The Wanderer's Tale

by David Bilsborough

  SO THEY CONTINUED DOGGEDLY, pacing out the most painful steps upon that darkest stretch of their road so far. The Peladane’s mood was black and leaden, and emanated from him like a cloud of necrotizing spores to the others of the company, infecting them with its bane. Few words were uttered, the name of Methuselech mentioned not once, and only Whitehorse – lightened of his burden but darkened of heart – dared glance back towards those evil heights wherein still lay his master.

  The next few days saw the bedraggled company’s slow but steady progress out of the Blue Mountains. Despite their expectations, they could not yet see the Northlands from here. The first day was spent leaping one by one over deep crevices and narrow fissures that fell away sheer into blackness below, and from which surged freezing currents of air and the distant echoes of rushing streams and the forlorn bleating of goats.

  On the second day they travelled northwards along a narrow, knife-edged ridge of uneven rock that was split by frost and shaped by the wind of a thousand centuries. It felt like travelling along the chipped blade of a timber saw. The gales howling up at them threatened at any moment to pick them up and toss them down the slope. They all ensured their mounts trod very carefully, for once they started sliding down a slope like that, they would not stop till they reached the very bottom – however far that was.

  In all that time their only company were the lammergeyers that wheeled high above against the deep blue sky, or the occasional line of saiga antelopes that clattered below along almost sheer rock-faces.

  On and on they travelled, the next day hauling their reluctant steeds over great slabs of jagged granite or picking their way gingerly around wide patches of ice. All the time the raging wind sang in their ears and lashed their burning faces. But towards the end of the final day, after an hour of arduous scrambling up the shoulder of a particularly hazardous peak, they finally gained the summit and stared in wonder at their first, and now unexpected, view of the great, wild Northlands.

  ‘Ha!’ cried a jubilant Wodeman above the shrieking wind. ‘I told you we’d be seeing the Northlands by tonight.’

  Nibulus steadied himself against the wind, clutching Hammer-hoof’s reins for support, and shouted back: ‘I seem to recall you saying that four days ago.’ Nevertheless, he slapped Wodeman heartily on the back.

  It was the most stunning view any of them had seen yet in all their time traversing the Blue Mountains. Below the peak on which they stood, the mountain dropped away gradually in a long, unbroken slope until it reached the green, wooded foothills miles away. And beyond that extended the beautiful magnificence of the Northlands. Below those hills marking the boundary of the uplands sprawled the grey-green emptiness known as the Rainflats: mile after mile of moorland where a few solitary hillocks poked through an enshrouding blanket of mist like islands drowning in a cold grey sea. This greyness stretched all the way to a darker patch that lay almost on the horizon, and which, they guessed, was the great forest of Fron-Wudu, beneath whose boughs they were destined eventually to pass.

  Beyond that – though they could not be sure – the keener-sighted among them believed they could discern distant peaks of white shining right on the very limit of their vision. Those must be the fabled Giant Mountains, compared to which the Blue Mountains were little more than a ragged collection of knolls.

  ‘Take a good look now,’ said the Peladane, drawing his great Ulleanh around him against the chill, ‘for this is the last view we will enjoy of where we are bound.’

  Gapp shivered violently, not from his sudden exposure to the wind after their sweaty ascent, but from the thought that all that vast, dark expanse of land (more extensive than he had ever seen in his life), with all its unknown dangers, was but a journey leading to an even worse place, a place where the cold would cut right through his body without bothering to go around it. All that land to cross, all those weeks of hard travel, with scarce sign of civilization, and nothing at the end but a hollow castle which – if they were lucky – would still be empty. He glanced at Appa, and briefly their eyes met: the young and the old sharing a mutual bond of intimidation and dread.

  Bolldhe on the other hand felt more elevated in spirit than during the whole of this quest so far. He gazed down the slopes and breathed in deeply. The scents from below reminded him acutely of the land in the West he had forsaken, and brought back vivid memories of his beloved and forsaken Moel-Bryn. As they began their descent, he walked alone in his mind, treading again the familiar pathways of his youth as the smells of pine forest, damp needle-strewn earth and whispering moorland filled his head.

