Even in the glare of the setting sun, he found the sudden glimmer of colors in his mind dazzling. He didn’t flinch from it though, and let it swell around him in its now familiar way.
He focused in on the welt and saw that, while it wasn’t as intense as the mass of threads that he’d seen with Jan, there was definitely a small streak of darkness. And as with before, he could make out a subtle drifting of blue mist towards the dark patch. He also thought he felt a peculiar sense of someone else there, another connection to the colors.
So, it was the Elder! He definitely knows how to use it too.
He watched as the colors moved towards the patch, inch by inch. It was very slow though, so Raf concentrated and threw himself wading forwards into the color. He had hardly even started thinking about trying to heal him when a sapphire streak crystallized out of the surrounding mist and swept in, as thick as syrup. It poured over the blackness where the wound was, completely filling and saturating it. In seconds, he could see that the dark patch was no longer there; it had been completely erased.
Raf smiled, and then for a brief moment his awareness switched to a more external one and he heard himself singing alone.
Not again…
He opened his eyes and saw the Elder not two feet from him. His face bore an expression of disbelief that made Raf’s heart leap into his throat.
“You,” whispered Bolyai. The haggard old man was crouched with one knee on the ground, pointing a finger at him. He stood up slowly and stepped closer to him, pushing the finger hard into Raf’s chest. “What color was it, boy?”
“I don’t know wh- ”
“What color was it?” hissed the Elder.
“I… blue, I think? I don’t know what you m…” stammered Raf desperately. “How did you know? Did you see it, too?”
The Elder gaped at him, his mouth quivering slightly. His arm slowly lowered until it lay against his side again. “I knew it,” he whispered. “I knew there was one there. It was you in the tree, wasn’t it? And you with the sick woodsmith.”
Then, to Raf’s astonishment, the Elder tilted his head back and suddenly erupted into a husky laugh, clenching his gnarled fists in front of him and pumping them up and down.
Raf tried to quickly get up, but as he did he came face to face with Tiponi who was staring at him wildly, one arm hooked back rubbing his shoulder.
Bolyai bent over to catch his breath, wheezing, and then beckoned to Raf. “Listen to me,” he said slowly. “Your Bard - the one who was banished?”
“What about him?”
“When you went to speak to him, did he tell you anything about music? Old music?”
“No….”
“He never mentioned anything to you about music? That’s… a pity.” Bolyai looked away deep in thought. “It was lucky I came when I did. So old already…. but, never mind, it’s still… after so long… to find one…”
“What are you talking about?” begged Raf.
“I don’t even know where to start, boy,” said Bolyai. “If you learnt nothing from your Bard -”
“He’s an idiot!” said Raf. “He was always drunk and going on about crazy stuff. Music, and something about it being food for plants, and he called it menfi… meg... – well, something about foraging, or -“
Bolyai interrupted Raf by laughing again, his head tilting back up to the sky. “Indeed! Coincidence? I think not… The boy already knows of melforging -”
“Melforger! That’s it!” cut in Raf. “I remember now, a melforger! But, what is it?”
Nodding slowly to himself, Bolyai looked up at Raf.
“That, boy, is what you are.”
29. DESERT
Raf tenderly rubbed some shea butter on the back of his neck, grimacing at the sharp sting of the exposed reddened skin above his tunic.
“No good putting it on now, boy. You should have done it yesterday afternoon when we first left the Forest.”
Raf ignored the Elder and stretched his neck, feeling the onset of a dull headache. They’d been travelling for hours now since they’d left at dawn, and without an Ancient in sight, there was hardly any cover above to block off the brutal sun when it slid up over the horizon. It was so hot. The heat seemed to push down on him like a blanket, squeezing the moisture right out of his body.
“Should we continue our chat, then?”
Raf shook his head irritably. “It’s no good, Elder. It’s just pointless.”
Bolyai looked up at the skies and muttered, “First one in over a hundred years and it would be a whiny teenager.”
