by Roger Taylor
But it would not be enough, he knew. What hung here, what was somehow seeping into Canol Madreth through Cassraw, was no passive spirit. He remembered again the all-too human triumph in the clamour he had heard during his search for Cassraw. Rampant, savage joy. The kind of joy that danced on the crushed body of an enemy. Devoid of respect, of compassion, of everything save awareness of itself and its insatiable needs.
What hung about this place was merely the aftermath of its touch. The will that had brought it about was gone.
‘Who responds to His song builds a way for Him, and He will not relinquish it,’ the Whistler had said. ‘And there are many ways in which He can come. He builds ever.’
Vredech nodded to himself as he pondered the remark. He found he was staring absently at the motionless form of Nertha. She seemed to be more solid even than the ancient canting stones about him, yet, ironically, she also looked soft and very vulnerable, leaning back against the rock. He was happy that she was here with him.
Not cavalry country. The thought came from nowhere and made him smile. What in the world could Nertha know about such things? But in its wake, as if suddenly released, came other, more sobering, martial images:
Cassraw’s first sermon with its talk of armies – multitudes marching forth, united under His banner; the Whistler showing him the awful sacking of that alien city; then, almost prosaically, the faint menace of real conflict with Tirfelden that was hovering silently around the edges of the political mayhem in the Heindral. A spasm of terrible fear suddenly shook him at the prospect and he clenched his hands together in the manner of earnest prayer. In the name of pity, let none of this be, he thought desperately, as the images persisted. Then, untypically, and not without a touch of guilt, he asked of his god, ‘Reach out and stop it, Lord. Reach out, I beg You.’
Bridgehead.
The word came out of his rambling war-filled thoughts with an almost physical vividness. It seemed to be important and he scrabbled after it as if it might suddenly be snatched back and interrogated. In common with most Madren, he knew nothing of war save such of Canol Madreth’s early history as he had been obliged to learn at school, and such as could be gleaned from various dramatic passages in the Lesser Books of the Santyth. Yet, as he turned over the word ‘bridgehead’, memories began to return from the time when, as a child, his father had read him a tale of a single warrior who had held an entire army at bay while his companions demolished the very bridge he was standing on. The idea and the manner of the telling had thrilled him enormously, and he had spent many exciting daydreams holding one of the local bridges against unspecified but overwhelming odds for a long time afterwards. To his surprise, some of the excitement lingered yet, his palms tingling slightly with the feel of the grip of his long-sheathed and quite imaginary sword that had solved so many problems so invincibly and so simply. He allowed himself a smile of regret at the passage of such childish intensity. And as the word carried him back across the years, so it spanned into the future. Doubts about what was happening fell away from him. Not his intellectual, reasoning doubts, but those ill-formed doubts that prowl the realms of the mind beyond the depths of reason and gnaw at the roots of faith. He shied away from using the name Ahmral, but he could no longer turn away from the inner knowledge that some power was intruding into his life and, potentially, the lives of everyone in Canol Madreth. Nor could he turn away from the knowledge that Cassraw was being used by Him. And, just as Cassraw was His, or, being charitable, was becoming His, so He had chosen this place. A bridgehead. An enclave deep inside enemy territory.
Let him build nothing.
Many ways…
‘Nertha,’ he said, very softly. She opened her eyes immediately. ‘What are you thinking? Tell me right away, however foolish.’
She looked up at the sky and then, as he had been doing, around at the surrounding mountains and valleys. ‘I’m thinking that the sky looks different here, and the mountains. I’m thinking that everything feels different, too, as if this place weren’t the summit of the Ervrin Mallos any more, but something else – and somewhere else.’ She spoke without hesitation and with no sign of embarrassment. Then she stood up and looked at him. Vredech saw that her face was tense with the effort of keeping something under control. The same tension came through in her voice when she spoke again, her words measured and deliberate. ‘Yet I feel no different, and I think I’m an experienced enough physician not to allow my affection to cloud my judgement about what’s been happening to you too badly. So I must presume that what I feel up here comes from something outside of me, for all it’s as though it were coiling round my insides.’ The control faltered slightly and she folded her arms and hunched up her shoulders. ‘There’s something here that’s colder than death,’ she said. ‘Yet it’s alive and wilful.’
