The Heretic Land

by Tim Lebbon

  Every Broker is a selfish beast. As soon as he had arrived on Skythe and caught his first hint of the magical dregs there, he had known that to be true. His Regerran blood and night-time madness, the murders of pathetic Skythians … he knew that many would see him as a Wrench Arc. But his shame at what he did meant he was not quite there. Wrench Arcs were shameless.

  ‘Juda, the day’s wearing on,’ Leki said.

  ‘We’ll get there.’

  ‘But, your—’ Leki stopped. She did not wish to call it madness.

  ‘We’ll get there.’ He could offer her no comfort. If they did not reach the marshes, he would have to flee from them before the night took him down. Alone, they would all be easy targets for the slayers.

  Bon groaned. Juda paused, trying to shove his relief aside. Even if he did stir, the man would not be able to walk on his own for some time.

  ‘Bon,’ Leki said softly, and as Juda continued pushing himself uphill, she whispered to the man slung over his shoulder. He responded with groans at first, and then muttered words. By the time Juda hit the ridge and collapsed, Bon was able to break his fall when he slipped from his saviour’s shoulder. Juda hit the cool, damp heather and rolled his face against it, relishing the freshness against his sweaty skin. He caught Bon watching him, and saw gratitude through the pain.

  ‘I can walk,’ Bon said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Juda replied. Bon’s hand was swollen and red, exuding heat he could almost feel from where he lay.

  Leki knelt beside Bon and cradled his head in her lap. She looked from one man to the other.

  Juda stood. His knees shook, muscles in his legs quivering. He needed food, energy, but they had no time to stop and eat. He looked downhill and saw no movement, but that did not mean the slayers were still down. They could have been moving painfully through the shadows lower down the hillside, slashing their skin to vent infected blood, growling away their pain.

  ‘His hand,’ Leki said, moving her own around Bon’s, but not quite touching.

  ‘I could cut it to release the pressure, but infection would soon follow,’ Juda said. ‘Best to let it settle on its own.’ He drank the last drop of water from his canteen. It was warm, and did little to sate his thirst.

  ‘He was bitten on the ship, too. Unlucky.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Juda panted.

  ‘You can’t carry him any further. I can.’

  ‘You?’ Juda said, immediately feeling a pang of regret.

  ‘Yes, me. A woman. I’m probably stronger than you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Juda said. ‘I didn’t mean …’ But he had, and he could not explain it away.

  ‘I can walk,’ Bon said again, but he could barely speak.

  ‘How far from here?’ Leki said.

  Juda pointed across the plateau. ‘Four, five miles that way. Then down into a—’

  ‘Let’s take one thing at a time,’ Leki said. ‘Help me get him up.’

  Bon waved her hand away angrily, propping himself on his good hand and pushing, falling onto his side and crying out when he struck his stung hand against the ground. So Juda helped, sensing the strength in her as she hoisted Bon across her left shoulder, and he remembered that an amphy could swim as fast as any fish for a short stretch of time, flooding muscles with a burst of power to give exaggerated strength. How long that might last on land he didn’t know, but he had to trust her.

  No choice.

  ‘We should get away from the slope,’ he said. ‘They’ll see us moving against the sky.’

  Bon protested one more time, but then Leki said something to him that Juda did not hear, and he seemed to fall calm and loose across her shoulder. She smiled an enigmatic smile as she started walking, looking at the ground before her and moving with grace and no apparent discomfort.

  That won’t last, Juda thought. He squatted and looked downhill, back the way they had come. There was no sign of movement, and no sense that those bastard things might be watching him from the shadows. Yet doom still hung over him like the breath of a god. However fast they ran, however close they came to the gas marshes, he suspected that sensation might never lift again.

  ‘Aeon, and magic, awaits,’ he whispered, glancing back guiltily. But Leki was already forty steps away, walking steadily and smoothly. Even if she had heard him – even if Bon had heard him – neither would know what he meant.

