by Martin Davey
Gerard fell to his knees in his eagerness to be on her. He was muddied and gasping like some dreadful slug from nightmare as he grabbed her ankles and slid himself up her, his hands everywhere his eyes wild in the rain and the wind and the dark.
Ysora tried to crawl away; mud in her nails, her mouth, her eyes. And then Gerard had rolled her onto her back, his shaking hand reaching up her skirt and even as she screamed, she had to close her eyes against the rain.
She heard the shout even over her own screams, over the sound of her fists beating uselessly against Gerard’s shoulders, over Gerard’s mutterings of gods and destinies, over Godie’s frantic barking. It wasn’t anything as coherent as a word; it was a man’s shout, a cry of primal shock and anger, a guttural roar.
Ysora and Gerard both looked up at the shout, still twined together like two young lovers caught in a hayloft. No face was discernible in the foul weather, but the man’s hair was long and dark and unprotected from the rain, and he wore a red coat buttoned to the neck. Even as they looked, he started running towards them. He was armed, a sword swung from his hip as he ran, though he didn’t seem intent on drawing it.
Gerard went limp. “No…” he moaned. “She is mine! She belongs to me! It has been written!” He held up both hands as though protesting his innocence at the same moment he spoke his guilt.
Ysora was already scrabbling to her feet, more filth congealing in her boots. She ignored it and ran back the way she had come, toward her workshop. Two men in red coats brought her skidding to a halt; one old and tired looking, the other young and dark haired with a wry smile fixed on his face. Ysora turned and ran for the stables.
Another red coat this one on a horse stepping nervously as the first peal of thunder rolled from the dark skies above the Sea. Without a thought, Ysora rolled beneath a discarded cart resting next to the stable. Dry, flaking paint fell into her hair as she shivered in the mud.
More thunder. A splinter of lightning flaming the yard in a riot of black shadows, pouring rain and thick mud. The man, the first man in the red jacket with dank wet hair hanging to his shoulders looked young, his eyes dark and bright, and he held Gerard by the arm, pulling him to his feet like an angry parent berating a child. Only now did Ysora see that Gerard’s breeches were unfastened, the sudden movement causing them to fall about his knees. The yard falling back into darkness hid the Village Cleric’s shame. Not so dark, though, that Ysora didn’t see Gerard strike out at his assailant, the blow landing weakly about the younger man’s cheek and neck.
The response was brutal. Holding Gerard by the collar of his filth-spattered waistcoat, the younger man hit him once full in the face. Ysora was convinced she would have heard his nose breaking even from her position next to the stable were it not for the peal of thunder spreading across the land from the Sea. Another spike of lightning and Ysora saw Gerard slump to his knees. The red jacket turned away, shouted something lost in another crack of thunder and hammering rain. Ysora had never known rain could be so loud.
She felt her heart clutch as she saw the dim shadow that was Gerard struggle back to his knees, reaching out to his conqueror like some supplicant beseeching a remote god. A sordid, sickening part of her felt pity for Gerard, willed him to somehow strike down these men in the red coats. Why? The man had just tried to rape her! And just because she knew him, she wished him to prevail over these unknown men? The thought struck her cold in her stomach.
She wanted to flee; she needed to be away from this place, from these strange men in their unfamiliar uniforms. She remained frozen beneath the cart; rain running in rivulets down her cheeks, past her ears, as she watched Gerard scrabble at his assailant’s feet. Another man; the older one, strode across the yard, unconcerned by the puddles and mud sucking at his black boots. He barely spared Gerard a glance, speaking to the younger man, gesturing to the house.
The talking stopped. Both men looked down at Gerard. He had his arms wrapped around the younger man’s legs. He seemed to be trying to pull himself to his feet. A knee shattering into his jaw stopped him; he fell backwards, a black boot stamped on his arm—a measured cruelty in the action that reminded Ysora of Rhodry. Gerard screamed, but it was her own screams she heard in her heart. She slithered away through the mud and slime like a furtive worm. She fought to her feet, hidden in the shadow of the stable and tried to catch her breath. The rains and the thunder and the lightning seemed to pause for a moment, enough for her to hear a voice shouting, “The woman! Where is the woman?! The Clerk wants the woman!”
