Hallsfoot's Battle (30 page)

“The battle,” she said, “is not Gathandria’s,
nor the elders’, nor indeed Gelahn’s. The battle is mine. This time
we will fight it, not according to the mind-executioner’s wish, nor
as tradition or even as the elders advise. We will fight it in the
way my own wisdom guides me and we will fight it first.”

“How?” Johan asked.

She smiled.

“We will call him to us,” she said.

Something light and powerful passed through
Johan’s mind that she could not comprehend, but it made her
shivering cease. He blinked.

“Isn’t that too dangerous?” he asked.

Annyeke flung out her arm to indicate the
scenes of devastation in which they stood. “And you think all this
is not dangerous, Johan?”

After a moment, he smiled. And still that
something else slipped from her grasp. What was it?

“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “We have
suffered too much while we wait for the executioner to come to
us.”

Annyeke nodded. She gestured for several of
the Gathandrians nearest to them and gave them orders to take the
First Elder and Talus to a place of safety if one could be found.
Talus objected, but she shushed him with a touch of her hand and he
left, grumbling, hand in hand with a woman she thought she knew
from the old theatre. Three Gathandrian men carried away the
injured Elder. The women fussed around them, tiny sparks of mauve
and gold flying from their skin, the colours of compassion. One of
them was Iffenia, the Second Elder’s wife, but that was good. A
woman to be trusted, Annyeke thought.

As soon as the remaining wounded and children
had been cared for as much as was possible, she turned to Johan.
Gazing at him, she felt all the words she wanted so much to say
dancing in her thoughts. She should ask him about the little battle
training he and Talus might have managed to impart to the people in
spite of the sense of failure she had already gleaned from him, but
she could not. For a moment, she once more sensed something she
couldn’t interpret, a gift she wasn’t expecting, but then, just as
suddenly, it was withdrawn. Perhaps it had never been there at all.
What in the gods’ and stars’ names was going on?

She pulled her feelings back before she said
anything foolish. Her heart was beating fast and her skin felt too
hot. Now was not the time for emotion of any sort. Now was a time
for clear, concerted action.

She stepped away from Johan, the tendrils of
his puzzlement clinging to her skin. She tracked her mind into the
waiting air so her thought-words would be clear to everyone.

It is the stories, she said. It is the
stories that bring destruction and healing, that give life and take
it away. It is the Great Library that has proved an entry point for
our enemy. I do not yet know how this has happened, but rest
assured I will discover the reasons for it. For now, we see the
chaos his presence has brought amongst us here today. The Library
is gone but the stories are not. We must grieve, but we must also
hope. For our tales lie here around us, in the scattered scraps of
parchment and manuscript the flames have not burnt away. They lie
also in our memories and in our minds. Let us then use our stories
to draw out the mind-executioner. Let us tell them to ourselves, to
each other, and to our land and let Gelahn hear all our words, so
he cannot deny the power of them. For why should we wait for a time
that someone else will choose when we have the gift of making our
own choice? Indeed, when we have finished with the tales that we
know, let us start with those we hold within ourselves, the stories
known only to our private minds. For it is in connection that we
grow stronger, it is in our stories that we are most truly
ourselves.

There was more she wanted to say. But she
knew the words would flow through the minds of the people of the
city and there needed to be space and time enough for them to
respond. So she waited.

In the silence, she felt the touch of Johan’s
hand on her shoulder and smiled her thanks at this small comfort.
For Annyeke knew what she asked of the people was more than had
ever been asked of them in all the generation-cycles of their
history that had come before, more, indeed, than she had asked them
to give her in her first words to them as Acting Elder. She was
asking them to bring trouble to the land when for all their lives
they had been lovers of peace, and when they were not ready for it.
But when would they ever be prepared for what was to come? The
truth of it pierced her as the sun pierces the morning mist at the
time of the wine harvest. Perhaps all they could do was choose the
timing. And, by the gods and stars and her own ingenuity, such as
it was, she would do her utmost to ensure that was enough, or die
trying.