  The time would come to tell. But first they had to survive.

  Walking away from the remnant towards what might be the heart of a dead god, Venden found himself dwelling on the past more than he had for a long time. He heard his mother saying his name, as she used to when she watched him playing or reading, or making some complex device whose purpose was pointless but which was remarkable nonetheless. She had spoken with deep pride and love, and he thought perhaps a trace of sadness as well. Maybe it was memory giving her voice that lilt, but he thought not. Maybe it was the fact that her little boy would grow up, and become a person of his own, and eventually leave to make his own life … but he thought not.

  He thought perhaps his mother had known when she was going to die.

  You have further to go than most, she had told him, words once lost to memory but surfacing again now. They had confused him as a child, but remembering them as he walked through Skythe’s wilderness, Venden heard something so prescient in his long-dead mother’s sad tone.

  His destination, Kellis Faults, was way to the north, and he had no wish to travel all that way on foot. Walking there might be easy enough, but returning with the heart of Aeon …

  ‘Too heavy,’ he said. ‘Too precious.’

  So he was seeking help. And he went bearing gifts.

  Venden watched them from behind a rocky outcrop, wondering how they could even survive like this. He had spent some time thinking about the Skythians – how they were now, and how they must have been before and immediately after the war. And unless the punishment visited upon their old society had in some way hobbled their ability to learn, grow and evolve, then six hundred years ago they must have emerged from that cataclysm little more than blind animals. They had persisted, but not prospered; they existed, but without triumph or joy. Watching them attempting to farm, he could see why.

  The field was already criss-crossed with furrows from previous years, scarring the land with barren impressions. He knew from experience that yield from these farming attempts was small – perhaps the soil’s nutrients had been scorched away by the war’s fallout – and barely worth the effort the Skythians put in. And these were the more advanced of their race. The disparate and somewhat uneven levels of civilisation remaining on Skythe were a mystery to Venden, and he could only put it down to bloodlines. Perhaps the war had damaged and polluted one family branch more than another, and descendants carried those greater or lesser degrees of taint. Even the lesser degrees were sometimes heartbreaking to watch. In other areas of Skythe farming was unknown, and food grew in the next valley or ran from hunters’ spears. These Skythians were ploughing against the grain.

  They had a wild shire shackled to a heavy scrap of melted metal, similar to the tools Venden had picked up but much larger. Another shire was tethered across the field beneath the shelter of a huge old koa tree, the tree’s branches drooping and heavy with parasitic growth. Venden had seen this extended family before, and several times soon after he’d arrived he had tried forming some sort of bond with them. Communication through basic sign language was relatively simple, but a desire to communicate had been absent. They had watched his efforts and sometimes reciprocated in a basic manner, but he’d seen no enthusiasm, no drive to know him better or even to accept the gifts he offered. Wildness hid behind their cautious stares.

  They seemed to remember his name, however, and they muttered Venden Ugane each time he visited. It was strange hearing those words in the middle of incomprehensible chatter.

  He carried those same gifts with him now, and as he watched them he planned how to pass them over. They have to know what I
mean, he thought. I have to make them know.

  The shires were wild and difficult to control. The family had tied basic harnesses around the neck and shoulder of the one they were using, and tried urging the beast to do their bidding, dragging the spiked metal shape through the ground. The men stood on the metal to add weight, and if they were lucky – if the shire did not turn the wrong way, the men did not fall, the metal did not strike a buried rock, and the rough ropes did not break – they would plough a furrow deep enough, perhaps, to plant seed bulbs. It was a painful process to watch, because the progress was so slow and success so rare. But Venden sat for a while and took a drink, finding some measure of respect for these Skythians’ persistence and determination.

  After a while he emerged from behind the rocks and walked down the gentle slope, careful to edge around the field as he approached them. One of the children saw him first, standing from the uneven furrow he had been planting and filling in with clumpy, rocky clods.

