by Coral Walker
“Dilea,” called Ornardo.
“What?”
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Do you still remember me?”
“Of course I do, young sir. You weren’t as tall as him, I mean Jack. But that was many moons ago, and you might be taller by now if you had lived. After all, your father was a tall man.”
“You met my parents?”
“Of course sir. Lord Shusha always hosts a banquet every year when the yellow moon is at its fullest and your parents, Sir Doluli and Lady Nurra, were often among the prominent guests. I had a few good glimpses of them. A housemaid like me doesn’t serve at banquets. But once, Sharhanna, the kitchen maid died out of the blue, really ghastly — God bless her. She was found dead behind a bush, with her stomach open and a kitchen knife beside her. I didn’t see it myself, but the ones who did had been gibbering about how bloody it was and how mysterious the death was. It looked like she cut her own stomach open with a knife. Why would she want to do that?”
“Silly of me. We aren't talking about Sharhanna, are we? I'm still shaking even just mentioning her name. Anyway, I took Sharhanna’s place because they were short-handed. Another two girls and I served the gentlemen. Your father — I especially remembered him — was the first I served. I was young at the time and very scared. My hands kept shaking like leaves. Lord Shusha was with the gentlemen, and he has eyes as sharp as the eyes of a bokwa. I know it isn’t proper to describe a gentleman like that, but that was what I was afraid of. My hands just kept shaking, and as you might imagine, I nearly dropped the plate onto your father’s gown.”
“He was a kind gentleman.” She smiled, her eyes gleaming. “He steadied me by my arm, looked into my eyes and said — well, something I would never forget — ‘Steady there, nothing to fear.’ It sounded important, but I couldn’t figure out exactly what he meant. How being steady can rid you of fear while the things you fear will be still the things you fear. But I am not going to accuse a gentleman of talking nonsense. It might be a jewel that can only be perceived by certain eyes. So I treasured it in the most secret part of my heart.”
She raised her hands and pressed them to her ample bosom. Her chest rose up and down as if keeping the words safe there required an overwhelming effort.
“I chewed the words over and over to see whether I could understand them — ‘steady there, nothing to fear’ — and one day I figured it out. It indeed worked like magic. When you're trying to be steady, you no longer think of the things you fear, but only the things needed to steady yourself. How wise your father was!”
“You look in pain, sir. What’s wrong? See how you bite your lip. It’s bleeding. Have I said something wrong?”
“Do you remember Lizi?”
“Of course sir. She was such a little angel with her curly golden hair and liked to be cuddled. You took her to Cranpumply Castle once and left her for us maids to take care of while you and my Lady took off who knows where. So sad, so sad that she was attacked on that dreadful night. She was only ten, wasn’t she? She has grown so much now. You can’t imagine any more she used to be that sweet girl.”
“Where is she?” Ornardo groaned all of a sudden.
The maid froze and gave a startled look as if she had accidentally stepped into a minefield.
“How ... how ... would I know where she is?” she stuttered weakly.
“You said she was so grown-up now. You must have seen her recently. Tell me, tell me, Dilea, for the sake of my parents, please tell me.” Ornardo’s voice quivered and trailed off into a whine.
“I shouldn’t sir ... I shouldn’t. It was rather upsetting. She’s not normal anymore. ‘Insane’, some folks say, sir. People with insanity aren’t treated well. They’re segregated and treated like animals. You wouldn’t want to know where she is. It's rather upsetting sir ... It's no use.”
She paused to look at Ornardo as if the expression on his face concerned her.
“Where’s ... she ... NOW?” Ornardo screeched.
She looked bewildered for a while and spoke again as soon as she had collected herself. “Lord Shusha took her, to treat her insanity — that’s how the rumour went. She’s up in a tower in the castle with the other women he took.”
“Did you see her up there?”
She looked reluctant and licked her lips hesitantly before snapping in a harsh voice. “I’ll be dead if Lord Shusha finds out I've told you.”
