Dreamwalker

by Oswald, J. D.

  Benfro looked across at the flat-topped rock, twenty paces or more distant. Frecknock still sat there, her eyes screwed shut, but now a look of confusion was spreading across her features. She reached out with her hand, feeling for the spot where the book had been. Benfro could see that it was no longer there, though he couldn’t begin to understand how Meirionydd had retrieved it. Then he remembered what his mother had told him about how the villagers acquired most of their food. Had Meirionydd done the same to the Llyfr Draconius?

  ‘It’s over, Frecknock,’ Meirionydd said and Benfro was startled by the closeness of her voice. It filled his head in the same way that Sir Felyn’s had, but hers was a kind, gentle voice with none of the sense of otherness that he had heard in the alleged wandering dragon’s speech.

  Frecknock’s eyes snapped open in surprise and alarm. For an instant Benfro was confused. He could see the young dragon from two slightly different perspectives and he could feel her embarrassment mixed with fury. And then he could see three dragons standing on the riverbank looking at him. He recognised Meirionydd and Sir Frynwy, but who was that scrawny-looking small creature by the old bard’s side?

  ‘Get out of my head, you horrible little squirt.’ Benfro felt Frecknock’s words as a slap in the face magnified a thousandfold. His sense reverberated and for a moment he thought he might lose his balance, topple into the swift-moving water. But Sir Frynwy’s hand on his shoulder gripped him tight. It was an anchor and a strength that helped him find the way back to where he was supposed to be. Even so, his knees sagged under him as his vision began to clear. At least now he only saw the world from his own eyes.

  ‘Steady there, Benfro,’ Sir Frynwy said. ‘Are you all right?’

  Benfro was about to reply, but he was aware that Meirionydd and Frecknock were still deep in conversation. He could no longer hear the words clearly over the roar of the river, but by Frecknock’s dropped head and submissive posture he could see that she was being berated and, it seemed, accepting that what she had done was wrong. Then Meirionydd beckoned to her and Benfro nearly fell over again. Frecknock stood, blew out the flame in her firepot and stepped off the rock. But instead of dropping the few inches into the roiling water, she seemed to flow across the space and appear at Meirionydd’s side on the bank. Together they made their way back to where he and Sir Frynwy stood, clambering silently back up the bank to the path. Only when they were far enough from the river to speak comfortably above its noise did Meirionydd turn to Frecknock.

  ‘I think you owe Benfro an apology,’ she said. For her part, Frecknock looked almost completely defeated. Certainly the two older dragons seemed taken in by her posture and silence. Benfro knew better. He could still feel the taste of her fury, the sting of her anger as she had… what? What had she done? What had he done? Had he really been inside her head, seeing the world through her eyes and feeling, for that briefest of instances, the world as she felt it? And if so how?

  ‘I’m sorry, Benfro,’ Frecknock said, finally looking up and staring straight at him. ‘I had no right to do what I did to you. And I know now that it was both foolish and selfish. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me someday.’

  Benfro was almost convinced of her sincerity. If nothing else, Frecknock could be very persuasive. But he knew her too well. He could see beyond the downcast eyes and hunched wings to the dragon who had gloated over him when he was powerless to do anything. He remembered the months of agony when he had not been able to speak of what he had seen. And most of all he remembered her supreme arrogance. Frecknock knew that she was better than all the other villagers. She had not long been studying the subtle arts and yet she was more skilled than all, save possibly Meirionydd. And she longed for something more exciting than the daily boredom of village life. She wanted a champion to come and free her, to take her away to exotic places. Benfro could understand that desire. He too yearned to see the world. But he knew the danger that existed should he be captured. No doubt Frecknock thought that she could overcome any man who might attack her, but what she didn’t see in her arrogance and ignorance was that the danger was not just to herself.

  Benfro nodded an acceptance of her apology, not trusting himself to speak. Silently in the gathering gloom of evening they began the journey back to the village. He doubted that the party, his hatchday party, would resume once they arrived, and he wasn’t really sure that he was in the mood for it anymore. At least they had succeeded in stopping Frecknock before she made her calling this time. But Benfro knew for sure that this would not stop her from trying again.

