Missing Piece
Page 22
They were not awoken by the early morning battle trumpet. Even as Tharfen pulled down the cavern ceiling upon the invaders, their deep sleep continued.
Saheli awoke at the very moment Montither was placing his sword on Torgee’s chest. Instinctively she clutched at her own chest. Her wounds had healed! She kept her hand there for a long time waiting to see if her heart would beat. It didn’t.
Soon Xemion was also awake. He was nervous about this new Saheli, but he was also rested and relieved. The spell he had nurtured for so long was finally complete and his kone thrall was over. Normally he would throw open the windows in the morning, but today he just wanted to narrow the world down to this one room, to only him and Saheli.
As they breakfasted on Mr. Stilpkin’s rooftop plums, Saheli pieced together what had happened to her. The memory of the old man in the forest, her grandfather, spinning a spell kone the wrong way — a memory she had regained five years ago — had wider implications than she’d been able to deduce back then. Yes, her mother’s simple prayer as the kone had spun, “every day I’ll love you more” had somehow manifested in reverse so that her mother loved her less and less each day, but the thought that it had been some kind of absentmindedness that had caused the old man to turn the kone backward was wrong. She now knew he had done it intentionally in an attempt to reverse a spell her own father had cast upon her.
“My father was a young man at the time of the Pathan takeover. He was one of a group of renegade spellcasters who first invented spell kones,” she told Xemion. “They had stolen thaumatological dictionaries and they carved the spells onto wooden stamps and used them to mass-produce spell kones. My mother told me all this. There was generosity at the heart of it, I suppose. They thought everyone should have access to the spellcraft. But it got out of hand. People began to write spell kones for every small purpose, and often there were mistakes in the spell kones, and sometimes people used them for selfish, evil purposes. After the Pathan takeover and the spell fire, my father, still a very young man, fled to the forest of Ilde and hid there in that camouflage hut you and I and the others spent the night outside of. For almost thirty years, he lived there alone, regretting his ways, fearing for his life, understanding all too well his complicity in the terrible downfall of his people and culture. He began to detest what he’d done, so he set about trying to purify himself. Unfortunately, his way of doing this was to use more spell kones. He checked each word in the thaumatological dictionary and wrote careful spells that succeeded in ridding him of his vanity, of his selfish ambitions, his lies.
“In his fiftieth year he met my mother, and he was fit finally for the goodness of love, which, believe me, despite everything, she had an abundance of. She might not have loved that fuller self that he had whittled down, but this new, almost entirely good self appealed to her and, despite the great age difference, the two fell in love. Her father, my grandfather, never approved, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. And when they had a baby,” she pointed to herself with a downturned, sad-looking smile, “he accepted it. My father, though, did not accept me. He needed me to be perfectly good,” she told Xemion bitterly. Neither of them had noticed yet the soft, soothing, flowing sound, outside the tower.
“Even in my infancy my mother told me, it disturbed and offended him to hear me crying out loud for what I wanted. He could not abide anything in me that was not pure and passive and humbly eager to learn. That was not my nature. But my father didn’t see it that way. He saw it as a family flaw, a tendency to what he called “animal evil.” Without telling my mother, he began to prepare a special kone for me. He constructed it and wrote it in a secret cave not far from where we lived, and when it was ready, using the excuse that he was taking me for walks in the forest, he began to magically alter me. He would put a kind of ring about my brow. It was black and it was tight is all I can remember. It must have had an elastic quality and when he turned the spell kone I remember how it would dig into my forehead. I vaguely remember my father telling me that I was a queen and that it was my crown, but it always hurt me terribly when he took it off, as though pieces of my soul were being stripped away. He thought it was all to the good because he was making me a better person, but my mother noticed the change in me. I became quieter. I became shy. I was more timid than I used to be. Nothing for myself, only for others. True, my father had succeeded in subduing the expressive and demanding part of my nature, but without it I was not as bold. Not as direct. My mother tried everything to help me — diets, medicines, prayer — but as my father continued taking me for walks, I only grew more and more diminished. There must’ve been several years when he stopped. He must’ve thought he had made me pure. I can remember my amazement at finally feeling good enough. But I wasn’t entirely myself, and I had a sense of it. Then everything changed again as I approached adolescence. I felt his disapproving eyes on me all the time and I did my best to stay away from him as much as possible. I began to journey in the woods until finally I discovered boys. They were from a fishing village on the coast. And I tell you, the first thing I wanted to do when I saw them was to kiss them all immediately. I had never even seen boys before. We used to play a game where we spun a stick and wherever the stick pointed I would kiss that boy. They were deep kisses, but it was all very innocent in a way. It didn’t lead to other things. I just liked kissing them. It was the best thing. But, as you must be guessing, my father followed me one day, and when he saw what I was up to he drove the boys away. I had never seen him so angry. I was terrified. He dragged me back to the cave he’d taken me to when I was a child and he made me wait there as he wrote another kone. Then it all started again, only more often. Whatever he had written in his kone prevented me from telling or even protesting. He succeeded in stripping away whatever it was that … that made me want to kiss the boys. But other things changed in me as well. I couldn’t eat. I got very thin. I stopped having my moon-time. Then one day my grandfather followed my father and me on one of our walks and he listened outside the cave and heard with shock what was going on. He demanded my father stop and there was a fight between them, which I do not remember. My memory after those times when he spun the trait kone is very dim, but there was a fight and my grandfather, though he was old, had spent years as a woodsman and he was still very strong, while my father was spindly and weak. My grandfather subdued him.
