Darkburn Book 4: The Haunt of Ternss by Tayin Machrie - HTML preview

Chapter 26

Yaret was deep in thought. In front of her Tamu and Leor rode on side by side. On previous days she’d seen the two men talking eagerly. Now not a word was exchanged.

She supposed they had as much to think about she did. But then all other thoughts were overtaken by the scene that opened on their left.

A flatness like a cloth stretched tight across a giant loom. At first, a mere grey ruffled fringe along its front. Then as they came closer lacy shades of white appeared; a vast shivering sheet of silk flashed greenish-grey behind. The haze of felted wool on the horizon.

And she could hear it – whisper, whisper; then a long roaring sigh as if some enormous animal were settling down to sleep. Once heard, it was there always. It was like wind in the trees, but there were no trees. She held her breath until the sound returned. Whisper, whisper, sigh.

The Vonnish train had turned west from the standing stones with their interesting inscription, to ride along low sandy cliffs made sharp by grasses and dappled with green dials of some hairy flat-leaved plant. Further on, the cliffs reared up dramatically: on their top a dark uneven outline stood.

Initially Yaret took it for a rocky outcrop, but gradually the shape transformed itself into a building – a large one; very large. By the time they were within two miles of it she guessed it had at least three storeys, and perhaps had once had towers, although its ragged top displayed its ruin.

Despite its impressiveness the Riders did not increase their speed. Instead they slowed, drawn rather to the sea. Huldarion, at the front, pulled up his horse to gaze out at the grey rippling fabric. When he dismounted his councillors did likewise, and they began to scramble down the sandy slope towards the water.

Then the whole army halted, fragmenting into scattered groups who left their carts and horses to meander west along the shore. Like stray invading beasts, they wandered here and there upon the silver strand, while between them small unobtrusive seabirds scooted anxiously away and then rose up in curving flocks to skim the waves and circle round in wide arcs before settling down again.

Yaret walked over to the sea’s nudging, whispering edge. The shore was long enough for there to be no sense of crowdedness. Behind her birds swung effortlessly on the breeze: above her, pile on luminous pile of thick white cloud climbed up like layered branches of snow-laden trees: and in between, just this, a shifting world of subtle cloth transformed to water. She stood on pale sand, watching pebbles being drowned and buried and refound a dozen times a minute by the murmuring sea.

All other things were gone, washed out of mind. Her current nagging worry, about that giant stone, had lost its urgency. If her dead had stood behind her shoulder for much of the long journey, on this wide shore she felt them step aside and look out, as she did, upon the endless grey. Together they put aside their burdens of resolve and grief, and watched the evasive pliancy of water, both wide awake and dreaming. The melding hues tugged at her gaze, drawing themselves back and back until she was not certain which was sea and which was sky.

She felt her breathing slow to match the soft unhurried pulsing of the waves. For her and her imagined gazing dead it felt like journey’s end. Obandiro slept. She knew there was still far to go; yet to this place and to this moment she belonged, and it to her, and so she felt her mind relax at last. The water spoke to her and though she did not know the words she understood the meaning. Here I am. This place is now. This time is always.

After a while she turned her head and saw Rothir was watching her.

“It’s so flat,” she said, although the surface was tufted with white feathers where the wind plucked at it, and further out the extraordinary plain of sea swelled as if some submerged hill were waiting underneath.

Rothir smiled. “You like it?”

“Like is the wrong word,” she said, “but yes.”

“Look at them,” he said indulgently, “those children,” and he nodded to the group of Riders twenty yards away. Theol and Sashel and some others were stripping off their shirts and boots, and finally their breeches, so that clad only in their linen underbreeches they ran towards the waves and dashed themselves in. She heard their cries, as staccato as those of the seabirds wheeling overhead.

“Is it allowed?” she asked.

“I don’t think Huldarion will try to stop them. He doesn’t seem to mind, as far as I can tell from here.”

