by Anne Brooke
Calling the Lost One by his own name seemed even less fitting than usual to Annyeke; the former scribe had already travelled far beyond their expectation, although in quiet ways and almost against his own will. Johan however knew him better than she did and was entitled to call him whatever he wished. Her life-partner was right about the legends though; none of them relating to the Lost One spoke of this.
“I don’t know the answer,” she replied, “but perhaps now is the time to start living and writing our own legends. We are making everything anew, or the Lost One is.”
“That much is true.” Johan stepped back and wiped both hands upwards over his face. The gesture left a shock of hair rising from his head. He half-squinted at her, frowning. “There is more, isn’t there? Tell me.”
She did so, as simply as possible. “Because the Lost One is alive again, as long as Lord Tregannon keeps him that way and I think he will, the villagers in Lammas are divided. Some of them, led by Jemelda the castle cook, have left their homes, what remains of them, and taken themselves to the woods and fields. Whatever the Lost One plans to do, they will fight against him. If that happens, then the healing of the land will be delayed and that will affect not only Lammas, but all of us, here in Gathandria and the lands beyond us, everything that lies within our responsibility. Not only that but I’m sure there’s something going on with the elders here, with the Chair Maker particularly. Once or twice his thoughts have brushed against mine, and there’s a … a … darkness there I don’t understand, but it scares me so much I can’t even think about what it might mean. By the gods and stars, Johan, we are weak enough after the wars; must we still fight for peace?”
Annyeke hadn’t realised that was what she actually thought until the words were humming in her mouth. She sat down on the stool once again, clinging to Talus, for the comfort of them both.
Johan hesitated for a heartbeat or two and she could feel his colours swirling and dancing around and within him until his mind was steady with purpose. How she wished she could say the same! By the stars, she almost wondered whether it would have been better to walk away from the role of First Elder of the city if she had known such difficulties were to come. But no, how could she even think such a thing? Look where the elders had led them to, and how she had hated what they had done. She would not change even one breath of her decisions, not even the decision to slay the mind-executioner. She would do it all over again if she had to, for the sake of the land, for the sake of her people. It was only in this moment that the weariness of what she had witnessed and what might be to come had overwhelmed her. She needed to sleep, but would she be ready to face the future when her sleep was through?
Puzzling over all these important matters and trying to blink herself back into wakefulness and her usual vigour, she had not noticed Johan had hunkered himself down before her. He placed one hand on her knee and the other with a gesture of affection and intimacy on her forehead, including Talus also within his embrace.
Annyeke, he said, using thought only. She could feel the love he had for her enfolding her like a vast cloak, keeping her safe. His mind-words were as clear as sunlight, and she knew Talus also caught their meaning.
Yes, what is it, my love?
You need have no reason to fear, he replied. Now you are tired, yes, but soon you will be yourself again. In all the year-cycles and heart-cycles I have known you, you have always been a woman who understands what to do at the right time, whatever it is we must face. Trust yourself, and the spirit of the stars within you, Annyeke; trust yourself as I trust you. All will one day soon be well.
She had not heard him speak with so much commitment and passion before, at least not about her responsibilities, and she could only hope his confidence would prove to be right. For now, she must regain her strength, and on the morrow she would form a plan to help the Lost One and those that cleaved to him, a plan which would have to bring healing to them. She only hoped she could find the faith to believe in it.
Chapter Nine: Rumours of War
Jemelda
It seemed to be many hour-cycles since she and her small band of loyal followers reached the Cave of Hiding. When she first arrived, there was something about the atmosphere which gave her pause but she shrugged her shoulders and brushed aside the undergrowth nonetheless, striding through into its dark safety. Her mind clung to the images of recent events: the scribe’s death; how everything she’d hoped for seemed to be achieved; then the way the magical cane had brought him back from the dead, with the help of his friends. Shocking too he could name any as his friends, remembering as she did so keenly what he had done to them.
