The Way to Babylon

by Paul Kearney

  ‘But the rub,’ Murtach said, ‘is that you, my fur-faced friend, are needed in the hall. Matters of import call, don’t you know.’

  Ratagan groaned. ‘Cannot they leave a cripple alone for a while?’

  ‘There’s beer,’ Murtach remarked.

  Ratagan brightened. ‘Duty is a burdensome thing, but it cannot be shirked... Come on, it’ll get warm.’ And the pair trooped outside, Murtach sparing a wink for Madra as he left. Fife and Drum cast her a regretful glance and then followed. The room seemed very quiet when they had gone, and Isay had taken up his role outside as sentry once more.

  Beyond the window, the hammering smith had stopped, and all they could hear was the faint, far-off buzzing of humanity that might have come from the market place. Madra rose and picked up Riven’s rucksack.

  ‘What are you going to do with it?’ he asked her, reluctant to see it taken away. It was all he had left that bound him to his own world.

  ‘Sort through it and pack it neatly,’ she said. ‘You won’t be needing these clothes for a while at least, and there are a few tears I might mend.’ She pulled out his trousers and fingered a rent in them. It was an old one, and had been stitched before; once, clumsily, by himself, and then by Jenny. But her neat stitches had come undone. He felt a pang at the thought of Madra unpicking what was left of them.

  ‘What can I do?’ he asked her, and was angered by the plaintive note in his voice.

  A faint smile hovered on her lips. Was she seventeen, eighteen? There was something about her that seemed ageless. ‘I could mend them here, if you wish,’ she said, and suddenly she looked like a hopeful child.

  ‘All right,’ he said roughly, and felt an odd relief which disturbed him.

  The day wore round. He occupied himself with cleaning his boots whilst Madra bent over her needlework at his side. As the afternoon waned, she laid a fire, and the world outside the window became blue with dusk even as the flames cast a saffron glow about the room. The needle winked like a glede in the firelight, weaving in and out of his clothes in the grip of her deft fingers.

  Only the sound of the sea missing.

  He could imagine it now, the long breakers shooshing on the shingle before the bothy, the smell of peat smoke in the air, the twilight looming up out of the glen and reaching the first stars.

  His eyes closed.

  HE WAS WITH Jenny again, and they were riding together through a wide, unspoilt land of valleys and stone-strewn hills, with the sky a vast blue bowl above them and the mountains mere guesses of blue on the far horizon. They rode two fine horses with deep saddles and mild eyes, and the long grass of the open country swished at their stirrups as they travelled.

  But she was dressed strangely, in garb he had never before seen her wear: a black riding habit of supple suede and a dun woollen skirt with a myriad of pleats that fell in folds around her thighs. There were high riding boots in her stirrups, and the hands that held the reins were encased in gloves of dark leather.

  And her face... It was the Jenny he knew, but the wild wind-skein of her hair had been plaited and tied in rings around the back of her head. He ached to see it swing loose in the breeze.

  And there was something in the eyes; in the bearing, perhaps. As if some of her wild-deer grace had been lost and replaced by artifice.

  The wide, empty land unfolded around them as they rode steadily onwards, and he almost thought he could see the mountains become clearer as they went. There were snow fields, tiny with distance, on their flanks and the black of wind-scoured rock. They were riding north. North to the Greshorns.

  ‘A thousand miles to the Greshorns,’ Jenny said beside him, and he was somehow unsurprised to hear an accent in her voice that was not of Skye. ‘Some say that the mountains to the north mark the end of the world, that after them there is nothing but the great gulf where the stars wheel. No one has ever gone beyond them, except perhaps the Dwarves, and they tell us no tales of their journeying, their earth-delving. So maybe the Greshorns are indeed the world’s end.’ And she looked at him, her eyes dark as well-water in a pale face. They were not his wife’s eyes.

  ‘You do not belong here,’ she said flatly.

  ‘You’re my wife,’ he croaked, the words like dust in his mouth.

  ‘I am not,’ she said, and terror crawled its way up his backbone.

  His horse stopped.

