“Look at you,” said Nuria. “How much use will you be to her like this?”
Stone looked between Nuria and Mallon.
“I can give you everything you need,” said Mallon. “But you need to rest.”
He turned to his men and told them to disperse the people. Gradually, the villagers drifted back to the fields and groves.
With his arm cleaned and stitched, Conrad stood outside the tavern, mug in hand, brimming with frothy drink. He was alone with the sun on his face, long hair trailing down his back, watching the constant motion of Dessan. He had spent the past few hours with his aunt, Mary, and his cousin, Ambre, holding the small child tight. Now, he wandered to a spot behind the building; he sipped his mug, swallowed and then sank to the ground, strangely preferring it to a seat. He stared ahead with vacant eyes, washed a hand over his face and slowly poured the rest of the drink into the soil.
He traced his fingers over the symbols branded on his arm, then folded his hands over his head and wept.
“I didn’t know,” said Sadie.
Stone was sat outside a mud hut, in the shade, eyes half shut, a water bottle in his hand, apple cores in his lap. She eased herself onto a stool, letting out a long sigh, and wiped the sweat from her face. The village was busy. The fields needed ploughing and planting, the groves trimming. The blacksmith and the fletcher were forging weapons and ammunition and hastily passing the skill onto younger apprentices. The children were in school with a new teacher, Roberto, recently arrived from Le Sen with his family. He would teach them how to read, how to count, how to write their name. He would teach values and morals and codes of behaviour. Lena was his assistant, thirteen years old now, no longer a pupil, proud to work alongside him, absorbing so much, knowledge pouring into her head, dreaming of one day standing in his shoes, holding sway over young minds – no more would the names be spat in her face or that of anyone else.
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded, slowly.
“What happened to your arm?”
He glanced down at the branding, the simple symbols, three shapes in a row. He shook his head.
“Mallon called it a fairy tale.”
“I know,” said Sadie, letting out a long sigh, her hands holding her stomach. “She’ll never know her father.”
Nuria appeared in the doorway of the hut. Behind her, water boiled over a fire. There was food and clean clothes.
“You’re having a girl?”
Sadie looked up at her, nodding slowly. “I think so. Do you want to feel her kicking?”
Nuria took a few steps forward. She pressed her grimy hand against Sadie’s stomach. She could feel nothing.
“She’s probably having a nap.” Sadie smiled at her. “Are you going to stay?”
“No,” said Stone.
“I don’t know,” said Nuria. She looked at Sadie, fear, confusion and guilt in the young woman’s eyes. She wanted to say something more but she was too exhausted to dig out any words. She offered a weak smile and went back into the hut, closing the door and peeling off the prisoner garb, tossing the clothing onto the fire and watching it burn. Her body was caked with dried blood. She uncorked a bottle and took a long drink and then washed and stitched her shoulder wound. It ached but the bullet had gone clean through and she was thankful for that. Finally, she took a large cloth, dipped it into the bubbling water and began to scrub. She scrubbed her skin raw, cleansing it of the blood and grime. Then she washed herself a second time and she kept washing until the water turned cold. Running a hand over her scalp, she dressed and then lay down on a bed, turning onto her side.
Quietly, she wept.
Stone opened his eyes to Nuria’s stunted tears. Sadie had gone. He must have dozed. He didn’t remember her leaving but he remembered what she had told him before she left. He eased onto his feet and his hand touched the door of the hut. He listened to her cry, lowered his eyes and began to walk away. He still wore the blood soaked prison clothing. A man stopped him, shook his hand and hugged him. Stunned, Stone walked on, in a daze, until he reached the gate by the river. He stared at it. Militia armed with bows and quivers of arrows stood guard. They nodded respectfully at him. He trudged from the gate, through the scattered mud huts with smoke lazily climbing from low chimneys.
Inside Justine’s hut, women tended to her, trying to keep her warm. She was in bed, wrapped in blankets. They had bathed her, cleaned the filth from hair, burnt her prison clothes, fed her, gave her water but still her skin was sickly pale, her eyes red rimmed, cheekbones jutting out. Her cough had worsened, too.
