Ashes Under Uricon (The Change Book 1) (21 page)

If I had thought it was hard in the morning, I had yet to experience what was expected of me in the afternoon.

That first afternoon turned out to be one of the worst times of my life. He had told me that he was about to teach me how to survive. Survive what, exactly, he never actually said. I eventually worked out that there was no ‘what’ – the techniques I learned were intended to help me survive anything that might happen. To be honest, to call what he taught me ‘techniques’ is also wrong. There were no lessons in how to do something, or how to avoid something. It was never as simple as that. His method was to place me in seemingly impossible situations and leave me to work out how to escape them. If I escaped, he considered it a success and moved on to another situation. If I failed – which I did on several occasions to begin with – I would not be allowed to eat when we returned to the castle. Or wash the following morning.

When we left the castle the first time, I had half-expected him to hand me some equipment. I had no idea what that equipment might be. I imagined ropes, knives, emergency food supplies. Something. Anything. There was, in fact, nothing. He put on his leather coat, picked up his bow, strapped on his belt with the arrows and the axe, and set off. Presuming I should follow him, I did so, without saying a word.

We walked – he walked, I had to run to keep up – for more than two hours by my reckoning. Had I known what was to happen I might have taken a little more notice of my surroundings. As it was, I just stumbled along, mostly wondering when he was going to stop. The whole journey took place within what was a huge forest. Trees and dense undergrowth, the noises of what were presumably animals occasionally punctuating the endless swishing of his boots as he marched on relentlessly.

At last, he stopped. Looking around, we seemed to be in a small clearing. Right in the centre of this clearing was a tree that was taller and thicker than the others. It reared up into the sky, the top impossible to see.

“Wait here,” he said, and walked on ahead. In minutes he was back, holding an old sack. He tipped its contents on the ground. There was a length of rope, a crude stone knife with a wooden handle, and what appeared to be a leather boot. “Stand next to the tree,” he said.

I was inclined to ask why, but thought better of it since I did not wish to annoy him when we were miles from the castle. I stepped forward and stood near the tree.

“Closer,” he said. “Your face towards the tree.” I turned around and took another step. Quickly, before I could move, he had taken the length of rope, passed it twice around me and the tree and, having pulled it so tight that I could hardly breathe, knotted it on the other side of the tree. My arms were free, my legs below the knee were free, the rest of me was pressed up against the rough bark surface. If I tried to move my body the bark cut into me, through my dress.

When he was satisfied with the knotted rope he came and stood beside me. He leaned over and picked up the knife. For one brief moment I thought he intended to give it to me as an aid to free myself.
 
I was wrong. He drew back his arm and thrust the blade into the tree just above my head. I flinched, closed my eyes and tried to turn away, convinced he was about to stab me. I succeeded only in dragging the side of my face against the tree.

Without pausing, he then picked up what I had thought was a boot and disappeared back into the trees. Many minutes passed. I was just beginning to think that he was not coming back when he appeared next to me. He was holding up the ‘boot’, which was now bulging and soaked with water. It was a water bottle. That meant there must have been water near, though I had neither heard nor seen it.

He placed the container on the ground some distance away from me. Coming around to the side I was now facing he said, “Darkness in ...” He paused, looking up to the sky, barely visible above the trees. “About three hours. After dark, the door will be locked.” He turned on his heel and strode away.

“Wait!” I yelled. “You can’t leave me here like this.” He did not pause even once. I heard the swish of his boots fading away into the trees. At first I thought his intention was to leave me here for a while before coming back. I rested my head against the tree, my grazed face now stinging. Time passed but he did not return. Before long, and agonisingly slowly, the light began to fade. I tried calling his name, quietly at first, convinced he was somewhere in earshot. When there was no response I called more loudly, until in the end I was shouting, my voice echoing through the trees. He did not come.

