day, he quickly found and caught a few more small fish and cooked them. As he ate them, he thought how this might well be all he had to eat for the next year. It wasn’t unpleasant really, though he knew he would get bored of it. He didn’t want to get to a point where he never wanted to eat fish again; he liked fish, he always had. A slab of bacon would have been nice, though.

&nbs
p; Once he had eaten, it didn’t take long to finish preparing the wood. He went and whittled a few stakes, and then set about weaving his wood around them, working from vague memories of watching people on television, years before, building houses out of wattle-and-daub. Daub was going to be hard to make here, though, he thought. Unless he used grasses and roots rather than straw.

  It took about four hours to build the walls, and Peter was tired from all the stretching. His fingers were sore, but he had to carry on or else he would end up never finishing it off. When he did finish, he stood back and looked at what he had done. The structure was all of six feet tall – he had taken the parable of the man who had built his house on sand into account and found the longest branches he could to use as stakes to weave around – and around eight feet square. There was a gap facing outward, toward the sea, for a doorway, and no roof. He would attend to the roof later.

  As the days wore on, he found it almost excruciatingly difficult to retain his sanity: between the loneliness and the uncertainty as to whether he was going to survive long enough to wake up the following morning, he felt lost. Eventually, however, he began to acclimatise to his new surroundings, and as his shack – which, in his head, he called his “Hovel-on-Sea” – came to be more complete, he began to feel a little more comfortable. He had a supply of water, food and a place to live. He had even made a simple flute from a spare piece of reed, and was teaching himself to play.

  However, not all of it was plain sailing: he found out what the noises in the night were after being in his exile for nine days. It was wolves, and they were wild and angry. The first night he saw one, he saw far more than one.

  He was surrounded; there must have been half a dozen of them. They initially just watched him, but in his fear he ran, as he had on his first day, and they then gave chase in earnest. He happened to have the small willow wand he had made with him, and he had sat with it, studying it, but he wasn’t sure that he was ready to use it.