  She smiled at him, nothing of the woman he had known in the smile.

  ‘What are you?’ he whispered.

  ‘I am you,’ she replied calmly, and then her laughter hurt his ears, grating on the threads of his nerves. It was wild, full of grief, and it ended in a sound that was neither sob nor snarl. ‘I am a bad dream you once sweated through. I am a darkened room you were afraid to enter. I am a dead hearth high with ash. I am the stone of a mountain. I am the story you cannot tell. And yet you must. Your life is the history of this world, your stories its life’s blood. The magic that sustains it runs in your veins. Find it.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing is easy.’ She grinned.

  Fury flared up in him like a sudden coal. ‘Leave me the hell alone, you bitch!’

  She shrugged. ‘Not possible. You need me, Michael.’

  ‘Why?’

  She leaned forward in the saddle. ‘I am the life of your stories. Without me, your part of the tale is at an end, and there can be no new beginning.’

  ‘The tale died with you,’ Riven grated. ‘There are no more stories.’

  ‘There is always a story. Maybe the people within it are different—maybe it is even someone else’s to tell. But it continues. Your part in it must continue also. It is not finished with you yet.’

  ‘I’m finished with it.’

  She shook her head sadly, and for a second that took the breath out of his mouth she was his wife entirely.

  ‘Michael, the choice is not yours—or mine. We merely do what is given to us to do. You have this thing to put right.’

  Tears choked him, clenching his face into a grimace of pain. ‘Jenny—’

  ‘She’s gone. She is here no longer. There is only what your mind took and made out of her, and what this land made out of her.’ And yet her face was before him, pale as death.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ he ground out, bowed over the pommel as though in bitter pain. He could not look at her.

  ‘Do not forget, Michael,’ she said, her voice becoming distant.

  He hugged his chest as though it were bursting and would not look up.

  BUT OPENED HIS eyes to muffled darkness, and felt warmth in his clawed embrace, someone yielding to his grasp. A hand caressed the hair on his head and the sob in his throat caught and strangled itself.

  ‘Hush now,’ a voice was saying, a low voice, and he went limp. ‘You’ve been dreaming, crying in your sleep,’ the voice said, and he thought for a second that a cheek rested on his head, light as thistledown.

  Is this regular nursing procedure, he wondered? But no—that was another time, another world away. He gazed up into Madra’s eyes, grave under the heavy brows.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, cursing himself for the crack in his voice. She shook her head slightly and with a forefinger wiped the tears from his cheekbones. He flushed, but did not move, curiously content to remain in her arms.

  A dream. Nothing more. But what is a dream in this land, and what is not? What is real, here?

  Ah, Jenny.

  And once more he buried his face in the breast of the young girl, who held him without asking questions.

  THE NEXT MORNING found Riven on the ramparts of the Rorim with Isay and Madra for company. There was a keen wind blowing, like a remnant of the weird winter that had preceded Riven’s entry into Minginish, but the sky was as clear as ever, the slopes of the nearby hills ablaze with buttercups.

  Once again, Riven smoothed down the cloak which hung round his shoulders. He had not quite accustomed himself to its idiosyncrasies and it constantly fell off his shou
lder to baffle his free arm. The other was in a sling. Madra hitched it up for him again without a word.

  He was wearing a thigh-length tunic of leather, and breeches of close-knit dark blue wool, reinforced on the inside of the legs with leather patches. Beneath the tunic was a linen shirt, and on his feet were his hiking boots. There was a belt around his waist supporting a scabbarded sword with a two-foot blade. The belt was buckled around a sash of sky blue. Over all hung the cloak, blue as a twilit evening, pinned at one shoulder with a heavy bronze brooch that Madra had set in place for him. Strangely, instead of feeling inconspicuous at being dressed like the people around him, he felt self-conscious and ill at ease. And there was a bad-tasting dream running at the back of his mind.

  ‘The cavalcade approaches,’ Isay said beside him, with a trace of irony. Riven peered out towards the north gate, and thought he could indeed make out a dark line of horse and foot coming nearer. There were banners waving above their heads, something he had not yet seen in Minginish. The Myrcans, it seemed, disapproved of such fripperies.