  *

  ‘Dig, you fools, dig! I haven’t got time to stand around waiting.’

  Queen Beulah sat on her horse, hood up to protect her from the constant rain. Her cloak was heavy with water and the ground puddled with it, sleeking the grass and turning the dirt to sticky, soupy mud. The gathered workmen huddled around the two ornate headstones looking uncertainly at each other and shivering in the cold and wet.

  ‘Dig you imbeciles, or I’ll have my men run you through,’ Beulah said. Beside her the captain of her guard shifted nervously on his horse. Behind him a dozen warrior priests stood silent, motionless and uncomplaining in the rain. A flat bed wagon with a heavy canvas cover sat to one side.

  ‘They’re worried for their souls, Your Majesty,’ the captain said quietly. ‘It goes against the teachings of The Shepherd to disturb the last resting place of the dead.’

  ‘I’m well aware of the teachings of mother church,’ Beulah said, her voice loud enough to carry to the miserable workmen. ‘But this act has been blessed by Inquisitor Melyn himself. Your souls are the least of your worries if you don’t obey me.’ She let slip the rein from her right hand, lifting it free of her cloak. With a single thought, a blade of pure white light sprang from her fist, crackling in the wet. The workmen stared, terrified, and beside her the captain let out an involuntary gasp. Behind her she could hear the troop of warrior priests shuffle their feet in the mud. Beulah smiled. It did no harm to challenge their preconceptions about women and magic from time to time.

  ‘Now dig, because your lives depend on it,’ she said.

  The workmen set to with satisfying energy, though it was awful work. The ground was so wet that it slopped back into the hole when they piled it too close to the edge. Beulah could feel her patience slipping away with the minutes. She had taken a chance coming here anyway. The Obsidian Throne might be hers now, but she knew better than to take it for granted. Her father’s reign had been weak; what better time to foment revolt than in the first few days after her coronation? But she had heard the voice. Someone else had a better claim. And if that were true it could only be the offspring of her sister.

  In the dull grey of the winter rain it was almost impossible to make out the buildings of Ystumtuen. Even so the feel of the place was unmistakeable. Beulah had hated it here and she still did, cut off from the lights and excitement of Candlehall. Stuck out in the foothills, surrounded by endless miles of forest and hunting parkland; there was nothing to do here except kill mindless animals, eat them and drink large quantities of ale. Beulah preferred the endless politicking and the machinations of court, that was where the real power was to be found. But Lleyn, perfect Lleyn, had loved the old ruin with the same perversity of nature that had attracted her to the dark Llanwennog, Balch.

  A noise of metal on stone woke Beulah from her musing. She still grasped the blade of light in her right hand, its warmth and power reassuring, filled with the surging energy of the earth. Even in this dead winter place there was more than enough life to light it. But it had served its purpose so she let it shimmer away to nothing, turning her full attention to the deep hole in front of her.

  ‘Haul them out of there and onto the wagon,’ Beulah shouted over the rain. ‘And make it quick. I have to be gone from here within the hour.’

  The workmen were covered in mud from head to toe, their clothes slicked to them like wet sacks. The hole was deep and its sides treacherous as t
hey struggled to lug the heavy caskets up and over the ledge. The first safely on the back of the wagon, they returned for the second and almost had it clear of the pit when one man’s foot slipped in the dirt. For a moment, Beulah thought they had it. Then the weight, shifted suddenly to the other workmen, overbalanced them all. Panic hastened the end as men slithered to get out of the way of the falling casket. Two workmen screamed as they fell under its weight, their cries abruptly silenced by the crunch of stone crushing skull. There was a dull thud as the casket finally came to a halt on its side. The lid slid off and a skeletal bundle fell out into the rain-filled hole.

  Fourteen years had desiccated the corpse, but the stone had prevented it from rotting. Beulah recognised the clothes it wore and the dark hair that hung in long ringlets from the shrivelled head. His skin had darkened in death, but there was no mistaking those features. A silver amulet hung around his neck on a long chain.

