Yulan did the same as he crested the top of the climb. Spared himself the briefest fragment of time to shake his shoulders and lift his injured foot from the stirrup. It was sharply painful, protesting at any weight he put upon it. Nothing he could not bear for now.
The sound of the Clamour’s wagon coming up behind him caused him to turn, to see how the bull was faring after its cruel exertions. Spittle was trailing from its great wide mouth, and he could hear the snorting of its breath even through the muffling rain. Its stride still looked strong, though; its head was not falling too low.
Then he looked to Hestin, hunched up on the seat behind the beast, and he saw the mottling in her cloak of leaves. The dullness, here and there a hint of browning, that had taken over the formerly luminous green. And he was afraid for the first time since they had left Curmen.
“Halt!’ he cried into the storm, loud as his voice would bear.
He sprang from his horse and ran, splashing, slithering, for the wagon.
No, no, was all he could think. Don’t let this happen. Nothing, not Callotec or Towers’ Shadow, perhaps not even keeping the Bereaved from the hands of the Orphans, would be worth the loosing of the Clamour. Don’t let me have made this happen.
15
Hope On The Air Yet
“Halt!’ Drann heard Yulan shouting behind him, startlingly loud and sharp.
His horse had already begun trudging of its own volition after Kerig and Wren and some of the archers who were heading out, with the few spare horses, along the thankfully now flat droveway. He hauled on the reins, more firmly than he should have done, and the animal came to an unsteady halt, clearly unhappy.
Drann was no happier. For all the protection of the cape he had been given when the rain came, he was as wet as he could ever remember being. His body, which so long as they had kept to the Old Threetower Road had pretended to be growing accustomed to riding, had collapsed into all its habitual aches and pains once the punishing climb away from that road began.
He tried to turn his horse around, to see what was happening behind him, but it had clearly run out of patience with his inept handling and refused to move. Carefully he twisted around to look over his shoulder. The movement scattered raindrops over his eyes. He wiped them away.
Yulan was down from his horse, running towards the Clamour’s wagon, which had just come up over the top of the slope and was trundling slowly on. Drann could not see anything amiss. Nothing to cause the alarm he had caught around the edges of Yulan’s cry.
Others evidently did, for Wren suddenly came galloping back past him. Her horse pounded through a puddle on the track as it went by, and sent fountains of water splashing across Drann’s leg. It made him no wetter than he already was, though it did add an unappealing spray of mud to his attire.
He made to dismount, thinking that this chance to move his legs, perhaps bend and stretch some fresh life into them, was too precious to waste. It would hurt, he knew, but it would be a better kind of pain than the steady stiffness that was in them now.
“Stay in your saddle,” snapped Hamdan, appearing suddenly at his side.
Drann froze in mid movement, inelegantly poised half out of his seat. Hamdan’s voice held none of the light good humour he had come to expect.
“Stay in your saddle,” the archer said again.
He was staring fixedly at the wagon, at Yulan as he climbed up on to the seat beside Hestin.
Drann slumped glumly back down. He looked, and saw Yulan leaning in to say something to Hestin, who was as unresponsive as ever. Wren, still mounted, was leaning down, apparently trying to look into Hestin’s eyes, or hear some whisper.
“What’s happening?” Drann asked.
“Her cloak look the same to you?” Hamdan said.
Drann squinted through the blurring rain. He supposed Hestin’s strange garment did look to have lost some of its lustre. The vividness of the leaves, to which he had grown accustomed, was lessened. That might be a trick of the deceptive rain, but not the browning he thought he could see in some of those leaves. As if autumn had breathed on a few of them, and set the edges to curling and brittling.
“Means she’s struggling,” Hamdan said dolefully. “Means the Clamour’s stirring.”
“What should we do? Should we help?” Drann asked, fully sharing now in the wider trepidation.
“We stay on our horses, and if it comes to it, we run. Nothing the likes of you and me can do, if the worst happens. That’ll be down to Hestin and the rest of the Clevers. Not much they can do either, probably. If we have to go, I’ll take your reins. You just try not to fall off.”
