Ghost of the Wall

by Jeff Mariotte

  He shook his head, looking completely lost. “Slow,” he repeated.

  Alanya put her hands together and drew them apart leisurely. “Slooow,” she said as she did so.

  He duplicated her motions and her phrasing, speaking the word at the same languid pace that she had. “Sloooow.”

  “Right,” she said. She had begun to relax now. If he were a threat, he would have already made some move toward her, rather than engaging in verbal play.

  She tried to point in the general direction of Koronaka. “I live there,” she said. “Koronaka.”

  He pointed toward the west and spoke a word that she couldn’t make out. She guessed it was the Pictish name for his home, but it just sounded like a guttural growl to her.

  “Why are you here?” she asked him. “Across the river from your home?”

  He touched his own face with his first two fingers, just under his eyes, then drew them away again. “I come,” he elaborated, “to look at you.”

  3

  KRAL BECAME ALANYA’S little secret.

  She would go to bed playing over in her head the talks they had, and wake up anticipating their next meeting. The days seemed to drag interminably until she got a chance to escape Donial and Lupinius, to escape Koronaka and get to her clearing in the woods. Kral seemed to enjoy their time together as much as she did—rarely did she arrive that he didn’t show up a few moments later, emerging from the shadowed trees like some sort of phantom.

  His Aquilonian had turned out to be very basic indeed, but he was intelligent, a quick study, and Alanya found it easy to teach him new words, even for difficult concepts. Before long they were engaging in wide-ranging conversations. Kral seemed amazed and impressed by her stories of life in Tarantia, though he could scarcely believe that so many people could live in the same “village.” And Alanya listened in wonderment to his stories of barbarous life—hunting; battling against settlers or, more often, other Pictish clans; skinning animals with his bare hands, teeth, and knife, boiling their brains to tan their hides. His love of the forest was contagious, and he knew a variety of special places: fast-flowing creeks and grassy glades and trees of unimaginable beauty. Alanya had never thought there was much here except empty space where she could find refuge, but Kral convinced her that there was beauty in the forest on its own terms, that the trees, grasses, and animals had charms that were unlike anything Tarantia had to offer.

  She enjoyed keeping him a secret, someone whose company she enjoyed but about whom she would say nothing to another living soul. At the same time, there was a loneliness to it. She often found herself wanting to share the strange and wonderful stories he told. She decided to save them in her memory. When she was safely back home, she could regale her friends with them. Here, the settlers would just want Kral captured or killed. When that realization set in, she knew she could never truly be at home among such small-minded people.

  Back in Koronaka, Lupinius confessed that he was worried about her. She had taken to long periods of silence—periods during which she was perfectly happy, thinking about some tale or other that Kral had told her, or remembering some bit of woodcraft he had taught. Lupinius assumed these were mournful or sad moments. Of course, she couldn’t tell him that he was completely mistaken. Despite the fact that Kral had never put a hand on her except to help her across a rushing creek or to dust the grass from the back of her shift, Lupinius would be horrified at the idea that she had any contact with one of the savage Picts.

  Alanya, frankly, couldn’t even picture Kral cooking and eating her, or any other human. He did mention human sacrifices and severed heads in some of his stories, which was horrific enough, but he gave no indication that she might become the subject of one of those barbaric religious rites. Nor did he treat her as someone he might want to enslave, or even take back to his clan as a wife. He seemed content to talk, to explore the forest and show her what he knew of nature, and to enjoy her company, just as she did his.

  When her father had told her that they would be living on the border of the civilized world for some indefinite period of time, she had been virtually heartbroken at the thought of leaving her friends, her home, the only life she had ever known. Actually arriving at Koronaka after the overland journey had done little to dispel that sorrow. Getting to know her uncle Lupinius had only made things worse.

  Now, finally, she had found something precious here on the frontier, something that was hers and hers alone, and which made her happy to rise every morning. It was an idyllic time, and she found herself wishing it would never end.

