She lowered herself, a little stiffly, and sat beside him. Although she found the drop somewhat unnerving she did it all the same, just for him. She too looked out across the Sea of the Dead Sun, but her own thoughts were elsewhere, not seeing beyond the horizon to the unimaginably ancient origins of the Bazarran.
Her own gaze began to drift towards the north, following the sweeping spread of the forest until the Graywyse Defence Road pointed her at the march of the Gray Mountains. She knew Grunstaan would still be there beyond its closed pass, beyond its carr sceld, selfishly preserving her remnant Nouwelm world.
It would remain so until the end of time, or until the earth swallowed her whole, her and her redundant, imprisoned folk – all hope lost but to aspic. Far too small to worry Nature, isolated as she had intended, and now so cleverly devoid of Grunstaan’s own procreant seed.
Penolith turned back to Nephril, to her heart-rending care. “Not visiting your old chambers then, Nephril?”
“No,” he began, a weariness descending. “Thought I would give it a miss this time.”
“Your leg?”
“Hmm. Not been too good of late, but the journey has made it worse.”
“Next time then?” When he didn’t answer, she wrapped her arm through his and snuggled up close.
After a while he reached around and gently stroked her hair. “Actually, I reckon it might be my last time,” he said, and she peered up at him. “Studman Shaftrake’s useful stoom-wagons have given me a few more years, thankfully, but I am finding even they are a bit of a trial now. Pity the laadnimana never went beyond Galgaverre. Oh well, time’s winged chariot and all that.”
A faint puffing noise soon drifted to them along the wall from the north, the stoom-wagon’s yellow smoke distantly billowing out across the sea. It drifted out to join similar such plumes rising from the spread of ships now ploughing their way to and fro from Bazarral’s harbour.
Would Melkin have handled it any differently, any better than Crowbeater? Nephril wondered. Would he have better resisted the guilds, tempered their rapid greed for Laytner’s new timber-devouring engine, his funny old horse?’
When Nephril realised where he’d been staring all that time, his face lit up. “I wonder if any of them are piloted by Phaylan?” He nodded towards the ships. “Should have got his licence by now.”
“That was two months ago, Nephril, don’t you remember, and Steermaster Sconner’s already retired. Oh, I don’t know, do I have to remember everything for you these days?”
When she frowned and bit her lip, as she’d done in her library almost twenty years ago, he patted her knee. “Not doing badly for mine age, thou hath to admit.” He grinned broadly, making her smile and soon laugh.
A distant whistle gave notice of the stoom-wagon’s approach, and Penolith stood up, a little unsteadily although she kept it from Nephril. “You still alright to spend a couple of days with Melkin and Lambsplitter on the way back, as we planned?”
“We have always done so each year, have we not?” Nephril realised he’d been short and had hurt her. “I will be alright, mine dear, do not fret.”
“It’s just that Mirabel’s now getting to that age, you know, when she’ll be a bit of a handful.”
Nephril laughed, a laugh to challenge the approaching stoom-wagon’s vaporous breath. “Putty in mine hands, dear Penolith, nothing more worrisome than putty.” He began chuckling but winced, his hip cramping badly.
By the time he’d eased himself from the wall’s edge, and was standing a little more comfortably, the stoom-wagon was already drawing to a noisy halt. Penolith waved breezily as the driver gave a short toot, and then she turned back to Nephril.
“I hope it works out for them.” Her words, as Nephril well knew, hid a much deeper worry, one upon which the whole realm’s future hung. Would their union, the first of its kind, bear mule or donkey? Would their mixed blood prove viable and thereby fill Dica with a much stronger people?
Their union had been accepted - not without disdain - and in time guardedly welcomed as a chance to curtail each disparate habben treowlic - of hopefully blending Dican and Bazarran blood. If left separate then one would one day usurp the other, and their new future again become spoiled.
Nephril’s silence at her mention of the child made Penolith ask, “Are you sure you never wanted children, Nephril? Even now you’ve still got time.”
He leant forward and gently kissed her forehead. “Nay, mine cherished one, I have never had the urge, not in two thousand years. I do not think I am about to change that now, and anyway, what would I do without thee, eh, and who in their right mind would welcome abed an ancient and crusty High Dican?”
She smiled to hide her relief and hugged him. “Come on, crusty High Dican, we’ve a stoom-wagon waiting. Don’t want to keep the good folk from their market day in Weysget, now do we?”
“You go on. I’m sure the good folk of Grayden will not mind waiting on their Master of Ceremonies, not for a few minutes more.”
“Master of Ceremonies!” he said to himself. “High Lord to a dying place, to Galgaverre.” He sighed and once more looked out to sea. “Not long now, a few more decades at most and Leiyatel will be no more, her succouring radiance finally quenched forever. No more Leiyatel and so no more Certain Power, and with it no more Galgaverrans – their mechanically copied blood finally curtailed.”
He turned to see Penolith now chatting with the stoom-wagon’s driver, her still striking appearance besotting him but belying her sexless and artificial state. Hers was, after all, like all her kind, a forever childless blood, long removed from its natural Bazarran stock, a product only of Leiyatel’s copyist skills.
