This was a moment when, according to the rules of the kind of war Edern was familiar with, the dragoons should have been replaced, or at least supported, by the regular infantry; it was the grunt’s role to stay in one place and bear the brunt of an onslaught, and then push the frontline slowly onwards. But Dracaland had no more soldiers to spare. Rumour had it, the Taurica situation, that Roman wart in the Varyagan underside, had finally burst open. Scythian Sea was much closer to home than far-away Qin, and much more important. The grunts were needed over there.
And so here they were, stuck in an endless chain of sieges and set-piece battles, month after month, just because the General Staff couldn’t find anyone better to send as their replacement. They’d become victims of their own success, the name given to them by the Qin — the Ever Victorious Army — was now a curse.
That their commanding officer, the man who had brought them here in the first place, had gone missing — presumed dead — didn’t help the morale either. For a few weeks, Edern had expected to hear something from, or about, Dylan, but eventually, he had lost faith and interest. Perhaps the Ardian — and Edern would always think of him as an Ardian — had perished on the clandestine mission, or perhaps it was still on-going in full secrecy. Either way, Edern had enough on his plate to gradually forget about the matter altogether. It was only in nights like this one, when there was enough time for his mind to wander, that he wondered where the Ardian had gone and what secret had required him to abandon his troops so abruptly.
Why didn’t you take me with you? he thought. Why only Gwen?
A complex web of lightning tore the veil of the Suchou Barrier apart. This was not the breach everyone waited for. Edern’s keen eyes pierced the darkness, and he saw clearly a troop of enemy cavalry sallying forth from the opening on the backs of the leaping Bishiu beasts. He surveyed the field quickly. A flank of the besieging army lay wide open before the attack.
He stretched sore muscles. His reserve force, resting in the camp, was the closest to the breakout. He blew the alarm whistle, and then ran towards the dragon enclosure where Nodwydd, his mount, waited impatiently to join the action.
Samuel stood in the middle of the steel corridor rooted to the spot in fear. Freezing-cold mist was rising around him, seeping from underneath the iron door with a hiss.
Something banged on the door from inside, repeatedly, a rhythmic, metallic thud. Once, twice, three times. The door bulged, cracking and heaving; the rivets flew out of their sockets. The fourth bang smashed it open, showering the corridor with metal splinters.
He woke up. The bell-tower was ringing out the fourth hour. A rhythmic, metallic thud...
I must have dozed off in the heat, he realized. What did I dream about?
The remnants of the nightmare quickly vanished from his memory, leaving just a lingering feeling of dread. It took him a moment to remember where he was, and why he was there: a small, walled garden of fragrant roses and rainbow-coloured tulips.
Dejeema.
It was an almost perfect imitation of a piece of the Bataavians’ homeland. How they had managed to create it here, in a different climate, on a tiny artificial island in a hostile country, on the other side of the globe, was the source of Samuel’s unceasing wonder.
He plucked an unripen rose from a bush and placed it thoughtfully on top of a large rune-stone set in the middle of the herb plot.
“Ah, there you are, Doktor.”
The Admiral appeared behind Samuel, wearing his most elegant uniform and full regalia, his beard trimmed and his golden buttons gleaming; immaculate.
“I see you’ve come straight from the meeting with the Magistrate,” said Samuel.
Otterson nodded. “Alle sorted. We are leaving in a few days.”
“Leaving? Where for?”
“Yedo. The kapital.”
“That’s — good, isn’t it?”
“Ja. The Magistrat was most eager to finally get rid of us, and the only way was to make us somebody else’s problem.”
“How come? The Bataavians I spoke to were certain we would get nowhere with the Yamato.”
Otterson smoothed his long, black beard.
“Things are changing, Doktor. The revolution seems to have started without us… And that other power I told you about? They are already in Yedo. Nobody’s saying it, but I can read mellan raderna… between the lines well enough.”
“Ah, the other power. You still haven’t told me who they are. Is it still a secret?”
