The Wanderer's Tale

by David Bilsborough

  ‘. . . You do not have forests where you come from, then? . . .’

  Gapp did look up at that, thinking he was being got at.

  ‘. . . It’s just that the last human I took in was an Aescal, too . . .’

  Gapp pointed to the wheel questioningly.

  ‘. . . The Lightbearer missionary, yes. He hadn’t got a clue what he was doing . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gapp said. ‘I really don’t. Just a coincidence, I suppose. Wyda-Aescaland is the nearest civili – no, settled country to here. Maybe we just have more travellers . . . or more idiots, perhaps.’ He trailed off, feeling more pathetic than ever next to this knurled ironwood figure before him. ‘We do have forests, I suppose, but hardly anyone ever goes into them any more,’ he added, in a hopeless attempt to justify his people’s feebleness.

  Yulfric rubbed the end of his nose, plucked some nasal hairs out, then scratched his eyebrows for so long they let loose a snowfall of flaky skin and white mites onto his tabard. He appeared to be trying to remember something.

  After a while, he stood up and beckoned Gapp to follow him.

  ‘. . . Come. He left something behind. I show you . . .’

  They went into another room, the ‘guest room’, as the wheel translated it, which went some way to explaining why he had so few guests. There was a crudely built bed filled with loose straw (actually it looked more like a byre) and next to it a stool with only two legs. The third leg had been eaten away by some pernicious fungus, and the stool was now supported upon a pile of books. Grimy and damp, they had obviously seen better days.

  ‘. . . Behold, the library . . .’

  Yulfric was having difficulty disguising the pride in his voice. And there was no doubting that, this far north, six books all together in one room probably did constitute a library. But looking at this sad heap of weathered old tomes, with their surrounding cloud of spores, only made Gapp wonder if Yulfric had again missed the point.

  The Gyger went over to his prized collection of literary masterpieces and pulled them out one by one. Gapp joined him, and together they studied their near-illegible covers. Two of them were so damaged the titles could not be read, and one of these could not even be opened, so pulped together were its pages. The third book was written in a tongue neither boy nor Gyger could understand, but the fourth and fifth were written in Aescalandian. Of these one (currently being used to nest a family of fieldmice) was entitled Morio and the Gleemen from Friy, the other The Bumper Book of Nahovian War Atrocities.

  The sixth volume (perhaps the least decrepit and certainly the smallest, being only a pocketbook) was written in a script Gapp recognized as deriving from the territory of Qaladmir. The cover bore symbols that looked distinctly alchemical, and it was this one that Yulfric took hold of. He thumbed through the pages nostalgically, the book tiny in his massive hands, then turned to the inside cover and showed it to Gapp.

  To his surprise, there was a hand-written message there; some of this, again, was in the unintelligible tongue of Qaladmir, but right at the end, added almost as an afterthought, the young Aescal recognized words in his own language:

  ‘To Yulfric,’ he read out loud. ‘So long, and thanks for all the venison: Finwald.’

  Gapp’s jaw dropped so low it almost hit his chest.

  Finwald?

  Yulfric regarded the boy inquiringly. He had never seen such an expression on a human before.

  Finwald? Gapp thought incredulously, and bade Yulfric start spinning the wheel.

  ‘The missionary?’ he demanded, pointing to the signature. Yulfric nodded.

  What’s Finwald doing in all this? Gapp puzzled. It can’t possibly be the same . . . but how many Finwalds can there be in Wyda-Aescaland? And possessing a book on alchemy, to boot?

  ‘Slim build, indoor complexion, long black hair, black eyes?’ Gapp described, ‘And wearing a medallion shaped like this . . . ?’ (He outlined the shape of the Torch of Cuna with his hands.)

  Yulfric nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘. . . Made of silver . . .’

  ‘Silver, indeed,’ Gapp confirmed. That was it, then. It had to be Finwald. Gapp had not mentioned any of the names of his companions upon the quest, nor even the name of the town they started from; he saw no necessity in giving such specific details.

  ‘. . . You know him, then . . .’ Yulfric responded with a shrug. To him there was little coincidence in his two visitors happening to know each other, since they did, after all, come from the same country.

