Second Kiss

by Robert Priest

  “I know she is my warrior beloved.”

  “How? Did she tell you?”

  He tried not to say what he said next, but he couldn’t stop himself. “She didn’t need to. She kissed me.”

  Tharfen took a close look and she could see he wasn’t jesting. “Where?”

  “We had just come out of the shadow of the Great Kone and—”

  “No, you fool. I mean whereabouts did she kiss you? On the cheek, I suppose.”

  He blushed and her lips lifted into a full on snarl of outrage. “On the lips?”

  He didn’t answer now, regretting what he’d said. But he couldn’t hide it.

  “Xemion! She was just some poor bedraggled thing that you dredged up out of the river—”

  “How dare you!”

  “How dare you take advantage of someone with amnesia?”

  He failed the second time trying not to say something. “It was she who kissed me.”

  Tharfen saw that he wasn’t lying, and the bushy redness of her hair and the brownish redness of her many freckles were suddenly accompanied by the blushing pinkness of her cheeks. She bared her teeth. “Well you let her, didn’t you? In her state. All while recovering from a wound, I suppose, and drinking cursed waters from a well that wipes away your memory. She took a little bottle of that forgetting water with her, you know, aye? Seen her chugging on it lots of times. So even if such filth as you’ve just told me is true, she ought to be mercifully forgetting it right about now. Maybe with a little help from Torgee even.”

  Xemion was doing a much better job of ducking her many jibes and insinuations than he ever had when she had set out to annoy him back in Ilde, but this latest one was a challenge. He bit his lip. He didn’t want anything to interrupt the steady flow of time toward noon, when he would see Saheli.

  Tharfen could see she wasn’t going to get him going so she stayed quiet a while as they traipsed through the misty grey streets of the ancient capital toward the Panthemium. Here the elaborately and minutely chiselled walls had been cleaned and were in good repair so that the intricate epic scenes that adorned them all along the way could be seen to good effect in the sea-scented morning sunlight.

  “Well, I knew you was unfortunately safe, too,” she said at last as they drew closer to the crowd milling around outside of the Panthemium doors.

  Xemion flinched. That strange feeling he’d had when he’d first been ejected from the high gate of Shissilill, the feeling that he’d lost some tiny part of himself in there, had quickly been subsumed in his feelings of losing Saheli. But now he felt it distinctly again and he glanced at Tharfen.

  “Yes.” She nodded with a slightly malicious smile. He looked away, not wanting her to see the shudder of his revulsion. She didn’t have to see it, though; she felt it emanating strongly from the little piece of him that was in her. She’d never known it so clearly before — how strongly he detested her. She felt nothing about it. She picked up a stone, swung it around in her sling, and launched it at a gull perched atop a chimney pot on the building across the road. The bird sat there perfectly still as the little piece of fallen masonry sped toward it. Before Xemion could even shout to try and warn the bird, the missile shot by and continued on over the rooftop to the next street. Tharfen stopped in the street and stared at the bird, aghast.

  “You missed,” Xemion said softly, somewhat amazed.

  “I wasn’t trying to hit it, you fool,” Tharfen snarled at him. “Oh, you want me to hit it? Sure, I’ll hit it for ya.” Before he could dissuade her, another piece of masonry had been launched, but it, too, missed its target, and the bird remained perched impassively on the pot. Xemion said nothing as Tharfen, enraged, took a third piece of masonry and proceeded to miss again by an even wider margin. The bird, finally alerted to the danger, flew off, and Tharfen, pretending to be satisfied, continued on her way without looking at Xemion.

  After a while, he said, “Is this the first time you’ve used your sling since you knocked that bottle out of the examiner’s hands?”

  She gazed up at him red-faced. For a second she saw again the examiner’s horrified eyes as the ghouls at the well yanked his head round backward. A second later, livid with anger, she was poking her index finger at Xemion so fast and hard and so close to his face he had to draw back defensively. “He got what he deserved. And so will you.”

