She beamed radiantly at him. ‘If the horse is patient and gentle, I can ride it, at least, I think I can.’
‘I have just the one for you. Keep practising though, as I said, Trask will be here within the week.’
She nodded. ‘Something to do then, I look forward to it.’ She seemed to remember herself then. ‘Forgive my rudeness in not asking earlier, but how are your wounds
healing?’
‘Well.’ He seemed quite pleased with himself. ‘Even my hand. Astania has more power inside her than she thought. I hope that statement applies to all the mages inside the city,
I really do.’
‘As do I. Trust me, Morgan, I know I can do this.’
‘I trust you. Were you this much trouble on the island?’
‘Most definitely. My mentors probably threw a party after I left.’
‘I am sure they are missing you now, though. The Gods keep you, Cheris; I will see you when I have more news.’
After he had left, she fought with a thousand different emotions – fear and excitement, dread and anticipation. Mikel, she had to see Mikel; his help would be crucial in this enterprise.
She kept the thought of the inevitable reprisals that she would suffer at bay; this was all about the act, the deed. Never a vengeful woman before, once this sore had been cut from her she need
never be vengeful again.
Another dawn, another pile of smouldering bodies. Cygan tried unsuccessfully to block out the smell as he dropped another dead Malaac on to the pyre. It had become something of
a routine for them all – travel the narrow, winding waterways, visit another near-deserted village, prepare for the assault and burn out the Malaac. There had been casualties. A couple of
battles had been especially vicious but those that had survived had learned and had been toughened by the experience. Cygan himself sported a deep red scar on his thigh, which might have become
debilitating had it not been for the overworked Dirthen’s healing powers, and few of his companions remained unscathed.
‘We are close now,’ he said to Fasneterax as he walked away from the pungent mass of roasting flesh. ‘The sea is not far from here, the water is still fresh where we are but
that will change soon. It may be best to wait for the others to arrive here before we move on. If we light a beacon tonight they will know where to come.’
‘The men need rest anyway.’ Fasneterax was cleaning his knife in the grass. ‘We have moved far quicker than any of us expected; it will be good to stop for a day or
two.’
‘I think one of the reasons for that is the Malaac themselves. The battles have got easier of late; either their numbers have been decimated or...’
‘They are falling back, maybe to the lake itself, ready to make a final stand.’
‘It is what we would do in their stead.’ Cygan sounded circumspect. He could not help but think that a battle awaited that would test all of them to the utmost.
‘Hungry?’
‘The local women are preparing food for us as we speak.’
Cygan gave a short laugh. ‘Ha! Our reputation precedes us: the Malaac lay waste to the land and we lay waste to the winter stores. It will be good to get away from this smell at any rate.
Thank the spirits, the wind blows the smoke away from the village not towards.’
The two men strode from the small island on which the Malaac burned, crossing a narrow wooden bridge and strolling up a narrow strip of land almost fully concealed by high reeds. Finally they
reached the village, a motley collection of straggling buildings mostly built partway over a broad sluggish watercourse, perched on their stilts like so many other Marsh dwellings. Hundreds of
people were here, warriors not just from the Black Lake but from every tribe they had help liberate en route as well as those local villagers who had not fled north in terror at the Malaac’s
approach. The men of the north were there, too, though, like the Marsh Men, some of their number would no longer see another sunrise. The atmosphere was one of excitement, a sense that hope was no
longer the domain of the fanciful and feeble-minded.
Not everyone felt this way, though – Sperrish for one. The speed of the advance had meant that he had had no time to wander off unwatched to put his plan to harvest spirit grass, the
narcotic of the nobility, into action. There was also the nagging sense that his collaborator in this process had been going to great lengths to avoid him. He always seemed to be in a different
boat, or in a different part of the battlefield. That morning, after he had ferreted around for information, he decided to confront the albino to see if his reticence was real or imagined.
He caught him sitting by his boat chewing on one of the local onion plants that only he among the north men seemed to like. He knelt down next to him, keeping his voice low, for some of the
other men were fairly close by, chewing on pieces of flatbread and talking idly of home.
