by Shannah Jay
Today all the children could do was wash themselves carefully, and those who had clean clothes donned them. From somewhere in the wagon, Herra found strips of material in a soft blue, the colour the Sisters had always used for their robes and which the Kindred still used when they dared.
These, the children tied around their foreheads, like the old embroidered headbands to help emphasise how special and different this day was.
The next morning, just before dawn, Ivo gave the eight boys and seven girls who had sat vigil that night a beaker each of festival wine, to which Herra had added the drugs needed to enhance consciousness, herbs she had found easily in the lush tangles of the nearby wildwoods. The wine wasn’t as strongly laced as usual, but it would suffice, for Herra’s powers were far superior to those of most Sisters.
Then Ivo and Davred led the offrants across the clearing, singing the festival anthem and stepping in time to its subtle rhythms. He and Ivo were the only ones to know the words, though usually a whole community of adults would be singing it, for you memorised it easily at your Choosing, under the influence of festival wine. Under a great tree, Davred led the offrants to form a circle and there they all waited for Herra in the hushed green silence.
As Davred and Ivo started singing the anthem again, she moved across the clearing with a half-dancing step often used in temple ceremonies. Surely, she thought, this was the strangest Choosing at which she’d ever officiated. But it filled her with joy, as did anything which reminded them of the happy life the Serpent had stolen from the people of the Twelve Claims.
As she reached the small circle, the singing faded and silence settled on the clearing. The other children, who’d lined the path and strewn flowers and sweet-smelling herbs in front of Herra and the offrants, watched entranced. Few of them could remember Festivals of Choosing, but all had been told about them by their parents.
Herra walked slowly around the circle, pausing in front of each offrant and gazing deeply into the child’s eyes, the child who would be considered an adult from this day forward. From the first she’d known this would be different from the usual ceremony, but not how different. It was rare to choose anyone, almost unheard of to choose two or more at one ceremony. But here, in this small group, she could sense a welling of talent.
When she stopped in front of him, Jiran took a step forward, as was the custom. Ah, she thought immediately, it’s as I suspected. ‘You are chosen by our Brother, dear child,’ she intoned. ‘Welcome to the Kindred of the God.’
Jiran’s whole body radiated utter and complete happiness. He remained where he was, beaming in delight, not stepping backwards to rejoin the circle, as she moved on.
Herra paused in front of Purvlin. He stepped forward, face solemn, and a thrill ran through her.
‘You are chosen by our Brother, dear child. Welcome to the Kindred of the God.’
Purvlin gaped at her. He hadn’t expected this. To be named as an Elder, perhaps, but not to be chosen.
Nor had Herra expected it, for Purvlin’s Gifts were practical ones and less strong than Jiran’s, though like all Gifts they would develop as he grew up. Only the festival wine could show that some people had the Gifts.
She stopped in front of another boy. ‘I name you, Rinnill. One day you shall be Elder of your community.’
The boy beamed at her and stepped back, pride radiating from him.
Two more girls were named Elders, then Herra stopped in front of Daranna. ‘You are chosen by our Brother, dear child. Welcome to the Kindred of the God.’ She had known that Daranna would be chosen when she first met her. Sometimes it was as obvious as a beacon glowing in the night.
‘I shall serve our Brother with joy all the days of my life,’ said Daranna, the only one to speak the correct response.
Herra felt a small surge of happiness and hope. Times had changed in the last decade, for in the old days, children had played games of Choosing in anticipation of their own Festival Day and had all known the ritual phrases. Now, to hear the words spoken so confidently and surely, even as they were fleeing from evil, seemed to her a sign of better things to come. Those of the Serpent hadn’t managed to wipe out their Brother’s ways. And they never would!
When Herra had finished testing the children, she turned to face the group of smaller children watching in fascination. ‘You, too, shall have your Festivals of Choosing when you grow older,’ she promised. ‘The Serpent shall be defeated.’
As she spoke, there was a shuddering in the earth, a deep sound, too deep for hearing, which was sensed mainly as a vibration in the belly. Herra stiffened. The Serpent. It was watching them. It had gained enough life to exist on its own, apart from groups of its followers. Then she realised people was approaching. As she cast out those other senses she could tell that the Serpent’s anger at their small festival had communicated itself to Sen-Sether and his men, who were now speeding up their pursuit.
She was loathe to break up the joyful gathering, but it had to be done. She clapped her hands twice. ‘To the caves. Our pursuers are coming to attack us.’
As they passed through the big clearing, she saw that the deleff had already left and taken the wagon with them.
The children exclaimed and began to stumble up the hillside, some of the younger ones sobbing
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in fright. The offrants were still a little numb from the effects of the festival wine and they stumbled along behind the others in a daze. As they began to fall behind, Herra used her enhanced Healer’s powers to clear their heads.
‘Quickly!’ she called, checking to see that all the children were on their way up the hill. ‘Ivo, everyone, take what you need from the camp as you pass through. Bring nothing you can’t carry easily.’ She took nothing at all, but ran past the struggling children making their way up the hill, drawing Daranna with her, then leaving the girl to stand in the entrance to the cave and direct them all towards the rear.
