The Wanderer's Tale

by David Bilsborough

  After an hour waiting his turn, Gapp – the last one of course – finally lowered himself into the slightly murky but warm embrace of the bathtub. He had already eaten well, gorging himself on black bread and mutton, and four bowls of a thick soup made from various root vegetables, edible toadstools, tree bark and spicy forest herbs. He had also drunk deeply of a full-bodied elderberry mead that Nym kept in apparently limitless supply in the back room; and even now the kettle was whistling shrilly as the after-dinner harebell and fungus tea was being prepared. As the tub’s last, slow wisps of steam exhaled through the thin scum that layered the water and adhered wetly to his face, and the comforting warmth of the water permeated every pore in his skin, Gapp felt his whole body relax: every chill, cramp and ache floated away and was forgotten. Bloated with food, half-drunk on mead, all he needed to do now was let his troubled mind drift away into sensuous semi-consciousness.

  Barely aware of the others’ existence, Gapp could hear the distant drone of their conversation, the muted, contented hum of their talk only occasionally punctuated by sudden bursts of his master’s raucous laughter. But he was heedless of whatever was being said as he languished in blissful unawareness.

  ‘. . . bit odd, don’t you think? Didn’t show their face once . . . Where’re they all now? I mean, does she live here on her own?’

  Finwald’s voice was quickly interrupted by that of the Peladane:

  ‘Who cares?’ he said, just before thrusting yet another hunk of gravy-soaked bread into his staggeringly capacious mouth. ‘She’s got food.’

  Clearly their leader was fully aware of their present situation regarding rations, and was taking full advantage of this unexpected opportunity to feed himself with as much as he could cram in without causing himself internal bleeding.

  ‘We’ll not come by such fare as this again till Myst-Hakel,’ he explained between mouthfuls.

  ‘Myst-Hakel’s just up the road,’ Finwald exclaimed. ‘Didn’t you hear what she said earlier?’

  The voices faded again as Gapp’s mind wandered away. After what seemed hours, but may have been only minutes, he awoke again to the sound of Nibulus’s laughter. The bath water was still warmish, the fire still lit.

  ‘. . . that thing in the pool . . .’

  ‘Just forget it, Finwald, it’s gone. In any case, these are the wildlands; you have to expect things like that.’

  ‘But to just appear then disappear like that? I tell you, Nibulus, I don’t like it at all. We’re still too close, and this place . . .’

  ‘Finwald; you always were a worrier.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing. It’s gone. I have decreed it. You three priests dispelled it or “turned” it, or whatever the word is. Trust me, it’s gone.’

  There followed a short pause in which Gapp’s bath water seemed to become notably cooler, then Wodeman’s voice cut through clearly.

  ‘. . . can’t believe you didn’t even try to rouse me! What’s the matter with you people? Can’t you smell it? Euch! The whole place reeks of aberration . . .’

  Eyelids like lead, the boy finally fell asleep.

  As he slept, he dreamt. He dreamt he was walking the high bleak hills north of Nordwas with his brothers Ottar, Snori and the rest. They were chattering endlessly, but whenever he tried to join in they would merely laugh and ignore him. After a while he became aware that somebody else was walking alongside him, but something prevented him from seeing who it was. He tried asking his brothers about this newcomer, but now they had transformed into Nibulus and the rest, and still would not speak to him.

  The unseen walker emanated a distinctly macabre aura, smelling of dead crows nailed to a wooden post on a stifling summer’s evening. The newcomer suddenly whispered to him in a female voice: ‘Look o’er there at yonder horseman . . .’

  Gapp looked, and saw that it was Bolldhe, galloping hard towards a cliff-edge.

  He called out warnings, and called and called, but it was no use. In desperation he turned round to face the stranger at his side, and saw at last that it was Nym-Cadog. But younger, slimmer and infinitely more alluring than he remembered her. She was laughing at him wickedly and then he became the rider, the one galloping hard towards the rim of the cliff.

  With a sickening lurch the ground gave way below him, and he was falling, falling into a blackness so dire, floating down a long, black tunnel of freezing water . . .

