A Solitary Journey (25 page)

So now my heart it cries to know

To where the wild young creatures go:

What is it makes my soul keep yearning,

When the season’s always turning,

For something much more stable, hi-de-ho’?

Meg knew the voice. Beneath the straggly beard and bedraggled shock of black hair she recognised the thin-
faced minstrel who’d come to Summerbrook a long time past. And another face was familiar too—Saltsack Carter—a much thinner, sicklier version of the man she remembered. She paused in the drifting rain and darkness, waiting for the minstrel to finish his melancholy tune. The song ended without applause, the men staring silently into the tiny flames, each lost in his private thoughts, and she felt as if she was intruding rudely as she stepped into the light. ‘Saltsack?’ she called quietly.

The men’s eyes snapped up, the pair with their backs partly to her turning sharply and grabbing weapons. Carter squinted at the ghostly apparition and seemed unable to comprehend the vision. ‘Meg?’ he queried in disbelief.

She came forward, wary of the others whose grips on their weapons tightened. ‘I heard you singing,’ she said. ‘It is Bandolier Talemaker, isn’t it?’

The minstrel’s mouth dropped open in amazement before he stammered, ‘Y-yes,’ in reply.

‘By all of Jarudha’s miracles!’ Carter gasped as he rose to greet her. ‘You were dead. I saw your body in the river.’

‘You were there?’ she asked.

‘I was coming back from Quick Crossing and I saw the smoke, and then I saw the bastards coming down the road so I went bush. They took my cart and all the supplies I was bringing in, but they didn’t find me. I got to Summerbrook and—well, there was nothing I could do. They killed everyone.’ He paused, as a grim memory took root. ‘I buried Flower. The bastards had—’ and he wiped away the tears seeping from the corners of his crinkled eyes as if they’d betrayed him. ‘I didn’t stay after that. There was nothing to stay for. But I saw you in the river. I’m dead sure of that.’

Meg was aware of the men staring at her. ‘I wasn’t dead,’ she said.

‘Then I’m sorry,’ Carter offered quietly. ‘If I’d known—’

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ she said. ‘When did you get here?’

Carter glanced at his companions. ‘We came through the mountains to escape the Kerwyn a week ago. We hid in caves on the western slopes for a long time, avoiding their hunting parties. We saw things—’ He paused, haunted again by memories. ‘They butchered everyone they found.’

‘Except the children,’ added one of the two men that Meg didn’t know.

‘What did they do to the children?’ she asked.

‘Took them away,’ said Talemaker. ‘They march the children to the coast and sell them to slavers who put them on ships.’

‘Ships?’ Meg repeated. ‘Where do the ships go?’

Talemaker’s bony shoulders shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘But how do you know that’s what they’re doing?’ she asked.

‘I’m a minstrel. I’ve travelled. Even before the invasion that’s what the Kerwyn were doing to the small villages on their borders. There are songs about it.’

‘Yeah,’ agreed Carter. ‘I’ve heard those stories too. A trader I know from up in Lightning Ridge told me that the Kerwyn sell the children because there’s good money to be made. I’ve heard they even sell their own children sometimes.’

‘If you had a Kerwyn brat you’d sell it too,’ said the stranger.

The men chuckled. ‘So how come you’re out here on your own?’ asked one of the men unknown to Meg. Although he laughed at the joke, his eyes were dark and serious, and his expression revealed a deeper suspicion.

‘I’m not alone,’ she said.

The stranger lifted his sword. ‘Easy, Dark,’ Carter said. ‘Meg is one person you can trust with your life.’

‘We are,’ Dark muttered. ‘Where are your friends?’

‘He’s waiting where we were camping,’ she explained. ‘I said I’d come and check what we’d heard.’

‘You and your bloody singing,’ Dark muttered at Talemaker.

‘Tell him to come join us,’ Carter offered.

‘There’s better shelter where we are,’ Meg replied. ‘You can join us.’

