The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms)

by Paul Kearney

  ‘She didn’t recognise me,’ Riven grated. ‘I saw her at the bothy, and she didn’t know me.’

  ‘She cannot be your wife,’ Guillamon said. ‘Not truly. As I have said, death is final. But part of her is the woman you knew—perhaps. Perhaps.’

  ‘Talk bites its own tail after a while,’ Ratagan rumbled, and Guillamon smiled.

  ‘You have the truth of it, there. But some talk is necessary. I am only sorry that it must by necessity be on painful subjects.’ And here he bowed to Riven. ‘There will be yet more talk, and discussions, and debate, and all of it will be on matters you had thought to hold private. For this I make my apologies in advance, Michael Riven. If there were any other way we would try it—but you are the clue to our ruin and our survival, and thus must become the property of us all. In the meantime, this Rorim is your home.’

  Riven nodded. Somehow these people always managed to humble him. There was silence in the room for a few moments. Dust danced in the sun from the windows. They could hear cattle lowing in the Dale.

  ‘If what you have said this morning is true, then we had best be on our guard, Guillamon,’ Bicker said quietly. ‘Minginish will keep on trying to kill the Teller here.’

  ‘And the Rorim is between them,’ Ratagan added ominously, scratching his beard. ‘I foresee a busy time ahead.’ Then he grinned. ‘For those of us who are not invalids, that is.’

  ‘Maybe you should send me back home, to my own world,’ Riven suggested.

  Bicker shook his head. ‘We will keep you alive, never fear, but we will have to decide what it is we must do about this. Besides, you will not be fit to travel for several weeks.’

  Guillamon came away from the fireplace, suddenly brisk. ‘We have indeed a busy few days in front of us,’ he said. ‘There is the rebuilding and the burying. We cannot make good our losses until Luib and Druim are satisfied with their trainees.’ He looked at Bicker. ‘I am putting Unish on to the training, to try and speed things up. And’—he glanced at Riven—‘our guest here will now be guarded by a Myrcan at all times. Isay has said he will do it. I think he was impressed by your actions in the square last night, Knight of the Isle; though he will never say so, being a Myrcan. I must go. There are duties waiting me.’ And he left quietly.

  ‘I think I’ll get drunk,’ said Ratagan. He sounded subdued.

  ‘I think you won’t,’ Bicker retorted. ‘Even a laggard like you can be put to use on this morning.’ He smiled to take the sting out of the comment. ‘Murtach has a Myrcan and six Hearthwares out with him, patrolling the Dale. When he gets back, I want you to get his news, and then pick six others to send out immediately after. Ord can take them.’ He went to Ratagan and examined his face. ‘Can you manage to do that, old friend? It must have been quite a battle.’

  ‘I have fought easier foes,’ Ratagan admitted. ‘And Riven proved himself to be a soldier of our world as well as of his own. He has a sword, now; I think he should be allowed to keep it.’

  Bicker moved to where Riven lay silent on the bed. ‘Well, Knight of the Isle: would you bear a Drinan-forged sword and lift it in defence of this land that is trying to kill you?’

  ‘There are worse causes,’ said Riven, and he grasped Bicker’s proffered hand.

  What the hell.

  NINE

  BROKEN BONES. RIVEN had vast experience of them. He knew the fracturing of his limbs and joints as well as he could trace the contours of his own face. They ran through him like fault lines, cracking the strata of his memories so that under their pressure images slipped, slid, flaked away.

  He was an invalid again, the broken parts of his body imprisoning him within his bed. From it he could see the blue sky beyond the wide windows in his room, empty of everything except cloud and the occasional far-off bird circling the distant hills—eagles, Ratagan had told him. They spun in the sky here as they did back at Camasunary.

