Authors: Tony Shillitoe
‘
T
om came back,’ Dyan said quietly as she stroked Meg’s hair. ‘He came with fifteen men from the Andrak army. There was Tim Woodbearer and Letta’s son, Kain, and they came back to protect the town from the Ranu. We were all excited to see them, even knowing that the Ranu were advancing and our government troops were being beaten. Our boys were home. We’d been waiting for them. Emma—Emma was so happy to see Tom.’ Dyan’s hand trembled as she lifted it briefly from Meg’s head and tears glittered in her eyes. She glanced at the five women in her parlour who were silently weeping, using their handkerchiefs to wipe away the persistent tears. Letta, leaning against the wooden mantelpiece, forced a weak smile.
Dyan lowered her hand to Meg’s head on her lap and gently stroked her dark hair. ‘We promised that we would hide them from the Ranu until the war settled down, but they didn’t want that. They wanted to fight. They said that if we didn’t fight, the Ranu would rape and kill us and they wouldn’t let that happen—not to us.’ She sniffed and fought back a sob. ‘We didn’t know what the Ranu were like. You know the stories. The government has always told us that the Ranu are monsters, people
with strange habits and violent ways. We believed it. And we were terrified that they were coming so quickly. Tom and the others rallied all the young people and some of the older men too. They knew they couldn’t fight the whole Ranu army, so they set up traps and ambushes and hiding places to kill as many Ranu as they could without getting caught. They said that if we were persistent the Ranu would give up and leave us alone.’ A woman in the room suddenly cried out and her companions moved to comfort her. Dyan looked down at Meg’s ashen face, saw that her eyes were closed as the tears trickled down her cheeks, and sighed. ‘It wasn’t like that at all when the Ranu came. They were too many and too strong. It took them just three days to round up the resisters. Tom and the others killed some, but it didn’t stop them. They—they hung everyone they caught. They even hung the ones who they caught helping them.’ She stopped to look at the other women again. Everyone was caught in the moment of silence, trapped in their personal worlds of grief. Dyan plainly did not know how to tell Meg her daughter’s fate. The words were too terrible to be spoken aloud. She swallowed and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’
She crept out of Dyan’s house before sunrise and briskly walked barefooted through the dark shadowy town, avoiding the night watch’s gaze as she passed them. The Ranu soldiers made no attempt to stop her. If they had, she would have pushed them away. They had no right to stand between her and her daughter. They had no right. A weak frost gave the grass an icy edge when she trod on it outside the ruin of her home, the sky paling in the east, but she was numb to all feeling except the empty hole in her being where hope had resided. In the ash at the centre of the desolation, from where Dyan and Letta carried her the previous afternoon, she sank and wept openly, trembling, her mind awash with the brutal questions of
grief.
Why Emma
? she begged.
Why my daughter? Why
? Over and over the questions circled like carrion birds, cruel and bitter and relentless.
Why my children? Why must it always be my children
?
She started at the touch of a hand on her arm and looked up to find two Ranu soldiers, one holding a lantern, offering to help her up. Rage leapt and she rose, flailing the men with her arms and screaming incoherently until they retreated to the roadside, and then she sank again into the ashes, leaving the Ranu to shake their heads at the mad Andrak woman as they walked back towards the town centre.
In her mind she saw Emma at ten helping her tend the garden, pulling weeds and asking what each plant was and why Meg didn’t like it. She saw Emma at fifteen, a young woman in her bright blue smock, cranking the wheel to lift water from the well, the early morning sun shimmering on her red hair. And then Emma was laughing and rubbing her swollen belly, proud to be pregnant and in love with a young man standing beside her in his green Andrak uniform. ‘You killed my daughter,’ Meg hissed and punched the earth, raising a white plume of ash. ‘Why did you come back?’ she wailed. ‘Why?’