M
eg woke to rolling thunder across the mountains and Whisper burrowing under her right shoulder. The rain was heavier on the grove’s canopy and she was conscious of a fine mist clinging to her skin. Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked. In the instant of pale white light she saw the silhouettes of the five sleeping men clustered in the centre of the grove around the glowing warming stone that she had created and the slender shadow of A Ahmud Ki standing at the entrance. She knew that he was angry at her for leading them back to the grove. He never said so, but she saw it in his expression when she lit the space with another light sphere to introduce everyone. The men had also gaped at A Ahmud Ki, someone physically alien to them, and A Ahmud Ki’s resentment hardened with their stares. The meeting was uneasy, exacerbated by her explanation of how the Shesskar-sharel people were treating the Shessian refugees. ‘We wouldn’t treat them like that,’ Dark growled.

‘They can’t really expect us to choose between being slaves or being butchered,’ Carter argued.

‘But they don’t want us here,’ Meg told them.

‘Where else are we meant to go?’ Carter asked.

A Ahmud Ki watched the interchange in sullen silence, locked out by language and unspoken prejudice, finally detaching from the group and taking a spot outside the dull circle of light. When the questions of her identity were partly answered, the tales of escape from the Kerwyn shared and exhaustion settled on the party, Meg chose a small rock to turn into a warming stone and doused her light sphere to allow sleep to settle in the grove.

Lightning and thunder played across the mountains again, so Meg scooped up the bush rat as she stood and stared into the darkness where she remembered seeing A Ahmud Ki. Her brief, fitful sleep had been punctuated with dreams of which she could recall fragments, like crystal images. In one dream she was standing on the battlements of a castle or a palace, overlooking a city. People were swarming in the streets and the sky was filled with blue storm clouds that were sweeping in across the dark ocean. She looked at her hands and was surprised to see that they were the hands of an old woman—wrinkled and spotted like Emma’s hands—but she knew they were hers. Young people stood around her and she felt as if she knew them. Like her, they were all looking skyward, to the west, waiting for something.

In another dream she was on a ship, heaving across a rough ocean that stretched endlessly to the horizon. What was strange about the dream was that she felt as if she was not herself but someone else—a child—someone feeling a great loss, sorrow, hopelessness.

My children are still alive,
she thought.
They are alive, and I must go west to find them.
She closed her eyes and formed a small light sphere to light her feet and approached the entrance. A sharp flash of lightning showed A Ahmud Ki still staring into the storm. ‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked as she reached him.

‘I haven’t seen a storm for a long time,’ he replied without turning to her. ‘I’d almost forgotten their power.’

She felt as if she wanted to speak to him, but she had nothing to say so she also stared into the darkness. Another lightning fork lit the forest. Thunder exploded. Whisper pressed against her chest.

‘There must be some Aelendyell out there,’ he murmured.

‘Aelendyell?’ she asked. ‘What are Aelendyell?’

‘You really don’t know?’ he asked.

‘I’ve seen the name in books and I’ve heard you mention them,’ she explained. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What has happened to this world?’ he muttered. He drew a breath and said, ‘The Aelendyell are descendants of the Elvenaar, themselves descendants of the Alfyn. They are the oldest people, the people of the forest. They look a little like me. You must have seen or heard of them.’

‘You are the only person I’ve seen with your features,’ she replied. ‘When my friends asked me about you and where you came from I told them I’d found you here in Shesskar-sharel. No one looks like you. The people here have dark skins, dark hair. There are no Aelendyell. There never have been in Shess.’

‘Have I been imprisoned that long?’ A Ahmud Ki murmured. ‘And King Dylan?’

‘We had a queen, Queen Sunset Royal, but she was assassinated.’

‘Andrakis?’

‘No. But I know that name. I read it in a book—your book.’

‘Then how can you speak with me if you say that none of these things exist?’ A Ahmud Ki demanded.

‘The Conduit lets me understand anything I read or hear—as if I learn it automatically.’

‘Where is this Conduit?’

‘I am the Conduit,’ Meg replied. ‘It’s in me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Unsure of the accuracy of her memory and uncertain as to whether or not she should tell a stranger the truth in detail, she sighed and said, ‘It’s a long tale.’

‘We’ve got time,’ A Ahmud Ki replied as lightning flickered overhead, illuminating the trees with ghostly light.

Meg waited for the thunder to end before she said, ‘It was a gift. It came from my great-uncle, Samuel Kushel, whom the Seers murdered.’ She decided, then, to tell him what she remembered, in detail, of the amber crystal, the link to Erin and Alwyn and the Genesis Stone, and how she’d embedded it in herself to keep it from the Seers. As she unfolded her story, her memory expanded and the life that she’d forgotten—first, in returning to Summerbrook, and then after the Kerwyn raid and her near-death injury—took focus until tears ran down her cheeks as she spoke and the rain poured its grief into the earth.