Vredech frowned. ‘You feel an actual presence? A will?’ he said, trying to keep the alarm from his voice.
‘Yes, I think so,’ she replied. ‘Faint, but there, definitely there. Something very old. Something very strange, and frightening.’
Suddenly concerned, Vredech reached out and took her hand. ‘Perhaps we should leave,’ he said urgently.
‘It’s all right,’ she said reassuringly. ‘I’m female. By my nature I’m nearer to the truth of things than you are. There’s much easier prey available for it than me.’ She looked at him pointedly. ‘I’m also a devout sceptic and a trained physician. And what I smell here is the onset of a disease. The inconsequential symptoms of a grievous sickness to come. It can be resisted.’
‘I feel no presence,’ Vredech said, still anxious. ‘I did, when we were searching for Cassraw, but not now. I feel only a kind of… desolation – a waiting.’
Nertha took his hand. ‘Your turn,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you’ve been thinking.’
Vredech coughed awkwardly. ‘I thought, “bridgehead”,’ he said. ‘Something establishing itself here against a future intention.’
Nertha half-closed her eyes, testing the idea. ‘Yes,’ she decided. ‘That’s good.’
Vredech ventured his most fearful question. ‘What do you think it could…?’
Nertha’s free hand came up to silence him. ‘What or who it is, where it’s come from, and why, I can’t begin to think. I’ve precious little logic keeping me afloat as it is. I’m really sailing over deep waters just on my intuition.’
‘It’s all we’ve got, I suspect.’ Vredech was not unhappy to abandon his question. ‘But it’s all right saying nothing is to be feared, only understood. That doesn’t necessarily make whatever lies in the darkness beyond where we can measure any less dangerous.’
‘Oh, it’s dangerous,’ Nertha said, her eyes narrowing. ‘I can feel that.’
‘What can we do, then? We can’t just debate and do nothing. But how can we fight something that we can’t see?’
A shadow fell across the summit of the mountain, making them both start, but it was only a cloud passing in front of the sun. Nertha pulled free from Vredech’s grip with a cry of annoyance at being so foolishly startled. ‘I fight things I can’t see all the time,’ she said angrily, striding away across the rocks. Then she stopped and pointed a determined finger at Vredech. ‘You do what you can. Say your prayers, speak your blessings, whatever you feel is right.’ For a moment Vredech thought she was being sarcastic, then he realized she was quite sincere. ‘I’m going to try to cure this place. If there’s a disease here, then there’s a cause.’ The pointing hand became a clenched and angry fist. ‘I’m going to look for it like I’d look for any other disease. And if I find it I’m going to root it out.’
As Nertha moved away, Vredech felt the cold inside him intensifying. For a choking moment he thought that he was not going to be able to move, that he would become like one of the great fingerstones that marked the summit.
‘Come on!’
The call transported him momentarily back to the night-time hillside where he had met the Whistler only hours earlier. Though he had no
t felt that his vision was impaired in any way, everything was suddenly in sharp focus, as though a fine veil had been drawn back. And the cold no longer bound him.
‘Come on!’ Nertha shouted again, waving to him. She was clambering up a small cluster of rocks that marked the highest point of the mountain and that did indeed look as if they had been pushed up from below by some last desperate effort. He walked across and climbed up after her.
Nertha was standing with her hands resting on one of the rocks and her eyes closed. ‘Do your praying silently,’ she said. ‘I need to concentrate.’
Vredech was half-inclined to ask her what she was doing, but the tone of her voice forbade it. He grunted an acquiescence.