Even as these thoughts entered her blood, she
could sense the gathering of the people’s response, more quickly
than she had anticipated. At first, it was a slight trickle and
then each answer gathered up another and another and another,
singing their small streams into a mighty flood, greater and more
powerful, and with such a depth of colour, green and yellow and
blue, than she could ever have imagined.

Annyeke opened her arms wide to receive the
offering of the people, although the physical form of it was as
light and insubstantial as a prayer. In her mind, however, its
weight was vast.

One thing then she knew—the act would have to
be performed with temperance and with a steady heart, for the
answer, in the end, was yes.

Sixth Lammas Lands
Chronicle

Ralph

The howling of the dogs comes ever nearer.
The kitchen-area is filled with dread. He can sense the dark
shifting colours of it emanating from the cook, her husband and the
boy—black, purple, brown.

Ralph pushes the boy towards Jemelda and at
the same time reaches for the pouch of emeralds she still
holds.

“Look after Apolyon,” he snaps out the words
like small knives, and drops one of the precious jewels back into
her palm. “This emerald will help protect you.”

“My lord, where are you going? You
can’t…”

He pays her no heed. Already he’s pulling the
curtain aside and half stumbling into the courtyard, ignoring the
pain in his leg and still clutching the emeralds, hoping they might
save him as he tries to draw the executioner’s dogs away, not
knowing if they will. The icy air bites his skin and, pointlessly,
he understands that today the snows will start for certain. The
battle will be all the more bitter because of it.

The dark howling of the dogs assaults all
Ralph’s senses—not just his ears, but his mind also. He does not
know if he can contain the noise. It brings with it madness and a
strange self-destructive path he does not want to choose. And
without warning, just when he thinks he can bear it no more, the
wild barking rises to another level and he sees the first of them
appear around the corner of the castle.

The lead hound’s black shape ripples as it
runs towards him, as if its very form is bleeding into the air or
arriving from another element. Its teeth are bared and its red eyes
are a fiery contrast to the dark. Ralph knows it has scented him.
He does the only thing he can think of. He runs—away from the
kitchen-area and towards the village. He sees the well in his mind
and he flees to it.

Impossible to get there. Whether sound of
limb or not, he cannot outrun the hunger of Gelahn’s dogs. But at
least they are chasing him, the whole pack of them. If they
continue to do that, they will not harm those left in the castle,
those supposedly under Ralph’s care. Sharp stones pierce the thin
leather on his feet as he races over the courtyard slabs to the
bridge. The guard’s post is abandoned; none care now who leaves or
who enters his domain, or what was once his domain.

Hot breath threatens his legs and he knows
the dogs will soon be upon him. He knows, also, how Simon must have
felt when the executioner let loose these devils on the mountain
and showed him no mercy. Ralph is barely over the bridge now. The
village and the well are a lifetime away.

Instinct drives him, just as the first of the
dogs scrapes his flesh with its cruel teeth. His fingers scrabble
in the jewel pouch, find an emerald. Seize it. He swings round,
casts the emerald towards the dog. The jewel flies through the
animal’s head—a shaft of green through the deepest black. The
howling is instantly cut off, as if the hound’s tongue has
inexplicably vanished. Ralph doesn’t wait to see what happens next.
Clutching his cloak around him, feeling the reassurance of the
remaining five emeralds in his hand, he sprints out over the field
towards the trees and, beyond that, the village. The pain of his
present wounds doesn’t matter any more; he is too afraid of the
pain that might come.

Behind him, the mountain dogs begin to howl
again.

Ralph is almost at the trees when they catch
up with him once more. Taking the next emerald out of the pouch he
flings it at the two dogs a little ahead of the others. This time
they are wiser. One of them leaps up towards the orb of green fire,
jaws closing round its small form. It vanishes into the dark.

He screams out a denial, his voice nothing
but a whisper compared to the wild howling that pursues him.

