Heartwood (32 page)

 

CHAPTER TEN

I

Grimbeald opened his eyes with a gasp. The room was almost dark, lit only by a few candles, and he felt completely disorientated. The last thing he remembered was standing on the hill looking down at the wound in his shoulder, and then gazing into Tenera's eyes, and then everything had gone black. Where was he? And how had he got there?

“Grimbeald?” Tenera's voice came from behind him and her face appeared, pale as the moon on a dark night. She looked tired and drawn, but lit up as she saw him. “You are alive!”

“Of course I am alive,” he said gruffly, coughing a little and wincing at the pain in his shoulder.

“It is a miracle,” she breathed.

“Hardly.” He coughed again and looked around him. He was in some sort of underground cave. The ceiling was low, only a few feet above Tenera's head, and the room was long and narrow. He was lying on a makeshift bed in the centre of the floor. To one side he could see shelves lining the wall, each filled with objects. His eyes were blurry and he could not make them out. “Where am I?”

She glanced around the room and he thought she gave a little shudder. Then she looked down at him and smiled. “Do you remember being injured on the hill in the Farmines?”

“Yes. That is the last thing I do remember.” Apart from your eyes, he thought.

“You lost a lot of blood. We could not bring you round. It was clear we had to get you out of the rain. So we bought a cart from one of the villages and, as it was not far, brought you here.”

He looked around again. Where was “here”? He squinted at the objects on the shelves, barely illuminated in the light of the scattered candles. They were white and all different shapes, some round, some long and slender, laid together in piles. Wait a minute. Were they… bones?

“You are in the Tumulus,” said Tenera softly.

A chill ran through him. “The Tumulus? Why have you brought me here?” Panic rose within him at the truth in her eyes. “You thought I was going to die?”

“Grimbeald… I do not think you understand. You had lost a lot of blood. You needed to be somewhere warm, and we were not far from the Tumulus. When we got here, we realised there was a room underneath the mound, and it was out of the rain. We did not take you here because you were dying. But just now, I swear to you, you stopped breathing. I truly thought you
had
died.”

“Is that why you said ‘it is a miracle'?”

She nodded, then hesitated, as if she was afraid to admit something. Finally, she said, “One reason we decided to bring you here was that we thought the energy from the Node might help you to recover. It was a long shot – I do not know if any of us truly believed it. But just now, when your chest ceased to rise and fall, a light appeared above your heart, I swear it, and it glowed like a lantern, and then suddenly you gave a great gasp, and you were breathing again.”

Grimbeald remembered the gasp, and the feeling of life flooding through his veins. He looked around, seeing now his vision was clearing that the wall to his right was laced with tree roots that clearly strengthened the hollow earthen mound. So this was it – the Node, the centre of energy he was to activate.

He managed to raise himself on an elbow, wincing at the sharp stab in his shoulder, and looked at the ground. It was made of hard-packed earth. There was no sign of any energy centre, no indication of where any light could have sprung from.

“I had assumed there was just one person buried here,” he said, sitting up with Tenera's help. “I had thought it was the grave of some long-forgotten king or ancient war leader. I did not realise it would be the last resting place of so many souls.”

She glanced around at the bones lying on the shelves. “I do not know there are souls here. Remnants of bodies, yes. To one side of the Tumulus, there is an area with a scattering of tiny bones that has led us to believe it is an excarnation place – where bodies were left for the elements and the wildlife to strip the flesh. Afterwards, we think the bones were then brought down here. The souls were gone long before the bones were clean.”

Grimbeald shivered. Her words did not make him feel any easier.

Although Wulfians, Laxonians and Hanaireans all followed different forms of Animism, their basic beliefs regarding death and the afterlife were the same. When you died, your life energy was absorbed by the earth and the flowers and trees that grew in it, including the Arbor, and thus in a way you continued to exist by giving your lifeforce to other living things.

