Tenerbrak The Founding

by Shannah Jay

Another man came forward. ‘You can camp over there, by the river. Do you have some goods to trade?’

  Jovis nodded. ‘A few.’

  ‘Then maybe I’ll come and visit you later. I buy and sell things myself.’ He turned away without giving his name.

  Jovis watched him go, noted how the other people all moved back to let the fellow pass. He must be someone of importance, then, Chief Elder, perhaps. But when Jovis looked directly at the others, they too avoided his eyes and moved away. He began to feel uneasy and turned to tell his wife he’d changed his mind, didn’t want to stop here, but she looked so exhausted he closed his mouth on the words. She’d never carried babies easily and this one seemed to have drained all the strength from her. When they got to the next big village, he'd try to find a healer. Things weren’t going well and Shilra had lost weight, not gained it, so that her arms and legs seemed like sticks, too thin to support the heavy swell of her belly.

  When the wagon stopped, the deleff walked from the harness, then stood beside it, moving their feet uneasily.

  ‘We’re stopping here for the night,’ Jovis said firmly to Mezrith, who was leader of this pair.

  The two huge creatures hesitated a moment longer, then Mezrith blew out a gusting sigh and they made their way down to the river, where they drank deeply. Afterwards, they made no attempt to browse, just stood by the edge of the water, fidgeting uneasily.

  From the back of the wagon, the girl watched them and shook her head again. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  And felt to be getting worse.

  ‘Sarann, will you fetch us some water?’ Jovis asked, seeing that Shilra was slumped against the pole that held up the wagon canopy, her face as white as the canvas above her. ‘Veeron, get down and start a cookfire, will you, lad?’

  Sarann picked up the bucket and made her way down to the river. The two deleff came to stand near her. ‘What's the matter?’ she asked, for she found it easier to understand the deleff than anyone else in her family. Indeed, it sometimes seemed to her that the great creatures were trying to put pictures into her mind, but her father said that was just her imagination and animals couldn’t think like people, even intelligent animals like deleff.

  Mezrith whined in his throat and trampled his feet up and down restlessly. Ferrin hovered behind him, swinging her head from side to side.

  Her father’s voice recalled her to her duties. ‘Sarann! Where’s that water?’

  She picked up the bucket and took it back, emptying some of it into the cauldron he had ready to hang over the fire and the rest into their water barrel. Then she returned to the river for more. It was while she was lifting the full bucket carefully from the stream that she heard her mother scream. She dropped the bucket and turned to run back to the wagon, but Mezrith barred her way and when she turned again, Ferrin was standing on the other side with her ruff partly raised.

  She heard her father's voice roar in fury, but his shout was cut off abruptly. Terrified, she called out to him and tried again to push past the deleff. But Mezrith knocked her over, sending her sprawling into the shallows of the river. As she stood up, spluttering, the two deleff came to stand on either side of her.

  A wild-eyed man came running down the path brandishing a blood-stained sword. Sarann shrank back in horror.

  ‘Father!’ she screamed.

  The man laughed. ‘Call all you like, spawn of evil. He's dead and so will you be soon!’

  The ruffs of skin around the deleff's necks were fully raised now, standing out stiffly in great frills which only happened when they were extremely angry or upset. Mezrith lifted his head and let out a loud, trumpeting noise. And

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  then - Sarann caught her breath, for she’d never seen this before, though she’d heard tales of it, as had all traders’

  children - wings of bluish light formed on both deleffs’ backs, exploding into being from the knobbly bumps on their spines and spreading out instantly into great fan shapes, each half as big as their wagon.

  Traders always said, ‘Pray you never see the wings unfurl!’ for they only appeared in times of great trouble. The wings were made of dark blue light that hurt your eyes if you looked at them for too long. You could see through them, but everything looked blurred and out of focus.

  ‘Mother! Father!’ she moaned, but didn’t try to move away, for she realised now that the deleff were trying to protect her, that only they stood between her and death.