Drann groaned, because he could think of nothing else to say. As they watched, Yulan was holding Hestin’s hand, murmuring urgently into her ear. Wren had straightened, and was waving at the rest of them to move further away.
The huge shrouded cage on the back of the wagon shook. Just once, as if some convulsion had passed through the monster it contained. Wren’s horse sprang away from the wagon and almost threw her. Yulan did not react, concentrated entirely upon Hestin. Hamdan said nothing, but quietly led Drann away.
They went perhaps a hundred paces. Far enough that the rain swallowed up the wagon, hid most of what was happening. Drann was not overly sorry for that. Whatever curiosity he might retain about the Clamour, it no longer included a desire to see it for himself.
They waited, all of them save Yulan and Wren, huddled together in the downpour. Drann found himself imagining what it would be like to flee on horseback, through this storm, across this ground. He had a glum feeling that it would be a brief flight, whether Hamdan was holding the reins or not. He could imagine himself, all too clearly, pitched from the saddle, sprawling down into mud and puddles. Flailing around there as something terrible came howling down upon him out of the rain.
Wren came slowly into sight, riding towards them. Not fleeing, Drann was pleased to see, even though he did not know whether that meant anything.
“We rest for one hour, Yulan says,” she reported as she drew to a halt before them. “No more than that, but Hestin needs it. Getting the bull up here took too much out of her.”
Hamdan laughed suddenly, and slapped Drann wetly on the back.
“Looks like you’re not dying today after all, son. That’s a pleasant surprise, eh?”
They set oat-laden feed bags about the muzzles of the horses, arranged the animals in a rough line and squatted in the lee of them. It made hardly any difference to the remorseless rain, but it was a little more restful than riding doggedly on. Just a little.
Drann crunched thoughtfully at an apple Hamdan had given him. Acquired from Ordeller, it seemed. Drann wondered whether the Emperor had been deprived of some of his preferred fodder. He doubted the ape took such disappointments with indifference.
“Is the Clamour going to…” he began, only to realise he did not know quite how to phrase his question. “Is it going to fight, when you catch Callotec?”
“The Clamour’s more threat than weapon,” Hamdan said. “You ever see that thing out of its cage, you be sure to wet your breeches right before you run, because there’s a good chance it’ll be the last thing you see. It’ll mean the threat’s failed, and all other hope is spent. That’s not where we are now.”
He lifted his chin and sniffed ostentatiously at the water-thick air, then grinned at Drann.
“I smell hope on the air yet, don’t you?”
Drann did not know what to say to that either, so he shrugged.
“Trust me,” Hamdan nodded. “I know the scent of hope. We’ve not outpaced it yet. Not quite.”
“You’ve a sharper nose than me,” muttered Kerig, sitting a short distance away.
“Of course,” agreed Hamdan lightly. “I’ve a sharper everything than you. Just ask your wife.”
Kerig growled. It was not angry, not confrontational. An echo of their habitual barbed banter. But neither of them had quite the belief, or the lightness of spirit, to pursue the ex
change.
They rode on, into the night and beyond the storm’s will to hound them. The rain faltered and then fell away. The day’s light did the same.
No one in their right mind travelled far in darkness, as best Drann knew. But he supposed that was more out of fear of wild beasts, or robbers, than anything else. Few ill-wishers – whether beast or man – would earn fear from the Free.
The moon, unshrouded now that the clouds had rolled away to unleash their angers elsewhere, gave light enough for the trail ahead to be seen clearly. It did not give light enough to dispel Drann’s own tiredness. He was dimly aware, in an unconcerned way, that his head was nodding in time with his horse’s stride. That his hands were slackening on the reins. His eyes narrowed, moment by moment. It felt as if it would be a great and unreasonable exertion to force them open. When he allowed them to at last close, a tremendous, releasing relief washed through him.
