Ashes Under Uricon (The Change Book 1) (17 page)

Again, they were excluding me from the discussion. This time I would intervene. “Excuse me,” I said. Neither turned their faces away from each other’s. I repeated, louder, “Excuse me.”

Rhiannon half turned her face to me with a savage look. “It is not for you to speak. Be silent.”

“I will not be silent,” I said. “How dare you issue commands to me. Just who do you think you are? Of the three of us here, I think I am the one who is most able to command others.”

Eluned dropped Rhiannon’s hands and turned to me. “Do not be angry, my lady. She means you no dishonour.”

“No dishonour? She is a little girl, yet we have to abide by her every whim. We have been standing here for I don’t know how long while she has a strop. And all you do is encourage her. We need to move on.
 
To this other house, if that is where you say we must go. If this silly creature is not willing to take us, then we will go alone.”

“We cannot do that, my lady.”

Rhiannon broke in. “Why do you call her ‘my lady’? She is nothing. She is of the Short Life.”

“No, Rhiannon. That may be true. Yet there is something different about her. I knew she was important the first time I saw her. She is truly a lady.”

“I do not believe it. How can a Short Life be a lady? They do not live long enough to know honour.”

She was off again. “Look,” I said, quietly, controlled. “Are you going to take us to the other house? Or not? If you don’t wish to take us, just say so, and we’ll go alone.” Eluned was about to speak. “And don’t say we can’t, Eluned. We have come this far. It cannot be too difficult to find.

“Besides, I have to find my grandfather. And the other Professors. The longer we wait around here, the further from us they will have gone. We need to hurry.”

Eluned smiled. It was one of those smiles that told me that I was ignorant of the true facts. “We may never find them, my lady,” she said.

“Of course we will. We have to. How can I finish my work without them?”

“The ‘work’, as you call it, will be completed without them. We do not need them. We need only the books.”

“But we need them to translate and explain the books,” I said.

“You are skilled enough, my lady. Your grandfather and the others have been taken we know not where. There is no time to look for them. If we complete our task, they will be safe. That is all I can tell you.”

“Then it’s vital that we complete this ‘task’, whatever it is. Can we go now? Rhiannon? Are you going to take us?”

Rhiannon turned to Eluned. “C’est vrai? Elle a les competences?”

Eluned nodded.

Rhiannon finally turned to look directly at me. “Bon. On y va.”

I returned her glare. “Speak English.”

She turned on her heel and headed off towards the driveway of the house. As she did so, she turned her head and shouted over her shoulder, “Allons-y. Let us go. ‘My Lady’.”

Quickly, Eluned grabbed our spare clothes from where they still hung on various branches, stuffed them into her bag, grabbed my hand and pulled me after her as she followed Rhiannon.

As we approached and passed the gates to the house, I shivered. How had it come to this? Taid and I had arrived here in the middle of the night, stumbling upon this house as it seemed to appear out of nowhere. Five years later I was leaving. Five years older. I had lost, perhaps forever, my dear and trusted Taid. The man who greeted us so enthusiastically when we arrived had, presumably, been taken away with the others. The woman who Taid had followed to bring us here had become the cause of my leaving.

So much had happened. So many things I neither understood nor appreciated. At the time. Beginning as a young girl who was so sure that she knew everything about how her life was to be conducted, I had grown into a young woman who was unsure of everything. My companion was a woman who claimed to have lived as long as history, a history of which I had been totally ignorant. Now I knew a little more of that past as she and the Professors were convinced that I was somehow part of it, indeed that I had a part to play in it.

As we reached the road, I pulled Eluned to a stop and looked back for one last time. Where the house, Plas Maen Heledd, had stood, at once elegant and mysterious, yet a welcoming presence, there was now a smoking heap of rubble. It had been cruelly destroyed by those who I had once been convinced were come to save the world. What I now knew was a narrow, confined world in which the wealth that is to be found in a room filled with books had been ruthlessly rejected. In its place, a world trapped in one book and one book alone, presented in a language no longer spoken.

Eluned tugged my arm. “My lady. We must go. We must not lose Rhiannon. She moves quickly.”

