The Sword of Feimhin (41 page)

‘Why?'

‘Because he intends to make a spectacle of it.'

‘A spectacle of what?'

‘Destroying me.'

Mo Grimstone refused to wake up. Yet the voice that called her, a faint whisper within her mind, was persistent. She recognised the half growly, half comforting voice of Magtokk.

Her eyes reluctantly opened to confirm that it was, indeed, deepest night outside her tent, but the Torus that had been restored to its leathery thong around her neck was pulsing with light, filling the interior with a milky blue glow. How warm she felt, how comfortable, cuddled up within the furry embrace of her Shee guardian, the tigress, Usrua, whose six-inch whiskers twitched as she lay curled up into a circle around Mo's body: nine feet of big cat devouring every morsel of space beneath the seal-hide tent. Mo's eyes drifted closed again.

She must be dreaming.

Her mind was overcome by the exhaustion of another hard day's riding through treacherous terrain on the shoulders of her onkkh. They were still only a few days further down the slopes from the valley of the skull pyramids, but there had still not been any attacks from the Tyrant's forces. Maybe they didn't need to attack, the landscape was more than hazard enough.

No human arms and legs could have brought her and the vast Shee army this far across such daunting slopes. It wasn't just the pitch of them – it was the vicious broken nature of the rocks themselves; a morass of sharp ledges, deep horizontal fissures and looming crevasses that made the journey hazardous beyond belief. Only the giant birds, with their tenacious claws and the ability to hop and leap between ridges and ledges could have brought them this far. And only an army of giant cats that had the surefootedness of four powerful limbs with their own feline claws could have kept pace with the onkkh.

Mo envied the Gargs flying overhead. If only they could all fly like Gargs, the journey would have taken two or three days.

The whisper came again:

Mo shook her head, somewhere close to sleep again.

That woke her. The whisper was coming from somebody – some being – who knew her real name; the name given
to her by her birth mother before she was lost to her adoptive parents' machinations.

She spoke aloud: ‘What …'

A leathery finger was pressed against her lips.

Magtokk!
It
was
his voice. Yet, when Mo opened her eyes, she saw nothing, not even a shadow, within the gloom of the tent.

The leathery finger withdrew from her lips.

Her voice fell to a whisper: ‘Where are you?'

Mo jerked to full attention. How could Magtokk possibly know the name given to her by her birth mother?

She spoke, within her mind:

When Mo looked down, she was startled to see her sleeping self still folded within Usrua's mighty embrace.

discover a way to peek and pry. I have discovered the usefulness of invisibility.>

When Mo blinked again, or at least when she thought she blinked, she was already outside the tent staring out over the extraordinary spectacle of the mountainside camp. There was a strange low-pitched roaring sound, but now she realised that it was the flapping of tens of thousands of tents. She could hear the onkkh farting and snoring where they were tethered to iron stanchions driven deep into the rock. Beside her, she was aware of the ghostly shape of the orang-utan staring up into the navy bowl of moon and stars. Mo followed his eyes to see a shockingly familiar shape swoop down out of the starlight, its fierce black eyes and raptor's beak agape. She recalled the Temple Ship ploughing through the central currents of the Snowmelt River after their escape from Isscan … the dark cruciate shape of an eagle, with flashes of white fletching over the outer reaches of its enormous wings had accompanied their journey after the arrival of the dwarf mage.

Mo recalled how the eagle had pounced to save Qwenqwo's runestone when, enraged by what she mistook for treachery, the mother-sister of the present Kyra had hurled it far out over the water.

Mo looked on in silence.

Mo shrank back in terror as the giant shape, ten times the size of any eagle on Earth, wheeled and flapped, to come in close to where they waited. She saw the yellow knob of raptor's beak and the knot of the enormous taloned feet.

She hardly had time to think of what he meant before, thankfully without time enough time to shriek, she found herself wrapped around Magtokk's neck. He then took a comfortable perch just between the shoulders of the giant eagle, where he clung on with all four feet. Mo felt the giant eagle soar, with no apparent effort, until the sky and the mountains below them became a blur of light and shade.

She had no memory of the journey that followed. It just seemed as if, in a moment, she had been transported from Tír to Earth to find herself in an unfamiliar landscape. Day
had become sunset in a desert landscape that she did not recognise, surrounded by strangers who sat cross-legged around her. Some of the women had sleepy-headed children, who clung to their necks. They were dark-skinned and naked, their faces were sombre, their hair, silhouetted by the setting sun behind them, was ruffled and bleached. Directly in front of Mo was a pond of very still water and further back, glowing with the russet light, was a low rock face covered with stencilled etchings of hands, boat-shaped ovals, hatchings like ladders, and serpent-like curves containing rainbows.

Suddenly she was within the mind of a young woman, looking though her eyes at her reflection in the pond, where she saw a young face, dusky in hue, with a nimbus of curly black hair. The face was not Mo's face, but she felt comfortable within it and within the tall, slim, girlish figure. Mo's mind filled with new knowledge. She knew that the rock face bore the clan markers and dreamtime stories. She knew that her name was Mala, a name taken from the ancestral spirit hare-wallaby, which was fleet but vulnerable, and thus kept itself out of sight during the day. She also knew that this day was her sixteenth birthday.

