Blindsighted Wanderer

by E. Hibbs

  Everywhere was a cacophony of activity and excitement; laughter hung over everything. A troupe of entertainers stood nearby, and Silas glanced at them in turn. A juggling duo was performing tricks with leather balls filled with sand. Two men dressed as a king and a queen sat opposite one another, heavily engrossed in a game of chess – and watched by onlookers who seemed just as interested. Silas supposed that there was probably some kind of bet between them, in favour of the ‘king’ or the ‘queen’ winning.

  There were groups of people selling fruits, fish, and fabrics. Others offered more expensive items, such as new cartwheels. A large boar was roasting on a spit beside a great keg of ale, and the mouth-watering smell of meat was pungent in the heat haze. The resident blacksmith of Ullswick was offering metalwork for a reduced Midsummer price, from his forge at the edge of the square. A group of young boys were occupied with a rather noisy game of skittles, and girls – having been shunned by their brothers – were running through the crowd, playing tag.

  Over the din of voices, Silas could hear the gentle strumming of a jolly tune on a lute, and the dual sound of a pipe and tabor. The melodies filled his ears, and in searching for their source, he found the Travellers.

  He was a little surprised for not having noticed them straightaway. Sitting atop their own carts – which, he noted, were being pulled by horses rather than donkeys – their voices danced above the familiar murmur of Valley-dialect. Like a heady mist of pollen floating on an updraft, their words were rich and laden with a strange mixture of sounds from another place. For Silas, the Ridges were the boundaries of his whole world. All Valley-folk were born in the Elitland, they lived there, and they would die there. It was the way it had always been. To hear and see people from outside was one of the rarest things to happen across.

  Patrians, they were known as to the residents of the Valley. It meant ‘homeless’, although Silas was sure they called themselves something else. He had never seen their race before, but the older generations had known of them coming and going, years ago. Tales and legends of these rootless people had drifted through conversations for years. Another, bitterer name that Silas had heard used for them was Raptors: ‘thieves’. But as he watched them with a quiet fascination, he decided that it was surely misplaced. Going about their business as honestly as any other, there seemed nothing about them which could be deceitful.

  A tanned girl of roughly his own age – with jet black ringlets and striking grey eyes – looked over, and Silas suddenly realised he had been staring at her. Blood rushed to his face and he quickly turned away, beginning to pick idly at the hem of his tunic. After a few moments, he risked a glance back at the carts, to see if she was still watching him. She was, but before he could pretend he hadn’t seen, she shot him a sharp-toothed grin and winked. Then she turned her attention to a man at the front of the crowd, who was holding up a slice of salted pork to trade.

  “Hey, Silent Si!”

  Silas jumped and looked down to see Raphael swinging the first of two canvas sacks off his shoulder and onto the back of the cart. Silas swallowed, glancing once more at the Patrian girl, but only caught a flash of her hair disappearing behind two men. He shook his head and turned around, grasping a leather tankard that Raphael was offering up. Silas took a grateful swig; then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Thank you, Raph,” he said, as his brother pulled himself up onto the seat.

  “No trouble,” Raphael replied with a cheery grin, and raised his own drink. “To health and life!”

  They rammed the tankards together and each put the rims to their lips. The strong ale went straight to Silas’ head and he had to blink a few times, but he was so used to it that he recovered fairly quickly. The two of them settled back, gazes straying back to the Fayre. In the centre of it all, two young men were wrestling, each of them sitting piggyback on the shoulders of two others. The crowd had formed a circle around them and were looking on in amusement, calling out the boys’ names in encouragement. A huge cheer went up as one caught the other in a headlock, pulling him from his ally’s shoulders, before all four of them crashed to the ground.

  Raphael laughed as he lowered his tankard. “God!” he gasped to the sky. “Please have mercy on Judgement Day!”