The Admiral glanced around before answering.
“No, I think not. You’d learn as soon as we reached Yedo anyway. We call them Vinlander — but you know them as the Gorllewin.”
Gorllewin?
Samuel blinked and then slowly nodded. The mystery proved not as surprising as he had thought it to be. There weren’t that many nations sending merchant ships out into the waters of Orient, and the Admiral had already ruled out most of them, so the Gorllewin were always one of the prime candidates. Besides, the question of who was never as important as the how and why. Otterson had a state-of-the-art under-sea ship that let him sail past the Sea Maze… what did the Gorllewin have? And what made them aim for Yamato as the first target?
“Whose grav is this?” the Admiral asked, nodding at the runestone.
“Oh, it’s not a grave,” replied Samuel. “It’s a memorial stone set up by one Bataavian physician in memory of his predecessor.”
“Ah, another Doktor! I see.”
“I knew the man who founded it. I met him last year in Transvaal. I never knew he was in Yamato as well.”
The dragon figurine I got from him… I gave it to the Ardian’s son, he remembered. He tried not to think too often of the ship’s disaster and the death of so many of good people, so many of his friends. Death at sea was a sailor’s lot — a navy-man’s even more so. But he did feel sorry for the boy — his life had been cut far too short…
The Admiral leaned in to read the runes. “Von Siebold…” His eyes widened. “That’s the spion who led us to Yamato!”
“Ah. So not just a physician, then.”
“That’s quite a… coincidence,” said the Admiral, frowning.
“Not that big, when you think about it,” replied Samuel. “Bataave does not have that many colonies left. A well-travelled man – a spy and a scientist — was bound to find his way through most of them, eventually.”
The Admiral stood over the runestone for a while in silence, thinking intently.
“You Drakalanders and Bataavians have much in common, nej?”
“How so?”
“You are just tiny nations on the edge of the sjoe – and yet you are now everywhere. Even here. So strange.”
He shook his head, his beard swaying from side to side.
“The Khaganate is here, too.”
“Ah, but that is different. With us, it was inevitable.”
He crouched down by the tulips and ran his fingers through the petals, his bulky frame made to seem even greater by the contrast with the dainty flowers.
“There is a legend in my country,” he said. “When Reurig, the first Khagan, was fleeing from Arthur the Faer’s armies, he found a kulle — a hill on an island in the middle of a lake. On its top he had a vision: to the Vaest stretched a great wall of stone, manned by warriors clad in steel. To the Oest, an empty forest, ready for the taking. He built a great city on the island — Holmgard, our kapital. And we have been looking Eastwards ever since.”
He stood up and turned his back to the slowly setting sun.
“But the forest was not empty. It took us a thousand years to wrestle it from the man-beasts, the varulvs, the bjorn shamans, the tiger-skins… along the way, we’ve conquered the steppe from the Horse Lords, and the desert from the Tosharans, and we’ve built the greatest Empire the world has ever seen — and finally we reached the Stora Havet — the Great Ocean. We thought that was enough.”
“And then you’ve learned about Yamato.”
The Admiral nodded.
“There are small islands far to the north of here near the icy wastes… the Varyaga built outposts there to trade seal fur and valspaek – whale fat with the local tribes. They told us of another island, big and rich, from which kopmen — traders came wielding steel swords and paid with gold and silver for the furs, not with glass and pig iron, like us. And it lay to the east of our shores, where we once thought there was nothing more… we simply had to find it.”
“I thought this spy… this Von Siebold told you all you needed to know?”
“Nej.” Otterson shook his head. “He filled out the gaps in our knowledge, but we knew where to look long before he came to us. The kopmen the tribesmen spoke of… ten years ago, we — I raided their outposts and captured some men, though most preferred to die rather than surrender. We interrogated them with the help of the island tribesmen. Only then were we certain that the kopmen were coming from Yamato through the Sea Maze, and not some Qin or Chosun dependency.”