As darkness fell, a wind arose. It murmured through the upper branches to begin with, and there was a moment when I mistook it for the sound of his boots and thought he had returned. Soon it increased until it was roaring through the trees like a wild animal. My shouts of “Teacher” were soon drowned out. As suddenly as it had started, the wind stopped. It was followed by a frightening silence and pitch darkness. Unable to see, my ears began to pick up every sound, near and far. I was soon convinced that I was surrounded by creatures that were watching me, creeping closer and closer. Before long I was absolutely petrified. I threw up my arms to cover my face in a useless attempt to make myself somehow invisible.

To make matters worse, whether through fear or cold, or both probably, I began to shiver, uncontrollably. My whole body was soon shaking, forcing me to rub up against the bark, which tore my dress and pierced my skin. With one last, feeble effort, I cried, “Teacher. Please. Help me.” That is the last thing I remember before my whole body sagged and I lapsed into unconsciousness.

I must have come round two or three times in the night. I only have a vague memory of hearing an owl hooting somewhere above me, a noise behind me which was followed by the sound of an animal lapping water. The last humiliation was waking to feel warm liquid running down the inside of my legs. Strangely, the warmth was comforting and I soon relapsed.

The next time I awoke I was falling to the ground. As I collapsed in a heap I managed to open my eyes. It was daylight. The Teacher stood over me, the rope that had bound me to the tree now coiled in his hand. As I watched, unable to move, he retrieved the knife from the tree, picked up the water container, which lay on its side, now empty, and bundled the items back into the sack from which they came. When he returned from replacing them wherever he had found them he prodded me with his foot.

“Get up, woman. See what your book learning has done. I should leave you to die here.”

I lifted my head a little. “I wish you would,” I whispered. “You’re a monster.”

“That’s as may be,” he said. “There’s much work to be done. Up now.”

He took my arm and pulled me to my feet. As soon as I found my balance I shook him off.

He stood looking at me, a scowl on his face. He gestured at my clothes. “That was my mother’s. Now it is ruined. Come.” Without another word he walked off. Reluctantly, I followed. In less than half an hour, I stumbled out of the trees to be confronted with a tower that rose high into the sky. As I lowered my gaze it was to see the great door we had entered two nights before. Leading up to it was a wooden bridge that crossed a deep ravine, at the bottom of which I could hear running water.

I turned back to look into the trees. How had it taken so long to reach that place where he had tied and left me and yet so little time to return? I was baffled, but too tired to ask.

“To your room,” he said as we entered the castle. “Eat. Sleep. Tomorrow you will try again.”

He was true to his word. The following morning I was allowed time to wash and change my clothes before we spent the morning tramping round the courtyard, endlessly repeating the same verse of the poem. After a quick bowl of broth we plunged back into the trees. Reaching the same clearing, he produced the same items and told me to stand near the tree. This time I protested, verbally and physically. I swore at him, I kicked him, I scratched at his face. He simply carried me to the tree and tied me to it even as I struggled.

Again he left me. Again he did not return until the following day. Three times he did this. In the end, probably as he had anticipated, I used my brain. Instead of fighting against him, I calmly walked up to the tree and allowed him to rope me to it. Only this time I pushed my knees and my head against the tree as he knotted the rope. Once he had gone, I relaxed my knees and lifted my head. This had left me with enough space to wriggle my way free from the rope. I threw the rope over the knife to pull it down, picked up the water container, still full of water and set off. I had taken note the previous day of the direction in which we had gone. In less than half an hour I was back at the castle.

The Teacher was sat on the bridge, his legs dangling over the side, stripping the bark from some thin branches to make arrows. I proudly dropped the rope, knife and bottle beside him. He stopped what he was doing, stood up, kicked the rope and bottle into the ravine, picked up the knife and gave it to me.

“At last. Tomorrow a new task. In the morning a new verse.”

“‘Well done’ would have been good,” I said.

“Time enough for praise,” he said. “That time is not now.”

He disappeared inside the castle. I did not see him until the following morning.

