by Awert, Wolf
Content
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Chapter 1
They were men of hard faces and few words who made their way through the pickwood bushes shaded by some elder trees. Shepherds visited these copses now and again when bad weather was brewing or the opportunity arose to pick a few berries. Not that a handful of berries could fill you up, but in a land where every bite was hard to come by, anything that brought a little sweetness to the day was a treasure.
They said later that magical powers had led the Ramsmen to this place, and many believed this to be the truth. It is entirely possible, though, that it was nothing but a lucky stroke of fate that they were around this very day: once the grass was grazed, the herds were always moved to a different place, and no one but the Ramsmen themselves knew the routes and the sequence in which the different pastures were visited.
A boy was wandering about the bushes, stopping here and there as if he listened to a quiet voice, and did not take any notice of the men. Judging by his size he could hardly be more than four harvests old. His weatherproof travel garb was stretched tightly over several layers of underclothes so that he appeared to be slightly chubby. The clothing showed scratches and odd discolouring, and seemed to have gone through some stress, but it was not in need of repair, and hardly dirty. The leather was smooth and of a quality rarely found even in this part of the land, which had a long tradition in the tanning of hides. On the leathery chest, barely hidden by two small hands, rested a mighty amulet whose band had gotten caught somewhere between neck and collar.
Roddick was the eldest of the Ramsmen. It was he whom the eyes of the men sought when the group faced a decision, and he who spoke the first word. Roddick crouched down before the child and looked at the amulet. All he saw was a simple wooden disk, thicker in the middle and covered all over with fine carvings. Although the child had apparently sucked on the wood for a while, he could see no traces of wear, save for a few spit stains. Whatever wood this was, it must be very hard. And it did not come from around here.
The Ramsmen were people of the land. Roddick, who knew every plant and every animal in the area, weighed the wood gently in his hand. It was too heavy for its size, the tint unfamiliar and the grain foreign. His gaze did not find the familiar rings of a transversely cut piece of wood. Instead, it followed beautiful swirls that wound around several eyes of rest. The carvings were rich, if simple, but not of the kind made by people sitting by the fire in the evening when the day’s work was done. Nearly all Ramsmen wore a pendant around the neck, and Roddick himself did too. He had cut his from the heel bone of a Mulch, the first beast he had slain by himself. He called it his amulet, even believed a little in his talisman. But it was by no means a real amulet. To create a real amulet, one needed magical powers. Only the village’s Reeve owned a true amulet and openly wore it upon his jerkin as a sign of his powers. He who owned an amulet was of high standing and destined to rule over the people. Always it was a master of magic, though he would rarely have to prove his powers. Perhaps even Esara, who was known to have mysterious powers, called an amulet her own. But if she did, she kept it secret, like she did so many other things.
Even more puzzling than the disk itself was the woven band it hung from. Roddick could make out eight carefully greased cords, braided in a complicated pattern to form a skein. They ended in a star-shaped knot in front of the wood, their soft points reaching over the upper edge like a protective hand. Roddick had heard of the skilful way the Water-Men artfully knotted string into figurines. He had never seen any such thing, though, nor did he understand the reason behind it. Art, however, does not develop without purpose, even if that purpose takes time to become apparent. The knot looked like an open blossom with eight curved petals encompassing a small, hemispherical butte.
Roddick lifted the knot’s star-shaped petals a little and discovered beneath a single, almost invisible string that ran from the butte into the wooden disk. It looked as though one could tear the wood with one sharp pull from its band. He carefully tugged at the string to test its resilience. It moved a little and cut into the skin of his fingertips. Roddick understood neither the wood nor the band, and neither had he ever seen a plant which, when spun into a thread, produced an unbreakable string. In his hands lay something that was not of his world.
He took the wooden disc gently from the boy’s hands and hid it under the child’s shirt. Finding a child in the wilderness was unusual enough and would cause a lot of excitement in the village. Roddick saw no reason to fan the flames with the mystery of a strange amulet. The Ramsmen followed Roddick because he knew what to do, and his wise words could convince even those in doubt and those who wavered. But now, the leader of the Ramsmen made sure not to let even one word slip. Sometimes, the most important things in life were better left unnoticed.
The men who had found the boy were no men of big words, and they brought the child into their village. He did not resist. Only his gaze seemed to be tethered to a point somewhere in the far distance.
There was a saying in Earthland that rumors were the only thing faster than the wind, and so the men were not surprised to find that they were already expected when they returned home. The last light of the evening sun shone upon their families, who had gathered in small groups in front of their houses and watched them arrive. The wind had abated and readied itself, like every evening, to blow back down from the hills to the valley from which it had risen during the day.
Roddick let the boy ride on his shoulders and walked down the wide, heavily trodden path that led to the center of the village and connected the well with the village square. The villagers stepped out from the shadows of their huts and followed Roddick and his Ramsmen on their way to the Judgment Tree, where the other half of the village population had already assembled under the lead of the Reeve.
