Talus and the Frozen King

by Graham Edwards

  'Mishina, of course.'

  'And of course I will tell you, Bran. The tale of my past is one I have never told you and which you deserve to hear ... and hear it you will before we next make landfall. But first I must do the bidding of the new king of Creyak. I have no doubt he will ask a story of me as well and I am afraid the king's will comes before that of the fisherman.'

  The eastern sky was beginning to brighten, not with the northlight but with the dawn.

  Another day already, with so much to be done. And so far still to go.

  Talus bounded away through the snow. The dawn intensified with every step he took. He felt filled with energy and entirely alive.

  After all these years—Mishina! The name might have been different but the man was the same. And so was his purpose—Talus was sure of this. Which could mean only one thing.

  I have been given another chance!

  Even better, there was a new puzzle to solve.

  The bone hunter will bring your story to an end.

  Who was the bone hunter? And had Mishina really travelled as far north as he'd claimed?

  The questions were delicious. Talus savoured them. The answers were far from reach, lost in darkness and mist.

  But he would seek them out.

  'Talus?' said Bran as he trudged through the snow after the bard. 'What do you mean:

  "before we next make landfall"?'

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  Lethriel was waiting for them at the henge. Behind her, the sky was a rich and gorgeous purple. The coarse grass rippled in the breeze. High overhead, a gull circled.

  As Bran came up to her, Lethriel placed her hands on his shoulders.

  'I thought you'd gone with Tharn,' he said.

  'I wanted to see you.' She hesitated. Talus regarded them both with open curiosity.

  'We'll catch up with you, Talus,' said Bran.

  'I can wait,' Talus replied.

  'There's no need,' said Lethriel.

  Talus didn't move. Bran waited. Smart as he was, sometimes the bard could be so slow.

  'Oh,' Talus said at last. 'I'll ... be on my way.' He paused. 'Thank you, Lethriel, for your help.'

  'You're welcome. I'll see you at the cairn.'

  'Yes, of course.'

  The bard turned on his heels and loped away across the henge.

  'What did you want?' said Bran when Talus had gone. It was good being close to Lethriel again. Difficult too.

  'Just to say goodbye.'

  'Goodbye?'

  'It's the only time we'll have, Bran. Soon you'll be gone and I'll be with the king.'

  'It's where you want to be.'

  Lethriel laughed. The sound fluttered out across the henge as if it had wings. Bran felt himself relax.

  'Yes, Bran. It always was. But I had to make sure you'd be all right. That you'd find a place where you want to be too. And ...'

  'And what?'

  'I wanted to hear the rest of your story.'

  'My story?'

  'In the cave you told me about your wife. About Keyli. I know she died but I know too that somehow you're still searching for her. I don't understand how that can be but I can see it clearly.

  It's like a light behind your eyes. Or a shadow. For some reason, you still have hope. I want to know where that hope comes from. I need to know.'

  'Because of Caltie?'

  'Yes. And Gantor. Because of all of those who died. I know ... I know they've gone to be with the spirits in the afterdream. I know that if I wait I'll meet them again, when my turn comes. And I know in the meantime that Tharn will love me ...'

  'But?'

  'But waiting is so very hard.'

  The wind gusted, blowing scraps of snow through the henge. The dawn rushed towards them.

  'Talus says ...' Bran paused, began again. 'After Keyli died—right from the very moment she died—I lost all hope. I saw no reason to carry on living. I wanted to wade out into the water and follow her into the afterdream.'

  'But Talus stopped you?'

  Bran considered this. For a long time, the memories of that dreadful night had been trapped in his dreams. He'd been trapped too, unable to speak about them, unable to escape. Finally telling the story to someone—to Lethriel—had liberated him.

  'He didn't exactly stop me. He ... I suppose he gave me a choice. Talus told me that he was travelling. That he'd been travelling for a long, long time. He said there was an empty place on the path at his side, and asked me if I wanted to walk with him. I asked him where he was going. Can you guess how he answered me?'

  'How?' Bran grinned to think of it. 'He told me a story, of course. A short one. Do you want to hear it?'

