The Wraeththu Chronicles

by Storm Constantine

  Yarrow sighed and went back to his slicing. "Do I like the sound of this? I think not!"

  "But would you?" I insisted.

  "What, do you mean preparing food?" He wrinkled his nose. "No, I don't think so. Would you eat it? They are different from us. As for working about the house, I don't know. They're not supposed to be trustworthy and the fact that they loathe Wraeththu must be taken into account. Why, Swift, what is all this?"

  Now I would have to trust him. First making him swear not to tell anyone, I told him about the humans in the town, that they might be killed, that I wanted him to get around my father and have two of them brought to the house. "There is only one person who can get his own way with Terzian over something like this, and that is you," I said.

  Yarrow was flattered. "Mmm, maybe. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer another puppy instead? Mareta will be having kittens again soon. Won't a dog or a cat be less trouble than humans?"

  "I don't want them as pets," I said. "I feel sorry for them." "Really! This is worrying, Swift. How did you get to see them anyway? How do you know about them?" I smiled and shook my head. "I just know, that's all. Will you do it?" "They are children?"

  "Yes . . . well, not that old." I walked around the table once more and put my arms around him. "Yarrow, if you do this, I will love you forever, I promise!"

  "Ha! Love me, will you?" he said and laughed, and by that I knew that he'd agree.

  "One of them is named Bryony," I told him. "One of the guards will know. His name is Leef."

  "Leef!" Yarrow exploded, obviously knowing more about Leef s reputation than I did. "Swift, what have you been up to?"

  "Hush!" I said. "Nothing. See my father after breakfast. I shall be especially well behaved to soften him up."

  It was a tribute to Yarrow's powers of persuasion and my father's fear of upsetting Yarrow that within two days, Yarrow and two of his staff went into the town to choose human slaves to work at Forever. I was a little worried that Leef would not cooperate. After all, he would be afraid that my father might find out that he had spoken to me in the dark, and thought of me as older than I was and put his warm, forbidden hands on my waist when we were on the moving horse. He might say, "Terzian's son? What are you talking about?" and laugh. There was a very good chance he might do that and then Yarrow might bring the wrong humans back to the house. Not that it mattered, I suppose, a charitable act was a charitable act, whoever it was that benefited, but I was particularly interested in those two. I had been ignoring Gahrazel very thoroughly for the past two days and Swithe and Moswell could not understand what was going on. Gahrazel had said the next morning, "Look, Swift, I'm sorry that—" But I had not let him finish and had walked away, head in air.

  Cobweb said, "Have you and Gahrazel quarrelled, Swift?"

  I just shrugged and said, "He's changed."

  Cobweb smiled and touched my hair. "Poor little Swift," he said and went back to his painting.

  One evening, I went to see Cal in his room and, even though he looked even more tired than usual, told him all about it. He laughed. "Oh, Swift, all that trouble, all that secrecy! If you wanted to see humans, I'd have taken you myself, in daylight even!" and I thought, Of course, why didn't I think of that?

  "Cal, do you like my father?" I asked, knowing he would have taken me to Galhea because he cared so little what Terzian might think. "Your father is a complicated har," Cal said obliquely. "But do you like him?"

  "Like him... like him... ?" Cal tapped his lips with a pencil, thinking, his eyes glowing like coals in dark, ravaged sockets. "I think perhaps I do. I don't dislike him, certainly. Pass me that green pen, Swift, will you?" "Can I read what you're writing, Cal?" "No," he said.

  Yarrow spoke to me about the humans. "I told them if they tried to run away, or steal anything, or not work hard, I'd have Ithiel slit their throats," he said. "Their names are Bryony and Peter and they are brother and sister." He told me that the rest of the staff were rather pleased about the new arrivals because it meant that all the most shunned, arduous or unpleasant tasks could be allotted to them.

  I wondered whether the humans were pleased that they had been saved from death or working for someone worse than Yarrow, who, although he exacted hard work from his staff, was never deliberately cruel. He might treat the humans differently, of course. When they had first arrived, Terzian had told everyone about it at dinnertime. "Yarrow is behaving strangely," he said. "He's asked for human slaves! Cobweb, do you think that latest batch of sheh was tainted or something?"

  Gahrazel looked at me slyly while everyone laughed politely at Terzian's joke. Cal saw me going red and said, "Well, Terzian, this does dispel an illusion! There was I thinking that the only human you'd tolerate within a mile of your august presence was a dead one."

  Terzian's responsive laugh was a little strained for some reason. Cobweb refused even to smile.

  "Oh, you know how Yarrow is," Terzian said. "We suffer his whims. No doubt he'll get sick of trying to discipline them and get rid of them."

  "We must examine carefully then all the meat we are served in future," Cobweb remarked drily and I saw Cal look at him. Did Cal ever tell the truth? I wondered.