He turned to Raf with feigned patience. “Maybe a different song would be better? If you only try what I was saying, y-”
“- I don’t know what you mean, though,” interrupted Raf. “You talk about holding the color? That’s not really how it works for me.”
“Well, how do you use it, boy? Explain to me, then I can try to help you.”
“I don’t know!” replied Raf. “It’s complicated. I don’t use it, I sort of move with it. I don’t know…” He groaned. “It’s so hot. I just want to be cool for a bit…”
“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said the Elder. “You must learn to harness it, even if you have to start with small steps. It’s a skill that hasn’t been seen for generations and I haven’t met many other Elders, even, who were melforgers. There’s only me and a few others, and none of us could do what you did to Tiponi’s shoulder as quickly, or even half as well.”
At hearing his name, the iMahli glanced back at them. He hadn’t said a word to Raf since the incident, although when he looked at him, it was with an odd, unreadable expression.
Probably thinks I’m some sort of freak, Raf thought.
He found his eyes drawn yet again to the dark man’s shoulder, and searched for any evidence of the vicious welt that had been there only the night before. There was absolutely nothing. If there was even a scar, it was so faint as to be almost invisible.
He chewed his lip and forced himself to look up at the path, noting wearily that there didn’t seem to be an end in sight of the shallow rolling hill-tops. More and more common here was a strange tree that Bolyai told him was called an acacia.
A pretty name for a pretty unfriendly looking tree.
From a distance, they looked like soft green umbrellas, but up close, their branches and leaves were laden with countless small thorns. He was staring at a little copse of them in the distance when he noticed some movement underneath. Squinting, he stared hard, not believing his eyes; until they got close enough to get a clear view, and his mouth fell open. They were birds. But huge! With thick feathered bodies on top of long wiry legs and a neck that almost doubled their height, all of them would have towered at least a foot above Tiponi.
The iMahli had also spotted them. “There. We change for these.” He nodded at the goats pulling the wagon
“What?” Raf sat up, his face twisting with suspicion. “What’s he saying?”
Bolyai looked at him and the tiniest smile creased his mouth. “You heard him. The goats won’t do well in these conditions, let alone once we get out into the real plains, so we must change them at this farmstead for some ostriches,” continued Bolyai patiently.
“Wait,” said Raf standing up. “Wait. We’re going to travel into the plains, the dangerous plains I’ve heard about? Pulled by these ‘ostriches’, as you call them? You’re not just pulling my leg here because I’ve never left the Forest before?” Bolyai sighed and gave Tiponi a dry look. “I mean, seriously, Elder, I’m really going to travel in a wagon pulled by some birds?”
“I suppose you could try to ride one yourself, if you wanted,” said Bolyai. “But they can kick something fierce and their talons are razor sharp.”
Raf slouched down heavily on the floor and rubbed his temples. “Too much sun, I’ve just had too much sun. Dad was right.”
They reached the pen with the ostriches, and a small group of iMahlis emerged from the shade of some acacias, walking up
to greet Tiponi. They clapped their hands in front of their chests a few times and spoke to him in a way that seemed deferential, and Raf was reminded again that their friend was an iMahli of some stature.
The meeting didn’t take long and after a few glances past Tiponi to the wagon, the deal appeared to be done. Tiponi untied the goats and led them into a pen, whilst the other iMahlis selected two ostriches and led them out by the thin harnesses they wore.
Raf noted that the two they had picked were larger than the rest, and their plumage completely different to the others. While most of the birds in the pen were a dull mottled brown, these two had a mix of tightly packed black feathers over the majority of their bodies, with startling flashes of white peeking out from under their wings and atop the small fan of tail feathers.
He watched warily as they were harnessed to the wagon, taking in their talons which did indeed look capable of causing serious damage, and the large beaks from which there was an occasional low hissing. Their eyes were dark brown and stared impassively at Raf as the cords were all tightened. He decided he would keep his distance from the monstrous birds and tried to inconspicuously move to the back of the wagon.