  Looking down, he could see an honour guard of fully armoured Hearthwares lined out from the Rorim gate like a row of steel statues. The Warbutt waited there, his silver hair flickering in the wind. With him were Bicker and Guillamon, Murtach, Udairn and Ratagan. The day was not particularly warm, and Riven wondered why Bicker had insisted he be present at the entry of Marsco and another two lords, Lionan and Mullach, into the Rorim, Two others, Malig and Keppoch, had been admitted earlier in the week with, so he had been told, none of this ceremony.

  The cavalcade, as Isay had labelled it, came nearer, and Riven felt both his companions stiffen beside him.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked impatiently, but they did not answer him. Fuming, he focused his attention on the long line of horsemen and infantry now closing on the ramparts. There were five banners billowing in the air. Three were edged with the sky blue of the sash that encircled his own waist, whilst one had a scarlet border and the last was trimmed with green. Riven frowned, wondering if this was important.

  ‘The three blue-edged banners are those of our own lords,’ Madra said. ‘But the scarlet one—that is the flag of Bragad, and the green is the badge of Mugeary, the two lords of the Rorim to the north and north-east of Ralarth.’ Mugeary—he was the man who had lost his son. And Bragad was the would-be general of the Dales.

  ‘Strange travelling companions,’ Isay said sombrely, and Riven thought his grip on the metal-bound staff tightened.

  The column halted before the gates, and the riders dismounted between two files of Ralarth Hearthwares. Armour flashed in the sun, the light chinking off chain mail and horse harness, helm and sword hilt. The visitors looked for all the world as if they were riding to war.

  ‘It is an embassy,’ Madra said. ‘Bragad is here as his own herald. I see his wife, too. And Mugeary has sent his nephew, Daman.’ She pointed. ‘And, look, there is Marsco, on the big grey gelding.’

  Riven saw a tall, lean man with a brown face who had dismounted to lay his hands in those of the Warbutt. Snatches of talk floated upwards, but the wind took them away before he could make sense out of them. He felt irrelevant and irritable, and his cracked bones were complaining to him. He paid little attention to the other newcomers below.

  Grooms ran from the Rorim to take the company’s horses, whilst a pair of Hearthwares received their weapons at the barbican. Riven turned and stared into the fortress as the procession moved into the courtyard beyond, hoofs clattering off cobbles. The banners were dipped as they entered the shadowy gateway, then furled, and the dignitaries moved off towards the great double doors of the Manse, whilst the men-at-arms and Hearthwares trooped off to their barracks.

  Beside them on the ramparts, a Hearthware sentry spat casually over the wall and raised his eyebrows at Isay.

  ‘There’ll be much talking tomorrow, and much beer tonight, if I’m not mistaken. The captains will have a hatful of things to mull over.’

  The Myrcan nodded. ‘Sometimes it is good to be merely a soldier,’ he said.

  IN THE EARLY evening, with the sun beginning its slow slide beyond the western hills, Bicker and Ratagan came to Riven’s room.

  ‘Greetings,’ the dark man said, his mouth curving into one of his quick smiles. ‘I am afraid it has been a while since I have said hello, Michael Riven, and I apologise for my neglect, but—’

  ‘He’s been running round like a cat with a bee up its arse,’ Ratagan finished, and his sobriety fell from him.

  ‘Something like that,’ Bicker said ruefully. ‘It has been a busy time.’

  ‘Especially today,’ Riven pointed out.

  ‘Aye. You will have seen the arrival of our... guests. It is all over the Rorim, of course, and there will be a banquet tonight after the official reception.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Riven asked. ‘I’ve a feeling you haven’t been telling me everything.’

  ‘He hasn’t been telling anybody everything,’ Ratagan snorted.

  Bicker looked pained. ‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘It is not by chance that Marsco and his fellow lords arrived today in the company of Bragad, and Mugeary’s herald. They have been treating with each other in the past few weeks, and come now as virtual allies to try and convince the Warbutt of their cause.’

  Riven whistled softly.