But then she softened, “Yes, I've seen her, more than once if you want to now. One of the footmen who used to guard the tower is a distant cousin of mine. He told me all about it, and then I said, ‘Poor Lizi, I knew her parents well, and her brother used to be on such good terms with my Lady, would you mind if I go up the tower and pay her a visit?’ And he said. ‘That’s no trouble, cuz, the tower is quiet at night. Just don’t let Lord Shusha know, or we'll both be in deep trouble.’ So I went up there one night and paid her a visit.”
She paused, and the silence ticked away like a clock.
“She had her own room and was dressed like a lady, sir, and she looked very grown-up and very beautiful.”
“So she’s alright,” murmured Ornardo.
“Alright? Well, maybe, if you think a woman locked up in a small room is alright. There were other women crammed into other rooms, chained up or confined to bed. Some of them were in such pain, they howled like lost souls in the moonless night — if you think that’s alright.”
She suddenly patted her large chest. “Silly me, I shouldn’t have worried you with all this. But she’s not alright. She didn’t move much or do anything, like a doll — if you know what I mean — standing there, staring at the wall. She didn’t recognise me or even answer my call. She was very thin, and —”
She put her hands on her stomach.
“If you think my tummy is big, you should see hers. All the women locked up there have a growing tummy.”
Jack felt the body tilt suddenly sideways. One of the maid's hands was caught in his.
“Take me to see her,” came Ornardo’s voice, desperate and forceful.
“No sir, I can’t. Ouch, sir, you're hurting me.”
“Please, please,” the voice sobbed.
“I ... I ...”
“Take me to see her. TONIGHT!”
“Alright, sir. You are hurting my hand. Let it go ... Oh, please! If my cousin is on guard!” She surrendered.
His throat was rumbling with some rasping sound, and the small window frame Jack was watching through narrowed and blurred.
He could see nothing!
He stamped his right foot and was shocked by the unexpected loud bang.
The maid jumped. “That gave me such a scare,” she complained.
“It wasn’t me. It was Jack. I control only part of the body.”
“How awkward that must be,” she remarked sympathetically and then a smile appeared on her face. “So he’s still there.”
“Yeah, alive and kicking. You should tell your Lady how cramped it is in here.”
The maid nodded agreeably. “Can he hear me?”
Yes, I can. Jack shouted, or he did what seemed to be shouting, except his commands weren’t passed on to the voice box.
“He said he could hear you.”
“Then let him know that I am glad that he is still there.”
She blushed suddenly, perhaps realising what it might mean for Ornardo. “I mean nothing bad, sir. It was just that Jack was also a good young man, just like you. He has a sister too, and he fought hard for her. You should have seen how he did that jump and stabbed the giant bokwa with a dagger. It’s rather awkward to think you two share the same body, but I guess my Lady had no other choice, and his body happened to be perfect as your host. If you only knew how many bodies my Lady has tried.”
“He has a sister too?”
“And a brother according to rumours. I swear with all my heart, he wasn’t bad, just an outlander. If you know what I mean — the tr
avellers who come and go. He and his sister were unfortunate. They didn’t arrive on one of those big birds but through some strange tunnel. No wonder they were caught and taken as slaves.”
“Why did they come here?”
“There were rumours, but I don’t believe any of them. He’s inside you, sir. Why don’t you ask him?”
“He isn’t as friendly as you think.”
“What would he do if you asked him?”
The left hand smashed into the left chin.
“Ouch! Stop it!” Ornardo cried, shaking his head. “That’s what I get. He wants to show you himself. He doesn’t feel hurt, but I do!”
“If you don’t mind sir, I just want to tell Jack something. Something about his sister.”
Leaning forward, Dilea grasped the hand that had hit the chin. Her gaze narrowed and sharpened as if she were trying to pass through Ornardo to reach deeper.
“Jack,” she started, “your sister, Brianna — travellers saw her alive, riding on a flying targar.”
The hand jerked in hers.