“It’s good to see Sashel looking happier. He’s romping like a nine year old,” she said, for Sashel was trying to duck Theol, unsuccessfully. “They remind me of the boys in Obandiro. Mind, Sashel isn’t much more than a boy himself.”

“You think so?”

“Are you going to join them?” Yaret asked.

Rothir shook his head. But then he bent, pulled off his boots, and rolled his breeches up above his knees before he waded off into the shallow water.

She watched his legs, strong against the gleam of waves. Then she pulled off her own boots and hose and stuffed them in her saddlepack before she walked into the water after him. The wooden foot was not exactly ugly, but it was odd. Not quite a foot; more like an elongated hoof, she thought, as if she were half human and half some peculiar beast. A chimera.

Once she was standing in the waves, however – so cold, and surprisingly forceful in their heave and pull – that hoof was hidden, from anybody else, at least. Looking down at it she saw around her mismatched feet another set of waves: the underwater ripples of the sand picked out in silver laced with charcoal. There was an impelling rhythm in that pattern. It would look good in cloth, she thought, if only you could weave it in. But difficult to replicate those curves, those waves, the way the ocean did so effortlessly. A twill, maybe, but with variable stepping, if you could just work out how to modify the harnesses.

“I wonder how you could set waves on a loom,” she said, but thankfully Rothir did not hear through the swish and hiss of the real sea.

Further down the beach more Riders were discarding garments and starting to wade in. Zan and a couple of Ioben hunters were egging each other on loudly: Zan, who had suffered the same deep loss as she had, was now seen laughing for the first time in her experience. Even Tamu stood ankle-deep with shoes in hand. Felbe pushed Nerobe, who pitched in fully clothed and then leapt out to chase Felbe with enthusiastic glee and pull her down into the waves in turn. There were shrieks and splashing arms. A welter of new sea-creatures.

Elsewhere, others hunted for flat stones to skim across the water. A herd of horses, now let loose, trotted experimentally along the water’s fringe, seeming to enjoy the wet smack of their hooves: Poda, freed of duties, tossed her head and frisked with Narba on the sand.

There was no lack of space for all this revelry. The splashes and the shrieks were lost amidst the cries of countless seabirds and the shifting vastness of the sea. A hundred yards along the beach, Huldarion stood next to Meya, looking back at his Riders, apparently indulgent of their play.

Nearer by, small flocks of birds were pecking at the shore, almost invisible until some boisterous human came too close. Then the flock would snap abruptly into view, scuttling to the shoreline before all the birds took off and as if connected by invisible threads swirled just above the waves, wingtips almost touching, to land again a little further on. An endless dance.

She looked down at the world beneath the water. A tiny crab terrorising tinier fish. Shells: pretty things. She scooped them up and watched the water drip from pink and orange whorls. Once they were half-dry she put them in her pocket. Sea shells were unknown in Obandiro, so these would be rare treasures for the children.

And such smooth pebbles! Even smoother than the river pebbles that collected underneath the Dondel Bridge, their colours livelier. She plucked out one: an oval, crimson-grey with a white band running round it like a belt.

“Look,” she said to Rothir.

He looked and smiled. “You’ll find better. That one’s not perfect.”

“It doesn’t need to be perfect,” she replied, “just interesting.” She put it in her pocket with the shells. But she kept searching for a better one; or for one that Rothir would consider better.

“Look,” she said again after a moment, “this one is like an egg. Pure white. Laid by some sea monster far out in the deep, no doubt, and washed up to the shore.”

Again he smiled. This time he took the stone and turned it in his hand. “I wonder what it will hatch into.”

“A stone serpent, about this long. It will bite holes in your pockets.”

“I’ll risk it.”

She watched him slide it in his pocket. The sea brushed past them like a cool breath, a warm wind, a kindly memory. She wished the moments could be hours; the hours days: the days forever.

“It’s odd,” she said, hearing her words be washed by the waves. “How it sinks into you.”

“It is odd,” said Rothir, gazing out across the flecked grey-blue and silver. “I seldom come to the sea and yet it always feels like home.”

