Hallsfoot's Battle (9 page)

She could sense it now amongst her
listeners—the colour green amongst the black and red of despair and
misery. Not much, but it was there. It was enough.

“The elders have retired from us for a
while,” she spoke, her voice and her mind stronger now. “They have
gone to the Place of Prayer and Healing beyond our city but they
will not be gone forever. They are part of us and we of them, no
matter what has taken place. Whilst they are meditating and, I am
sure, giving us strength through that sacred practice, they have
bequeathed to me the mantle of leadership. But I do not carry this
burden alone. My friends and companions are with me—Johan Montfort,
Simon the Scribe of the White Lands, my charge Talus and…and the
snow-raven, a traveller from the Kingdom of the Air. Not only that,
but we, the people of Gathandria, work together and we are never
without help. As long as we live and move and have our being in
this land, we will stand together. And we will fight against our
enemy, the Mind-Executioner, who threatens to destroy all
things.

“Up to this point, the battle has been only
in the mind, but it has been a harsh one. We believe that when the
Mind-Executioner strikes again, he will also confront us in the
physical realm. He has no other choice; the mind-cane is no longer
his. So the battle will be on two fronts. But we have a plan to
prepare ourselves for this ordeal. My colleague and overseer, Johan
Montfort, with the help of Talus, will prepare our people for
physical battle. Both of my friends have suffered much and are
willing to take this duty for the sake of Gathandria’s survival. As
for the realms of the mind, I and Simon the Scribe will lead that
area of our training. With the kingdoms of body and mind combined,
I believe we can fight our enemies and win, for ourselves, for our
families and friends, for Gathandria and for our neighbours who
rely on our oversight. But it is you, the people who made this
city, who will bring success or failure to our endeavours. So I
appeal to you all, on behalf of Gathandria’s great Spirit, please,
will you put your minds, hearts and bodies to this worthy
cause?”

She felt clarity easing through her thoughts.
Nothing more to say. Nothing more she could tell them.

A silence.

Then, as if from nowhere, a vast shout, heard
in the air and in the mind.

Yes.

The word was magnified countless times. The
echo of it filled the Square of Meeting. It reached the trees and
all but ruined yellow grasses of the park. It sang through the
broken glass and broken buildings of the city. Even guessing at
everything that might be to come, Annyeke smiled. It was enough—for
now.

The First Gathandrian Legend: Fortitude
and Lust

Simon

All this was bigger than he’d imagined. The
earlier scenes at what Johan had called the Square of Meeting had
swept through the scribe and he couldn’t rid himself of the taste.
It should have made him more confident. The fact that the people of
Gathandria had accepted Annyeke’s leadership and, by default, his
own presence here should have helped. He knew that.

But it didn’t. It made him feel overwhelmed.
How could he possibly live up to what they might expect of him?
With his history of betrayal, murder and downright cowardice, how
could he really help? Still, he mustn’t think like that. He’d
changed since leaving the Lammas Lands. He wasn’t the same man, so
he must find a new way of meditating about himself. The past
remained, but today he could not mend what he had done. Other
pressing matters called him.

On the floor next to him, the mind-cane
quivered and began to whine. Simon shook his head to displace his
thoughts and tried to imagine nothing. After a moment, the
high-pitched noise stopped and he breathed again. Odd how the
artefact picked up so strongly on his own emotions; at times he
felt as if it was nothing more than an extension of himself. A
dangerous thing—he was never sure whether the cane would attack him
or defend him. Moreover, it seemed to be too easy to make it angry
and so hard to know what it wanted or how he might be supposed to
work with it. He still couldn’t believe he’d used it to attack and
almost defeat Duncan Gelahn only a few day-cycles ago. That didn’t
feel like something he would do.