  . . . With a violent kick, Gapp awoke. This time he knew for certain he was genuinely awake. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then he realized that it really was dark, totally lightless, and he was floating in cold water. And there was a rank, marshy smell now that had not been here before.

  In blind panic he lunged out of the chilly water and tumbled unceremoniously from the tub. He stifled a grunt, some inner voice warning him not to call out. With shaking, desperate hands he felt about on the floor for his spectacles, then his clothes, and managed to pull them them on. Then, just as he was about to try to grope his way to the door, he heard a kind of fluttering, snuffling noise right behind him . . .

  Something enormously heavy smote him on the back of the head, and Gapp was propelled back into unconsciousness.

  After what might have been days or even weeks, Bolldhe awoke. He jerked upright in panic. Confusion and disorientation combined to cloud his sleepy mind. The night was without any light whatsoever, and all he could hear was the gentle whisper of a night breeze through the tall reeds.

  It was a cool breeze, which Bolldhe breathed in deeply, gratefully, in an effort to rouse himself. A few yards off to his left, Zhang wheezed. Then Bolldhe, smelling the familiar moor-grass in the air, recalled where he was.

  Not quite so obvious was why he had woken up, or rather what had woken him. There was something very disturbing about this night, a distinct sense of menace. He searched his thoughts, and had a vague recollection of a stranger, a tall, ragged man approaching him in the dark across the moors. He had held a ruelbone scroll-case in his hand, but as soon as he had proffered it to Bolldhe, the figure, its scroll-case and all, had been snatched away . . .

  And then, well, Bolldhe had woken up, he presumed . . .

  Yet even now, not all was as it should be; the night seemed just that shade too dark, that little bit too still. And there was a feeling of . . . expectancy in the air. It was like the lull before the thunderstorm, yet Bolldhe could smell no such weather in the air this night.

  Silently, he waited . . . and waited.

  Eventually, still a little perturbed, the wanderer fell asleep.

  At that same moment, many miles to the east, Gapp awoke again.

  At first, vague thoughts and images came and went, floating randomly through his brain. Then they became more insistent, pressing in on his mind and demanding attention. But he did not really want to wake up, for already a dull sensation of throbbing pain at the back of his head was giving him the impression that, if he were to acknowledge it in any way, it would not be pleasant. So waking up, he concluded, would be an even greater folly.

  A droning hum, deep and sonorous, invaded his senses. At the moment it was still far away, a dull frequency that was felt rather than heard, just on the edge of his perception. But gradually it drew nearer, its pitch occasionally rising and falling as it grew clearer.

  Now voices . . .

  Finally, reluctantly, he awoke.

  ‘W-Wass ’apnin’?’ he mumbled, drawing dank air sharply into his lungs. ‘Where am I?’

  He sat up, slid his index fingers under his spectacle lenses, and rubbed his eyes. Still the hum droned on, and the voices muttered quietly. He stared about himself but, though he knew his eyes were wide open, still it was pitch black in here. He was confused.

  The voices stopped, and then one called out: ‘Radnar? Is that you?’

  Gapp continued to stare into the darkness, fighting the urge to panic. Why was it so dark? What time was it? What was he doing sitting on a cold, gritty, flagstone floor? What
was that awful smell? And where were those voices coming from?

  ‘Who’s that?’ he called back, a little hesitantly. ‘Master Wintus?’

  ‘Yes. Are you all right?’ replied the voice, a little off to his right. It sounded dead and flat, as if they were confined to a burial barrow underground.

  ‘I’m . . . all right,’ he claimed, even though in truth his head now felt as though someone had bored a hole in the back of it, inserted a red-hot pipe, and was unrelentingly sucking his brains out. Purple-green lights swam before his eyes, and he felt nauseous to the point of being sick.

  On top of that, he could hardly breathe for the foul stench from some unknown source.

  Still the droning continued.

  ‘Keep calm, then, Gapp,’ Nibulus said, in an uncharacteristically responsible, measured tone. (Gapp’s pain and sickness were instantly forgotten, and a chill immediately cleared his head; Nibulus never talked like that. Gapp was anything but calm, now.) ‘. . . We could be in a spot of trouble, here.’