Still reluctant, I let her take me. Once again I was about to set off along unknown roads towards an unknown destination.

For days we walked, always following Rhiannon, who remained determinedly some way ahead of us, pausing only when we reached a crossroad, ensuring that we did not take the wrong turning. Signs of habitation became fewer and fewer, the fields showing less and less evidence of cultivation. By night we slept; at first, in buildings once intended for animals, then in simpler structures which were little less than four walls or less and a roof, lastly in the open, sometimes under a tree, sometimes beside a hedge.

Once we had stopped for the night, usually as the light finally faded, Eluned and Rhiannon would disappear for an hour or more, eventually returning clutching a variety of root vegetables and herbs. These would be boiled up in a large pot that we had discovered in the first place we stayed at, producing a thin soup that served as supper, with enough left over for a meagre breakfast the following morning. During the day we ate nothing, occasionally stopping briefly to drink from a stream as we passed over it.

On what turned out be the last day of our journey I awoke feeling desperately hungry. We had slept, or tried to sleep, beside a thin hedge that barely separated the road, now little more than a rough track, from the empty moorland on either side. Eluned had disappeared for hours but had returned with nothing, while Rhiannon sat, sullen-faced as she had been throughout the journey, saying nothing.

When I sat up, I saw Eluned sitting alone, a little way from me, clutching her knees in her arms and rocking from side to side.

“What’s the matter?” I said, sensing that there was something wrong.

“She has left us, my lady,” Eluned muttered, more to herself than to me.

“Who? Rhiannon?” As we had not encountered any other person on our journey I was aware that this was rather a futile question. “Will she return?”

“I think not. I did not hear her go. She must have left when we were sleeping.”

“But why? Isn’t she supposed to stay with us until we reach the other house?”

“I fear something may have happened, my lady. She may have been summoned.”

“Summoned? What do you mean? How on earth could she be summoned out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“She answers to the call of the Lady. She is needed elsewhere.”

I stood up. The hedge was low and I was able to see for some distance in all directions, although a low mist obscured the horizon. “Well, we will just have to carry on without her,” I said. “We can’t sit here waiting for her if we don’t know if she will return. Which way did we come last night?”

Eluned looked at me for a while before standing up, shaking some life back into her arms. The whole time we had been travelling there had been no opportunity to wash, so my skin felt rough under my shift. We had changed shifts twice, taking ‘clean’ ones from the bag that Eluned carried. All three were now stiff with dirt and dust. I had not removed my last one for three days.

Eluned pointed along the track in one direction. “We came from there, my lady. If you wish to continue, we should go the other way.” She picked up the bag of clothes in one hand, taking the empty pot in the other, and stepped out onto the track. I had given up offering to carry one of these, as she flatly refused to give either one to me. We set off, our hearts heavy.

After an hour or so, the sun rose over the horizon and the mist slowly began to rise. As it did so, it revealed another track, running away to the right of the one we were on, some distance ahead. When we reached this, Eluned stopped.

“We should take this new track, my lady.”

“If you think so,” I replied. I was too exhausted and hungry to argue with her.

“Do not be afraid. ‘
In all your ways acknowledge me, and I shall direct your path.’ The Lady is telling us where to go. We have arrived at our destination.”

I looked around. There was nothing to be seen. Empty moorland in every direction as far as the eye could see. I shrugged my shoulders, and we set off, along the new track.

After half an hour or so, the track ahead suddenly seemed to disappear. I thought at first that it had simply petered out, leading nowhere. I did not relish having to retrace our steps back to the old track. But it was not so. The ground suddenly fell away before us, the track leading down in a zigzag fashion. At the bottom of this unseen valley I could just make out a house, surrounded by a mass of trees.

Eluned pointed, saying excitedly, “Ty’r Brodyr, my lady. We have arrived. That is why Rhiannon left us. She knew we were near to our destination.” She threw the strap of the bag of clothes over her shoulder and swapped the pot to the same side. With her now free hand she grasped mine and set off down the track leading to the house. After five paces she stopped. So suddenly that I could not help banging into her. Taken off balance, I fell to one side, pulling Eluned after me. We ended up in an ungainly heap across the track.