With another round of short claps, the iMahlis bid them farewell and Tiponi jumped up to take the reins. With a powerful heave from the birds, the wagon lurched into motion back towards the path. Tiponi clicked his tongue when they reached it and directed the birds to cross over into the dry grassland that covered the whole area.
“They can certainly move,” muttered Raf, holding on to the sides as the wheels bounced over the uneven terrain. The ostriches’ long necks were taut as their legs pumped furiously, kicking up sand and debris from the path.
Bolyai gave a grunt as they hit a tree root and then scowled briefly at the back of Tiponi. “This noise will make it hard for us to take up where we left off.”
“With the music thing again?”
Bolyai’s reply was cut off as he had to dodge a low hanging acacia branch that scraped over the side of the wagon.
“Well, that’s a pity,” said Raf, carefully looking up the path.
The Elder watched him for a bit. “Do your parents know?”
Raf spun around. “No!” He hesitated and bit his lip. “Nobody knows. Not even my friends. I mean, Elder, I don’t even know what I’d tell them.”
“Your parents will want to know this, trust me, boy.”
“Will they? I don’t think so,” Raf replied. “I’ve never heard anyone say anything about this sort of thing before. Besides, then my mother’d probably make me sing all the time. It was bad enough she wanted me to perform in the stupid Festival.”
Bolyai frowned at him. “You don’t like music?”
“Of course I like music. I just don’t like standing up and... you know…”
“You’re afraid you’ll embarrass yourself?”
“No, that’s not it,” replied Raf. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it is.”
“If you practice and get good enough, though, I think you will find pleasure in it. This is a gift. You have a duty to use it, don’t you see that?”
Raf looked skeptical and then reached down to get the shea butter again.
“There is so much we’ve lost over the years. So much.” Bolyai stared pensively at the wagon floor. “If I cannot help you, then we must find someone who can. There is tell of people in Miern –“
“Of melforgers?” Raf looked up in interest.
Bolyai shook his head. “That would be very unlikely. But I have heard that there are some with the talent amongst them. If we are to find someone to help you, it will be there, I feel sure.”
“In Miern?” said Raf. “I was going to sojourn there. You’re welcome to talk to my mother though, because she isn’t interested in the idea.”
“Oh, she’s probably right, boy. Don’t be mistaken, Miern is a dangerous place, -”
“Great, you sound just like her.”
Bolyai stared at Raf, an eyebrow raised. “I…” Even in the blazing heat, Raf could feel his cheeks glow red.
“Sorry, Elder.”
Bolyai grunted softly and then reached down to seize a stick of dried meat to chew on.
“Besides,” Raf continued, “we’ve got to fix the Forest before we can do anything else, right? My family’s stuck in there. How long till we get to this ishranga person?”
Tiponi leaned back from the bench and replied, “Whole day.”
“And to the escarpment?” asked Bolyai.
“Not long,” replied Tiponi.
Raf scanned ahead of them through the trees and saw nothing that stood out from the rolling plains of dry grass. “What’s this escarpment?”
Bolyai smiled. “A treat for the eyes. We’ve been climbing steadily for a while now and will soon reach the top. It’s quite something. We’ll rest there before we head down onto the plains.”
. . . . . . .
Raf looked up at the sound of Tiponi whistling at the ostriches. The wagon drew to a stop and with the halt in its noisy progress, a peace fell. The wind whistled softly through the grass and then a few seconds later, a few staccato blasts of chirruping came from crickets hidden in the undergrowth. Somewhere in the distance, a lone hornbill blew its shrill trumpeting call.
Getting up from the uncomfortable position he’d had to adopt with all the bouncing, Raf stretched and looked around. Behind them to the left and right was the same rolling plain of grass sprinkled with acacia trees, but in front of them was a small rise that seemed to disappear into the sky.
“Go have a look,” said Bolyai.