He did not close his own eyes, however. Instead, as before, he watched Nertha, for fear that, in the stillness of her own darkness, she might be in some kind of danger. Silently, he started to reach for the abundance of prayers and litanies that were a routine part of his religious life. After a moment, he hesitated. They would not be enough, he realized. They would suffice for most people, for most of the normal ills of life, but this was no normal ill. Nor was he an untutored member of a flock to be consoled by a solemn utterance. He was a Preaching Brother, well versed in the origins and inner meanings of the church’s rituals and, if he were brutally honest with himself, more than a little hardened to their balm. No form of words, however revered, would aid him here. It came to him that if he was truly to find the strength to oppose this menace, then he must look to the very heart of his faith.
He felt helpless. Nor was he unaware of the dark irony of his position, standing on top of the Ervrin Mallos and looking to find form where generations of scholars had searched and failed. He was given no time to ponder his position, however.
‘It’s here,’ Nertha said, her voice a mixture of triumph and disgust. He looked at her. Her eyes were still closed, but she had removed her hands from the rock and was waving them vaguely in front of her. As she turned, one of her hands struck him and she seized hold of him. ‘It’s here, Allyn,’ she said again. ‘Something that doesn’t belong. Something that’s binding it here.’
‘What do you mean?’ Vredech asked, bewildered. ‘There’s me, you, and the rocks, nothing else.’
Nertha’s head shook in denial. ‘Hush,’ she said. ‘I’m listening.’ She released him and, gently easing him to one side, held out her hands again, searching. She was treading carefully, her feet testing the ground before she placed them down, her hands moving slowly for fear of impact with the rocks that formed this shattered crown of the mountain. For an instant, Vredech felt cackling mirth rise up inside him at the sight: mirth without humour, full of the savage unrestrained cruelty that only a young child can know. He wanted to take hold of her and push her with all his strength from their small eyrie, to end this foolishness here and now and to walk away from everything.
The shock of the thought made him gasp.
‘Hush,’ Nertha said again, irritably.
This time it was cold fury that filled Vredech and he found himself looking around for a rock suitable for dashing this insolent woman’s brains out. He was on the point of bending down before he realized what he was doing.
‘Here!’ Nertha cried.
‘No!’
Nertha’s eyes opened and she turned to him sharply, for there had been such rage in his shout. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, alarmed, as she met his own wide-eyed stare.
Vredech gaped and shook his head several times before he could release the words. ‘I don’t know,’ he managed. ‘Such thoughts, such emotions. Horrible.’
Nertha, her arms extended, was leaning forward, half-sprawled across a flat-topped rock. She was torn between going to him and leaving what she had discovered, as if it might somehow slip away from her. Vredech ran his arm across his forehead. It was clammy with sweat as though he had just completed some massive task.
Nertha frowned and, still reluctant to move, motioned him toward her. Vredech’s head began to spin. He put out a hand to steady himself on one of the rocks. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ he said.
And he was.
Nertha abandoned her discovery immediately and in two long strides was by his side, offering a supporting arm. He brushed it aside. ‘I’m all right, I’m all right,’ he said.
‘You don’t look it,’ Nertha retorted. ‘What brought that on all of a sudden? We’ve both had the same things to eat.’
Vredech was fumbling for a kerchief to clean his mouth. ‘Guilt and disgust,’ he said, quite clear in his diagnosis. He turned to her. ‘I had such appalling thoughts… about you. Dreadful, primitive. They came out of nowhere.’
‘Tell me,’ Nertha said. Vredech shook his head. ‘Tell me, damn you, Allyn. Whatever they were, they’re gone now. Bring them out into the light for pity’s sake if you don’t want them to come back.’
The Whistler’s words came to him. ‘We must remember the darkness in our own natures,’ he said softly, speaking more to himself than to Nertha. ‘If we forget, we’ll be taught again.’ He looked at her earnestly. ‘I understand that,’ he tapped his head, ‘as an idea. But when it came like that, possessing the whole of me, visceral… unreasoning…’ He shivered.