  3

  A Great Boon to Us

  At the Panthemium, Xemion couldn’t stop looking for Saheli, but neither she nor any of the others chosen by Lighthammer were present. After a breakfast of smoked haddock and some kind of crunchy grain that Xemion had never tasted before, Lirodello led him and a group of the others to the fairly intact remains of some majestic buildings that had once constituted the main body of the Phaer Academy.

  The first thing Xemion noticed as he entered the white marble hall that housed his first class was the sunscope that had been mounted and assembled on a table. It was just like the one he had used in Ilde. Beside it, a group of Thralls had gathered over a book the size of a small window. Excited despite himself, Xemion quickly joined them, peering down over four sets of hunched shoulders to see a full-colour illustration of the hero Amphion, his sword held to the sky, a dragon exhaling steam at his side. Xemion caught his breath. Until now he had only seen this picture as a projection from the miniature version in the locket library. The details and colours in this much-larger and richer version were astonishing. Tharfen, too, leaned in to look, doing her best to keep as far as possible from Xemion. She had never seen such a picture before, even as a projection.

  “Yes, the picture is wonderful, isn’t it?” said Captain Sarabin as he entered the room. Sarabin was very old. His face was lined and cracked like a dry riverbed, but his eyes sparkled. Xemion tried unsuccessfully not to stare at the two copper hooks that Sarabin now used skillfully to open the cover of the book. “But even more wonderful are the words written inside, which, I assure you, by the end of this season, you will all be able to read for yourselves. And not just this one volume. I am happy to tell you that we have been blessed with the full recovery of all the Phaer Tales.”

  “But how did these books survive?” Xemion asked, turning to face Sarabin.

  Captain Sarabin closed the book and continued in a quiet voice. “Children always hide favoured things, and in the days after the Pathan betrayal they hid their favourite books. From a hundred pits and cupboards and buried boxes all over the land, one by one, every volume of the Phaer Tales has been recovered in the past two years, and we now have the complete collection several times over. It’s a great shame that the old professors failed to bury just as many boxes of poetry and philosophy. But being Phaer, we always kept our books in public libraries, where the Pathans got at them rather quickly, I’m afraid.”

  It took a while for Captain Sarabin to get the recruits to close the book and sit in the wooden seats lining the room. Some of those who now filled the chamber had probably heard versions of the Phaer Tales told in secret by old men and women before, but few of them had ever seen a book of any kind, and that picture of Amphion clearly captivated them.

  Sarabin was an enormously patient man and he asked repeatedly and in a quite calm voice for the class to come to order. Finally, when they had all taken their seats, he took the book of Amphion into his arms and, using his hooks with considerable skill, placed it open on his lectern. “You have all been forbidden to learn to read,” he said in a burred voice. “You have been told that reading is mind-sickening and a pathway directly to the spellcraft. But that is wrong. You are the heirs of the greatest literary tradition in all the history of the Orb. And one of the greatest evils perpetrated by the Pathans, along with murder and slavery, is … was … stripping you of this ability. Reading is a great boon to us. There are great treasures to be had from reading … and writing. I am here to teach this. Now listen.” Quietly he began to read.

  Captain Sarabin was not a born orator. There was a reedy but wispy quality to his voice that wa
s swallowed by any slight noise in the room. Everyone listened with ever-greater attention. Sarabin continued the story a long time, up to the point where Amphion is first separated from his warrior beloved, Queen Phaeton. There he stopped and closed the book. Looking up with a smile, he said, “And the rest, as soon as you learn to read, you can finish for yourselves.”

  This incited quite a lot of protest in the group, but Sarabin was unusually firm.

  “Come, come, come. It will not take long. We begin with one letter and then we proceed to the next. Soon you will be reading for yourselves.”

  After that, he tried to teach them the first letter of the Elphaerean alphabet, E, but there was too much grumbling for him to continue. Eventually he had to make an agreement with them. If they would learn the first five letters of the alphabet he would read them the conclusion of the story tomorrow. “Any questions?” he asked.

