Graynelore
STEPHEN MOORE
Harper
Voyager
An imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Harper
Voyager
2015
Copyright © Stephen Moore 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2015. Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Stephen Moore asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Digital eFirst: Automatically produced by Atomik ePublisher from Easypress.
Ebook Edition © August 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-810353-8
Version: 2015-07-10
For Carol
‘Whenever you think I’m lost, and you cannot find me, look here. I am always here.’
If every man’s life has the makings of a story, the comings and the goings and the things in-between, where does my story truly begin?
For want of a narrator, for want of a name and the soul it belongs to, I fear, it must begin here…
[From:
A Beggar Bard’s Tale
. Anon.]
Contents
I am Rogrig, Rogrig Wishard by grayne. Though, I was always Rogrig Stone Heart by desire. This is my memoir and my testimony. What can I tell you about myself that will be believed? Not much, I fear. I am a poor fell-stockman and a worse farmer (that much is true). I am a fighting-man. I am a killer, a soldier-thief, and a blood-soaked reiver. I am a sometime liar and a coward. I have a cruel tongue, a foul temper, not to be crossed. And, I am – reliably informed – a pitiful dagger’s arse when blathering drunk.
You can see, my friend, I am not well blessed.
For all that, I am just an ordinary man of Graynelore. No different to any other man of my breed. (Ah, now we come to the nub of it. I must temper my words.)
Rogrig is
mostly
an ordinary man. The emphasis is important. For if a tale really can hang, then it is from this single thread mine is suspended.
Even now I hesitate, and fear my words will forever run in rings around the truth. Why? Put simply, I would have preferred it otherwise.
Let me explain. I have told you that I am a Wishard. It is my family name…it is also something rather more. I say it again,
Wish-
ard, and
not
wizard. I do not craft spells. I do not brew potions or anything of the like. No. My talent, such as it is, is more obscure. You see, a Wishard’s skill is inherent, it belongs to the man. You either possess it or you do not. (Most men, most Wishards do not.) It cannot be taught. As best as can be described, I have a knack. Rather, I influence things. I make wishes, of a kind.
Aye, wishes…(There, at last, it is said.)
Forgive me, my friend. I will admit, I find it difficult, if not tortuous, to speak of such fanciful whimsy. Make what you will of my reticence; measure Rogrig by it, if you must. I will say only this much more (it is a caution): by necessity, my testimony must begin with my childhood. But be warned: if I tell you that this is a faerie tale – and it is a faerie tale – it is not a children’s story.
Please, humour me. Suffer Rogrig Wishard to lead you down the winding path and see where it takes you. There is purpose to it. Else I would not trouble you.
Graynelore
Children remember in childish ways. So, through a child’s eyes, I will look again upon Graynelore. I can see a frozen wasteland. Deep winter’s ice lying broken and sharp upon a horse-trodden path. The riders are long departed. My breath is a broken kiss upon the air. The land before me is a magical silence.
I can pass a child’s hand across the ruts and crevasses of a cold, wet stone wall. It is the wall of a house, and built so thickly
this
Rogrig can stand at his full height and yet hide safely within the depth of its wind-eyes.
I can find a child’s delight in the crackle and spark of burning logs, the heat of an open fire.
I can lift a child’s finger to my tongue and taste the iron of an abandoned broken war sword. I can feel the dead weight of it again, as I struggle to drag it across a stone floor for the lack of body strength to lift it.
I can sting my nose with the smell of the piss and the shit of fell beasts – animals sheltered indoors against the rumour of coming raiders – and yet still know the comfort of it.
I can raise the beat of my heart and laugh at a tangle of drunken men, falling through an open doorway, playing at the Old Game. And I can wince at the foul cry a young woman gives them in chastisement.
‘Ah! Be-having-you! Do you have to come kicking that fucking head about in here? You’re spilling blood across my freshly strewn floors!’
I can ache to my soul for the death of my father; only slaughtered, it seems, for his surname. I can hear words, murmured together in a single breath: murder, blood feud, Elfwych, and understand them, with a child’s innocence, only as the unbearable pain of my father’s absence…and a mother’s tears.
I can huddle with a grieving family, grimly gathered at our fireside, making the cursed talk of revenge.
Sick with fear, I can taste stomach bile at my throat on seeing the sudden stillness of my first human killing. He was a Bogart by grayne; though a Bogart out of an Elfwych. Upon a holyday, I once played childish sport with the lad. Yet I dropped a great stone upon his head – broke it apart – as he lay face down upon the ground. His body was already sliced open, that the work of another’s sword, but it was I who killed him.
To possess all that is life, then, in a breath, in less than a breath, to take it all away…
Before the raider’s trail, I can sit piss-scared upon my own dead father’s hobby-horse. And I can heed the old wives’ warnings that came ringing to my ears.
‘Mind how you go there, child! Keep off the bloody bog-moss. It swallows grown men whole! It sucks down full-laden fell-horses, carts and all! It will leave us no sign to remember you by…’
And, of a bright summer’s day, without a care, I can run again through the long dry grasses with Old Emma’s Notyet, chasing after the cat’s tail. Mind, that is no man’s business but my own, and I will thank you for it and keep it to myself.
Do you follow me, my friend?
Old Emma, my elder-cousin, was a long time dead. Notyet, her daughter, was my playfellow. She was a weedling child, plain-faced, stoical, yet not displeasing. In age, there was less than a season between us. We came together because we lived together. We sat out upon the same summer fields and watched, lazily, over the same stock. We ran, a-feared, from the same raiders, raised the hue and cry. We ate from the same table, burned our faces at the same fireside. Bloodied our noses against the same hard ground and broke ice from the same stone water trough. And we each caught the other looking, without a blush, when we washed ourselves, naked, in the same stream.
Notyet would often hide herself away in some secret woodland dell, where she would play awkward tunes upon the crude wooden whistles she made. I would listen, and follow after her simple music. I liked to find her there, in hiding. Was she my heart’s meat? Was she? Ha! Upon Graynelore! If it were true, I would not have admitted it. She
was
my kissing kin, but…(And
but
is enough to condemn me, and us.)
Little more than babbies, we made a babbie together. She did not carry the infant well. It was dropped too early, born a feeble weedling; and un-cherished, it was soon dead.
Birth is such a bloody struggle. Life is such a difficult trail to follow, while death – the sudden stop – so very easy.
My friend, I have given you these awkward childhood memories; these fleeting glimpses of Graynelore, not because of their individual worth, but because together they might give you a sense of the world into which I was born. For the most part, they might appear to be nothing better than the gathered pieces from a broken clay pot! A handful of shattered fragments, a few, no doubt, so cruelly sharp they can hurt still, but, at best, incomplete.
Indeed, there are pieces missing. There is another memory I must share with you. I must take us to another day, and to a meeting with a Beggar Bard.