“Failing that, I’ll have from you a confession, properly witnessed, to all manner of injustices committed by the Free. Transgressions on the part of their Clevers. Once we have that… well, you can guess, no doubt. And I’m sure you know I can get such a confession from you.”
Kerig refused to know that. He would hope to die before such a thing came to pass, under either Sullen’s ministrations or his own. A Clever had more ways than most to end his own life. But he needed some strength, some respite from the constant distracting daggers of pain. He set himself to retreating, burrowing back into the darkest and most silent recesses of his mind. He hoped Wren might forgive him for all of this. And that she might find a way to kill Sullen one day.
“If he seems to be regaining his strength, bleed him for a little while,” Sullen was saying to the guards. “Constant watch. Never forget what he is; what he is capable of if you give him the chance.”
The sound of a door opening, grating over rough flagstones.
“Come away, Weaponsmith. I need to get some rest. We all do. There will be much to be done in the next days, if all goes well.”
24
A Hundred Thousand Wings
The smell of roasting hare made Drann’s hunger dance a jig in his stomach. Lebid had shot the thing that afternoon, from a ridiculous distance, as it sped across the hillside. Sent it tumbling head over heels with a single arrow that transfixed it through the chest. The best arrow-work that Drann had ever seen in his life.
Now the hare was skinned and gutted and spread-eagled on sticks beside the fire, dripping its juices to sizzle on the stones beneath it. Its scent had been what woke Drann from an unsatisfactory drowsing sleep. For a moment, he had dreamed he was back in the village, watching his mother serve up rabbit stew. Then he had opened his eyes and found himself somewhere very different, living a very different life.
Everyone seemed to find the hare and its cooking utterly entrancing. Night had come on while Drann slept. Wood had been gathered, the fire lit. The Free had assembled around it – Akrana, Rudran and a dozen of the lancers and archers, at least – and now stared fixedly at the skinned animal. Lost in their own thoughts.
Drann took his place in the circle, and held his hands out to gather in some of the fire’s warmth. The air was acquiring that sharper chill that said a lasting change in the weather had begun. Back in his village, the first snows were probably only a few weeks away. Perhaps less.
He had never seen the Free so subdued. So silent. He wondered whether this was defeat.
“Where’s Wren?” he whispered to the archer at his side, a little nervous at disturbing the contemplative hush.
“Went down into the trees by the stream,” the man grunted without taking his eyes off that hare. “We found a drowning pool down there when we were getting the firewood. Said she wanted to see it.”
“Oh.”
Drann looked towards the hollow beneath the camp. The moon dusted the canopy with silver, but other than that, the trees were a dark mass.
“Is she recovered, then?” he asked.
“A little,” Rudran said quietly. “Way to go yet.”
“Has she eaten?”
“Couldn’t say. Don’t think so.”
Rudran did not seem overly concerned. His lack of interest struck Drann as resignation rather than indifference.
“I could go and see if she wants food,” Drann suggested. “Perhaps she shouldn’t be on her own.”
Rudran shrugged. “Perhaps she shouldn’t,” the man grunted, “but you’ll not have more luck telling her that than we did.”
Drann hesitated for a moment or two, staring into the fire. Then he pushed himself to his feet and set off down the hillside. Down to that dark and unwelcoming thicket of trees.
He had to kick and crash his way through tangled undergrowth once he got there. If there was a path, he could not find it in the darkness. The woods were not of the sort suited to people. A little bit of wilderness, run rampant and disorderly according to its own whims.
There was a wide pool, nested there amongst the trees. It was ringed by ancient flagstones, between which and over which a dense growth of grass and briars had come up. The moon was painted on its dark, still surface. The reflections of the stars above twinkled in it. Wren was sitting by its side.
“It’s a drowning pool,” she murmured without looking round.
This was the first Drann had seen, but he knew of them. They had been everywhere, once, and though no one had used them for their intended purpose in a long time, ill rumour and frightening tales still clustered about them.
“The Sorentines made them, didn’t they?” he said.
For a long time, he did not think she was going to reply. She sat there, gazing into the darkness of the water. Then she spoke.
“They revered the qualities of the Aestival entelech above all others. Fire, strength, courage. The sun, the summer, the day. Even anger. They thought these things the most valuable, and they thought least valuable that which seemed an expression of the Hibernal. Like still water. So when they had someone to kill, someone they had no respect for, they drowned them. In these pools. They had a lot of pools, since there were a lot of people they were minded to kill.”
“I didn’t know that,” Drann said quietly. “Not all of it, anyway.”
He took her willingness to talk as, if not quite invitation, at least permission, and sat beside her at the pool’s edge.
“People forget things,” Wren said. “There’ll be bones down there. In the mud.”
She closed her eyes. They tightened, just for a moment, as if tugged by some passing pain.
“Are you all right?” Drann asked, and was at once struck by the rank stupidity and cruelty of the question.
She opened her eyes and glanced at him, sidelong.
“No.” She held up her hand, turning it slowly before her face in a shaft of moonlight falling through the branches, as she bent and straightened the fingers. “I think the joints have stiffened. They’ve changed. It’s uncomfortable.”