  FOR HIS PART, Kral was happy to keep Alanya’s presence concealed from the rest of the Bear Clan. They lived in a truce with the settlers of Koronaka, and did some trade with them. But there were those within the clan who would insist that Kral had no business associating with one of them, especially a young woman. They would demand that he either kill her or bring her to the village. It was time, some said, for Kral to think about taking a wife and building a family of his own. If he was really so taken with her golden hair and delicate face, then she might as well be the one.

  To be sure, such thoughts had crossed his mind anyway. But he truly valued her spirit, her willingness to teach and be taught in return, and her enthusiasm whenever she saw him. If he took her captive, he was afraid she would lose that. Better by far simply to be her friend, to meet by secret in the forest and spend time with her that way. If at some point things changed, then they could discuss her joining him in the Bear Clan’s village.

  On this particular day, he came to her with a heavy heart. Every young man of the Bear Clan had to go away by himself for a time on what the Picts called a Spirit Trek, to live naked and alone in the wilderness, to seek inside himself for the spirit that would accompany him for the rest of his days. These journeys had no fixed end point, concluding only when each man had discovered his spirit. Some were gone for days, others for months. Kral had to leave, though, and he had to tell Alanya that it would be some time before he would see her. If her father decided to return to Tarantia while he was away, then they would never be together again. The realization was almost too awful to bear, but there was nothing to be done about it. It was simply the way things were.

  Before he even had a chance to tell her, she pulled something from beneath a cream-colored gown that was more elaborate and formal than most that she wore out here. She had taught him the name of the material, which was silk, and explained that it was woven by insects. He had a hard time envisioning that, but was willing to take her word for it. It was even softer than the fabric he had found in the field—softer by far than anything traded by the Aquilonians for Pictish copper or furs.

  The object she held out before him was round as the full moon, only with a handle about as long as the spread of his fingers was wide. “Look at this, Kral,” she said excitedly. “It belonged to my mother. The last memento I have of her. I always keep it beside my bed.”

  She handed the thing to him. He held it gingerly, looking it over. There were gems encrusted in the surface of the main disk, blazing red and green and blue in the day’s bright sun. The handle was barely as thick as two fingers, shaped like two intertwined worms joining at the bottom. Kral had not a clue what it might be used for, but the workmanship was impressive.

  “Nice,” he said.

  Alanya laughed, a sound he always equated with cool water trickling over rocks. Her golden hair was pulled back and tied with ribbons of red and yellow. He thought once again how lovely she was. “Turn it over, silly,” she said.

  He did so, and in his shock he dashed the thing to the ground. His right hand dropped to the hilt of his knife as he stared at it. But then he looked at Alanya, and her expression was startled, crestfallen—not the look of someone who was playing a joke or trying to trap him in some way.

  “It’s just a mirror,” she said. She squatted down and picked it up, then held it toward him again.

  The side that was not bejeweled was perfectly smooth, like a
pond on a windless day. As in such a pond, he could see his own reflection. He had seen himself in water and polished steel enough times to know what he was looking at. But as he allowed Alanya to draw closer with it, he realized he had never before seen himself with such precise clarity. The scar that bisected his left eyebrow, courtesy of a bobcat he had wrestled with eight springs before, was plainly visible. So was the longer scar that ran up the line of his jaw, on the right, from a fight he’d had with a couple of members of the Raven Clan two summers ago. He smiled, remembering that their scars at the end of it had been worse than his. And as he did, even his smile was reflected in the object Alanya held. A mirror, she had called it.

  “Is it . . . something magical?” he asked at length.

  Alanya giggled again. “My father has hinted that it might be,” she replied. “For myself, I have never seen it do anything except show reflections, and there’s nothing magic about that.”

  Would his fingers pass through the surface, or ripple it like water? Almost afraid of what might happen, Kral reached out to the mirror’s face and touched it. His fingers left streaks on it, but that was all.