  But it was not the coincidence that astounded Gapp, for coincidences are bound to happen once in a while. What he could not get his head around was why Finwald had ever been here in the first place.

  ‘Yes, I know him,’ Gapp replied thoughtfully, ‘or rather, I did know him. Finwald is – was – the mage-priest I told you about earlier, the one whose idea it was to journey to Vaagenfjord Maw in the first place. It was he who experienced the vision of Drauglir’s re-awakening.’ And he who got me into all this trouble in the first place.

  ‘. . . Interesting. He must be a man driven by great need, to be sure. When first I happened upon him, he was much as you are now – starving, frightened, exhausted, feverish; blundering about the forest with no idea of what he was doing. I took him in, as I have with you, and let him stay till he was fit enough to go on his way. After a week, he was ready, and he departed, vowing never to return to the North again in his life. Ha! I don’t think he expected the wilds to be quite so wild!

  ‘And yet, two years later, here is a friend of his who tells me he has set forth intending to travel through the Great Forest once again! Even in the company of warriors, this new mission of his must be exigent indeed if it means he is to journey where once he nearly perished. Do you yourself believe that the Rawgr is truly arisen once more?’

  Gapp did not reply at once. He chewed his lower lip and stared absently at the damp patches on the floor by Yulfric’s feet. Then he said, ‘Two years ago, you say? Did Finwald tell you exactly what he was doing out in the forest all by himself?’

  ‘. . . Yes, he told me he was a missionary sent by the elders of his land to teach the pagans of Wrythe. He said that their heathen souls were to be saved, and he was the one chosen to carry out this task . . . armed only with his faith, his silver amulet . . . and a dead snake in a bag, as far as I remember . . .’

  He paused at this last thought, laid his hand on the door jamb, grimaced, wiped his hand quickly on his tabard, and continued. ‘. . . He seemed very committed, a man of singular purpose . . .’

  But Gapp shook his head in befuddlement. ‘No,’ he murmured, ‘that doesn’t sound like the Finwald I know. Oh, he’s certainly committed to his faith, I’ll give him that. But he’s never, in all the years I’ve known him, struck me as the missionary type. Not at all. More into studying than preaching.’

  He thought hard about it. There was something not right at all about this whole business. There had never been any mention of such a mission to the North lands that he had been aware of, and in a town the size of Nordwas, such a thing was unlikely to pass by unnoticed. What was Finwald up to then? Why had he never mentioned any of this to his quest-mates? It all seemed very peculiar.

  And Wrythe . . . Wasn’t that one of the places the company was supposed to be heading for? If he remembered rightly, it was the only settlement in the Far North that lay anywhere near Melhus Island.

  Wrythe? Why there, of all places? What was so special, so secret, about it? There had to be a connection, that was clear. But according to the Gyger, that encounter had been two years ago, and Finwald had only had his divine revelation this recent spring . . .

  . . . Or so he had told everyone. What did he know that he had kept to himself for two years, possibly longer, to the exclusion of even his fellow questers?

  The question hung in Gapp’s mind for a long time. It nagged him, it harried him and it drove him to distraction. Then something Yulfric had just said came back to him.

&nbs
p; ‘. . . dead snake in a bag? Did I read that right?’

  Yulfric shrugged. ‘. . . That’s what it looked like to me . . . I never found out because he never let me see it . . . A long, thin bag of oiled hessian, strapped to his back . . . bound tightly around something long, thin and wavy . . . but stiff as a board . . . Like I said, it looked as if he was carrying a dead snake . . . never let it out of his sight . . .’

  Gapp stared at the words hard as they appeared on the wheel. He could make no sense of them at all, and wondered again if it was not merely a fault in the translation.

  But, when all was said and done, he concluded there was nothing he could do about any of this. It was probably all academic, anyhow; Finwald was dead along with the rest of his companions, and he would never find out.

  Gapp was accepted into the household of Yulfric not through kindness, obligation, curiosity, nor even loneliness, but rather through absent-mindedness. The Gyger just did not seem to remember the lad was there most of the time, or why he was there. Back in Nordwas this had been the norm, but here sometimes even the hounds appeared not to notice him. It felt as if he had somehow disappeared below the threshold of sentient awareness. It was some time before Yulfric stopped looking startled, or vaguely troubled, whenever he came across the boy.

