Crossing Over (31 page)

Read Crossing Over Online

Authors: Anna Kendall

Something caught my eyes: a bit of cloth snagged on a gorse bush. I seized it. Embroidered green silk. She had been here! I broke into a run.
A shape grew in the far distance. At first I thought it was a trick of the clear, high light. But as I drew closer, I saw it was a low hill, far off, and that smoke rose up from it. It could be a town. It could be Hygryll.
But dusk was falling, and the smoke was still far off. A cool wind began to rise. Running had exhausted me, and I could go no farther without rest. I built a small fire, to keep away beasts, in the shelter of an outcropping of stone. The peat burned with its own peculiar smoke, acrid and earthy. There was no moon, and a million stars blazed in a black sky. I had no food, but a little water was left in my water bag. I drank it, wrapped myself in my fur-lined cloak, and fell asleep.
I dreamed of my mother.
She sat in her lavender gown with a child on her lap. I was both the watcher and the child, safe and warm in my mother’s arms. She sang to me softly, a tune that I heard at first without words. Then the words became clear, and Roger the Watcher’s blood froze: “Die, my baby, die die, my little one, die die ...” But Roger the child listened to the monstrous song and nestled closer, a smile on his small face and the pretty tune in his ears. “Die, my baby, die die, my little one, die die ...”
Hands jerked me away from her. But they were real hands, neither in the country of dreams nor the country of the Dead, and they were pulling me away from the safe warmth of the campfire. Torches sputtered and flared in the night. Men surrounded me, pulling me with rough hands, turning my face to the flickering light.
Someone gasped.
I thought it was me, so terrible did the men look. And yet there was nothing inhuman about them. They were just men, heavily bearded, dressed in tunics and boots of tanned leather. They carried small knives with handles of carved wood. And the gasp had not come from me. It came from the man holding my arm, when he gazed deep into my eyes.
“Another one!” he said. His accent was like the householders in the Unclaimed Lands, like Bat’s.
“Let me see,” said another voice. I struggled to be free, but the first man slipped deftly behind me and closed his arm across my neck, while twisting mine up behind me. I could not move.
“Who are you?” I said. “Do you have Lady Cecilia?”
No one answered. A much older man came forward. Between his white beard and horned hat, only his eyes showed. They were green, the startling green of new leaves. As green as Cecilia’s. He studied my face for a long time, and under his gaze, strange sensations flowed through me. Not thoughts, not even emotions. It was as if a current moved in a hidden river in my mind, and all at once I remembered something nonsensical: Mrs. Humphries, in the country of the Dead, totally absorbed in watching the white stones shift shape under the flowing water of the slow river.
Finally the old man said, “No. Not another one. He has never been here before.”
“But he is—”
“Yes,” the old man said. “Oh, yes.”
The first man let me go. And then, there in the eerie light on the ground of peat and stone, the men of Soulvine knelt to me, Roger the Fool, and bowed their heads.
 
