Empire's Legacy- The Complete Trilogy

by Marian L Thorpe

  Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. Rilke

  Chapter Six

  We continued eastward, from one water source to another, a day's walk apart. After the third day, I no longer needed to fill a waterskin with tea. We talked as we walked, he telling me stories from Linrathe, from Sorham, or about what he knew of the East; I telling him about the Empire. There was an unreality to this time, just the two of us alone in the seemingly endless grass. It felt sometimes like we had been always walking, and would go on forever.

  At night we watched the sky, and Cillian told me more stories, the legends that belonged to the constellations. Occasionally as we sat or lay by the fire he would stroke my hair as he spoke. I found the caress comforting.

  The fire was for heat and for protection against the animals that prowled the grassland, the large bow and quiver kept near. We slept side by side for warmth, and because I felt safer that way, and as long as it was my arm across his chest or my body nestled against his back, I could relax. He could hold me when I was awake, but in sleep the weight of his arm brought restlessness, and often dreams.

  I awoke before him one morning, slipping away quietly to sit by the tiny pool a short distance from where we had slept. I liked the dawn birdsong and the movement of small animals to and from the water. I sat, letting my mind drift, watching the sun rise, the sky to the east turning from deep pink to a pale, clear blue. Another dry, hot day.

  “Lena,” Cillian said quietly, a courtesy he had adopted quickly once he realized I panicked if surprised, especially from behind. He handed me a mug of tea. I hadn't even heard him at the fire, I realized; perhaps the first time since the attack my senses had not been heightened. He sat beside me.

  “Put your tea down,” I said. I leaned over and kissed him, very lightly. He looked at me questioningly. I kissed him again. It felt comfortable. Unthreatening. Familiar.

  “Another courtship?” he murmured.

  “In a way. It might be very prolonged, though.”

  “We have all the time there is,” he answered. “You decide, leannan.” He put his arm around me, kissing my hair. I looked up at him. His eyes were very gentle. I leaned against his shoulder, wondering.

  A few mornings later, I woke to find he had turned in the night to face me. One hand rested near my neck, and as I moved slightly it slipped down against my breast. The touch did not terrify me, but instead aroused a faint tug of desire, gone in an instant, but real. I stayed still, imagining. Considering.

  We kept walking east. The land began to slope downward, almost imperceptibly and then definitely, and then below us in a fold lay a small lake, its waters rippling in the warm southern breeze that had sprung up during the afternoon. The sight of water! We had left the temple behind many days ago, and in that time had found only small seeps at each stopping place, enough to slowly fill waterskins and make tea, but not for bathing. Sweat and dust coated our skin and hair and clothes.

  “Wait,” Cillian said, a warning hand on my arm. “I know you want to go down there, leannan, but if there are people on these plains we should find them here. We need to watch for a while.” We lay in the sparse grass, watching, for some time. Small trees rimmed one end of the lake, but I could see no paths leading through them. Other than a fox stopping for a drink and waterfowl feeding among the reeds at the lake's edge, nothing moved.

  Even so, when we reached the shore, we made a thorough check for the remnants of campfires, for footprints, for any sign of human presence. Only when we had traversed the entire lake was Cillian satisfied.

  “What first?” he asked. “Hunt or swim?”

  “Hunt,” I said reluctantly. “Otherwise we will likely scare off the birds.” The ducks had seemed unperturbed by our presence, though. I wondered if they knew what people were, but caution said to harvest our supper while we could. A group of the brown birds dabbled, tails up, close to where we stood; quick work to shoot two. I gutted them, tied their feet together, and hung them over a branch. At the water's edge, I cleaned the knife and brought it back to where our packs lay.

  “Done,” I said. “Now let's get in that water.” I stripped, letting my clothes fall: I would wash them later. Naked, I ran to the lake, splashing through the shallows. The ducks scattered. I could hear Cillian just behind me. When the water reached my thighs I dived, a shallow plunge forward, and submerged, glorying in the silky, cold caress of the water.