  'If you can remember it.'

  'Every word. This is what Talus said: "A great queen once claimed that, in the far north of the world, lies a place where the northlight meets the ground. The place is called Amarach. It is a place where all the worlds meet: this world, the afterdream, and many others. If a man can only find his way to Amarach, he will be rewarded with a single moment in which he will see again all the people he has lost in his life. Inside that moment will come a single chance to go with them, or to bring them back home. Or to say goodbye forever. To find this place is hard, but if a man is both strong and true it may be done."'

  Bran realised he was crying. Lethriel touched his tears.

  'It sounds like a story told to comfort a child,' she said.

  'I know,' Bran replied, 'and it comforted me for the longest time, all the time we journeyed north, even through the coldest depths of winter. But hope can only last so long. By the time we'd reached Creyak, I'd stopped believing Amarach even existed. I was tired of hoping, tired of dreaming.

  I'd decided to turn back.'

  'And now?'

  Bran dragged his good hand through his matted beard. 'I'm ready to go on again.' Saying it aloud was a revelation.

  'What changed your mind?'

  'A little of this place. A little of you.'

  'And?'

  Bran sighed. 'Mostly I think it's because the tale of Amarach is one of the tales of Talus.' He took her kind hand and squeezed it. 'And that can only mean one thing.'

  'What?'

  'That it's true.'

  The sun rose. Strong men retrieved Arak's body and carried it up from the beach; others brought poor Sigathon from the totem pit. As he stood in the cairn, it seemed to Bran that Gantor, who'd been placed at his father's side the previous day, looked less lonely now in the presence of his brothers.

  The whole of Creyak was there. Many of the villagers were crammed into the cairn, making its confines hot and cramped. Even more were gathered in a great crowd outside. Their faces - freshly painted with pure white mud—were turned up to the sky. Their singing was low and sad and filled with love.

  Bran felt honoured to be one of those allowed inside. All his fear of the cairn had gone.

  Perhaps the press of living bodies made him feel safe. Or perhaps he'd changed.

  Tharn took Mishina's place as speaker-for-the-dead during the funeral ceremony. Nobody questioned his right to do this. After all, he was the king. At his side was Cabarrath, whose injuries from his encounter with Arak at the henge were superficial. Fethan had survived too, but his wounds were too severe for him to attend. Bran hoped he would live.

  Tharn's words were halting; he was prompted frequently by Lethriel, who was familiar with shaman ways and able to direct all the small but essential rituals like the lighting of fragrant fires, the chanting of the names of the afterdream waykeepers and the drumming of the heartbeat-echoes of the newly dead.

  It was the drumming that affected Bran the most—even more than the heady stench of burning grasses that filled the cairn's crowded interior, or the low murmuring of the foot-trampling throng that surrounded him. The drumming was like thunder in his head and, just for a moment, he was back inside the storm.

  A burst of flame illuminated the little door that led, so they said, to the afterdream. The door loo
ked impossibly close. Bran wanted to touch it, wanted to see it slide open, wanted to see what - or who—lay beyond. But there were too many people in the way.

  The drumming subsided, the moment passed.

  'And now,' said Tharn, speaking over the dying echoes of the drums, 'the bard will tell us his final tale.'

  Talus's story was about an old man who walked across a desert to fetch water for his family.

  He journeyed for many days over dunes of yellow sand and lakes of white salt. He did battle with venomous snakes and ravenous wolves. Finally he reached a deep hole filled with pure, clear water.

  He filled his watersacks and made the return trip, which was just as perilous as the journey out had been.

  Eventually the old man came home. But when he went up to his wife and children he found they could not see him. When he spoke to them, he found they did not hear. When he tried to give them the water he had brought, he found it had turned to sand.

  Then the old man saw his own dead body lying on a funeral pyre. As the flames carried his spirit away to the afterdream, the last thing he saw was the tears his family were shedding, and he understood that water had come to them after all.

  Just as Talus concluded his tale, a dazzling beam of sunlight stabbed through the cairn entrance. The smoke filling the cairn turned orange in the new morning haze. The low chanting of the mourners subsided. The fires went out. The funeral was over.