‘Whitey,’ Sperrish whispered in a confidential tone, ‘word is we are here for some days, until the other boats arrive. You understand what I am saying?’
Whitey nodded but his tone was uncertain. ‘We have come too far. We will never find our way back now, not unless Hytha rode with us himself.’
Sperrish grinned, stroking his thin moustache. ‘Leave that to me,’ he said. ‘West and north, we can use the moon; if we travel by night we can avoid awkward questions from any
native villages we might pass. I can remember most of the way anyway; I have done nothing else but think about it since we left. Aren’t you tired of fighting? Do you really want to face a
dragon? Or would you rather come out of this rich and alive?’
If Whitey was being honest, he could remember most of the way himself, too.
‘No one wants to fight a dragon, Sperrish, no one. But if it isn’t stopped here, then it will come north, to Sketta and then on from there.’
Sperrish’s laugh was incredulous, ‘Don’t tell me, you actually believe all that! We are dealing with some big marsh monster here, nothing else. It is happy in its bit of swamp,
why would it leave?’
‘Then why did Baron Esric send us down here?’
‘Artorus only knows, but if he was serious he would have sent more than twenty men and please notice that twenty are now sixteen and two of them are too wounded to continue. Wounds
don’t heal in this accursed damp and any exposed skin gets bitten raw by every type of bug created by the Gods, all of which seem to live in this miserable place. But that’s not what I
wanted to talk about.’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Spirit grass, in a lake to the north, I have seen it with my own eyes, a whole thicket of the stuff half in and half out of
the water.’
Whitey did not look at his companion. ‘That is their sacred lake, isn’t it? They got all upset when we passed it earlier; we are not supposed to look at or go near their sacred
lake.’
‘You are not telling me that you are going to let the superstitions of a bunch of savages stop you!’ If one could whisper and shout at the same time that was what Sperrish was doing.
‘It is just sitting there, waiting. Far more than they will ever need. Now, they are lighting a beacon tonight; everyone will gather around it for the warmth, apart from the odd sentry, that
is. We will find it easy to sneak away and take what we need. I will cut the stuff and you bring the boat up. We will be away before anyone here is wise to us.’
Whitey buried his head in his hands for a second, rubbing his face and making his short hair look even spikier. ‘I can’t, Sperrish. Not their sacred lake. If you want to do this,
then that is fine. I will tell no one but I cannot help you. These people have done nothing to me to warrant my stealing off them. I... I just cannot betray them like that.’
Sperrish was silent for a minute. His voice, when it came, was thick with anger and disappointment.
‘You have gone soft, Whitey. Do you really think anyone will be grateful for your selflessness? When you go back to the guard it will not be to a pile of gold and a country estate. You
will be back fighting drunks in taverns and hoping the gangs do not take a contract out on you for changing sides. Like you, I joined the guard because I had to, and now I just want enough money to
leave and still be comfortably off. Stay here and get swamp foot and blood boils if you wish but, if you do, remember the chance you turned your back on, and never come to me for charity the next
time a shit bucket is emptied over your head in the stocks.’
Whitey considered the other man’s words before replying. ‘When I was working with Gorton the merchant I robbed the summer estate of Baron Pavellier in the Marassans. You should have
seen the stuff I took from there – silver candlesticks, jewellery, gems housed in gold, all sorts. I got twenty crowns for the job, more than I had seen in my life before. I bought some
decent clothes, rented an apartment where I did not have to wipe cockroaches off the bed before getting in it, bought some women, gambled a little; I thought I was being quite prudent. Well, within
a month it was all gone. I was hungry again, went back to my old hovel where at least the rats were pleased to see me, and there I waited until Gorton’s next job. Money is wasted on me,
Sperrish – when I have it I spend it and when it is gone I wonder what I spent it on. Good luck tonight. I hope you enjoy your wealth because I know it is something I will never do. I have
chased coin all my life, robbed, cheated and killed for it and really, when I think about it, what am I doing it for? I can’t eat it or marry it or sleep under it. Artorus look after you,
Sperrish, but I will not steal from these people. I may be a treacherous little snake back home but I am not out here. And so I will not act like one.’
