The Wanderer's Tale

by David Bilsborough

  It was customary at this point for a sorcerer to draw a little of his own blood and squeeze it onto the soil where the Bucca had dwelt, a small sign of respect for the slain creature, and a hope that a new one would soon sprout in its place.

  But Wodeman simply shoved the body into his pouch and stormed out of the glade.

  ‘Little bastard!’ he swore. ‘I hope that hurt like hell.’

  Squatting beneath the cover of a low, overhanging rock by a stream, Wodeman began chanting his next spell. Now he had harvested the Bucca, he was attempting to tap its power. Here, surrounded by hazel trees in this secret corner of the wood, he had ritually boiled the elver-like strand of Bucca flesh in water drawn from the sacred spring using a simple bowl of alder wood.

  As a nature-priest of Erce, Wodeman was well aware of the exigency of ritual in these matters. Just as Man needs ritual in the special moments of his life, so too did the sorcerer at times like these. He admitted, in the back of his mind, that most glyphs, incantations and magical ingredients had little or no power in themselves. But the power of Symbol was absolute; it spoke to the mind’s eye and could focus the psyche far better, as it encapsulated in one simple image any logical thought process or wordy explanation.

  Take for example the tree, the sacred symbol of his religion; not just the hazel that grew all around this part of the wood, but all trees. They were the symbol of the interconnectedness of all things: their roots were in the earth, yet their crowns reached up into the sky further than anything else living. The elements – earth, water, and the fire of the sun – fed them, while the air carried their seeds. Creatures lived in them, and were fed by them. And the hazel grove, the most sacred place of all, was just what he needed for his most powerful spells.

  As for the alder, which provided shelter to the water-sprites and whose leaf they used to dye their clothes, what better wood to use in this spell than that? What better way of demonstrating the sorcerer’s reverence for the world of the Hidden People, and for the Bucca he had taken from them?

  At least, that was what he had been taught. Mash, mash, mash, went his pestle as the vengeful shaman ground the sticky Buccaflesh into a horrendous-smelling pulp. Crunch, chomp, grind, went his teeth as they masticated the paste before letting it slip down his gullet. Slowly he consumed it, chanting the spell between each chew. The narcotic steam from the alder bowl wafted up his nostrils, till already he was beginning to feel light-headed.

  He did not have to look up or even open his eyes to know that the night-hued raven was back. Just as it had to be, to receive that part of the sorcerer’s soul which he was now lending it.

  ‘Raven,’ he intoned hoarsely, the astringency of the concoction stinging his throat, ‘take this, my spirit, into your eyes. Go now, and show me your master’s intent.’

  With the help of the Bucca’s flesh, Wodeman had become a medium. The ignorant folk of Nordwas would never believe that a wild man of the woods could do this; they assumed that mediums only communicated with the dead. And for their own priests maybe that was true. But for a nature-priest such as Wodeman, a medium was a conduit, a path that allowed the Earth-Spirit’s divinity to flow into the mind of Man. Thus had he now become, like the tree, a thing that joined heaven to earth.

  He seemed now to be rising, leaving his cage of flesh behind and ascending into the highest branches of the trees. Up there he found himself looking through the eyes of the raven, seeing all that it saw. Delaying not an instant, it and he took off from this lofty perch and soared above the treetops, witnessing a thousand shades of green in the mellow, late-spring sunlight. They glided on over the open pastures beyond, everything looking so sharply defined from up here, and Wodeman’s soul thrilled with the exhilaration of it all. Soon they were flying over the rippling, cream-coloured fields outside Nordwas, and above farm buildings that looked like little wooden toys. The people who worked there were like ants running around on a path.

  Then the raven turned, and Wodeman could see that they were approaching the town itself. In particular they seemed to be heading for one lofty tower that Wodeman recognized as part of Wintus Hall. The raven glided closer and closer, until finally it flapped down to perch upon a window sill.

  Suddenly, Wodeman felt troubled. This vision was beginning to fade long before it should do. Something was trying to intervene, to interrupt the vision before it could tell him anything meaningful. Erce, no, not after all he had just been through!