An old woman climbed to her feet and came towards her, the edges of her figure glimmering in the dying rays. Her skin was ruddy and glowing with ochre. Around her neck was a thong of leathery material on which hung a
flattened stone disk. The disk was torus-shaped with a rough hole carved through the centre by tools of bone and granite. The surfaces of the disk were worn smooth by the flesh of countless elders who had worn the talisman from the time of its creation. Mo recognised it as the Torus she now wore around her own neck. The basket the old woman carried – on a thong attached to a broad strap across her brow – was long and cylindrical, woven from something finer than rushes. She took no notice of an emaciated dog that was yapping and whining around her legs. With fleeting touches of her ochre-stained fingers, she urged Mala to stand and then turn to face the setting sun.

Mo saw from within Mala's mind how her feet created arcs of indentation in the bright red sand.

In the basket, the old woman carried sprigs of two different kinds of flowers. One of these Mo recognised as clematis and the other was ivy. The old woman – in Mala's mind, Mo caught the respectful expression
minyma pampa
, tribal elder – chanted a hymn containing lessons of mental beauty and fidelity, making a corona of the ivy and clematis, which she placed on the young woman's head, like a crown.

The elder's face was deeply lined, her dark features contrasted sharply with her white bush of curly hair. Her breasts were flaps of leather. Her features were those Mo associated with a native Australian. Mo realised that Mala's features were also aboriginal, though less dark and unlined.

The language of the chant sounded powerful and familiar to Mo's ears. She understood the words mind-to-mind. In
her actions, in her speaking, the elder was curiously unhurried. She called Mala
minyma
, which meant woman. She hesitated on the word, as if, through her posture, she infused some additional significance. Then she reached into the basket again and raised a stick with a rattling pod at the end of it and she waved it here and there. She said
tjitji
, which Mo understood to mean child, and she chanted things and waved her stick with its rattling pod.

A woman – a child
…

She said: ‘
Tjoti a-nu
.'

It meant that the child went.

She bade Mala to lie down in the sand and open up her legs. She examined her down there whilst chanting, turning from time to time, sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right, as if addressing the land, the red dirt, and the semicircle of perhaps thirty odd people gathered between Mo and the sunset. She talked about the dreaming, and the making of the sun and moon. She talked about the spirit of the child, which must become real and then grow in the womb. She talked of how the spirit of the land must enter the child there in the womb, in the fifth month, and only then would the woman feel the new life move within her. This was the
tjoti a-nu
. This movement was accompanied by a pause – a silence that was imbued with additional significance. ‘Thus,' spoke the elder, ‘is a woman's child – a
minyma yjoti
– made alive by the spirit of the land, so the land is the spirit is the dreaming.'

The old woman turned to the semi-circle and she called out: ‘This
minyma
is with special child.'

Mo's heart almost stopped.

The old woman's words provoked a murmur among the people gathered around her. Mala looked at the semicircle of people with anxious eyes, fixing on one of the women, presumably her own mother.

‘The
minyma
is with child – but she is unbroken.'

This provoked an excited murmuring. In some it provoked cries of disbelief, or something else, something that made the young woman flinch. Mo stared up out of the eyes of Mala at the old woman. She didn't understand.

A woman cried: ‘It is a demon child!'

The elder thought about this. She seemed undecided. Mala shivered, and in soul spirit, Mo shivered with her. Both their eyes looked beyond the semicircle into the distance, beyond the small coppice of spidery trees with their leaves shivering in the rising breeze of evening. She looked at where the sun was setting behind a gigantic red mountain glimmered with light. The caves within it looked like open maws.

Mo heard Mala whisper the mountain's name: ‘Uluru.'

Uluru was the dreamtime place of Mala's unborn child. That it was a girl, she already knew. She had sensed that girl in her from the time her blood had stopped. The notion of a child within her felt so strange and disquieting that she felt a rising panic in her breast.

Mo shared her panic.

Magtokk whispered:

Mo gazed into the heavens above the red mountain, where an ocean of stars were sweeping down out of the sky. She recognised them as True Believers. They were weaving patterns amongst themselves, moving in strange but meaningful rhythms and streams. When the old woman gazed up at them, her eyes wide and staring, Mo saw the twinkling reflections of the starlight in her eyes.

The elder declared: ‘This child is born of no fellah. Her father is the spirit of the Dreamtime, Tjukurpa.'

Mo's spirit voice trembled,

The seated figures within the semicircle began to chant in deep, throaty cadences, their heads lowered.

The elder's head inclined as if she were listening to voices speaking to her inside her mind. She turned to face the sky. A fiery corona of rays radiated from the broad mountain of rock, pitching rainbows of colour down into the valley of sandy scrub and straggling trees.

She said: ‘Her mother name her.'

Mala spoke: ‘I name her Mira.'

In spirit, and she sensed in her physical person back in the tent, Mo wept openly and gratefully.

The elder spoke, and the gathering echoed her, as if with one voice: ‘This dreamtime
yjoti
– this name belong her – it is Mira.'

Mo felt a tremor run through her, from the nape of her neck to the tips of her fingers and toes. Even as she understood what was happening, she felt herself withdraw from her mother, Mala. She didn't want to leave her, she wanted to know more about her. She wanted to talk to her, she wanted to embrace her and be embraced by her. Mo resisted this drawing back. She heard Magtokk speak to her quietly mind-to-mind.