Sperrish did not reply. Instead, he spat into the water, got up and left the other man behind, the days when they had called each other friend seemingly well behind both of them. Whitey finished
what he was eating, got up and went to help construct the beacon. Neither man noticed Cygan, hidden close by behind a thicket of rushes, carefully whittling away on a piece of wood, trying to turn
it into a flute. His eyes though followed both men for a long time before he started whittling again.
It was a colossal beacon and, once the flames had truly set to blazing inside it, they all knew it could be seen for many miles over this flat and open country. It had been built slightly away
from the village on a patch of dry but uneven ground covered in clumps of thick grass and loose stones. Blankets had been strewn over most of the area and it was around the beacon that everyone was
now seated apart from, as Sperrish had noted earlier, the sentries. So far the Malaac had not returned to places where they had earlier been defeated, but this did not mean that there should be any
let-up in the vigilance of the defenders.
Dirthen had been asked earlier to tell what he knew of the common history of the two peoples and so, standing in front of his attentive audience and with Cygan next to him translating, he
started to speak in a firm voice with only the occasional bout of hesitancy betraying his nervousness. He may have been in line to succeed Terath as loremaster but he had never been pushed to the
forefront like this before.
‘In my country,’ he began, once all the onlookers had been quietened, ‘you are known as the Vokahemenes, the Marsh Humans, and this is the first time we have seen each other,
talked, shared our meals together in nearly a thousand years. Your people are far more ancient than the folk you call the Taneren. We had traded with you for centuries before their coming. It is
said you were once a seafaring people, fleeing to this country to escape a war, and were happy to take the Endless Marshes as your homeland as it closely resembled your country of origin. You kept
to yourselves for the most part, though our trade links were strong and once a year our leaders would visit yours to cement our bonds of friendship.
‘Then the men of the east arrived, having defeated our people in battle on the plains. They took our capital, the city of Res Hetha, and then their ships landed in the south and they built
their own great city, securing dominion over these lands. To the Great Marsh, though, they did not come, seeing nothing of value there.
‘Many of our people fled, either over the sea or into the forests of Seyavanion or Morrathnay. But one tribal leader, Cuyethu of the Denussi, did not accept defeat so readily. His tribe
were fierce riders, adept with both spear and bow, and he decided to carve out his own domain, south of the hills you call the Marassans, but to do so he needed help. After conquering a swathe of
land and burning out the new human settlers he travelled here, by boat, to ask for aid.
‘One of your leaders then was a man called Tunuveferak the Grey, a man of great virility despite his advancing years. He called upon your gods to direct him for, though you had little love
for the men of the east, you were all human, so was it truly wise to side against them for an entirely different race? After one night alone with the spirits Tuneveferak returned to Cuyethu and
said that, yes, they would aid them in their struggle and would continue to do so until the Isles of Metu should disappear from the earth. Now, these three isles sit on what we both call the Broken
River right on the boundary between the Great Marsh and the lands of the north, a place both sets of people knew well. Many birds lived on them and their eggs could be harvested in the spring.
‘And so, fighting in tandem as one people, they attacked the newcomers laying claim to their ancient lands. Their ferocity was great and little mercy was shown on both sides. In terror,
the usurpers were driven away where they were scattered and were splintered into many small factions. Victory appeared to be a certainty; Cuyethu proclaimed that none of the enemy would be living
in his domain by the turn of the year. But he knew little of the deep reserves of the people he was facing. Their leader, Tanar, left his city in the south and came against them with all the force
at his disposal. For months the war swung this way and that; victory was followed by defeat which in turn was followed by victory. Everything was in the balance and with winter coming both sides
arraigned their forces for one great final battle that would determine the futures of all the peoples concerned. They stood on high ground overlooking the many twists and coils of the Broken River
where the Isles of Metu were discernible in the far distance.