by Col Buchanan
Since then, they had carried on southwards towards Bar-Khos at the fastest pace they could maintain. But the main road was thoroughly churned into frozen furrows and holes, so that the route was choked in many places by wagons bogged down or broken.
When they had reached a lesser road that also headed roughly south, Cole decided they should take it instead, figuring that those transporting the pleasure slaves and his mother to the front would most likely have taken it too. Nico wasn’t so sure about that, but he went along with his father’s judgement anyway.
Riders came and went along the lesser road, imperial couriers bearing messages between the front and their stronghold of Tume back in the Reach. There was other traffic too, camp followers on foot and the odd squad of soldiers, though from what they overheard they were still far behind the lines here, with most of the Imperial Expeditionary Force now converging on Bar-Khos having rafted down the Chilos.
In the first glow of dawn, the road wound its way through a landscape devoid of life in these depths of winter, save for the crows wheeling over stands of trees, or a sudden hare springing from the verge into deeper grasses. Nico gazed at the ground flowing ahead of them, wanting it to lull him once more into a running meditation in which all his thoughts were effortlessly replaced by a deepening presence in the moment.
But his clothes were too wet for that, clinging to every movement of his body. And his hands so numb he could barely feel them, nor the tip of his nose.
It should be getting warmer the further south they came, but instead it seemed to be growing colder, until now the latest downpour was starting to turn to bitter sleet.
‘Bad weather coming,’ his father remarked with a glance to the west, as though the endless rain and sleet was hardly bad enough.
Nico grunted, chomping through a sausage as they ran, swallowing down chunks between breaths, filling a stomach cramped and sick with hunger. His father tore mouthfuls from a loaf of bread. Nico held out the sausage and they swapped so they could each have a bite of the other.
He squinted, seeing something move on the road ahead of them. But as they drew closer he saw that it was only an old scatterweed, a crazyweed some people called them: those balls of thorny branches that rolled across the landscape borne by the wind, feeding on the debris and fallen leaves they speared up and carried along the way. As he and his father approached the crazyweed it bounced off the bank of the road then veered with the wind so that for a time it accompanied them in their run, tumbling along at their side as though it had chosen to join them.
‘How far ahead do you think they are?’ asked Nico with an eye to the bouncing weed.
His father sucked in air before he could reply. He was growing tired.
‘Half a day maybe. If we’re lucky we should catch up with them tonight. Tomorrow at the latest.’
‘I can’t stop thinking what she must be going through.’
‘Better not to, boy. You’ll only torment yourself.’
‘That’s what I’m telling you. I can’t help it.’
He’d been trying his best not to think about what his mother must be going through at the hands of her captors, for the thoughts had been driving him crazy. Yet every time he passed another destroyed hamlet or body lying by the roadside, it was a bitter reminder of how insane and dangerous these people truly were.
‘Interesting terrain up here near the Reach,’ said his father, from the blue yonder of his mind.
‘Huh?’
‘I always liked this part of Khos. Still enough trees to be partly wild. And with the Windrush so nearby. And the Chilos. Good country.’
Since dawn’s first light his father had been unusually chatty. Indeed since the first stiffened corpses they had come upon, suddenly rendered visible by dawn so that Nico could see how they had been running past them all night long without noticing. Just trying to keep Nico’s mind off the passing horrors, he slowly came to realize now, and his father’s concern only made him feel worse for what he had said the day before.
‘If you say so,’ he responded, staring through the sleet at the passing trees and snow and marsh grasses, a white world broken by frozen streams and ponds. His father saw much more in a landscape than he ever would, Nico knew. He had knowledge of most wild things that lived and grew on Khos, intimate with the cycles and balances of nature. A true outdoorsman.
‘I remember the first time I ever saw the lowlands of western Khos,’ said Cole, his voice strained with exertion. ‘Where they grow all those endless crops of grain, and chase away the travelling Greengrasses trying to rewild the land as a threat to their business. I remember looking across the world and seeing how all of it was farmland, just field after field enclosed within hedges, ditches, stone walls, and hardly a stand of trees worth mentioning. Everything tamed. Everything the same. My uncle owned a farm there. You never met him. He thought the lowlands were pretty. Civilized, he used to call them. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that what I saw was desolation, a barren plain empty of most of the life that once had been there, killed or driven away. A land stripped naked of its forests, subdued, put to work.’
‘You’re thinking of the wild farm again, aren’t you?’
‘Always. How was it when last you saw the place?’
‘Thriving still.’
A grunt by way of acknowledgement. The pride and joy of his father’s life, his wild farm in southern Khos, where their cottage was located in a rugged landscape bordering the sea and the foothills of the High Tell. Over the course of the years, with passion and infinite patience, Cole had grown a forest garden filled with beneficial and perennial plants, all working in balance with each other and needing little tending, providing year-round food and medicines, and a semi-wild home for all manner of species normally driven away by farming.