Unfortunately, before he could be made to undo his evil work he escaped and took with him the black trait ring he’d used around my brow. I know now that he must have gone the way you and I did, through the Crumbles to Ulde, making his way eventually to the bog where I suppose in some act of final benediction he had the black trait ring consecrated into the stuff of the bog. Because he was such a virtuous man.”
Xemion had never heard her speak with such irony before. And he could see the hardness in the back of her eyes, the anger. “And there it remained until the battle, when you …”
They looked at each other. Xemion remembered her dying with the mortal wounds in her chest. He remembered that moment when she’d pulled him down with her last breath to kiss him as he’d been uttering the Spell of Return.
“When you spoke your Spell of Return,” she finished.
“When you kissed me,” he said matter-of-factly. He half expected to feel a hot rush of embarrassment at this, but he didn’t.
“I don’t remember that. Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. I am as sure of that as I am of anything.” Xemion said it with his usual tone of awe, but he didn’t feel the usual welling up of devotion. “And you kissed me once before as well.”
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “But you make so much of it. Such a small thing.”
“I thought you were my warrior beloved,” he said humbly, but without pain.
She shook her head. And he wondered — did he really see the slight curve of a smile at the edges of her lips. “You take things so very seriously,” she said, looking away
.
“Serious enough to bring you back,” he said a little defensively.
She looked at him with some degree of wonder and appreciation. “I thank you for my life,” she said. He had an urge to say “and I thank you for that kiss,” but he held back. This love that had for so long filled his life at the expense of anything else in him suddenly seemed a little flimsy, ludicrous even. It had seemed like the bedrock, but now it seemed like a ribbon in the breeze. “I’m sorry the spell took five years to work. It needed the Great Kone to finish a full turn first. The problem is I seem to have brought a lot of other things back at the same time,” he said with a shrug.
“But it is a most awesome power you have,” she said, her eyes shining with admiration. “My father took ten turns on a spell kone to remove almost all of one small trait of me, but you brought all of me back together with but a wish.”
“With but a spell,” he corrected her.
“I have a strange memory of coming up out of the bog and taking on substance and …” She bit her bottom lip. “Oh dear. That part of me — the cut off part, while it was trying to get back to me … and to you … may have gotten up to some terrible mischief with that fellow Lirodello.”
“Oh dear.”
Saheli bowed her head as the recent memories returned. “Yes. It was like I was a little sliver of a person made up of what my father had stripped away from me, but I was … she was … always trying to get back to me.”
“What do you mean when you say mischief with Lirodello?”
She thought about it a moment. She may even have looked slightly amused. “I don’t quite know, but I’m still remembering.” A mischievous look entered her eyes. “Come here,” she said and she pulled him toward her. Their mouths met tenderly, but it was a kiss of friendship, not romantic passion. They drew back from each other and there was an understanding twinkle in her eyes as his skidded away. “It’s different now, isn’t it?” she said quietly. He shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I’m a different person now,” she said. He nodded and swallowed. “But don’t worry, Xemion, I will always love you.” Xemion smiled and they hugged. “And I know you’ve been holding back your power for me.”
“No, it’s not that,” he protested. “It’s frozen. I’m damaged. I—”
“I’m not afraid of it anymore,” she said. “And you don’t need to be either.”
Xemion shrugged and changed the topic. “When you were unconscious, did you hear me at all when I read you the poems of Rondell?”
She shuddered. “The only thing I can remember from all that time is an intense cold that was almost all of me, except there was just this one little splinter of — not a splinter but a fragment — a little piece of heat.” And now that she had mentioned that fragment of heat, she thought of Torgee.
“What do you mean, a fragment of heat?” Xemion asked.
“What has happened to Torgee?”
Here, he might have experienced a shudder of jealousy in days gone by, but there was no shudder. “He hasn’t been seen for some time. They fear he might have been captured, or …”
She closed her eyes solemnly and Xemion wondered if she had just now been stricken by her first grief since arising, but when she opened her eyes she said “No, he is alive. I can feel it.”
She looked directly into Xemion’s eyes to see if he understood what she meant, and she saw that he did. “I have a piece of him inside of me, and even when I was a hair’s breadth from the grasp of death, it was that piece of him inside of me that was my only warmth.” She clutched her chest suddenly. “Oh dear. I can feel him,” she said. “He’s in great pain.”
