by Mark Henwick
What they had done instead was to inform the villages in the hills.
No doubt, the message had been about a dangerous, unstable criminal heading your way.
Each little village up here has Sierra Rangers: two or three fit young men of the community who supplement their income with part-time police work and environmental protection duties. And most of them have big mountain dogs, a pack of which might be capable of fighting the Hartzak, if one of them should come down from the high ranges.
Hidden from view, she runs a sweaty hand over her face. She’s heading to those high ranges, to the Sierra Arija. She wonders if that’s a sign of madness, but she’s become obsessed by Ohana’s words: Be our witness. Someone must live. Someone must tell what happened.
She’s done what she could about being a witness, about telling what happened. Out of sight of a village, but close enough to jack into their InfoHub server, she’d written a bare account of the doomed stand of Commander Benat and Training Company Bravo. She’d sent it to a server in Valdivia with an instruction to duplicate to other servers and publish on message boards in three days’ time.
Now it’s time for the other part of Ohana’s instructions: staying alive.
She needs to keep moving. She shouldn’t have fallen asleep, but she’s run out of stim tabs and her body is trying to compensate. She’s found she can fall asleep anytime she’s not actually walking.
She’s looking down a gentle slope at a dirt road. The road is long and straight. The cleared area is wide. Very wide. There’s no place to hide when crossing.
It seems wider every time she looks at it.
She should have crossed straight away. It’s not as if she’s in sight of a village.
All she’d intended was to pause, to see if anyone was coming. But she’d felt sleep dragging her down. She’d had just enough time to cover herself.
She knows she can’t go on like this, but she thinks this road must be the last one, connecting the last couple of villages, surely. Surely. No one lives higher up the mountains than this—they say the Sierra Arija is empty except for ghosts and shame. And animals.
How appropriate she’s heading up there, dragging ghosts and guilt behind her.
She has made herself a bow and arrows. She’s not bad up to about thirty paces, but it’s more for show than anything. She will not kill any Newyan, even if they’re trying to kill her. She’s not sure if she can kill even a Syndacian now.
Her bow will be useless against the Hartzak too. Stalking the little bouncing deer that dart between the trees is too hard. No, the best hunting results will come from traps, when she has time to set them. She can’t afford that time yet, not anywhere near a village.
Berries, leaves and roots. Water from streams. That has to be enough to keep her going.
And she must be going now. She can’t rest here, and lack of sleep is making her delirious.
She’s about to move when she hears distant voices on the road.
Two rangers, and a dog.
There’s no point running away now—they’ll definitely see her if she moves. She just has to hope her camouflage works, and the dog...
Well, there’s nothing left to hope for with the dog, except maybe it’s too old to scent her.
She’d pray, but she’s been too ashamed to speak to the Goddess since the battle.
She’s just so tired. She lets her head sink back down until she can see nothing but a thin strip of road.
The voices get closer. She has to listen hard over the pounding of her own heart. The men are talking about a girl in the next village. If they’re supposed to be looking for her, they really aren’t trying.
They walk into the strip of the road she can see and her heart stops. The dog is a huge young animal with a tawny ruff—a real mountain dog. He must know she’s there. He’s looking straight at her.
He can’t see me. He can’t see me.
She doesn’t breathe. Doesn’t blink.
The rangers pass out of her line of sight. She closes her eyes, breathes again. Listens to them wandering down the road with their dog until finally she can’t hear them.
The dog doesn’t care about her. As far as he’s concerned he’s just out for a walk unless something dangerous threatens his humans. And she’s not dangerous any more.
Or maybe the Goddess is still looking down on her. Holding her in Her hands.
She sends a shame-faced prayer of thanks.
She gathers her camouflage net, sweeps dead leaves to hide where she’s been lying and crosses the road, swift and grey and quiet as a phantom.
Chapter 10
Kernow
Talan and I look at each other in one of those moments of complete understanding.
We just know who’s making that banging noise, and it isn’t piskatellers.
Down in the cabin, we’d swung the table out from its normal stowed position to give us something to drape wet towels over.
Talan pushes it back, freeing the cover to the old smuggling compartment in the deck. It’s pushed open from below: Rhoswyn and Alexis are squeezed into the space so they can barely breathe.
“Out!”
As they clamber out quickly, Alexis is looking frightened and Rhoswyn stubborn.
I can barely think straight. I’m so furious at them and scared for them at the same time, I can hardly speak.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I manage to say.
“I heard Warwick tell you about the piskatellers,” Rhos says. “It’s time I saw them too.”
“You are impossible!”
Shouting is upsetting Alexis, who is a good child and would never have dreamed of an escapade like this. What can I do about Rhos? I’ll have to call Gaude—they’ll be searching for her. What will Bleyd think when he finds out about this? I’m not fit to be her parent.
I’m getting no help from Talan and Hwa. They’ve found urgent duties on deck.
Rhoswyn’s face is set. Not sulking at least, but so determined.
“It’s what you would have done,” she says.
How many times did I confront my grandfather with that face and that sort of argument? Rhoswyn is my punishment for my adolescent disobedience.