She gasped aloud as she felt something cold and wet press against her bare arm. Godie. She’d forgotten about him. He huddled against her, shivering against the cold. “Go, Godie,” she whispered pointing away. “Go!” More of a hiss this time. And without taking the time to see if the hound had listened, she ran for the cliffs and the black Sea beyond, the calls and the shouts of the men following her every step.
CHAPTER 6
Thirty years was a long time for a man to run. Long enough for him to forget why he was running in the first place. At least it would be if his dreams weren’t haunted every night by his masked pursuers. Marin smiled; more a gritting of his teeth through the dull rhythmic pounding in his skull. The Andalian Mountains, grey and white-tipped, sombre sentinels of the path west, stood before him deriding his hope that his thirty year journey was almost at an end.
Marin paused, Retaj far behind him and struggling to catch up; the price of his insistence on carrying half a larder of food with him.
Halter grass brushed Marin’s thighs as it wisped under the wind rolling down from the chill heights. He wondered if that wind had swept past the source of the drums which had pounded without respite for the past three weeks. Drums that could be heard across the span of a continent; summoning white-skinned fisherfolk from the rivers and canals of the Marshlands, tall dark-haired and heavy-browed people from the hills to the east, fine-boned people from distant Karni with their tales of a war chief with flames for eyes and a hammer that could crack the earth. And then more people still, men women and children dressed in every colour, armed with every weapon, all heading in one direction.
West. To the sound of the drums.
Marin hefted the sack on his shoulder and took another sip of his waterskin. Just looking at those jagged peaks made his bones ache. He was getting too old for this. To think that had he obeyed the will of his gods he could be sitting in a farmhouse married to a dutiful wife and letting the fine sons he would have had tend his estate.
Instead here he was in a country he had never known existed all those years ago, about to climb the mountains which for all he knew might mark the ends of the world. Marin sighed and placed the waterskin back in his sack; it seemed that for the past score years or more every hill, every mountain, every cliff he had found, he had expected to mark the end of the world. The world was a very much larger place than he had ever imagined. And the reach of the Keepers was just as boundless itself. Why wouldn’t it be? Who was he to think he could outrun the grasp of the gods? But before he finally succumbed to the insanity of his dreams, before his heart finally fell to the terror of an outraged god, he would see just who or what was beating those drums enough to shake the very moon from the sky. It was almost a wonder that the Andalian Mountains themselves didn’t crack and crumble under the onslaught.
The mountains were now nothing more than dark outgrowths rising from the sea of teal-tipped halter grass shivering in the wind. Dusks were thin and bleached this far west of the Winding River; the cloudless sky a dishwater grey.
The way west was getting busier with Seekers, all of them dark silhouettes in the thin light. All of them avoiding the village ahead, empty and quiet in the dying light. No movement there, surely the entire village hadn’t heeded the call of the drums? More than forty buildings, all of them red roofed, all of them black-windowed and silent. But then it seemed the entire world had fallen silent, shocked into quietude by the crushing power of the drums.
A
family up ahead, father and mother with about five children riding hunch-backed and loose-reined on thin-ribbed donkeys and horses, were walking well clear of the village, veering away from the road and further into the field of halter grass. Marin even saw a cluster of Marshfolk riding some mesutok—the long-necked, short-eared overgrown dogs which seemed so common this far west of the Winding River. He vaguely wondered how anybody could bear the stink of that thick matted fur which seemed to attract flies like shit in a field of honey. Perhaps the mesutok smelled like nectar of the gods to somebody accustomed to smelling fish everyday of their lives. Even these Marshfolk, fighting men all of them, judging by the cruel weapons strapped to their saddles, were giving the village a superstitiously wide berth.
Further ahead the road wound through the halter grass, curving about low stone walls and thickets of twisted trees leaning away from the Andalian mountains as though they were desperately trying to scrabble clear of that terrible sound.
