The Rose Cord

by J. D. Oswald

  This was obviously a step too far for the young man. He turned his head away, wincing in pain as he stretched the wound.

  ‘My lady,’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Even if I order you to?’ Beulah said, teasing. ‘No, “my lady” is fine. I like that actually. Yes, Clun, you will call me “my lady” from now on, whatever the protocol of the occasion demands. And now you must get some rest. Heal. Don’t worry about your position in the order. I won’t let Melyn bully you.’

  Errol shoved his few possessions into a small canvas bag and pulled the cord tight before throwing it over his shoulder. He took a last look around the dormitory, then stepped out into the corridor.

  ‘Were you going to leave without saying goodbye?’

  ‘I thought if I hurried, I could catch you in the library before Osgal marches us off to Llanwennog,’ Errol said to his old tutor.

  Andro smiled. ‘Either you really mean that or I’ve taught you too well how to lie,’ he said. ‘But if I know anything about Osgal, it’s that he’ll punish you severely for holding him up. Come. I’ll walk you to the courtyard.’

  They fell into step, Errol noticing that he had to slow himself down to match the old librarian’s speed. For a long while they walked in silence through the dark halls.

  ‘You mustn’t think that you can always fool the inquisitor just because you’ve done it this once,’ Andro said finally.

  ‘Did I really?’ Errol asked. ‘Fool him, that is.’

  ‘He’s distracted at the moment. Losing the dragon has angered him more than even he’ll admit. But there’s more to it than that. We’re preparing for war with Llanwennog, and they’re doing much the same. Melyn’s hand has been forced by this assassination attempt. He needs you to be loyal and ready. That’s why you’ve fooled him this time.’

  Errol felt a moment’s annoyance. He’d worked hard to master the skills Andro had taught him. Some credit would have been nice.

  ‘Ah, Errol, even now you betray yourself,’ Andro said. ‘I can sense your frustration and I’m not even trying. You’ve got to keep a tight control on your thoughts at all times. Especially when you’re among the Llanwennogs. What will you do when you’re presented to King Ballah?’

  ‘Ballah? But I thought –’

  ‘That you’d be allowed to serve Princess Iolwen without first being presented to the king?’

  Errol was about to say more, but they stepped out into the courtyard and an angry voice cut through his thoughts.

  ‘You’re late, Ramsbottom,’ Captain Osgal said. He was already mounted, as were the other members of the troop that would escort him to Llanwennog. Hastily, Errol tied his bag to the saddle of his own horse, then hauled himself up on to the beast. He felt uneasy; riding was a new skill and not one at which he had practised much.

  ‘I wanted to have a few last words with Errol,’ Andro said to the captain. ‘This is a dangerous mission he’s embarking on, and he needs to practise the skills I’ve taught him.’

  Osgal looked at the old librarian with a stony face, nodding and grunting the most non-committal acceptance of his explanation. He threw Errol the reins he had been holding.

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ he said. ‘May we leave, Master Librarian?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he kicked his horse into a trot. The rest of the troop fell in behind him and Errol’s horse lurched forward to keep up. He had a brief glimpse of Andro’s worried face, heard the old man say, ‘Good luck, Errol,’ but he was concentrating too hard on staying in the saddle to do much more than nod a reply. There was a strange tingling feeling in his skin as they passed through the magical wards that protected the gates, and then they were on the Calling Road, heading for the great arch.

  It was a cold morning, dawn still about an hour off. There was enough light to wash away all but the brightest morning stars, but not enough that they could push the horses into a gallop. Errol was grateful for the reprieve, giving him time to get his balance. Even so, he knew that he would be sore long before they stopped for the day. Ahead, Osgal muttered something to one of the other warrior priests, then allowed his horse to drop back until he was alongside Errol.

  ‘We’re out of the monastery now, boy,’ he said in a low growl. ‘That means you’re my responsibility. The inquisitor might think you’ve got what it takes for this mission, but me, I’m not so sure. You’re trouble. I just know it.’