Roddick walked slowly towards the great tree whose massive outer branches were so heavy they had come to rest on the ground. The cattle were banned from this place and driven off with kicks and bats if they accidentally found themselves beneath it, for the village square with its Tree of the Court was a holy place and a public place, where decisions were made that determined the future of the whole village.
Roddick walked the last steps alone. The other Ramsmen stood back in reverence, as did the villagers. Roddick knew that a boy of four was already too old to touch the heart of a woman who had to tend to a new infant every year, and too young to help any family with the work. They would have to talk for a long time this evening, for no family found it easy to feed another hungry mouth. To add a fifth to four children meant less milk, less bread and less cheese for every one of the four others. And often, there were not four children, but eight or even ten. But Roddick was convinced the village, under the leadership of the Reeve, would find a solution in the end.
On the way down into the vale the boy had stopped listening out, and was now looking around in interest. His eyes glinted from beneath his fair hair and rested for a moment on a bony middle-aged woman who did not stand with the others on the village square but seemed to be almost invisible in the shadow of a house. The moment Roddick handed over the child to the Reeve, she walked out into the brownish-yellow light of the evening sun.
“Give him to me; I will take care of him.”
A murmur rose from the group, of relief and disapproval at once. The arrival of a child of foreign blood was no matter for rash decisions. Everyone knew that rashness was an important decision
’s worst enemy. Did not custom demand to let the Ramsmen speak first and to hear all the details and circumstances of their discovery? Did not tradition command that they consider and discuss? The villagers looked at the woman who now stood calmly by the Reeve, and not all looks were friendly. When strange things happened to the village, even the mundane became a public affair that concerned everybody and had to be discussed by all. And besides – who had ever heard of a truth-teller raising a child?
The Reeve raised his hand and the murmur died down. His eyes met with the truth-teller’s, pierced the child, passed over Roddick the Ramsman and wandered over the group of villagers, until his glance returned to the boy and finally came to rest. It was he, the Reeve, who was responsible for giving everyone the place which by tradition and the magical order of this land was his to be.
For the stranger, such a place had yet to be found. To commence the acceptance of the foreign child into the village community by breaking custom and tradition meant disregarding order, and on top of that, it was a bad omen for the future. The Reeve therefore hesitated to give in to Esara’s wish. But he was also a clever man and knew that sometimes something became desirable only when someone else desired it as well. So with a clear voice he asked into the night: “Is there anyone aside from Esara the truth-teller who lays claim to this child?”
Before anyone could even open their mouth, Esara said calmly and resolutely: “No, there is no one in this village who will lay claim to this boy. The ken of Today and Tomorrow and the band that weaves them together is mine.”
Never before had anyone heard Esara speak like this, and never before had Esara been as highly visible as she was now, here under the Holy Tree. Her presence seemed to fill half the village square, where normally she’d rather keep out of the spotlight. And if sometimes she stood in the bright light of day, the eyes of the villagers would avoid her, for that which you cannot see cannot scare you.
Esara looked at Roddick and said sternly: “Put the boy down, Roddick, he is old enough to stand.” She took the boy by the hands, broke through the ring of villagers, which opened only grudgingly, and walked with him to her hut at the edge of the village. She left behind her pensive faces. The sun had long settled before all words had been spoken and the village square regained its nocturnal calm.
So it came to be that the foundling grew up in the care of Esara the truth-teller. Yet the dark clouds that would overshadow his entire life were not driven away by decent food and a safe place to sleep. “The strange attracts the strange, and strange things will come of this,” the old wives of the village prophesied, and knew that good things came rarely from afar. Esara herself, too, had one day appeared out of nowhere like the boy, without past and without roots.
First of all, Esara peeled the boy’s travel clothes off and threw a nettle shirt that was far too large over his head, gave him food and put him to sleep. For a long time she held the amulet in her hand and hearkened. The wood was as still as a tight-lipped mouth. The moon had wandered a fair stretch when she finally said: “It is time you found some sleep, too.”
She wrapped the amulet in the boy’s clothes, put the bundle down in a corner of the hut and asked the whisper-willows’ roots to watch over it. That very same night the runic bones rattled on the pentagonal stone slab of prophecy, as Esara attempted, with the only light coming from the dying embers from the fireplace, to look into the future. She smiled at the thought that many of the unlearned believed that the future lay in the signs that revealed themselves after every throw. No, it was not that simple. These signs only sought connection to the sky, just like those signs that seemed to hide on the stone greeted the earth. An arcanist considered where the various bones lay on the stone and which was looking at which neighbor and whether one could read the signs only when changing his own position.
Yet in this night, not only did the signs hide, but also fate itself. Esara’s curiosity was replaced by an oppressive restlessness. For her and the boy, who had quickly fallen asleep in one of the corners of the hut, there seemed to be no fate, neither in the short nor in the long run.
“This one is not good,” a child’s fair voice broke the silence, and a small hand took one of the bones. All the other stones that had lain motionless upon the slab moved suddenly.