He approached, unsure what he could offer. His hands were hands of violence with scant tenderness in the tips of his fingers. He could wait days unmoving to ambush a man and send him to his death. He could carry vengeance in his soul for more than thirty years. He could carve an existence from nothing. He could take relentless punishments and still rise to take more. He had nothing to offer her. He felt ashamed that Tamnica had inflicted such cruelty upon her. He wanted to turn away from the pitiful figure curled in the bed. Yet he had held her, on that very bed, and loved her and she had clung to him and she had found warmth in him and kindness in his touch and a softness he never knew existed. A smile touched her thin lips as he idled awkwardly by the fire. She asked the women to leave and they scurried outside. The hut was warm. Thin lines of sunlight peeked through the roof. Dust motes floated, drifted.
Stone felt his heart burn. She reached for his rough hand and pressed it to her heart. He sat on the bed and she looked into his battered face, a myriad of cuts and a fresh long scar. She touched it with her finger and he flinched. She slid the blankets from her shoulders and showed him her back. It was criss-crossed with scars from the Warden’s whip. She pulled the blankets around herself and he held her in his arms, his face resting on the top of her head. She rocked and cried, for a short time, but then the tears were gone. She broke away from him, coughing, and the women came back inside, wanting Stone to leave. Her eyes watered as the coughs racked her body but she dismissed them and told him to stay.
“Get me up,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
He found her a pair of sandals and fresh clothes. Once dressed, she held onto his arm as he led her from the hut and toward the farmland. He glimpsed Sadie working beneath a hot afternoon sun, her brow glistening, dark patches of sweat soaked through her clothes. She waddled uneasily, her giant belly straining before her. He led Justine to the pen of black feathered ollish birds, scampering about, clucking and jumping and flapping. He found her a place to sit and she curled against him and watched the birds until the sun began to sink, bathing the land in colour. A woman came and herded the birds back into a wooden coop and locked it. Still they clucked. Stone saw the smile on Justine’s lips, the tiny joy in her eyes.
The temperature had fallen away by the time he had settled her back into bed and wrapped her in blankets. He stoked the fire as the shadows lengthened. Her cough persisted. She was shivering but her skin was burning. The women returned from Conrad’s hut with mixtures and potions his uncle had dabbled with but nothing seemed to be calming the fever. He told the women to leave; there was nothing they could do. He sat with her into the night as the village celebrated the return of the prisoners. There was drumming, singing and laughter. Stone hoped Nuria and Conrad were blind drunk. He held Justine’s hand. The cough was brutal, without mercy. He stroked her hair, wiped the sweat from her brow, pinched the tears from her cheeks.
As dawn broke, he kissed her hand, bony and weightless. He gently lay it upon her chest and stepped outside. He took a shovel and dug a grave in the moist ground, next to the pen of ollish birds. He wrapped her still body and carried her through the village.
Silently, he buried her.
--- Twenty One ---
“This is for you,” said Mallon.
Stone had scraped the dirt and grime from his body, roughly trimmed his beard, pulled back his long hair and tied it. He wore fresh clothes and boots and a sheathe
d sword hung from his belt. Now he stood with the chosen leader of Dessan, proudly displaying the newly constructed village armoury with strong mud walls reinforced by wooden poles and a heavy wooden door banded with iron. Inside, torches burned and Stone noted racks of bows, crossbows, spears, swords and shields.
“I found it in the forest,” said Mallon. “You left it behind when you chased after Darrach.”
Stone studied his old rifle. It had been meticulously cleaned but there was no ammunition. Mallon saw the expression in his eyes and handed him a cloth bag. Gingerly, Stone peeked inside and saw it was filled with bullets.
“The Maizans were trading them with the Collectors.” He nodded. “I have a horse ready for you; provisions and water, blankets, binoculars.”
The two men were alone in the armoury. Mallon straightened his back.