  ‘I only want what’s best for the order,’ Errol said. The blow came from nowhere, almost unseating him. Only as his vision cleared did he see Osgal take up his reins. He hadn’t seen him drop them.

  ‘Speak only when I tell you to,’ the captain hissed. He raised a fist, dark in the half-light, and squeezed it. Errol felt a pressure build in his chest as if the captain were squashing his heart. It was a brief thing, but frightening nonetheless.

  ‘I’ll be watching you, Ramsbottom,’ Osgal said. ‘And if I even suspect you’re up to no good …’ He flexed his hand once more, sending a bolt of pain through Errol’s body. Without another word, he spurred his horse to the head of the troop.

  7

  Of all the myths attributed to dragons, none is more potent and yet also more plainly ludicrous than that of the mother tree. Said to be the source of all life, this legendary creature, or plant, resides in the midst of a great forest. Taller and wider than any tree, it yet remains invisible unless it wishes to be seen. It is said that in times of great need the tree will appear, or send one of its minions to give aid. It is also said that it can exist out of time and that to eat of its fruit is to be given the gift of second sight.

  Plainly this myth is founded in the simple credulity of the forest dragons. Always on the hunt for food and scratching the most basic of existences, they have not the wit to improve themselves, instead making bearable their misery by inventing tales of better times to come. That such false hopes light their simple dreary lives is a mark of their true base nature. And yet do we not ourselves cling to similar fancies? For is it that different to cross oneself before entering a house recently visited by the Shepherd? Do we not still have a secret fear of prophecy and an unacknowledged wish to be touched by good fate?

  Father Charmoise, Dragons’ Tales

  For long seconds Benfro just lay still: not moving, not breathing as the world settled itself down around him. He could feel soft loam in his hands, moist and spongy. Every part of his body ached, even his teeth, but he was not falling any more. He took a short breath through his nostrils, his lungs still loath to work properly. The air was warm, humid and scented with the rich fug of leaf mould. The forest at first seemed silent, but as he lay motionless Benfro started to notice sounds: the rustling of small animals scurrying about their business on the black forest floor, the twittering of birds flitting about the branches of the canopy overhead, the occasional grunt or roar of something larger and farther away. Slowly the sounds of the wild filtered back as the forest accepted this new intruder into its dark embrace.

  As he lay panting in an effort to get the wind back into his lungs, Benfro started to make out shapes in the murkiness about him. Far from being black, the forest floor was a mass of delicate patterns painted green by the great canopy overhead. Something moved ahead of him, hopping through the leaf litter and rubbery-leaved plants that clustered around the clear area where he lay. It inched closer, no doubt curious to discover what this new thing was that had dropped into its world.

  Closer still and Benfro could make out the shape of a squirrel. It was bigger than any he had ever seen, its bushy tail as big as his head. It came so near that he could almost have reached out and grabbed it, were not his arms still refusing to work. It would have made a tasty morsel.

  Panic flitted across his mind then as he thought the fall might have paralysed him. He longed to flex his hands, stretch his legs, but all he could do was lie there, stunned and motionless as the squirrel sniffed at his nose.

  ‘Dragon,’ it said in a tiny squeaky voice, then turned tail and
fled. Benfro watched its departure and waited to see what happened next. Slowly the ache in his hands and arms lessened to the point where he could move. He pulled the leather bag out from underneath him and checked the small pocket for his mother’s jewel.

  The moment he touched it, he felt safe. His mother was just there, beyond the fringe of leaves, out of sight but watching. No harm could come as long as she was there to protect him. And yet there was a frustration mingling with his relief. She was so close, so calm. He could almost smell her on the still forest air, sense the pattern of her thoughts, hear the soft regular swish of her breathing. Closing his eyes, Benfro tried to imagine her smile and the play of sunlight on the tiny patterned scales on her face. All he could see was a single blade of pure white light arcing through the air, howling a silent scream as it went.