  I scrubbed my body and hair with my hands, floated, swam, did it again, feeling my own skin. The sun sank lower. Maybe, I thought, we should stay here a day or two, wash clothes, rest. I rolled onto my back, spread my arms, let the water carry me, cleanse me.

  “Fire,” Cillian said, “and food.” On the shore we pulled on a layer of clothes. Cillian gathered wood and built the fire, practiced and fast, while I skinned the ducks, breaking the bodies along the backbone to make them lay flat above the coals.

  Our hands and faces were slick with fat after the meal. I went back to the lake to wash. The warmth of the day lingered; impulsively I pulled off my clothes and went back into the water. I heard Cillian laugh. I swam out a few strokes, flipped, and swam back to the shore.

  “Were you an otter in another life?” he teased as I combed the water from my hair with my fingers.

  “I like water,” I said. “I told you about the baths at Tirvan.”

  He crouched to wash his hands and face, scrubbing his beard to remove the grease. I watched him, suddenly conscious of my nakedness, remembering the flash of desire earlier. Could I? “Get dressed,” he said over his shoulder, his voice mild, “before you start to shiver.”

  I had to know. “I'd rather not,” I said.

  He straightened, turned. The breeze caught at his hair. “Lena?”

  “Will you…could we make love?” I asked. “Or try to, at least?” He gave me a long, searching look.

  “Are you ready?”

  “I don't know,” I answered. “But I want to try. Ivor treated me as if I were an animal to be hunted and taken. I want to feel...wanted for myself, again. Valued.” There was another word, but I could not say it.

  In the dying light I could not read the expression in his eyes. He smiled, slowly, holding out his hand.

  We lay by the banked fire, near to sleep, watching the night sky darken from cobalt to black. A late duck quacked its way onto the water.

  “Falling star,” Cillian said. I found it, followed its arc until it disappeared.

  “There is so much sky,” I murmured.

  “So much space for you,” he answered. We lay silent again. Another star fell. “Lena, for you to trust me as you did tonight was a very great gift.”

  He had been infinitely gentle, infinitely patient, leaving all decisions to me. Tonight would be a memory of tenderness, and at the end unexpected passion: his body, encompassed under mine, the warm breeze on my skin, my name on his indrawn breath.

  “How could I not trust you? You know what I need, so well, without me having to tell you. I needed gentleness tonight and that is what you gave me.” He did not answer. “Cillian?” I said, softly.

  “Lena,” he said, his voice barely audible, “the violence that was done to you is unspeakable, and not something I can comprehend. But I do know something about being used, and the cold emptiness it brings. I thought you would turn away from me, after, but you asked me to stay. That was...unexpected.”

  “I felt safer,” I murmured. That wasn't enough. I reached a hand to touch his face. “Sheltered.” He turned his head to kiss my palm, his cheek against my skin.

  “As best I can,” he said roughly. “Käresta, you asked to be wanted, and valued. You must know you are.”

  “There was a third thing,” I said slowly, “but I couldn't ask. Not until I tell you something.”

  “You can always ask, Lena.”

  “No,” I said. “Not this. Not until you know.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I was wrong when I told yo
u all I could offer you was affection. So wrong.” I hesitated, searching for courage. “Cillian, I love you.”

  He was very still. “Never did I think I would hear those words spoken to me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Lena, are you sure this is not just gratitude?”

  “I am sure. I knew, before.”

  “The third thing, then, the one you could not ask, was it to be loved? But you are, käresta. Did you not realize? You are, with all my heart.”

  I woke sometime before dawn. I moved to look at him, just making out the planes of his face. He slept deeply. I lay watching, thinking, remembering other mornings: Maya, Garth.

  It had been simple with Maya, two children growing into love, all Tirvan there to support us. Garth and I had been an interlude after war, the memory gentle. But I was no longer the girl, nor the woman, I had been. I carried so many scars, from violence recent and past, from war and loss, and his were as dark, and deeper. This night alone had not assuaged them, nor would many.

