The Wanderer's Tale (32 page)

‘A tunnel!’ Gapp croaked. ‘Does it say where?’

‘“. . . inne the last sell but one, behinde a sette of loose stones.” ’

‘Last cell but one?’ That meant his own cell. Gapp spun round and began searching the shadowy walls. ‘Does it say where, exactly?’

‘Just behind yew, to yor left.’

‘What, here?’

‘No, there, yew halfwitte!’

Gapp paused, then quietly sat down in one corner.

For want of anything better to do, he peered at Wodeman, who was still droning on.

The shaman knelt motionless upon the floor of his cell, his head slumped upon his chest. His intoning was fainter now. But Gapp also noticed something else; in the unsure light of this otherworldly place it was difficult to tell, but it looked as if Wodeman was crouched in the middle of a chalked circle with arcane sigils bordering its outside rim. Gapp stared in genuine curiosity now, his previous disquiet forgotten.

After several minutes, his patience was rewarded. Without any forewarning, Wodeman’s plainsong ceased and he collapsed upon the floor. One moment he was kneeling in rigid concentration, the next his body went slack and he crumpled like a rag doll. He now lay spreadeagled on his back in the middle of the chalk circle, his face deathly pale, his body as inert as a corpse.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Is he all right, d’you reckon?’

‘Quiet, everyone! It’s just his magic.’

Straining their eyes to see better, the company watched the still form of Wodeman in perplexity. They all realized his lore was ancient and bizarre, part of an alien tradition that preceded conventional wizardry and alchemy by many centuries. But in that dark gaol, with its flickering shadows and half-heard echoes, it was not so easy to curb the imagination.

Then out of Wodeman’s open mouth appeared a pygmy shrew.

The watchers gasped in fear and awe. Something was happening here of which they had no comprehension.

The shrew, a tiny, black creature with a silky sheen, sniffed the air nervously, its whiskers all a-twitch. One tiny paw pressed down upon Wodeman’s lower lip, then out it popped. It darted away from his face and landed lightly on the damp straw covering the floor. It ploughed its way through the stinking, wet stalks until it reached a drier patch. Here it hesitated. It stood up on its hind legs and sniffed the air again, as if to determine its next direction. Then it moved off, slower now, nosing its way through this cleaner straw.

‘It’s trying to find something,’ Finwald commented, his eyes bright with fascination.

The shrew made as if to exit Wodeman’s cell, but as it reached the bars, instead of slipping straight through, it wove in and out of them as if doing a slalom, before continuing on its way. Thereupon it changed direction and skittered across the floor towards the row of cells opposite.

In doing so it virtually fell into a drainage channel that ran the length of the passage towards the well at the far end. Far from taking fright, it set off at a greater pace down this course. Pausing only twice, once at a blockage of sludge and once to savage a worm it encountered, it continued along the runnel until it reached the lip of the dark well.

There it stopped, and stared intently down into the gaping black hole.

‘Weird,’ remarked Nibulus.

‘Without doubt,’ Finwald agreed.

All of a sudden the shrew began squeaking urgently, far louder than one would expect from such a minuscule creature. The men gawked in astonishment. It was as if the creature was calling out to something down below there.

Then abruptly, it fell silent. Without a moment’s delay it pelted back up the length of the runnel, across the floor into Wodeman’s cell, and dived straight back into the shaman’s wide-open mouth.

Wodeman’s whole body jerked violently, then he sat bolt upright, looking about himself in bleary confusion, till he focused on his watching companions.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said limply. ‘I’ve just been talking to Bolldhe.’

With a choking cry, Bolldhe awoke. Sweat had broken out all over his body, and he was trembling violently with cold and with fear. He sat up straight and stared out into the dead blackness of a night filled with portentous dread. The last vestiges of sleep still fuddled his mind, and with them the dreams, dreams that felt more real than waking.

‘What a—!’ he gasped, drawing his bedroll up around himself. ‘What a dream that was.’

As his visions quickly faded away into the recesses of his subconscious, so the thunder receded into the distance.

The thunder! Had that been a part of his dream, too? Bolldhe listened hard. There was not the slightest hint of it now. He assumed that was what had awoken him, but there was a chance that it, too, might have been solely in his head.

Yes, now that he concentrated he
could
still hear thunder echoing, right on the very outer rim of perception. But it was in his head, not outside.