  A few days afterwards, my father was summoned north by Ponclast and we all looked forward to a relaxing few weeks while he was away. I thought the humans were quite attractive once they were cleaned up. Good food and comfort would restore their flesh. I was glad that they did not appear to recognize me. Yarrow suddenly found jobs for them to do that had been building up for ages. There was a cupboardful of linen to be repaired and all the silver and brassware needed a good polish. His racks of herbs needed labelling; the list was endless. Sometimes we could hear Bryony singing while she worked, that strange, high, female sound. Perhaps they were not too unhappy. Once, when I went into the kitchen, she was sitting by the hearth with Mareta on her lap, peeling vegetables (so Yarrow had relented about the food). She looked up and said, "You are one of the pure-born, I can tell." Then she said, "The Varrs live differently to how we imagined." I was quite surprised that she dared to speak to me, and without any shyness, too. "And how did you imagine it?" I asked.

  "Oh, we thought that with all the killing and because you have no craft, you'd live like pigs!"

  "You're not afraid of us, are you?"

  "No," she said. "I'm not afraid of anything any more. This house is like a palace and you're all like people from a story. Peter and I thought Cobweb was a woman at first. Will they incept my brother, do you think?" She gave me a dazzling smile.

  "I don't know." I was not sure what she meant. "You don't seem to mind being here; do you?"

  "No, I don't mind being here. Isn't it strange? Our tormentors are now our saviours. We were foolish to get caught, though. The winter made us foolish."

  "Where were you going?"

  She didn't answer for a moment. "Oh, south," she said finally. "Are there humans in the south?"

  "Not many." She had finished the vegetables and carried them over to the sink. It looked so natural, the sunlight coming in through the window onto her face, the brightness splashing from the taps over her hands, as if she had always lived here in this man's house that Wraeththu had taken for themselves. Her face was shiny and she pushed back her hair. "You don't seem much like your father," she said. (They must have been asking who I was, then.)

  "They say I resemble my hostling more," I replied, missing her point.

  "Hostling," she said and laughed. "I can't remember my mother. It must be really odd

  having two fathers!"

  "I don't. I have a father and a hostling."

  "Oh, I know. It's just that Wraeththu look more like males to us. Strange males, like angels and elves and demons all mixed up together. Some of them are angels, some of them are demons. In the north, there are more demons than angels, that's for sure!" She carried the cleaned vegetables back to the stove and began dropping them into a saucepan.

  "This was once a man's house," I said.
<
br />   "This was once a man's world," she replied. I could imagine Cobweb saying that.

  "I don't think you're that different from us," I said.

  "Perhaps not, but you're supposed to be. Our father (his name was Steven), he said that Wraeththu came into the world because men and women had forgotten how to open their eyes properly. I was younger when he said that and I didn't understand. He said it in church and everyone was angry with him and after that, the Wraeththu came, and they took away our homes. They only killed the ones that tried to fight them; they were not one of the very bad tribes. My father spoke to the Wraeththu, he wanted answers, and sometimes people would throw stones at us because of it. But it wasn't too bad until the Varrs came on their black horses and the Wraeththu began to fight. Things happened ... we knew we had to leave."

  "Wraeththu fighting each other?" I asked in a small voice.

  She looked at me strangely. "Well, yes. Varrs kill nearly everything, don't they?"

  "Not here."

  "Well, you're all Varrs here, aren't you? And I suppose you're a sort of prince and you haven't killed anybody at all yet, have you?"

  "Cobweb said..." I began and then couldn't continue. I had been about to say that Cobweb said that to kill was an extremely bad magic and one for which I would have to pay dearly if I ever did it. Just to wish someone dead was bad. But I couldn't say it because Bryony had seen Wraeththu kill Wraeththu and Wraeththu kill men and saying it was pointless. Bryony had seen all this, yet she could still sing and be happy. She had no proper home and had lost most of her family, yet still she smiled. I thought she must be very strong.

  "Swift," she said. "Can we be friends?"

  I looked up startled. "Don't you know your position?" I asked sharply, not really offended but just surprised.

  She nodded. "Yes, I know my position, but I also know that I owe you my life. That's why I know I can suggest it."

  "You do recognize me!"

  She smiled. "How could I fail to do that? When I first saw you, I saw a girl and a boy superimposed over each other with the most wonderful eyes I had ever seen. I felt your shame. When you asked my name, I knew. I only had to wait and then Yarrow came. I want to thank you. We never thought we'd find someone like you this far north."

  I was too embarrassed to speak.

  "Friends?" she said.

  I nodded. "Bryony, what is the beast?"

  Her face clouded. "What do you mean?"

  "You know, your brother said it, when I first saw you. He said, 'The beast will come.' What did he mean?"

  She looked at me hard and I could see she didn't want to answer. "It is just evil," she said.

  But it was more than that and I didn't learn its form for a long time.

  One day, hara came to the house with Ithiel and one of them was Leef. It was early summer and the weather was already very warm. I didn't know where they had been, or what they were doing at Forever, but they were very dusty. Leef had stripped to the waist and was washing himself at the pump in the stableyard. Gahrazel and I had just finished lessons; we were going into the house for tea with Swithe wandering behind. I stopped and looked at Leef, intrigued by his lean, tanned body. He sensed he was being watched and looked up. "Oh, it's you!" he said. "Been wandering among the common people again recently, have you?"