“Home is where,” said Yaret, and stopped.

He looked at her. “Home is what?”

“Nothing.”

He turned to look away again, seeking the horizon. But she heard the sentence carried on the waves, an echo from that stone sea inside the Uin-Buin Hills, in the heart of the Fioronhall; the shimmering voices that had circled round the cavern.

Home is where you are. The words washed in and settled round her like a flock of birds. So many meanings held within them.

Home is where you are, Rothir, she thought. Home for you is here, and nowhere. Home for me is nowhere too. But it is where you are. The sea sinks into me, and so do you. You are written on my heart and eyes and ears and body, though you do not know it.

I have known it for a long time. And now, here, on this abandoned shore at the end of the Red Roads, I have to face it. You are the reason I am here, so far from my own people. I told myself that it was for the dead, but it was also for the living. For one man.

Home is where you are. Without you where would I be now? Alone and lost.

The waves washed over her feet as if performing some insistent service. She had no idea what Rothir was feeling. But it was unlikely to be anything like her. Dreams of Caervonn, maybe, some glowing long-anticipated future that did not have her in it. She could not stay in Caervonn. She had to go back. And even if his feelings were the same as hers, he could not desert Caervonn for Obandiro.

So there it was. And how absurd to think she would be lost without him. She wouldn’t be alone; she would still have friends, a purpose and a future. She would make her future for herself. Nothing had changed.

Yet everything had changed. Was continually changing. And here she was, standing with him at the world’s end, at the border of unfathomable mystery.

At last he sighed and turned away.

“Look,” he said, “even Gaelera is joining in the fun.”

She looked across to where Gaelera stood, having waded a few yards into the sea. Oddly, she had not bothered to lift her skirts, which lay resting just beneath the surface; unheeded waves lapped at the embroideries.

“Like a jellyfish,” said Rothir.

“What’s a jellyfish?”

“Although on second thoughts, anyone less like a jellyfish than Gaelera is hard to imagine. A sea-turtle maybe, with her carapace.”

“I suppose she’s enjoying herself,” said Yaret doubtfully, for Gaelera stood quite rigid in her sodden, floating skirts and gazed out to sea with a perfectly blank face. Behind her, on the shore, Maeneb jigged and winced as if she felt she ought to follow her and didn’t want to. “Maeneb won’t like the sand between her toes,” she added.

“Do you like it?”

Yaret nodded. While her feet were hidden he had probably forgotten that she only had five toes, not ten. So let him forget, she thought, forget all troubles, all responsibilities, for a while. It was a joy for her to see him so at ease.

“Weird, isn’t it? This sea thing.”

“What?” She turned towards the new speaker. Her heart sank; for it was Inthed, her least favourite of all the men of Gostard with whom she’d ridden into battle.

At least there was no risk of him trying to put his hand down her breeches here, in Rothir’s company – and moreover in the presence of his burly captain, Jerred. Him she was glad to see. Jerred managed to look more like an old soldier every time she met him, even with his boots thrown round his shoulders by their laces and stout scarred legs planted firmly in the waves.

“Weird, isn’t it?” repeated Inthed. “And it’s only water. Moves about a lot, though.”

“It’s known for it,” said Rothir, with amused civility.

“How are you, Jerred? Inthed?” she asked the pair.

“We’re good enough,” said Jerred. “Apart from wondering what we’re doing here, dibbling for crabs at the land’s end. You wouldn’t happen to know the answer, would you?”

“You must think me very close with Huldarion if he would tell me that. No doubt he has his reasons,” said Yaret, and she looked at Rothir, who merely looked inscrutable.

“Ah well,” said Jerred. “Not that I’m complaining. Just not what I expected.”

“Think I’ll sign up for a soldier, if this is all there is to it,” said Inthed, grinning.

“Enjoy it while it lasts,” advised Rothir.

“Oh, I will, I will. A little paddle and a nice hot dinner, that’s the life. A long way from the mud of Melmet, aren’t we, Yaret? A long way indeed.”