  ‘Why, what’s happened?’

  ‘It seems we may have put a little too much faith in Nym-Cadog. She is obviously not what she would have us believe. Apparently we all fell asleep without posting a guard. At any rate, we now appear to be somewhat . . . incarcerated. Now, if you can manage to stand, get up and have a search around you. Tell me what you feel.’

  Gapp dutifully did as he was told, and crawled uncertainly about the floor with one hand waving in the dark before his face. His fingers soon came up against a stone wall, which he used to help him stand up. Then methodically he ran his hands over the whole of its smooth, almost glassy surface. Above him, no more than two inches above his head when standing upright, he could feel the ceiling. The walls on either side were just the same but the fourth contained a row of thick metal prison bars running from floor to ceiling, as immovable as the stone into which they were set.

  Gapp sat down heavily, and his chest began to constrict in panic. The truth of the situation was that he was trapped in a tiny dark cell.

  He called out to his master in a shaky voice, ‘D’you think you can get me out of here, please?’

  ‘’Fraid not, Gapp,’ Nibulus replied in that same calm tone. ‘We’re all of us in the same position. We think that woman Nym must have sold us to some lord or other to hold for ransom here in his donjon, or wherever we are.’

  There was a general buzz of agreement from different directions.

  ‘Everyone else here too?’ asked Gapp, feeling close to despair.

  ‘All here,’ Nibulus confirmed. ‘All awake, all unhurt, and all hopelessly trapped in separate cells, I’m afraid. Except Finwald, who’s been squashed into an animal cage so small he can’t even stand.’

  Gapp, despite everything, began to feel vaguely irritated at his master’s apparent composure. Peladanes were always so calm and unflappable in situations like this. Why couldn’t they just panic like everyone else?

  ‘The walls are solid, the bars immovable, and all our weapons have been taken from us. So it looks like we’re going to have to sit this one out and see what happens.’

  ‘What about our magic-users?’ Gapp persisted, as though he were the first one to think of it. ‘Can’t they do—’

  ‘Not me, unfortunately,’ came the feeble voice of Finwald from another direction. ‘I overspent my powers back there at the swamp – it’ll take me some days to build up my resources.’

  ‘And Appa’s even worse depleted,’ Nibulus continued. ‘He can’t seem to stop falling asleep.’

  ‘Not that he’d be much use to us even if he were fit enough,’ Finwald added. ‘Not really up his street, this sort of thing.’

  ‘According to Wodeman, not up anyone’s street,’ Nibulus pointed out. ‘He claims we’re trapped in “another world”, locked away by huldre-magic, and if that’s true, it means none of our own magic will work.’

  The rapid breathing audible from the cell to Gapp’s left began to accelerate, and the stench became suffocating.

  ‘Not that it’s stopped him trying,’ Finwald remarked. ‘Hear that thrumming? That’s him trying to find out what’s going on.’

  Gapp turned his attention to the noise he mentioned, which seemed to be continuing without even the slightest pause, a constant drone reminding him somewhat of the mage-priests’ plain-song he had so often heard echoing through the stony temples back home. He shivered. This closeness, this darkness, it was not to his liking at all, and the sorcerer’s incantations were not reassuring him one bit.

  He began to frisk himself in the vain hope of finding something that might prove useful, but partly to keep his sanity from fragmenting. He was still wearing his spectacles, thankfully, and the clean set of clothes he had put on after emerging from the bath, but all his other gear – cloak, belt and pouches, baggage and weapons – were missing.

  However, there might still be a few articles that he had concealed in various items of his clothing. Before setting out from Nordwas the youngster had considered the possibility of being robbed, so had sewn a number of small items into the lining of some of his garments, for just such an emergency as this. He ran his fingers along the hems of his clothes, trying not to hope too hard that it was into these same clothes that he had hidden these precious objects.

  ‘They’re here,’ he whispered in relief, and grinned at his own resourcefulness.

  ‘What?’ hissed a voice in the dark. It was the voice of the stinking individual who had been breathing so hard next door to him.

  ‘My survival kit,’ Gapp whispered back, conspiratorially.