  The man with the sword slashed it towards one of the deleff's wings, laughing hysterically, blood-lust in his eyes. As the wing swept over him, however, his laughter changed to howls of pain and he dropped the sword as if it were burning his hand. When the wing swept over him a second time, his scream stopped short and he dropped to the ground unconscious.

  Another man came running down the path, dagger in hand. He was whirling her mother's best cloak around his head and it was bloodstained. Sarann wrapped her arms around herself, sobbing aloud.

  The second man ran right into the deleff's wings and as the dark blue light touched his body, he, too, yelled out in agony and crumpled to the ground.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ called a voice, and the rest of the men rushing towards Sarann stopped dead, turning their heads towards the speaker, the man who’d told Jovis where to camp. ‘Hold back, you fools! Don’t you know the deleff's wings are dangerous. Whatever you do, don’t let them touch you.’

  He stared past the deleff at Sarann and she felt terror creep along her limbs and hold her immobile. Death stared at her from those eyes. Not wild raging death, but slow calculating murder.

  One of the men spat on the ground. ‘What about the girl? You said we could kill them all. You promised.’

  The man narrowed his eyes and studied the deleff. One of them raised its snout and screamed defiance, beating the wings up and down again. When it moved forward, the men edged back.

  ‘You’ve killed the others. What does one scrawny child matter? She hasn’t grown big enough to pleasure anyone, after all.’

  ‘Aaw!’ The men might have been children, denied a treat.

  ‘Why don’t you burn the wagon instead?’ Sobrin asked. ‘Take the stuff out first and put it in my barn, then burn the wagon. You'll enjoy that.’

  Their sudden pleasure was as mindless and empty-eyed as the violence had been.

  When they ran away to fetch kindling, Sobrin remained where he was, frowning across at Sarann, then he turned on his heel and strode away, shrugging.

  She stayed in the river with the deleff, sobbing quietly now, covering her face and hoping desperately that this was a nightmare. But the man’s eyes were to haunt her dreams for years to come and this tragedy was all too real.

  When something nudged her she looked up in panic, sighing with relief to see Mezrith staring down at her. His wings were still beating the air and as she stood up, one of them touched her. She froze, expecting to collapse in agony as the men had, but it was just a tickling sensation. Again the wing beat over her. Again, a slight tingle as if something had touched her and that was all.

  Mezrith nudged her forward out of the water and towards the track that led out of the village. She began to stumble along between the two deleff, looking over her shoulder every now and then, thinking she heard voices, thinking the men were pursuing her. But no one came after them. In the village something was burning, sending up a great pall of black smoke.

  When they came to a length of track bordered by wildwoods, the wings vanished and the deleff pushed their way into the dense undergrowth, taking her with them. She was tired now, so tired she could hardly put one foot in front of the other. When she fell and couldn’t get up again, Mezrith stopped and knelt down, bending his two front legs very slowly and stiffly. Ferrin pushed her and she realised through the mist of grief and weariness that they wanted her to climb up on Mezrith’s back.

  She wedged her body between the knobbly bits, nestling her head against the ruff of thin skin, furled up again
now.

  It felt soft and warm to her touch and the iridescent grey scales seemed darker here in the shadows of the wildwoods.

  Soon she was asleep. But it was an uneasy slumber. Every now and then as the deleff tramped on through the pathless tangles of plants and trees and creepers she would start awake, sit up with a gasp and peer behind her, fearful of pursuit.

  Then, when she saw nothing, she’d sigh with relief and lay her head back against the ruff.

  Just after the second moon rose, the two deleff stopped next to a pool and Sarann came fully awake. Mezrith knelt again and she slid off his back. She scooped up handfuls of water, thirsty now. After she’d drunk her fill, the deleff let her lie there and she slipped into another uneasy sleep.

  In the morning she awoke with a scream of terror, but her two huge guardians were still there. As soon as they

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  realised she was awake, they began shuffling their feet about, in the way they always did when eager to set off.