Worst of all was the way the Lammas Lord had cleaved to him and had wanted the murderer to live even though it was best for him to die. The land required it, she knew this in the hidden depths of her blood and in the strange silence she felt growing within her. A silence which reminded her of swirling waters, with their own personality that was both herself and not herself. If she only focused her mind a little, it almost felt as if she might be able to name it but after a few tense moments she gave up the effort. No matter, whatever – or whoever – it was, it gave her a rich power she welcomed. Because of it, she would bring about the murderous scribe’s death for her people and her village, no matter what. These had been the uppermost of her thoughts on arrival, but there were other matters also to consider.
In the thin sun dappling the cave, she knew it was her husband’s abandonment which pierced her the most. She had expected him to follow her when she left the Tree of Execution at the castle as, by the stars, they had been together for so long and he had always been at her side, and she at his. This time-cycle, she was alone. She swallowed hard and wiped away the wetness from her cheek. This was no place for weeping.
Besides, she wasn’t quite alone, was she? Around her, huddled like refugees in the cave, sat the small group of Lammassers who had, unlike Frankel, accompanied her in her rebellion.
Thomas the Blacksmith was at her side, naturally enough as he remained like her so opposed to the scribe that he would kill Simon again if he had the opportunity. Other villagers had followed them also: one of the two night-women left in Lammas, although the second had stayed behind; five of the remaining farmers with two of their wives, the other three women being dead; two weavers, both women; and one boy who had worked briefly as an apprentice to the dye trader. Twelve people, thirteen including herself, so not much of an army, but it would have to be enough. Even though they were facing strange magic and the power of the mind-cane, not to mention the Tregannon emeralds although her understanding of what these could do was more ragged, Jemelda would give her best to stop the plans of the scribe from being fulfilled.
Once the murderer was truly dead, then his hold on Lord Tregannon would be gone, and the village and its fields and woods would be able to rebuild itself once more. For that to happen, Jemelda and her people would need to stop the cane and the emeralds from providing the scribe and his followers with protection. She needed to drive out the Gathandrians also, if Lammas was to be itself again.
“Jemelda, what would you have us do?” Thomas’s gruff question made the cook jump and she blinked at him, hoping he did not pick up her uncertainty in the cave’s shifting shadows.
She laid her hand upon his shoulder. “Do? We must fight back, that is what we must do.”
“How can you fight thought-power when we have none of such magic?” he snorted. “The one who holds the mind-cane is the one who wins. Look how today the bastard scribe has come back from the dead where I sent him. Nobody should have been able to live with the rope I tied him in or the winter-sour beer he drank, and I have not seen anyone come back from the unknown before today. It is a curse and an evil.”
With that, Thomas spat on the rock floor, causing the night-woman to cry out before stifling her cries with her hand. Jemelda shook her head.
“You do not need to be afraid,” she told the trembling woman. “You are among friends here and n
o-one shall harm you. Is that not so, Thomas?”
A slight pause, and the blacksmith nodded. She could see the gesture in the half-light, and knew as clearly as if he had spoken it to her that Thomas had lain with this woman, and in the recent past too. Perhaps he had cursed and spat at her then, because she was not the woman he had loved and lost, and because of what he had done with her to ease his grief. By the stars, how this war and the scribe had brought them to such a state, but she would fight until things were as they should be again. Today, this bleak winter afternoon, these people had become her people, of a sort, and she must take care of them.
“What is your name?” she asked the woman, and then wondered if the question was an insult if the woman had never had one. She had not stopped to think before speaking.
She was about to apologise and speak of something else to prevent kneading in the woman’s shame when she spoke. Her voice was low and quiet.
“My name is Corannan,” she said.
Corannan. One who suffers, in the old Lammas tongue. Jemelda thought the night-woman’s family must have been poor but with enough dignity not to forgo the naming ceremony. Still, Corannan had been forced to sell herself to live, an act which made poverty an evil master.