“So you’ve met the Yamato before.”
“Ja. I even know a little of the language. Made the negotiations run a bit faster.”
The Admiral was unexpectedly frank today, and yet Samuel sensed there was still something important Otterson wasn’t telling him. That thing at the lowest deck, he remembered with a shudder. What is it for? What else did the Varyaga learn from the Yamato merchants?
“I should go,” he said, rolling a tulip stem in his fingers. “The Bataavian doctor asked me to help him with a patient. Although I think he’s just happy to have somebody to talk to.”
Nagomi absentmindedly picked at the rice with a chopstick. She still felt as if the earth beneath her feet rolled slightly back and forth, but that was just an illusion — they were on dry land, at an inn in some small castle town somewhere past Okayama.
Half-way through a yawn she realized what she was doing and covered her mouth, looking around nervously. Luckily, the bear-man seemed equally distracted, playing with the small wooden slat upon which a piece of silken paper was glued — their permit of passage, a forgery produced by the Chōfu conspirators who had helped them get across the mountains of Todō province.
After a week’s journey together, they had split from Takasugi in Naniwa. He boarded another, smaller ship, to get any pursuit off their backs. Nagomi promised to pray for his safe arrival in Chōfu, but she soon forgot about her pledge.
“How many more of these stations before us?” Torishi asked, rolling the tegata in his fingers. The forgery was good, but every time they had to present it to the officials along the way, the tension was unbearable.
“I’m sorry?” Nagomi raised her eyes from the breakfast. “Oh, I’m not sure. The boats are not checked as often as the roads. We should be fine from now.”
“You seem distracted. Visions, again?”
She paused for a second.
“I had the dream today.”
“The one with the dragon?”
She nodded.
“You must pull that sword out.”
“I know, but… I’m too terrified to move. You know how it is with dreams.”
“You must try, little priestess,” he said, clenching his fist in encouragement. “Something is waiting at the end of that vision. The third verse. It must be the key.”
They had been pouring over the words she’d heard in her vision, trying to decipher their meaning. Who was the boy who couldn’t be seen? What man and beast were torn apart? Neither of them could guess.
“I understand. I will try next time.”
“Think of the sword before you go to sleep. It helps.”
She nodded and pushed the rice bowl away and stood up. The floor beneath her swayed. She wasn’t sure if it was a tremor or her still weary legs.
“What did you say?” she asked.
Torishi raised his head.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Strange. I’d swear I heard somebody calling me.”
There she was again, on the veranda of the Itō house in Nagoya, with the rampaging dragon roaring in the garden. The floor beneath her feet rumbled with the approaching steps of the slobbering monster.
She bit on her lips until blood trickled down her chin. The pain tore her out of her petrified stupor. She stumbled down from the veranda and ran up to the sword stuck in the dragon’s paw. The beast spat a cloud of steam and vile gas all around her, but it let her pass and she pulled with all her might, drawing out the sword; black blood splattered her snow white kimono. The dragon roared with the force of the hurricane — and disappeared.
Nagomi was left alone with the ancient sword in her trembling hands. The eight-headed monster burst into the garden. Nagomi retreated. The monster crawled towards her with all of its sixteen eyes staring at the blade with hatred.
Somebody stepped beside Nagomi and took the sword out of her hands. A tall boy, roughly her age… She had a feeling she had seen him somewhere before, but she couldn’t see his face clearly enough to recognize him.
He charged at the monster and, with one strike, cut off all of its eight heads. The black, oily carcass fell down, dead. The boy turned back to Nagomi, wiping the sword on the silk of his robe — a robe marked with the golden seal in the shape of a chrysanthemum flower.
The bamboo flute trilled once again. The whispering female voice returned, at last.
What was dead will be reborn,
What was lost shall not be mourned.
The boy nodded at her. He opened his mouth to speak, but the monster behind him rose again, growing eight new heads and fell on the boy, throwing him to the ground and tearing him apart as Nagomi watched, unable to run, unable to fight.