  ‘Venden Ugane,’ the boy said, walking backwards across the furrows and grabbing his two small sisters by the hand. The children wore only flat wooden shoes, and one girl had a withered arm.

  Venden paused, raising both hands palm-out. The same thing happened every time he chose to approach any Skythian group, and for that reason he did so less and less.

  ‘Patience,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Plenty of time.’

  The men dropped from the make-do plough. They scurried close to the women and children, hunkering down as if to present a smaller target. Venden always felt a sadness at this; a proud person would stand straight. The men’s hands grasped beneath their tatty clothing for blades, and Venden sank to a squat, twenty steps from them and far enough away to turn and run. He would beat them in a chase, but that was not what he wanted.

  He wanted to give them things.

  Carefully, slowly, Venden took his flint box from his pocket. He emptied a handful of dried sawdust onto a slab of unearthed rock, flicked the flint, and after only three attempts a spark caught in the sawdust and a flame rose.

  The Skythian children laughed, the men gasped. Venden glanced up at them and smiled. One of the women was slowly shaking her head, though whether in doubt or fear he could not tell. He bent over the smouldering sawdust and blew slowly. The flame was short-lived, and he inhaled the sweet-smelling smoke as he held out the flint box.

  One of the men edged forward. He limped on a deformed foot, and wore a rough leather patch over one eye. Venden left the box and backed away, and the man snatched it up, spilling its contents as he darted back to his family. The woman who had been shaking her head scolded him, and he slapped her across the face with the back of his hand.

  Venden blinked, tensed. The woman spat at the man’s feet and stared at him with eyes full of fire, but she did not retaliate. Venden hoped that would be for later. He watched the man move slowly back towards him, picking up the spilled pieces from the flint box. When he was close, Venden spoke.

  In his time here he had gathered what he hoped was a basic understanding of their native tongue. Sign language seemed limited, but several times over the last year he had attempted stilted, confused exchanges, with mixed success. More than anything, he had sensed the Skythians’ surprise that he would even try talking with them. Sometimes they seemed to fear him, and on occasion he thought they were in awe. He had no idea why.

  ‘Shire,’ he said, holding up the other things he had brought.

  The Skythians were startled, the children afraid of this alien speaking their language. But the woman who had been slapped reacted quickly. She glanced at the tethered shire, back at Bon, and he saw an intelligence in her expression which had been absent before. Perhaps they are merely guarded, he thought. The idea that they might feign such wildness had not crossed his mind, and he found it chilling.

  ‘More than this.’ She reached out and tapped the flint and box in the man’s hand.

  Venden removed the next gift from his pack and stepped forward to hand it to the woman. She took the folded leaf and opened it. Sniffed.

  ‘Bruised heather root.’

  ‘Treated in a way …’ Venden frowned, and started blending in some words from his own language. ‘A way … I know how. Paste it on wounds. It heals, prevents infection.’

  The woman looked at him, mistrustful, subconsciously touching an ugly scar across the left side of her neck.

  ‘And I have more. Medicines. Tools.’

  The woman glanced back over her shoulder at her family.

  ‘I can give you—’

  ‘See you watching,’ the woman said. ‘You see us weak, wasted.’

  Yes, Venden wanted to say, but he frowned. To understand this she must surely be more intelligent than he’d thought. It should have been easy to come here and buy a shire, but she was entering into conversation with him. It was something he had not anticipated, and he wondered again at his assessment of these Skythians. Perhaps they were further removed from the wild tribes elsewhere than he had given them credit for.

  ‘I see you trying,’ he said.

  ‘As do you,’ she said. ‘Trying to touch the remains.’

  ‘Remains?’ Venden asked, startled. How much did they know about him? Him, and the remnant, and what he knew it to be?

  ‘Of the past. We see them, but you need to touch them.’

