by Col Buchanan
A clink of cutlery as Kosh dropped his spoon into his half-empty bowl, his appetite flown.
‘You’re really going into the Edge then?’ enquired the medico Shin of Ash, leaning towards him over the table. ‘You’re really venturing into the warrens of the kree?’
Ash shrugged to imply there was no other choice in the matter.
‘It is the only way to gain enough Royal Milk for our purposes.’
‘And what purpose is that?’
Ash knew how crazy it sounded, but he said it anyway.
‘To bring my dead apprentice back to life, once we have reached the Isles. They need Milk, apparently, to perform the procedure.’
Shin frowned, thinking he was playing with her, and so Ash cleared his throat to catch the attention of the monk Meer.
‘Tell her,’ he said.
‘Eh?’
‘Tell her what you mean to do in the Isles.’
He smiled to the woman by his side.
‘I can tell you would not believe me if I did.’
‘Oh, please try me,’ she prompted.
‘Well, in the Isles of Sky the privileged can live a thousand years by consuming Royal Milk, and by regrowing new bodies for themselves in tanks of the stuff. With the boy’s ashes we will try to do the same.’
She looked to Ash with narrowed eyes.
‘You’re serious.’
Minutely, Ash nodded his head.
CHAPTER NINE
In Flight
The Falcon’s crew treated them as coldly as ever over the following days, while the passengers settled into their cramped cabins and did what they could to pass the time. Ash spent most of his mornings up on the foredeck of the flying ship, meditating or loosening his body with hathaga stretching and breathing exercises, good for the back and his joints, along with Meer’s daily sessions with his needles and hot rocks.
Soon an eerie silence had fallen upon the ship, the crew all too aware that they were nearing the Mannian territory of Pathia, and the sky blockade which surrounded the Free Ports. They knew that a single skyship should have little trouble breaching the imperial blockade, which in reality was stretched thin enough around the islands to be mostly porous, but you could never tell.
The skyship’s colours were changed to those of neutral Cheem, and when at last they spotted the coastline of Pathia in the distance, where the Sargassi sea became a line of white against the rocky coastline, the hush of the nervous crew became complete. The bell rang out, and the lookouts doubled and then tripled around the ship and began to call out what they saw; a few harbour towns, a river delta, a squadron of enemy warships in the water to the west, beyond a small island.
Slowly, shifting and creaking, the Falcon adjusted course so they were headed for a river delta, which from the scale of it Ash supposed to be the mouth of the Elba, the mighty river that served as a border between Pathia and neighbouring Tilana to the west. Maintaining their high altitude, they crossed over the coastline unchallenged and left the sea to their stern where their flag of convenience trailed and snapped in the thin air. With the thrusters roaring they sped above scattered banks of clouds that were trailing rain, and then the overcast cleared before them and old Stones the pilot followed a course along the river, wide enough here that it looked like a flood spilled across the land. On both far banks the many towns were dull smudges obscured by smoke, and to either side the plains rolled away into the horizon, mottled greens and yellows and reds. Snakes wound their way across the plains: roads and side-rivers like the arteries of leaves. It was the sky which the crew watched most of all, vigilant of patrolling birds-of-war. Only merchant skyships could be seen though, bearing trade from east or west, usually some distance below them.
They were in the Empire of Mann now, and the creaking of the sculls and spars and the growl of the thrusters was all that could be heard from the ship, for the men’s silence lingered save for the odd joke of bravado.
Some of the newer members of the crew began to mutter in prayer.
*
‘You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?’ inquired Aléas by his side, as they stood by the forward rail flying through another shower of rain.
Him, Ash reflected. Aléas did not use his name. They never used his name in conversation, too powerful a thing to utter aloud in the plain light of day; like a swear word in front of children, or a blasphemy in the face of believers.
‘In a way. I was thinking of his mother back in Khos,’ replied Ash. ‘Why, were you?’
The Rōshun apprentice nodded.
‘I can’t seem to shake it, how he died.’
Aléas and Nico had been friends, close even though the pair had barely known each other. But that was all it ever mostly took, Ash knew. An easy connection with someone and you could be friends for life.
‘Just breathe until it passes.’
Aléas gripped the rail and inhaled the oncoming breeze, his blond locks flowing backwards in the stirrings of air.
‘If this works, I hope he doesn’t remember any of it.’
‘That still remains a big if.’
The young man shrugged, as though dismissing such cautions.
‘Remember what Meer has said,’ Ash advised him. ‘The process can be unpredictable. Even if we succeed in bringing him back, he may not be the same person that we remember. He may not even be in possession of his mind.’
‘Still. I’ve a feeling we’ll be seeing him again. Don’t you sense it?’
Ash glanced across at his companion, saying nothing. You sense the hope in your own heart, he thought, like the old man that he was. Expectations were for the young, for those who hadn’t yet learned that the nature of life was surprise.
Yet he had no wish to crush the hopes of others, and instead he slapped the rail lightly, saying, ‘You recall the time you both had to compete in fishing to settle that score with Baracha?’