But the emerald is not prepared to die so
easily. Green flame explodes out of the fluid stone shape of the
dog and the howl accelerates to a shriek, just as suddenly cut off
as a river of colour flows from the animal.

And already Ralph is running once more, the
thought of the well and the safety it might bring. To him? To the
jewels? He no longer knows any of the answers but thought of the
well drives him onward. Branches tear at his skin and hair, but
they’re slowing the dogs down, too, only the gods and stars know
how. But he has known these woods since childhood, all their secret
paths as clear to him as if they are the familiar rooms of the
castle. And dogs such as these, he imagines, are not used to woods
or forests; their terrain is the uncrowded spaces of the mountains.
In truth, they are the mountain.

Breath snagging in his throat, Ralph arrives
at the far edge of the woods. From here, it is only a matter of
minutes before he reaches the well. For the first time, the thought
that he is leading the dogs towards people rather than away from
them slides through his mind. But the well should be deserted. At
this time of day, all the water will have been drawn and the
people, what few are left, will either be in their homes or the
fields. They will hear the dogs, they will hide, and perhaps Ralph
is somehow doing the right thing this time.

Besides, it is him the hounds are after. Once
the pack has scented the wolf, it will neither rest nor turn aside
to other quarry until the chosen prey is dispatched. They may kill
him, but he must hide the rest of the emeralds. Jemelda will know
where they are. The jewel he has left with her will guide her to
them. She may even be able to interpret their power more
effectively than Ralph when the time comes; she is the
purer-hearted of them.

It is imperative he lives as long as it takes
him to get to the well.

Even as he acknowledges that thought, a roar
behind him catches Ralph unawares and the next moment he feels the
jaws of death about his throat. He opens his mouth to cry out but
no sound comes out. Skin rips and his hands, slippery now with
blood, tear helplessly at his attacker.

He will die here after all. He has
failed.

As Ralph falls to his knees, still scrabbling
for release, his hand spills open and the four last emeralds drop
to the earth. One of them brushes past the strange stone coat of
the mountain dog attacking him. Green flames singe its body and a
part of it melts away. The hound opens its mouth and howls. Blood
streams from Ralph’s neck, but it’s not the lifeblood. It’s not
spurting out as he has seen happen when his own dogs bring the
field deer to its end.

He drags himself to his feet. Grabbing the
pouch, he snatches up as many of the fallen emeralds as he can
find. Three of them have come to rest in a hollow near a cypress
tree. The dog that attacked him is lying whimpering on the other
side. He can see the fire of the emerald that touched it licking
its destruction over the animal’s body. The dog is vanishing. First
a flank and then the whole leg disappears completely and the dog’s
howl rises, rises.

The rest of the pack are still straining for
Ralph. Dark saliva drips from their bared teeth and they glance at
him and then at their dying leader, over and over again. He knows
if he runs, they will make their choice for him. The fact Ralph has
stopped has thrown their purpose out of kilter. But, surely, soon
the scent of his blood will overcome that brief hesitation. Before
this, he has always been the hunter and not the hunted. Now he
knows how the wild stag feels. At least he’ll face them
standing.

But as he takes a breath, the pack have
already made their decision. The nearest hound draws up his
haunches and leaps. Not towards Ralph but towards their dying
leader. In the next heartbeat, the rest of them are upon the beast.
Stone slashes into stone, and darkness and crimson flies upwards.
Green sparks, too, which must be the work of the jewel. The howling
and the death cries of the doomed animal fill the air.

As Ralph starts to run, or rather hobble,
something hard lands on his face. Reaching up, he finds it is the
fourth emerald and, still fleeing, he drops it with the others back
into the pouch. He doesn’t know how it returned to him but there is
no time to ponder such questions. It won’t be long before the dogs
continue their hunt. Already, the sound behind him changes in tone,
and soon he knows they will look for their next prey. In his head,
Ralph can hear Jemelda’s words. She said there was safety in water.
There is a safety of sorts, too, in the pouch of emeralds he
carries. Perhaps both will combine to protect them.