Raf jumped down off the wagon and, keeping a wide berth of the ostriches, stepped his way through the dry grass towards the top of the slope. As he got closer, he realized that hidden in the grass were some things that made him draw up, a crooked smile appearing on his face.
“Rocks.” He sounded the word out and his smile broadened into a wide grin. It wasn’t anything like the whetstones they used in the Forest and until you actually saw a ‘rock’, it was difficult to imagine the textured hardness and mottled grey color of these huge natural objects. And they were just sitting here!
A soft breeze brought a moment of coolness to his burnt cheeks and he looked up to find himself facing a vista that took his breath away. Directly in front of him, for a mile perhaps, the mountain side sloped down at a sharp angle until it leveled out far below. From there, as far as the eye could see, a vast plain was laid out like a sandy brown tablecloth, scattered with lumpy hills and granite knolls, and dotted here and there with tiny acacia trees. The landscape rolled away and just kept rolling and rolling until it faded from view in the shimmering distance.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” came the quiet voice of Bolyai behind him. Raf nodded vaguely, lost for words. “Well, come on then.”
Tiponi steered the wagon towards a break in the rocks and they found themselves at the beginning of a path which set off at an angle down the mountain side. Shading his eyes, Raf following it and saw that it veered left a few hundred feet down, then right, and so on, moving like a snake between the clumps of rock all the way down to the bottom.
An awful long way to go when it’d probably be quicker just to go straight down, surely, he mused.
As he was about to voice this opinion, he watched a small rock, dislodged from its place by one of the ostrich’s talons, tumble forwards and then pick up speed rolling down the escarpment. Bouncing high in the air, it only took a matter of seconds before it reached the bottom of the slope, where it hurtled hard into another rock. The sharp clatter of the impact was loud enough to drift all the way up to Raf. He winced and looked at Tiponi who was on foot, slowly leading the ostriches along the path.
I’m glad he knows what he’s doing.
. . . . . . .
It took an age, but the wagon made its way down the treacherous incline and eventually the path leveled out into a less precipitous slope and Tiponi climbed back up on the driver’s bench.
The h
eat had intensified more and more as they descended, and now, without the breeze that had given them some respite higher above, everything seemed to roast. Even as he looked around, the trees and grass as close as fifty yards away swayed eerily in the searing haze. It was too hot for anything else other than sitting silently on the wagon, staring out at the plain. Nobody said a word. Not even when they stopped and Tiponi found some shuji to dice up for water for the ostriches, squeezing the moisture into a wooden bowl which they drank in seconds.
Raf found himself rocking to the motion of the wagon, unable to sleep for the heat; his skin was dry and itched as the sun sucked every last particle of water from it. He started imagining things, seeing things, and twice sat up in shock as he thought he saw people walking next to them, only to find it was a dead tree, or a clump of grass. There finally came a time though, when he kept seeing the same odd thing again and again and finally gathered enough energy to sit up.
“Tiponi.” The iMahli, seemingly unaffected by the heat, turned and looked at him. “What’s wrong with those trees? The acacias?” Raf pointed at a fairly large specimen they were travelling past.
Tiponi looked over at it. “Wrong with it?”
“Yeah, there’s that weird bump thing on it, see?” About half way up the trunk of the acacia, there was a round, knobbly shape about the same size as a large pumpkin.
Bolyai added in a hoarse voice, “Looks like a beehive from all the holes covering it.” He squinted up at Tiponi. “I didn’t think there were bees this far into the plains.”
“But you can see leaves sticking out of the top of it,” cut in Raf. “It’s a plant, isn’t it?”
“These things you find often in my land,” said Tiponi. “It grows from a seed left by birds.”
“Like banyans?” asked Bolyai.
Tiponi shrugged. “I don’t know those. But inside that plant is full of ants.”
“Ants inside the plant?” asked Raf. “You mean they’ve eaten into it?”
Melforger (The Melforger Chronicles) Page 21