“All be passing. The old giving way to the new as it should be, as it always should hath been.” He realised he was now looking at the old fishing frame, its bell long since seized, stilled by crusted salt, flaking rust and a thick crust of birdlime.
It made him think of Pettar and the surprisingly strong trading pact he’d formed with Breadgrinder. An unlikely pair. “Good foils to each other, though, as it turned out. Just goes to show thou never can tell. They seemed to be doing well, thank the Certain Pow... Well, thought we might have at least bumped into them along the way.” He could hear Penolith chatting away to the passengers but wanted to linger a while longer, wanted to think yet again about Breadgrinder’s revelation.
He leant forward and grasped the frame’s flaking legs, felt their dry, salty rasp, the breeze-cooled metal and the connection with earlier times. For Nephril, it had all started here when Pettar had disturbed his sleep, bringing an even more disturbing message.
For Breadgrinder, however, it had all begun decades before, some nine in fact. His own Pettar had been a naked, black figure, one that had beckoned to him from the edge of his own small world, from the top of the wall where, as it turned out, Nephril would later use his lust to force a way in. It seemed that even Nature had been brought to cunning guile, for although she herself is all things, she’s only all things in their rightful place.
“All things in their rightful place, eh?” he challenged the frame. “All soon to be put right as Leiyatel draws close to death, to her own Naningemynd.”
She was now too weak to upset Nature’s own world, which left Dica free from interference, and not only gave Melkin freedom to innovate but also – and here an ancient word demanded resurrection –liberated the old sawool - the original soul of man.
“Can’t keep the good folk of Grayden waiting now can we, eh, O symbol of the time ‘tween ages, between bygone and new.” He scoffed and reached up to feel the frame’s sun-bleached handle, remembering the anguished look on Pettar’s face when it had struck his hand.
It didn’t take long for Leiyatel’s words to spring to mind, as they always had each year. ‘Nephhryl, Meowyh Caegheorda, Ichr eom grevlic yfel en af eow hayben neodh. Cuman aer tar meowyh clypnes. Ablissian. Eowerh Treowe Lufa, Leiyfiantel.
“Your True Lover, Leiyfiantel!” he repeat
ed a number of times until Penolith’s anxious voice broke the spell.
“Coming, dear?”
For the very last time, Nephril turned away from the old fishing frame, and without a backwards glance, joined his precious Guardian.
He tried to pull himself up onto the wagon but found he couldn’t quite reach, the driver smartly stepping down to give him a lift. When aboard, he smiled his greeting to the other passengers and they too smiled back in their turn, eyes filled with genuine pleasure at meeting him.
“They must have made the step higher since last year,” he grumbled quietly to himself as he sat down beside Penolith. His gaze came to rest on the seven white marble pillars, some way up the now even more overgrown rise of the terraces. Still shining their veined, white glory at sea and dying sun, he thought.
When Penolith looked their way, she answered, “Strange how nothing seems to have grown in front of them, though.”
The boiler cracked and knocked and hissed, and the driver eased the lever forward, so the stoom-wagon could begin to shake and jolt its way south. ‘Just twenty years!’ Nephril thought. ‘So many changes, it already feels like a different world.’
The tall, yellow-black chimney had soon fallen to its rhythmic, vaporous panting, stifling conversation and dusting them all with its corky, white wood-ash. It did, though, make safe company for the old tongue’s loosing.
“Thaer willa fyllan ure habban abtramiled cnaawansten, Af an Treowe Leoht haele eyn absuransten.” Nephril had half humorously intoned the words, but Penolith soon picked him up on it. She leant in close to his ear, smiled and then breathed. “There will fill our own untrammelled knowing, Of a True World safe in uncertainty.”
Nephril looked closely into her eyes and soon realised how at peace he felt. He kissed her on the lips, surprising her, and then thought, deep down and well out of hearing, “Finally at peace in mine own newfound mortality. Uncomfortable and often painful it may be, and certainly uncertain, it is at least, most undeniably, our very own True World.”
About the Author
Clive Johnson was born in the mid-1950’s in Bradford, in what was then the West Riding of the English county of Yorkshire. Mid-way through the 1970s, he found himself lured away by the bright lights of Manchester to attend Salford University.
In addition to getting a degree in electronics, he also had the good fortune of meeting Maureen (Kit) Medley - subsequently his partner and recent Editor. Manchester retained its lure and has thereafter been his hometown.
Torn between the arts (a natural and easy artist) and the sciences (struggled with maths), youthful rationality favoured science as a living, leaving art as a pastime pleasure. Consequently, after graduation, twenty years were spent implementing technologies for mainframe computer design and manufacture, and being a Group IT Manager for an international print company.
The catalyst of a corporate takeover led to a change of career, and the opportunity to return to the arts. The unearthing of a late seventies manuscript - during loft improvements - resurrected an interest in storytelling, and one thing led to another. A naïve and inexpert seed finally received benefit of mature loam, and from it his first novel - Leiyatel’s Embrace - soon blossomed.
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Of Weft and Weave (Dica Series Book 2) Page 43