“Don’t worry, Inthed,” said Jerred, “your debtors back home won’t have forgotten you.”

“But I thought Yaret might have. She’s hardly come over to say hallo since then. Me and Yaret, we’ve got history together,” announced Inthed to Rothir. “I saved her life once.”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Yaret.

“Ah, how can you deny it? And after you told me that I fought well! Don’t you remember how grateful you were?”

“It’s true you fought well when you weren’t busy making a nuisance of yourself,” she said, and Jerred laughed.

Rothir said, more seriously, “How did he make a nuisance of himself, Yaret?”

“It’s not important.” Because Rothir was giving Inthed a long, hard look. In one way it was gratifying. But she wished Inthed would leave.

Inthed held his hands up. “All right! I know when I’m not wanted. Until you need me to save your life again. You might do, with that wooden leg.”

“As I remember, we all saved each other’s lives several times,” she answered a touch wearily. “And Jerred saved the most.”

“My pleasure,” said Jerred, and winked at her. “Ignore the turnip-head. He’s actually slowly turning into some semblance of a man. Make a good scarecrow one of these days.”

“I’m sure,” said Yaret, although other epithets for Inthed sprang to mind. But there was no need to insult him.

Jerred looked at Rothir. “You don’t need to worry about my idiot friend.”

“I don’t,” said Rothir.

“Good. Hang on to that one,” said Jerred. “Peg leg or no. Come on, hero.”

The two men wandered off, kicking sand at each other, and left Yaret feeling embarrassed. Staring out to sea again, with all its undeniable weirdness, she both wished and feared that Rothir would make some comment. He did not.

“Oh, there’s Parthenal,” she said. “Enjoying a swim.” Parthenal had stripped off and thrown himself into the water behind Theol and the others, but without their laughter. He swam with fast and practised skill, up and down the line of waves, before returning to the shallows and emerging dripping. Yaret glanced at that well-honed body and the clinging under-breeches. Parthenal undressed was a banquet for the eyes.

Not that Parthenal himself would care. He was glowering as he strode back up the shore and picked up his shirt to dry himself. So he had not forgotten all his troubles, whatever they might be.

“What’s he so cross about?” she asked.

Rothir gazed over at his friend. “I’m not quite sure,” he said, “but I expect he’ll sort it out. He usually does.”

“Perhaps you should talk to him.”

“I do. Quite frequently. But I can’t solve his problems for him.”

“Do you even ask him what they are?” she countered.

“I’ve a fairly good idea what at least one of his problems is,” said Rothir drily, “and I have no intention of solving that one for him.”

Again she was embarrassed, and turned her head away. “There’s Tamu over there, looking lonely,” she said. “I’ll go and say hallo. I like Tamu.”

She walked towards him through the water. Rothir did not follow, but strolled over to Parthenal who was pulling on his wet shirt with angry jerks. She saw Rothir say something casually; to which his friend snapped out some sharp reply.

As she waded through the shallows, the water now felt almost warm. Its pull at her legs was like the tugging of an eager dog. She noticed that Tamu too was surreptitiously watching Parthenal, although as soon as he saw Yaret he looked down at the frilled ridges of the lapping waves. He bent to touch one as if stroking it.

“It’s hard not to think of it as alive,” she said, when she was close enough to speak. “Have you visited the sea before?”

“Once. When I was a boy,” said Tamu. He was not as shy with her as with some others. “It was far west of here. But that was a rocky, even dangerous beach. It wasn’t like this one.”

It occurred to her that Tamu had led a rocky, even dangerous life; especially if she was correct in her surmises. Kelvha would have been a perilous place indeed. He would have grown extremely used to subterfuge.

She splashed over to stand next to him. “About that stone,” she said. “The inscription you read out for us.” Nobody was within earshot. Even if they had been, the waves would have drowned her words for anybody else.

“What about it?” said Tamu with caution.

“How old do you think it really was?”

