by Alex Bentley
The Nowhere ripples.
The stone has hit the lake.
It is about the Big Things. The Gods.
Suddenly, I am somewhere.
The transition is so abrupt I cry out like someone waking from the worst of nightmares.
I am somewhere. I am in the Freewood, upon my knees next to my dying father. Behind me, I can hear the slite’s shallow, sticky gasps.
What happens next—now that there is a next, now that there are moments in which things can happen—surprises me, even though I am the one making it happen.
I lift my right hand, gloved in blood, from my father’s wound and direct it to the slite, pointing at the creature with a dripping finger. My left hand, I flatten, splaying my fingers wide. And then I stop breathing. I do not ‘hold my breath’, I just stop taking breaths. My lungs are as still as a lake before it is struck by a stone.
Behind me, a voice, rumbling and wheezing, says, “It is coming.”
My heart strikes my sternum hard, trying to break free of my chest. I turn.
There is no one there. Only the dying slite.
“It is coming.”
The slite. The slite is speaking. It has no lips with which to shape the words, but it speaks them nonetheless.
“It is coming.”
The blood in its mouth bubbles with each syllable, as if the words are emerging from its lungs, as if the words are its dying breaths.
“The Gravene,” it says.
Then a ball of pale pink light, the size of an apple, lifts from the centre of the slite’s forehead, as I have heard of swamp lights emerging from the black waters at Fenfellic that some say are the ghosts of those who wish they were dead but lack the courage to end their lives. The slite’s body slumps into itself, as if all its offal and gizzards have withered to nothing, and the ball of light glides toward me. It stops an inch or two from my fingertips, hovering. It smells of blackberries and rose petals.
I stretch out toward it. Touch it.
And then I am looking up at the canopy of trees, the pale blue sky beyond. It is an afternoon sky, and we began our hunt in the small hours of the morning. I see a cloud shaped like a heart and I recall my mother telling me that seeing a heart-shaped cloud means love is looking for you from somewhere afar.
My father’s face appears.
The blood on his chin and around his mouth and nose is dry. There is panic in his eyes.
“Alys!” he whispers harshly. “We have to go. The grefa stones will be whistling, and the Jarl will be looking for the reason why. We have to go, Alys. Now!”
Chapter 3
Of Maddy Things and Crawlies
I remember the first time I heard the whistling of the grefa stones.
I was six and helping my mother plant carrots at the back of our roundhouse, in the small patch of good ground which gets the sun and is sheltered from the wind. My mother was singing ‘The Carrot Song’ which she told me must be sung while planting carrots. I later found out she had invented the song on the spot because she could see I was getting bored with drilling holes and pushing down seeds.
We push the seed into the ground
Into a hole an inch around
Not too deep, not too deep
We do not want the seed to sleep
We want the seed to turn to shoots
And reach down deeply with its roots
We want the seed to become a carrot
Carrot! Carrot! Carrot! Carrot!
Six-year-old me found that last line hilarious, but now I suspect it came about because my mother couldn’t think of a word that rhymed well with ‘carrot’.
Then, in mid-verse, my mother stopped singing and straightened from her work, wincing a little at the pain in her back.
“What is it, Mammy?” I asked.
“Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“A whistling.”
Her expression shifted by degrees from curiosity to alarm.
When next she spoke, her voice was quiet and flat. It wasn’t exactly a whisper. It was more like she did not want to give the words weight. It was as if, perhaps, she was giving herself leave to deny she’d said them at all.
“The grefa stones,” she said. Then, “Stay here, Alys. Carry on with the planting. Sing the Carrot Song.”
She handed me the seeds and hurried away.
I could hear it myself then, the whistling, high and thin.
I made a big hole in the soil with my fist and dropped all the remaining seeds into it.
“There,” I said, clapping the dirt from my palms, and followed my mother.
She was standing at the edge of the crowd that had formed outside the Jarl’s squarehouse. To one side of my mother was Roisa. Roisa had been my best friend since we were babies, but the week before we had fought over a brooch we’d found in the brambles on the edge of the Freewood and had not spoken since.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
She glared at me.
“That was my brooch,” she said. “I saw it first.”
“You did not. I saw it first. What’s happening?”
“The bowl full of grefa stones in the Jarl’s squarehouse started whistling, and now he says we have to find the Maradyn before the Cwalee come.”
Maradyn. Cwalee. I had heard these words before, but my mother and father had never schooled me in them, never knee-sat me and explained them as they did with all the other words and things in which I expressed a curiosity. I wondered why they had never done so, then realised I had never asked. And then I wondered why I had never asked.
I manoeuvred my way to the front of the crowd. The whistling was almost maddening now.
The Jarl was standing in the wide doorway of his home, a large wooden bowl held out in front of him, the bowl from which that strident whistling was coming. There was a painting of an eye on the side of the bowl, the pupil of which was a red triangle. The Jarl was strong then and mostly dark of beard, and his voice had yet to creak and wheeze. The last ten years have not favoured him.
