‘You see it that way, but we don’t. The inconvenience now matters to us. And you still kill people.’
‘Our president has issued strict instructions for us to kill only when it is necessary to ensure victory in this war. Soldiers are not people. If we do not kill your soldiers, your soldiers will kill ours. It is one.’
‘And people who are not soldiers,’ Meg asserted.
‘When? My men haven’t done this. Where have you seen ordinary people killed by Ranu?’ She was about to describe the encounter with the dragon eggs that left her stranded, but instinct warned her to stay silent. ‘You see?’ Rasu said triumphantly. ‘This is a war between governments. The people stay the same.’ He shook his head. ‘No. The people will be better off with a Ranu leader who is compassionate and who wants a better future. This is a just war, a war for the good of people. Why do you think so many of your people simply agree to let us march through and let us take what we need? They know there is a better life coming.’
Tired of the man’s diatribe, Meg began walking along the bank. He caught up and walked beside her. ‘I have a question,’ he said. When she didn’t speak he continued. ‘Where were you going this morning?’
‘To Marella,’ Meg replied without looking at him.
‘Why?’
‘My daughter is there. I want to see that she is safe.’ She saw no reason to lie about her mission. If Rasu was genuine in his belief, then he would have no cause to stop her.
‘How old is your daughter?’ he asked.
‘Twenty-three.’
‘You must have been very young when she was born,’ he remarked, but she ignored his clumsy compliment. Rasu touched her arm. She flinched and stopped. ‘My apologies if that was a rude thing to do. You are a married woman and I meant no offence. I merely wanted you to stop.’
‘No offence taken,’ she curtly replied.
‘If it is important for you to go to Marella, I would like to offer an escort to accompany you there so that you are not treated with indignity.’
Meg stared at the Ranu commander, puzzled by his show of generosity. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.
Rasu blushed and bowed his head briefly before explaining. ‘No doubt you will find me impertinent for saying these things, but I have always been an honest man in my dealings with people. There is an Ithosen saying that he who speaks with an open heart will only suffer the truth.’ He paused to check her reaction. ‘You are a very beautiful woman. I should not say this to you because you are married, and in my land such a rash statement would bring me shame and I would be forced to compensate the husband with a payment, but I am honest and I believe war affords me the right to say what is true. So you might think me shallow to offer you an escort just because I see you as a beauty, but beauty is deeper than the outside and I saw in you when my soldiers were rough and rude a strength that warned me you would not let anyone treat you in that manner.’
I was afraid, Meg thought. Once I might have been brave, with the amber magic, but I was afraid.
‘I have two daughters at home in Tul Nathir,’ Rasu continued. ‘They are of similar ages to your daughter and I am already blessed with grandchildren by them. I know what it is like. So I make my offer as I would hope you would make an offer to me if our circumstances were reversed. This is also an old Ithosen teaching.’
‘Are the Ithosen religious men?’ she asked.
Rasu shook his head. ‘No. They are philosophers. In ancient times they were religious leaders with mystical powers, so the legends say, but now they are thinkers and lawmakers—wise men.’
Meg gazed at the ferry which was disembarking troops on the near bank. ‘Bill and Lee will go home. I will travel to Marella with your escort,’ she said. ‘Will you honour that request?’
Rasu bowed his head. ‘A woman should not travel alone. My men will guard you as they would guard me, but will your husband allow this?’
‘Bill is not my husband,’ she said bluntly, and she walked briskly towards the tents where Bill was resting after the surgeons had treated his injury to tell him that she was leaving.
The Ranu soldiers never spoke to her throughout the journey except with gestures for basic needs, like eating, mounting and dismounting. True to Rasu’s promise, the escorting soldiers were distant yet polite, according her respect as if she was an important person, and she felt safe in their company.
They shadowed an ancient forest throughout the first day after crossing the river, before turning north and joining the main road to Marella late on the second morning. Meg had only seen the forest from a distance as a dark smudge on her annual journeys to Lightsword, and to travel within a stone’s throw of it made the place mysterious and intriguing. It was different to what she remembered of the Whispering Forest in Western Shess—the trees were taller, broader, thicker, older, the trunks gnarled with wisdom and wrapped with vines. It was a forest that had seen history pass and somehow escaped destruction, the kind of place that she imagined A Ahmud Ki might have roamed.