  Eventually Gapp became part of the daily routine, the only condition being that he work hard, both in the house and out on the hunt, pull his own weight, and stay there only for as long as it took him to regain his strength and go his own way.

  His stay with Yulfric was, as it turned out, only brief. But in the time he spent there, a whole rich new world was opened up to him. It was a time that, if he were fated to weather the changing fortunes of Fron-Wudu and survive, he would never be able to forget. The secret life of the forest was gradually revealed to his young eyes. He had never believed, in all his fifteen years behind the stockaded walls of Nordwas, that such miracles of nature were happening all the time beneath his very feet.

  It was not all wonderment. He was thrust head-first into a world of pain, hardship and cruelty that – but for his recent ordeals – he would have found traumatic and hateful. But at the same time it allowed him to experience at first hand a world and a life that he would never have been able to guess at, had he merely passed through as a traveller.

  Privation and suffering were really felt, here. They were not merely unfortunate experiences occurring now and then. They were constant, and were a central part of the daily routine. If a problem arose, it had to be solved. There was no choice. Coming to terms with this was Gapp Radnar’s next step in his sudden maturity.

  Coming to terms with death, too, was something the young man had to harden himself to. Before, killing had been necessary only when the company had had the misfortune to stumble across a dangerous adversary. Here and now, they actively sought it out: there was no mercy, no fair play and no natural justice. It was a case of killing for meat. Often that meant very young animals that had hardly even had a glimpse of life yet; or the sick, or aged. All would be ruthlessly taken. Pathos was an unheard-of luxury. Their quarry was simply meat which had not yet been secured.

  Forced to adapt to this new way of thinking, Gapp’s quaint old notions of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ quickly fell away, to be replaced by ‘live’ or ‘die’.

  Furthermore, though the days he spent with Yulfric were few, they seemed to last longer than any he had ever known. Time took on a new intensity, where day-to-day survival was all that mattered, and what the future might hold was not even a passing consideration. But Gapp soon discovered that there was another side to this coin; the exigencies of survival and the vitality of their lifestyle meant that each day, each hour even, was experienced with a new intensiy. They really lived, and this gave life a new edge that made his previous existence seem as though he had spent it half-asleep. The years of a hunter might be short, but that did not matter, was never even thought about.

  Within several days, Gapp found his senses come really alive for the first time. His reactions quickened, his alertness multiplied many times over, and any debilitation was soon quashed. His whole body now thrilled with a heightened life-force as he hunted daily with Yulfric and the pack.

  Even his spectacles did not seem to steam up quite so frequently.

  If there was one thing that he never quite came to terms with, though, it was Heldered. Nothing had been said about this most unapparent member of the House of Yulfric, and at first Gapp felt that he would rather not know more about it anyway. But there was no avoiding the subject. Things were laid out ready for the giant, meals were cooked and served, plates were cleaned, clothes were picked off the floor. Yulfric had apparently become used to this attention. But it was all done so haphazardly, never with any of the obsequious consistency one would have expected from a servant. If things were done, fine; but if not, well, one could hardly make demands from a domestic helper that, as far as Gapp could tell, was unpaid, unbidden and unseen.

  Only once did Gapp think he caught a glimpse of this ‘entity’. One morning before anyone else had got up, he left his ‘byre’ to fetch a mug of cold water, and upon entering the dining room (for want of a better description) he was sure that he had spotted Heldered. In the half-light of dawn it was difficult to say, but out of the corner of his eye he could have sworn that he had seen a diminutive figure hovering, fast asleep, above the table-top.

  It had given him quite a start, and he never entered that room again alone. But when he questioned Yulfric, the Gyger would only say that Heldered was a Nisse. This was a new word to the Aescal. Yulfric did not explain it further, and the meditation wheel seemed content to leave it at that. The only conclusion that Gapp could draw was that a Nisse must be similar to the Gardvords and Godbondes back home.