“Men!” he commanded. “Each take a stone.”
The men did as instructed. Including my father.
“You know what must be done,” said the Jarl, once every man had his grefa stone. “Fetch your sword. Find the Glystgedder. And when you do, do not waver, do not shrink. Do that which must be done. For the good of Gafol and all the lands beyond. Go!”
The men dispersed, and the whistling of the grefa stones dispersed with them, like blood in water.
I felt a hand seize mine and looked up into my mother’s face.
“Didn’t I tell you to carry on with the planting?” she said.
“I did. All the carrots are planted.”
“Let’s go home,” she said. “I do not want you to see what comes next.”
“Why, Mammy? What comes next?”
“It doesn’t matter. You are too little to hear of it.”
“But Roisa knows,” I complained. “And she is eight days younger than me. It’s not fair. She knows all about the… Maddy Things? And the… Crawlies?”
“The Maradyns. And the Cwalee. It is not something you need to know about. When you are older, Alys.”
I continued to harangue my mother for the rest of the journey home. I was very good at haranguing. Haranguing and running and wrestling brooches from the grip of my best friend’s hand.
It was dark, and the stew my mother had made had gone cold in my father’s bowl. I had only ceased my haranguing in order to eat and to listen to the distant whistles of the grefa stones.
My mother glared at me and sighed.
“Very well,” she said. “If only to take my mind from what’s being done… what’s happening out there.” She sat down in her chair by the hearth and gestured for me to sit in the chair opposite, my father’s chair. I had never sat on it before without my father. It felt strange, too big. My legs dangled inches from the ground, and the heat from the fire warmed the soles of my feet.
&nb
sp; “Once upon a time,” I said.
“No,” my mother said a little too quickly. “This is not a ‘once upon a time’ story. It matters when this thing happened. Because it was not in the dim past where the candle flame cannot reach. It was in the bright past, where candle flames are not needed because the sun still shines there. There are yet those alive who remember those days. They are very old those people and there are very few of them, but they are around.”
“Old like Nanny Torr?” I asked.
“Older, but not by much. And there are none in Gafol. Not since Agnis Bron passed, and that was before you were born, when I was wee like you.”
“Tell it,” I said. Even at six, I knew my mother was stalling.
“Less than one hundred years ago, there used to be magic across the land, and people called it the Glyst. There were healers and seers. There were those who could make fire in the palm of their hand, and those that could talk to the beasts. There were those that could fly and those that could walk through walls. It was, according to all the stories, a wondrous time, when the Great Cities were built and the Big Roads were carved through the forests and hillsides, as a ploughshare cuts through the soft soil of a generous field. This time in our history is known as the Abundance because there was an abundance of Glyst and an abundance of all things because of the Glyst. Every town and village had its Glyster, sometimes more than one. A village Glyster might be able to heal a sick cow or encourage a crop to grow or hold back a frost. Glysting was a currency between villages. The Glyster of one village might mend the broken limb of another village’s Jarl, and in return their Glyster would see that the harvest was good in the other village.
“The most proficient users of the Glyst — the Maradyns, as they were known — gathered in the Great Cities. There were schools there, clusters of huge spiralling towers, where Glysters could be taught to control their talent, improve it, and become Maradyns.
“The cities were where the Cwalee first appeared, stepping out from holes torn in the very air. It is said they were tall and thin and white, with too many joints in their limbs. Their heads were long and fleshless, and where a mouth should be were tentacles, as of the squid that can be netted at Brim. These tentacles could grow to any length it seemed, and with them they drained the Glyst from the Maradyns, drained the Glyst and the life. Those without the Glyst who stood in their way were dispatched as easily as you or I might dispatch an insect. And soon there were no Maradyns left, and the Great Cities were as tombs.
“And then the Cwalee came for the Glysters, in the towns and the villages. And soon there were no Glysters and no Glyst. The time that followed is called the Want, because it was a time of paucity and lack, a difficult time, though there are some that called it the Calend, which means ‘opportunity’ or ‘beginning’ in the old tongue.
“But we’re lucky, little Alys, because we are living on the other side of those times. Life can be hard, but life is good. We work and receive the benefit of our labour. Thanks to the kindly nature of the Jarl.”
It was years later that I understood that these last two sentences were uttered with the nettle sting of sarcasm.
“But,” I asked, “what has all this to do with the grefa stones?”
“The stones whistle when the Glyst is near. And they whistle especially loudly when the Glyst is born.”
“When a baby Glyst comes into the world?”
My mother smiled. “No. When the Glyst is born into a person. Like an idea might be born in your head.”
I gave her my best confused look.
“Remember that time you decided to write ‘stinky’ on the back of our pig with the green dye I’d made for your father’s cloak?”
I smiled.
“And,” she continued, “when I asked you why you did it, you said…”
“I said, ‘I don’t know. It just came into my head’.”
“Well, it is like that with the Glyst. It just comes into a person.”