  Shocked, he dropped the jewel back into its pocket, guilt mixing with grief and impotent fury. He couldn’t afford to lie here waiting to be caught. He had to get up, move on, find Corwen.

  His legs did work, he discovered, but not well. Nothing was broken, of that he was sure, but he was covered in great bruises where he had smashed into countless branches on his way down. They restricted his movements, not so much with pain but with a simple refusal to move. Still he managed to stagger through the sparse undergrowth to a root bowl in the nearest tree trunk. Water had pooled here and he drank deeply before slumping against the wood.

  The effort of moving just a few feet had exhausted him, the trauma of his fall and flight even more so. The deep wood was a comforting place, warm and unthreatening. It soothed away some of his earlier panic. The men were far away. He knew they would come after him, especially Inquisitor Melyn, but it would take them a month to cover the distance he had soared in a couple of hours. At least for now he was safe and possibly even closer to his goal than he could have hoped. Lulled by the gentle business of the forest sounds, Benfro drifted off into a deep sleep.

  Something nibbling at his feet woke him. It stopped as he wiggled his talons, backing off a few paces into the murk. As his eyes shook off their sleep fug he could make out the speckled white spots of a fawn, quite small, eyeing him with great liquid orbs. It bobbed its head, turned and fled into the undergrowth.

  Benfro didn’t know how long he had slept, but looking up he could see spears of light striking through the canopy. Their angle made him think it was evening and their distance from him made him gasp. How could he have fallen so far without killing himself? The tree whose root he was leaning against was far bigger than anything he had encountered before. The trunk was as wide as the great hall back in the village, and it stretched up as straight as an arrow. Thin, weedy branches sprung from its top but nothing grew in the lower hundred feet or more except one bare branch perhaps twenty feet off the ground. A couple of branches hung by a thread where they had been snapped, fresh white wood flesh showing where Benfro had made his journey to the forest floor. He tried to gauge the distance from these to the branch that had finally stopped his fall, then on to the ground. How had he managed to catch hold of it? It was enough that he had done. Without that last stop he would surely have been killed.

  It was dark on the forest floor, but not completely so. Somehow the evening light managed to penetrate the canopy, giving the undergrowth a brief period of energy. And what undergrowth! There were plants Benfro had never even imagined, let alone seen. Great shrubs with leaves as big as doorways that drooped and split as they neared the ground; thin wiry creepers like ropes that climbed into the trees; spiky flowers clinging to the rough lower bark, their petals formed into great cups that dribbled steady streams of water to the ground. Everything was moist, even the air, filling his ears with the sound of dripping, overlaid on the background cacophony as the countless creatures of the daytime gave way to their noisy nocturnal cousins.

  Something was rattling the bushes not far from where Benfro sat. He watched, fascinated by the busy motion. He was too weary to be afraid, could not even bring himself to get up and investigate. Overhead, the light was fading as evening gave way to night. He would just sit here, rest. In the morning he would feel better; then he could look for something to eat and work out how he was going to find his way to Corwen.

  The bushes gave a final startled rattle and a large squirrel popped into view. Benfro assumed it was the same one he had seen before, but in truth he could not be certain. It scuttled across the small bare patch of loam that surrounded the massive tree towards the mounded crater where he had landed, stopping when it saw the space empty. It scratched at its head with a small claw, looking this way and that as if astonished that something so large could be not there any more. Then it sniffed the air, circling until it was facing in Benfro’s direction. It hopped through the leaf mould towards where he sat in the darkest shadows, pausing hesitantly, unwilling to commit itself to the darkness.

  ‘Dragon?’ it said in its curious piping voice. ‘You there?’

  Benfro revised his earlier opinion about it making a tasty snack. There wasn’t enough meat on the creature to be worth the effort. And besides, he felt it would be somehow wrong to eat something that could talk. He had never before met a squirrel that could do this, but at that moment he wasn’t too concerned. The beast seemed to be friendly, and he hadn’t talked to anyone friendly in far too long.