  *

  After finishing their ale, Silas and Raphael made their way home. On the return journey, they exchanged places, and it was Raphael who walked alongside the donkey. Silas sat atop the cart – and although he secretly wished for his brother to stumble so that he could take a turn to poke fun, it was himself yet again whose mind strayed.

  At first, he thought about the Patrian girl, and the way her long hair had seemed to shine in the sun. He wondered how hair could shine like that. It was as though a handful of stardust had rained down on her head, and into her eyes.

  He shook his head in frustration and looked away from the track that would take them back. It was the only road, stretching from one end of the Valley to the other. Beginning at Ullswick, it led through Cedarham and finally Fanchlow, towards the single high Pass that was the only entrance and exit to Silas’ world.

  No-one knew how old the Elitland was, and to most, it was simply home. The late afternoon sun was warm on Silas’ back as it moved slowly on its course, feather-like wisps of white cloud drifting over the great golden eye. It lit up the fields and the solitary houses sprinkled here and there; nestled in the shadows of the swarms of small hills on the Valley flat. Natural terraces of earth rose across the grassy floor, and the river swirled as it caught the wheel of a mill. The mountainous snow-capped Ridges stood proud and tall, nestling the green gem at their heart in an ever-protective embrace. Rising on the steep slopes, trees sparkled in an emerald montage of oaks, rowans, birches and willows. They stretched high, and their boughs rustled softly – as though they were whispering exchanges that only their tree brethren might know.

  And then, to the west, in the shadow of all, was the Wall. The Wall that marked the boundary of the forbidden place that lay on the other side.

  Immediately, all thoughts of the girl were chased away. Silas had stopped wondering about the Wall many years ago. It had stood for centuries, dividing the land, from the outskirts of Fanchlow all the way to Elizabeth Falls in the far south. Everybody grew up knowing of its presence, and was taught to award it a view of nervous respect. Indeed, Fanchlow itself was the smallest village in the whole Valley, simply because of how close it stood to the northern section of the Wall.

  Nevertheless, Silas could remember back to when he was much younger, and he had spoken to Raphael about it. Years ago, in the mind of a child, it was never dangerous or dark, because of Silas’ infallible belief that nothing could – or would – tear through his brother.

  ‘Raph,’ he had asked, ‘what’s on the other side of the Wall?’

  ‘Our wall? Why, the rest of Fanchlow, silly!’

  ‘Nay, not our wall. The other Wall. The one in the west.’

  ‘Ah, that Wall. Now, that’s a forbidden place, Si. We must never go there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know why. Nobody does. We just know that we are not welcome there, and that there is a huge Lake: even larger than the oxbow-shaped one at Ullswick; and so deep they say it is bottomless. All I know is what everyone else knows. It is called Evertodomus to us.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means home of the demons. And I want you to promise me that you will never go there. I might not get you back.’

  “You alright, Si?” asked Raphael. Silas jolted back into the present and glanced up. The corners of Raphael’s mouth turned up into a grin. “Oh, my Silent Si. What are we to do with thee?”

  Silas rolled his eyes and looked over his shoulder to check the spice sacks. He hoped that Raphael hadn’t noticed his faraway look too much, but the thought of the Wall had brought another to his mind. One that, in its own personal way, was much darker than talk of demons.

  “Raph?”

  “Aye?”<
br />
  “How long do you reckon Pap has left?”

  Raphael went quiet. That was completely unlike him: he was always smiling and cracking jokes. It was Silas himself, after all, who had earned the word ‘silent’ as part of his nickname. In all truths, the two eldest Atégo boys couldn’t have been more different, and yet it was just that which brought them so close. Both knew they could voice anything with each other, and be ignorant of the boundaries that would exist between other members of the family.

  But Silas knew that Raphael’s pause was well-founded. Both were aware that their father, Julian, was extremely weak. He had been sick for some time, and in the past month, he had worsened at an alarming rate. It was a fact that they, their mother Araena, and the eldest daughter Mekina had been careful to soften for their younger siblings – but all knew that Julian’s days were numbered. It had now become a case of counting down the time to go.