  He argued to have the bed moved to below the window after a few days, dismissing Bicker’s worries that he would find a Rime Giant in his lap one of these nights, and from then on he could see the southern half of the Rorim and the Circle, and watch the people of this world come and go about their business. He spent untold hours lying there, whilst his collarbone and ribs knitted wearily together again, and he watched the rain come out of the southern sea and roll across the hills in great banners and stacks of cloud, the sun chasing after. Impossible that he was here, that he saw everyday scenes and faces he half recognised or felt he knew. Impossible that they could exist as he had pictured them—impossible that they could not, for now he touched, greeted, smelled and ate with them. Magnificent make-believe characters now dressed in linen and leather, wishing him good morning, riding past his window, returning from the hunt with deer draped across their saddles, sitting cleaning their armour outside the gatehouse or getting drunk in the hall. He had been given a glimpse of the nightmare in the eyes of the Rime Giant as they met his own and recognised him. Now he was allowed to live in the dream for a while—to wear a sword, perhaps, to ride a horse, to be the kind of soldier he had always wanted to be. Perhaps. But the best things are better not savoured too long.

  IN THE WEEK following the attack, the Rorim buried its dead and rebuilt its walls. Bicker and Murtach led patrols of Myrcans and Hearthwares up and down the Dale and the surrounding hills, visiting the villages and hamlets of Ralarth in turn and reassuring their inhabitants. Even so, each time they returned to the Rorim they had a straggling band of people following them on foot—refugees of a sort, fleeing their farms on the higher hills and seeking safety within the long walls of the Circle. They told tales of massed attacks by wolves, or the marauding of solitary Giants. The snow had gone, but the beasts remained. And the harvest had been destroyed. It would not be long before the Dales began to feel the nip of hunger.

  Within the Circle, Guillamon soon began to find himself pressed for space as more people sought sanctuary. Those farmers who had always lived there presented him with complaint after complaint. The Circle was common land, in that all men used it freely with the permission of the Warbutt, but daily the herds using it grew. Huts were thrown up by the newcomers, and the Rorim began to resemble a vast, ungainly camp. Eventually, many of the newcomers were moved out by the Hearthwares and settled on the lower slopes of the surrounding hills, not always willingly. Those who stayed were expected to provide more men for the militia that the Myrcans were training in the practice fields to the west of the Rorim. All this Riven learned as he lay helpless in his bed and waited for his bones to knit together. As the slow days passed, he was told of the other attacks which peppered the Dale, the constant raiding of the flocks, the sighting of grypesh—another of his pet monsters—within sight of the Rorim itself. He saw Bicker seldom, for since he had returned to his own world, the dark man had found more and more responsibilities loading themselves on his shoulders as the Warbutt left the daily running of the Rorim to him. And then there was Mira, Dunan’s sister. In the evenings that were left to Bicker, she seemed to occupy much of his time. She was a petite, black-haired girl with pale green eyes who spoke seldom, but whose sharp-featured face lit up when the dark man was with her. And he in turn seemed to shed some of his cares when he was in her company. Riven thought of her as a girl, but in fact had learned that she was older than Bicker. The pair ought to have married years ago, Ratagan maintained, but Bicker had some itches to work out of the soles of his feet first, and she seemed content enough to wait.

  The dark man was helped by the warden, Guillamon, and by Ratagan’s father Udairn, but he had little enough time to spare, all the same. He came to Riven’s room sometimes in the evenings, often accompanied by Guillamon, and they spent hours discussing and speculating, until Riven’s head ached and the bed seemed like a prison.

  It was Ratagan, the other invalid, who spent most of his time with him. There were others, also. The girl, Madra, seemed to have taken it upon herself to become Riven’s nurse while he recovered, much to Ratagan’s amusement,
and she was in and out every day until her face was as familiar to him as the big man’s. It was heart-shaped, framed by long tresses of feathery brown hair, with thoughtful eyes almost the same colour and heavy eyebrows that made her look as if she were frowning half the time. Riven both liked and hated having her near him.

  Finally there was Isay, the Myrcan. Being what he was, his conversation was not plentiful, and he tended to stand solidly at the door of Riven’s room, for all the world like a statue of a sentinel. He was younger than most of the other Myrcans, though, and Madra was good at raising sudden, almost shy smiles from him. He was Riven’s bodyguard, and never left his side.