  ‘Hello there Prince Balch,’ she said. ‘The years haven’t been kind.’

  The men in the hole had backed away from the corpse as if it might suddenly spring up and attack them. One of them made the sign of the crook around his face and down the centre of his chest. It was a stupid, superstitious gesture that annoyed her far more than it should. This was an enemy who had no reverence for The Shepherd and no loyalty to the Obsidian Throne. It was bad enough that he should have been given such an honourable burial without these men making like he was some kind of saint.

  ‘You there,’ Beulah shouted at the man. ‘Fetch me his amulet.’ The workman looked up at her with terror on his face but she lifted her right hand slightly and he scurried to the body, kneeling in the soft mud and trembling as he reached for the silver necklace.

  ‘Your Majesty, his throat’s been cut,’ the man said, his fear seeming to abate slightly as the corpse remained still and did not try to steal his soul from him. Beulah laughed at the superstitions of the peasants who lived and worked in these backwater woods.

  ‘Of course it has,’ she said. ‘You don’t think he wanted to jump, do you?’

  Such was the man’s surprise at her words that he jerked away from the body, forgetting the amulet clasped in his grip. The silver chain jerked once, lifting the body upwards, then time and old wounds took their toll as the Prince’s head lolled backwards, neck snapped, and fell off into the mud. Stumbling backwards, the workman scrambled out of the pit along with those of his colleagues still alive. His terror was almost total now, Beulah noticed. The whites of his eyes gleamed large from the mud-streaked blackness of his face.

  ‘Give it to me,’ she said, holding out her left hand. ‘Then you’ll be paid.’

  The mention of money was enough to give the workmen the courage to line up. There were five of them and the man with the amulet seemed to have been promoted to the position of leader.

  ‘Thank you,’ Beulah said as she took the amulet from the sodden peasant. He looked at her expectantly, not casting his eyes down now as he had done earlier. His face was thin and drawn, his eyes piggy and stupid. Alongside him, their backs to the pit, his fellow workmen were no better.

  Beulah swung her arm in a single, effortless arc. Like a bolt of lightening in the gloom, the blade of light was there for an instant, then gone. One by one, like a child’s game of falling stones, the workmen crumpled, toppling backwards into the pit, their heads neatly severed.

  The amulet was heavy in her hand as Beulah turned her horse away from the carnage. She looked at the family crest of the Llanwennogs intricately wrought and set with precious jewels, then slipped it into a pocket in her cloak.

  ‘Fill in the hole,’ she said to the captain of the guard. ‘And see to it that the other casket is delivered to Emmass Fawr. Melyn will know what’s to be done with it. I must ride with all haste for the palace. I will take two guards and spare horses.’

  ‘Of course, ma’am,’ the captain said. If he felt anything about his orders, or the person giving them, he did not let it show. ‘Hamer, Jone, you will go with the queen at once.’

  The two guards broke ranks, heading back to the derelict tower where the horses were tethered. Beulah watched as other guards began to fill in the hole. In minutes her escort returned, mounted and leading the other horses.

  ‘No one must know what’s in this wagon, captain,’ Beulah said. ‘The future of the Obsidian Throne depends on it.’

  ‘I will guard it with my life, your highness.’ The captain bowed in the saddle and clasping his hand to his chest.

  ‘Yes,’ Beulah said. ‘Yes, you will.’ Without waiting for a response she spurred her horse to a gallop and sped away for the road to Candlehall.

  *

  Errol itched at the collar of his new cassock and surveyed the pile of parchments that awaited him. He was still in the same room, still working his way through the same wall, slowly cataloguing what he found in the same thick, leather bound book. It was weeks now since his birthday and he was beginning to wonder if he would ever finish this monumental task.

  At least he was able to go above ground on those rare occasions when Andro would let him have some time off. He had classes to attend, too, and when these were held in the higher towers he sometimes even caught a glimpse of those magnificent mountains, snow-covered in the early spring and brilliant against the clear blue sky.