  He had to work fast. On an impulse, Wodeman sent the raven into the room beyond, in a last desperate effort to glean as much information as possible.

  There was not much to see there: just a stranger sitting on the edge of his bed, intent on honing an axe. He had thinning, curly brown hair, and the definite look of a foreigner. The man looked up sharply, but made no attempt to disturb the raven.

  It was only a glimpse he received, but Wodeman knew he would remember this man: the premature lines of a hard life etched into his face, the troubled look in the eyes – and those odd images of dragons tattooed on his hands.

  Then the dream faded, and he was back in the hazel-grove by the stream.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ he called out in frustration to the trees. ‘Is that all I get for risking my life with a Bucca?’

  But no answer was forthcoming, and he felt cheated. All he could assume was that the Skela, they who governed even the gods themselves, including Erce, had for some reason of their own interfered.

  ‘This must be serious indeed,’ he muttered to himself.

  Wodeman bit his lip in anxiety. Clearly much was now expected of him, but as yet he had not the slightest clue what that was. All he knew was that the man seen in his vision was the key. Of course, he could march into the tower and simply ask the stranger, but what would he say to him? ‘Excuse me, but I believe you are very important to my god. Now, please tell me how.’ No, that would not do. The folk of Nordwas already considered Wodeman some sort of lunatic, and this would merely confirm that belief.

  For now, he would just have to cast the man’s runes, and hope to discover more later.

  The magician proceeded to do just this, kneeling down upon a patch of dry soil by the bank of the stream. His knotted fingers with their sharp, strong nails slipped under the wolf-pelt and drew out a small leather bag that contained something that rattled. He untied the thong, placed the bag on the ground between his knees, then lifted up his arms. Then he raised his face to the sun and let out a long sigh.

  All about him became still. The birds ceased their chattering, the breeze died down and the leaves rustled no more. Into this sudden quiet, Wodeman began to chant. At first his voice sounded like the warning growl of a great cat, bestial and threatening, almost evil. Then this gave way to a low moaning from the pit of his stomach, issuing from his mouth like the breath of a phantom. Gradually it began to grow sonorous, and hypnotizing in its constancy. No man of Nordwas would have guessed there were words contained in this dirge, but words there were, words of power from an ancient and secret tongue known only to the Torca.

  Wodeman stopped, and the chant was over. He opened his eyes and blinked against the sunlight that dappled his face. Looking down at the bare, cracked earth of the stream-bank, he suddenly had a vision that all around him was black, and only a small circle of earth could now be seen. But it was not earth – rather it looked to the sorcerer like cracked flagstones glowing under a sputtering orange torchlight. He could smell the warm fug of a horse, and hear a strange kind of whimpering, like that of a woman . . . And the air was freezing.

  This new vision faded.

  Odd, he thought. I haven’t even cast the runes yet.

  He shrugged, and plunged his hand into the leather bag, rummaging about. Eight runes he needed, one for each of the catkins on the hazel sprig the raven had brought him. As he did so, he asked his first question.

  Who is the foreigner with the axe, residing with the Peladanes?

  Averting his eyes, he then withdrew his hand from the bag,
and cast its contents upon the earth.

  ‘Only one?’ he murmured. ‘Not much to go on . . .’

  Only a single rune tile had been given. He had expected at least three. Nevertheless, he turned over the hazelwood tile, rubbing his fingers over its smooth, age-worn surface, and peered at the blood-marked symbol engraved upon it:

  The Road.

  On its own this told him little; it could signify a journey, a traveller, even a long distance. But, regarding the man in his vision, it was easy enough to assume he was a traveller from afar just from his appearance – and Erce would not waste a valuable rune in telling him that. No, in this case it had to signify a quest. The man must be travelling to seek something, something of great importance.

  Still with seven runes remaining, Wodeman did not hesitate. Pausing only long enough to put back the Road rune, he asked his second question.