  There were politics in the air, Riven discovered in his evening talks with Bicker, Guillamon and Ratagan. The Lords of Ralarth, who owed allegiance to the Warbutt, were unsettled on two counts. Firstly there was the obvious disaster facing them with the total destruction of the harvest, but there was also the fact that they saw the people of their own fiefs deserting them in droves and heading for the safety of the Rorim itself, with its walls and Hearthwares. They could not give the same protection that the Warbutt offered, having only a few retainers apiece to defend their own interests, and they eyed with dismay and apprehension the militia that was being trained in the shadow of the Rorim.

  ‘The fools think we’re trying to use the opportunity to leech power from them and centralise it here, in the Rorim. They cannot see that what we are doing is best for the whole Dale,’ Bicker said hotly one dark evening, when he had come in from a round of patrols that had taken in the residences of the five most powerful lords of Ralarth.

  Ratagan laughed deeply, his flagon dancing on his good knee. ‘Though you will have to admit this is a golden opportunity to cut down some of the Warbutt’s more troublesome vassals once and for all.’

  Bicker smiled unwillingly. ‘I shall have to resist the temptation. As it is, it would seem that they want some kind of meeting with the Warbutt to thrash things out. Our burgeoning militia has them scared stupid.’

  The big man chuckled once again. ‘If they could but see what left-footed, addle-headed idiots Druim and his comrades are working with, they would not be so afraid.’

  ‘They are fools,’ Guillamon put in darkly, and his blue eyes flashed. ‘Do they think they must fear us more than the very beasts out of the mountains?’

  ‘Turn them into toads, Guillamon. That’ll show them,’ Ratagan said, his humour unquenchable, and everyone laughed.

  Riven’s arm was still in a sling, and his ribs did their best to cut off his breath every once in a while, but he was healing. He was looking forward to feeling the wind on his face again, even if he could go no farther than the ramparts of the fortress. He wanted to taste the keen air he could feel outside the windows. It no longer seemed so odd that he was breathing the air of a world that could not possibly exist. He was glad now he was being given this thing—for the moment. He preferred not to think of the darker side of it.

  ‘It is Marsco who is the real instigator,’ Bicker was saying. ‘He is a good man, but stubborn as a goat. He sits up in that crag of his at Ringill and reckons he can go his own way, but as soon as he thinks we’re infringing on his rights, he’s gathering together the other lords like hens under a hawk’s shadow, putting all sorts of ideas in their heads. If it weren’t for the fact that Ringill is so damned strong and in such a ticklish place, I’d have manoeuvred him out of it years ago.’

  ‘You would?’ Guillamon asked with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘Well—I’d have got you to do it,’ Bicker said, grinning wickedly.

  ‘Why is Ringill so strong?’ Riven asked. He knew the name, but it had had only a mention in his books. It conjured up an image of a black, sheer rock topped by stone walls.

  ‘Ringill is the northernmost of the Ralarth fiefs,’ Bicker explained. ‘Hence its seat was chosen with care to be the best fortress, since it borders on the territory of Garrafad Rorim—Bragad’s lands. And we have never been overfond of our northern neighbour. It is the poorest of the fiefs, but also, by tradition, the most independent.’

  ‘Too blasted independent by half,’ Ratagan muttered.

  ‘All the Dale lords have private forces of their own,’ Bicker went on, ‘but they scarcely amount to much—maybe a dozen men apiece, and nowhere near as well trained as our Hearthwares. But Ringill has always had more, partly because of its strategic importance—’

  ‘—And partly because the lords of Ringill have always tended to think a mite too highly of themselves,’ Ratagan finished, and he drained his flagon.

  Guillamon smiled. ‘You are a Hearthware, Ratagan, and so see things like the soldier you are, but from where I see it it is no bad thing to have a man as able as Marsco in a place like Ringill. If the worst happened, he has at least the ability and the pride to defend the place to the last. That knowledge is worth the nuisance he makes of himself from time to time.’ Here he looked pointedly at Bicker. ‘The Warbutt’s heir might also be expected to take the longer view of things.’

  Bicker shook his head ruefully. ‘Politics. I need more practice.’

  ‘You’ll get it soon enough,’ Guillamon told him. ‘The lords should be here any day now, to air their grievances. No doubt the Warbutt will be wanting you to do most of the listening for him.’

  ‘As usual,’ said Bicker, a little bitterly.