More a way of life than a farm, he had been keen to tell others. A way of being. Just like the travelling Greengrasses always claimed, those wandering monks of the Way who had passed these things on to his father and many others. The Greengrasses made it their life’s work to spread the teachings of wild farming wherever they went in the Free Ports. They reminded people that they belonged to the land, not the other way round, teaching sustainable techniques of farming that went with the grain of nature, not against it. Practices that his father had taken to heart.
It was Cole’s desertion of his beloved wild farm that had been the most shocking thing of all, even more so than running out on his family. Yet now he wanted to change the subject, perhaps for the same reason he didn’t wish to speak about Reese, from guilt and the fear of what would become of them.
‘When I saw the Alhazii deep desert for the first time,’ Cole panted, ‘it was a thousand times worse than that. The desert was once fertile land covered in forests of giant chiminos. Until the birth of some early civilizations there, a few millennia ago. They cut down all the trees. Salted the soil with over-irrigation. Eventually destroyed the land base itself along with their own existence. I knew all this from the Greengrasses . . . But it wasn’t until I laid eyes on the Alhazii desert that I understood what the people there had done. What their civilization had created in its own image. All I could see was sand in every direction. A continent of dust where life had once thrived. And the people living there now, the desert-dwelling Alhazii . . . they seemed to have forgotten what it once had been like. Somehow they thought it was normal that they etched out what lives they could in this vast, dry lifeless graveyard of dead species. As though the Alhazii desert was only natural, not man-made at all.’
Cole blew the breath from his lungs and sucked down a fresh supply. It was wearing him out, this talking on the run. And he was starting to favour his left foot as though the right one was suffering. Still, it was impressive that he was still going, still loping along with the longrifle in his hand, when most men half his age would have dropped in exhaustion long before now.
‘We’ll have to stop and rest soon,’ he said. ‘No sense running ourselves into the ground like
the zels.’
‘But I haven’t even hit my third wind yet.’
His father glanced across at him as though he was joking, but Nico meant it. For all the hours they had been running like this, he was merely tired.
‘When did you get so fit, lad?’
‘I don’t know,’ Nico lied, and then he shook his head in scorn. ‘Since coming back with this new body of mine,’ he admitted. ‘I feel stronger in it. Definitely fitter. Like I could bound over a house or keep on running forever. I’ve never felt as comfortable in my own skin as I do now.’
‘Interesting. Maybe they straightened out a few kinks.’
‘Yes, I’ve been thinking that.’
‘The pock marks are gone from your forehead. From scratching when you had the child pox.’
It mellowed Nico’s heart to hear his father speak that way, to remember him as a boy; to have carried that memory with him for all this time.
His voice almost broke when he next spoke aloud.
‘Why did you come back, after all this time?’
A long pause, Cole’s expression lost within his hood.
‘I felt a calling. It was time.’
You couldn’t have felt it a little earlier?
Nico thought back to the wild farm too. The family cottage that had been his home, where he and his mother had lived on after Cole had deserted them.
‘She missed you, you know. She never stopped missing you.’
His father glared with a single eye, then gazed southwards through the sleet. Despite his obvious weariness he pushed himself harder, spurred by whatever regrets lay on his path behind him, drawn onwards by some lingering remnants of hope.
‘She’s going to be fine,’ he growled at Nico. ‘You hear me? Your mother’s going to be fine!’
*
With the early fall of twilight a fierce wind loosed itself from the plateau of the Reach behind them, bearing clouds thick enough to cast the world into darkness. It was a charged wind too, common in this season of storms, carrying with it the scent of lightning and causing the hairs of their bodies to stand on end. What was known on Khos as an Arcwind.
Soon the sleet was falling again, but this time with the added fierceness of the storm. Onwards they pushed, knowing that Nico’s mother was still somewhere ahead of them on the road. It grew colder than ever. The sleet turned to snow. With conditions verging on a blizzard, blowing them this way and that, his father cursed aloud and shouted that it was no good, they had to get out of this weather. Cole led him from the road into the deepening woods, seeking shelter. He was like a divining rod when it came to things like this, and soon they came to a dead tiq tree standing tall and bare-limbed, with the trunk hollowed out at its base. Icicles hung from their nostrils by then. Nico could no longer feel his extremities.
It was like a dry cave within, a cave of knotted wood with a floor of old leaves and sticks blown in from the triangular opening, which they used to start their fire.
After a while they were both snug and warm inside, with the knobbly walls of the space reflecting the light and heat of the fire, making Nico sleepy for all that it was barely evening. They had been running for what seemed like an endless time.
A bare foot prodded his flank, stirring his gaze from the flames.
‘Throw another log on the fire,’ came Cole’s weary voice from beneath the hat perched over his eyes, lying there against his backpack.
The fire crackled and hissed when Nico tossed another broken log upon it. The wood was damp and the smoke stung his eyes, but his skin tingled wonderfully in the heat.
‘Those cone nuts are crisping up,’ remarked his father without looking, twitching his nostrils.
‘I like them that way,’ Nico told him, and turned the spiky tiq cones over where they sat on the stones around the flames, turning dark. Even though he had already eaten some jerky from his pack, his stomach growled as he smelled the roasted nutty scent of them.