“Where do you come from?” she asked. “I know you were not born in Lammas.”
Corannan hesitated. “I come from the White Lands, but my mother was half of the marsh people too.”
Jemelda couldn’t help herself; she shuddered. The people of mixed breeding were viewed with suspicion and she had heard tell they never lived long. Another legend which had turned out to be a lie and, now she looked at Corannan, she saw the tell-tale paleness of the White Lands folk and a hint of the Marshlands in her brown, gentle eyes. She’d never truly looked at the woman before the war due to her profession, and an urge to ask her why she did such acts overwhelmed the cook, but it was not the time-cycle for that. She would have to work with Corannan from now on, so the questions she burned to ask must remain unspoken.
“You are welcome here,” she said. “Now, for the rest of you, tell us your names so all of us here may know them. For I too, who have lived so long at the castle, do not know every one of you.”
For a while the small gang of rebels talked, telling their names and something of their history. Jemelda realised one of the farmers, Matthus, and the young boy too had been amongst her regular customers for the left-over bread and cakes from her kitchen. She had never liked the practice in other countries with lesser lords of merely leaving the waste food outside for people to take it, so she had put the abandoned morsels on the central table and left the kitchen curtains open, even in winter, so they might come in and take some warmth from the hearth before eating what they might. As they spoke, the boy haltingly, she recognised them although they were far thinner, and the man greyer also, than they had been. Then again, the war had changed everyone, hadn’t it?
Others of the Lammas folk she found familiar also, particularly the women whom she must have seen on market days back in the day-cycles they had been held, but she had not known their names until this afternoon.
Thomas the Blacksmith, spoke last, even though he had no real need to do so as all knew who he was.
“My name is Thomas,” he said, “but that is not the most important fact about me. No, what matters is this: I have come with Jemelda to fight the evil man who has returned to us and I will continue to fight him and his murderous magic until he is dead, or until I myself die. There are no other options for me.”
When he finished speaking, the silence around them seemed heavier and more menacing and Jemelda shivered.
“There are no other options for any of us,” she said. “This is what we will do.”
Simon
When he woke, he didn’t recognise his surroundings, at least not at first. Whatever he was lying on was soft and he felt warm and, above, he could see a strange pattern of sky and wood and stone. He couldn’t understand why he was not colder, if he could see the sky as the great snows were not yet over. Or they had not been when he had last noticed them.
Pictures danced and swirled across his mind but he couldn’t make sense of them: rope; the toughness of wood carved onto his back; the anger of men, and women too. He stirred and groaned and, at once, he felt someone’s hand on his shoulder easing him back on to the bed, as bed it must be.
With that touch, a hundred other pictures: armour and bones; a man dressed in a cloak with strange symbols; another man who smiled at him but whose beauty was ravaged by grief; then a raven as white as snow; and the mind-cane. The mind-cane.
Simon woke for certain with a gasp, arms flailing, pain tracking through his bones. Let me up, I must have the cane.
He spoke without the need for a voice, his thoughts crystallising in a surge of mind-power which brought him half-risen on the bed and all but fighting the man who tried to hold him down. At the same time-cycle, his companion’s mind collapsed beneath the sudden onslaught from his own and in the midst of the pain he was unaccountably causing he caught one word only: Simon.
He let go at once, still gasping, still fighting for possession of the cane. Ralph? The Lammas Lord was kneeling half-on half-off the bed, his hand continuing to grasp Simon’s shoulder, but his thoughts scattering away to the stars and beyond, if that were possible, as he ran in his mind from Simon’s unwitting attack.
“Forgive me,” the Lost One spoke aloud this time, fearing to cause more damage to the floundering man. For a heartbeat, maybe more, he didn’t know what to do or how to remedy his actions but then the mind-cane, which must have been there with him all along but he had not linked with its voice, fell like a homing bird into his palm and he felt something like a rush of water flowing through him.