The Dead can sit insensible for days, years, centuries. Not so the living. I was aware of every sight, every sound, every prick of sensation on my skin as the men escorted me to Hygryll.
They talked little, and they would not answer my questions about Cecilia. They seemed to know completely who I was (which was more than I knew), so completely that it was a matter beyond discussion, as accepted as air to breathe. I was weak with hunger but afraid to ask for food. If I gave any sign of weakness, would they change from kneeling before me to killing me? Maggie had said they murdered people here to “take their souls.” The belief might be folklore but the murder would be real, and I had no wish to dwell permanently in the country of the Dead. Not yet. So I walked as swiftly as they, grateful that the pace was not too quick, because of the old man. And with each step, I felt the peat springy beneath my boots, saw the torches bobbing ahead of me, smelled the sweet night air, experienced all the sensations that meant I was still alive.
Was Cecilia? Was she somewhere just ahead, in that town faint on the horizon?
And so we came to Hygryll. It lay in starlight among a group of hillocks, odd hills that were both wide and low. Then I realized that Hygryll actually lay
in
the hillocks. Each was a large round building made of, or covered with, earth and peat. A leather flap covered the doorway of the closest one. The old man pushed it aside and we entered.
I stood in a low, windowless round room of stone. A fire burned in the center, the smoke going up through a hole in the roof. The men set their torches in holders on the walls, and I saw stone benches heaped with fur blankets ringing the central space. Baskets rested under each bench. The only other furnishing was a large drum. One of my captors took the drum and went back outside. The others tossed fur blankets on the floor beside the fire.
“Sit down,
hisaf
,” the old man said.
I sat. I didn’t know what a
hisaf
was, or what they thought I was. I dug the nails of one hand into the palm of the other to steady myself. Outside the drum began to beat, a slow rhythm but not monotonous, a message I could not begin to decode.
One by one, men and women came into the round stone room. None was young, although none seemed as old as the green-eyed leader. I looked eagerly at each, but none was Cecilia. And yet it seemed to me that I could see something of her in this girl’s chin, that youth’s eyes. Each came to me, knelt, and said in their rough accents, “Welcome,
hisaf
.”
More and more people, until the room was full, warm with the heat of their bodies and heavy with their silence. These were different from the people I had known all my life in The Queendom: the farmers at country faires, the inn-keepers and faire folk, the soldiers and courtiers at the palace. They were different from Lord Solek’s savage warriors, with their smiling and singing, their ruthless discipline. They were different even from Hartah. These sat somehow heavily, saying nothing, waiting stolidly.
They reminded me of the Dead.
When it seemed the room could hold no more, the drummer came in from outside. He put his drum on a bench and went out again. The old man stood. He spoke slowly, and despite his accent, I could understand most of his words.
“Here comes a
hisaf
. There has not been one among us for a very long time. He was not born in Soulvine, and has never been in Soulvine, but Soulvine is his home. He is welcome. Soon he will travel to—”
I didn’t catch the word but, of course, he meant the country of the Dead. That was, after all, what everyone wanted from me, everywhere.
The old man finished, “But first, we will eat.”
Food! My empty stomach gave a loud growl. Surely food would end my light-headedness. The stuffy room didn’t help; I was shifting between a heightened, almost dizzy awareness of every detail and sudden bouts of sleepiness. In the body-packed gloom, someone threw a handful of dried leaves onto the fire and it flared. A sweet, pungent scent filled the room.
The door flap opened, letting in a brief blast of cold air. Young men and women entered, all about my age, dressed in woven white robes. Some carried big, steaming bowls, others loaves of bread. All were comely, and I looked eagerly for Cecilia. She was not among them, although the girl who came up to me had the same green eyes and brown hair. Even her smile hinted at Cecilia’s. I smiled back. The young Soulviners moved around the room, offering people stew and bread. I was given only bread, and when I reached toward the stew, a girl drew my hand away gently. “You are a
hisaf.”
That word again.
The bread tasted wonderful, sweet with honey, studded with dried fruit. The scent from the fire grew stronger as someone threw more herbs onto the coals. Drowsiness took me. Almost I dozed, but then the alert light-headedness was back, and again everything seemed preternaturally sharp and clear. I could have cut myself on the fur hide, the rush torches, the very air. Dimly I realized that there was some drug in whatever had been thrown on the fire. The young men and women left on another blast of cold air.
It was all so strange. And if Cecilia had indeed come from here, how much stranger the court of The Queendom must have seemed to her! I understood a little better now her constant edge of hysteria, that urge always for more excitement, more laughter, more dancing to banish the sense that she would never really belong. I had never really belonged, either, not anywhere. It made a bond between us.
Where was she? Surely they would bring her soon. . . .
The old man rose. “We are an old race, and we have drawn strength from the souls of others. Now we will go with the
hisaf
to the oldest place.”
Go with me? To the country of the Dead? What did he mean? No one could go there with me, no more than anyone could come back with me. Or did he mean that all these men were going to kill themselves right now?
And me, too?
Fear ran over me, banishing all drowsiness. I half stood. But the old man stood taller than I, and the room was packed with strong men. There was no escape. I had, as always, only my wits. And to my drugged mind, it seemed to me that this was a bargain:
Cross over for us, and we will give you what you ask
.
I said, “What do you wish me to learn for you in . . . in the oldest place?”
He looked puzzled, as if my question had no meaning. How could that be? Always those who sent me to the country of the Dead wanted me to bring back information. Hartah, all of Hartah’s desperate faire customers, Queen Caroline. But all the old man said was, “Go.”
I nodded. The men closest to me drew back, as if to give me room to fall. They knew, without being told, what would happen. I drew my knife, jabbed it into my thigh, and willed myself to cross over.
Dirt in my mouth—
Worms in my eyes—
Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—
Then I was over. And not alone.
Never,
never
had I felt anything like this! There seemed to be a crowd of others with me, invisible but somehow
there
. They had been with me in that brief moment of death, and they were with me still, pressing like heat all around me. I screamed and ran.
A few steps, and they were gone from around me.
But now I could see them, a faint cloud of gray, like dank fog. The cloud did not move. The men of Soulvine were not present here in body, as I was. A fog could not talk to the Dead, learn from the Dead, instruct the Dead, as I had. But in some sense, the men of Soulvine were here. I had not thought such a thing possible.
But now that I was out from the midst of that fog, I could see the country of the Dead, and I saw more things I would not have thought possible.
The land that lay around me was Soulvine Moor. There were no hillock dwellings, but there was the vast, high plain dotted with outcroppings of rock, with forests and mountains in the distance. But the sky overhead flashed with lightning and crackled with thunder. The springy ground beneath my feet lurched, once so hard that I was nearly knocked over. The boulders
jiggled
, as if with energy that stone never had. And a hard wind blew, a wind that did not dissipate the patch of living fog.
Amid this chaos the Dead sat serenely, staring at a rock, a withered flower, the roiling sky. There were no drilling dead soldiers here; these men and women did not believe they were in Witchland. I had not told them so, and anyway they believed the hidden creeds of Soulvine.
Here—somewhere—was my mother.
I did not know what the people of Hygryll wanted from me. But I was here, I would take the opportunity they had handed me, and I began to search. The countryside was stretched out, as always, and the hordes of Dead scattered among the jiggling boulders. But I had time. No one could call me back to Hygryll until I chose to go. And the Dead did not wander around. I could search methodically, looking into their faces, matching them with my dim memory of my mother in her lavender gown. I began.

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