When she woke up, she tasted blood.
The peasant’s wife looked over the yard one last time, then went back inside the house and shut the door. Bran waited a while longer, hidden in the tall grass until the faint candle light inside went off and the family went to sleep.
He crawled through the grass to the granary shed. Underneath the floor of the thatched hut, between the four tall oaken pillars, stood several clay jars, each half the height of a man, their lids weighed down with heavy stones. This was exactly what Bran was looking for. He removed the first stone, trying to make as little sound as possible. He winced at the burst of pain in his leg.
The first jar seemed to be filled with sour, fermenting rice, but Bran already knew that was where the best food was hidden. He reached deep into the stinking brown mass and pulled out juicy morsels of marinated fish. He put them into a small jute sack he had stolen from the previous farm, and then reached into another jar. This one was full of soured forest vegetables; an unappetizing pile of deep green and brown shoots and leaves, plants, the names of which Bran didn’t know, but already knew were filling. He packed them into the sack too.
He already had enough to last him for the day, but decided to try the third jar. As he raised the heavy boulder, it slipped from his hands and crashed into the lid. In the silence of the night the sound reverberated like a gunshot.
The door of the hut slammed open, and the farmer ran out, naked, brandishing a sickle. Bran grabbed his sack and, without looking back, ran off through the tall grass as fast as his injured leg allowed him, trampling the barley field and splashing across a small rice paddy, towards the forest.
He reached the line of trees and fell panting to the warm, moist ground. The farmer had abandoned the pursuit, too scared to venture by himself into the forest at night.
Limping and hissing, Bran found his way to the glade where he had left Emrys. The dragon looked at him, yawned, and returned to the carcass of a deer it had almost finished eating. Like the great reptiles it descended from, Emrys could go for several days without food, but eventually, Bran had to allow it to venture deep into the mountains to prey on the wild animals there. The Yamato deer were too small to share.
Bran himself had neither the skill nor the strength for hunting. He had once caught a snake, but he couldn’t cook i
t properly, and the meat, burned to crisp with dragon flame, was disgusting. Hungry, tired, and increasingly feverish, he had to resort to stealing food from the mountain farmers.
He reached into the sack; the fish and the vegetables were squashed together into a brown-green pulp, but he was too hungry to care, and devoured the contents of the jute bag, gagging on the strong taste of vinegar.
He touched his leg. The wound was taking a long time to heal. In fact, it didn’t seem to be healing at all. The skin on his thigh was still a mess of seeping red blisters.
If I don’t treat it soon, I might lose that leg, he thought with cold clarity.
He limped over to a small spring and washed the wound in the freezing cold water. He splashed some on his itching cheeks. He had not shaved since the Grey Hoods put him into his cell. It was the least of his worries, but it did irritate him more than he’d expected.
Two days earlier Bran had decided that he could no longer simply keep to the coast; he was certain it was taking him too far the wrong way, so he turned inland, towards the setting moon. Soon wild mountain ranges rose across his path, and it was there, trying to find yet another shortcut, that he finally lost his way for good. Whenever Bran tried to cut short through what he thought was a bay or gulf, he would end up far out into the sea with no land in sight, and had to retrace his route before Emrys ran out of strength. That they had to fly at night didn’t help with the orientation. Bran dared not risk being spotted by a passing fishing boat or a harbour watchman. At night, his only guidance was the moon and the stars, and the lingering glow of the waves dashing against the shore.
“Come on,” Bran said with some effort, “it’s time. Let’s try to get somewhere tonight.”
Slowly, gritting his teeth in pain, he mounted Emrys. A thousand knives pierced his leg. Wobbling, they flew off into the warm summer night. He didn’t want to accept it, but it was becoming apparent that they were hopelessly lost.
The Chrysanthemum Seal (The Year of the Dragon, Book 5) Page 16