“Stop that, Chigg,” Esara said calmly, though behind her motionless face she fought to conceal her horror. “This isn’t a toy.”
Chigg, in Esara’s dialect, meant simply child or boy. The names parents give to their young are of no importance. True names are given by life itself, sometimes casually, sometimes brutally and violently, as only life itself can.
Chigg dropped the rune bone back onto the slab, where it rolled about aimlessly for a while. Esara collected all the bones anew and scattered them beneath the child’s watchful gaze. The bones rolled and fell over the stone, unable to find the right place. They only found it when Chigg removed one of them.
“Bad bone,” he said.
Esara took it from him and returned all the runes to a little sack. It was not always easy to recognize the will of fate, and often enough she was misled. But fate completely denying her was something she had never witnessed.
Fate, too, has a master it must obey, Esara thought and shook her head pensively. “If there were no more fate, the cosmic order would be gone, and no order would mean the end of the world. There must be another reason why I cannot see the future.”
Esara was too small and unimportant to solve this riddle. Her knowledge was barely sufficient for truth-telling. The power that ruled concealed by fate was beyond her reach.
Even though Esara was feared by many villagers, she was no sorceress and as such was not part of the ruling noble class. Still, she was no mere woman of the common people, for she knew more about the web that made up the world than any other.
“Everything was different once,” she tried to remember, tugging at the veil that covered the scenes from the past. It did not give, it was woven too tightly.
In a village where everyone was considered rich whose doorstep was passed over by hunger, Chigg suffered no shortcomings, for Esara had neither husband nor children. Neither she was likely to find a man. As an outsider, she had no family in the village whose support she could secure through marriage, and opinion was divided on the matter of whether her second face was a gift or a curse. The talent was certainly not a desirable dowry. Her charm, too, was limited, even in her youth, to her eyes. There may be places on Pentamuria that would have considered her red hair evidence of royal blood and as such highly coveted. Here in Earthland, as in the Metal World whose borders were in the foothills just a few days’ journey away, the people had dark hair. Red was neither the day nor the night. It was the color of morning and evening in Earthland, the short moments of indecisiveness between today and the near future. Red also stood for the Fire Kingdom, which never brought any good tidings.
While the houses and cottages of the influential kinships were grouped around the village square, Esara’s hut stood by the edge of the village where nobody else wanted to live. The other houses formed a ring along an invisible line where the downs met the valley. They stood where the earth was still dry and the ground was even. The damper grounds were too valuable to settle on. They were used to grow onions, and lush grass grew there too, which brought the herds through the dry season. The rights to the grass were negotiated anew every year under the Tree of the Court. Only Esara’s house stood where the ground was much too damp, where the Fever Spirits lived, who brought sickness to the villagers.
Yet for Chigg, Esara’s house was the most wonderful in the entire village. The cottages were mostly built out of branches, the gaps filled with grass and clay, for good wood was sparse. The Reeve’s house alone was made entirely of wood and even had a stone foundation.
Esara’s house, on the other hand, was neither a cottage nor a real house. Upon her arrival in the village she had planted four fast-growing whisper-willows, which had formed the four cornerstones
of the house and grew larger and stronger every year. The low-alder grew between these living columns, a dense, short bush, barely taller than the average man could reach. On the inside, where the light was less abundant, the twigs had died. Yet they remained as pliant as ever, which Esara had learned to use to great effect. The twigs on the outside, however, kept growing, turning the small shelter into a blossoming palace encircling a small, well-protected room in the middle. Esara called her house Grovehall.
The ground was simply flattened earth, and despite the dampness of the area always dry, for the whisper-willows and the low-alder took the water from the earth.
The more the bushes grew and the larger the house became, the more birds decided to nest there, so before long the boy was woken every morning by birdsong. And every evening, the loud screeching arguments between the birds trying to find their rightful sleeping place reminded him that it was time to go to sleep.
Chigg was still too young to notice how Esara was avoided by the villagers. The women hissed after her and spat thrice on the ground if their paths crossed. The men dodged out of her way. Anyone who wanted to visit did so at night, in secret, and there was every reason to do so.
Sometimes Chigg would be woken by hoarse voices, so quiet they were barely audible. The voices belonged to young girls asking for love-potions, hunters who had lost their skill with the bow, or anxious mothers, begging for a blessing upon some item or other, or else for a herb-potion to cure a child’s fever.
Esara’s knowledge was not limited to fate; she also knew of the powers of plants, metal and earthen colors. The village near the border between Earthland and Metal World was too small, too insignificant and too poor to have its own healer, so Esara’s counsel was often asked, but love and respect do not go well with fear and dread.
When Chigg was not sitting in Grovehall, he was running around or playing at any place in the village that enticed his imagination. When he was still small, he did not attract any attention, from either the adults or the other children. But after every harvest the adults began to talk more and more, asking why he was not working. And nor could the other children overlook him any longer.