I pushed her aside, rubbing my arm, which had taken the force of the fall. “What are you doing?” I shouted. “Why did you stop like that?”

She rolled over onto her front, burying her face in the rough grass. Her shoulders started shaking. I was afraid that she had hurt herself and was immediately sorry for shouting at her. “I’m sorry, Eluned. I did not mean to shout at you. You took me by surprise, stopping so suddenly. The track is steep and I thought we were just going to go straight down it.” I realised I was gabbling, so I stopped. She was still crying uncontrollably. “What’s the matter?” I asked, sheepishly.

She lifted her head, just a little. “My mother,” she mumbled, before dropping her head back.

Of course. I had forgotten. Before we had set off Eluned had told me that her mother had been the ‘protector’ at this place, but she had died after being attacked by some men. The realisation that this was the place must have struck Eluned as we set off towards it. What was I to do now? Any words of mine would be useless. Should I attempt to carry on down to the house? But they had said that no one lived here any longer. What would be the point? I couldn’t leave her here. I pulled myself up into a sitting position, my only hope that she would pull herself together eventually. How selfish that thought appeared to me, but there did not seem to be any alternative.

Tired, hungry, frustrated, worried, I watched over Eluned as she lay sobbing endlessly. Exhausted, sleep came over me. My head fell forward onto my chest. I was woken up by what felt like a sharp prodding in my ribs.

“Who are you?” I heard a voice say. A moment later, “Who are you?” it said again.

Blinking away sleep, I looked up. I could see no one. The sun now lay low on the horizon. I glanced to my right. Eluned still lay stretched out, although the sobbing seemed to have stopped. I put up my hand to shelter my eyes.

“Who are
you
?” I croaked.

Eluned stirred. She moved her head enough to look at me. “Are you calling, my lady?”

“Did you hear that?” I looked around. There was still nothing. No one. “Someone said ‘Who are you?’. You didn’t hear it?”

Rolling on her back, Eluned sat up. She wiped her eyes. There were heavy black marks beneath them. “There is no one, my lady. Perhaps it was the wind.”

“Didn’t sound like the wind to me,” I said.

I did not hear the voice again.

“Eluned,” I said. “Look. We’re both extremely tired, very hungry. You are distraught because this is the place where your mother used to live. Where she was killed. We just need to eat and rest. Anything except vegetable soup.” I struggled to my feet. My legs tingled from lack of movement. We must have been sleeping for most of the day.

I lifted my arm and looked down at my side which was now stinging. I could see blood oozing from a cut visible through a tear in my shift. Some of it was seeping into the cloth, a red stain spreading out. Eluned lifted her head. Immediately she saw the blood.

“My lady. You are hurt. We need to bathe the wound. Quickly,” Eluned said. “We must go down there.” She was pointing to the house at the bottom of the valley. She lifted my arm up, put her other arm around my shoulders and we started off down the track.

I felt incredibly faint. The lack of food, the fatigue, the loss of blood, were all beginning to overwhelm me as I stumbled down the steep track, Eluned barely able to support me. Painfully slowly, we approached the trees surrounding the house. We were forced to slow down even more as we entered beneath the trees.

When we emerged from the trees I was practically being dragged along, all energy gone. Eluned’s last reserves were also drained and, releasing me, she fell forward. I collapsed to the ground beside her. Darkness had fallen by the time we roused ourselves and, together, staggered towards the house.
 

“Hello,” Eluned called. Her voice echoed faintly off the high walls of the house. With what I thought at the time was amazing strength, she leaned forward, placed her other arm beneath my knees and lifted me bodily. She said nothing as she carried me into the house. I was unable to speak, my head cradled against her shoulder. A brief flash of a hallway passed by before she burst into a room and half-threw me onto a soft leather couch. As she removed her arms I slipped into unconsciousness.

I woke up the following day, the sun blazing through a high window directly where I lay. I was still on the couch, but now covered with a heavy grey blanket. As I tried to move my head to avoid the sun, it felt as if every bone, every muscle in my body, had seized up. A figure moved between the sun and me, shielding my eyes.