  For the rest of that day, his heart ached with a profound happiness.

  During the next week, progress was tediously slow. As the company descended the foothills of the Blue Mountains to the lowlands beyond, the path that had grudgingly and somewhat unreliably led them through the mountains now, to their dismay, disappeared altogether. The Chronicle of Gwyllch told of ‘a gradely highway used by many trayders and marchaunts, bilt upon a dyke they name Enta-Clawdd, that dothe run strayte and trewe unto the town of Myst-Hakel, that we calle Edgemarshe.’

  ‘Trade’s obviously dried up somewhat in the last five hundred years,’ Bolldhe commented dryly to their leader. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a more up-to-date guidebook, have you?’

  There was also a growing sense among the men that they were now descending into unfriendly, alien lands. Ever since leaving the mountains, they had the distinct feeling of being spied upon, and both Wodeman and Paulus were fairly confident they knew by what.

  ‘Spriggans,’ Paulus whispered. ‘It is an evil land we come to.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Wodeman.

  ‘We approach the marshlands,’ Paulus explained. ‘Neither earth nor water but something between. Such places are the dominion of Huldre, treacherous and evil.’

  ‘Among my people the marsh is considered a sacred burial ground,’ the Torca countered, ‘for it is there that our dead are most easily dragged down to the next world below. We do not fear it.’

  ‘Treacherous and evil,’ Paulus repeated. ‘We will not even eat the creatures inhabiting such places, newt and toad, for they too are neither one thing nor the other, but unclean and detestable. I tell you, we are entering an evil place.’

  Wodeman might have argued further, except that the previous night he had had a dream that disturbed him greatly. In it he found himself standing alone upon a desolate wasteland, while a woman with hair as black as her aura had floated towards him over the tussocks, her feet not touching the ground.

  Nibulus, at least, was concerned with more practical things, for the journey through the mountains had taken longer than anticipated and their rations were dwindling. This would not present too much of a problem if they could find their way to the town of Myst-Hakel fairly soon. But the lack of any clear road and virtually no information about the town itself, save that it lay to the north of the mountain path they had emerged from, meant that they now had to spend much of the day foraging. Much like nomads, they started living off the land, setting traps at night and subsisting on meagre victuals.

  Wodeman came into his own at this time, and proved himself invaluable in finding things edible. Second nature to him was the art of smoking wasps’ nests to plunder their delicately flavoured baby grubs, locating wild roots, herbs and edible fungi, and coaxing amphibious creatures out of their hideaways. His knowledge of such lore of the wild seemed without limit, and he came up with a thousand and one natural recipes to please all tastes.

  By night their camp would be plagued by velvet ants that would drive the sleepers mad with irritation, leaving painful bites all over their skin by morning. Only Wodeman was untroubled: he would sing to the ants, entreating them not to touch his rations or disturb his sleep and, to the exasperation of the others, they obeyed him.

  ‘The secret,’ he informed them, ‘lies in rewarding them beforehand; a little of the food you don’t finish yourself, and they soon go away.’

 
This angered Paulus greatly, for to him it was the surest sign of capitulation to the ‘treacherous filth-dwellers’. Whenever the velvet ants filed away with the shaman’s offerings, he would secretly crush them into the mud with his great boots.

  The following morning Bolldhe abandoned the quest. He simply mounted his horse and rode off into the West, leaving the company behind forever.

  The company stared helplessly after the swiftly departing horseman as he grew smaller in the distance, and was then lost from sight. Only Appa made any attempt to call him back; but the pathetically comic gait of his pony was no match for the speed of Zhang, the Adt-T’man from the Tabernacle Plains, and the priest’s attempt proved no more than an act of desperation.

  Now, a quarter of an hour later, as the company stared westwards at the sight of the aged rider slowly returning without his quarry, feelings of apathy and futility stole the last of their good humour away.