“It won’t go away?”
“No. I called up a new shape, a new movement, for the earth from out of the Autumnal. My body sheds fragments of its shape, and its movement. What we take must be given back. So it goes.”
They sat side by side, both of them gazing into the water. Seeing nothing but a vision of the night sky. It seemed to Drann that he could as easily have been lying stretched out on the ground, staring up.
He looked back towards the camp. There was nothing to be seen, through the trees and the moon shadows, save the fire burning. An orange lantern amidst the darkness. Now and again its light would flicker and shiver, as someone walked in front of it.
“Lebid shot a hare, you know,” he said. “It was running fast. I’ve never seen such a shot. They’re roasting it now. If we’re quick we can —”
“I’m not hungry. Thank you, for what you did.”
“What I did?”
“When Sullen came for Kerig. I hear you picked a fight with him.”
Drann grunted. “Not much of a fight. My ribs still hurt. I didn’t really think about it. Just happened. Akrana told me that only the present’s real. It’s all there is, so you do what needs doing now; getting in Sullen’s way seemed like it needed doing, at the time.”
“Oh, she wants that to be true,” Wren said with a sigh. “She wants to be weightless. Truth is, none of us are. The present’s always got the past riding on its back. But she’s right, too. Sometimes you just do what needs doing.”
She plucked a long, nodding stem of grass from beside her and cast it out on to the pool. It made no sound. Ripples, perfect circles, raced out from it. Trembling away into nothingness across the glassy water.
“Look,” Wren breathed. “Fireflies.”
She pointed across the pool, and Drann saw that there were indeed a few points of greenish light, bobbing amongst the undergrowth.
“I always liked them,” Wren said. “It’s la
te in the year for them, though. Their last dance, poor things.”
Drann watched those drifting gleams as they came and went amongst the trees. It was restful. Something in that dance, whether it was their last or not, was easing to his mind. He heard an owl hooting.
“Take a message to Yulan for me, will you?” Wren said.
“Come and tell him yourself.”
“No. This is a calming place, don’t you think? Tell Yulan this: it’s not his fault. I don’t blame him.”
“You come and tell him,” Drann persisted.
He did not want to walk away from her, and leave her sitting here alone with the moon in the water. Calming or not, restful or not, drowning pools were bad places, he had always been taught. Places where bad things happened; where too many people had died. Something bad had already happened to the Free, he knew. But it felt unfinished.
“Leave me be,” Wren said, with less warmth than her voice had carried before. “Tell them – tell Yulan – I’ll be back soon.”
Drann trudged heavily away through the copse, up towards the fire. He knew no one had really expected him to bring her back with him, but even so, it felt like failure. Everything felt a bit like failure right now.
“No luck?” Rudran grunted as Drann returned into the light and heat.
The lancer was sitting on a rock, chewing at a leg of the hare. The fire had put a flush into his cheeks, to match the rusty red of his hair and beard. A beard over which grease was now trickling.
Drann shook his head.
“Where’s Yulan?” he asked.
“Perched on the cairn. Watching our trail.”
Drann thought he could dimly see Yulan’s form close to the top of that great tumbling heap of stones, an outline darker even than the sky that framed him.
“What about Hamdan?” he asked.
Rudran shrugged. “Have some meat, lad. None of this is your mess to mend.”
A large bird of some sort suddenly swept low over their heads, its wings snapping. Gone away into the night even as they ducked.
“What was that?” someone coughed.
“Crow, maybe?” one of the lancers suggested.
Drann noticed that Akrana was lying close by, stretched out with her hands behind her head. Looking for all the world as though she was asleep. If Akrana was sleeping, Drann suspected, everyone else probably should be. From what he had seen, she would always be the last of them to seek rest.
First one, then another bird flashed through the little island of firelight. Silent, these; both of them owls, or broad-winged hawks. Drann frowned. Higher up, there were more winged shapes passing over. He walked towards the cairn, and found Yulan already descending over the loose stones.
Drann turned, not knowing exactly why, to gaze out into the impenetrable night, in the direction of the trees and the drowning pool. Was he imagining that he could hear… something? The sound of wind amongst branches, even though there was no wind.
Birds were coming in from every direction, he realised. High and low, the sky was alive with them. They passed across the bright face of the moon. The stars winked in and out as they were obscured and revealed, obscured and revealed, over and over again. He had never seen anything like it. And there was a wind now, stirring his hair.
Yulan took hold of his shoulder. He looked tense. Tight.
“Where’s Wren?” he snapped.
“She’s still down there,” Drann mumbled. “By the pool. I couldn’t persuade her to come back to the fire.”
Yulan grimaced, cast an anxious glance up into the bird-crowded sky.
“She asked me to give you a message,” Drann said.
“What did she say?”
“Uh… she said, she said that it wasn’t your fault. That she would be back soon.”
Yulan stared at him. Firelight danced over his face. Another flight of birds – certainly crows this time – went flapping past, unseen in the darkness but calling loudly. They were passing, as all the birds had been, from high ground to low. Towards the copse.
Drann could see Yulan’s lips moving, but couldn’t hear what he said. He thought it might have been: “She’ll be back soon.”