Xemion nodded. And he felt the piece of Tharfen that was in him and he knew that she, too, was still alive. And he wondered where she was. And where his dragon was. He went to the window and pushed open the shutters so the midmorning light streamed in. And then they both heard it.
“The wind,” they both said at once.
“The battle must have started,” Xemion said. “I must go and help them.”
“I have to find Torgee,” she said. “He doesn’t have long.”
57
The Siegemen
The Lion’s Head had been designed so that the long crystal beams of its ceiling could be tipped to fall and break in a precise sequence so that they formed a giant stairway from the top of the cliffs down to the sea. Each step was ten feet high. Not too high for warriors in armour to jump down one at a time and get to the beach, but too high for invaders to climb in the face of an onslaught from fierce defenders above.
As the wind picked up and the horizon began to be dotted with the sails of incoming ships a second battle trumpet was sounded and some of the best fighters in the Phaer Academy made their way down these steps to the beach below. They had to keep the attackers from getting up the cliffs.
And so as the well-trained Thralls, Nains, and freemen of the academy gathered on the extended beach in front of the cliffs, clad in their own simple handmade armour, bearing weapons old and new, but made by human hand not magic, the un-captained armada raced toward them, each ship competing with the other now to see who might get in first and get the best of the spoils.
Once the mother ships were close to the water’s edge, the great hulls discharged their inner flotillas of smaller ships and the attackers started rowing feverishly for shore. The Phaer fighters ran in to meet them as they jumped from their boats, determined not to let them get a foothold. The fighting was fierce and bloody. The soldiers of the academy, though mostly inexperienced, were very well-disciplined, and they kept formation using long spears from behind locked shields to ram the attackers back. It didn’t take long, though, because of the sheer number of attacking vessels that kept rolling in and disembarking their crews, before the formation started to buckle inward and soon broke apart entirely. Chaotic fighting ensued and the Phaerlanders were pushed back closer and closer to the cliffs.
By this time the siegemen had arrived. They had removable keels on their large-hulled ships, which enabled them to sail in quite close to shore. They swarmed into the shallow waters, each carrying some piece of the ship that they had disassembled as well as their weapons. In quite orderly fashion, once ashore they began to use the disassembled parts of their ship to start building a wheeled siege tower. Another group used the metal rods that had previously acted as handrails around the ship’s deck to construct, parallel to the beach, sections of rail line. As the rail tracks grew longer and the tower grew higher, the ship they had arrived in grew ever smaller.
Once the tower was together a large group picked up the track assembled from the rails, turned it to face the cliffs where the gap in the ramparts was, and pushed it forward until its further end butted against the bottom of the cliff. Now, while some of them formed a line of battle around the tower, they linked the piece of rail they had mounted the tower on to the longer rail and began to roll the great structure toward the cliffs. Once they were about twenty feet away, they stopped pushing the tower and, still guarded by the battle line around them, a large battalion shouldered their weapons and quietly filed into the tower and up the stairway. Another ship had arrived in the meantime, and many of their fellows in full regalia, heavily armed, were now on the beach making their way toward this tower and three others that were still being constructed.
Atop the cliff, Lirodello and Atathu were in the front rank facing the sheet of grey iron that formed the front of the assault tower. Lirodello had called for a battering ram to topple it, but the siegemen had positioned it just far enough from the cliff so that nothing was long enough to reach it. Lirodello ordered the archers to shoot burning arrows into the wood structure lower down, but the wood was still so wet from the sea that no fire could take hold.
He and Atathu and a corps of their best fighters gathered along the cliff edge, swords out, shields up, and spears ready. The two Thralls had not said a word to each other si
nce arising and there had not even been time for Lirodello to don his scarlet jacket with the gold epaulets. He was dressed now just as he had been five years previously when he stood with Imalgha on the beach below with his long kitchen knife in hand. Atathu, however, was shining. She had never looked so beautiful, so fierce and threatening, and her heroic presence inspired everyone around her.
Suddenly the tower shot toward them, and when it was just inches from the edge it screeched to a stop. This sudden change in momentum caused the sheet of grey metal on the front of the tower to be jolted down like a drawbridge onto the edge of the cliff. The dust had hardly risen from the impact before a harpoon launched by the same mechanism as that used by Prince Icrix exploded out of the darkness within, straight at Atathu. Three abreast, the invaders burst out of the tower and into Ulde. Their tools had been transformed into weapons: the hammers were now war axes, their saws swords.
58
Torgee’s Message
For once Torgee’s “wrongness” had worked in his favour. If his heart had been in the same side of his chest as everyone else’s, he would be dead now. But it wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and somehow Montither’s sword had slid through the place where his heart was supposed to be without severing any main arteries. Still, he had lost a lot of blood and was very weak and thirsty and he was in great pain. Even as he felt himself flowing out to the bloodless darkness of death there was one bright star in him that forbade it. Saheli. She was alive in him, and there was strength flowing out of that piece of her that he had treasured for so long.