Whether a person had a soul as such was a matter of debate in the universities and amongst those who liked philosophical discussions. Was one aware of an afterlife – of existing in a sentient form after the body had expired? The general consensus was that one was not; the process of awareness occurred through the living brain, and this ceased to exist upon death. However, many others liked to think that when the life energy was absorbed by the earth, awareness continued – a person's lifeforce retained its oneness, its completeness, in some form or other. Thus, the concept of reincarnation was a popular theory, with the belief that this complete lifeforce, or “soul”, was reborn into another living thing, be it a plant, a tree or a person.

Grimbeald could tell from Tenera's comment that she was one of the latter, and she believed in the existence of a soul after death. He was not sure. When young he had scorned the idea of reincarnation, thinking death was death – the end, a crumbling into dust, like falling into a deep void, with the darkness and silence of a deep, deep sleep. But now?

He thought of the figure he had seen at the edge of the Forest of Wings, and shuddered. Even those who believed in souls rarely believed in ghosts – in the presence of a soul outside a living body. But his romantic heart was unable to push the idea completely out of mind. As he had grown older, his thoughts had naturally turned more to what happened after death, and he had found if he accepted the presence of a soul, he could not dismiss the idea of ghosts. That thought was something that haunted him more than any spirit.

There was a clattering of stones at the entrance to the Tumulus, and then the three male Militis appeared, sliding down through the loose, wet soil into the cave below. They stopped for a moment, startled to see Grimbeald sitting up and talking, then came forward with exclamations to clap him on the back and shake his hand.

“We thought you were gone,” said Feritas with relief, looking even fiercer in the candlelight, his bushy brows like caterpillars crawling across his forehead. Revoco was the same, his Wulfengar heritage evident in his wild hair and the angry expression that seemed to reside on his face permanently, even when smiling. Even Elatus looked pleased to see him, the young Laxonian's arrogant face creased with a smile.

“It takes more than a fatal wound to get rid of me,” Grimbeald joked, and accepted Elatus's hand to pull him to his feet. His neck and shoulder felt stiff and sore, but he could tell he was on the mend. He was puzzled at that – it had been a deep dagger wound, and the blade had not been clean. The wound should have been infected and swollen, but when he looked, he found it flat and clean, as if someone had drawn a line upon his skin with red ink.

“You can put that down to Tenera's skill with herbs,” said Elatus as they helped him up the slippery slope to the outside. “She studied with the Head Gardener at Heartwood for a year or two, and then with the Medica.”

“Thank goodness,” Grimbeald said, but although he acknowledged her healing skills, he was not sure his recovery was entirely to do with her talents. He had been treated before for injuries by skilled physicians and had never recovered this quickly. And he must not forget Tenera had thought him dead at one point. Had the Node really healed him with its energy?

Grimbeald pulled himself up into the daylight. He was not surprised to see it was still raining. They were right on the edge of his beloved Highlands. To the north the hills rose and fell into the distance, their slopes filled with forests, the valleys with rivers and lush green grass. He could see carpets of bluebells, as if the trees had spread cloaks on the floor on which to rest, and grazing goats and wild ponies on the cleared hilltops.

The Tumulus had been built on a small, flat-topped hill on the edge of the Highlands, almost as if guarding the entrance to them. He walked down and then around the mound. At the bottom of the hill were two oak trees standing like brothers guarding the tomb, their roots obviously those he had seen below, holding up the side of the cave. They masked the tomb from the south side, making it invisible to those travelling to the Highlands. Grimbeald had known it was there, but had never investigated it in any detail; he had always been in too much of a hurry to pay any attention to it.

Now he wondered who had built it, and who had been buried in it. As he had said to Tenera, he had always assumed it was the burial site of some rich lord, a final resting place where the inhabitant had been surrounded by his or her earthly belongings, which had almost certainly been robbed out long ago. However, now he doubted there had ever been anything inside the Tumulus except bones.