  You have no idea what I’m building, he thought, but something in her eyes betrayed the lie in that. A chill went through him, and he suddenly wanted to be back at the remnant, safe beneath the overhang and staring at whatever it was he had done. The idea of a people portraying themselves as the Skythians did, purposely, troubled him. Perhaps in the race memory of their past they found a need to exist as they did now. Simply, and out of sight.

  ‘Take a shire,’ the woman said. ‘Build your thing, Venden Ugane.’ She spoke no more, but in her eyes he saw so much. You amuse us, her expression said. We watch you.

  Venden walked past her and pulled a blanket from the back of the plough-harnessed creature. It shook its long head at him and snarled, but he moved away from it, and away from the family. The children whispered, the adults watched him go. Never had he felt so observed, and he feared that by speaking their language he had seen away his advantage, and closed a distance. It concerned him that he could not have seen the gentler reality of these people.

  As he approached the tethered shire, he felt confidence return. Fool or not, he would surprise them again. He had never seen a Skythian riding a shire. They were beasts of burden, not a means of transport, and there was little wonder why – the Skythians he had observed rarely travelled more than a couple of miles from wherever they chose to make their home.

  The shire snuffled as he approached, regarding him warily yet unconcerned. Its nostrils flared, its head swinging left and right as it gathered his scent. It looked stronger than most shires he had seen, perhaps because it was fed more than those in the wild, where shires’ predilection for the meat of their young sometimes drove new mothers many miles to evade those they had previously run and hunted with. He didn’t know what meat the Skythians fed them – this one had been munching on a pile of dried grass and fruit – but its muscle tone was defined, limbs long and strong.

  That was good. He had a way to go, and on the return he would be carrying more.

  He approached the beast and rubbed its flank. It looked at him, blinked slowly, and went back to its leisurely meal. Its brown hair was coarse, yet well groomed. Its long tail whipped flies from around its back end. Its lush mane was beaded with the small, bleached bones of birds, some of them carved into unknown shapes by the Skythians.

  ‘You’ll not give me any problems,’ Venden said nervously. The shire regarded him with one large, watery eye. He had seen riders sprint after wild shires on Alderia, taking them with a harsh-dart to lessen their speed and then mounting, riding them in three circles to break them to their riders’ wishes. Still wild, they would be easier to control and steer, and Venden had watched in astoni
shment as dozens were herded together and raced for the amusement of the gathering crowds. It had been a long sunny day, and his mother had held his little hand in hers. Even then there had been a sadness to her.

  He folded the blanket and heaved it onto the beast’s back. It neighed and stamped its forefeet, but did not move away. Lulling it with gentle sounds, smoothing its shoulder, Venden resisted the temptation to look back at the Skythians undoubtedly watching him. The children had fallen quiet, and he imagined their confusion as he stood close to their work beast, whispering in its ear and preparing to make it his own.

  Grasping the animal’s long mane and tensing his legs, he heard something from the Skythian family that might have been a gasp of surprise, or a laugh. And jumping, hauling himself onto the shire’s back and clasping his hands into its long mane, the idea crossed his mind that there might be very good reasons why Skythian shires were not ridden.

  For a moment the beast froze, and Venden even allowed himself a small, satisfied smile. And I was worried that—

  He felt the movement building from deep within, muscles coiling and a heavy growl bursting out at the same moment the shire bolted. It bucked as it ran, hard wide back pummelling against his backside and legs, shaking him, his stomach rolling and vision blurring with each impact. In desperation he pressed himself down low to the animal’s back. He held on to handfuls of mane, feeling each strand and clotted piece of dirt against his palms and fingertips. If I fall I’ll break something it’ll trample me I’ll die, he thought, images of his demise flashing through his mind like his whole life yet to come.

  The shire was snorting. Foam speckled its long snout and head, misting the air as it leaped and spat. Each impact of hooves against ground sent a shockwave into Venden. He could not draw breath. He heard the beast screaming, and then realised that it was him, shouting into the mane waving and flailing him across the face, insult to injury.