  Eventually, Raphael spoke. “It will not be long, Si.”

  Silas cast his eyes down and picked at a loose thread in the leather of the bridle. His brother’s voice was quiet and sullen, almost lost among the cartwheels’ clatter. But Silas’ ears were keen, and even if he hadn’t heard Raphael’s exact words, he would have known from the very tone what the answer was.

  “Are you afraid?” Raphael asked.

  Silas pressed his lips together for a moment. “Aye, of course.” He paused. “And ye? It must feel terrible for you.”

  Raphael nodded to himself. As the eldest son, he would become the head of the household after their father passed away. All responsibilities would fall to him, including the title of one of the Elders of Fanchlow. Their family was – compared to most of the others – reasonably wealthy: their house was slightly larger; they owned more livestock, and a good amount of land on both the Valley floor and the higher pastures. This had earned the head man a privileged say amongst others of a similar status in their community. So Raphael would be taking up a greater mantle than he would if they possessed as much as their neighbours.

  None of them knew the cause of Julian’s illness. When he had first fallen in the field, and the fever had come down on him, they had thought it was the sweating sickness, which would have been bad enough. But then his hot and cold spells turned to a permanent chill, and his eyes began to mist, as though the depths of a lake had filled them to the brims.

  And to make matters even more mysterious, no-one else in the family – or indeed the whole of Fanchlow – had suffered from it. That was the most confusing of all: whatever it was, it would only wrack Julian, as though some kind of demon had entered him and was drowning him from the inside out. The priest of their local church, Father Fortésa, had attended to him and tried to drive whatever it was from his body, but it hadn’t worked. Nothing had, and the neighbours had drawn further away from the family every day. A rumour had been stirred up that their name was cursed, and it made Silas grind his teeth in anger whenever he heard mention of it.

  My father is a poor sick man, and nothing more or less, he would silently rage behind closed lips and blazing eyes. How dare you treat him like some product of the Devil!

  Journeying the length of the Valley took two days, and the road eventually began its steady incline towards the Pass. Over the hill, the houses of Fanchlow rose up as a blur of brown against the green backdrop of the fields. Silas and Raphael found it immediately, and their hearts lifted with the sight of home. The faint low rumble of the cattle’s moos drifted down from the summer pastures high above, and a pungent fragrance of garden herbs was on the breeze.

  Soon enough, the small village came into full view, and they heard the sound of voices and giddiness in the streets. Today, everybody had taken a day free from working the fields – while a great many had travelled to the Fayre, others had stayed home to drink and dance and make merry. It was only beginning to settle down now, when the sun was hovering low over the Western Ridge. But it wouldn’t be long before the great bonfire was struck on the village green, to celebrate the highest point of the sun.

  Raphael guided the donkey past the first few houses – the cart only just scraping past the walls of two buildings in some cases – and eventually they arrived home, the door surrounded by white roses. Large cruck timbers towered above, forming an A-shaped frame beneath the sloping thatched roof. They entered the small open shelter nearby that was used to protect the cart from the worst of the elements, and Silas called out once they were fully inside to tell Raphael to stop.

  “Whoa, girl,” Raphael said soothingly under his breath, gently pulling on the reins under the donkey’s chin. She came to a halt with a snort, and he ruffled her short mane before glancing up towards the house.

  “Ma?” he called. “Mekina?”

  There was no answer. Raphael gave a shrug and began to remove the donkey from the confines of the cart.

  “I suppose they’re at the celebrations, still,” he mused.

  Silas nodded to himself. “Aye.”

  Raphael led the donkey away towards her small stable adjacent to the cart-shelter, singing under his breath. Silas listened casually as he jumped down from the seat and reached for the nearest sack.

  “Sweet loved-one, I pray thee,

  For one loving speech;

  While I live in this wide world

  None other will I seek.

  With thy love, my sweet beloved,

  My bliss though mightest increase;

  A sweet kiss of thy mouth

  Might be my cure.”