Aléas laughed. ‘Yes. After Baracha sent Serèse away, thinking they were sleeping together.’
Together they chuckled at the memories.
On the foredeck the rain had lessened, and without a strong wind to drive it sidewise they were well enough sheltered by the huge envelope of gas hanging above their heads. To the south the sky was clearing in breaks of white and blue.
‘When you return to the Hermitage,’ Ash said aloud, ‘Baracha intends to challenge you.’
The apprentice replied soberly. ‘An interesting time to become Rōshun.’
Unspoken in his tone lay the ruins of Sato and the dead amongst his companions, Oshō and all the rest of the Rōshun who had fallen in the attack against their order. Aléas had been quieter in his ways since they had left behind their home in the mountains of Cheem. As though he had left something of himself behind.
‘We are at war now with the Empire, your own people. You should make sure you are straight with that in your head, and quickly.’
A stiff nod. The young man’s gaze fell away to the land far below.
Ash looked over the rail too at the chasm of space below their feet. Nico would have hated these heights. The boy had popped his eyes for most of the trip to Cheem, every time he had caught sight of land or sea.
Far below, the land was creased by the rush of the Red Elba, which despite its name looked grey today, a thin ribbon running through lands of green towards distant highlands. Beyond the highlands lay the Untamed Plateau, that high wilderness where they would find the frontier town of Lucksore and hopefully a longhunter to guide their way through the Hush.
Through the clearing sky ahead, Ash caught a glimpse of a bright whiteness up on the high plateau, and when he squinted he could just about see them, the rising flanks of the Broken Spine of the World, topped with snow and ice.
Beyond them, he knew, ranged the vast expanse of the Great Hush.
Once more, Ash’s thoughts returned to the boy’s mother back in Khos, Reese Calvone, with her red hair and her fierce protectiveness over her son, her only child.
H
e had promised the woman he would keep Nico safe, just as he had written and promised his own wife all those decades ago concerning Lin, their own son. But Ash had returned to Reese Calvone with nothing but a clay vial of ashes held in his grasp, a monstrosity which she had slapped away in her furious grief before setting herself upon him.
Even now he could hear the dull fleshy sounds of the woman’s palms striking his face, could almost feel the hot sting of her blows burning his cheeks. Though perhaps rather than memory, it was only the sudden heat from his regrets that he felt, and his desire to put them right.
CHAPTER TEN
Reese
East of the city of Bar-Khos, in a downpour of rain thrashing through the bare limbs of trees overhead, Reese Calvone stopped beneath the shelter of a juniper to catch her breath and to wipe a strand of lank red hair from her eyes, and noticed that the palms of her hands were suddenly smarting. Curious, she stared down to see the redness of their skin, stinging now as though she had been slapping something with force.
Just like the day she had struck out at the old farlander in fury, for returning her son in a small clay vial.
Nico.
Not a day or an hour passed without Reese thinking of her son and feeling the loss of him renewed. And with the recollections came the same incriminations; why had he left her and why had she let him go? But the answer was there even as she asked for it.
Her son had left home because she had taken in Los as her lover, a man whom Nico had loathed. Because, in a way, she had chosen Los and her own needs over those of her son.
Reese flexed her tingling hands until the sensation passed, both hands shaking now. She shuddered with barely controlled emotions and looked about for the dog again, the golden-haired animal she had seen from the kitchen window and which had first drawn her out into the bad weather, hoping that it was their dog Boon, after all this time, a living trace of her son returned to their cottage.
No sign of him now though, and the wind and rain were so fierce that she stayed where she was beneath the green boughs of the tree, waiting until the worst had passed. It was only the tail of the winter storm remaining now, having spent the worst of its fury during the previous days.
In Bar-Khos, her neighbour Hira had told her incredulously, they were still cleaning up after the high winds had dropped entire vineyards of winterberries onto the city, smearing the streets and buildings with their crimson juices like a downpour of blood.
Hard to believe such a story, yet she had never known Hira tell a lie. Now some were hailing it as a portent for the approaching imperial forces of General Mokabi, which were only days away from the Lansway and the Shield, where they would join those already besieging the city.
The war seemed to be entering yet another desperate phase.
When the gusts and rain finally lessened, so that the drips from the overhanging boughs were more apparent than the thinning drizzle itself, Reese heard again the heavy rumbles in the sky towards the west, not from the rain clouds but from the cannon on the far Shield, where the siege of Bar-Khos was now into its tenth year. She loathed the sounds of those guns, loud enough to hear all this way along the coast. They were worse than a constant intrusion into the peace of her surroundings; a reminder that such peace was an illusion and little more.
People had started to flee the area of the Running Hills, this rugged coastal region between the Chilos delta to the west and the mountains of the High Tell to the east, where the land was a rolling corrugation of humps and depressions much like the neighbouring storm-swollen sea. They fled in fright of those imperial forces now holed up around Tume far to the north; the Mannian Expeditionary Force that had invaded Khos from the sea. So far, the Imperials had been contained in the north to this side of the Chilos river, though they were probing ever further along it towards the southern coast.
