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She spoke softly. ‘You are not one of us. To some, that will be a problem. They may even be angry that you have come there.’
‘I know. It will not make my task easier.’
‘You will have to prove yourself to them before they will accept you as part of our kin-clan, let alone as a Great One.’
‘I was thinking of that.’
She drew a deeper breath and let it out slowly, a prelude to sleep. ‘How long will it take us to reach the Wintering Place?’
‘We could be there tomorrow. But I do not wish to move that swiftly and arrive there depleted of power. We will move more slowly and stop sooner.’
‘That makes sense,’ she agreed, and then said, ‘I need to sleep now.’
‘Yes,’ Soldier’s Boy agreed. But it was some time before he closed his eyes. I sensed he was weighing his options and planning a strategy. But I could not find a way into those thoughts and suspected he deliberately kept them from me.
NINE
Journey in Darkness
Soldier’s Boy was the first to waken. I’d been aware for hours, alone in his darkened skull and feeling oddly helpless. I knew that he was planning something, something that would affect both of us forever, but had no idea what it was or how I could influence him. I’d again attempted to move the body, to ‘sleep walk’ it while he was unconscious and succeeded not at all. All I could do was to wait.
He stretched slowly, mindful of the two sleepers who flanked him. Awkwardly, he disengaged his body from theirs. They both burrowed into the warm space he left, now sharing the blanket more comfortably. He walked a short distance away from them before he relieved himself. Overhead, a narrow stripe of blue sky showed. I tried to decide if the mountains were leaning closer to one another overhead, or if distance only made it seem that way.
When he went back to Olikea and Likari, the two had cuddled together. In the semi-darkness, Olikea embraced her son, and both their faces looked peaceful. I wondered who the boy’s father was and where he was. Soldier’s Boy understood far more of Speck customs than I did. I found my answer in his mind. Only rarely did Specks select a mate and remain with one person for life. The kin-clan was the family who would raise the children born to the women. Usually, mates came from outside the kin-clan, and often the journey to the Wintering Place or the Trading Place was when young women met males from other clans for those liaisons. It was not necessary for a boy to know who his father was, though they usually did. Often fathers had little to do with sons until they were old enough to be taught the hunting rites. Then a boy might choose to leave his kin-clan to join that of his father, or he might decide to remain with his mother’s people. Women almost never left their kin-clans. It was not the Speck way.
‘It’s time to travel again,’ Soldier’s Boy said. His voice sounded odd.
Olikea stirred and beside her, Likari grumbled, stretched and then recurled in a tighter ball. He scowled in his sleep. Olikea opened her eyes and then sighed. ‘It’s not night yet.’
‘No. It’s not. But I wish to travel now. The nights grow colder. I don’t want to be caught here when winter bites hard.’
‘Now he worries about it,’ she muttered to herself, and then seized Likari’s shoulder and shook it. ‘Wake up. It’s time to travel again.’
We did not quick-walk. The light from above reached down to us. It was the strangest natural setting that I had ever experienced. What had seemed like a pass between two mountains had narrowed to a crevasse. We walked in the bottom of it, looking up at a sky that seemed to grow more distant with every step of our journey. The sides of the rift were slaty, the rock layered at an angle to the floor. Rubble that had tumbled down into the rift over the years floored it, but a well-trodden path threaded through it. Moss and little plants grew in the cracks of the walls.
By late afternoon, the crack that showed the sky had narrowed to a distant band of deep blue. We came to a place where water trickled down the stony walls. It pooled into a chiselled basin, overflowed it, and ran alongside our path for some distance before it vanished into a crack. We re-filled the waterskin there and everyone drank of the sweet, very cold water. Plants grew along the stream, but not luxuriantly. It was evident that they had recently been picked down to the roots. Olikea muttered angrily that nothing had been left; tradition demanded that some leaves must always be left for whoever came behind. Soldier’s Boy, his stomach grumbling loudly, lowered himself to his knees. He put his hands in the cold water, touching the matted roots of the plants lightly.
I felt the magic flare up in him and then ebb. Then he took his hands away and slowly stood up. He shook icy water from his hands. For a distance of six feet or so, the plants had pushed forth new foliage. Olikea exclaimed with delight and hurriedly began to harvest the fat leaves.