  ‘Survival?’ came the voice again. It was, of course, Paulus – who else could smell like that? It was only now that Gapp began to appreciate the Nahovian’s efforts up until now to sleep downwind of them whenever they pitched camp.

  Everyone was listening attentively now, hopes rekindled by this unexpected foresight from the least one among them.

  ‘Let me feel what’s here,’ Gapp said. ‘A length of wire, a small lodestone . . . several pinches of Khetann-Hittam pick-me-up . . . and some string.’

  ‘Yes?’ Nibulus prompted.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so . . . Yes, that’s it,’ Gapp concluded.

  ‘You call that a survival kit?’ hissed Paulus, now sounding on the verge of hysteria. ‘You stupid little maggot! I’ll twist your soggy little head off when I get my hands on you. What were you hoping to survive? A head cold? Your bootlaces snapping?’

  ‘There’re many situations,’ the slightly abashed esquire began defensively, ‘in which my personal survival kit could be—’

  ‘Name one!’

  ‘The lodestone can tell you the direction—’

  ‘Brilliant! So now we know which direction is North: through a set of inch-thick bars and fifteen feet of solid rock! . . . Have you nothing useful?’

  Gapp flushed. ‘No,’ he replied coldly. ‘Have you?’

  ‘You little bastard, I’ll—’

  ‘Shhh,’ hissed Finwald. ‘You’ll disturb Wodeman. I think he’s trancing.’

  They considered this for a moment, then simultaneously came to the conclusion that Wodeman’s trancing was probably even less use than Gapp’s survival kit. It was fortunate for the boy, therefore, when he suddenly announced: ‘Oh, here’s my flint and steel, too . . . and my tinderbox.’

  He tore off a length of his shirt, tied it around with the wire, doused it with tinder, and struck sparks over it with his flint and steel. The tinder caught almost immediately, and though the cloth sputtered a little at first, before long it was burning happily. The flames growing, fed by Gapp’s careful breath, he took it over to the cell’s bars and placed it upon the floor.

  The cloth was not perfectly dry, which meant it burned slowly, and also meant it hardly burned at all. The flame was not much, then, but to eyes that had become accustomed to the darkness it shone like a beacon.

  Gasps of wonder mixed with dis
taste breathed around the prison as the company looked for the first time upon their surroundings. They were confined in a long narrow chamber with a line of cells down each side, and a wide passage running between them. Near one end was a free-standing cage that held the dejected, cross-legged form of Finwald, and right in front of this was a hole in the floor that could have been a well or latrine, and out of which issued a sound very faint and indistinct. At the opposite end of the long cellar a short staircase ran up to a single door, apparently the only way out of this place.

  But it was the colour, the shapes and the grain of the place that was so alien and unsettling to their eyes. The smooth, glassy walls were composed of something that resembled jade, a translucent, soapy green stone shot through with weird swirls of gold that seemed to absorb the light of the paltry flame and reflect it back in bright pulses; while the bars of the cells looked deceptively like gleaming copper, and on the walls intervening between each cell door hung velvety, crimson drapes. The entire place was unlike anything that any of the company had ever experienced before, and suited perfectly the dizzying aroma from the diseased Nahovian.

  ‘Maybe Wodeman wasn’t so far from the truth in talking about “another world”,’ Nibulus muttered. Appa opened one eye and groaned, and Paulus’s breathing redoubled in pace.

  ‘That’s it,’ Gapp moaned. ‘We’ve got to get out of here . . . Master Nibulus, does the Chronicle make any mention of this place?’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought about that,’ the Peladane replied. ‘Let’s see . . . ah yes: “Inne the marshes wer we captored by a foulle wich, who didde trobell us with vile prisonment. But a tunel we didde bild, and thence cam oute to yonder marshland—”’

  ‘A tunnel!’ Gapp croaked. ‘Does it say where?’

  ‘“. . . inne the last sell but one, behinde a sette of loose stones.” ’

  ‘Last cell but one?’ That meant his own cell. Gapp spun round and began searching the shadowy walls. ‘Does it say where, exactly?’

  ‘Just behind yew, to yor left.’