People heard one story too many of how far the Mannian slaver parties were now ranging beyond the main imperial forces, and then they were gone the next day, all of their possessions loaded onto a cart to make their way to the relative safety of the city.
Yet still Reese Calvone remained behind like many of her more stubborn neighbours. She would never leave this place that was her home, not even now. All that she knew was here, most of all the memories of her son.
‘Boon!’ she called out once more, and stepped out from beneath the tree to continue her search for the dog, the fallen leaves hard and slick against her bare feet, for she had forgotten to put on her boots.
Maybe I imagined him after all, Reese thought, recalling too the odd glimpses of Nico that she had been seeing lately, ghosts of movement in her peripheral vision, her head turning in habit towards a son no longer there.
Onwards along the path she trod, listening to the sounds of the forest in the rain, rustles in the undergrowth and the calls of unseen birds. Above her head a pair of striped chirups glided between two trees, webbed arms and legs extended to catch the air, animals that hadn’t touched the ground their entire lives.
Sometimes Reese felt like a girl again when she wandered alone through the trees like this. As a youth she had roamed the hill forests around her family farm, at first with her older sister Terl, before Terl had passed away from a coughing sickness, and then later by herself, following the tracks of spotted fox, deer, even the odd solitary wolf, ever deeper through the trails of the Running Hills in search of the unknown, the untamed.
It was on such a walk that she had first met Cole, a young man out hunting with a homemade crossbow, bent down as he drank from a racing torrent. Seeing her approach, the young man had stood with an easy grace and dropped his wet hands to his sides, eyes and mouth open wide.
‘Hello,’ he’d said at last over the crashing water, observing her gently with his animal eyes.
The next week they had met again in an illicit rendezvous in the depths of the forest. Reese’s small closed world had opened up like the blazing full moons of the night sky, in the end leading to a son in her belly and a new home, a new life, which she could call her own.
Her love had only deepened for Cole during those early years as a husband and father, this tall lean man who liked to sit on the porch for hours on end watching the rain and the distant mountains; who made the world seem just right every time she laughed at his dry and easy humour; who liked to smoke and drink then dance and whirl whenever the spirit was upon him.
Before the Empire had come with its tidings of war, and the siege had drawn her husband Cole into it, eventually as a leather-clad Special fighting down in the tunnels beneath the Shield. Without a doubt those years had changed Cole. Each time he returned on home leave he bore even more wounds and scars than before, and brooded with deepening anger and guilt over the companions he had lost, clearly a man who did not expect to survive for long himself. So entirely was he scarred by his years fighting in the tunnels, both inside and out, that finally Reese had barely recognized him any more for the man that she had once adored.
Another memory flashed through her mind. The last night she had ever seen her husband, his drunken features bloated with fury, dragging her across the floor by her hair while their young son watched on in horror.
A monster, where once had stood her man.
Yet still, for all that she resented his actions, even now she felt that burning ache for him, for the person he had once been. Even now she felt that terrifying sense of emptiness, now deepened a thousand times following the death of her son. All that she cherished, gone save for this cottage and farm.
She was never going to see them again, either one.
*
The forest garden looked bare in this month of early winter, though there was still plenty to forage if you knew what to look for. The pigs knew too, for they were snuffing through the grasses and wild crops not far from the trail she followed, looking for ponyon roots and tumbler bulbs, fallen berries and nuts.
Her husband Cole had designed the forest garden to provide a bounty even in the dark season, followi
ng the principles of natural farming which he had embraced so passionately before the war. Techniques which been passed to him serendipitously by a travelling Greengrass who was also a monk of the Way, one of many who walked the islands spreading the knowledge of how to farm most naturally, and most bountifully – going with the grain of the land rather than against it.
Cole had planted many of these trees himself, choosing those that would bear nuts and fruits for harvest, and others that would complement each other by attracting or repelling certain insects, or adding specific qualities into the soil. Just like many of the plants he had sown between the trees too, perennial crops that needed little tending once established, and which taken altogether provided a bounty all year round.
A work of love, of intimate trial and error, her husband wishing to create an abundance of life around the small cottage where he and Reese had first settled to start their family. Though he had hoped too, in his own way, to show the other farmers of the area how they could embrace a different way, a way that had been flourishing throughout the other islands ever since the revolution of the democras, with the exception of here in Khos.
Wild farming, some called it. Methods of cultivation first inspired by certain monks of the Way, who had learned how to sow rice without tilling the ground first, simply by coating the seeds in clay, and how to grow abundantly at altitude using rocks for heat and windbreaks, and how to make the most of small lowland farms using trees and perennials. All sustainable methods of farming which added to the soil over time rather than depleted it, allowing land previously made barren to green itself once again, so that over the decades the Free Ports had become one of the most richly abundant lands in all the Midèrēs.
‘For Mercy’s sake we could stop our endless toil now,’ Cole had often declared to his peers in the local taverna, still young enough to fully give voice to his passions.