  A bird trilled, the first sound of the new day. Cillian stirred. A thought came to me, a promise. He opened his eyes. I watched as he remembered, the flicker of wonder on his face, and his slow smile beginning. The bird still sang its morning benediction, welcoming the sun.

  “Hello, my love,” I said.

  We stayed at the lake for three days, doing all the things that needed doing. I fashioned a fishhook, and we ate grilled fish as a change from birds, hanging more over smoky fires to cure. Near the southern edge of the lake I found what medicinal plants had survived and gone wild, picking mint, digging ginger root, and drying more anash leaves for tea.

  I found myself checking where Cillian was every few minutes. I couldn't quite decide why, what the nature of the reassurance I sought was. Safety? A fear he would disappear, like otherworldly beings in children's stories? When he was close, I wanted to hold him, feel his arms around me, needing that shelter.

  “Should you be,” he had asked me that first morning, “the one to choose to make love, or not, for now?” But beyond that conversation, we spoke very little of what had changed between us. But he seemed to need the same reassurance as me: I would look up to find him watching me, and he found reasons to touch me as often as he could, undemanding touches, a hand trailed across my back, a kiss dropped on my hair in passing. When we swam, which was frequently, we played, chasing each other; I was a better swimmer than Cillian, but his height and length of arm often gave him an advantage. The games usually led to making love. At night we slept curved together, and I did not dream.

  On the fourth morning the wind changed, switching round to the east, and the air was hazy. “We should be on the move,” I said to Cillian, over breakfast.

  “I suppose.”

  “We can't stay here forever,” I said gently. “As much as we both might want to.”

  He grinned. “Only until the snow came.” I laughed, but as much as he was joking, there was an undercurrent of truth to his words. We had little idea how far we had to go in the short summer of the plain.

  We climbed out from the bowl of the lake and over the eastern range of hills to find the land falling away again, down to another endless stretch of grassland, this one even drier. On a flat area not big enough to be called a plateau, the ruins of buildings stood, surrounded by a wall.

  “A camp?” Cillian asked.

  “A fort,” I corrected. “Look at the shape, the rounded corners on the wall, the layout of the buildings—it's just like the White Fort, or Wall's End. There were a lot of men here, once.”

  “It's well situated,” Cillian said. “Water from the lake above us, piped down here somehow, I'm guessing; a long view over the plain below us.”

  “But they couldn't see what might be coming from the west,” I pointed out.

  “Probably guard posts up on the hills to the west of the lake,” he suggested. He glanced back. “We were focused on the lake, looking for signs of people. I wonder what we missed.”

  “Well, we're not going back,” I said. “If there were guard posts, I can tell you exactly what they would have looked like: I've spent enough time on one. I will draw you one, Comiádh, if you like.” He laughed. We picked our way down to the ruined fort. The wind blew steadily, keening through gaps in the stone. Small wildflowers grew on the walls and lizards darted and froze among them, hunting insects. I looked around me. Buildings had crumbled, roofs and wooden stairs and doors gone into dust. I walked along the midline of the fort to where I thought the headquarters should be. A courtyard surrounded a large building. I stepped through the opening. In front of me was a line of arches, and in the centre of the courtyard lay the two halves of a huge bowl.

  Cillian had followed me into the courtyard. “But I've seen this before,” he said.

  “At the Wall's End fort,” I replied. “The headquarters there.”

  “All those years,” he murmured, “and still loyalty to a plan, a way of thinking and building.”

  “If we go inside,” I asked, “do you think the floor will be tile, and a diamond pattern on the walls?” He gestured me to go ahead. We stepped inside the space, open to wind and rain and animals. The floor was covered with a layer of sand, and the plaster had crumbled off the walls long ago.

  I shivered, although the day was warm enough. “When do you think people were last here?” All those hands, all those lives, over how many years, given to building and maintaining this place, this symbol of Casil's order—and here it lay, empty and abandoned, under the relentless sun. Was this what we would find at Casil itself, if we found it?

