Hallsfoot's Battle (16 page)

Yeke had been born in the Region of the
Winemakers in the city but had moved to live with Annyeke’s parents
in the area of the Chair-Makers before Annyeke was born. That house
was only a few streets away from where she was living now, but had
been destroyed early on in the War. She could not fully grasp her
response to that loss, even now. It was not, after all, as if it
had been personal; her parents had been dead for five year-cycles
by then. They had not been young when she was born. The deepest
impression Annyeke had taken from her childhood was the power of
her grandmother and how much they had clashed together during the
early part of her life.

Her first memory was of pain in her arm and a
spark of fire in her mind, as if she was being crushed by something
red. She could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen
moon-cycles old. When she opened her eyes, she could see two
fierce-looking eyes, rivers of green, but the fire that came from
them was of the darkest crimson. Annyeke did the first thing that
came to mind. She opened her mouth to scream and, at once, strong
hands that brooked no gainsaying picked her up and held her tight.
But the voice that crooned in the unread depths of her child’s mind
was not one that aimed to soothe, but to command.

Be quiet, little Annyeke. Now is not the time
for crying. You will wake your mother. She needs to rest.

Heart beating fast and struggling to respond
to the shock of hearing another in her thoughts for the first time,
Annyeke held herself rigid against the woman’s body. She remembered
thinking how odd it was that, in the warmth of her home, she could
suddenly feel so chilled. The next moment she was colder still for
the woman swept her out of the shelter of her room, through the
front door with its glass carved top and into the early morning
garden.

The wind was bitter through her thin night
tunic.

Little granddaughter, what will you be? What
will you be?

The mind-words, though whispered to a tune
she’d heard her mother sing, somehow managed to pierce her thoughts
with more of the strange cruelty of red, and Annyeke drummed her
small fists on her grandmother’s deep green gown.

At this, her grandmother laughed and this
time, when she spoke, it was aloud also. “Ah, little Annyeke,
you’ll be a fighter, then. Come what may.”

Desperate to escape, Annyeke managed to
squirm round in those encompassing arms and face the grass and
cedar trees, herbs and rock roses of her parents’ garden. She
opened her mouth and, despite her grandmother’s disapproval, began
to scream.

Just at that moment, a forest owl swooped up
from where it had been hiding in the long grasses near the roses.
Annyeke’s small angry cries must have disturbed it. She could
remember great talons stretched towards her, the stink of bitter
feathers and the glancing blow as the bird’s beak caught her on her
left ear. She screamed yet louder. Then the earth came up to meet
her and there was nothing.

When she woke later, with a scarlet headache
that seemed to overshadow her whole body, she could feel the gentle
comfort of her mother’s hands on her head, beyond that, her
grandmother’s words.

The child is too fearful. It was only a bird.
It would not have harmed her.

Annyeke did not hear her mother’s response,
though in the moon- and year-cycles to come, she grew to understand
her grandmother’s power and her mother’s loving weakness. All that
then filled her mind was the reality that her fear had been there
even before the bird. Fear of the strange woman who had taken her
from the comfort of home and into the chill of the garden. The owl
had only deepened it. When she was able to put a name to what she
felt that day, she would call it injustice, and anger, too, at her
grandmother’s assumption. What remained with her was the slight
scar on the side of her head, and the fear.

From that day forward, the untamed strength
both of birds and of her grandmother was forever linked in a red
haze of memory in her blood, and she never lost her wariness of
either.

*****

“Did it not help,” Simon asked, “to have the
knowledge of this? You understood where your fear started. Can your
mind-skills not overcome it?”

She shook her head. “No. Because there is
more to the tale. That is only the beginning.”

“Tell me then, Annyeke.”

*****

It was as if he had given her permission.
Strange how she had told no one of this, not even Johan, through
all the seasons until now because Yeke had never understood her
granddaughter’s fear or how it was bound up with herself. In that
moment, when Annyeke had experienced mind-contact for the first
time, she had also discovered how to hide her privacy. Some of the
crimson of Yeke’s mind stayed with her always since that first
unwanted link, and she found she had no need to attend to the later
childhood lessons of how to hide her thoughts from others. She
already knew; the crimson was a curtain beyond which few were
permitted entry.