  It seemed that Errol’s enforced stay in the library archives had marked him as more of a thinker than a fighter, or perhaps it was just that he was so much further advanced in his reading and writing than the other novitiates that he could proceed faster to the more cerebral aspects of the training. Whatever the reason, and no one would explain it to him, he was not required to undergo the arduous physical training that Clun and the other novitiates spent at least half of every day doing. Instead he had to make his way back down into the library archives and continue with the tasks he had begun. Younger and considerably smaller than the other boys, this suited Errol fine. In any case, whilst he had always had a fascination for the warrior priests and their magical powers, as he learned more about the truth of warfare he came to realise that a life of quiet study and scholarship need not be a bad thing after all.

  Besides, he doubted that he would have been able to keep up with the other novitiates in their training, judging by the change that several months hard exercise had wrought in Clun. His stepbrother had grown inches taller and his muscles, always impressive back in Pwllpeiran, would have given the old smith Tom Tydfil a run for his money.

  Thinking of the burly smith brought a strange melancholy to Errol’s heart. He had not realised how much he missed the simple life of the village. Every so often simple things would trip a memory and he would find himself back there, walking the woods or listening to ancient tales of warring dragons and men. And always there was that element of confusion, as if his memories were hazy with age, not the fresh-minted things that they should have been. Lately he had found that delving too deep into his past life gave him nasty headaches, so Errol instead threw himself into his work in an attempt to forget. At times it was difficult though, particularly at night as he lay awake, listening to the snoring of his exhausted dormitory mates whilst his mind whirled with the day’s new discoveries.

  Sighing, Errol tried once more to focus on the manuscript that was allowing his mind to wander so. It was a tally of some form, columns of numbers and names cross-referenced in some arcane fashion he could not quite understand. It was a relatively new document, the parchment still supple and the ink fresh. The script was neat and well-executed, written in the common tongue of the Twin Kingdoms, unlike some of the more obscure texts he had uncovered. But the names were all archaic and foreign sounding, the numbers meaningless.

  ‘Ah, there you are Errol,’ a voice broke through his mystified staring before his mind could begin to wander again. Errol looked around to see Andro standing at the door, his white hair almost glowing in the lantern light. The old man crossed the room to see what he was doing, leaning over the reading table and peering clo
se at the manuscript as if his eyes were failing.

  ‘The first survey of King Divitie,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Ah, I remember this well.’

  ‘You know what it is?’ Errol asked.

  ‘Of course,’ Andro said. ‘I wrote it.’

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  ‘It’s a census, of a sort’ Andro said. ‘It lists all the known dragons within the Twin Kingdoms, their stated age at the time of the census, where they live and what tithe they’re expected to pay to the court.’

  Errol looked back at the parchment. The names were certainly foreign, things like Sir Cadrigal, Ystrad Fflur and Ynys Môn. Yet they had a certain flowing elegance to them that tripped neatly off the tongue and made his own name seem ungainly. The claimed ages of the beasts amazed him, for there didn’t seem to be any less than eight hundred years old. Some of them were more than fifteen hundred.

  ‘How can this be?’ Errol asked, pointing at the figures. ‘Surely nothing can live that long.’

  ‘Well, it may be that dragons aren’t very good at counting, or it may be that they exaggerate their own age to make themselves feel important. It may be that they truly do live that long. Certainly they live longer far than humans do.’

  ‘And what of these red lines?’ Errol asked, pointing to the marks that had been scored through at least two thirds of the names.

  ‘Dead,’ Andro said. ‘Most slain by our very own warrior priests.’

  ‘But I thought King Divitie lifted the aurddraig,’ Errol said.

  ‘So he did, young novitiate. But not every warrior priest was happy at the king interfering with what they thought of as their sacred duty. Close by, where he could keep an eye on things, the dragons were more or less safe; especially if they kept out of the way. But in the Hendry boglands and further east out on the Gwastadded Wag, they were fair game as ever. And we only have scant intelligence as to the fate of dragons in the northern plains of Llanwennog. I’ve heard some tales of captured beasts being trained as circus animals, but most information that trickles in is about deaths. ’