She was surprised to see the grey light filtering through the forest as she opened her eyes because she couldn’t recall going to sleep. She last remembered listening as A Ahmud Ki described the world in which he’d lived before being imprisoned by his arch enemy, Mareg the Dragonlord. She listened with suspicion when he explained that he’d been the King’s Chancellor and was responsible for training apprentices in the art of magic—the Ki as he called it—because she equated what she heard with what she remembered of the Royal Seers. It left her wondering if he was another of their kind—a man bent on acquiring power at the expense of others in the name of religion—and she wished that she could see his face when he was talking because it might have
betrayed his real emotions. Her scepticism strengthened when he started talking about dragons. Magic she had learned to accept, despite her original disbelief, until she discovered the effect of the amber on her, but dragons were pure mythology. She listened to the stranger patiently, but she knew that he was fabricating a story to hide the truth from her. She’d freed him from a cruel prison—but had she freed someone who deserved to be imprisoned after all?

She dreamed of her children. The sudden memory of what transpired in her unexpected sleep startled her and she stood in the clearing, breathing rapidly. Carter’s news that the Kerwyn were taking the children west to the ports and selling them to slavers resurrected her hope and in her dream she saw them—Emma, Treasure—her children—walking with a host of other children along a waterfront. They were alive.

‘The rain’s stopped.’ Bandolier Talemaker’s statement startled her. He was smiling and she was oddly conscious of his ragged and faded red tunic. ‘I’ve never met a legend,’ he said. ‘I’ve sung about plenty of them, but never met one.’

‘I’m not a legend,’ she retorted.

‘You are if I sing songs about you,’ he replied. ‘Lady Amber—’

‘Never existed in reality,’ Meg interrupted. ‘Of all people, you, a minstrel, should know how legends are created. A little bit of truth and a whole lot of imagination. I’ve heard the ballads. They’re lies.’ She looked around the clearing for Whisper, but the rat was gone.

‘But you have the Blessing. I saw it last night.’

‘Simple magical tricks.’

‘Making light from air? Heat from a cold stone? There’s nothing simple about that.’

‘All of the Seers can do them,’ she told him. ‘Some
can do much more, but they’re all tricks of one kind or another.’

‘So teach me then, if they’re just tricks,’ Talemaker challenged.

‘You need to have the Blessing first.’

‘So there is more than tricks to it.’

Meg sighed. ‘How did you sleep?’

Grinning at her evasion, Talemaker replied, ‘Like a dead man.’

She looked past him at the central space of the grove. It was empty. ‘Where are the others?’

Talemaker looked over his shoulder. ‘Probably hunting something,’ he said. ‘I’d have starved without Dark or Stillwater.’

A shadow moved in the trees. ‘Who’s there?’ Meg asked nervously. An apparition detached from the darkness and A Ahmud Ki approached. ‘I didn’t know it was you,’ she apologised.

He held an offering towards her—fungi and berries—which she took and cupped in her hands. ‘I don’t know the fruit of this forest,’ he said, with a glance at Talemaker, ‘but these look edible.’ When she hesitated he said, ‘I’ve already tried them.’ She thanked him, but as she divided the food with Talemaker she saw Talemaker staring intently at A Ahmud Ki. She cleared her throat to draw his attention, but Talemaker’s gaze was fixed. ‘Tell your friend I don’t appreciate being stared at,’ A Ahmud Ki warned as he walked away.

‘What did he say?’ asked Talemaker, his gaze still firmly on A Ahmud Ki.

‘He said he doesn’t like being stared at,’ she explained.

‘But where does he really come from?’ he asked. ‘I’ve seen the local people. He looks nothing like anyone I’ve ever seen.’

‘He’s—’ she began, but stopped, unable to say what she wanted. Instead she said, ‘He’s foreign. He came off
a ship and found himself being treated as a slave in Shesskar-sharel so he’s escaping like us.’ She noticed A Ahmud Ki walking back towards her with his finger pressed to his lips.