BOOM...BOOM...BOOM
Anybody would think the Seekers would be going anywhere but to the sound of those drums. Only a creature from nightmare could cause such a noise.
Marin shivered. The Andalian Mountains rose out of the plain of halter grass like the spine of a scuttlefish. More than twenty days since he had first heard that dreadful sound. Then it had been the faintest thrumming, a pulsing in his ears after a fight. Now it sounded loud enough to wake the Fallen Four themselves.
Retaj finally caught up with him. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy climbing those things through the night, Marin. Better make camp somewhere.” His shoulder-length ginger hair hung in sweaty strands about his face as he looked about for a decent place to camp.
Marin sighed. Maybe it was the ungodly drums making people think of demons and ghosts and godkillers. Retaj had no pretensions to being a fighter, that was for sure, but Marin had always thought the man to have a sensible head on his shoulders when he wasn’t drooling over anything in a skirt. Retaj had been with Marin for the better part of half a year, longer than he had known anybody since his flight from the City of the Gods.
City of the Gods. Out here beyond the Winding River where a man could walk for weeks without meeting anybody who’d had the Dream, they still called his home Ralinmal. The city of Ralin, Queen to one of the Forsaken Kings. They said a man could be disappeared for saying that name in the City of the Gods; though Marin had never heard of such a thing. He’d never even heard of the Forsaken Kings or Ralinmal before he crossed the Winding River.
Retaj was bent almost double under the weight of the sack strapped to his back. The Keepers only knew why the man insisted on bringing so many belongings on his journey. Many a traveller and many a whore had woken to find Marin, and perhaps a purse of coppers or a thick blanket, long gone. And yet Retaj’s seemingly infinite supply of supplies remained untouched every morning. But why? Marin had stolen from far more engaging travelling companions, deserted warm bodies and silken thighs for long lonesome treks through the wilderness more times than he cared to count. So why did he remain so long with Retaj?
Perhaps he needed the company after thirty years of loneliness. Maybe Retaj’s seeming hopelessness had stirred some latent paternal instinct in him.
Anything was possible. He shrugged and gestured to the village, with its squat red-roofed houses arrayed on either side of the main road, a dark and shadowy village green just visible in the midst of the cottages and shops. Other, larger buildings loomed over the houses; an inn, perhaps a blacksmiths and some other two-story building with an ancient sign swinging listlessly in the breeze. Bored chickens scratched in the dirt paths trod into the ground between the houses and a stray goat bleated in protest at its loneliness. “We’ll stay there tonight.”
Retaj was a good hand shorter than Marin, and he had a habit of looking up through his hair at the older man. Marin had had hair like that once, now it was grey and wisped thinly in the winds rolling across the plains. “There?” The younger man’s green eyes followed to where Marin was pointing. “There? I’m all for having a roof over my head tonight, maybe a soft mattress or a comely warm body to take the chill out of the night. But...” He gazed at the village and shook his head, the drums still beating and the sign still creaking in the wind. “There’s something wrong there and all the other Seekers know it.”
“We aren’t Seekers.” Marin sighed and scratched behind an ear. He didn’t want to get into that argument again. “You stay out here if you want. I’m not going to let ignorant superstitions rob me of a bed for the night.” He set off for the village. The lonely goat watched him with dull black eyes.
Retaj followed, straggling behind like a reluctant child. “There’s superstitions and then there’s the evidence of your own two eyes, Marin. You think anybody living in a hole like this can just afford to just leave their homes and livelihoods? Imagine you lived here and started hearing those drums; would you take your wife and children up into the mountains to complain about the noise?”
Night was falling fast. Only a few Seekers still made their way west, flitting ghosts in the sea of blue-green halter grass. Retaj had a point. Would an entire village just decide as one to up sticks and leave? He looked away from the village, to the path he and Retaj had walked from the east. Less than a day’s walk back to the nearest village. Three days to the nearest town of any size. Jostun it had been called, straddling a thick brown river that smelled of shit and piss, though the locals hadn’t known what he was talking about when he complained of the stink. That creaking sign was getting louder, almost as though it sought to compete with the relentless noise of the drums. “I wonder if they fled the drums? They could have seen something coming out of the mountains when the drums began.”
