The Seventh Friend (Book 1)

by Tim Stead

  “I have lost my honour,” she said.

  No,” he said, and he was surprised at the strength of his own voice. “Not honour. Innocence, perhaps, trust, but not honour.”

  He tried to think of what to say, and the book came back to him again. He had always liked the Ten Tales, and perhaps he had always unconsciously measured himself against them, and always he had been short, lacking, a fraction of what he should have been. Now he saw that they had another purpose.

  “Do you know Karim?” he asked. “The Ten Tales?”

  She lifted her eyes for a moment. “Of course,” she said.

  “You remember the second tale? Karim is deceived into fighting the god Maritan, and he is beaten, his sword, the one that was given him by the king, is taken from him, and his armour stripped away, and he is forced to return to the king naked and humiliated?”

  She nodded.

  “Karim said to the king that he had dishonoured the king by being so humiliated before the people. Do you remember what the king replied?”

  He could see her look sideways, trying to retrieve the tale.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I remember. He told Karim that honour cannot be stolen by the deeds of another. It lives solely in your own actions, thoughts and deeds. Honour is not lost when a battle is lost.”

  “You are safe here. You are needed. You have your honour.”

  She sat and looked at her hands holding his for a long time, but he felt that she was calmer. Her shoulders slowly relaxed. She looked up at him.

  “You are wise, Sheshay,” she said. “I will do what you wish me to do.”

  “Do not do as I wish because I wish it. You are free, Sheyani; free as the hawk to stay or to go. I hope, of course that you will stay, but the choice is yours. And it is Karim’s king who was wise, I simply remembered.” He extracted his hand gently from her grip. “Now, will you be eating with us tonight? The cook has prepared a fine meal.”

  “Yes, Sheshay, I will eat with you.”

  “Good.”

  He left her and closed the door softly behind him. It was a small act of expiation for all those other times, but his eyes were open now, and he would never be the same man again. He could never walk away.

  26. Pascha

  So it was to be war again. Word had come to Benafelas with a group of traders down from the north, which was a surprise. The Mayor of Benafelas was directly responsible to the court. He was the King’s man, but no royal messenger had come. Even when the news had spread, become the idle talk of every tavern in the town, there was no sign that the mayor knew. No riders left for Telas Alt, no soldiers ran about the streets inspecting what little defences the town possessed. Perhaps there was no point. There was a small fortified keep out on the headland beyond the harbour, but it would be no hindrance to Seth Yarra.

  Pascha listened to the rumours. She had her maid servant gather them up and bring them back to her with the shopping.

  The war was in the east again, it seemed; as far from Telas as was possible. Maybe that was why the mayor did nothing. People here seemed to regard the Dragon’s Back as an impenetrable wall that would keep all trouble at bay, and perhaps it was.

  Narak was involved again. She heard that he had been seen in the capital, had spoken with the king and queen. It made her feel odd to know that he had been so close. Not that close, exactly. It was over two hundred miles to Telas Alt, but it felt close.

  She had been about to order her house packed up. Her move to Berash was due, but with war looming the other side of the mountains it did not seem a wise thing to do. She would stay here and wait out the trouble. It could not last more than a year.

  She trusted Narak to be victorious again. It was what he did best. He would defeat the armies of Seth Yarra and she could return to her life of nomadic inheritance. She could pretend yet again to her own blood.

  Pascha still remembered. The flame of hate for Seth Yarra still burned within her, even after four hundred years. They had killed Alaran, her prince, her love. Nothing had been the same after that. With Alaran’s death she had lost what remained of her appetite for society. Where she had danced and laughed she now sat and brooded, lost in the memory of sorrow.

  And she remembered Narak.

  It was the day after she heard the words Seth Yarra spoken again that she went down to the cellar of her house in Benafelas. There was a room there for which she alone had the key. She wore it always on a thong about her neck, but she had not used it in twelve quiet years. Now she had heard those words again: Seth Yarra; and she went down to the cellar and took the key from around her throat and fitted it to the lock.

  It was a small room beyond the locked door, no more than a large cupboard, and yet it held three things more important to her than anything else she possessed. She took a lamp and hung it on a hook within the room, and allowed her eyes to feed on the three objects.

  The first was a sword, stained black with blood, the blade rusted so much that it had begun to lose its shape. It was the same sword that she had picked up when they had killed Alaran, the same blade that she had used to kill his murderers. It was a mortal blade, a weak thing, long past its usefulness. Yet the feel of it in her hand reminded her of the only time she had felt the power of what she was, a god, even if it was only the god of sparrows. She had cut down the assassins like so many rank weeds, and it had felt like real power, even though the reason for power was gone. Alaran had been dead. It was too much, too late.