‘Should we not stay and fight them?’ Purvlin demanded as he panted to a halt just inside the rear cave.
Herra shook her head. ‘Not this time. Not against Sen-Sether.’
‘Sen-Sether himself!’ Purvlin shuddered with horror at this dreaded name.
‘I’m afraid so. One day, I promise, you shall help destroy Those of the Serpent, but not now.
Help us get the little ones into the rear caverns.’
‘But we’ll be trapped there! They’re bound to find us.’
‘No. There are passages which run back into the hill. Daranna will show you all where to go. If you will find torches - ah, thank you, Daranna! Light them quickly and lead the way.’
As the last person stepped into the shadowy passage, Herra set wards at the entrance, the strongest wards she could create. She doubted this would stop Sen-Sether, but it would slow even him down.
Then, that task finished, she ran after the others, pausing briefly to comfort a sobbing child and to encourage a terrified one as she overtook the line of figures stumbling through the half-lit darkness. She found Purvlin and Jiran there at the front of the line with Daranna. For once, they weren’t arguing.
She ordered most of the torches extinguished, so they wouldn’t all be used up and leave them without light, and made her own light to lead them by, creating a glowing ball on the end of an unlit torch. There was an ‘Ooh!’ from the children as she produced this minor miracle.
‘It is not magic! I was taught how to do that,’ she said, looking at them severely. How she disliked people to call the results of her Gifts and training magic! But she could see that these children did not believe her. Well, let them consider it magic if it helped them to endure.
‘Keep going as fast as you safely can!’ she ordered. ‘When we come to the place you have noted, Daranna, where there might be a weakness in the wall, stop and show me.’
The passages had been created from a series of caves, of which there were many in these hills.
The first ones they passed through w
ere natural fissures, the result, perhaps, of ancient movements of the ground. The inner ones, below ground level, might be the remains of an old river system, for the walls were smooth and rounded. Every now and then they would come to a point where someone, a long time ago, Herra thought, had dug out passages to link one channel to another.
‘Brother, look down! ’ she prayed aloud as they walked.
The girls echoed her words, again giving the correct ritual response. ‘Look down upon us all! ’
Someone, probably Daranna, had kept that knowledge alive in them.
When Daranna stopped and gestured to the walls, Herra waved the others on past her and went to study a fissure that had allowed small pieces of crumbling rock to slip and shift into an angled pile at its base.
‘Our Brother provides,’ she told Davred calmly. ‘Look, if we can cause the rock to slide a little, our way shall be barred.’
‘My Katia could do it easily,’ he said involuntarily.
‘Yes. And maybe I can imitate her actions. Enough to block the passage, anyway.’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Hurry up, everyone! Daranna, take the children two hundred paces farther on, then stop and wait for me.’
Davred remained beside her. ‘Can I help?’
‘Not this time, dear boy. My Enhancement provides the strength I need.’ For her Brother the God had granted her the rarest Gift of all. Sisters renewed their bodies regularly and so lived much longer than other folk. Although she now knew, with that special sense that only the Kindred developed, that she could not renew her body again, her powers had been greatly enhanced. She wouldn’t decline into death; she’d dance forward joyously to greet it, knowing she’d be reborn or, as she hoped, move up to the next plane of existence.
She pressed her hands against the rock, leaning her head against it, too, for a moment, as if to commune with it. Then she stood upright, held her hands out at shoulder height, and started gathering her forces. From nowhere a wind blew around her, even there in the tunnels, from nowhere light began to shine, forming a halo around her slender body. Thus was it with Herra since her Enhancement.
Davred took another few steps backwards, knowing he’d only be in the way.
‘ Brother, look down! ’ she called, in a voice which echoed along the tunnel. ‘ Look down and grant me your aid! ’
As she concentrated her forces on the fissure, the ground rumbled, not with the deep uneasy growl that had signalled the approach of the Serpent, but with a sighing vibration, almost as if it were reluctant to move to Herra’s bidding. Then, very slowly, more fissures appeared in the walls, the roof tilted and great slabs of rock started shifting to block the passage.
Herra stepped slowly backwards, one step at a time, her hands still raised. Dust and debris flew around her, a piece of rock struck Davred’s cheek and caused blood to flow, but nothing touched Herra.
When the sound had faded to a tense silence and the dust had settled, they went back towards the fissure and found the passage completely blocked, not by rubble but by a great slab of stone.
Looking at the solid wall, Davred hoped fervently that there was another way out of these tunnels.
Not until then did Herra let her hands fall, and Davred stepped forward, ready to catch her if her energy was depleted.
But she smiled at him and turned round as gracefully as a young rock nerid. ‘So, son of my heart, let us move on.’
‘Are you all right, Herra?’
‘Yes. My Enhancement still holds.’ She walked lightly past him to rejoin the others, as calm and unruffled as if the earth had not just moved at her bidding, as if they were not now trapped inside a
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mountain, as if Sen-Sether and his guards were not pursuing them.
As they walked on through the darkness, Herra found herself thinking about their predicament. It was so hard to keep the balance between peace and stagnation. She’d been gifted with a very long life, nearly two hundred and fifty years. During that time she’d seen the rise of the Serpent cult and with it the horror of another Age of Discord, bringing a madness that had spread death and violence across the whole world.