Her grandmother took it upon herself to tease
Annyeke into courage. Now, in the calmer light of adulthood,
Annyeke told herself that it had been done in good faith, but at
the time she had been beaten down, almost defeated by it. Each
glimpse of weakness Annyeke let slip from her mind would be taken
up and shaped into a lesson in how to be brave. She soon learned
how to keep things hidden, or how to deal with them alone. Her
mother proved to be an ineffective ally, although she never fully
acknowledged that fact until later. It was her grandmother who
ruled the household.

The most terrible fact of all was her fear of
birds. Annyeke could never hide it from anyone. How could she when
she was unable to understand or control it herself? No matter how
often she told herself to remain calm, not to give in to the
blanket of red and black that overpowered her thoughts, she did not
have the strength or the ability to do so. Yeke always found her
out.

And, in finding her out, her grandmother
tried to cure her. Two or three times in a summer week-cycle, when
lessons were done, Yeke would take the small girl out for a walk in
order, ostensibly, to give Annyeke’s parents a chance to be by
themselves. But such walks would always lead to encounters with
birds, and little Annyeke grew to dread them. So much so that
sometimes she would hide in the garden or under bedding, in the
foolish hope that she would not be found. It was impossible, of
course, for a child, unskilled in the protection of the mind-net,
not to be found. At other times, she would pretend to be ill or
tired, and sometimes that worked, but no one can be ill
forever.

In the end, therefore, Yeke would always
win.

Sometimes, though, her grandmother was
merciful and the two of them would walk through the theatre region
of the city towards the lines of elms and wind-poplars where the
actors rehearsed their dramas in fine weather. Here, Annyeke would
feel the most at ease with her grandmother. The song of the poplars
would lull her thoughts and she loved to hear the players learning
their lines. More than anything, however, the birds here were tree
dwellers, smaller by far than the river fowl or the raptor that had
first terrified her. They did not approach too closely. No matter
how much Yeke would try to coax the elm-larks to her hand, she was
never patient enough to bond with them.

It was the times when their steps took them
to the park and its two small lakes that Annyeke found her skin
growing hot and clammy and her mind becoming more heated and darkly
coloured. For here, the wild swans lived in abundance, accompanied
by wood geese and always the distant cry of the ravens and dawn
owls, some of whom drank from the lake during daylight hours. She
was always afraid they might touch her.

Because of this, her grandmother drew her to
the water, splashed her fingers into the shallows and sparked the
birds’ attention, bringing them flocking for food or purely out of
curiosity. Yeke carried a pouch of stale bread for the purpose of
giving courage to her grandchild. Because of this, Annyeke did all
she could not to go near the waterside. She pretended interest in
the games of the babies and younger children who were not allowed
as near to the water’s edge as she was. She found much to occupy
her amongst the trees or in watching the actors whenever they
strolled by.

None of these ruses helped her.

For in the end, Yeke would insist that she
feed the bread to the creatures she feared above all others. There
had never been any question of disobedience to her grandmother’s
rule—rebellion came later on in Annyeke’s life and was precious for
that reason. But, as a young child, she had to do as she was
commanded in the end. If she did not, then that strange crimson
shadow would pass over her mind and Annyeke knew she could not
fight against it. So she forced herself to breathe slowly, take the
slimy bread from Yeke’s hand and stretch out her fingers to the
hot, strange feathers and beaks that sprang towards her. On most of
these occasions, she managed somehow neither to scream nor to cry,
but once or twice her small store of courage deserted her and she
would run, wailing like a wounded puppy, past the children and
theatricals and into the safety of trees.

It was no use. Yeke would catch up with her,
the daggers in her voice tearing through Annyeke’s thoughts, and
drag her back to finish her reluctant communion with the birds.
There seemed to be no end to it. Only with the onset of winter did
those evening walks begin to diminish, and often not even then. The
following year-cycle, Annyeke would be older, more able to hide her
fear.