‘Remember to leave some,’ Soldier’s Boy cautioned her.
‘Of course.’
They nibbled on the leaves as they walked. The food was not enough to satisfy Soldier Boy’s hunger, but it kept him from focusing on it. They did not talk much. The crack of light above us continued to narrow. The cold was a constant, and I think they all suffered from it, but no one spoke of it. It was simply a condition they had to endure.
My eyes had adjusted to the dimness. As she had the day before, Olikea began to gather the stub ends of torches and bits of firewood. Soldier’s Boy said nothing about this but kept the pace slower so that she could manage it without being left behind. We came to another trickling wall stream. This time, the catch basin was obviously man-made. It was the size of a bath tub, and the sides were furry with a pale moss. The water that overflowed it ran off into the dimness in a groove that had probably been originally cut by people and smoothed by the passage of the water. Again Likari filled his waterskin and we all drank. ‘We should have brought torches,’ Olikea fretted as we left the water.
In a very short time, I saw why. The crack overhead that had admitted a bit of indirect light vanished. I looked up. I could not tell if it was overgrown with foliage or if the rock had actually closed up above us. I suddenly felt a squirm of great uneasiness. I did not want to go any deeper into this crack that had now become a cavern. If Soldier’s Boy or any of the others shared my discomfort, they gave no sign of it. I felt Soldier’s Boy kindle the magic within him to make a stingy pool of light around us. We walked on, Likari and Olikea close beside him.
At first, I assumed that the darkness was temporary. I kept hoping that the overhead crack would reappear. It did not. The stream that paralleled our path added an element of sound and humidity to our passage. The cold became danker, with an organic smell of water and plant life. Our luminescence briefly touched white mosses and clinging lichen on the walls. When Olikea saw a cluster of pale yellow mushrooms leaning out from a mossy crevice, she crowed with satisfaction and hastily harvested them. She shared them out and we ate them as we walked. I felt Soldier’s Boy heightened awareness of the cavern after he had eaten them. His energy seemed renewed and the light that he gave off became more certain. Both Olikea and Likari seemed renewed by the mushrooms as well, and for a time we travelled more swiftly.
Occasionally, I heard splashes from the stream, as if small startled frogs or fishes were taking alarm at our light. The sheen on the rocky wall on that side of the cave showed more water sliding down to feed the stream. It flowed merrily beside us, and this, more than any sensation of descending, told me that our trail was leading us downward.
When Soldier’s Boy finally decided to stop, the others were footsore, cold and weary. Olikea seemed grateful that he had chosen a regular stopping site. Here the cavern widened out substantially and there was a large blackened fire circle. Olikea was able to salvage quite a bit of partially burned wood. While she kindled it, Likari went off to investigate an odd structure built into the stream. He came back with three pale fish. ‘There wasn’t much in the trap. These ones were barely big enough to get caught in it.’
‘Usually, it teems with fish and there is plenty and to spare.’ Olikea shot Soldier’s Boy a meaningful glance.
‘We are the last, most likely, to make the passage this year. When we come in the wake of so many people, it is not surprising that others have harvested and hunted before us. Three fish are enough for us, for tonight.’
‘Enough?’ she asked him, shocked.
‘None of us will starve,’ he clarified.
‘But you will not look like a Great One when we arrive.’
‘That is my concern, not yours,’ he rebuked her.
‘It is not my concern if others mock me that I have tended my Great One so poorly that he looks like a rack of bones? Not my concern if we reach the Wintering Place and you have not even enough magic to kindle a fire for yourself? I shall be completely humiliated, and you will be mocked and disregarded. This does not concern you?’
‘Other things concern me more,’ he told her. Then he turned away from her in a way that suggested the conversation was over. Muttering, she went about the task of preparing the fish for cooking. Likari wandered at the edges of the firelight, exploring the abandoned trash. He came back to his mother’s fire with a tattered piece of fabric. ‘Can we make shoes from this?’ he asked her, and they were soon both involved in that task.