The first morning rays were gilding the canopies when Meg, hearing a rustle in the ash, opened her swollen eyes and soft pressure against her hand drew her gaze down. A black bush rat looked up at her. ‘Whisper!’ she cried and scooped the rat into her arms, pressing her against her chest and chin until the rat squirmed in protest and dropped into her lap. ‘Whisper,’ Meg repeated, ‘You’re alive,’ and burst into tears, sobbing as she stroked the rat’s sleek fur. She smeared the tears across her cheek with the back of her hand and looked around furtively, checking that no one had seen the rat. Then she rose, cradling the rat, saying, ‘We can’t stay here,’ but as she took a step
forward Whisper wriggled free and dropped into the ash. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, bewildered by the animal’s rejection. The rat, a shadow in the grey light, shuffled through the ash to a point where she started digging frantically. Meg joined her, asking, ‘What are you doing?’ but Whisper kept efficiently and purposefully shovelling ash aside with her tiny paws until she revealed a soot-blackened jar, and nudged it with her snout as if she was trying to release it from the ash’s grip. Meg bent, and as she touched the object a tingle thrilled along her finger and wrist. She wrapped her hand around the jar and pulled it from the ash. Checking again to see if she was being watched, heart racing with fear and anticipation, she scooped up the rat and walked towards the hills as the rising sun washed the town rooftops.
She sat on the flat rock on the hill crest, her gaze fixed on the soot-stained green jar, her world focussed inward. Through the trees, the distant town continued its new military existence as its people repaired what damage they could and dwelt in common grief at what they had lost, surrounded by the Ranu victors. She had stared at the town for much of the morning, memories of her life there with Emma vividly forming and fragmenting in tears. At first, Whisper endured her desperate embrace, then was content to curl in her lap, and now she was stalking insects through the thick grass around the clutter of boulders below Meg’s vantage point. The town was her past. She understood that. Whatever life she had hoped to build there was as real as the cloud shadows flitting across the hills. It was as distant now as Summerbrook. There came an image of her daughter sitting before the cottage hearth, cheeks rosy with knowing she was entering motherhood, petting Whisper and smiling, and she curled up on the rock, clutching her stomach, and sobbed again, as she had throughout the morning, confused as to why
her daughter had to die when so much happiness was awaiting her.
When the crippling grief eased, she sat up, cross-legged, and contemplated the jar.
That is also the past
, she considered.
There is only pain and death in the jar.
A shadow passed over the rock and she looked up at a white Ranu dragon egg drifting overhead, flying eastwards, tiny windwheels driving it. ‘The future is stranger,’ she murmured. ‘Where do I go now?’ She reached for the jar and felt the tingle of magic, the sensation that had brought her so much woe.
I can’t go back
, she decided.
But the dreams
—
I can’t escape the dreams.
The dreams were as familiar as the tingling of the magic trapped in the jar. In one, she would travel east to a strange place, to a hidden place in the midst of ruins. In another, she would be standing on a wall with people she knew, watching a strange storm of blue light sweeping towards her. She was older in those dreams, much older, so they were not meant to happen yet, not for a long time, but she knew they would happen, just as every other dream had taken shape in her life. She was a prisoner of her dreams, fated to see them come into being, never quite as she imagined, but always true. All she could be certain of was that Andrak no longer was a haven. She had to go somewhere else, perhaps even back to Western Shess—somewhere to escape the growing pain inside, the pain she knew too well from the past, losing her children, one by one, to war and hatred. The tears rose again and she trembled as she lay back down on the rock.
The Ranu paid no attention to the ragged creature shuffling through the checkpoint into Port River. The tall, stooped woman, patchy dark and red-tinged hair matted and filthy, lean face streaked with dirt, watched them warily with her sad green eyes as she headed for the harbour, clutching her grey carry bag containing the two
most precious items in her life. One was sleeping, enjoying the lazy motion and warmth inside the bag, curled around the second item—a chipped green jar.
She was hungry, skin and bone, and exhausted from weeks of wandering from the west, skirting towns and Ranu troops whenever she could, sleeping in ditches and under bushes, begging from refugees like herself and from Andrak citizens who’d accepted the Ranu invasion stoically and were living normal lives as if the war hadn’t happened. Her memory of her suffering was as ragged as her clothes, so many days and nights spent drowning in grief, so many times howling at the sky, screaming her anger into the wind, lying curled like a foetus wracked with sorrow. She blamed Emma’s death on the Ranu soldiers and spent hours plotting how to kill them, how to make them feel the pain that she felt at the loss of her daughter. She blamed Tom and the young men whose lunacy infected her daughter and killed her, and she wanted to know how to make the dead suffer, how to torment their souls for the agony they inflicted on her. And she blamed herself for leaving Emma alone while she went on her own idiotic annual search for a son who was already long lost, long dead, and she wanted to kill the pain that was self-inflicted, the sharpest pain of all. Sometimes she wanted to embed the amber and wreak revenge on everyone, use the magic to root out every source of pain. But that she couldn’t do. The magic itself was the greatest source of her pain. It had destroyed her life. So there were also times when she contemplated burying the jar, dropping it in an abandoned well, casting it into the ocean, destroying it before it destroyed anything else.