“I did try to find her. I care a great deal about her.” He paused. “Why do you think all of this has happened?” He swept his arm around the large building but Stone knew he meant much more than the armoury. “I am sick of losing people. All my life I’ve watched people disappear at the will of Ilan and that damn Centon. Life is hard enough, Stone, and I'm not prepared to let it get any harder for Dessan. People deserve a better life than the slavery Ilan was offering them. This is why I had the wall finished, increased our militia numbers, pulled the villages together.”
He ran a nervous hand through his cropped black hair.
“The Map Maker believes in Ennpithia but we found no trace of either of them. What makes you think you have any hope of finding her?”
“I won’t give up.”
Angrily, Mallon stamped outside. Stone followed, loading his rifle. He blinked at the late afternoon sun and saw a dozen men on horses had gathered.
“What’s this?”
“This is me not giving up,” said Mallon. “There isn’t a day I don’t think about what we could have had but I have to protect Dessan.”
“I’m not taking these men with me,” said Stone. “Use them to patrol the forest road. The Tamnicans will return.”
“He’s right,” said a voice, and Mallon recognised his old friend, Conrad, unkempt and dishevelled. He looked as if he had only moments earlier rose from his bed. His arm was thickly bandaged. “You need to be wary of the Tamnicans. We didn’t kill all of them and they still have a prison to run which means they’ll be looking for new workers.”
Mallon shook his head, frustrated, and said, “It seems being leader means you make none of the decisions.”
Hands clamped against his hips, eyes shifting from Conrad to Stone, he turned to his men, growing impatient on horseback.
“Scout the forest road. Break into two units.”
In a cloud of dust the horsemen wheeled around and galloped toward the gate at the bridge.
“I’m coming with you,” said Conrad. “Emil saved my brother’s life. It’s the least I can do.”
“You’re not,” said Stone, taking the reins of his horse.
“He is,” said Nuria, lurking behind him. “We both are.”
Stone furrowed his brow.
“It seems I’m not the only one who doesn’t get to make decisions,” grinned Mallon.
Loaded down with weapons and supplies, the trio rode through the north gate of the village and followed a long dirt trail through the trees. They glimpsed the highway winding east from Tamnica and curving around to the north and the east. As they galloped along winding dirt paths the highway cut across them, the surface buckled and ripped. Stone assumed the Map Maker would have kept off the road. He would have known the dangers of a highway with no vehicle. He would have taken his horse north through woodland.
No one spoke as they crossed acres of deserted forest. The sun dipped on the horizon but still they rode, sweeping over the deathly silent and barren terrain. Stone spotted trails that wound east and cut away to the west but he ignored them and continued north. Sadie had told him of the map, the map that had been passed to her through kin, a map believed to be from the time of the Ancients, a time when Gallen was a much different world. Stone had little interest in the history of Gallen but Sadie had explained how, in a faded portion of the map, beyond the town of Cabourg – or Caybon, as Philip had claimed – was a great sea and a stretch of land bearing the initials EN. The Map Maker believed this was the promised land of Ennpithia.
As darkness blanketed the land, they rested and watered the horses and made camp, Nuria building a fire and Stone keeping watch, patrolling a wide circuit around them. He could see nothing but trees. Chewing halk meat, warming beside the fire, Conrad told Nuria the myth of Ennpithia. Stone half-listened, the man’s voice dropping out of range now and then as he stepped through the trees, rifle in hand, collar raised, boots gliding over a carpet of fallen leaves, needles and branches.
“It’s where you go,” he grinned, licking his lips. “That’s what they told us when we were children.”
He lifted a bottle, spat out the cork and filled two cups.
“Go?” asked Nuria, puzzled, swigging her drink. She had taken a crossbow and sword from the armoury and the weapons were propped next to her.
“When you die,” said Conrad, chuckling, and then his face clouded as he thought of Justine, laid to rest only this morning. “I’m sorry; I suppose it’s not funny.”
She squeezed his knee.
“Maybe you shouldn’t find humour in everything.”
He poured another drink and his thoughts flashed with the beatings in Tamnica, the Bald One, the branding of his arm.