9
Brianna, Brianna
Teilo half-dragged and half-carried Brianna back to the cottage. Aunt Malalea was waiting by the gate, looking anxious. She should be anxious of course. It was her idea to send Brianna to the stream to fetch the water on her own. She knew that the stream was infested with bokwas. If you weren’t experienced with bokwas then most likely they’d give you trouble. By the size of the swelling on her leg, the bokwa that bit her must have been a nasty one.
Aunt Malalea opened the door to her bedroom that she usually kept locked, and Teilo had hardly ever peeked inside before. Together they laid Brianna onto the soft, scented bed.
He heard the murmurs that travelled through the ground, the grass and the trees. They sounded like the shadow of sounds, and they sounded triumphant, “Brianna, Brianna.” Then he knew that Brianna was in trouble; Malalea knew it too.
The songs of the bokwamen resonated in the holes made by bokwas, and bokwas would echo the message and forward it to more distant lands.
But bokwamen, as far as he knew, lived only in tall tales.
He saw the sudden darkening of Aunt Malalea’s face as she glanced at the bokwa’s bite. Three punctures, one much larger than the other two. He had never seen anything like that. It was certainly not made by one of the bokwas usually found in the woods.
“What is it?” he asked.
Malalea didn’t answer. Out of a drawer nearby, she took out a long strip of lace and started winding it around Brianna’s leg, a few inches above the wound.
Staring at her wizened hands, as agile as a young woman’s, Teilo heard her hushed voice, low and heavy.
“Weebinee’s bite, like the one that killed Prince Hecro of Bara many moons ago.”
His heart sank.
Weebinee, the legendary bokwa that killed Prince Hecro, was almost as rare as bokwamen. How could it possibly have been at the stream? The venom of Weebinee wasn’t quick to kill but it was the deadliest, for which there was no cure.
“You ... you’re hurting me,” Brianna groaned, squirming.
Teilo’s heart leaped, and he leaned forward. Brianna’s eyes were fluttering, and her face was all twisted. How pallid she looked!
“The garden ... I’ll ... water ...” she stuttered, gasping between words, arms bent as if she were trying to get up.
“Keep still Brianna, or the poison will spread faster,” said Aunt Malalea, who had just finished with the bandage.
“P ... poison?” Brianna seemed bemused, but then her lips curved upwards. “Yes ... a snake bit me. I dreamt of it. I ... I told Jack. Ja ... Jack said it can’t ... be true.”
She paused, took a few gasps of air and muttered some more, “He said ... I ... I should be ... dead in sleep in ... instead of hassling him.”
Her face widened into a smile, but a convulsion overtook her. When she was calm again, she was shaking like a solitary leaf on a wintry night.
Teilo watched, wringing his hands until they hurt, feeling just as hopeless as when he had seen Tyanna, poisoned and lying fettered to a slab of stone, left to die.
“So ... am ... I going to die ... Ja ... ck?”
Brianna’s voice came to him as light as a wisp of air and wafted its way into his mind. Teilo saw suddenly that her gaze, soft and calm, was on him, and her hand near him trembled a little.
He took the hand and held it in his. “No, you will be fine. Jack won’t let you die. He fought for you once, and he’ll do it again.”
He saw Brianna’s eyes dim before they shut, and her face smoothed out as consciousness abandoned her. The curves at the corners of her lips lingered longer and for a while she looked as if she were asleep, having a pleasant dream.
Malalea sighed. “She might not wake up again —”
“Unless we take her to the Dome of the Oracle and place her in the Bath of Life,” blurted Teilo.
Aunt Malalea threw him a sharp glance. “It’ll kill her if she isn’t the one.”
Blood surged to his head. “She is the one — I know it!”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Tyanna told me.”
The immediate doubt in Aunt Malalea’s face irked him.
She didn’t believe him, he registered bitterly. Nobody did.
How could Tyanna, who was no longer in the land of Taron, still talk to him? But she did, in his sleep, and in his dreams. She had told him in her particular ethereal way that he must prepare for the coming of Brianna, who was to take her place. That’s why he had got himself captured by the Barans and sold to the arena, so that he could wait for her there. Aunt Malalea, of course, sensed it too with her Wona sense, but she let the smoke of doubt blur her awareness.