  ‘Thank you for helping me,’ she said, for Granfer had taught her to speak to deleff as if they could understand every word. And sometimes it seemed to her they really could, though her father had always said it was just the tone of her voice they understood and her grandfather had been in his dotage to say such nonsense. She was glad Granfer had died before these troubled times. He’d been such a gentle man, better at tending small animals and children than haggling over trade goods.

  She walked through the woods between the two great creatures for what seemed a very long time. She found a few nuts or berries which she knew were safe to eat, but still she felt hungry. And there was another emptiness echoing inside her, an emptiness she didn’t dare look into, a dark sense of nothingness in her heart where her family had been.

  Whenever she started to stumble from weariness, Mezrith would kneel down and she would climb up on to his back again, finding the swaying gait and the warmth of his body more comforting than anything else.

  Once they walked straight into the middle of a pool where the water sprayed up in fountains around them. It felt soothing on her face and the weather was so warm she enjoyed the coolness. Her dress was now ragged and stained, and her hair had fallen into wild tangles on her shoulders, but what did she care about that? What did she care about anything now?

  When they came out of the pool, the wildwoods looked different, but that might just have been her imagination. She felt so weary she could hardly stand upright and had to lie down and sleep for a while.

  Next morning at first light they set off again. Soon the wildwoods turned into woodland that showed the presence of people and Sarann came out of her numbness for long enough to look around fearfully.

  Mezrith made a quiet crooning noise and that reassured her.

  An hour later they came to some ploughed land, with crops standing on it, almost ready to harvest. Beyond that was a small settlement. People came out of their houses to stare at the girl stumbling along between the two huge deleff.

  A woman stepped forward as they reached the group. ‘Who are you, child?’

  ‘Sarann.’

  ‘Where is your family?’

  The grief that the child had been holding back suddenly burst forth and overwhelmed her. She burst into tears and sank to the ground, sobbing hysterically. ‘They’re dead! The men killed them!’

  The woman crouched beside her and gathered her against a capacious breast and she sobbed out her story against its soft warmth, gulping and gasping as she tried to put the horror into words.

  ‘The deleff brought me here,’ she wound up. 'They're called—’ But when she turned round, Mezrith and Ferrin were already walking away beyond the ploughed field. ‘They've gone,’ she said in a puzzled voice and burst into tears again.

  ‘They’ve left me.’

  ‘You’ve got us, now,’ the woman said soothingly.

  The people of Yarralik took her in without question. They’d heard of the Discord madness that afflicted some people in the south, but this was as near as they'd ever come to it.

  When Sarann had recovered, they asked her to tell them again exactly what had happened and then, grim-faced, they made their own preparations. The only time a band of raiders came near Yarralik in the years that followed, they found more than they’d bargained for. Watchers at the boundaries, hidden pits and traps on the tracks around a settlement of well fortified buildings.

  An arrow, shot from a narrow slit in one of the upper storeys all the houses now had, hit one man in the shoulder.

  Another arrow narrowly missed the leader. The raiders turned and left.

  ‘Easier pickings elsewhere,’ one of them said, laughing in a shrill, hysterical way.

  Everyone in the settlement, Sarann included, continued to keep watch and the children learned how to defend themselves and their homes as soon as they were able to hold stones in their hands. The people of Yarralik were grimly determined to keep what they had laboriously wrested from the wildwoods, and to keep their families safe.

  CHAPTER 5 Karialla’s Path

  The deleff which had stayed behind nudged Karialla’s travel pack, which lay on the ground near the fire. She should have thought of retrieving that herself, but her mind wasn’t working well after her terrible experience.

  She found her own possessions among those of the men and put them into her pack again. She decided to pick up the knives that the raiders had dropped and take them away with her too. The men would probably come back to their camp site when the deleff had gone, so she didn’t intend to leave any weapons with which they could hurt others.

  But before she’d realised what was happening, the deleff knocked the raider’s knife out of her hand with its snout and placed a massive foot on the blade. It trod the weapon into the ground until the steel splintered against a small

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  rock, then it went round doing the same to all the other raiders’ knives.