Then he was gone. Gone that same way, towards the copse.
“What did she say?” Yulan demanded.
“Uh… she said, she said that it wasn’t your fault. That she would be back soon.”
Yulan stared at Drann, but did not really see him. Heard, but paid no further heed to, the sound of wings and bird calls in the night.
“She’ll be back soon,” he murmured to himself.
Such a small thing to say, but it could mean many things in the world of the Clever. It woke despair in him. So he ran.
Bounding down towards the trees, trusting to luck and moonlight that he would not fall, or break his ankle in some scrape or burrow. Reckless, but if ever there was a moment for recklessness, he thought this was it.
He had set Hamdan to watch her, not thinking the archer could prevent her from doing anything rash, just hoping it might buy him some narrow warning. Time enough, perhaps, to stop it. He knew, by instinct, that the warning he had hoped for was not going to come. That it might already be too late. He had failed her, and all of them.
As he plunged into the dense thicket, the wind raking through the treetops grew ever stronger. Branches rattled against one another. The great sails of leaves roared. The undergrowth tugged at him and thorned him, as if it conspired to keep him from his destination, but he pushed through it.
He found Hamdan at the same moment he came within sight of the drowning pool. The archer was soundly asleep, amidst nettles. He would be profoundly ungrateful for that when he woke. It was Wren’s doing, of course. But sleep was not a thing to be made from her Autumnal entelech; it was of the Hibernal. That meant she was reaching beyond what came naturally, easily. It would weaken her, and she had already been weak. Yulan sensed disaster bearing down upon him, upon all of them, like a vast grey wolf loping remorselessly out from a far forest, with cold eyes and ill intent. More ghosts, coming his way.
He went on, to the edge of the pool. Its surface was trembling, disturbed by the gusts of wind churning about above it. Twigs and leaves were flying now. And above it all, armies of birds were coming in, sinking down towards the trees. Riding and tumbling and twisting in the storm.
“Wren!’ he shouted. No answer.
Some way beyond the far side of the drowning pool, the trees seemed just a little thinner. The wind a little stronger. He thought he could see a rain of dark shapes plunging down there. Birds.
He ran around the pool’s edge, keeping to the flagstones from which guilty and innocent alike had once been cast to their deaths. He pushed through a screen of bending, flailing saplings. The air itself beat at him, pushing back.
“Wren!’ he shouted, both in alarm and to make himself heard over the clattering of wings, the shaking of wind-savaged branches.
She was there. Standing in a partial clearing. She gave no sign that she heard him; remained quite still, arms spread, head thrown back. Above her, a huge spiralling tower of birds was descending.
“Wren! Don’t do this,” Yulan cried.
The seething gyre came ever lower. Crows and thrushes and hawks, all mixed together, all circling down in a wild storm of bodies that would hide Wren from him in mere moments.
“I have no choice,” he heard her cry, though her voice was almost lost in the noise.
Leaves and twigs and feathers were spinning around, pattering against Yulan’s chest, stinging his face. He put a hand up to guard his eyes.
“Of course you do,” he shouted, taking a step closer. “Help us. If we have the Bereaved, we can bargain…”
“It’ll be too late.”
There were birds between the two of them now, spinning so fast about Wren that Yulan could not make out their forms, only the blur of their abandoned flight.
“You know what they’ll do to him,” she shouted. Her voice was thinning. “Wh
at Sullen will do. They’ll kill him, sooner or later. I don’t have a choice. I gave that up the day I wed him. Gladly.”
“Wren, please,” he begged. “Trust me.”
She was stretching further up, he thought, pushing up on the balls of her feet, though such was the thickening frenzy of birds about her that he could not be sure.
“But I might save Kerig.” He could barely hear her now. His ears were filled by the beating of wings, the groaning of trees, the rain of debris. “And you can save the rest of them, Yulan. I know you can. I do trust you.”
He could not reach her. The wind was pushing against him, making him sway. The walls of the bird storm were too thick, too fierce. He could barely see the outline of her reaching form any more. His strength was of no service to him. All his hopes and plans were coming to nothing, and still it was not him paying the price, but others.
“Wren!’ he shouted.
There was no reply.
“Wren,” he tried once more. But she was lost to him, letting the entelech consume her. Passing beyond his reach, beyond his ken.
A great spinning column of dark birds rose before him now. It writhed up from the ground to far beyond the canopy, to the clouds, sucking in more and more birds all the time. Becoming monstrous. Mists of earth and shredded vegetation surrounded it. Feathered corpses were flung out, falling around Yulan; birds killed by collision with their brethren or with the trees.
“I’m sorry,” he thought he heard her say, very soft, very distant. Perhaps inside his head, not out there on the turbulent air.
And the great gyre of bird surged upwards. The ground bucked and flung Yulan on to his back. Debris fell all around him. He lay there, staring up, and watched the churning flock ascend into the sky like a writhing black feathered serpent, tearing itself free of the earth. The maelstrom of birds twisted and turned and raced away over the top of the trees. Out of sight, though he heard it still; the muted roar of a hundred thousand wings.
The Free Page 24