“And where have the men gone with the stones? What is Daddy doing?”
A darkness passed over my mother’s face, like the shadow of a black cloud as it flies above the fields.
“I shall tell you when we’ve had some tea,” she said, forcing a smile.
She must have made the tea with mamera leaves, which she normally used for herself when her back was particularly bothersome, because I fell asleep before I’d even finished the brew.
There was a little light creeping into our roundhouse when I was woken by my father lifting me from his chair. He smelled funny. It was a familiar smell but, in my groggy state, I couldn’t place it. It wasn’t the worst smell, but neither was it pleasant.
“Are you awake, little one?” he said. He sounded tired, and there was something in his voice that I didn’t recognise. Unlike the smell, it wasn’t something I knew but couldn’t bring to mind. It was a new thing. “Are you awake, Alys?”
I pretended I was not.
“Is it done?” my mother asked.
“The whistling has stopped, has it not?”
“Is it done?” my mother asked again, clearly in no mood for questions in response to questions.
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Noola.” My father spoke the name as if he were pulling it from his flesh, like a thorn.
“Noola Fynn?”
“Yes.” Again, a thorn being pulled.
“That poor thing. And Dansk Fynn, did he stand in the way?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“He fought to the end.”
“With who?”
“Me.” Another thorn plucked.
There was a long silence between my mother and father. I almost drifted back to sleep in its span.
“And who…?”
“Noola?”
“Yes.”
“Not I. I could not.”
Another silence, then my mother said, “Thank the gods. Thank them all.”
The next time I heard such relief in my mother’s voice, it was after the Ritual of the Seven Cuts and the Seven Cups, when the Jarl said, with a thread of incredulity in his own voice, “She lives. Alys lives.”
My father carried me to my bed, sliding me under the thick blankets.
Before I fell back to sleep, I recognised the smell. I’d smelled it a few months ago, when we’d slaughtered Stinky the Pig. It was the smell of blood.
Chapter 4
In the Freewood, Alone
“Alys!”
My father pulls at my arm, lifting me as easily as he lifted me from his chair all those years ago. He smells of blood now, too. His own. But the wound to his chest is now just a wound to his tunic. I remember my mother making that tunic and, for one silly moment, I worry she will be vexed at the state of it.
He sets me down on my feet and, when he is confident I will not collapse, he takes his scabbard, complete with sword, from his belt and fastens it to my belt, next to my dagger. To the other side of my belt, he ties his small need-bag, the one that contains his flints for making fire, medicinal herbs and such. He puts his waterskin over my shoulder, then takes my bow and casts it aside, replacing it with his own, and filling my quiver with his arrows.
I don’t understand what’s happening.
“Go south,” he says. “If you can see the moss high on the trees as you run toward them—and you must run—you will be heading south.”
I want to tell him I’m not stupid and know how to navigate the woods, but my mouth is dry and my tongue is asleep.
“In an hour or so, you should reach the River Woever,” he continues. “Follow it east until you come to an abandoned bridge. Cross the river there. Be careful. The bridge, like the road it serves, has not been used since the Abundance, and its wood will be soft or brittle or both. The road will take you south-east. A few hours along, you’ll see a roundhouse. It is set back and overgrown, so you will have to have your wits about you. That is where your Aunty Elsam lives. She has not seen you since
you were six, but she will know you. She is not in the jurisdiction of any Jarl and fends for herself. You will be out of the reach of the grefa stones, and your aunty does not believe the Glyst is a threat. She will feed you and care for you. She is a horrible woman, make no mistake, but she is good and loves deeply.”
My tongue finally stirs from its idleness.
“I don’t understand any of this,” I say and am embarrassed by how childlike I sound, how hopeless and afraid.
“You do,” my father says. “You understand it all.”
I nod.
I do understand. I have the Glyst. The grefa stones are whistling. And the men of Gafol are coming to slay me.
I understand. I just don’t want it to be so.
“From where you will meet the river to the bridge is a long trek,” says my father. “It will be nightfall before you reach the bridge. Do not travel by night. Find somewhere to hide and rest until dawn. Do not light a fire. A fire will attract interest.”
He takes off his cloak and rolls it up.
“This will make a good-enough blanket,” he says, and hands me the cloak.
It is his green cloak. The one that my mother made and coloured with the same dye with which I wrote ‘stinky’ on our pig. Without thinking, I slide the cloak between the small of my back and my quiver.
Then a thought occurs. A horrible thought that sends a frost down my spine and pulls my skin tight.
“What about the Crawlies?” I ask.
My father looks confused, and I realise my mistake.
“The Cwalee,” I say. “They will come for me.”
“They will not,” my father replies. He sounds almost certain.
“They will not?”
“I do not think they will come. Your aunty is horrible and loving, and she is also honest. Speak to her about it.”
“The Cwalee will not come for me?”
“No.” And then again, resolutely, “No.”
“Why? And how do you know? How does Aunty know?”