  “I should like to be this mirror,” he said, “if you look into it every day.”

  Alanya’s fair skin went crimson, and he knew he had spoken too rashly. Before she could reply, he filled the silence. “I must leave,” he said. “On a . . . a journey.”

  The red glow faded from Alanya’s cheeks. “But you’ll be back soon?”

  “I know not,” he told her. He wanted to tell her that he would try, that he would make any promise he could, but the Aquilonian words wouldn’t come to him. Even the Pictish tongue seemed to fail him, or his own mind did. He didn’t know what he wanted to say, much less how to say it. Instead of speaking, he took a copper band from his wrist, handed it to her. “A . . . memento,” he managed, echoing the word she had used earlier to describe the mirror.

  Alanya was very pale now, her lower lip quivering. She thought for a moment, then reached down and ripped a narrow strip of cloth from her gown. Silk, he reminded himself.

  “A memento,” she said as she handed him the silk. He held it in his hands for a moment. It was almost weightless, and as smooth as water, or the surface of the mirror. Then he wrapped it around his forehead, tied it in place. She slipped his wristband around her upper arm, where it held snugly in place.

  He wanted to say more, or to take her in his arms, or something. But the Aquilonian tongue had utterly abandoned him, and at any rate he had never learned the words for a situation like this. Anyway, he had to be going. There would be feasting tonight, in honor of his quest, and he couldn’t be late. In the morning, before first light, he would be on his way. As it was, he had tarried too long.

  “Good-bye, Alanya,” he said, remembering the words for that, at least.

  “Good-bye, Kral.” She held his gaze for a moment, but then turned away from him. Feeling discharged, he picked his spear up off the ground and started into the trees, bound for home.

  ALANYA HAD WANTED to keep looking into Kral’s eyes, wanted him to elaborate further on what he had said about wanting to be her mirror, a statement with a certain fierce barbaric charm that even the smoothest boys of Tarantia couldn’t match. But tears had filled her eyes unexpectedly at the thought of his leaving. She had to look away. When she blinked them clear, he was already becoming one with the shadows.

  She was torn between sorrow and rage. Why had he said something like that now, today of all days? Why had he not made his feelings clear earlier, when he wasn’t going away? And why did he have to go, for that matter? Where? For how long?

  The clearing in the woods had no answers for her. Before, it had seemed like a little circle of paradise on earth, but now it was just a bare spot where the trees wouldn’t grow, where lightning had blasted the one brave enough to try it.

  Now that she knew Kral wouldn’t be here, she doubted that she’d be coming back either. She had practically worn a trail through the grass, beneath the oaks, all the way from Koronaka. She would follow that trail back, but that would be the last time she would use it.

  She was almost to the trees when she saw Donial, half-hidden behind the trunk of one of the oaks, staring at her with wide, fearful eyes.

  4

  “YOU ARE SPYING on me!” Alanya charged as she stalked through the tall grass toward her younger brother.

  Donial’s mouth worked for a moment with no sound coming out. He backed away a few steps, until he ran into a low-hanging branch from one of the oaks.

  “Ow,” he said, stopping suddenly and rubbing the back of his head. His dark hair was thick and wavy. He blinked his big dark eyes at Alanya a couple of times. She had wondered for a couple of years if he would ever grow into his own facial features—his eyes and full, red lips seemed too large for his head. “You were . . . that was a Pict!”

  “I know that,” Alanya said.

  “Did he hurt you? You were crying.”

  “He would never,” Alanya insisted, sniffling a little in spite of herself. “He is very nice.”

  “But . . .” Donial pointed toward the copper band on her arm. “Did he give you that?”

  “He is my friend,” Alanya said. “Not all Picts have to be brutish savages, you know.”

  “That’s not what Uncle says.”

  “Uncle, in case you hadn’t noticed, is not always right about everything.” When they had first arrived from Tarantia they had been allies in their distaste for Lupinius. Since then, Donial seemed to have been won over to their uncle’s side, more and more. It worried Alanya, made her question her brother’s judgment.