  Raphael’s voice was always entertaining. It didn’t matter whether it was by joke or song; he held that wonderful quality which could turn the darkest moments into ones of joy. Silas did secretly envy him for such a laidback manner. He in comparison seemed so sour – and in some cases brooding – even among his family, and they knew him best of all. In many ways, Silas almost acted in Raphael’s place: although a full three years his junior, Silas possessed the drive that was arguably the eldest son’s to bear, and ensured that his younger siblings worked well and hard.

  But in truth, Silas wouldn’t have wanted it any different. Raphael was the way he was, and if he was any other way, then he wouldn’t be the great big brother that the Atégo children had always known. Life was tough, but everyone pulled their weight, and there was harmony.

  “Raphael.”

  The boys turned at the sudden voice, Raphael’s tune cut short. Silas’ hands rested on the rough canvas of the sack. Fourteen-year old Mekina was standing just inside the shelter of the roof. There was a strange, numb expression on her freckled face. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her, and Silas frowned when he noticed that they were trembling.

  She turned her head towards the house. “Ma, they’re back,” she called out, and her words were strained and monotonous. When she looked back at her brothers, Silas realised with a jolt that the skin around her eyes was red and puffy, and he knew immediately that she had been crying.

  Raphael started towards her. “What is it?” he asked tightly.

  Silas watched, his heart slamming dully against his sides. Raphael placed his hands on Mekina’s shoulders. She gazed at him for a moment, and then lowered her head, her face obscured by thick coppery hair.

  “Pap,” she whispered into his chest.

  Raphael drew Mekina back from him enough for her to look into his eyes. But as soon as she did, the tears overcame her and he quickly pulled her into an embrace. Their mother’s frenzied howls of sorrow drifted from inside the house.

  A stone dropped in Silas’ chest. His fingers tightened around a corner of the sack and his knuckles went white. He stared straight through his brother and sister, into the evening sun, and then fell to his knees in despair.

  CHAPTER II

  Julian’s Funeral

  24th day of Jyune

  W e have settled in a small, bowl-shaped hollow high up on the mountainside, beside a small lake, overlooking the plain between Cedarham and Fanchlow. We came back to the north so that we may b
e ready to leave whenever is fit. We took care to select an area away from the cattle pastures of either place, so as to avoid any unwanted or wrongly-perceived attention, and from where we pitch this nighte, we may enjoy a most pleasing view of both of the villages... as well as that of the sunset over the mountains, and of the forests on the steep slopes.

  I must note, however, that I am most puzzled of the large structure that is built on the far westerne side of the Valley. It seems familiar of some kind of great wall, and from the moment we entered this place, I have seen it stretch into the distance. I wonder if it even has an ending. But I have also seen no entrance or other point by means of which it may be crossed to or from either side. And all of the people speak of it not, as though they seek to believe it does not exist at all.

  I do wonder, oh my great Lady, what is the purpose of this said Wall? I do pray that it is not what I may fear.

  *

  The death of an Elder called for a larger service than usual, so behind the six remaining Atégos, every available pew in the rickety old church was taken. Another smaller crowd of well-wishers lingered outside the door. Sobs equalled the rush of the water from the river, as it fought its way over pebbles and wound around banks. A drizzly rain was falling from the overcast sky, and the air was humid: a silent harbinger to a coming storm.

  After the requiem mass, the mourners who hadn’t been as close to Julian bade a respectful nod in the direction of his family before returning to their own business. Amid her attempts to comfort the younger Selena and Uriel, Mekina accepted the acknowledgements with impassive courtesy. Their mother, Araena, wept fretfully into her hands, and Raphael busied himself with remaining at her side. Silas, however, was immediately aware of how their neighbours hurried away. He wasn’t spoken to, but that didn’t surprise him, and he was also glad of it, because even he was unsure of how he would react. He could barely ignore the wary glances thrown towards his family, and his own raw remarks that were blazing inside his mind.