The Andrak had myths associated with a forest-dwelling culture called the Lendel and she had heard stories about them from people in Marella over the fifteen years, but she also remembered that A Ahmud Ki used another name, similar in sound and yet different. Aelendyell, she recalled suddenly, as a breeze whispered to her, and she shivered as if fingers had stroked her bare arm. She glanced at her Ranu escort at that moment, but they seemed oblivious to the forest’s presence or the breeze’s message.
The first night, they rested in a village at the forest’s edge. The locals stared at her until she greeted them in Andrak, and shared her name, and then they were full of questions.
‘Why are you being escorted?’
‘Are the Ranu brutal?’
‘Will they take everything?’
‘Have you seen prisoners?’
She answered the questions as honestly as she could, telling the dozen men and women outside the village tavern that she was on her way to Marella. ‘There’s been trouble in Marella,’ a man with a red eye-patch and a limp in his left leg told her. ‘You shouldn’t go there.’
His comment stirred her uncertainty. ‘What kind of trouble?’
‘Rebels,’ he said. ‘The Ranu were ruthless with them. That’s why we’re scared that you’ve brought these four here. How many more will come?’
‘What have the Ranu done in Marella?’ Meg asked.
‘Burnt houses. Hung those who resisted,’ said the man. ‘There’s a curfew and it’s hard to get in or out.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I was visiting when the Ranu came, but I left when the trouble started. My sister lives there. Dyan Trapper. Do you know her?’
Meg nodded. ‘We work together in the shirt factory.’
‘I’m Liam Woodburner,’ the man said. ‘If you’re going there, look out for my sister for me.’
‘I will,’ she promised, but her heart was in turmoil for Emma’s safety now that she knew there had been conflict in Marella. When the curiosity dissipated, and the people dispersed, she accepted a woman’s offer to sleep overnight in her cottage and not on the ground in the company of the Ranu, but she took a long time to get to sleep and it was a sleep overwhelmed with dreams.
She stood on deck of a ship, staring away from the setting sun at the endless ocean expanse. The waves rolled beneath her feet and she knew she was sailing towards Western Shess. She felt that she had been away from home a very long time and it was as if she had been waiting to make this journey.
The old dream, standing on the battlements of a wall, came and went. Surrounded by people, she was facing a storm coming towards the walls, a storm with a blue glow at its base, and beside her were people for whom she felt an enormous love.
Another new, brief dream startled her. She was in a space dimly lit from an unseen source, but she sensed that all around her were books, endless shelves of books, and there was someone else too, the disembodied voice of an old man.
T
he dreams remained with her as she rode out of the village before sunrise with her silent Ranu escort and she puzzled over their meanings. Clearly she was meant to return to Western Shess, just as she knew that one day she would inevitably travel east to a strange ruin, and that she was fated in her future to face something terrible from the battlements of a castle. The reasons why she would do these things eluded her, but the glimpses of the future—that was what she’d learned through her experiences that these dreams were—only made her frightened and more determined to avoid them.
The Claarn-to-Marella road was busy with war traffic—marching soldiers in white uniforms, wagons of goods, grey weapons on carriages. Occasionally she spied Andrak people, some going about their daily business, some carrying personal belongings or pulling them behind on dogcarts, and most greeted her as she searched for familiar faces, but she recognised no one. Low grey clouds closed in the world, adding gloom to her increasing anxiety as she passed through the familiar green landscape, and when she spotted the charred ruins of a farmhouse a short distance before Marella, and saw thin smoke rising above the low hills, she knew that Liam Woodburner’s warning was grounded in truth. It wouldn’t affect Emma, she told herself. My daughter has no cause against the Ranu. But fragments of the dream that prompted her to leave Lightsword flashed into crystal clarity and she tightened her grip on her horse’s reins as her troop crested the last gentle slope before descending into Marella.