  ‘The best part is still to come,’ Ratagan told him.

  Bicker shrugged. ‘Bragad and Mugeary have combined. Their two Rorims operate as one. Bragad has arrived in person for a parley, whilst Mugeary has sent Daman, his nephew. I have a feeling that Bragad is the senior partner in this combine.’

  ‘The death of Mugeary’s son brought that on,’ Ratagan interrupted. ‘He is an old man, tired of ruling. I believe he cares little now for power or politics...’

  ‘A timely disaster, his son’s demise,’ Bicker speculated, and there was a hard set to his mouth.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ said Riven.

  ‘It is not,’ the dark man agreed. ‘Nothing like this happens in your stories. We have been meaning to ask you whether Bragad figured in the plans of your tales, or even in your imagination.’

  ‘No,’ Riven said. ‘In my books, the Dales were all independent. There was no... overlord. They were too busy fighting the outside enemies.’

  ‘That is Bragad’s idea—a combine to fight off the monsters that beset us, and cooperation in the matters of food distribution with the ruin of the harvest.’

  ‘Is that such a bad thing?’ Riven asked.

  ‘You do not know Bragad,’ Bicker said. ‘He cares little for the welfare of his vassals, so long as they are in a condition to serve his own ends. So to that end he needs more men, more territory. And Ralarth is the greatest of the western Rorim.’

  ‘We’ll know for sure this evening, at any rate,’ said Ratagan. ‘Before the feasting begins, Bragad will put a formal proposal to the Warbutt in the presence of the whole Rorim.’

  ‘And what will the Warbutt say?’

  Ratagan grinned, but did not reply.

  THE GREAT HALL was crowded with people. A veritable sea of faces ran down its sides, with a narrow clear space left in the middle where heavy boards had been placed over the fire pits. It was like a gauntlet to be run, with all the folk of the Dale sitting in judgement, punctuated by the stern, upright figures of Hearthwares in full armour. They stood like graven statues of steel, their protecting plates edged with blue and the inevitable sashes belted around breastplated torsos. Riven was impressed despite himself, and realised why so few of them were needed to protect the Dale. An unarmed man would have little chance of harming them—unless he were a Myrcan. Almost unarmoured by comparison, the Myrcans somehow contrived to appear more fearsome still.

  Riven took his place beside Ratagan in the upper end of the crowded hall, and met Bicker’s welcoming smile from where the dark man sat on one of the high seats. The Warbutt occupied the other; his robe was the mirror of Ralarth Rorim’s pennant in colour, and
was trimmed with gold. The old man’s head was bare, but there was a golden torc about his neck and he held in his blue-veined hands a rod of white, silver-trimmed wood. On the Ralarth side of the hall, Riven could just make out Udairn standing with the dark, diminutive form of Ethyrra, Ratagan’s mother, beside him. And Dunan the Hearthware lieutenant was there also, his sister Mira at his side, with her eyes fixed on Bicker. Nearby was Gwion, looking harassed and no doubt wishing he were somewhere else, overseeing the preparations for the feast that was to follow; but Ygelda towered impassive and serene beside him, her copper hair ensnaring the light of the torches.

  Someone squeezed his hand, and he knew it was Madra. She did that, to gain his attention. She was on his other side.

  ‘You look like a Ralarth lord,’ she whispered.

  He shrugged, smiling back absently. Perhaps he did, but he did not feel comfortable with the illusion, for reasons too innumerable and tenuous to voice.

  Riven made a game of trying to recognise Ralarth’s lords from the descriptions his companions had given of them. Marsco was easy to pick out, half a head taller than anyone in the hall save Ratagan, his eyes like icy fires in his weathered face. His cheeks were hollow and ruddy, speaking of much hard exercise in the open air. He was clad in a doublet of black, close-fitting moleskin so smooth it looked like velvet. His sword hung at his side, slim-bladed and basket-hilted, unlike the heavy long swords Riven had seen most other warriors in Minginish carry. A circlet of silver glittered at his temples. Riven met his blue eyes and saw them widen slightly, speculating. Then he had to look away, cursing himself.