She was not only the oldest person now living, but the oldest who had ever lived in the entire history of the Twelve Claims. Sisters often exceeded the normal ninety to a hundred years of life, and in the past few thousand years, quite a few had lived to a hundred and fifty, but Herra had gone far beyond that. And yet she didn’t feel old. Her body was that of a healthy woman in her middle years, though she could change it at will to appear younger or older.
Herra was a direct descendant of Karialla, who had founded the Sisterhood long ago, and of her husband the Illustrious Deverith, First Manifestation of their God. From them came these special Gifts. Her line had also mingled with that of Terraccallis, the Second Manifestation of their God, who had come down to help the Sisterhood in an earlier struggle against evil.
She’d always wondered what Terraccallis was really like, this winged being who’d mated with her ancestor, another Herra. The Statue of the God in Temple Tenebrak showed him as fine-boned and handsome, with great membranous wings that folded down his back like a glistening golden cloak.
The chief Healer at the Temple had written in the Archives that Terraccallis’s bones, though slender, were so strong you could not break them and that his golden eyes could see into your very soul. The statue showed all the Eight Manifestations in which their God had come to their world to help them, and not all of them had human bodies.
She sighed at the thought of Temple Tenebrak, which was as near a home as she’d ever had. It was now besieged by Those of the Serpent, though it was protected, as were all twelve temples in the world, by a device called a stasis cube, which stilled all life within a certain radius. The cubes had been brought down to them by the man who walked beside her - Davred, Eighth Manifestation of the God, a man born on a faraway planet in the Galactic Confederation, but a man whose destiny had brought him across vast distances to her planet, which his people called Sunrise.
She knew she’d never see her beloved temple again, that this was the last part of her long life.
Her Brother the God had whispered that knowledge in her ear when she and a small group of her Kindred had first fled from Tenebrak. During their flight, they’d encountered many wonders and met strange beings. Quequere, who called himself a crystalline matrix, came from another world, as Davred did, and - she frowned - some of the beings they’d met lived on another level of existence.
That was the only way she could describe it.
Such experiences had made the Kindred grow stronger, which would, she hoped, help them defeat Those of the Serpent in the final confrontation. For it would come to that, she was sure.
She adjusted the light she’d caused to glow at the top of the pole. Because of the Enhancement it sometimes seemed as if she were like the light, filled to overflowing with warm golden radiance, filled with joy, too, underneath the worries. She felt as if she were almost in sight of something so beautiful that death would be a most welcome transition to bring her to that place.
Davred, walking beside her, was amazed at the serenity of her expression. His beloved Elder Sister was the lodestone of their quest and he felt honoured to be part of it, for she shared her wisdom freely with her companions, the sort of wisdom he’d never encountered in the Galactic Confederation. One day he would share it in his turn with his people, but not yet. He still had so much to learn.
And first they had to escape from their pursuers.
CHAPTER 2 HEART OF THE MOUNTAIN
After two hours of travelling through the darkness, Herra called a halt. Near them a spring welled up from the rocks and then trickled away in a dark slick that soon tumbled down a narrow fissure at the bottom of one rough rocky wall. 'Let's rest for a while,' she called.
When everyone had drunk their fill, she gathered the three young people who had been chosen around her and led them slightly apart from the other
s. They followed her, wary and uncomfortable, uncertain how to behave.
She gestured to them to sit down and sank gracefully into a cross-legged position, which Daranna at least tried to imitate. When they were all seated, she smiled at them. 'In better times, we would have handed you over to a Novice Mistress in one of the temples, and she would have spent years training you properly in the ways of the Sisterhood and helping you to develop your own Gifts. Now, with violence threatening at every step, we have become a Kindred, men and women both, and we're still finding out how best to train those who join us. So we shall train you as and when we can.'
'What sort of people are being chosen to join the Kindred?' Jiran wanted to know.
'Some are young, some much older, like Ivo, who travels with me, and some come from outside the Twelve Claims, like Davred, who is the Eighth Manifestation of our God.'
When they all gasped in amazement at this last piece of information, she just smiled, that luminous smile that wrapped anyone near her in visible love.
'I can't believe I've been chosen,' said Daranna, then looked at Herra anxiously, afraid that she might have spoken out of turn.
'Never fear to speak to me, dear child. I am your Sister, your Kinswoman, not your jailer.'
'I can't believe it, either,' Purvlin said. 'I thought I might be named Elder. Well, I hoped for that, actually, but to join the Kindred, to serve our Brother with all my strength and will. No, I would never have dared hope for that.' He drew in a ragged breath. 'I wish my mother could have known. She would have been so happy about it.' He fell silent, swallowing hard to hold back the tears.
His mother must be dead, Herra thought. How sad their lives have been, these young ones raised in an Age of Discord. 'May her lives draw her ever nearer to wisdom,' she said, echoing part of the Sisters'
burial ritual.
Purvlin blinked. 'I'd forgotten that people used to say that. It's a lovely thought, isn't it, other lives and getting wiser?'