The Executioner's Cane (4 page)

Why has he come here?

By now the shouting has stopped and Jemelda
turns to go. Another pause and then as Ralph blinks to try to focus
on the scene, Simon struggles to his feet and limps towards the
castle, following the grey-haired old man, Frankel. Ralph is just
about to withdraw from his vantage point when he is sure Simon
glances up and sees him.

Ralph scrabbles backwards, all but stumbling
over a small table. If he thought his heart was beating fast
before, then it is as nothing compared to the pace of it now. Simon
must not see him. When Ralph reaches the wall furthest from the
window, he slides down, feeling the harsh stone on his back, until
he lands on the floor. He is trembling but has no way of stopping
it. Something has begun. Something has begun here today, and he is
not prepared for it.

Without thinking, Ralph finds he is crawling
towards the makeshift bedding underneath the fractured sky. He
feels as if a great weight is looming above, something to face in
the future but he longs to hide from it. As he curls inwards both
in body and mind – what he has left of it – Ralph understands two
things and two things only: the first is that if Simon comes here
to do what is wrong, then he does not have the strength to gainsay
him; and if he comes here, somehow, to do what is right, then there
is no place for Ralph in his plans. Perhaps there never has
been.

It is true then what the gods tell them. What
must be, will be, and always too soon.

First Gathandrian
Interlude

Annyeke

“No,” said Annyeke Hallsfoot the First Elder
of Gathandria, hands on hips, facing her husband who was sitting at
the other side of the eating table and was also, to her chagrin,
smiling quietly. “Absolutely not. Why should I change my name
simply because we have taken the ancient vows together? What good
have the traditions been to us so far?”

“Well, I …” Johan Montfort began to reply,
but Annyeke gave him no ground. Which was, she fully accepted,
unfair to a man who had had no option but to move into her tiny
home due to his own being destroyed in the Wars and had also had
the foolishness to ask her to marry him.

“And besides what have our menfolk given us
recently but death and loss and misery?” was her final triumphant
question.

Johan blinked and his smile vanished. Instead
one eyebrow raised in a manner she recognised from the
not-too-distant day-cycles when her new husband had been her
overseer at the Sub-Council of Meditation. In truth, those
experiences seemed like a lifetime away. But always the raised brow
had signified some misdemeanour of hers which would need to be
corrected shortly. Back then, he’d tended to be right in his
judgements and she had to acknowledge he was right this day-cycle.
Probably.

Annyeke grimaced, drew up a stool and sat
down opposite him. She sighed. “All right. I accept my last
statement may have been rather too harsh, but just because I’ve
married you doesn’t mean my whole personality changes, you know. I
love you, Johan, but I’m still me.”

This time he laughed before reaching out and
holding her hand. She could feel the warmth of his touch flowing
upward through her skin. Red and gold and lilac.

“I know,” he said. “If you weren’t who you
are, then I would not be as happy as I am now. And yes, I
understand what the former Gathandrian elders have done to our
lands and the lands of our neighbours. But I am a man, as is the
Lost One, Simon himself. We are not against you, but for you.
Surely men and women must work together if we are to be what we
could be?”

She took his hand, kissed it once before
letting go.

“Now that depends entirely on the men and
women involved,” she replied. One of the best things about being
married to Johan, even if only for a couple of week-cycles so far,
was how easily teased he’d turned out to be. Gathandrian women
needed every kind of good thing they could find in the great task
they all faced of rebuilding their country and, she hoped, that of
their neighbours too.

This time, however, Johan neither frowned nor
grimaced, nor even rolled his eyes at her. No, this time, he sprang
up from the table, took the three paces needed to bring him to her
side and gazed down at her. His deep blue eyes and serious
expression never failed to make it hard for her to breathe, and she
experienced no change to that response now. Perhaps men always had
the last word.

Before she could think of gathering her
thoughts together and making a suitably caustic comment which would
uphold the honour of Gathandrian womanhood wherever it might be
found, the colours flowing round him shifted from gold and the
calmest of blues to a shade of deep swirling red. They made a
pleasing contrast to the soft yellows of her kitchen-area. The next
moment, he’d pulled her to her feet – an action that only made her
level with the height of his chest – and gathered her into one of
his unexpected but welcome mountain-hugs. She breathed in the scent
of him – rosemary and winter-jasmine mixed with the wool of his
tunic – and smiled. Knew he sensed her smiling. Then she heard his
whispered words reverberating in her mind, not spoken aloud.

You’re right, my love. Everything depends on
the man and woman involved.

*****

Some time later, Annyeke lay on her back
staring up at the patterns of her wooden ceiling. She’d always
enjoyed allowing her eye to take in the ebb and flow of the grain.
It was an aid to meditation, a secret pleasure. Though of course
she would never have admitted it to anyone else apart from her
husband. As First Elder of this great city, she couldn’t afford to
seem either dull or strange. She sighed and snuggled up to Johan
who was lying on his front, snoring quietly. Something she’d teased
him about at once when she found the custom out after their
joining, and something he’d always strenuously denied. His presence
here with her, when she’d kept her feelings hidden for so long, was
still a source of pleasure, and it made her gazing at the ceiling
and thinking moments more companionable too. Even when he was
asleep.