  The king and his sons had passed out of this world and into the next.

  Slowly the cairn emptied. Bran let the crowd jostle him outside. Just as he emerged into the dawn light, Cabarrath found him and pulled him to one side. The tall man looked distraught.

  'I am sorry I struck you, Bran,' he said. 'I saw you on the beach ... the fog ... I thought you were one of Farrum's men.'

  'It was an easy mistake to make,' said Bran. 'But I have a hard head.'

  'Then you forgive me?'

  'There's nothing to forgive. Will Tharn be all right, do you think?'

  'He will be a great king. A king-of-the-summer. And I will serve him. We all will. I see your friend over there. You should go to him.'

  Talus's bald head was just visible over the crowd. It bobbed like a float in the ocean as the bard jumped up and down. He waved, trying to attract Bran's attention.

  'Look after your brothers, Cabarrath,' said Bran.

  'I will.'

  Talus continued to wave as Bran pushed his way through the mass of villagers. He looked like an excitable child.

  'Tharn wishes to meet us at a sea-cave on the beach,' he said as soon as Bran was at his side.

  'He says he has something to show us.'

  'What is it?'

  'The king wishes it to be a surprise. What did you think of my tale?'

  'It was a fine story. It made me feel ... well, calm, I suppose. Even if I don't know what it meant.'

  'Some tales do not mean anything at all, but that does not mean they are without power.'

  'You know, this morning I might actually agree with you.' Bran watched the last of the mourners traipse out of the cairn and into the early light. 'This surprise of Tharn's—I suppose you know what it is already?'

  With twinkling eyes, Talus led Bran towards the sea.

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  It was the same cave in which Bran and Lethriel had sheltered the previous night. In the daylight, the painted scenes on its sea-smoothed walls looked drab and still. Bran recalled how, in the moving light of the fire, they'd come to life.

  Just inside the cave entrance, the new king stood tall despite the pain he carried and his obvious exhaustion. On his head he wore a circlet of woven willow twigs: the crown of Creyak.

  Lethriel was at his side. Their hands were entwined.

  'So, what's this surprise?' said Bran.

  Without speaking, Tharn and Lethriel descended the sloping floor towards the back of the cave. Talus and Bran followed them round a polished knuckle of black rock to find themselves standing before a vast slab of flat stone that looked as if it had long ago fallen from the ceiling.

  Lying on the slab, propped in place by angled wedges of driftwood, was a boat.

  Bran, for no reason he could fathom, wanted to cry. To hide his emotion, he walked a slow circle around the vessel. It was a dugout, much cruder than Farrum's seal-skin ship but undeniably beautiful. Its hull was carved from a single trunk of oak; Bran had seen no such trees growing locally and wondered where it had come from. Four sturdy limbs splayed wide, two from each side of the hull. Between them they supported a pair of outrigger pontoons woven from willow branches.

  'Impressive,' he said as he returned to Talus's side. He didn't trust himself to say any more.

  'It's yours,' said Lethriel.

  'Do you mean it?'

  'Take it,' said Tharn. 'May it carry you at least a little further on your way.'

  Bran ran his good hand along the nearer of the two outriggers. 'Who made it?'

  'Fethan,' said Tharn. 'My father forbade such things, but he built it all the same. Fethan always dreamed of leaving Creyak, even before he starting a child growing inside his favourite woman.'

  'You knew about that?'

  Tharn gave a sad smile. 'I am his first-brother. There is not much I do not know.'

  'Will he be all right?'

  'He has a lot to live for,' said Lethriel. 'When we've finished here, I'll go to him. I know remedies. And there are plenty of tender hands ready to soothe his hurts.'

  Bran swallowed. He couldn't take his eyes off the boat. 'Then I suppose this is where we say goodbye.'

  'That is your choice,' said Tharn. 'I would have you stay as long as you wish, but ...' He looked at Talus.

  The bard joined Bran beside the boat.

  'The weather is fair,' said the bard. 'The lifting of the fog shows a change of weather to the south. Winds are rising that will help to carry us north. Our work here is finished. There is no reason for us to stay.'