  Several households in Nordwas were reputed to have Gardvords. Sightings, however, were rare, and few descriptions existed. As far as anyone could say, they seemed to be household guardian spirits, but much bigger than the floating homunculus Gapp thought he had seen; ogrish, heavy-set and naked, some were said to be as big as the house itself, a concept Gapp had always found difficult to warm to. And unlike the Nisse, they expected payment. If none was forthcoming, they might charge around the house roaring, stamping and slamming doors all night, or alternatively the owner might simply wake up one morning to find the pantry bare – or the cat missing.

  Either way, Gardvords were decidedly more sinister (not to mention more of a nuisance) than the benevolent little Heldered. And Godbondes, of whom at least three were said to exist in W‘intus Hall (though the Peladanes would boast this, wouldn’t they?) were even worse. These did not exist in corporeal form, and could never be contacted or reasoned with. They did not expect payment, but they were resentful towards guests, hurling things at them if they felt like it, and would even kill unknown intruders.

  This did worry Gapp, it had to be said. The thought that a potent huldre spirit (and all such entities were huldre, no two ways about it) was coexisting in their very house, at liberty to do almost anything, was more than a little unnerving. He could not understand how the Gyger could be so relaxed about it.

  But then, Yulfric was Yulfric . . .

  One day the forest giant called Gapp over to him, and pointed to a door that the boy had never noticed before. There was a look of conspiracy in his eyes which seemed to say: I have something very special to show you, boy . . .

  Gapp glanced apprehensively at the Gyger, but allowed himself to be escorted down the short, dark corridor that led to the door. He noticed that it sloped downwards somewhat, was perceptibly even more dilapidated than the rest of the house, and smelt of something a bit like freshly baked bread.

  Yulfric pushed heavily against the door two or three times before it opened, then stooped under the low lintel to enter.

  Gapp paused before following. There was no light whatsoever within, and the smell was appreciably more pungent now that the door was open. Nevertheless, he followed Yulfric down a short fli
ght of creaking steps into the room beyond.

  Yulfric struck a light and then lit an oil-lamp on one of the shelves, whereupon Gapp stared about in bemusement. Despite the close feel of the room, he could now see that it was a huge cellar with long racks of bottles, jars, amphorae and kilderkins everywhere. All of them were stoppered securely, but it took little deduction to realize that they all contained some heady alcoholic brew. The meditation-wheel was pressed into Gapp’s hand.

  ‘. . . My wine cellar . . .’ Yulfric announced proudly.

  Gapp continued to stare in wonderment. But it was the odour that held his attention more than anything. Everything smelt like creosote. There were undertones of baker’s yeast, drainage and old socks, but creosote remained the overriding smell. A half-hearted attempt had been made to dispel (or at least tone down) this olfactory intrusion, as could be seen from the numerous burned-out stubs of perfumed beeswax candles that littered every spare shelf. But forest-bees, being what they are, do have a tendency to create somewhat resinous honeycombs, so that any candles made thereof would inevitably smell of creosote.

  ‘. . . This, my miniature friend, is where I keep my greatest treasure. For here, in this cellar, is where I make, rack, bottle and store Skolldhe-Ynggri, the wine of the blackfruit. (Do not go telling anyone, will you, my friend, for this secret is known only to me, Heldered and yourself . . .’

  Gapp looked about himself doubtfully, wondering just who else he was supposed to tell. But he nodded in assent; he would tell no one.

  ‘. . . Good . . .’ Yulfric smiled. ‘. . . not even Finwald was let in on this one . . .’

  He went over to the nearest rack, extracted one of the smaller bottles and blew the dust from it. He held the label up to the lamp’s light, then read out the date. He beamed, as if to confirm the excellence of the vintage, and beckoned the boy to follow him, with an encouraging wink.

  He carried the bottle over to a small table with two stools beside it, dragging with it the umbilical-cord-like length of yellow cobweb that still clung to it. Several large hairy spiders had fallen from the web as it was pulled from the rack, and landed with an audible thump on the flagstones before scuttling in alarm back into the darkness. Yulfric set the bottle down and proceeded to rummage about in an old toolbox for a pair of drinking vessels.