  It had not been a promising day to start with. All night it had been chilly, with a determined wind blowing unhindered across the Rainflats, and then during the early hours it had started to rain. At first this was just a cold spattering of raindrops, but it soon grew into a steady drizzle, soaking into their bedrolls and even into their clothing. Their first attempts to make another fire had proved futile, but when one was finally kindled through the craft of Wodeman, all it achieved was to attract hordes of biting midges and fierce little black flies that bit and stung them for the remainder of the pre-dawn sleeping hours. All that could be heard was the incessant downpour, the high-pitched buzzing of insect life and the constant bad-tempered curses of the travellers as they vainly slapped the winged tormentors away from their itching faces.

  By the morning they had all been cheated of any strength that sleep might have restored. They arose, half awake and bleary eyed, to one of the most cheerless days imaginable, and seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A grey fog had now settled about them, so it was impossible to tell in which direction they should be headed.

  Even Wodeman’s expertly set traps had yielded nothing all night, except for one aged and rather poisonous-looking weal-toad, which squatted in the middle of the camp, gazing at them balefully before lumbering off into the tall grass.

  It really looked as though it was going to be one of those days.

  With ration packs now empty, and still no sign of a road, their frustration quickly led to bitter arguments, accusations flying and general foul-tempered bickering, with everybody determined to have his say.

  ‘At times like this,’ Paulus spoke up suddenly, ‘my people look to the lammergeyer for inspiration. It will not blanch at any carrion, no matter how foul the beast, how old the meat, nor how ravaged by other scavengers. And when it eats,’ he went on, with a faraway look in his eye, ‘it simply thrusts its head in, right in up to its shoulders! Encased in meat, breathing blood, gorging till it is sated! How I would now love to be a lammergeyer.’

  Nobody cared to discuss this further with him.

  With an inward sigh, Nibulus was forced to admit to himself that he had failed abysmally in the first test of a Thegne: he had not managed to form his company into a cohesive and co-operative expeditionary unit.

  To add to the general air of discontent, a certain member of the group appeared to have something else on his mind that was making him even grumpier than might be reasonably expected.

  It had caused Bolldhe long hours of wakefulness. What exactly was he doing here out in the wild Northlands, thousands of miles from his homeland, amongst a motley group of characters he hardly knew? Certainly none of the others knew the answer to this crucial question, not just the old priest who had persuaded Bolldhe to join them.

  All night he had debated with himself, endlessly, futilely, his exhausted mind mulling over the reasons time and again, until that little seed of doubt that had been with him from the very beginning now hung over him like a black cloud, quietly insisting: Why are you here?

  So, by the time he rose from his non-existent slumber to the news that their rations had totally run out, Bolldhe felt tired, bad-tempered and ready to quit.

  ‘Bloody quests!’ he muttered irately. ‘Who needs them?’

  He had not necessarily meant anyone to hear this, and in the general hum of swearing, had certainly not expected anyone to have paid him any attention. But on hearing this, Finwald, who had been preoccupied with scratching his armpits and yawning, suddenly spun around upon Bolldhe and snarled:

  ‘You don’t need quests? Good! Then we don’t need you either. Go pack your bags and piss off home!’

  The whole camp went dead silent. Finwald never spoke like this, not to anyone. The atmosphere darkened with violence and thickened with anger, and there was the feeling that something had started here that had to be seen right to the bitter end; there was no avoiding it now.

  In the awkward silence they all stared at Bolldhe and waited to see what he would do.

  Bolldhe stared straight back into the tar-black eyes of the mage-priest, whose open anger was matched by his own silent, smouldering fury.

  His hand involuntarily travelled down to the hilt of his axe.

  Everyone waited.

  Then Nibulus stepped forward. He had never taken to Bolldhe, never seen the point of him.

  ‘Finwald’s right,’ he said now, ‘You’re not needed here any more, Bolldhe. Or wanted. You’d better leave.’