With his other hand, he touched Ralph’s forehead, acknowledging the man’s sweat and fear on his fingers, and mind-delved further until he was standing at the very centre of the Lammas Lord’s thoughts. How familiar the landscape was to him: salty sand and stormy sky with fire-filled clouds. Trying to ignore the fact the last time he had been allowed here, the two of them had been lovers, he called back the spiralling sparks of Ralph’s broken mind, using his own, feeble as it was, as a beacon. He was slow in this, his own thoughts trembling and his limbs aching, but he put his weakness to one side and concentrated on undoing such havoc as he had caused.
It took the length of a summer story, the longest of all the seasons’ tales, but at last it was done. In time-cycles past, Simon would have desired nothing more than to stay and enjoy the Lammas Lord’s mind to the full, but he could not be as he once was. As they had been, now.
So he turned away and spun his thoughts back to where his body waited for them, in the Lammas Lord’s bedroom. He realised this for the first time, and swallowed. One heartbeat, then another, and he was where he had been, but not quite as he remembered himself.
Because everything had changed, hadn’t it? He’d given himself over to the villagers’ anger, he’d died and somehow he’d been reborn again. Oh yes, he remembered it all. He even remembered how he’d been taken down from the Tree of Execution and found himself in the castle kitchen. None of this was the usual arc to a Lammasser’s life, or even a half-Gathandrian, as he was. He sighed and felt Ralph stir. Slowly he took his hand away from his companion’s forehead and felt the slight click in his thoughts as they disconnected. By the gods, he already missed it.
Ralph stood, not confidently but holding himself steady by means of the nearest stonework.
“You are stronger than any of us anticipated,” he said. “Thank you for putting me together again. It seems you were always adept at that in some fashion.”
Simon had no answer, but perhaps Ralph expected none as he turned and reached for something on a nearby table. When he turned back again, he held a beaker of water in his hand, which he offered to Simon.
“Drink,” he said. “You will have need of it.”
The Lost One did so. It appeared the subject of what h
ad just taken place was now closed in the Lammas Lord’s mind; how easily Ralph left behind the aspects of his life which worried him.
“Thank you,” Simon said when he had finished the water. “Tell me, how did I get here?”
The Lammas Lord misunderstood and began speaking of the villagers and the tree, but Simon interrupted him. “No, you mistake me. That I remember well enough. I meant how did I get here, in your chambers? I can remember being in the kitchen below and then nothing.”
Ralph hesitated before replying. “The cook’s husband, Frankel, and I carried you upstairs. We thought you would find more comfort here. I have no experience of it myself, but I would imagine the kitchen table is not the best place for a man who has died and lives again.”
“No, I suppose it is not.” Simon wanted to say more, about the memories, both good and bad, which being here brought to his mind, but he could not find the words. Instead, he chose a rather safer avenue of conversation. “I came here to save the Lammas Lands as best I could, Lord Tregannon, and the task is not yet finished. The land is wounded, and the people too. There is much to do and I must be strong to achieve it. If I need rest, I will take it, but after that we must work for the good of the lands, Lammas and Gathandria and the rest, before it is too late for any of us to recover.”
“Bah!” Ralph made a dismissive gesture, almost knocking the empty water-beaker out of Simon’s grasp. “So you say, and how easy it is for you to talk of such matters! It is a miracle even that you are alive, and the powers you possess have surpassed all our knowledge and legends. Who knows what you might do after this? Neither do you need to remind me of the crimes I have committed, though it seems you have forgotten your part in them also, Simon the Scribe. You have moreover forgotten one essential fact about Lammas. It is I who am the Lord of it, not you, and when you arrive here with your miracles and your plans, know this: I will not be seduced by them. Not this time. This time, I will make my own decisions for the good of my people and not be swayed by the desires and unknown mission of another. Yes, we must work together, Simon. I am not a fool, though I have been one in the past. But any decisions taken here will be mine and mine alone. So tell this to your mind-cane and live with it.”