Walking around to the side, he saw the area Tenera had told him about; it was about fifteen feet square, and when he looked closely he could see scatters of tiny bones in the soil. There was a stone table at one side, and he guessed that was where bodies had been placed in the past to decompose; skin, flesh and muscle stripped by birds and wild animals and the cold, bitter wind.

Tenera walked up to him. “We have been working on cleaning up the area. There was not a lot to do, thankfully, but we have tidied up the grass, removed loose rocks and dead branches from the trees, just as Nitesco said to do.”

Grimbeald shivered. Was it his imagination, or could he feel a slight vibration beneath his feet, as if a herd of cattle stampeded in the distance? Cold droplets of sweat formed on his back. Was he coming down with a fever?

He looked over at Tenera, intending to ask her if she could feel anything, but to his surprise, she stared past him at something on the top of the mound, her mouth open and astonishment on her face.

He turned and gasped. Standing there was the figure of a Wulfengar knight in full armour, his face set in the usual Wulfian grimace, which wasn't particularly surprising in itself. What was surprising, however, was the way Grimbeald could see through the figure to the hills beyond, and the way the knight dissipated suddenly, as if he had dissolved in the drizzling rain.

 

II

For Beata, the journey to Henton was long and unrelenting. Caelestis's death had been a huge blow, and she could not shake off her feelings of guilt and sorrow. It was a momentous task to even get up in the morning, let alone get on her horse and continue each day with the aim of completing her Quest. Many times she felt like giving up, and would have rolled over in her blankets and buried her head beneath them, refusing to get on with the day. Luckily, however, Peritus was a rock at her side, postponing his own grief and worries and supporting her continually throughout the last leg of their trip. He planned where they would stop, organised lodgings and food for both them and their horses, and generally tried to keep her thinking positive, though it was a difficult task.

He finally managed to perk her up with the news he obtained from an inn in a little village where they stopped just a day's ride from Henton on the coast, having finally found a bridge across the river. Beata had taken to bed, claiming tiredness, but Peritus had gone down to the bar and joined some of the locals in a pint of ale to pass the time. He had returned to their tiny room excitedly, and had dropped to his knees before Beata where she lay listlessly on the bed, taking her hand and pulling her upright before telling her the news.

“I am tired,” she had protested. “Leave me be.”

“You are always tired lately,” he replied impatiently. “Look, I have news. They told me downstairs the Virimage is still in Henton.”

This made Beata sit up properly, and for the first time since Caelestis's death a spark of interest flared inside her. “Are they certain?”

“Two of them saw him last night, up at the… what did they call it? The ‘Castle on the Rock'. Apparently, his name is Teague. He entertains there every night. In return, they give him board and lodging. He has been here quite a while, it seems.”

“Teague…” She rolled the name around her tongue. “It sounds like a Komis name.”

“Oh, he is definitely Komis all right. Black hair, light brown skin, gold eyes; they were full of it downstairs.”

Beata sat back against her pillows. “Well, I suppose it makes sense. Just look at Silva. The Komis have always been said to have a strong connection with the land. Did they say what he was like?”

Peritus hesitated. “They called him ‘a bit of a lad'. That is about as much as I could get out of them. Not a talkative bunch, these fishermen.”

A bit of a lad? Beata couldn't begin to think what that meant. She had had very little experience with people outside of the Exercitus, and nearly all Militis were serious warriors committed to their work. She had never had such a thing as a social life, had never been to court, or had an admirer. It just wasn't part of her life. That didn't mean she wasn't aware it happened, but it was like trying to imagine the sea when you've always lived in the mountains; no matter how much someone tries to explain it to you, it's very difficult to conceive exactly what it's like until you experience it.

In spite of her naïveté, however, she was not stupid. The description of this Teague gave her the impression he was very young and still finding his way in the world. Well, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, she thought. Young probably meant impressionable, and that was not a problem considering what she had to persuade him to do.

She found it difficult to sleep that night, and when she eventually dozed off her dreams were filled with the Virimage and his strong brown hands casting spells in the sky and making flowers fall onto the ground and scattering her in petals.