  I looked around nervously but the others had gone inside and no-one was listening. I couldn't think of anything to say to him and yet I wanted to; it was very strange.

  "Have you still got those humans here?" he asked, and I nodded.

  "Yes, I can't understand it, they seem quite happy."

  Leef laughed in a not altogether pleasant way. "Wait until you see the world outside, son of Terzian. Maybe then you'll understand only too well!"

  I wished it was not always so obvious that I knew so little about the world. If I felt strong, it always happened that I was made to look foolish and it kept me in a childlike state. I wanted experience. I wanted to stand up and say to someone, "Oh, one day you will understand," complete and smug with my own special knowledge. I was the only person I knew that never did that. Leef put his shirt back on, but left it open. Now, most of Ithiel's guard affected the fashion of wearing their hair long at the back while still kept short over the crown. Leef tore the band from his hair with a grimace and scratched it loose. Was it a sign of growing up, I wondered, that he fascinated me? Yet if I dared to nurture any fantasies about him, I was too young to realize them, and by the time I was old enough, perhaps he wouldn't be around any more or would still see me as a spindly harling. Uncomfortable thoughts like that seemed to be springing into my head with uncontrollable regularity nowadays. Leef was no longer paying me any attention. I said, "One of the humans told me that up north Wraeththu are fighting Wraeththu. Is that true?"

  "Why don't you ask your father?" he replied, and stung by a shame so deep I could not understand it, I turned away and ran back to the house.

  That evening, Cal did not come to eat with us. After the meal, I went to his room and found him lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Don't you want anything to eat?" He turned his head in his lazy, Cal way and looked at me with his lazy, Cal eyes.

  "Maybe I don't feel too well," he admitted. I sat next to him on the bed and put my hand on his face. He flinched so slightly, I barely noticed it.

  "Do you hurt?"

  "My head's black inside," he said.

  "I could read to you," I offered cautiously.

  He sighed. "No . . ."

  I didn't want to leave him. To me he was like an injured wild animal that had been brought into the house. I couldn't understand him, it seemed unlikely we could heal him properly, he didn't really belong here, yet still I did not want to open the door and let him out. Half of me thought, Only what's outside can heal him. I was not exactly right about that.

  Inspired by a memory of infant sickness, I said, "Turn over."

  "Why?"

  "You'll see. Something Cobweb used to do when I felt ill."

  Sighing, reluctantly, he turned onto his stomach and I lifted his shirt and pushed it up above his shoulders.

  He laughed and said, "Swift?"

  "Hush, now listen. I will draw you a story." His skin was hot beneath my fingers as I began a tale of creatures living in the dark and eating only sticks and mud.

  "Do they hate the light?" Cal asked sleepily.

  "But of course!" I answered. "Here is the big stone they use to block the entrance to their tunnel."

  "It is my story you're telling then!"

  "No, they are ugly creatures. They have little sense of humor and they don't know how to write."

  "How do you judge ugliness?" Cal asked suddenly, half turning over and looking at me.

  I shrugged. "I don't know. When you can't bear to look at something, I suppose, or worse ..."

  Cal shook his head. "No! You can't see true ugliness," he murmured and his eyes looked past me. "It is on the inside. It is always hidden . . ." Our eyes locked. "Always!"

  "Cal..." I said softly and he replied, "No, no," just as softly. What was he denying? He looked dazed, almost delirious, turning his head this way and that on the pillow.

  "What can I do?"

  "I'm being attacked."

  "But there's no-one here!"

  "There's no-one here. Look! Look!"

  It was on my mind to fetch Swithe or even Gahrazel. I was afraid.

  "What is it, Cal? What is it?" I shook him, and his hand crept beneath his pillow.

  "I'm being attacked," he said and pulled something out to show me. A card. On the card someone lies prone in the mud pierced by ten swords. A divining card and one of evil omen. Only one person would put that there. I took it from him and tore it to pieces. He watched impassively. We said nothing. His face twitched and he pressed himself into the pillows. His voice was muffled. "Draw me another story until I fall asleep," he said.

  The next day, as it was the end of the week, we had no lessons, and Gahrazel
and I went out into the garden to talk. I had eventually come to forgive him for the incident in Galhea although I still harbored a prudish

  disapproval of his behavior. We never talked about it. It was a strange day, hot and close. The kind of day that makes you nervous and I could taste it clearly. It tasted salty and sour. "There will be a storm later," I said.

  Gahrazel rolled onto his back on the grass, looking lovely and wild and secretive. Sometimes I could not control my jealousy of him, although our relationship did not appear to have changed that much since his Feybraiha. "I want to stretch and stretch and stretch!" Gahrazel cried.

  "You!" I snorted. "All the secrets of the world are yours!"