‘This is your Whistler’s advice, is it?’ Nertha asked. Vredech nodded. ‘Well, he’s got more sense than you have,’ she said with some appreciation. ‘Now just tell me what happened.’
Vredech knew Nertha well enough to accept that he would have to tell her sooner or later, and telling her now was likely to be much easier. He did so. Nertha grimaced, but more because of the pain it was causing him, than from distress at the nature of his thoughts.
‘Very interesting,’ she said calmly, when he had finished. ‘Don’t feel bad about it. You should hear some of the things I’ve heard. They’d really make you throw up.’
Vredech was still distressed. ‘But…’
Nertha shook him. ‘They were nothing, Allyn. Smoke in the wind. They’re out and gone now. Gone for good. And you didn’t act on them, did you?’
‘I nearly did.’
Nertha sneered. ‘Nearly, nearly. Nearly’s nothing. Nearly pregnant. Nearly a virgin. The point is, you didn’t do anything.’ She tugged at his arm. ‘Forget it. Come and look at this.’
Nertha’s earthy dismissal set Vredech’s concerns aside for the moment, but he had the feeling that something within him had been changed for ever.
‘I felt it here.’ Nertha was back at the flat rock, her hands splayed over it. She closed her eyes. ‘It’s gone,’ she said angrily. ‘I’ve lost it.’ She swore at herself. ‘I’m not very good at this kind of healing.’
‘What was it?’ Vredech asked, puzzled by the reference to healing.
Nertha tapped the rock anxiously. ‘I can’t really explain. If I was dealing with a patient I’d say it was a hurt, a tension… a wrongness.’
She looked at him uneasily, as if expecting him to laugh, but Vredech was watching her carefully.
‘And when you’d found such a hurt in someone, what would you do?’ he asked intently.
‘Look to ease it, obviously,’ she replied.
‘How?’
Nertha looked flustered. ‘It depends, doesn’t it? I can’t answer a question like that. You have to be there.’ She became defensive. ‘I told you, I’m not particularly good at this kind of healing. It’s an intuitive thing.’
Vredech took her hands. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s like faith. There are no words for it.’ He held up a hand for silence as she made to speak. ‘Don’t say anything else. And don’t doubt yourself so much. Go back to where you were before I distracted you.’ He laid her hands back on the rock. As he did so he noticed a dark stain in the centre of it. In so far as he had noticed it previously he had assumed it to be residual dampness from rainwater or dew that had collected in a slight hollow. But there had been no rain for some days, and virtually continuous sunshine. Even as he looked at it he felt a sense of unease returning.
Hesitantly he reached out and touched it. The unease pervaded him.
‘What’s the matter?’ Nertha asked.
Vredech replied with another question. ‘What’s this?’
Wrinkling her nose, Nertha wiped her fingertips across the stain and peered at them intently. Then she closed her eyes and sniffed them.
‘It’s here,’ she said, her eyes opening in horror, her voice low and awe-stricken. ‘This is what I felt before. The seat of the hurt, the wrongness.’ She hesitated for a moment, and a look of fear and disgust passed briefly over her face. Then it was replaced by the expression that Vredech had seen as he had watched her treating the injured in the PlasHein Square and the Sick-House: a strange mixture of compassion and almost brutal determination.
‘What is it?’ he asked again.
Nertha bent forward over the stain and ran a finger along a thin line radiating from it. There were several such, Vredech noted. They were splash lines.
‘I think it might be blood,’ she said softly.
As she spoke the word, Vredech knew the truth of it. Blood and sacrifice. The cold, cruel dream he had touched had come back to him. He felt the oppression about the summit grow in intensity. ‘Some injured animal?’ he asked faintly, knowing that this was not so even before Nertha shook her head. No animal was going to clamber to the top of the mountain to die from an injury.
‘It must have been brought here,’ she said quietly. ‘And it was brought here as part of all this… business. I can feel it again now. It’s awful.’
So many questions filled Vredech’s mind that he could give voice to none of them. In the end he said, ‘We can’t leave it. We must do something.’