“We’ll have to turn back,” I start, but the girls get support in the form of Morgen, who leans down into the cabin.
“Duchess, it’s not dangerous,” she says. “If these young ladies are the next generation, they should be introduced to the sea folk.”
“I haven’t... I mean, it’s the sort of thing I should discuss with the duke.”
“From what the last Morrach told me, when the duke first went out, he was younger than his daughter is now,” Morgen says, and leaves us.
Although it immediately disappears, I catch a look of triumph on Rhos’ face and I know I’ve lost this one. Both girls go all soft-eyed and appealing, like they’ve practiced it. Who’d believe that of them?
“You obey what Morgen says immediately and without arguing,” I say and they nod their heads solemnly. “And there will be punishments and extra duties.”
More nodding.
“Get on deck and ask if you can climb up into the crow’s nest or something.”
“There isn’t—” Alexis begins, but Rhos drags her quickly out, leaving me to sit on the narrow bunk with my head in my hands.
I love them so much it tears my heart in two.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
When I emerge later, we’re so far out I can’t see any lights from the land.
Morgen suddenly stands, letting go of the tiller. She tilts her head one way and then the other, like a predatory bird. Her body sways to the rhythm of the boat.
“Here! Here!” she says. Her eyes are shining. “They’re rising.”
Talan drops the sail and we fold it hastily.
My heart stutters at the sound of a splash, thinking Alexis has fallen in, but it’s Morgen. She’s lying on her back, her hands waving languidly in the water.
There are stran
ge lights in the water and the sea looks odd, almost as if it’s simmering.
“Come on,” Morgen calls. “Quickly.”
Rhos and Alexis jump in as if it were the swimming pool at Pyran Manor and not the deep ocean, out of sight of land.
With a varying degrees of trepidation, near panic in my case, the rest of us follow.
Morgen orders us into a circle, then gets us to lie on our backs in the water and hold hands. Our heads point inwards and I have Rhos on my right and Alexis on my left.
It’s much warmer than I thought. The water is calm; there are no waves, just that simmering movement that stretches as far as I can see. My chest gets tighter and tighter: irrational fears of drowning, flashbacks of the undertow sucking me down, visions of creatures with teeth rising from the depths.
“Be calm,” Morgen says.
I can hear her speak as if she’s talking right in my ear, but she’s on the other side of the circle, and she can’t have spoken to me because she’s murmuring some sort of chant.
But oddly, her words help me to calm down.
And nothing happens. I don’t drown. Creatures don’t emerge and eat us. Instead we gently drift in our circle, around and around, while the sky above slowly grows lighter.
There are sounds: the wind, and a sort of echo to Morgen’s chant, like a distant crowd.
What are they saying?
Too indistinct to tell, and it’s too warm and comfortable to worry about it.
I close my eyes and drift.
Chapter 11
There’s a cold, cold wind coming off the mountains. Up here, where it seethes through the endless pine forests, the wind has a smell you can never forget: lemon peel and freshly turned earth and balsam.
And it has a sound. You can never forget that sound either. The wind sighs secrets, whispers old, forgotten stories.
I know exactly where I am. I’m in long-abandoned Berriaren, hidden away, high in the Sierra Arija on Newyan. I’m walking the black stone corridors of the Jauregia, dripping seawater, shivering.
There’s nothing but stone here. Wood and weave has long gone to dust. Rust has eaten metals from the inside. Only the timeless stone endures. Even the great pines hold their ranks away from the ancient buildings.
The tall windows of the corridors I walk past have lost their glass. They stare with sightless eyes over the great Plaza Nagusia, over the sleeping ruin of crumbling columns and fountains, to the distant, somber Auzitegi, the High Court, that sits opposite the palace.
Nothing but stone here... stone and ghosts.
And unfinished business.
A task I can’t complete. I can’t.
The image around me feels completely real, and yet I know it’s in my head. The piskatellers have found something in my subconscious and brought me here.
So real. Down to the unevenness of the floor. The seawater dripping from me, hundreds of kilometers from the ocean, as if I had been transported here instantaneously from the oceans of Kernow. The cold. The sound of the wind. The scent of the Sierra Arija.
How many stubborn Aguirre feet trod this corridor, wore these dips into the stones? How many besides mine?
I know the building. This corridor, or any corridor on this level, will lead me to the Harrera, the main reception room, where visitors came to make requests of the Aguirre when this world was newly settled.
That’s where I find Her. Her presence a contradiction: a light in the darkness, yet wreathed in shadows. As wide as the night, yet focused down to fit into my narrow sight.
I kneel. “My Lady.”
My Lady of Sorrows moves, a floating dance of black veils and haze. I see a small smile pass briefly across Her face.
“We are not what you make us, Duchess. You have these images much in your mind.”
I seek such wisdom as I may only find with Her help.
“We are not what you seek. We cannot speak like this. Come...”
She shimmers, and now the face that looks down on me is the one that I saw every day in the house where I was born. His portrait hung facing the main door. Xabat Abarran Aguirre, first of the Family to step onto Newyan. The man who made Aguirre a Name Among the Stars. He has features like a hawk, and I was always afraid of him.