Then Yulan was pushing him upright in the saddle.
“You’ve two choices,” the Free’s Captain said gruffly. “Share a horse, tied to the back of the rider. Or share the Clamour’s wagon. Neither’s much of a bed, but you might get some sleep. More on the wagon, I should think. It’s one or the other, because I’ll not have you slowing us.”
Drann looked back. The bull was there, not far behind him, still pacing strongly, unnaturally on. Hestin was calm and quiet. Her cloak was as simply green as ever.
“Is it safe?” Drann asked bluntly, not at all interested in trying to conceal his unease.
“As much as it’s ever safe, yes.”
But for his deep-rooted craving for sleep, as demanding as the most desperate hunger, Drann suspected he might never again dare to get within ten paces of that ominously silent cage. At that moment, though, he was starting to wonder if, and how quickly, uncomplicated exhaustion might kill a man. And he would overcome almost any fear for the promise of some time, however brief, spent away from the back of a horse.
He wedged himself in between two bales of bedding at the back of the cart. Perilously close to the edge; so close that a deep hole in the track might be enough to bounce him out. As close as he was willing to get to the Clamour.
He slept in fragments, jolted and shaken back to wakefulness over and over again but never dragged entirely out of sleep’s grasp. Even when he felt someone forcing themselves ungently into the narrow space between him and the cage, digging out their own tight sleeping space, he did not wake far enough to tell who it was. Given the sharpness of the elbows being employed, he fuzzily thought it might be Akrana.
In some of that disturbed sleep, he had the vague sense that he was dreaming of his mother and father and sisters. Even of Old Emmin, though she had been dead several years now. None of it stayed with him for more than moments, and even while it did, it felt oddly like someone else’s dream. All of it was shaken away by the wagon’s juddering progress.
He was finally, irrevocably woken by the unpleasant sensation of his unknown sleeping partner climbing over him, standing briefly on his head. Drann yelped in protest, and waved a protesting arm before sitting groggily up. It turned out to be Kerig. The Clever dropped to the ground and walked away, entirely ignoring Drann.
Drann grumbled a little more, to none but himself, as he looked around through narrowed, crusty eyes. It was daylight. He was surprised; he must have slept longer, and sounder, than he would have thought possible.
The wagon had come to a halt on the brow of a low hill. The grass here was longer, the hill a patchwork of wind-bent scrub and glades. It had not been grazed by stock in a long time. They had entered wilder lands, where few people dwelled.
Drann clumsily levered himself out from his nest and jumped down. It turned out to be a less than good idea, as his left leg had not yet joined the rest of his body in wakefulness. It was numb right through, as good as absent. Certainly not paying any attention to his commands.
He lurched and wobbled around, barely staying upright. The wet, clinging grass did not help. His leg tingled and burned and protested as life slowly returned to it, and he hissed his discomfort. He was glad that no one seemed to be paying his performance any heed. Those of the Free not eating appeared to be asleep, stretched out on blankets on the damp ground. Drann’s stomach rumbled its own very clear response to the sight of Hamdan pulling apart a flatbread. His hunger wetted his mouth. He hobbled over to the rest of them, rubbing at his thigh.
Hamdan saw him coming, and sent a hand-sized piece of the flatbread spinning across the air towards him. Drann was not quite awake enough for that, and tried to catch it, juggled it, and dropped it into the grass. He retrieved it, and brushed flecks of dirt and stem away before taking a bite. He limped over to stand beside the archer, not wanting to sit down for fear that his leg might seize up again.
The Free had chosen their resting place well, screened from most views by clumps of ragged thorn bushes. Drann noted that Akrana and Lebid were not amongst the others. Standing watch somewhere, he assumed. He wondered, faintly guilty, whether Lebid was being worked harder than the rest now, in punishment for his – and Drann’s – mistake in Curmen.
“How long are we resting for?” he asked through lumps of chewed bread.