Soldier’s Boy walked away from them. His personal light went with him. He walked towards the wall of the cavern. There the ceiling dropped low, but he ducked down and walked hunched for a time. The dim circle of light around us showed me little more than the stony floor in front of his feet. His back began to ache and I wondered where he was going and why. When the ceiling of the cavern retreated, he straightened up and stood tall again. He closed his eyes, then breathed out hard and suddenly light burst into being all around me. It was no longer his personal light that shone. We were in a different chamber, separate from the long rift we had been following. The cavern we were in was as large as a ballroom, and everywhere I looked, the walls sparked with crystals. Somehow Soldier’s Boy had woken light from them, and it illuminated the cave.
The crystals glittered brightly as he drew closer to them. They were wet and gleaming and appeared to be growing from the walls of the cavern. Some were quite large, their facets easy to see and other were tiny, little more than a sparkle against the cavern’s dark wall. Soldier’s Boy seemed to consider them for a long time; then he chose a protruding crystal structure and broke it from the wall. I was surprised at how easily it came away, and also at how sharp it was. Blood stung and dripped from his fingers as he carried it away from the wall and back to the centre of this cavern.
There was a pool there, as dark as the crystals were brilliant. Soldier’s Boy lowered himself down to sit beside it. He dipped his fingers in it and they came up inky with a thick, slimy liquid. He nodded to himself. Then he began to systematically prick himself with the point of the crystal and then dab some of the noxious liquid onto each tiny cut. The cuts stung, but the slime itself did not add to the pain. In fact, it seemed to seal each tiny wound as he dabbed it on.
He worked systematically, doing both his arms from the shoulders down and then the backs of his hands. He was working on his left leg, jabbing and dabbing when I became aware that a new light had joined us in the cavern. It was yellow and flickering. Olikea had wedged two burnt torch ends together to make one that was barely long enough for her to hold without scorching her hand. As she drew near to us, she exclaimed in sudden pain and then dropped it. She no longer needed it. The light of the crystals glittered all around us still.
‘I didn’t know where you had gone. It worried me. Then I saw the light coming from here. What are you doing?’ she demanded.
‘What you suggested. Becoming a Speck, so the People will accept me,’ he replied.
‘This is only done to babies,’ she pointed out to him. ‘During their first passage.’
‘I am not a child, but this is my first passage. And so I have determined that it will be done to me, even if I must do it myself.’
That silenced her. For a time, she stood watching him prick my flesh with the broken crystal and then dab the wound with the black slime. Her feet were wrapped now in clumsy shoes made from the old fabric that Likari had found. Her failing torch added a flickering yellow to the light around us and was reflected in the glittering crystals that surrounded us. As it began to die away, Olikea asked quietly, ‘Do you want me to do your back?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you … how do you wish it to be? Like a cat? Like a deer? Rippled like a fish?’
‘You may decide,’ he said, and then bowed his head forward on his chest to present his full back to her. She took the broken crystal from him. She worked swiftly as if this were something she had done before. She made a series of punctures, then daubed them all with a handful of the thick, soft muck. The pain seemed more intense when someone else did the jabbing.
I heard a sound behind us and became aware that Likari had joined us. ‘The fish is cooked. I took it away from the fire,’ he said. Uncertainty filled his voice.
‘This won’t take long. You may eat your share,’ Olikea told him. But the boy didn’t leave. Instead he hunkered down carefully on the shard-strewn floor and watched.
When Soldier’s Boy’s back was finished, Olikea had him stand, and did his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Then she came around in front of him and regarded him critically. ‘You haven’t done your face yet.’
‘Leave it as it is,’ he said quietly.
‘But—’
‘Leave it. I am of the People, but I do not wish any of them to ever forget that I came to them from outside the People. Leave my face as it is.’
She puffed her cheeks, her disapproval very evident. Then she handed him back the crystal. ‘The food will be cold, and our fire dying,’ she observed, and turned and left him there. He stood by the muck-filled pond, turning the crystal slowly in his hands. He remembered something then, something of mine. When I was just a boy and Sergeant Duril was training me to be a soldier, he always carried a sling and a pouch of small rocks. Whenever he caught me unwary, I could expect the thud of a rock against my ribs or back or even my head. ‘And you’re dead,’ he’d always tell me afterwards. ‘Because you weren’t paying attention.’