“Oh… it’s hard to tell. Certainly not as old as the stones themselves. Those sort of runes were in use three to five hundred years ago. So somewhere in that period.”

“Three to five hundred,” said Yaret.

“Yes.”

“I see.” The thought that had been worrying her since they had left the stones now returned with force. She tried to frame it into a question. “Tamu, when you read the runes–”

“What’s that over there?” Tamu raised his head and was staring out to sea. She thought: he’s trying to change the subject. But when she stared out the same way, she was baffled too by what she saw.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “But I don’t understand the sea. Maybe this is something that it does.”

“Swelling up like that? Is it a wave?”

Some distance out, she could not tell how far – a half mile? a full mile, maybe even two? – the surface of the sea had risen in a bulge. A thin mist drifted just above it as it heaved and streamed, a shining hill of water.

“Could it be a whale?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I suppose so.”

Several Riders stood up straighter to look out. Rothir and Parthenal gazed together, shading their eyes. A burial barrow, thought Yaret, but made of water, not of earth. Around it the waves flickered like brief ashen flames. A flock of seabirds that had been resting on the surface took flight and swept up in a long dark smoke above the swollen sea.

“I’ve read about giant waves,” muttered Tamu. “Very destructive. If that’s one, we should retreat.”

Some of the bathing Riders were already retreating, wading to the shore with backward glances. Like Tamu, Yaret stepped back out of the water. Her feet felt oddly heavy on the sand – even the wooden foot that always made Rothir flinch.

But there she paused; for the mound of water was gradually falling. The surface stilled, rippling only with small ordinary waves. Whatever had been beneath it remained as yet unborn; they looked out on a level field of sea that stretched back to the sky.

“A whale, I suppose,” said Tamu, sounding a little shaken. “The sea is a strange place.” He began to trudge away from her, shoes in hand.

“Tamu. Wait. Please. There’s something else I need to say, about that stone.”

He took a few more steps before he paused and waited, still turned away.

So she spoke to his back. “When you read those runes, Tamu, you made up the meaning.”

It came out more bluntly than she’d planned. Tamu spun round to look at her with shock and fear.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. I don’t blame you, Tamu. I would have done the same. They were all waiting for you to translate the carving, and it needed to say something harmless.”

“That is a baseless accusation,” he said forcefully. “You’re guessing.”

“I’m not guessing,” said Yaret. “I know it. Because when you read the runes aloud, I understood the words.”

He stared at her. “What? How could you? It was a completely unknown language. Nobody there could understand it – that was obvious.”

“Oh, they could have,” she said. “If the Ioben hunters had been there, they would have recognised it. I’m surprised that Leor didn’t, because I think he knew it once. It was Bandiran, or a language rather like it: an antique version.”

Tamu’s expression was one of pure dismay. “Bandiran?” he breathed. “Your tongue?”

She nodded.

“What did it mean? What did the inscription say?” He was apprehensive.

So she hastened to reassure him. “Don’t worry, it said nothing dreadful. Nothing about victory to the stonemen, or to the righteous either. That was a good attempt you made, but it was off the mark. You translated Wolathu as triumph, didn’t you? But Wolathu was a person.”

“A person?” said Tamu blankly.

“The stone said: Wolathu is the owner of these lands. To Wolathu is due tribute from those who wish to travel north of this mark and west of the hills. Effectively, the inscription’s just saying Watch out, Wolathu lives here.”

“Who’s Wolathu?”

“I don’t know. I’m guessing some tribal chief four or five hundred years ago.”

Tamu let out an audible breath, almost a groan of relief. Then he said, “I had to tell them something. Inscriptions can be very dangerous things. I’ve been made all too aware of that... Don’t tell anybody else!”

“No, I won’t. But Tamu, what worries me is not the meaning. That’s mundane enough. But why is it in Bandiran? How is that possible? The Bandiran live hundreds of miles northwards – and we migrated there from further north again. How could any of my kinsfolk have been so far south, here at the end of the Red Roads, by the sea?”