  Bolldhe stared at him without a word, unblinking, his astonishment at this sudden turn of events shared by the other five in the group. Seconds passed that felt like hours. Bolldhe found his thoughts going back to a time last year when he had found himself in the mountain country of Trondaran and had been watching a player in a travelling theatre being pelted with rancid aubergines by the raucous crowd. He recalled the embarrassment and pity he had felt for the luckless thespian as he stood there on stage all alone, hot tears of rage and self-consciousness clearly visible in his eyes.

  So, without a word of explanation, he jammed his gear into his saddlebags, slung his axe over his shoulder, leapt onto his horse’s back, spurred Zhang to a headlong gallop over the plains, and was gone.

  So Appa returned from pursuing the departing traveller, his voice hoarse from uttering weak cries of desperation.

  With despondency, the others watched the exhausted priest’s pony stumble back into camp again. He was clearly in a bad way, coughing fitfully and wiping the cold sweat from his pallid, febrile face with one grimy sleeve. As he drew nearer, they could hear him curse the uncooperative wanderer to hell, then disgustedly announce that they had lost their sole chance of defeating the Rawgr.

  All their options had disappeared with the fleeing Bolldhe, so no point in going on now. Drauglir, curse his foul existence to hell, would rise again unopposed, and there was nothing either they or anyone else could do about it. Nothing left for them now except to return home and prepare for approaching darkness, despair and death.

  ‘Lord Cuna!’ he wailed tearfully. ‘Can it really be true that we’re beaten?’

  As the others looked on with mixed pity and surprise, Appa fell to his knees in the muddied earth and trembled like a dying creature. His hands were clasped tightly around something and he was squeezing it fitfully till blood trickled between his fingers.

  Suddenly he pitched forward and buried his face in the mud. Finwald leapt forward to raise him back to his feet. He unclasped his fellow priest’s hand, and stared sadly at what lay therein.

  ‘Appa,’ he said softly, ‘it isn’t as bad as that, surely? Nothing can be that bad . . .’

  The words were spoken poignantly, and with great feeling. It was the Torch that Appa held, the little stone amulet of Cuna, symbol of his faith, and he had been wringing the life out of it.

  Finwald turned from the frail figure to face the others.

  The two warriors remained impassive, unmoved, neither of them having ever understood why it was necessary for that wandering trickster to have come along in the first place.

&nb
sp; Even Wodeman stood there without expression, continuing to stare westwards to the point where Bolldhe had disappeared from sight. Finwald could not guess at the thoughts that might lie hidden behind that inscrutable Torca mask, for Wodeman’s very existence seemed a strange anachronism to the learned mage-priest.

  But the set expression of the shaman belied the intensity of feeling within him. Like Appa, Wodeman had been entrusted with a divine mission to ensure that Bolldhe destroy the Rawgr Drauglir before he could rise again. But unlike the priest of Cuna, Wodeman was remaining calm. Worried but calm. Nobody could deny that things had definitely taken a turn for the worse; maybe, as Appa now believed, there really was no hope. Yet he could not bring himself to accept that mankind’s luck had run out completely. He could not believe that everything, the forests, the hills, the rivers and all that dwelt therein, were now doomed to blackness and despoliation just on the whim of one man.

  Anything could happen to turn things around, he reflected consolingly. So often the strands of the web of fate would be disturbed by an ill wind, becoming entangled, confused, and turned back upon themselves. Something would happen. Things had a way of sorting themselves out. If Bolldhe did not return to them, it could simply be that they themselves were not destined to be with him any longer. Possibly it was that, in some inexplicable way, the company had already played its part in the unfolding drama. Maybe Bolldhe needed them no more now than a fledgling deserting the nest when it is time to do so. Maybe Bolldhe would eventually turn North again to continue his appointed mission by himself. Or perhaps he would find others who would pick up where his old companions had left off.

  That Gapp was thoroughly despondent at the turn of events was clearly evident from the scowl on his face. He had looked up to the silent Bolldhe as an embodiment of all the heroism, romance and adventure of travel that he had yearned for himself, and now that the man had simply given up, under no visible threat, his disappointment quickly turned to bitterness.

  So much for heroes . . .