After a time, I’d begun to save the different rocks he used to ‘kill’ me. I’d had a box full of them before I’d left home.
He held up the crystal for Likari to see. ‘I want to keep this. Do you have room in your pouch for it?’
‘I can put it with your sling.’
There was a small surprise. ‘You have my sling.’
‘I found it in your old clothes. I thought you might want it again.’
‘You were right. Good boy. Put the crystal with it.’
The boy nodded, pleased at the praise, and reached to take it from me. ‘Careful. It’s sharp,’ Soldier’s Boy warned him, and he took it gingerly. He stowed it away in one of the pouches on his belt, and then looked up, a serious question in his eyes. ‘Let’s go eat,’ Soldier’s Boy told him, forestalling it, and led the way back to the dwindling fire and the food.
The fish was very good, but there wasn’t enough of it. I could feel that Soldier’s Boy had used too much magic making light and warmth. He was wearied. At this stopping place, there were alcoves hollowed into the lower walls of the chamber. He chose a large one and clambered into it, and was unsurprised when Olikea and then Likari joined him there. The moisture in the air made the chill more noticeable, as if the cold were settling on us like dew. Our combined body heat warmed the alcove, but the single blanket did little to confine our warmth. It leaked away and cold crept in. He decided that he could not afford to use any more magic that night; we’d simply have to get by.
Soldier’s Boy fell asleep. I did not. I hovered inside him in the darkness and pondered everything I’d witnessed. I am not a fool. I immediately connected the many tiny injuries he’d dealt himself and the inky slime he’d rubbed into them to the dapples on any Speck’s skin. Was it some sort of a tattoo that they inflicted even on the smallest child? Olikea’s specks had never seemed like tattoos to me. They’d even seemed to have a slightly different texture from the rest of her skin. I’d always assumed that all Speck babies were born with, well, specks on them. Was it possible that the Specks were not Specks when they were born?
Because I was aware, I think I was more conscious of Soldier’s Boy’s rising temperature. His flesh flushed warm and the tiny stinging wounds that he had dealt himself began to itch. He muttered in his sleep and shifted uncomfortably. Without waking, he scratched first one arm and then the other. He shifted again, causing the others to murmur in protest, and then dropped into a deeper sleep. Almost as soon as he did, I felt his fever rise higher.
He was ill. Very ill. He’d sickened my body and I was trapped inside it, voiceless and helpless. Every place where the crystal had pierced his skin now itched abominably, far worse than any insect bite or sting that I’d ever endured. When he sleepily scratched at the sores, I could feel how puffy and swollen each one was. I felt something pop like a blister and then the wetness of blood or pus on my skin. I longed to get up and go to the water, to wash myself and clean the injuries, but I could not rouse him at all.
He was deep into dreams now, and as his fever climbed, his dreams became brighter and sharper edged and harder to ignore. He dreamed of a forest that was impossibly green, and a wind that swept through it like the waves on an ocean, and somehow there were ships on those waves, ships with brightly coloured sails that floated and spun through the forest treetops. It was a bizarre dream of bright colours and giddy shapes, and it completely fascinated me. I wondered if my rationality would give way to his fever.
Then I felt him leave his body.
It was a strange sensation. For a moment, I felt I was alone in the fever-wracked shell. Desperately I reached out to try to regain control of my physical being. Then, as if the current of a river had seized me, I felt myself pulled away from my body and out into an otherness. It was like being dropped down a shaft. I felt shapeless and unanchored; then I became aware of the part of me that was Soldier’s Boy and held tight to him. It was like gripping the mane of a runaway horse.
He was dream-walking. I knew that right away, but it was as unlike my experience of dream-walking as a rushing river is unlike a quiet pool. It was a wandering fever dream, energized by the heat that tormented his body. He snapped from one awareness to the next, without pause or purpose, like a captured fish darting about in a bucket of water. We brushed wildly against Olikea’s dreams, a memory of shared lust, and then rushed towards Lisana. He beat furiously about her, like a bird trying to break through a window, but could not sense, as I did, how she reached towards him, trying to catch and hold the connection. She gave a lonely cry as he darted away again.