He gazed round the room he sat in, glad that
Annyeke had brought him here. She called it her work area in the
Sub-Council of Meditation. To him, it seemed to be a room of two
distinct halves—the calm tidiness of Johan’s area, which made him
smile, and the creative muddle of Annyeke’s. The walls were mainly
bare stone, apart from three small glass engravings of the park,
whose surface was scored with tiny lines, the aftermath of the
mind-battles. As a result, their beauty had long since vanished and
Annyeke had told him the damage could not be repaired. There was a
faint smell of lavender and apples in the air. Being a scribe,
Simon’s working area, in those lucky times he’d actually had one,
had consisted of wherever he happened to be living. He closed his
eyes for a moment or two and imagined how it would be if he had a
work area of his very own, somewhere he could go to and escape from
his real life, somewhere he could have control of, where he’d be
safe. He could sit and think and write, and there’d be no need to
take long journeys to strange places, meet members of his family
he’d never met before, or fight mysterious battles. Oh yes, by the
gods and stars, that would be the nearest to perfection he could
envisage. He was a scribe, not a soldier.

Even as these thoughts flowed through his
blood, the scribe became aware of a deep silence around him. When
he opened his eyes, the table, the walls, the room and even Annyeke
were gone and all he could see was a vast expanse of water
shimmering blue and silver, and above only empty sky. He gasped and
tried to stand but it was impossible. He was kneeling on what
looked to be a beach, similar to the one he’d seen with Johan
before travelling through the Kingdom of the Water. His limbs
wouldn’t obey the commands of his thought. The air smelt of winter
lilac, a memory he’d not had since youth.

Glancing from side to side, heart beating
fast, he could see a line of trees to the right. He fell to his
hands and tried to crawl towards them. A sound like rushing waters
filled his ears.

The trees were moving, swaying in his
direction. Elms, he thought. Despite the fact they were a field’s
length away he recoiled, this time scrabbling backwards, away from
them. The sound became a roar. It was coming from the trees. A
cloud passed over them, shot through with streaks of pink as if it
were evening, but the rest of the sky remained a vibrant blue. It
obscured the trees, diving down towards the scribe where he cowered
transfixed on sand as if it were a wolf seeking his prey. The wild
howling pierced his mind. Unable to think, unable even to breathe,
Simon buried his head in his hands, his whole body shaking.

As the howling swept over him, two words
crystallised into something he could understand. Learn well.

Crying out, he fell sideways and found his
hands clasping something solid, grainy, that dug into his skin.

“Simon? Simon? Are you all right?”

Blinking, he looked up at Annyeke. She was
shaking his shoulder from across the desk. The desk that he was
gripping as if he feared he was about to drown. He gazed round for
reassurance. Yes, this was Annyeke’s work area, where he’d been
before…before whatever had just happened. He could see the piled up
papers on her table, the gleaming array of four quills angled in a
writing-pot, those nearly bare walls, and the broken window
overlooking the park.

He could also hear the hum of the mind-cane,
not only outwardly but also in his thoughts. With a groan, he
glanced beyond Annyeke, at the snow-raven perched on a stool at the
corner of the room. The great bird spread his wings, gave one brief
and raucous cry and the cane fell silent.

Annyeke frowned.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Simon shook his head. “I was
here and then I was…somewhere else.”

“Where?”

He tried to think how to explain, glad she
was using speech and not contacting him directly. His mind felt too
shaky for that. “Near water. On sand. The water stretched beyond
what the eye could see and there were trees to my left. For a
moment, everything was peaceful, and I…I wanted to be there even
though I couldn’t get up. I was kneeling on the sand. Then, a cloud
appeared above the trees and began to race towards me. I knew it
would overpower me, swallow me up, but I couldn’t run. I screamed
but it was too late. The cloud was upon me and then…”

“Then…?”

“I heard a voice saying, Learn well. And then
I was here once more. Annyeke, what does it mean?”

She sighed, turned and made her way back
behind the table. “I don’t know. What we’re doing here isn’t
anything we’ve done before, Simon. I have nothing to compare it
with, no wise advice to give. All I would say is this—hold onto any
visions you have as we prepare for Gelahn’s second attack on us.
Ponder them in your heart. They may mean something, but this is too
new for me to know what that might be.”