Because she knew this moment of peace would
be short-lived. The remaining elders were expected back in the city
later this day-cycle. They had stayed in the place of prayer since
the end of the battle – a time she skirted round in her head as the
memory of it was currently beyond even her strength – but now they
were coming home. She understood why they had stayed away. She
could feel their prayer, both its strength and its weakness,
flowing through the cold winter-cycle air and through the fields’
lengths between the city and their small gathering. It had been
doing this for many days. She had told no-one about it,
understanding somehow it was only she who could sense the elders’
prayers. She had not even told Johan, though she thought once or
twice he might have guessed at something different in the colours
which surrounded her and in the shifts in her thoughts. Annyeke
would not bar him from even the deepest areas of her mind. For her,
this joining was everything. No, the mind-link strangely forged
with the missing elders must be something to do with her new role,
and the responsibilities she carried. She had said to herself when
she had simply been Acting Elder that it was good for a woman to
step forward to take on such a duty. But, by the gods and stars,
the road she had chosen to walk on since then had not been easy.
No, she would not think of the mind-executioner’s death, it was
done, it was done. She must think instead, even as her thoughts
latched onto the regularity and distinctiveness of the wood slats
above her, of how she might manage the returning elders, and what
role they who had betrayed the city to suffering could have in its
restitution.

If only Simon the Lost One were still here.
She had grown fond of him in the short time they had been together,
trying between the two of them to understand the power of the
mind-cane. He had been even more unsure than herself, but he had a
kind of courage which showed itself when the greatest need for it
arose. She couldn’t help but admire that. She hoped whatever was
happening for him in the Lammas Lands would be good, and they would
see him again soon. With or without his wretched bird.

Next to her on the blankets, Johan stirred.
In sleep, he reached for her, mumbled something she couldn’t catch
and then wrapped his fingers round her arm. The muttering eased
away. Annyeke smiled again.

The love-creation they shared between them
had been a revelation also. Indeed she wished she had been joined
to him far sooner than this, although all the gods and stars knew
the time then would not have been right. Their love had been forged
in battle, when the true calibre of them both had been most clearly
seen.

Now though things were different. Annyeke
snuggled closer to the man she loved and her smile deepened. What
she had discovered with him here was a thousand times better than
she’d expected from all her most private dreams. In truth, her
knowledge of a joining relationship had been hazy at best; she
couldn’t remember her mother and father ever having been happy
together, and of course they were both dead. How she felt about her
husband and how they were together was, she imagined, as far
removed from her parents’ experience as … as the distance of the
land of the mountains from the Gathandrian city.

Though the mountains were destroyed, lost
forever in the war. They would never return. Annyeke swallowed and
felt the darkness of loss spike through her mind. She shook it
away, refusing to allow the memory to spoil this moment, here and
now. Because all she could sense around her, apart from her own
doubts, was peace. The peace of her simple wooden ceiling, the
peace of the blankets wrapped around their bodies, keeping the
winter chill from their skin. Even the peace the two of them had
created in this room – she could sense its soft golden colours
drifting through her thoughts. She treasured each sensation, trying
to hold on to it, make it part of herself, for as long as she
could. But, no matter how much she tried, she could not gainsay the
sense of something about to happen, something just out of reach
which might take all this happiness away. Or, at the very least,
leave it as something to be put aside in the light of her Eldership
duties and then picked up once more when she was able. And, more
than anything, she wanted her husband to be the major part of her
life. She hated the thought that being First Elder might make
things difficult. Still, Johan had his own role in the Sub-Council
of Meditation, which would become increasingly vital as the
Gathandrians began to rebuild their world. Both of them would be
busy.

So many fields to seed and so many paths to
walk on ahead. She should stop worrying, and trust to her own
skills to cope with whatever lay in the future.

With that comforting thought filling her
mind, Annyeke closed her eyes and slept again, the warmth of
Johan’s body wrapping itself around hers as she slept.

Her rest that morning was dreamless and held
no terrors for her. She had planned to wake long before Talus, her
young charge, returned from his makeshift school for the midday
meal, but in the event it was the tendrils of his enquiring mind
which disturbed her and brought her gasping awake and blinking
almost unseeingly at her ceiling again.

The light swish of the curtain hanging across
her front door brought Talus’ thoughts into sharper focus as he
came inside, and Annyeke slipped out of the bed and grabbed her
clothes. Johan stirred and mumbled something, but she paid him no
attention. As she struggled into her tunic, Annyeke spun a quick
mind-net round her bedroom so Talus wouldn’t dart in to try to find
her. Not that he would do such a thing – at only seven summers, he
found any notion of romance between adults utterly horrifying – but
in her experience you could never be too careful. She made the
net’s colours yellow and lilac – the colours that seemed most
suited to them both.

As she swung back her rich red hair and
reached for the clip, she realised something she hadn’t had the
sense to pick up on first. Talus was worried. Something had
happened. Without a second thought, she dropped the clip and ran
for the front room.

She entered in a cloud of concern and
brushing back her hair with one sweep of her hand in order to be
able to see properly. Talus blinked at her, eyes wide.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him, her words
falling over themselves in the attempt to be heard. “What’s
happened?”

It might have been easier to probe his mind,
but Annyeke had never been a supporter of using that technique when
dealing with a child. In any case, her words tended to spill out
when they were needed and she’d never been able to stop them, not
fully.

Talus blinked at her again and she glanced
down. Seeing the top of her tunic was open to the elements, Annyeke
felt her skin redden and she hurried to close the buttons.

Sorry, little one, I was sleeping.

At least that wasn’t a complete lie, she
thought. She needn’t have worried however. Talus just shrugged. But
she could still sense the lines of concern in his mind. They didn’t
diminish even as she heard footsteps behind her and felt the warm
aura of Johan at her side.

“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly, repeating
the question she’d asked only a heartbeat ago.

But by then she knew exactly what had
happened. She could see the image in Talus’ mind even as he spoke
the words aloud. She could see the small group of them standing in
the snow outside her home waiting for her permission to enter. Her
own mind-net must have served to make her ignorant of their
presence, although she could not guess how long they might have
been there. Once she let them in – as she must do for the sake of
her land and her own peace – then everything would be different and
everything would begin.