  There also lay her bow. It was unstrung, wrapped in cloth. It looked like nothing, but her bow was no mortal weapon. Only three had been made; one for Jiddian the Eagle, one for Fashmanion the Crow, and one for her.

  The bow was a weapon that no man could string, let alone draw. It was made of secret metals by the greatest craftsmen of Durandar a thousand years ago, and it would never rust and never lose its power. She did not unwrap it, but instead remembered the feel of it, the immense sensation of an arrow released from its metal string, flying true over a thousand yards. She was a lord of the air, and the wind stepped aside when she aimed. She had never failed to strike gold when she aimed at a target.

  The third thing was a small silkwood box, exquisitely carved with leaves and flowers about the startlingly lifelike head of a sparrow. She touched the box, ran her fingers along its smooth edges, and over the sharp, silky lines of the leaves and flowers. For all that she disliked sparrows it was a beautiful thing.

  She opened the box. It was lined with green satin, like the richest nest in the world, but instead of an egg it bore a ring. It was a broad, gold ring in the Durander style of six hundred years ago. Three stones were set in it; an emerald, a sapphire, and a ruby. The value of the stones and the gold was considerable. Add the workmanship of the thing, and it was an artefact of great value, but even that was less than a tenth part of its actual worth. It was a calling ring. A thing of magic made in Durandar, and it was a gift, given to her by Narak when they were lovers.

  If she wore the ring, if she placed it upon the ring finger of her right hand and then covered it with the fingers of her left hand, then every word that she spoke could be heard by Narak. She had no reason to think that it did not still work. She had used it a few times in play, when she had first possessed it, but never out of need. She did not know why she had kept it so long, other than she could not possibly sell such a thing, and it seemed a crime to destroy it.

  She closed the box and put it back with the other things.

  Seeing these mementoes, touching them, had taken her back to other times, times before the war, even before Alaran. She had been cut off from things for so long, and suddenly rumour and gossip were not enough. She had another source of news if she dared to use it.

  She made sure that the door to the tiny room was locked. The last thing she wanted was for a servant to stumble upon her when she was in a trance state. The people of Telas were intolerant of magic, and a trance looked like magic to them. Such a revelation would make her vastly unpopular.
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  She sat on the floor and tried to settle into a comfortable position, but it took some time. The floor was hard and a draught whispered under the locked door. Eventually she managed to find a place against the corner where she could relax. She tried to remember the chant that Narak had taught her so many years ago, but it was gone. Only a few words remained, and they meant nothing. But it was not the words that mattered, she recalled. It was the rhythm, and she remembered that well enough. She invented her own words.

  It was easy, in the end. She slipped into the Sirash as though she had never been away, and it welcomed her. She felt at home here. Perhaps she had always felt this way, but she could not remember. The memory of the Sirash was tied up with the terrifying, tiny minds of sparrows, and that memory made her shiver with dread.

  She drifted for a while, enjoying the freedom. There was no compulsion on her to do anything, but her want came back to her. News. She wanted news.

  There were two ways. She could seek it herself through the eyes of her congregation, the sparrows, or she could approach another of the Benetheon and ask. Neither seemed attractive. She hated using the sparrows, but she was cut off from the Benetheon. They would not speak to her. Well, most of them would not. Narak, of course, would do so, but she had already rebuffed his attempt to speak with her. If she came to him now it would look desperate, and he was the last person she wanted to be beholden to.

  Beloff, on the other hand, had always been a friend; a friend to Narak, but a friend to her, also. He had been like a gruff uncle, short spoken, but generous of deed. She did not think that he would deny her.

  She slid across the greasy, dry, not quite darkness of the Sirash. Beloff was easy to find, a bright bear light, the brightest of them all, burning in the midst of the great forest. She reached out and touched him. He was aware of her at once.

  “Sparrow? Pascha, is that you?” Beloff was surprised, which in itself was not a surprise. It had been centuries since she had spoken to him. She, in turn, was surprised that he recognised her so readily.

  “It is, Mighty Bear. Will you speak with me?”

  “Levity does not become your circumstance, Pascha. What do you want?”

  She knew better than to tease him. When Beloff began to speak in sentences and to use words of more than two syllables it meant that he was angry. “News. War is coming?”

  “With Seth Yarra.”

  “You will fight?”

  “Of course.”

  “And Narak?”

  “Narak is Narak.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I do not. When it is time he will call me. I will fight. That is the way of it.”

  “He was in Telas.”

  “So I believe.”

  “What is he doing, Beloff?”

  “Ask him.”

  Beloff was not being very helpful, but at least he was back to his taciturn self.

  “What is the situation with the war?”