I was disconcerted that the next dreamer I glimpsed was my father. Why would Soldier’s Boy seek him out, I wondered, and then knew that he was Soldier’s Boy’s father just as much as he was mine. My father was sleeping the shallow sleep of an old man. The Speck plague and his stroke had aged him beyond his years. He dreamed of being clad once more in brave green and leading a flanking movement that would close off the enemy’s retreat. In his dream, he battled plainsmen who rode leggy white horses and brandished battle axes at him, but I saw him as an ailing old man, his age-dappled hands twitching against the blankets of his bed. We burst into his dream, and I rode by his side, as brave as he was, astride Sirlofty once again. My father looked over at me, and for one wild instant, he was glad and proud of me. I knew I had broken into a cherished dream, then, one in which I had fulfilled all his plans for me. But just as my heart warmed towards him, I grew fat, bursting my buttons and spilling out of my shirt, my flesh obscenely pale and jiggling.
‘Why, Nevare? Why? You were supposed to be me, all over again! Why couldn’t you be a good soldier for me? If I was only allowed one son to follow after me, why couldn’t you have fulfilled the task? Why? Why?’
The old man’s muffled dream shouts woke him, and he broke free of our dream touch. For a second, I saw his room at Widevale, glimpsed the fireplace and his bedstead and a bedside tray laden with all sorts of medicine bottles and thick heavy spoons.
‘Yaril! Yaril, where are you? Have you abandoned me, too? Yaril!’ He shouted for my sister like a frightened baby calling for his nursemaid. We left him there, sitting up in his bed and calling. It tore at my heart and that surprised me. I’d been able to be angry with my father, even hate him so long as he seemed like a man and my equal. To see him frail and afraid stole my anger from me. Guilt wracked me suddenly, that I’d caused him so much pain and then left him alone. For that moment, it mattered not at all that he’d disowned me and cast me out. When I had been a child, I had always felt protected by his sternness. Now he wailed for the sole child fate had left him, alone and forlorn, sonless in a world that valued only sons.
Even as my awareness reached towards him, longing to protect him from the doom he had brought down on himself, Soldier’s Boy swept on, snatching me away from him. I caught glimpses of other people’s dreams, splashes of colour against the fantastic canvas of Soldier’s Boy’s own dreaming mind. I could not focus on any one sensation: it was like trying to read the riffled pages of a book. I saw a word here, a paragraph there. He had no memories of his own; the connections that called him were mine. Trist dreamed of a girl in a yellow velvet dress. Gord was not asleep. He looked up from the thick book he was studying, startled, saying ‘Nevare?’
Sergeant Duril was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion, dreamless. No images floated in his mind, only the gratitude that for a time, his aching body could be still, his painful back flat on his mattress. My presence in his mind was like a drop of oil falling on a calm pool. ‘Watch your back, boy,’ he muttered, and sighed heavily. Soldier’s Boy swept on.
I do not think he was aware of his burning body, but I was. Someone trickled cool water past his lips. His mouth moved ineffectually. I sensed how tight and hot his skin felt. Distance and fever distorted Olikea’s words. They seemed sharp, yet I could hardly hear them. ‘He makes a fever journey,’ I thought I heard her say, and Likari piped up with a question that ended in the word, ‘name?’
Olikea’s response faded in and out of my hearing. ‘Not a baby,’ she said disdainfully, but I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. My attention was caught by a fantastic landscape. Never had I seen colours so intense. Very large objects came into my view, things so big that I could not see what they were until we had swept past them. Then, I wondered if the butterfly had seemed so large because we were close to it, or if it truly had been so immense that it covered half the sky and it only seemed small as we retreated from it.
‘Fever dream,’ I told myself, but it was hard to believe that it was only a dream and that I had not been transported into some other world.
Then, most tantalizing of all, we crashed into Epiny’s dream. Her dream was sweet and simple; she was sitting by the fireside in the sitting room in her father’s house in Old Thares. Next to her was a beautiful carved wooden cradle mounted on a rocking stand. A curtain of fine lace, all worked with pink rosebuds, draped the cradle. She sat next to it, reading a book and gently rocking the cradle. She looked up as I crashed into the room.