‘You still hungry?’ asked Cole.
‘Starving.’
‘Used to be a time we couldn’t get you to eat.’
‘What, when I was five?’
A smack of lips from beneath the man’s hat.
Once more Nico’s mind settled on his mother and what she must be going through right now. Nightmare images flared through his imagination. Feeling sick, he turned away from them by looking instead to the still form of his father.
It seemed to him that Cole had spent a great deal of time alone with himself over the years in which he had been gone; years living as a longhunter, he had said, much of them spent in the vast wilderness of the Great Hush. For as long as Nico had known him he had tended towards the quiet side, but now he barely spoke at all, not unless spoken to first, or when trying to take Nico’s mind off something. Seldom did he hold his son’s gaze for very long.
‘You haven’t asked me about Boon yet,’ Nico ventured quietly.
His father slid the hat from his eyes and peered through the smoke at him with his steady blue gaze. Cole had been close to the family dog too.
‘What about Boon?’
Even now it was hard to say the words. Nico recalled his heartbreak at the death of his lifelong companion, back when they’d been living rough in Bar-Khos. The tears had dripped from his face as he’d buried the old dog in the earth with his own two hands, stricken by the sheer awfulness of his loss.
‘What about Boon?’ his father asked again.
‘He’s dead. He fell sick in Bar-Khos. I buried him there.’
The news was enough to pinch Cole’s expression into a frown, and to send him rifling through his pack for his tarweed and papers. Within moments he had a roll-up in his hand; he lit it with a metal spark-lighter and took a draw of smoke, exhaling as he stared at the flickering firelight with his forehead deeply furrowed.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said after a time.
Cole stared at the flames without focus, as though seeing into the past. Shadows softened the many scars criss-crossing his features, and Nico was reminded of how his father had once been a strikingly handsome man, before the war had robbed him of his good looks.
‘Why did you leave us, Father?’ Nico blurted suddenly, before he could stop himself. It was the only way he could ask such a question.
His father brooded some more in silence. The flames crackled within their circle of stones as the snow outside was hurled about in the gusts.
‘I just couldn’t take it any more,’ he said. ‘The siege. The war. If I had stayed any longer . . .’ Cole winced, shaking his head. ‘I would have ended up taking my own life, just to stop the pain of it.’
Nico’s heart was beating fast now. He had witnessed the steady deterioration of his father over the early years of the siege. Each time Cole had returned to the family farm in the stained leathers of a Special bearing even more scars than before. But he had never really known what was going on inside the man, how much those fresh scars must have reflected much deeper wounds too.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked him softly.
‘It was a nightmare down there, Nico. Fighting in those tunnels under the Shield, year after year. It got to the point where I could hardly sleep in darkness any longer, not without jumping awake to the slightest of sounds. And when I was awake, the worst of memories would flood through me at any time. Friends I saw butchered to death. Friends I left to die, buried in rubble. I was falling apart.’
He looked to his son through another exhalation of smoke, eyes watering.
‘But I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I left you both behind like I did. You’ve every right to hate me.’
What could he say to that? How to cast aside all those years of anger he bore against this man who was his father?
‘Hate is putting it a little strongly,’ Nico offered, though he would go no further than that one concession. He wasn’t willing to forgive him just yet. Not while his mother remained a captive in enemy hands.
Together they looked to the f
ire, their troubled stares swallowed by the flames.
Another memory came to Nico just then, another piece of his life falling into place. Or rather another piece of his death, for in a flash he relived the moments he had been staked to a roaring bonfire in distant Q’os, terrified beyond sense and reason, struggling to be free from an agony so consuming he knew he would go mad from it, willing to give anything to be gone from there and home again in Khos. In those terrible moments he had prayed for the old Rōshun to come and save him, but his prayers had gone unanswered.
‘I died in the imperial capital, you know. They tied me to a stake on top of a bonfire, and they set it alight.’
‘I know.’
Nico blinked hard, feeling the heat of the flames against his face. He’d barely had a chance to speak with Ash before they’d parted for the final time. So many questions remained unanswered.
Bending forwards, he plucked one of the cone nuts from the fire and tossed it from one palm to the other, letting it cool, faintly horrified by the lingering glimpses of his own blackening skin on the bonfire.
Was the crazy old farlander really dead, as his intuition suggested? It seemed impossible that such a force of nature could suddenly cease to exist.
Beside him, Cole was taking his beloved longrifle from its wrapping so that he could rub it down with a cloth. It was typical of his father to seek out activity whenever he was uncomfortable. Not so unlike Nico himself.
‘You were living in the city?’ came his father’s subdued voice.
Nico exhaled long and hard. He placed the crispy cone nut back on one of the stones, his appetite momentarily forgotten.
‘For a while.’
‘How come?’
‘I didn’t like the lover my mother took in, so I left home with Boon.’
Cole slowed in his polishing of the rifle.
‘A lover? What was he like?’
‘Too young for her. And something of a bastard. Los was his name.’
His father grunted, eyes hidden in the shadow of his hat.