He shakes his head, shimmers, fades, and in his place my grandfather looks disapprovingly down at me. I was afraid of him, too.
Another shimmer.
Shohwa, with her depthless eyes. Not so much afraid, but...
Another shimmer.
“Duchess Tremayne. Keren.” I know it’s not really her, but the shock startles the greeting from me.
“We only wear her face. You are the Duchess Aguirre-Tremayne,” Keren replies, and nods as if satisfied. “Come.”
I follow her down the stairs to the courtyard, where open arches channel the wind and tattered ghosts throng the echoing space. And out. Out into the moonlit Plaza Nagusia, to the great central fountain, its basin choked with dust and dreams.
“Why here?” Keren says, turning around and holding her arms up to encompass the ruins around us, sharp-edged and deep-shadowed in the light from the twin moons above.
Why this place, indeed? She has taken an image from the surface of my mind, and my mind has been lingering on abandoned Berriaren ever since I found the Terrans are intent on the cynical ploy of establishing a Commission of Enquiry for Newyan.
“That building,” I say, pointing across from where we stand. “The Auzitegi. That was the Court of Disputes when the Founding Families built this city.”
Keren frowns at it: the columned facade, the heavy-browed, blank-eyed stare, the shouting mouth of the doorless main entrance. The Auzitegi is imposing and monumental rather than attractive; the style harks back to the forgotten peoples of Earth, in the age where Earth was still our only home. But it has become the style for buildings of its type on Newyan. The Auzitegi is the exact template for the building of the Bureau of Justice in the capital, Iruña.
My stomach twists at the lie that name has become. Bureau of Justice.
“You seek there for justice?” she asks.
I laugh bitterly. “In the time of Berriaren, that’s where people went for justice when it failed elsewhere. That’s where I went. Where I should return. But I don’t have the strength.”
Justice is hidden in the Auzitegi, but it might as well be as lost as Berriaren itself if I cannot reach it.
Keren’s face tilts until it seems the moon gleams from her eyes. “Justice is the blade that can cut both ways. Few truly seek it, Duchess. Fewer take it on themselves to deliver it. Yet what would your grandfather have said? What is life without honor, and honor without duty?”
My eyes blur at the sharp edge of the wind.
“Words learned at his own grandfather’s knee. As that grandfather did in turn, no doubt, all the way back to Xabat Abarran Aguirre who laid the foundations of that palace.” Keren eyes the Jauregia.
“The Jauregia is just a big house,” I say, “not really a palace.”
“Yet they called it a palace and laid the burden of leadership on your family. Except they called it honor and duty.”
“And shame.”
That knowledge, I sense the piskatellers have found in my head—they know why we bear this shame, why Berriaren is abandoned to ghosts.
“It is not your shame,” she says. “Or at worst, not yours alone to bear.”
I know she is telling the truth as she perceives it, and that she has the wisdom of many generations of humans she has spoken with, but I am the first from Newyan. She cannot understand why the shame of the Founding Families does not diminish by being shared, nor why revealing it will break everything.
“You are wrong in other things, too,” she says. “As is your mind-meshed sister.”
Hwa enters the plaza and joins us.
“I’m sorry, Zara.”
“What for?”
“I delayed telling you. I felt you needed to be rested before—”
“What di
dn’t you tell me?”
But Keren speaks before Hwa can answer. “This. Look,” she says.
The dust in the basin of the great fountain stirs and begins to spin. It swirls out around us and when it clears, we’re on a hill. It’s the scene of a desperate battle and we’re surrounded by bodies.
There are two women left alive in all this.
The older one staggers to her feet. Better old ghosts than new ones, she says.
There’s the sound of a distant aircraft. I can see the women’s faces. They’re both streaked with dirt. The younger seems familiar, even with her head bowed down so I can’t see her well.
What is this I’m seeing?
Something Hwa knows about? Something that has actually happened? On Newyan?
The older one pushes the younger away.
Go now, she says. Run and hide, girl. Run where they will not follow. Hide where they will not look. The Goddess of Mercy guide your steps and hold you in her hands, Kattalin Espe Aguirre.
The girl turns, I see her face, and suddenly Keren, Hwa and I are standing beside the dead fountain in the ghost city of Berriaren again.
Kattalin!
“She’s alive?” My question comes out as a croak.
It’s Hwa who answers.
“Yes, as far as the Xian delegation on Newyan know. She joined a small resistance force and survived a battle with the Syndacian mercenary troops that the Hajnal deployed near the city of Cabezón. There has been no news of her capture.”
My little cousin Kat, who was sent away to Valdivia to avoid my bad influence. Still alive.
“I’m not released from my oath,” I mutter.
In my mind’s eye, my grandfather is looming over me during one of those arguments about what was happening on Newyan. He was berating me for refusing to believe that there was a force seeking to undermine and destroy the foundations of our society.
Swear to me, he shouts. Swear to me that you will never abandon the family so long as one of them is alive.
I swear, I shout in reply, and he goes silent.
Then that will suffice for me. He turns on his heel and marches out, leaving me trembling with a confusion of pride and anger.