“What about the voice?”

Annyeke gestured, as if plucking words out of
air. At the same time, the raven flapped his way towards the window
and perched precariously on a stool next to it. As he spread his
wings, the fate of further papers piled up on a shelf hung in the
balance. Annyeke glanced at the bird and flinched, but obviously
chose to ignore the situation.

“Well then,” she said. “Could the voice have
been your own?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

His companion cleared her throat. It looked
as if his training was about to begin, but there was more he needed
to know. A question plucking at his mind, creating an itch he had
no choice but to satisfy. He didn’t know where it came from.

“What is the Spirit of Gathandria?” he
said.

Annyeke

The red-haired woman settled herself on her
familiar work area chair and gazed at the scribe opposite her. She
hadn’t expected him to ask that, but he was a man and half
Gathandrian so she should have realised the impossibility of
predicting what he might do or say next. She wished now that she’d
connected to his full thoughts anyway, without permission, although
that would be the height of rudeness. Even so, it might have
prepared her for such a question. Not only that, there were actions
she needed to take, and soon, but she had sensed it was more
important to give Simon a purpose before his unsteady resolve was
shaken further.

This wasn’t made any easier by the presence
of the mind-cane, nor by the bright shape of the snow-raven near
the window. All of which meant, of course, that in the room with
them were the scribe’s most feared object and her own. The
snow-raven currently perched on a small stool, the bulk of his
wings threatening to topple her fragile pile of meditation records.
The bird gazed outside and even Annyeke, in the muddle of
impressions she gained from the raven, was overwhelmed by his sense
of longing. She, too, wished he would fly back to the Kingdom of
the Air, but for very different reasons.

“The Gathandrian Spirit?” she ventured. “Why
do you ask?”

“I’m not sure. You spoke of it to the people,
and the phrase was suddenly there, in my head. I couldn’t deny
it.”

“I see.”

But she didn’t. Not really. The Spirit of
Gathandria wasn’t understood, or even known about, by those outside
the City. From the day-cycles before written records began, the
elders had guarded that secret first, above all others. And here
was the Lost One gazing at her, with the words he’d spoken hovering
between them.

What in the gods’ and stars’ names should she
do now? Well, perhaps this, too, would turn out to be part of
Simon’s essential mind-practice.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said at last.
“The Spirit is part of who we are. It’s something we’re born with
and we come to know more fully as we mature. Amongst those who
aren’t Gathandrian, it’s not really spoken of.”

“Why not?”

Good question. And not one she’d had to
consider before. The scribe might be, in some manner she couldn’t
fully comprehend, the answer to all their problems and pain, but it
was obvious that didn’t mean the journey would be a smooth one.

She struggled to answer him. “Tradition, I
suppose, and the assumption that people who don’t live here
wouldn’t understand, and so there’s little point in talking about
it.”

“That sounds…”

“…patronising. Yes, I could see it even as I
was saying it,” she laughed. “I’m sorry. The truth is I’m not sure
how to explain.”

Simon smiled back before coughing, throwing a
swift glance at the cane and speaking again. “I can understand
that. I’m never sure how to explain things either. So, then, what
do we need to do about it?”

Still puzzling over how to broach the power
of her country’s myth, Annyeke imagined that allowing her companion
to sense the words bond with the mind-cane, open yourself to the
raven and then we’re ready weren’t likely to be welcome. She wished
it was that simple. But her years in Gathandria, and certainly her
years as a Gathandrian woman, had taught her that simplicity was
always desired but rarely achieved. Instead, she cast about her
mind for some of the answers. No, if she were honest, even the
questions would be good.

As she opened her mouth, the snow-raven
turned his head and looked at her. She couldn’t remember the bird
gazing at her in that way before. An impression of flight, a blur
of cloud and a series of ascending notes filled her head. She heard
herself gasp out loud. Simon leaned forward frowning, and her
fingers grasped the solid wood of her chair. A moment later, her
mind was her own again. A trickle of sweat rolled down her face and
she wiped it away, trembling.