  “But all the others say it, too. The Rangers—”

  “They work for Uncle,” she pointed out. “Of course they agree with him.”

  “Still—the whole fort, the soldiers . . . everything exists because of the Picts, to keep Aquilonia safe from them. What makes you think they are all wrong?”

  Alanya huffed in frustration. “I never said they were,” she countered. “Just that not every Pict is evil, any more than every Aquilonian is good.”

  Donial stared at her as if she had uttered some unspeakable blasphemy. “You are lucky to be alive.”

  “Donial!” Alanya shouted. “I told you, he’s my friend!”

  “Where did you meet him, then?”

  “Right here, in the clearing.”

  Donial suddenly twisted his head from side to side, a look of fear crossing his face. “Are there more of them?”

  “Do you think they surround us?” Alanya asked, with a laugh. “How many ways do I have to say it? He would not hurt me. He would not surround me. He has never been anything but kind and perfectly proper.”

  Donial nodded, more to himself than to her, as if he had just reached a difficult decision. “I’m going to tell Uncle.”

  “You cannot, Donial,” Alanya said. She was aware that she was close to pleading, but didn’t care. “You must not. He won’t—”

  But Donial wasn’t listening. Instead, he had spun around on his heels and started back toward Koronaka at a full run. She half hoped that he would dash headlong into a tree—it would at least slow him down enough that she could get home first. Maybe she could persuade Lupinius to ignore the boy’s crazy tale . . .

  Not trusting the fates, she took off at a run herself. Donial was faster than she, however—he had always been a good runner, speedy and tireless. She gave chase as well as she could in her long silk skirts, but he had every advantage. Kral had taught her to move noiselessly through the forest and how to avoid the low branches and thorns. But even so, even as clumsy and . . . and Aquilonian as he was, Donial still outpaced her. Before long she could hear him crashing through the woods ahead, but couldn’t even see him. She slowed, beginning to dread reaching Koronaka and the miserable reception that would certainly greet her there.

  It turned out to be every bit as bad as she feared.

  THE THING DONIAL was best at was speed.

&nb
sp; Every boy had some skill or ability. Some were big and strong, others so tough nothing would hurt them, still others exceedingly smart. Donial was not any of these, he thought—he was small, wiry, and didn’t much care for pain or scholarship.

  But he was fast. In footraces, even against men twice his age, he usually left everyone else choking in his dust. He had acquired a reputation around Tarantia for it and knew that there were even those who gambled on his races. Betting against him carried a certain disadvantage, but he did lose from time to time, and on those occasions the payoff was significant.

  So when he ignored his sister’s pleas and took off through the tall grass, he knew there was no chance she could catch him. Alanya was strong and fit, but she was no match for him when it came to speed. He heard her voice behind him, becoming more muffled with every long stride.

  He knew he should have run the moment he saw her with the Pict. But he had been so astonished at the sight, he had been rooted to the spot, watching. If she had needed help, there wouldn’t have been much he could do—though he would have tried anything and everything. But the Pict was at least a head taller than him, with a much longer reach. He looked more powerful in every way, and in hand-to-hand combat Donial’s quickness might not have made much difference.

  So running for help would have made the most sense. The fort was a couple of miles away, but he could have been back with soldiers, or some of Uncle Lupinius’s Rangers, in just a few minutes. If he hadn’t trusted in his own speed, he’d never have left the fort to begin with, given the stories he’d heard about Pictish savagery.

  Fetching soldiers would take too long if the savage had decided to slit her throat, but they’d be quick enough to help if he had wanted to carry her away to his own village.

  Instead, he had just stood and watched until the Pict was out of sight. His response didn’t say much for his own physical courage, which had never been so tested until that moment. Of course, the young savage hadn’t seemed to be physically threatening her. His doing so might have made things different—might have spurred Donial to some more definitive action.