  ‘I’m here,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You walk?’ the squirrel asked. Benfro considered the question. Yes, he probably could walk if he put his mind to it. But he would really rather stay put.

  ‘Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘Then follow.’ The squirrel hopped off towards the greenery that fringed the space around the base of the tree. It stopped at the edge, glanced back to see whether its command was being obeyed, shrugged when it saw it wasn’t. ‘Follow, quick,’ it said. ‘Before darkness comes.’

  ‘Wake up, boy! Ah, by the Shepherd!’

  Errol heard the words a split second before something hit him hard, knocking the wind out of him and throwing dusty gravel in his face. In his confusion it took him several seconds of retching and gasping to realize that he had fallen asleep in the saddle.

  ‘Pick yourself up, you useless excuse for a novitiate.’

  He looked up from the ground to where Captain Osgal sat on his horse, holding the reins of Errol’s own mount. The captain’s face was dark and angry, but that was nothing new. This was the fourth time Errol had fallen off his horse today. Or was it the fifth?

  They were somewhere in the Dinas Dwyrain mountains, several days’ ride east of Emmass Fawr. As Osgal constantly reminded him, they would be a good deal closer to their destination if only he could ride like the warrior priest he pretended to be. But try as he might, Errol couldn’t keep up with the pace the captain set.

  The first day had been hell, any joy at being away from the inquisitor soon lost to the constant chafing of his saddle and the ache in muscles he’d never known he possessed. Getting back on to his horse in the pre-dawn glow of the second day had been agony. Things had only worsened since then.

  At least now, away from the well maintained Calling Road, they were forced to move at a walk most of the day, but Errol was so tired that the slower motion soon lulled him off to sleep. He suspected that some of the others in the troop slept in the saddle too, but they had developed the ability to wake up before they fell off.

  Taking the reins from the captain, Errol hauled himself back on to his horse. At least the stables had furnished him with a patient old mare. Even so, he wished they had given him something a little closer to the ground. To add to his aching muscles he was bruised from head to toe, and his travelling cloak was tattered and torn.

  ‘Right. Move out. We’ve another hour of light left and I want to cover as much ground as possible,’ Osgal said, and once more they set off along the narrow mountain path.

  An hour was optimistic. Errol could already see stars pricking the sky, and the folds of the mountains were dark shadows concealing all manner of terrible secrets. The
uneven path climbed round ragged shoulders towards a yet-unseen pass, and the higher they went, the colder the wind that whipped through the holes in his cloak, the deeper the snow that lay in the gullies, waiting for more to come.

  Without thinking Errol reached out to the lines for some warmth, and as he did so they swam into his vision like a thousand, thousand promises. He felt their tug, heard the ghost echoes of conversations, remembered the smells of childhood. There was something enormously comforting about their permanence and the way they called to him. They took away the pain in his arms and legs, soothed the aches and wrapped him in a comforting blanket of warmth. All too soon he could feel the tiredness dragging at his eyelids, and yet as they fell closed he could still see the scene all around him.

  If anything, it was clearer.

  The mountains were picked out against the night sky as if the sun were shining directly on them, yet he knew it had long since set. The dark shadows were still there, but at the same time he could see every rock and runnel, every scrubby bush and half-tree clinging to the poor soil. Every rabbit, mountain fox and nesting bird stood out sharp in his vision, even though they were so far distant he couldn’t possibly have seen them.

  Then he noticed the rest of the troop. They were still there, riding their horses, but they were indistinct. It was as if they were only basic representations of men. The horses they rode were clearly horses, but they seemed to have lost their harnesses. Looking around, he saw Captain Osgal’s great beast holding itself tall and proud. It was even larger than usual, dwarfing the ill defined ghost-like form that sat on its back. And yet, even though it felt like Errol was looking at the captain through a heavy gauze and from a great distance, he was sure that it was Osgal.

  Finally, Errol looked down at his own horse. She plodded along the line-scintillated path, dependable and steady. She had about her an aura of contentment and health, but she wore no reins, even though he could feel them in his hands.