“Maybe I shouldn’t,” he said, numb.
A breeze rippled through the trees and Nuria raised her eyes toward her precious white lights. Conrad had told her they were stars. She didn’t care what he called them. She could see them now without bars. Cathy was inside her head; beating her, forcing the tablets into her, ordering her to empty the bucket, laughing at her, forcing her hands into her, her fingers trailing her skin. She remembered how she had held her down and sodomised her for seeing Stone in the barn. She remembered how she had chopped off her hair as further punishment. She closed her eyes and tears rimmed her lashes. Conrad moved toward her and she flinched, dropping her cup.
Stone whirled round at the sudden noise. He crept toward the small camp.
“What was that?”
“Just an accident,” said Nuria, picking up her cup from the ground and filling it at once.
Stone nodded. She watched him stroke the horses and then stride back into the darkness, to keep watch.
“So Ennpithia is a made up place then,” she sighed.
“Sadie said that this old map the Map Maker has shows a land beyond the sea. Maybe something has been lost in the story.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, Ennpithia was told to us as children, so it cannot be real, but there is land beyond the sea, so something is there, whether it’s Ennpithia or not doesn’t really matter.”
Nuria nodded.
“Why isn’t Mallon helping us find Emil?” she asked.
Conrad stared into the flames, shaking his head.
“He is leader now. He has responsibility over hundreds of people, not just one. Don’t be too quick to judge him, Nuria, you don’t know him as well as I do. He is a man who cares deeply for other people. He knows every one in Dessan. I remember when he arrived. He was five or six years old. It was just him and his mother. They had travelled a great distance to find somewhere safe to call home. You know how welcoming we are.” He smiled. “I used to tease him about how different he looked to us, squinty eyes, a wide face. I was horrible to him. In a way, I was curious about him. He’d lived beyond the forest, seen places I could only dream of. I suppose I was jealous. One day after school, the other children encouraged Mallon to fight me to end the bullying. They didn’t care that I was upsetting him they only want to see a brawl.” He let out a short laugh, drank. “I can still remember standing opposite him with these puny fists of mine bunched together swing
ing punches at him.” He jabbed at the air. “I didn’t hit him once but he hit me plenty of times.”
“Good,” said Nuria, titling her cup to her lips. “I didn’t know you had a spiteful streak.”
“Of course,” nodded Conrad. “I forgot you had this rigid military upbringing. I guess you were not permitted mistakes.”
“Oh, I’ve made my fair share.”
“That night, after the fight, not that you could call it that, Mallon came to my home to apologise for beating me up. My uncle showed him in and was impressed with this very shy and very polite child who did what any child should do – stand up to a bully – but here he was, saying sorry for hurting me. The next morning we walked to school together. We’ve been friends ever since. He has a good heart, Nuria, but he carries this feeling of always having to prove himself. He fought with my father for so long to have that wall built but my father stubbornly refused, set in his ways with his devotion to the Centon.”
“He seems very angry,” said Nuria. “Hostile, even.”
“He is angry,” yawned Conrad, draining his cup and settling down for some rest. “At himself.”
He reached for her but she jerked her hand from him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, quietly.
She watched him fall quickly asleep, his chest slowly rising and falling, snoring lightly. She rubbed her eyes. Her body ached from the ride but she did not want to sleep. She carried food to Stone, crouched in the undergrowth, sweeping his eyes across the dark wall of trees. He was surprised to see her awake. She sat in silence with him, sharing his watch, thinking deeply about the pain he must be in – Justine’s death, Emil’s disappearance, his beatings and isolation within Tamnica. She thought of Conrad’s touch, beside the fire, a shiver creeping along her spine, astonished at how quickly her physical feelings toward the man had deadened. The prison was coursing through her veins, still raging beneath her skin. She glanced at Stone, remembering the tender moment they had shared in the barn, wanting him to hold her but his eyes impassively skirted the gloom and Nuria understood, even admired, his continual dedication to protecting them and allowing for nothing more.
The Wasteland Soldier, Book 2, Escape From Tamnica (TWS) Page 25