When opportunity gave her alcohol, she drank herself into a stupor. When she was offered local variants of Andrak drugs by people who also offered her food and lodging as she stumbled across the provinces, she smoked
the mind-altering dried plants, glad to feel the world melting, desperate to enjoy moments of happiness in her ocean of grief. She woke some mornings, lying in the rain outside farms, lying in mud in roadside ditches, lying in shit in animal sheds, unable to remember how she came to be where she was. And always she woke to find the black rat sitting protectively beside her.
She felt sorry for Whisper. ‘Why do you stay?’ she asked through an alcoholic hangover one morning, rising from a haystack. ‘What have I ever done for you but brought you trouble?’ Whisper looked at her, as if she was considering the question, before she went on preening, the question unanswered. The travel was taxing on the rat because she was always at risk of being killed as vermin by the Andrak and the Ranu, but she had an uncanny knack of vanishing whenever Meg mixed with other refugees, or approached people as she begged, and reappearing immediately there was no one nearby. The bag was Whisper’s refuge while they passed through populated areas. Meg was always afraid someone would demand that she open the bag, especially the soldiers, but no one did. The dirtier and more bedraggled she was, the more invisible she also became. People barely glanced at her. They were quietly disgusted when she approached for a handout, quickly throwing her food scraps and pushing her away with their abrupt comments and quick manners. Her bag was as unattractive as herself, so no one seemed compelled to look through it, especially as she clutched it fiercely to her chest wherever she went.
She ignored the pain in her feet, the soles toughened from weeks of travelling without boots or shoes, as she headed purposefully along the cobbled streets of Port River towards the harbour. She ignored people’s brief stares as they stepped out of her way. She only glanced at a popping and hissing machine on three wheels that rattled by with two passengers clinging perilously to its
steering arm and its brakes before she lowered her eyes and walked on.
The harbour had changed since her only visit fifteen years earlier as an immigrant from Western Shess. The wharves were more open than she remembered and the slave sheds were gone, replaced by imposing red-brick warehouses. The ships were bigger, some with four and five masts as well as the familiar stern windwheels, and two very odd ships were resting in dry dock—odd because they were made of metal and neither had sails nor masts for sails. She took in the details quickly before she focussed on a group of men unloading large bales from a wagon. ‘Can anyone tell me where I can find the Three-breasted Harpy tavern?’ she asked.
The men stopped and stared and one grunted as he turned back to his work, saying, ‘Must be for you, Harry. Too dirty to be mine.’
The men laughed and one quipped, ‘I thought you liked them dirty, Tom?’ sending another ripple of laughter through the group.
The men returned to their labour, except the second speaker who scratched his dark shock of hair and then rubbed his hairy chest as he faced Meg. ‘You don’t want to be going there, lady,’ he warned.
‘Just tell me where it is,’ she insisted.
Harry spat and wiped his lips with the back of his hairy arm, before he said, ‘Straight along the road behind the Port Authority building. Turn left into Sea Urchin Lane and you’ll find it there.’ He chuckled and shook his head. ‘Hope you find what you’re looking for, lady.’ Meg didn’t answer. Heeding the directions, she headed for the tavern along the road behind the Port Authority.
Sea Urchin Lane was a narrow, twisting remnant of older times, cluttered with discarded wooden crates and boxes and rubbish, an open sewer running down the centre of the cobbles. Five motley dogs greeted Meg with
slack-tongued curiosity, pressing around her, sniffing, fascinated by her grey carry bag, and she had to kick at them to keep them at bay. Two men slouched against a wall in a doorway, and a third sitting on the doorstep watched her with hungry eyes. The sign of the Three-breasted Harpy tavern swung awkwardly at the end of a rusty chain and she headed for it, scuffing through the detritus littering the lane. She tried the door handle and thought that it was locked because it didn’t give. ‘You have to push harder, lovey,’ the man on the doorstep called and laughed with his companions. Meg put her shoulder against the door and pushed and it opened.