  “As yet there is none. Seth Yarra waits to the north of Afael. Armies gather to meet them. Five of the six kingdoms are joined to do battle, though most come from the east. They number twenty-five thousand, we a few thousand less.”

  “Then we shall win.” She knew enough to know the importance of cavalry, and that the invaders had none.

  “If time and chance allows.”

  It was all that she could ask. He would not talk about Narak, and any greater detail about the war would be wasted on her. She was no strategist, and Beloff knew it.

  “How have you been, Pascha?”

  The question took her by surprise. It wasn’t like Beloff to ask.

  “Fine,” she replied. “I live an easy and comfortable life.”

  “Rootless and bored, you mean.”

  She was stung by the remark. Beloff dismissed four hundred years of her life in one harsh phrase.

  “Do not judge me, Bear God. I am not you. I do not need…”

  “We all need, Pascha,” he cut her off. “You and me and Narak and the kings of men and the peasants who work in the fields; we all need. What we need are friends, equals, betters and inferiors. We need others. You have been alone too long.”

  “Not out of choice.”

  “You did not choose to break the law with Alaran?”

  “I was in love, Beloff. There was no other choice for me!” She did not know why she was defending herself to Beloff, but she felt compelled to do so.

  “A passing infatuation with perishable goods,” Beloff said.

  It was such a terrible and hurtful thing to say that she broke the connection between them, and was once again drifting alone in the oily smoothness of the Sirash. Beloff had been her friend, one of her closest companions for hundreds of years before the break. How could he be so cruel?

  Indignation and anger swelled up inside her, but they felt hollow, unviable, a fire built with damp wood and wishes. She allowed the coolness of the Sirash to suck the heat away, leaving her empty.

  There was some truth to what Beloff had said. There always was. The Bear God spoke like a simpleton, but the words he uttered always carried meaning, and always had a purpose. Perishable goods. Was that really how he saw mortal men? Was that how they all saw men? She thought of her maid servant, the men and women that she knew in Benafelas, and she recognised the distance between them. None of them were friends. After all these years she was just like the others, aloof, isolated, superior.

  How could she have become like this? She had worshipped Alaran, loved him with all her heart, and yet, she had to confess, she had known that time itself would come between them, had felt that special doom. If he relied on her for life itself, then how could they ever be partners, how equals? He had been a prisoner of their love, even if he had died before he fully realised it.

  She allowed herself to drift, and wallowed in the misery of her revelation. Where she had thought herself better than the others, more egalitarian, more connected with the ordinary folk of the world, she now realised that she had only been less far sighted, less sensible. She had merely come to the same place by a longer, more painful road.

  And Narak? Narak had known.

  She punished herself, allowed her mind to dwell on each of the people she had come to know over the last four centuries. She remembered faces, occasions, conversations, intimacies, but there was no grief. People no longer died in her world. She moved away, cut them off like worn out rope, and started a new life. Like a snake shedding its skin she lost all the little scars each time she moved on. It was only the deep ones, the old ones, which stayed with her time after time: Alaran, Narak, her mother and father. She had stopped living.

  Was there a way back? She drifted on and on. Perhaps the Sirash was what she really was; a disembodied presence, passing over life, aware of it, able to reach out and touch it, but separate. No, she could not accept that. Narak managed to care, and Beloff in his way; some of the others, too. She needed to find a new balance, a new way to be part of the world. For the moment she was a cut flower, a rootless decoration that would shrivel and die.

  Something in the Sirash caught her attention and held it. Sparrows. A flock of sparrows in a field of corn. Her own creatures. She allowed them to distract her for a moment, but watched with growing fascination. She had never watched sparrows before. The corn was gone, harvested days ago, but the sparrows were among the broken straw, chaff and spilled grain. They boiled, swirled and swept around each other like a living cloud. In the Sirash they seemed a constellation of brightness, almost like a single living thing.

  She watched, fascinated by the patterns, amazed by the unity of the movement. If she concentrated on a single bird the movement was erratic. It hopped, it pecked, it flew, it was startled, it was hungry; it was a collection of simple desires and actions. Yet if she drew back and watched the flock, hundreds of birds seemed to move as one, with the intelligence of a larger creature.

  Could it really be so simple?

  Pascha was driven by her revelation. She was
filled with a reckless despair, and so she did what she would not have done a mere hour previously. She descended upon the flock of sparrows and merged with them. She became the flock.

  At first it was more frightening than being in a single bird. The tiny idiot brightness of one sparrow was simpler than having a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, being in the midst of a cloud of wings. She struggled to focus, but the harder she tried, the more difficult it became. A single person was just not meant to see with so many eyes. There was nothing in her mind that could cope with the clutter of images. She let go and allowed the images to bombard her. Like a pile of leaves picked up in an autumn breeze, the images spun around her.