  'Well,' said Bran. 'I suppose that decides it.'

  They kicked away the driftwood chocks and turned the boat to face the cave entrance.

  'We might need some help,' said Bran as he uncoiled the ropes he'd found tucked under the bow.

  'The boat is lightly made,' said Tharn. 'I believe you will manage.'

  He was right. Big as it was, the boat was so artfully carved that it weighed barely half what Bran had expected. All the same, by the time he and Talus had dragged it to the water's edge, his bearskin was damp with sweat.

  He was about to climb aboard when he remembered something.

  'Our things,' he said. 'Our packs, water sacks—they're still in the house.'

  'No, they're not,' said Lethriel.

  She pulled back a tanned leather panel concealing a well in the centre of the boat's hull.

  There was Bran's pack, the little pouch containing Talus's firelighting kit ... everything they'd been carrying with them when they'd first crossed the causeway to Creyak.

  'Are you trying to get rid of us?' said Bran.

  Lethriel laughed. 'We just knew that, once you saw this boat, there'd be no stopping you.

  Mind you, Talus, we've made a liar out of you.'

  Talus raised one eyebrow. 'Explain yourself.'

  'When we first met, at the henge, you told me that when you left Creyak you would take nothing away.'

  'Indeed I did. Nor shall we. As you said yourself, this boat belongs to my good friend Bran.'

  Bran stroked both his hands—the good and the bad—along the hull of the boat. He smiled.

  'All boats should have a name,' he said. 'What's this one called?'

  'Its skin has not yet touched water,' said Tharn, 'so it does not yet have a name.'

  'Why don't you give it one?' said Lethriel.

  'What do you think, Talus?' said Bran.

  The bard ran his finger over his chin. 'I believe the choice must be yours.'

  Bran didn't have to think very hard.

  'Keyli,' he said. 'The
boat is called Keyli.'

  Moments later, the boat was wallowing in the shallows. Talus climbed nimbly aboard and Bran followed. They picked up the broad paddles stowed in the hull and used them to shove the boat away from the shore. Tharn and Lethriel stood on the shingle with their hands raised in salute.

  'I'm sorry we had to know you in such hard times,' said Bran as the boat's hull finally bounced clear of the stony sea bed.

  'They were not of your making,' said Tharn. 'And I am glad you came with them. Especially you, Talus.'

  'You honour me,' the bard replied.

  The morning sun cleared the cliff, unleashing warm light on to the beach. The shingle turned gold beneath it.

  'No winter lasts forever,' called Tharn. He was dwindling now, growing smaller as Bran's oar-strokes pulled them out towards the open sea. 'A thaw is coming.'

  Lethriel shouted something, but the wind tore her words apart and they were lost. Soon it was too late even to wave. Creyak was a white-capped rock melting slowly into the larger coast.

  Ahead, the ocean was vast and welcoming.

  'Well,' said Bran, 'you found your way to the truth in the end. There's still something that puzzles me though. Why did Arak collect all those things? The fur from Alayin's wrap I understand. But Lethriel said he'd stolen things from all his brothers.'

  'A good question, my friend. Consider the bonespike Arak stole from Gantor—the weapon he used to murder his father. You found it in the cairn, hidden behind the door to the afterdream. How did it come to be there?'

  'Arak didn't want anybody to find it, so he hid it.'

  'A peculiar hiding place, do you not think? Would it not be simpler to throw it into the sea?'

  'I don't know. I suppose so. So why did he put it there?'

  'It was a gift.'

  'A gift?'

  'Yes. You must remember Mishina's role in all this. All the time he was urging Arak on, he was also reassuring him that he would be safe from the ancestors' wrath. I believe Mishina instructed Arak to take trophies from each of his victims and put them through the door. Not to hide them, but to send them on in advance to the afterdream. When Arak eventually died and entered the afterdream himself—no doubt after living a long and happy life as king of Creyak—he would retrieve the trophies and return them as gifts to their dead owners. In this way, he would appease the spirits of those he had killed and escape the tortures awaiting him.'