  By this time, the second deleff had returned from chasing the raiders away. As it came over to stand by its mate, Karialla noticed that the mist covering the ground had almost dispersed and the wings had vanished from the deleff’s backs. It was, it must be, an illusion, she told herself, a vision born of her terror perhaps. Animals couldn’t suddenly grow wings or produce mist at will.

  Or could they?

  A shiver crawled up her spine. The two deleff seemed to be waiting for something. What did they want of her? She took a tentative few steps away from them, but one moved forward to nudge her in the opposite direction.

  ‘I wasn’t going that way,’ she said, trying to speak to them calmly, because after this last attack, she wasn’t going to risk being captured again. She wasn’t going towards Tenebrak and the more populous southern areas until times were truly peaceful once more.

  ‘That’s the way I want to go.’ She pointed northwards, for wherever she was, she could always tell north from south, east from west. All she wanted now was to get as far away from the violence as possible.

  The great heads shook to and fro, then one of them nudged her again, still in a southerly direction.

  ‘I don’t want to go that way!’ she shouted in frustration, but the deleff continued to bar her way. She tried to calm down again, to reason with the creature. ‘I’ve changed my mind about going to Tenebrak,’ she said loudly and slowly.

  ‘It’s too dangerous. That’s the way I want to go.’ Again she jabbed her finger towards the north.

  One of the deleff took her outstretched arm in its mouth and gently but inexorably, it drew her on into the wildwoods, heading south. Its jaw was surprisingly cool on her skin—they must have a lower body temperature than humans. It blew spice-tree scented breath at her through its flaring nostrils, and the huge eyes, so close to her face, stared at her earnestly, as if they were trying to tell her something.

  She felt dizzy, probably a reaction to the violence, and she couldn’t summon up the energy to resist, so set off walking with them
through the undergrowth. Although the deleff soon let go of her arm, she found herself continuing between the two of them as if she were a prisoner. She suspected they’d stop her if she tried to get away from them and anyway, you couldn’t run quickly through the wildwoods. For they were well into the wildwoods now. They’d passed several trellis vines with their distinctive leaves and such vines didn’t grow where humans lived. There were other plants she didn’t even recognise.

  As her head gradually cleared, she looked up at the nearest deleff and studied it. She wasn’t afraid of them, well, not exactly, just a bit nervous. Where were they taking her? What did they want of her? If only they could talk!

  After walking with them for a while, she decided it was better to travel with them, at least until she was out of reach of the raiders. After all, she could always turn northwards again later.

  She stumbled on tiredly through the wildwoods, watching the first moon set, then the second moon finish travelling along its lower arc and sink down into the darkness of the western horizon. The third moon was left alone to shine down serenely upon a whispering, rustling world filled with the sound of K-thump, k-thump, k-thump! She found herself matching her own steps to the deleff’s gentle rhythms.

  ***

  By the time the early morning light began to filter down through the lush green canopy Karialla was utterly exhausted, feeling as if she had been walking for ever and full of aches and pains from the raiders’ beatings. In the end she stopped dead and stood there, too weary to move another step. ‘I can’t!’ she said to the nearest deleff. ‘I just can’t go on!’

  They stood there with her for a few seconds, heads swinging from side to side, then one of them backed away and crashed off through the undergrowth. The other stayed very close to Karialla, its ruff unfurled again, its eyes watchful as she sank to the ground at the foot of a huge tree.

  She fumbled in her pack and found her flask, drinking the stale water in it thirstily. She was ravenously hungry now, but hadn’t thought to pick up any food when she left the raiders’ camp.

  The snapping of branches announced the return of the other deleff and Karialla turned to face it. To her astonishment, it was carrying in its mouth a broken branch laden with dereela nuts and another hung with strands of glowberries. It laid the branches on her lap and stood watching as she ate the nuts and then bit into the luscious gold berries with relish.