“Just a couple of hours,” Hamdan told him. “You’ve slept through the first of them already, mind. We made good time in the night. However many times we swap the horses around, though, they need some rest; and Hestin’s tired.”
Drann looked over to the wagon. Hestin was sitting on the ground beside it, her back to one of the great wheels. Wren was kneeling there, holding a water skin to Hestin’s lips. That leaf cloak was green enough, but not quite as bright as Drann remembered it.
“Why does she do it?” Drann murmured. “Ruin herself like this?”
“Somebody has to. She chose to be that somebody. Otherwise the Clamour’d be raging around, tearing the world to pieces. Like a never-ending storm. That’s what it was doing when we were sent to put an end to it. Kill it. Way things turned out, it likely would’ve killed all of us instead if Hestin hadn’t turned up. Tamed it, joined us.”
“You couldn’t kill it?” Drann said, wondering what kind of power could overmatch the Free.
“It’s a Permanence. Pure entelech. It only looks like a real thing, a thing you can touch or fight. It’s not like you or me, or that bush over there. It’s essence, a little bubble of the raw stuff, risen up to spend some time in our world. Not sure anyone could kill it.” Hamdan shrugged. “I don’t know enough about these things to say. Just be glad that Hestin does what she does, so none of us has to try.”
“Yes,” said Drann. “Yes.”
“They’re coming,” Wren suddenly called from over by the wagon.
She was standing now, looking back the way they had come in the night, shielding her eyes against the low sun with her hand. Drann tried to see what it was that had caught her eye, but could not. Around him, the Free were getting to their feet; some just waking from their dozes. Yulan walked slowly towards Wren. He had a rough woollen blanket draped across his shoulders, and a heaviness to his tread. Even such a man as he had his limits, Drann realised with a distant tremble of concern, and they were being tested.
They came over the crest on magnificent horses, as big as any dray horse or plough-puller but built for the charge, not the steady drudge work of the fields. The sunlight struck flashes from the metal blades of lances, and set shimmers dancing on chain vests and bright helms. The horses stepped high, held on tight reins. They wore stiff leather scales on their faces, nets of chain ringlets across their chests, more leather, part covered with brightly coloured cloth, over their hindquarters.
Drann had never seen such men at close hand. He had not known there were any such in the kingdom, save Crex’s own Armsmen.
The lancers rode in double file, their leader ahead of the rest, alone, though there was nothing in his dress or his mount’s equipment to mark him apart. Rudran, Drann assumed. He did not look to be more than thirty years old
, but he was a big man. Wide-shouldered and long-backed, with a dense red beard.
“There you are, son,” Hamdan said, rising to his feet beside him. “Didn’t I tell you there was hope on the air yet? That’s hope riding in on big horses, that is. Can you smell it now?”
“I suppose so,” Drann said, and more or less meant it.
Rudran and his band did look like men fit to meet any challenge. A fearsome kind of hope, which struck Drann as the only kind likely to be worth much in the coming days.
16
Simple Men Doing Needful Things
Creel of Mondoon mistrusted all things in matters of campaigning and war. Allies, weather, assumptions. Promises and pledges; predictions and perceptions. All of it, he thought, essentially a conspiracy designed to trick or lull him into careless error and horrible defeat. He would be the first to admit that it made him less than soothing company for those who rode with him. But then he would contend that it made those who rode with him a good deal more likely to enjoy a long life than they might otherwise do. More often than not, they seemed inclined to agree.
It all meant that Creel, while at war, constantly expected something unexpected and probably unhelpful to happen. On the one day he had let his guard slip and rashly trusted assurances of safety, he would have died but for the Free. Since then, he had redoubled his commitment to doubting everything and anticipating imminent disaster.
As a result, he would not have named it a surprise when a vaguely harassed-looking messenger came, in the midst of the chaos that breaking such a large camp entailed, to tell him that the School Clade had arrived. Unannounced, uninvited and already going about some unexplained business of their own. Not just any of the Clade, either. Sullen, their loathsome commander.
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