Ranu troops were everywhere, lounging in groups, marching in columns, standing on relaxed guard at street corners, their white uniforms oddly pristine, as if the dust and sweat of daily duty couldn’t stain the material. And there was evidence of a brutal battle—ashes of buildings, scattered grave mounds, two corpses swinging from ropes by the ruin of the courthouse. Meg blanched at the sight of the crass display of Ranu justice, the corpses dangling, heads to one side, dishevelled dirty clothes and bloated bodies. One wore the remnants of the Andrak uniform, a tattered dark-green coat over dirt-stained cream trousers. The other was naked.
She urged her horse forward, steering through the troops, ignoring the protests from soldiers she nearly trampled, and broke into a canter as she headed for the intersection and the road along which her cottage stood. Her accompanying guides followed dutifully, although one stopped to talk to three soldiers who tried to stand in her way at the intersection and were brushed aside. As she galloped towards her home her stomach churned. Ashes and charred wood. No! she silently pleaded, her arms weakening. No! She wrenched at the reins and fell from her mount, stumbling three paces before she collapsed into the destruction of her flower garden. She pushed to her feet, and plunged into the ruined cottage, burnt door and wall frames like blackened skeletons, sinking into the ashes. ‘Emma!’ she sobbed. ‘Emma!’ she screamed, while her Ranu escort silently dismounted on the road.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Tom came back,’ Dyan said quietly as she stroked Meg’s hair. ‘He came with fifteen men from the Andrak army. There was Tim Woodbearer and Letta’s son, Kain, and they came back to protect the town from the Ranu. We were all excited to see them, even knowing that the Ranu were advancing and our government troops were being beaten. Our boys were home. We’d been waiting for them. Emma—Emma was so happy to see Tom.’ Dyan’s hand trembled as she lifted it briefly from Meg’s head and tears glittered in her eyes. She glanced at the five women in her parlour who were silently weeping, using their handkerchiefs to wipe away the persistent tears. Letta, leaning against the wooden mantelpiece, forced a weak smile.
Dyan lowered her hand to Meg’s head on her lap and gently stroked her dark hair. ‘We promised that we would hide them from the Ranu until the war settled down, but they didn’t want that. They wanted to fight. They said that if we didn’t fight, the Ranu would rape and kill us and they wouldn’t let that happen—not to us.’ She sniffed and fought back a sob. ‘We didn’t know what the Ranu were like. You know the stories. The government has always told us that the Ranu are monsters, people with strange habits and violent ways. We believed it. And we were terrified that they were coming so quickly. Tom and the others rallied all the young people and some of the older men too. They knew they couldn’t fight the whole Ranu army, so they set up traps and ambushes and hiding places to kill as many Ranu as they could without getting caught. They said that if we were persistent the Ranu would give up and leave us alone.’ A woman in the room suddenly cried out and her companions moved to comfort her. Dyan looked down at Meg’s ashen face, saw that her eyes were closed as the tears trickled down her cheeks, and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that at all when the Ranu came. They were too many and too strong. It took them just three days to round up the resisters. Tom and the others killed some, but it didn’t stop them. They—they hung everyone they caught. They even hung the ones who they caught helping them.’ She stopped to look at the other women again. Everyone was caught in the moment of silence, trapped in their personal worlds of grief. Dyan plainly did not know how to tell Meg her daughter’s fate. The words were too terrible to be spoken aloud. She swallowed and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’
She crept out of Dyan’s house before sunrise and briskly walked barefooted through the dark shadowy town, avoiding the night watch’s gaze as she passed them. The Ranu soldiers made no attempt to stop her. If they had, she would have pushed them away. They had no right to stand between her and her daughter. They had no right. A weak frost gave the grass an icy edge when she trod on it outside the ruin of her home, the sky paling in the east, but she was numb to all feeling except the empty hole in her being where hope had resided. In the ash at the centre of the desolation, from where Dyan and Letta carried her the previous afternoon, she sank and wept openly, trembling, her mind awash with the brutal questions of grief. Why Emma? she begged. Why my daughter? Why? Over and over the questions circled like carrion birds, cruel and bitter and relentless. Why my children? Why must it always be my children?
She started at the touch of a hand on her arm and looked up to find two Ranu soldiers, one holding a lantern, offering to help her up. Rage leapt and she rose, flailing the men with her arms and screaming incoherently until they retreated to the roadside, and then she sank again into the ashes, leaving the Ranu to shake their heads at the mad Andrak woman as they walked back towards the town centre.