Retaj shrugged. “Either that or we’ll climb into our beds tonight and end up next to what’s left of the villagers. Did your mother ever tell you about the rargs of the west? About what they do to unwary travellers? You know my mother told me that...”
Marin sighed and lifted a hand to quieten the younger man. Retaj’s mother had a tale for every occasion; each one seemingly designed to traumatise her red-headed child for life. “Rargs. Giants. Wierdlings. Cralgars. I think by now I’ve heard of all the creatures that stalked your mother’s bedtime tales. All I know is that I’ve travelled from the banks of the Winding River to the feet of the Andalian Mountains.” And a good distance more that Retaj need never know about. “And the only creatures worth fearing walk on two legs and have two arms just like you and me.”
They entered the village. Every window watched them. The silence even seemed to dominate the omnipresent drums, reducing them to a dull throbbing on the edge of thought.
“What about them then? The Canaristi?”
A flash of memory. Memory so vivid that Marin could still see the cuts and specks of blood in the man’s pink, recently-shaved scalp, see the fire in the man’s eyes as he poured the burning fluid down Marin’s throat.
He took a breath and nodded at the goat, at the chickens pecking at the dirt. A short hairy pig had circled around them and was nosing at the road grunting contentedly to itself. Another memory: hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes that burned with righteous fervour. He shook his head. “The Canaristi haven’t been here. They would have taken the animals. And anyway, there’s been no sign of them for the past few years. Why would they return now?” It was probably asked too sharply, but he was too tired and on edge to be concerned with Retaj’s feelings.
“And how would they murder everybody without leaving a trace of violence?” Retaj countered his own argument. “Anyway, much as I hate to put up with your thrashing and screaming for yet another night, I’m going to have to insist we sleep in the same house. In fact, I have a terrible feeling you might be waking up to find me cuddled up right next to you tonight.” He paused, watched one of the last group of silhouettes seemingly glide through the halter grass out beyond the village before they were lost to sight behind the tanner’s. “You think they know so
mething we don’t?”
Marin shrugged. No sign of violence anywhere; but everywhere there were signs of life. A child’s hoop lay abandoned in the road before them. Three windows in the houses that loomed to either side of them had their windows propped open, washing hanging out of them to dry. An axe stood embedded in a log next to a pile of firewood. Three bows lay on the ground next to a circular wooden target.
And still the drums beat and still the sign creaked in the wind.
“They think they know many things.” Marin stretched his neck and scratched at his collar. By the Keepers, but he felt watched. Too many black windows. Too much silence hidden deep beneath the constant noise. “You’ve heard their tales as well as I. Tales of Ley Walkers and the dead traipsing the earth. Wind Voices.” A chill wind brushed Marin’s neck. He ignored it. “Ignorant people living far from the civilized lands will always concoct tales to explain things they don’t understand. I’ll be damned by the Keepers if I let their ignorance cost me a soft bed and a roof for the night.”
Retaj nodded. “Right.” He looked at Marin sideways, hair hanging carelessly over his eyes. He stopped mid-stride as they rounded the corner and arrived at the village green. “Fuck, look at that.” He whispered, barely heard under the sound of the drums. “An inn. An actual inn. With beds.”
One of the inn’s two gates hung open, and as they entered the yard Marin could see a swarm of scuffed footmarks in the loose dirt. Some led to the inn’s barn, some to the outside steps, some back out to the gate and beyond. The air of the village seemed close and cloying, watchful. He pushed open the other gate to the yard, dragged the toe of his boots through the footmarks as he stepped towards the open door. “So you think we were right coming to the village now?”
Retaj stopped at the gate and leaned on it, arms crossed at the wrist. “Well if we die, at least we’ll die in nice warm beds. You know how long it is since we slept in a warm bed?” He shook his head, frowning, his green eyes shadowed in the gathering darkness. “But really, you think they know something we don’t? Maybe we should go and find some other Seekers, camp with them for the night?”