All through those seasons of water and
terror, she kept the sense of an injustice done buried deeply
within her thoughts. Not that she could have explained it then, or
why she allowed her anger to grow and burn inside as it did, but
that was the truth of it.

The worst of all her memories took place when
she was six summers old. It was the resting day and the family were
together in the garden as was their custom when the sun was kind.
Her mother was altering one of her father’s over-tunics, her father
himself was clearing the herb area of weeds, and her grandmother
was basking in the sun. Annyeke was concentrating on being as quiet
as possible and ignoring the constant hum of the birds.

A sudden clash of small claws and feathers
above her, near the flowering limes, made her gasp and peer
upwards, pressing her nails into the palms of her hands in order to
keep still. She would do anything to avoid Yeke noticing her.

It was too late.

“Little one, for the stars’ sakes, they are
only birds!” her grandmother snorted. “When will you learn to be
sensible?”

Her father tut-tutted at Yeke’s casual
blasphemy but said no more, instead turning back to his weeding and
ignoring the developing family drama.

“Don’t worry, Annyeke,” her mother frowned,
intent on her sewing. “They won’t hurt you.”

Annyeke didn’t reply to that. Meanwhile, the
two birds above her, an apple sparrow resplendent in its green
summer plumage, and a dull brown woodlark, continued their furious
battle. As Annyeke began to tremble, two feathers, one green and
one brown, floated down to rest on the ground next to her feet.
More than anything she wanted to run but couldn’t begin to think
where she could go that might be safe. The city was full of
birds.

When she blinked at her grandmother, she
could see Yeke’s hard green eyes piercing a way through her, body
and soul. Yeke’s dark red hair gleamed brighter in the sun, almost
the colour of blood. It made the strange crimson net in Annyeke’s
mind twist and she gasped again.

One last wild shriek from the woodlark, and
the sparrow tumbled down to earth. Annyeke’s hands gripped the
sides of the gardenseat, forcing herself not to move. She would not
run, she would not. Because if she did, she could not begin to
imagine what Yeke would do to ensure she would never run again.

The dying bird fluttered around on the grass
as the woodlark flew to the lime tree, perching halfway up and
declaring its victory in liquid song. Annyeke didn’t care about
that. Her attentions were focused simply on the sparrow. Its death
dance brought it nearer to her seat and she found she couldn’t look
away. If she looked away, she wouldn’t know what it was doing. It
might come nearer. Touch her even. She couldn’t bear the thought of
that. Every sense she possessed cowered away.

“By the gods.”

Yeke’s voice split the woodlark’s song and
the bird flew away from the tree. Her father’s trowel clanged down
in the soil, striking stone. At the same time, her grandmother
pushed herself up from her sitting position and strode with unknown
purpose to stand in front of Annyeke. For the length of a
heartbeat, the bulk of her obscured the sun, then she hunkered
down. Her hair glowed brighter again when she turned to Annyeke,
but her expression was lost in darkness.

“Women of our blood should never show fear,”
she said.

Before Annyeke could understand what was
happening, Yeke scooped up the dying bird, took two steps forward
and placed the tiny body on her granddaughter’s lap.

Annyeke couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak,
couldn’t think. The sparrow convulsed, its flesh warm against her
leg, opened its eye and seemed to stare up at her. One green
speckled wing lay at an angle downwards and she could see that some
of the feathers had been ripped out. Blood spattered across the
body from a rip in the throat the woodlark had made.

She opened her mouth and screamed. The sound
made her mother jump to her feet and her father gave a short, sharp
cry. The scream continued. On and on, so that she thought she might
be swallowed up by it entirely. Her mind felt as if a great black
flood of fear was sweeping through and out of her and would carry
her away, a flood of past and present terrors. All things only half
expressed to her family until now launched themselves into the air
within the scream’s strange power—her deep-seated horror of
feather, talon and beak, her unacknowledged rage at Yeke and the
injustice of the dying sparrow on her lap. She tried to get up,
push the bird away, but her grandmother held her down.