  Guillamon ignored his tone. ‘And there are things in the offing from north of Ringill, also,’ he said.

  ‘Bragad?’

  ‘The very same. Murtach has run into two of his patrols whilst quartering the hills up there—twenty strong apiece, and only two of them Hearthwares.’

  ‘So Bragad builds himself an army of sorts,’ Bicker remarked.

  Guillamon nodded grimly. ‘It would be no bad thing to remind Marsco of that when he comes here complaining of our militia.’

  ‘Nothing like an outside threat to cut short the squabbling,’ Ratagan said with satisfaction.

  ‘Bragad is good at talking, and the fiefs are in dire need of strong reinforcing. If he comes here preaching about combining Rorims the squabbling may get worse, not better,’ said Bicker, frowning.

  ‘Politics,’ said Guillamon, shaking his head. But his eyes were bright.

  THREE DAYS LATER, Riven left his bed for the first time since the Rime Giant attack. Madra and Isay helped him vertical, with Ratagan sitting on a nearby stool venturing helpful advice.

  ‘Take his waist, Madra,’ he was saying, with a grin in his beard. ‘He won’t bite you. And you, Michael Riven, lean your weight on her. She’s a strong, sturdy girl, and your bulk will hardly make her knees buckle.’

  Riven was pelted with images of Beechfield. Corridors and walking frames, and Doody telling him Rome wasn’t built in a day. His life seemed to be going in crazy circles of injury and recovery. He wondered why Madra’s face seemed so familiar to him. She was not one of his characters.

  They draped a heavy cloak around his shoulders and supported him as he stood by the open window. He looked out on to the green-gold land, with its silver glitter of river and the crawling patches of grazing herds, the clumps of buildings far off with their ribbons of woodsmoke, and the long snake of the Rorim outer wall in the distance with the two towers of the south gate like stubby megaliths, dark against the grass. There was a tang in the air—greenness and growing things, the smell of dung. And punctuating the quiet was the rhythmic ring of a smith’s hammer, clear as a bell in the wideness of the Dale, evocative as a call to prayer.

  Riven breathed in the air as though it were wine. He felt as though it could lift him off his toes and knit his bones for him at a draught. His two helpers supported him wordlessly, one to each side. He had come to realise that neither Isay nor Madra was overfond of needless talk, whilst to Ratagan conversation was a game and an art, as necessary to life as bread and beer.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said at last. ‘I can stand on my own.’ And their arms fell from him at once. He swayed slightly on the
balls of his feet and heard Ratagan shuffle up behind him. The big man was still lame, but surprisingly mobile.

  ‘I’m thinking we should find you attire suitable to your standing,’ he was saying. ‘With the Ralarth lords clustering here like bees around a foxglove, you should look the part.’

  ‘I will see to it,’ Madra put in. ‘Bicker is something of the same build as my lord here.’

  Riven caught Ratagan’s eye. My lord?

  ‘Your reputation precedes you, Sir Knight,’ the redbeard said, humour lighting his eyes. But Riven scowled. If there was a thing he did not need it was the titles Ratagan and the others had bestowed on him. They were something he could never hope to live up to.

  There was a knock at the door, which Isay immediately answered. Riven took a seat on the edge of his bed as Murtach slipped into the room, Fife and Drum at his heels. The two wolves immediately began nuzzling Madra’s palms, and she gave one of her rare smiles, the dark brows lifting.

  The shapeshifter was clad in grey sheepskins, and his eyes were bright as buttons.

  ‘Greetings, O wounded ones,’ he said, and dodged a swing from Ratagan’s crutch.

  ‘What news?’ the big man asked.

  ‘I hardly know what to tell you,’ Murtach replied, lifting his hands. ‘We have the lords gathering in ones and twos, their retainers eating up Colban’s meagre stores; we have news of a possible embassy from Bragad, and there are rumours of a battle to the north concerning Mugeary’s son.’

  Ratagan’s face hardened. ‘The outcome?’

  Murtach shrugged. ‘Ill. He is said to be slain, and a score of his men with him. Rime Giants overran them.’

  ‘So much for the sudden spring,’ Ratagan said quietly.

  ‘Aye. Carnach Rorim is in mourning tonight.’