In her mind she saw Emma at ten helping her tend the garden, pulling weeds and asking what each plant was and why Meg didn’t like it. She saw Emma at fifteen, a young woman in her bright blue smock, cranking the wheel to lift water from the well, the early morning sun shimmering on her red hair. And then Emma was laughing and rubbing her swollen belly, proud to be pregnant and in love with a young man standing beside her in his green Andrak uniform. ‘You killed my daughter,’ Meg hissed and punched the earth, raising a white plume of ash. ‘Why did you come back?’ she wailed. ‘Why?’
The first morning rays were gilding the canopies when Meg, hearing a rustle in the ash, opened her swollen eyes and soft pressure against her hand drew her gaze down. A black bush rat looked up at her. ‘Whisper!’ she cried and scooped the rat into her arms, pressing her against her chest and chin until the rat squirmed in protest and dropped into her lap. ‘Whisper,’ Meg repeated, ‘You’re alive,’ and burst into tears, sobbing as she stroked the rat’s sleek fur. She smeared the tears across her cheek with the back of her hand and looked around furtively, checking that no one had seen the rat. Then she rose, cradling the rat, saying, ‘We can’t stay here,’ but as she took a step forward Whisper wriggled free and dropped into the ash. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, bewildered by the animal’s rejection. The rat, a shadow in the grey light, shuffled through the ash to a point where she started digging frantically. Meg joined her, asking, ‘What are you doing?’ but Whisper kept efficiently and purposefully shovelling ash aside with her tiny paws until she revealed a soot-blackened jar, and nudged it with her snout as if she was trying to release it from the ash’s grip. Meg bent, and as she touched the object a tingle thri
lled along her finger and wrist. She wrapped her hand around the jar and pulled it from the ash. Checking again to see if she was being watched, heart racing with fear and anticipation, she scooped up the rat and walked towards the hills as the rising sun washed the town rooftops.
She sat on the flat rock on the hill crest, her gaze fixed on the soot-stained green jar, her world focussed inward. Through the trees, the distant town continued its new military existence as its people repaired what damage they could and dwelt in common grief at what they had lost, surrounded by the Ranu victors. She had stared at the town for much of the morning, memories of her life there with Emma vividly forming and fragmenting in tears. At first, Whisper endured her desperate embrace, then was content to curl in her lap, and now she was stalking insects through the thick grass around the clutter of boulders below Meg’s vantage point. The town was her past. She understood that. Whatever life she had hoped to build there was as real as the cloud shadows flitting across the hills. It was as distant now as Summerbrook. There came an image of her daughter sitting before the cottage hearth, cheeks rosy with knowing she was entering motherhood, petting Whisper and smiling, and she curled up on the rock, clutching her stomach, and sobbed again, as she had throughout the morning, confused as to why her daughter had to die when so much happiness was awaiting her.
When the crippling grief eased, she sat up, cross-legged, and contemplated the jar. That is also the past, she considered. There is only pain and death in the jar. A shadow passed over the rock and she looked up at a white Ranu dragon egg drifting overhead, flying eastwards, tiny windwheels driving it. ‘The future is stranger,’ she murmured. ‘Where do I go now?’ She reached for the jar and felt the tingle of magic, the sensation that had brought her so much woe. I can’t go back, she decided. But the dreams—I can’t escape the dreams. The dreams were as familiar as the tingling of the magic trapped in the jar. In one, she would travel east to a strange place, to a hidden place in the midst of ruins. In another, she would be standing on a wall with people she knew, watching a strange storm of blue light sweeping towards her. She was older in those dreams, much older, so they were not meant to happen yet, not for a long time, but she knew they would happen, just as every other dream had taken shape in her life. She was a prisoner of her dreams, fated to see them come into being, never quite as she imagined, but always true. All she could be certain of was that Andrak no longer was a haven. She had to go somewhere else, perhaps even back to Western Shess—somewhere to escape the growing pain inside, the pain she knew too well from the past, losing her children, one by one, to war and hatred. The tears rose again and she trembled as she lay back down on the rock.
Prisoner of Fate Page 6