“It’s the only chance of saving her,” he begged.
Malalea's face softened, but doubt still furrowed her forehead.
“Even if I agree with you,” she said, “the Lake is too far away. There’s no way we can get her there in time.”
Without warning, the door creaked open, and in strode a small old man with a large nose and heavy jowls.
Babeedo! There was no mistaking him — with a lightning-fast horse in his possession, he was almost everywhere.
“So it’s she — Brianna!” he exclaimed with a voice so unusually loud that folks believed that his prominent belly must hide some mechanism to echo and amplify the words before they were uttered.
“She doesn’t look good. In three hours, no, two hours, before shadows reach their own height, she will be as dead as my neighbour’s calf, who was dead moons ago — fell off a cliff.” He spoke in his bell-like voice and finished his words with a rough gesture, thrusting the hand downwards with fingers pointing, mimicking the calf’s fall.
Teilo sprang up, hands clenched into fists. If it weren't Babeedo, he would’ve landed a fist right on his bulbous nose.
Just as Babeedo couldn’t control the volume of his voice, he couldn’t lie. Two or three hours was the maximum time that was left for Brianna. If the swelling went all the way to her heart, nothing could save her, not even the Bath of Life.
“Unless, you give her one of the ice balls you have to freeze her and to stop the poison from spreading,” said Malalea.
“My ice ball!” Babeedo raised his voice, and the room vibrated. “Every one of them took me thirty moons to collect.”
“Then you must have more than one.”
“How about your superb heal-all that heals people whatever their disease.”
“It is not a heal-all, and this is not a disease I have ever had to handle before.”
“If I’m going to give her an ice ball, how do you know she is really the one?” he bellowed and crossed his arms.
“It’s up to you to believe,” Malalea sighed. “It appears to me that she’s a typical teenager, arrogant, unformed and too attached to things, and worst of all, ignorant — knowing nothing about our world. I saw the sign on her shoulder. I knew she is the one, but I wasn’t c
ertain she was up to the job.”
“So you put her to the test even though you knew she is the one.” Babeedo looked at her incredulously.
“I couldn’t help it. If I’m going to trust her with my life and my faith, she has to convince me she is worthwhile. On top of that, she wanted to do it, in return for my vision.”
“Vision of what?”
“Her family — Prince Marcus, Princess Zelda, Bo and Jack.”
“Did you see them?”
Malalea nodded her head, and her face dropped. “I did. Prince Marcus was alright, but I saw shadows creeping towards him. Princess Zelda, they locked her up somewhere underground. And Bo was a strange sight, I saw him in a large bottle ...”
“What about Jack?” Teilo asked.
He saw Malalea’s gaze locked on his, and the expression on her face ... Sadness? Pity?
Her lips moved. “I couldn’t see him,” she said quietly and quickly, and then looked away.
Teilo swayed. He was aware that Babeedo bent low to examine Brianna, took Brianna’s hand from his and folded it onto her chest, but his mind was miles away, back in the arena, high above the audience, staring at the pale-skinned lad shackled to the rails opposite.
Aunt Malalea’s words sank in with a chilling message — Jack could be dead!
His heart shrank at the thought.
“Are you OK, lad? You look like you've seen a ghost.” Babeedo’s voice boomed in his ears.
Teilo swallowed hard and raised his head.
Babeedo’s gaze was no longer on him but had shifted back to Brianna. His face and eyes creased up as he looked at her face, but in a while the wrinkles were all smoothed out. Something must have melted him and made his face as soft as butter.
“She looks just like her,” he muttered again in his booming voice and looked closer at her forehead, “and she has already got a grant.”
“It was from the Doctor,” said Teilo.
Babeedo’s face grew dark, and he made a swallowing sound before booming again. “If the Doctor trusted her with his grant, then I should do the same.”
At once, he took out the big, fat middle finger of his right hand, blew it with hot air from his thick-lipped mouth and rubbed it on his filthy, drab garment. After that, with an earnest look, he dropped the tip of the finger onto Brianna’s forehead.