  Where does this quest lead to?

  This time there were two runes. The sorcerer picked them up, and frowned. This did not look good:

  The Rawgr – and Ignorance.

  Very ambiguous indeed. The Rawgr could stand for literally that, a rawgr; or it could mean some disaster of another kind was imminent. To even begin to know which, he would have to ask that man who appeared in his vision. Ignorance, though, was a different matter. Did it mean the man was unaware of The Rawgr (or disaster), or was he on his way to avert some great calamity, but did not know how?

  Worse still, was he on his way to cause a disaster, and did not know it?

  Working on all three possibilities, Wodeman asked his third question, choosing it and phrasing it with care.

  Which god causes the stranger’s ignorance?

  This was presuming a lot, but if he had guessed the first three runes correctly, it was still a shrewd question. By asking this he was determining which cause the stranger would be working against, and thus whether he, Wodeman, was to help or hinder him.

  He threw again:

  The Rawgr again, and The Shield!

  This was good: it told him much. By equating The Rawgr with a god, it was clear that it was indeed a rawgr – and not merely some other disaster – that was the object of the traveller’s journey. And Wodeman was automatically against the destructive power of all rawgrs. Now he could well guess where he stood; if the man appearing in his vision was ignorant, and the rawgr stood to gain by this ignorance, then Wodeman’s role was to be present as a messenger of the Earth-Spirit to enlighten him.

  But what of The Shield rune? It stood for the Skela, the ‘guardians’, but what did they have to do with the rawgr? He went over in his mind all that he knew of the Skela and their relationship with the gods. Soon he came to a conclusion; though it was clear that the rawgr stood to benefit from the mystery traveller’s ignorance, the chances were that it was actually the Skela who were responsible for this ignorance. For ignorance, the sorcerer knew in his strange way, was nearly always due to the Skela. They did not allow the gods to tell their adherents too much; a vision here, an omen there, perhaps the odd bit of rune-casting; nothing too obvious, just enough to keep them guessing.

  In this case, due to the intervention of the Skela, the god that was the enemy of the rawgr had failed to get a message through to his servant. Exactly which god that was would be difficult to say at this point, for until he talked to the traveller himself he would not know which deity he served. Cuna the Lightgiver was the prime choice, for he was directly opposed to everything involving Olchor the Lord of Evil. But it could be his own god, Erce the Lord of Nature. After all, Olchor had never shown any regard for the land or anything that dwelt on it.

  Yet the man he had seen through the raven’s eyes had looked nothing like a typical follower of either cult. Maybe he followed one of the lesser gods, or even a false one . . .

  He then asked his fourth question. He had to know how he, and the traveller, could find out whatever it was the Skela were keeping from them.

  How can we know that of which we are ignorant?

  He looked down, surprised. Three runes lay upon the earth at his feet, all the last three runes of the hazel sprig:

  The Wyrm of Erce. The Tree of Knowledge. The Moon.

  These last three told Wodeman everything. The traveller was not a worshipper of the Earth-Spirit, but of some other deity. This same deity was being prevented by the Skela from granting the traveller the knowledge he needed to defeat the rawgr. But Wodeman’s god had found a way past the Skela; and Erce was slipping this tiny sliver of knowledge to the traveller behind the Skela’s backs! This knowledge, then, was to come – as the Moon rune, or rune of the night, signified – in the form of dreams.

  It was not much, but to get past the Skela, of course, it could not be much. Dreams and visions could be misread, often with disastrous consequences, even by one such as Wodeman, who had dealt in them all his life. But it was all they had, and that just might be enough to tip the balance . . .

  Wodeman the wolf-man, Wodeman the Torca, Wodeman the Dream-Sorcerer, was to accompany this poor, confused traveller on his quest – and through his servant Erce would pass on to the man his moon-knowledge.

  Wodeman leapt high in the air, like an insane frog, in a sudden burst of energy. Armed only with his Spirit’s dreams, he was to be the guardian of the entire world of Lindormyn.