With a shiver he hurriedly fumbled for the dry kindling in the saddlebag at his side, to build up the fire again. There were still a few glowing embers, so it did not take the traveller long to rekindle a small but reassuring blaze to chase away the demons of the night.

‘What the hell goes on inside my head?’ he breathed as he hunched over the crackling flames.

As he thought about it more, some of his dream did come back to him. It had started, he seemed to remember, much like any other: a nonsensical collection of random images and feelings, recollections of the previous day’s events. It had rambled on at a comfortable pace, and was just about to lull him into the deeper sleep of dreamlessness when all of a sudden something stepped right into it, and shouted: ‘LISTEN!’ There followed a terrific peal of thunder, and Wodeman strode out of his dream and stood there before him with fire in his eyes.

Bolldhe had stared back at him blankly. ‘Can I help?’ he piped.

‘Bolldhe,’ the sorcerer had urged, ‘you must listen carefully. Time is short.’ His voice had a strangely hollow ring to it, almost as if shouting down from the top of a deep well. ‘The Lady of the Mounds has taken us and we cannot get out. You must come back for us, Bolldhe. You must . . .’

Without warning Wodeman had disappeared, as though he had been suddenly cut off. Bolldhe then had the briefest vision of a great circle of menhirs exploding up out of the rock like ancient sepulchres on the Last Day. High on a mountain they were, lashed by a ferocious black rain. Between gusts of shrieking wind, voices were shouting frantically to be heard: strange voices crying out in despair, warped by the frenzied gale into demonic howls.

Then, as a spear of lightning had lanced down upon the mountain-top and lit up the entire scene for an instant, it seemed to Bolldhe that he was no longer looking at standing stones but tall figures, giants, shrouded from head to toe in long grey robes, and it was their power that had called up the tempest that carried the sound of the imploring voices away.

Then they had vanished.

Bolldhe was now standing atop a high hill. It was daytime, and on a warm, gentle breeze came to him the pleasant scents of day-old cut grass and of green plants growing by a brook. They brought with them long-forgotten feelings and memories of so many years ago. Ah, the passing of time! Was it possible that he had ever been that young, so full of a youth that he himself had killed off so long ago?

He realized that he was back at home in Moel-Bryn. He could see the town clearly, below him at the foot of the hill; stockaded, fortified and well patrolled, but a peaceful and prosperous town for all that. Joyfully he began running down towards it, descending through the sheepfolds, along the terraces, between the fenced-in hides, scattering sheep and geese as he ran.

But then he came upon two diverging paths. One of them, a broad and well-trodden lane lined with blackberry-laden hedgerows and shaded by gently swaying beeches, swept smoothly and without meandering towards the town; it looked pleasant, inviting and safe. But just as it drew near to the town’s outer protective dyke, he could discern that it veered sharply away and carried on past Moel-Bryn, on and on and on, towards the far horizon, all the way to the Crimson Sea and beyond.

Despairingly, for he had taken that road once before, and indeed was still on it now, he gazed along the other path. This one, instead, led directly away from Moel-Bryn, winding through jagged mountains, marshes and forests, and then over a strange and terrible country of fire and ice, a turbulent land where the elements constantly fused and separated in violent eruptions. However, as he strained to see further, Bolldhe realized that eventually this path turned back on itself, and headed straight back into the town.

He noticed then a wolf padding along it, which turned to him as if to say, ‘Come on, wanderer, this way.’

Suddenly a huge and savage peal of thunder shook the very ground upon which he stood. It split the air in its fury . . .

. . . And Bolldhe had awoken.

He now gazed into the multicoloured flames of the campfire that seemed to purr their protest against the gentle wind that stirred them. He had experienced strange dreams before, but none so
symbolic
, none so heavily laden with meaning. Bolldhe shivered in the pre-dawn coldness, as it reminded him of another time, years ago now, when he had likewise shivered in the dark upon cold, open grassland. On that occasion he had been taken captive by a renegade tribe of horsewomen out beyond the Kro Steppes, and had picked up only enough words of their barbarian tongue to understand that he, like most of the other prisoners, was held on the heinous charge of ‘Being a Man’.

During his mercifully brief spell as their prisoner, he had found himself shackled next to an old pilgrim from some country far to the South who, in addition to the crime of ‘Being a Man’, was also due to undergo torture on the further charge of ‘Having a Beard’. This same pilgrim – Habyib, his name was, Bolldhe recalled – turned out to be what the Peladanes back home would call a witch-doctor.