  “Five hundred years ago?” Cillian suggested. “I wonder if they thought, when they were building it, that it would stand long after their lives and their Empire's time were over?”

  “Do people think like that?” I asked. “Beyond their own time?”

  “Some, I think. Those who plan buildings and roads, write histories, make maps, I think they do.” He had been walking around the walls of the room, examining the stones, as he spoke. “What do you write your history for, Lena? For whom?”

  “For me,” I replied. “I thought in doing so it would help me understand what was happening, make me think about how my life fit into—into the events of the day.”

  “Was that the only reason?”

  “No,” I admitted. “I started it after Colm gave me his history to read. I did think that maybe in a small way what I wrote might be useful to another historian, some day.”

  “So you were thinking beyond your own time,” he pointed out.

  “I suppose,” I said. “But I can tell you, Cillian, that the soldiers actually building these walls and paths were not: they were thinking of their sore backs and nicked hands, and the sun or rain beating down on them, and when was the next meal break.”

  “The voice of experience,” he said lightly. I frowned: the comment felt dismissive, somehow. But I pursued my thought.

  “In what little I know,” I argued, “the histories have all been written by men like Perras or Colm, or at the very least by generals and Emperors. Not by the men or women who build the walls or—or shoe horses, or fish. Isn't their point of view important too?”

  “They would be,” he said slowly. “Very few wrote, though, as you are doing. But I wonder if there is a way to find those voices, not perhaps in written histories but in song and story. It is an interesting idea, Lena, and one that could be important.”

  A yellowhammer sang its 'See-me see-me see-me please' from atop a wall. “We should go, käresta,” Cillian said. “We likely have a long way to travel to find water.”

  There was no water, not the first night. Nor was there wood for a fire, but the dry, pelleted droppings of some deer-like creature littered the earth, and piled loosely, they burned well. We ate smoked fish, and I drank my tea, its bitterness enhanced by the dryness of my throat. The clear night turned cold and the dung fire gave off little heat; even close together, we shivered, sleeping restlessly.

  Dust and wind became inevitabi
lities, and the heat of the sun grew. Our skin turned red, and then brown. We found water the next night, another enhanced seep, so we were still on the road. I thought about the immense, incomprehensible work of building a road through this almost-desert, feeding and finding water for men and animals. The fort below the lake must have been part of that supply; would we come across another, desolate and deserted, in a few more days?

  Late on the fourth day Cillian stopped me with a silent hand on my arm. He tended to scan the horizon more distantly than I; other than for calculating direction, I was more alert to what was closer to us. I looked where he pointed. An enormous cloud of dust moved across the plain ahead of us, north to south. I tried to focus through the haze and my dry, stinging eyes, making out indistinct shapes. “People on horses?” I asked.

  “Maybe. Let's watch.” We crouched down. I found the waterskin, wet my mouth, passed it to Cillian. The dust cloud slowed, stopped. As the dust settled the shapes within coalesced into four-legged animals. No riders. No people. A herd of deer-like creatures milled around what I guessed was a water source.

  I relaxed. The thought of meeting people frightened me, although I knew that we must eventually. Cillian watched the animals. “They are nothing I know,” he said. “They have big curved heads and a single pair of horns, not branched antlers like deer.”

  “And they probably taste good,” I said, “but even one would be too much, for us.”

  “In the plains behind us, except for that lone large bird, we saw nothing that would feed a settlement,” Cillian answered. “These animals can.”

  We moved on, keeping an eye on the herd. It drifted south slowly. I guessed any grazing near the water was gone, and when we reached the spring, only thin grey soil surrounded it. The water itself bubbled up into a small pool, a bare layer of water over grey rock. It had been muddied by the animals, but I thought it would settle and clear.

  Filling the waterskins took patience and time. When they were full, I scooped water onto my face and eyes, running my wet hands through my hair. Cillian knelt beside me, doing the same, working his fingers into his beard. I kissed his cheek, leaning my head against his for a moment. “Käresta,” he murmured.