  Not wanting to waste any time, he set off immediately for Wintus Hall. He bounded through the trees, chattering excitedly to himself, running as swiftly as a deer. On crude sheepskin boots he made hardly a sound, and his wolfskin flapped behind him with a wildness that was mirrored in his eyes. Before long he had left behind the sanctuary of the wood and relinquished its dark whispering depths to all those that dwelt in it.

  And watching him go, its black, emotionless eyes blinking in the sunlight, was the raven perched high on a branch, a sprig of hazel in its beak.

  THREE

  The Wanderer

  THERE WAS STILL MUCH open country between Wodeman and the town. A dirt track raised high on an ancient dyke ran through rolling meadows of rich green grass thick with wild flowers; on and on until open pasture became fields protected by hedgerows blossoming with the fresh light hues of late spring. Fields gave way to livestock enclosures, then a muddy cattle-market, and finally the untidy, smoky straggle of wattle-and-daub hovels that huddled against the stockade wall. Beyond this protective barrier awaited the pungent and colourful streets of the town proper, Nordwas itself.

  Pungent was how the few cultured visitors described this frontier town. And it was as if, during the last couple of weeks, it had positively embraced this reputation, growing more pungent with each passing day as more and more travellers arrived.

  This always happened when word of the Peladanes’ latest campaign got out. The town would fill up with all sorts: mercenaries and merchants, actors and acrobats, artisans and partisans, souvenir-sellers, storytellers, oracles and seers, purveyors of beers, dodgy puppeteers, slavers and freemen, jongleurs and gleemen; freaks, quacks, tregetours and preachers, bear-wards and showmen with all sorts of creatures . . .

  And any other sort of money-maker one could think of. The town would become gripped by a kind of gold-rush excitement that was self-propagating and very hard not to get caught up in. Wherever one went one would encounter ordinarily decent and shrewd townsfolk walking around with that faintly glazed look of the terminally beguiled, pink of face and open of mouth, desperately trying to sell anything from a chair leg to their grandmother, then tearing around trying to spend their newly acquired coppers on the sort of things too worthless even for a Yuletide cracker.

  Here in Nordwas every kind of currency became legal tender, everything from zlats to zibelines and all in between. There were other coins, of course, which were essentially thin off-cuts of the embossed copper, silver or gold cylinders used elsewhere in Lindormyn, but these were rare in such northerly parts. Here, being more practically inclined, the folk of Nordwas preferred zlats: squares of copper or silver or gold cut from a single large
sheet: much easier to make, and no waste. Merchants from far countries would bring rare stones of enormous value, but in this region sardonyx, topaz and amethyst were still preferred as currency, being more abundant in the local geology, and their value easier to gauge.

  But perhaps the most unusual form of currency in Nordwas was the zibeline. Made from the fine but tough leather of the sable, these ‘bills’ were branded with an ornate crest that was difficult to counterfeit, and the higher denominations were even signed by all six officers of the mint. In Lower Kettle Bazaar today, the zibelines were passing from hand to hand so quickly one might be forgiven for thinking they were red-hot embers.

  The smells of badly cooked meat and onions, and the stupefying array of unknown spices; the braying of pack animals, the clanging of hammer on iron, the shrill histrionics of the medicine vendors, the shrieking laughter of the children watching puppet shows, and everywhere a dizzying furore of voices, music, chimes, rattles, whistles and any other means of attracting customers’ attention, all of this drifted up from Lower Kettle Bazaar, up, up and up, and in through the ivy-grown window of the little room at the top of the tower at Wintus Hall.

  And was completely ignored by the man who lodged within.

  Bolldhe lay upon the bed, staring up at the ceiling. It was not that he was tired, but this was what he always preferred when he found himself in the temporary haven of civilization. It was impossible to recall all the towns and settlements he had visited in his eighteen long years of travelling around the world. But whenever he arrived in such a place, and allowed himself the luxury of a cheap boarding house, he would lie on his bed for several hours, making the most of whatever privacy was afforded him and staring up at the ceiling.