  Here, Xemion nearly spoke up. From the moment Anya had begun to teach him to read she had insisted on complete secrecy. Even when he’d told the tales to the children of Sho, he pretended that he’d learned them by hearing them, not by reading them. But was that pretense still necessary? Perhaps a little longer. He would wait till noon. Nothing must interrupt the slow, steady progress toward Saheli.

  As Sarabin moved on tediously to the second letter of the Elphaerean alphabet, D, Xemion caught a glint of Tharfen’s gaze, which she quickly turned away — but not so quickly that it did not reveal the intense malice she bore him at that moment.

  “And what sound do you think this letter makes?” Sarabin asked, pointing to the letter A.

  Along with everyone else, he spoke the sound of the A. Suddenly, on the other side of the room, Tharfen stood up. “Excuse me,” she said loudly.

  Sarabin was a little irritated to be interrupted. “What is it?”

  “Is this teaching for those who already know how to read?”

  Sarabin was taken aback. “You know how to read?”

  “No,” she answered, looking at Xemion, unable to keep the glint of vengeful glee out of her eyes. “But he does.” With that, she pointed an accusing finger at Xemion.

  Sarabin’s head jolted back in surprise and a look of doubt crossed his features.

  “Really?” he asked, frowning at Xemion.

  Xemion was trembling. He couldn’t lie. Not outright. “Yes, sir.”

  Sarabin’s already pale features seemed to have found new recesses of pallor to draw upon. A slight tremble entered his voice. “All the letters?”

  “Yes, I know them all.” Xemion could feel the eyes of every member of the class upon him, and somehow he liked it.

  “And do you know how to read them when they are put together in words?” Sarabin asked incredulously.

  “Yes. In sentences, too,” Xemion replied with a smile that included everyone but the still-gloating Tharfen. “Whole paragraphs even.”

  “I do hope you are not joking,” Sarabin warned, giving him a severe look.

  “Of course not,” Xemion answered confidently.

  “Well, here then, show us how you’d read this. It’s something a little more recent than the Phaer Tales.”

  There was, at that time, only one volume of recent Phaer history available: The History of the Battle of Phaer Bay. It only existed because Sarabin, as a witness to the battle, had taken the risk of writing it himself, an act which he paid for with the loss of both hands. The Pathans then proceeded to burn not only his book, but his home and fields as well. Fortunately, they missed the second copy of the book, which he secretly buried in the forest. It was this hand-lettered scroll that he now passed to Xemion, who unrolled it carefully and took in the cramped letters neatly handwritten upon it. Anya had always insisted that he restrain the richer textures in his voice, but there would be no need to do that now. He held everyone’s attention from the moment he began:

  “And all the while the fool generals held back their precious gorehorses so that by the time they attempted to use them the battle was all but over. Only then did they send the poor beasts in where they hoped their horns might be good at least for goring. But though they galloped bravely into the ranks of the Kagars, they were turned away by the silvery, burnished shields made of some kind of metal unknown to us. And soon they had roped and corralled the gorehorses and we watched in horror as they rounded up the beasts and cut off their horns. There never was such screaming from a beast. And when they let them go, the poor animals were so unbalanced by the loss of their horns they could hardly stand. They kept staggering and stooping down to the ground as they tried to make their way away from the terrible carnage.”

  Xemion was completely caught up in the rhythm and emotion of the passage. His voice was soaring and swelling just as it had when he’d stood upon a stump in Ilde and held spellbound the children of Sho.

  “And some of the gorehorses they slew there on the beach, and others they wrapped in reins and led off back toward the sea, for what purpose we dread to think. Only one escaped, and this poor beast now dying is the last of all the gorehorses on the Phaer Isle. And all for what? For the folly of Magick!”

  When he finished, Xemion looked up to see many a rapt, sorrowful face among his fellows. Even Captain Sarabin was wiping away a tear.

  “And there,” said Captain Sarabin at last, “you have the beauty of the Elphaerean language. Superbly done, young man!”