This witch-doctor, it seemed, lived his whole life under the guidance of dreams. Every decision of his was made by the cold sands of the desert that whispered to him in his sleep; even the decision to embark upon this long journey that would lead to his being captured and tortured. Bolldhe, on successfully escaping, had decided to experiment with this principle. The reason he gave himself was for research in his capacity as an oracle – for the more authentic he could appear to the herd, the more money he was likely to be able to fleece from them. But there was more than a hint of genuine curiosity, too, for he had been troubled by very strange dreams ever since he was a young child.

However, all he had received at that stage was an earful of sand.

But last night’s dream had meant something, he was sure. He
felt
the truth of it as surely as he had felt his destiny tied up in this adventure, right at the very start.

His destiny! That was it. The two paths, his search all these years . . . And then Wodeman begging him to come back, to rejoin them on the long and arduous path through fire, forest and ice . . .

And if he chose the other path, the easy way, but one that would never end?

Or was this just the sand getting in his ear again?

For two hours he pondered and, as the sun materialized out of the saffron-tinted mists in the East, he let his mind wander wherever it would.

Then, with a sigh from the deepest place within his soul, he rose, saddled up Zhang and took to the road again, changing direction. With the light of the jacinth sun inflaming his face, he muttered darkly: ‘You’d better be right about this, Habyib – and you, Wodeman.’

The light from Gapp’s makeshift torch was scarcely brighter than the glow of a pipe now, yet in this strange world of jade, copper and crimson that seemed to magnify light, still it was enough to see by.

‘So . . . what’s up, Wodeman?’ the Peladane inquired, chary, circumspect. ‘You all right?’

‘We thought you’d died,’ Gapp added.

‘In a way I did die, Greyboots,’ Wodeman replied, wincing at the shrillness of the boy’s voice like a man with a hangover, ‘in that my soul departed from my body . . . but I’m all right now, it’s back.’

‘
Are
you all right, though?’ Nibulus persisted. ‘I mean, this business of tampering with your soul . . . ?’ He trailed off darkly.

Wodeman peered at the Peladane curiously. He was surprised at this seeming concern for his soul, especially from a crass and insensitive killer such as Wintus.

‘Tampering with my soul,’ he echoed. ‘But what is magic if not a means to transform oneself?’

Nibulus was always at a loss when confronted by the cryptic riddling of magic-users. He was far more concerned with the well-being of one of his party than with cosmic discussions on the nature of magic.

Finwald on the other hand was intensely interested in Wodeman’s spell. ‘What did you
do
, then?’ he asked, ‘Neither me nor Appa could summon up the slightest power down here.’

‘That is because you have not been brought up with magic from birth,’ Wodeman replied, ‘and because you still use your brain too much. Remember, your thinking mind is only the servant and messenger of your soul, not its master. Bring it under control! But . . . I’m afraid you are a true Cunnan, Finwald, and always will be.’

‘A what?’ Finwald replied guardedly.

‘It’s our word for a “knowing one”.’

‘I see,’ Finwald replied, somewhat relieved. ‘That doesn’t sound too bad to me.’

‘And that is exactly your trouble,’ Wodeman sighed. ‘You and your sort
think
too much, and refuse to
feel
. Cunnans of Cuna, the brain-god.’

‘Aptly named,’ Nibulus cut in. ‘It is said that Cuna gained his knowledge from the Brain of Ayame, whom he slew, and there it hangs on his belt to this day, encased in its skull-box.’

‘So?’ Finwald replied. ‘What’s the problem with that? After all, what higher purpose could there be than to acquire knowledge?’

‘Well, if we ever get out of this mess and make it as far as the Maw,’ Nibulus commented, ‘it might just happen that you find you heart’s desire there, Finwald – if it
is
knowledge you seek. There are documents in Wintus Hall, records of actual first-hand accounts by some of the Peladanes at the siege five hundred years ago, that tell of a hidden place deep within the Maw. They claimed to have found a “vast and dredfulle pitte” that they believed to be a Gateway to Hell itself. Above this pit the flow of souls can be heard as a torrent, a raging, screaming cascade that, were a living man to hear it, would drain his sanity. Here, so they say, time, space, even reality itself, have little meaning and, were a man to brave this terrible place merely to stand at this Gateway, he might reach in and draw forth a treasure beyond price. I mean knowledge – an entire world of knowledge, the like of which no one can imagine. And the
power
that goes with it; power to reshape the world!’