So it went on. Winter soon turned to spring. Every day we followed the same routine. Mornings for reciting verses. Afternoons for survival tasks. For weeks I struggled with both. The verses he chanted just did not seem to want to stay in my head. Many nights I spent seemingly far from the castle, trapped or caged, alone and afraid, until I used my intelligence to free myself.

As summer approached I started to use my brain more and more.
 
As the evenings grew longer I picked up my book, almost forgotten in the first weeks, and turned to the page that contained the verses I had been struggling to learn. Seeing the verses written down made them so much easier to remember. From then on, if I returned successfully from a survival task, I would spend an hour or two before I slept reading and rereading the verses we had chanted that morning. Soon we were racing through the whole poem. I actually astonished the Teacher one morning when I entered the courtyard and immediately set off on a circuit, chanting – perfectly – the verses that I had guessed would be rehearsed that day. I tapped my head when I had finished. “Books,” I said, grinning, “have their uses.”

And my body also learned to adapt to the trials it was being put through. I became rapidly stronger, faster, more resilient. I was capable of contorting myself into amazing shapes, twisting my arms and legs in directions I had not dreamed they would go. All these things meant that I could escape from virtually any circumstance he would put me into. My biggest fear, and the one I had still not completely mastered as spring turned to summer, was being trapped in or under water.

The first time I faced a water trial I really panicked. The trials had been going really well, and the Teacher no longer expected to have to come back for me. Which was why he did not return for two days on this occasion. He had put me inside a cage that was so small that I had to lie curled into a ball. The cage door, which was behind me, was locked. A rope was attached to a ring on the top. Without warning, the cage, with me inside it, was lifted high into the air and swung out over what turned out to be a waterfall. I was facing away from this, unable to turn, so all I knew was that somewhere behind me was water, cascading very loudly, slowly soaking me with spray. I struggled to look down. Far beneath the water roared into a black pool. For the first time in many weeks, fear took over completely. My mind shut down and I could do nothing other than hold my knees, whimpering.

If I moved at all, the cage swung wildly. The spray eventually soaked me to the skin. As usual, I started to shiver. The cage started to swing. For two days I hung there, a thoroughly wet and frightened specimen, as the cage veered from side to side and close to and away from the waterfall. I honestly do not know how I survived that ordeal. When the Teacher eventually came to retrieve me I was a gibbering wreck. When he opened the cage after pulling it back to dry land, I fell out still curled up, moaning faintly. It took me some time to recover. Thankfully, I was not required to repeat the ordeal as I think even he realised that it was impossible to escape. I did complete other water trials, but to this day I wake some nights soaked in sweat, convinced I am back in that cage.

Soon it was the height of summer. I went back to wearing my shift as it was lighter than his mother’s dresses. I washed it every other day leaving it to dry overnight. By now I had learned the whole of the Teacher’s poem. We spent our mornings pacing round the courtyard reciting all the verses, either together or in turn. I had even learned some intonation, following his lead, which was difficult as the words remained meaningless to me. I could even make him laugh by speeding up or slowing down my reciting so that the words came out as more nonsensical than they were to me already.

As the heat increased, the afternoon trials diminished. He began to teach me other things instead. I learned how to make an arrow. How to carve an arrowhead from a stone he called ‘flint’. How to choose just the right sort of stone to make it. He showed me how to make an axe head from the same material and how to fix it to a wooden handle. Most of all, he taught me how to shoot an arrow and throw the axe. I learned these things remarkably quickly, probably because they did not contain an element of fear like all the survival tasks.

One morning, when I returned from washing, it was to find the courtyard empty. This was strange, as he was normally waiting for me to begin our verse recitation. “Up here,” I heard him say. His voice echoed round the walls. I could not make out where it came from. “Up here,” he said again. This time I looked up. He was stood at the top of the tower, leaning dangerously over, waving at me. I had never been up there. I did not even know it was accessible. “The door to my room,” came his voice, echoing even more. He stood up straight, turned and was lost to view.