  Xemion shot a triumphant glance toward Tharfen, only managing to catch her eye long enough to see her disappointment and rage that her act had not hurt him more. For a while she fingered the thin leather sling she wore about her brow and Xemion watched warily, prepared to dodge should she choose to fire a stone his way. Meanwhile, the other members of the class had lapsed into animated chatter. Thrall and Nain, Nain and Freeman. Sarabin tapped on his lectern repeatedly but lightly and without much effect. The students were at too high a pitch of excitement. Not only because they had just heard Xemion’s exalted recitation, but also because very soon they would be relieved from their uncomfortable perches on the wooden chairs and sent back to the stadium, where they would get to use real swords for the first time. Xemion’s excitement was also at a pitch. Soon he would see Saheli.

  “Please, please.” Sarabin raised his voice, but just then there came the blowing of about ten whistles at once. The whole group cheered as one and began to evacuate their first literature class with great rapidity. Xemion finally looked at the sun outside the window and was relieved to see that it had notably edged up farther into the sky. Soon. Soon he would see her. Just then a cold piece of metal touched Xemion’s shoulder — Sarabin’s hook.

  “Do you also write?” he asked Xemion very seriously.

  “Yes, very well,” Xemion answered, sounding only the slightest bit proud of himself.

  “Well then, please, young man, I must ask you to come with me.”

  “But, sir,” Xemion protested, alarmed. “I can’t. I have to hurry.” He made as if to leave, but his shirt was caught in one of Sarabin’s hooks.

  “I know, I know,” Sarabin answered, his voice suddenly firm and authoritative, “but I have something far more important for you to do.”

  “But we are to be given swords today. And I have someone most important to meet at midday in the assembly.”

  “You will be back by then,” Sarabin said, “but I have something of the utmost importance to reveal to you and I’m going to have to ask for your secrecy about it.”

  Xemion frowned but nodded. Tharfen, with one hand tangled in the red coils of her hair, had come up behind them, listening.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “He says I have to wait behind,” Xemion said angrily, turning around to face her.

  “Do you also write?” Sarabin asked Tharfen.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then you can go,” Sarabin stated. “But you, young man, you must come with me.”

  “But …”

  “You will be happy you did,” Sarabin insisted matter-of-factly. He
seemed to be agitated and suddenly very determined. “And you, young lady, you can go along to the next instruction, and this fellow — what is your name?”

  Xemion answered, a little sullenly.

  “Xemion will come for his sword later,” Sarabin told Tharfen.

  “But—” Tharfen, sensing what she had set in motion, suddenly felt a sense of regret. But it was too late for that.

  “Off you go now,” Captain Sarabin said with impressive authority.

  Xemion watched desperately as she walked away.

  “I think you are going to be a great boon to … to our cause,” Sarabin said with barely suppressed excitement.

  4

  Dictates

  Not far past the crossroads where the High Street intersected with the road that led up to the old castle on the tip of Phaer Point, Sarabin led Xemion down into the coolness of a deep stone stairwell. At the bottom was a doorway with the words Song Is My Thrall carved into the top of the frame. They entered a dimly lit stone chamber with a domed ceiling.

  “Welcome to the underdome,” Sarabin whispered.

  Once Xemion’s eyes adjusted to the low light, he could see that they were standing in an aisle between rows of seats. From the stage area in front of them, a periodic rattling whispery sound followed by a scratchy rustling could be heard. As he drew closer, Xemion made out three shadow beings gathered about a candlelit table on the stage. The one in the middle, the oldest person Xemion had ever seen, sat in a stone chair, withered and whispering. She was clearly a Thrall woman of some kind, her face set and hard, and she had large yellow eyes. Beside her, illuminated in the same sphere of light, an elderly grey scribe held the narrow end of a large moon-and-star-inscribed cone to the old woman’s mouth. A second scribe sat across the table in front of the wide end of the cone, listening intently. The source of the scratching sound was the quill pen with which he was hurriedly writing her whispered words down onto a scroll of reed paper. And now that he was close enough, Xemion could hear the words that the cone was helping to amplify.