‘Move into cover,’ he whispered as he slid past her. Meg translated the order to Talemaker, whose eyebrow rose in bemusement as he followed them into the undergrowth beneath the outer trees and crouched to hide. Silent moments passed. Men appeared at the far side of the grove and eight Shesskar warriors herded three prisoners into the grove—Carter, Dark and Mainhill.

‘Where’s Stillwater?’ Talemaker whispered. A Ahmud Ki glared. Meg shook her head.

For an instant Meg thought the leading Shesskar warrior at the head of the group was Chi-hway, but the man was thicker-set and his bearing suggested he was older. He gave an order to his fellows and they pushed Dark forward to collapse on his knees. The warrior raised his spear with the clear intention of executing Dark so Meg stepped from her hiding place. ‘What are you searching for?’ she asked in fluent Shesskar.

The warriors reacted aggressively, but she could sense that they had not expected to be confronted by a woman—especially a pale-skinned, red-haired alien woman. The leading warrior took a cautious step towards her, his spear raised. ‘Why are you treating my friends with disrespect?’ she asked in a casual but firm voice, masking her nascent fear.

‘You are on Shesskar land,’ the warrior said with authority. ‘This is not your land.’

‘My name is Megen Kushel,’ she offered. ‘And you?’

The warrior paused and she knew he was deciding whether he could give her due respect despite her gender. Chi-hway’s attitude was evident in this man—a cultural diffidence towards women that reminded her of the Seers. ‘I am Chas-chi, of Ashan-hu-alandi.’

Place-on-mountain,
she translated silently.

‘You have trespassed without welcome,’ he told her. ‘Your men have hunted in our land and this is against our law.’

Meg assessed the men holding her friends captive. Apart from the older leader, the rest were young, barely out of their teens. ‘Please accept our apology, but we are hungry and we have had to escape a cruel enemy.’

‘Don’t waste your breath with me,’ Chas-chi snarled. ‘I’ve already killed a hundred trespassers who came with the same story. Your people have no courage to face their fate. Instead they come and steal and beg like dogs so I treat them like dogs.’ He pressed his spear on the back of Dark’s neck.

‘Don’t,’ Meg said quickly. ‘If you forgive us we will go back to Shess and never—’ but her plea was cut short by a figure charging from the trees. Chas-chi saw the attacker, but before he could swing his spear up Talemaker crashed into him and took him to the ground. In a flurry of arms and legs, Chas-chi broke out of Talemaker’s desperate hold and rolled to his feet, pulling a long-bladed knife from his belt as he crouched in readiness while Talemaker stumbled to stand and the Shesskar warriors closed in. ‘Talemaker!’ Meg yelled. ‘No!’

‘This is the treachery that marks your kind,’ Chas-chi accused as he sized up his thin and hungry adversary.

‘Let us go and we won’t cause any more harm,’ Meg promised. To Talemaker she snapped, ‘I’m bargaining with them. Wait!’

Talemaker’s eyes stayed locked on Chas-chi, neither man trusting the other, Talemaker with grim desperation to survive, Chas-chi relishing the impending chance to assert his strength. ‘Chas-chi, do you know Chi-hway, of Ha-chet-shu?’

Chas-chi did not flinch or shift his gaze from Talemaker. ‘How do you know this man?’ he asked.

‘We travel under his protection,’ Meg improvised. ‘I am his house slave.’

‘What are you saying?’ Talemaker asked.

‘If this was true then he has been a poor keeper and not the man I know,’ Chas-chi told her. ‘He knows where his territory ends and ours begins and he wouldn’t have let his dogs loose to roam.’

‘Chas-chi, look!’ a warrior called.

Chas-chi cautiously lifted his gaze from Talemaker. Behind the tall red-haired woman there was a slender man in ragged clothes with long silver hair and a rat perched on his shoulder. ‘Who is this man?’ Chas-chi asked, straightening and turning his attention from Talemaker as if the latter was no longer a threat.

Meg glanced over her shoulder, surprised to see Whisper on A Ahmud Ki’s shoulder. She focussed on Chas-chi, noting the warrior’s rippling arm and chest muscles, and said, ‘You’ve heard of our Royal Seers?’

Chas-chi squinted as if he was taking in every minute detail of the pale apparition. ‘There are children’s tales about priests,’ he said.