The mirror chronicles th.., p.37
The Mirror Chronicles: The Last Night, page 37
It was only the first glimpse of a red standard flying high on one of the hills – Thoth’s visage clearly visible between its folds – that finally shocked them into action. Cries of dismay echoed round the lake and, moments later, one of the commanders raised his battle horn and blew a sharp call to arms.
At once the meagre army began to gather. Everyone still able to fight bid tearful farewells to their loved ones and assembled as quickly as they could on the two long sides of the lake, seeking out their regimental standards, most of which were replacements scrawled hurriedly on scraps of fabric. Many of the exhausted warriors limped, others wore bandages and splints, but none faltered. They knew they faced impossible odds, and were without a general to lead them, but they also knew the stakes. If they could not slow this final assault, the valley would fall long before the day was done. Women, children, the old and the sick, all would be at the mercy of Thoth’s beasts and mercenaries. Whatever awaited them in the forest was a small price to pay.
And so, as the horn sounded the advance, this ragtag army of the weary and the wounded marched without hesitation between the trees and disappeared.
Those left behind watched wordlessly, turning their eyes between the forest and the hilltops. Their enemy could now be seen among the splintered stumps and carcasses of the trees: in the front, the Ghor, wielding great axes with broad blades, in the rear, Ghorhund, Ragers and Hamajaks, heaving away the felled trees with yokes and chains, their bodies steaming in the cold air. Slowly, relentlessly, the front lines were edging ever forward, beginning their descent into the valley.
Filimaya stood where she had watched the sunset the night before, looking at the hundreds of frightened, anguished faces about her. Coming swiftly to a decision, she walked to the shore and turned back to face them.
“Sisters and brothers!” She made sure that everyone was listening before continuing. “Now, more than ever, we must stay strong and together. Our brave warriors are occupied enough without wondering where in the valley we may be, so we must take what provisions we can from our homes and the stores in Sylva, and retreat to the Hollow.”
There was a murmur from the gathering, but no one moved, seemingly reluctant to leave the place where they had bidden their loved ones goodbye. “It is the safest place for us,” continued Filimaya, “and it is quite large enough for both the wounded and the well. The valley has made sure of that.”
She waited for a moment and, when there was no response, she called: “Come now! Strong and together! Everyone but those on watch at the Retreat follow me!”
She set out up the stony shore towards Sylva. As she passed, she grasped the hand of one old woman who had been gazing absently at the hills and drew her gently but firmly up the slope. A few steps on she took the hand of a teenage girl with blotchy, tear-lined cheeks and led her on. Together the three of them walked forward and only when they were deep in the forest did Filimaya turn to look back. To her relief, the crowds that had been gathered on the shore were following, moving solemnly through the trees.
She let out a sigh. “Well, that’s something,” she said. She gave her companions a rather forced smile, then led them on, into the avenues of Sylva.
Faysa had been awake for almost the entire night. On the few occasions she had begun to fall asleep she had startled herself awake, her mind full of images of her father’s limp body on the hillside, or Espasian running headlong into the enemy. Each time she had sat up sharply and turned to her father and to Espasian, checking their breathing, their temperature, their wounds, giving them more Salve, adjusting their blankets. But each time she found them no better than they had been a few hours before, perhaps worse. At one point in the night Espasian’s breathing had become so laboured that she had called a nurse to check on him, and after he had been given new dressings and an extra blanket, she had lain, staring at him, for at least an hour as though her watchfulness alone might keep him alive.
By dawn, she had given up on sleep altogether. She took her father’s hand and held it to her chest, hoping that perhaps her touch or the rhythm of her own breathing might help to revive him. But after another hour there was still no change. Like Espasian, his breathing was shallow, his face slack and pasty, his skin cold to the touch. She could barely believe that the vision before her was her own father: the man who would never sit still, or complain of an illness, or otherwise miss a moment of the life he so loved at his daughter’s side.
Faysa could not bear to look any longer at his sallow face, and so instead she turned her eyes to the many bracelets round his wrist – the ones he had collected on his never-ending travels across the Four Lands. Each time he returned he brought with him not only a fantastic tale of his travels, but also a bracelet acquired from some curious place along the way. Such a custom had this become that now his colourful, ornate collection stretched almost to his elbow. He called them his Clinchers, since he only allowed himself to buy one when he had clinched whatever deal he had set out to strike. As Faysa had become old enough to join him on his business travels, they had developed a new custom of finding a matching bracelet for her. (“Like links of a chain, Fay,” he used to tell her, holding up her Clincher and his, “clinching us together!”) In this way, over the following years she built a collection of more than a dozen bands of her own.
She laid her father’s hand gently at her side, and sat up in bed, pulling her bunch of bracelets over her hand. Then she began arranging them on the bedclothes: the bright blue bracelet they had purchased in Vhoskili, the city of waterfalls; the pewter one they had bartered so hard for in Hamkaris, the adopted home of the Hamajaks; the amethyst band her father had bought her in Sinci as a reward for braving Shame Pass, the perilous pathway through the Grevik Mountains; the spiralling copper snake he had acquired for her with the last silver coin left to her by his mother. For each she found the matching bracelet on her father’s wrist, remembering the moment they had found them together, and the place, and the journey that had taken them there. And, as she laid out bracelet after bracelet, tears rolled down Faysa’s cheeks. She worked through them until she had laid out every one and remembered every last detail of their story.
As she looked at the entire collection, she became aware that she was having to squint to make out the detail of them and, when she looked up, she saw that the strange glow-worm light that dangled a little way above her head had grown dim. When she glanced about the Hollow, she saw to her alarm that all of the lights had so dimmed, and now she could barely see more than ten beds away. Earlier she had been able to make out the other side of the Hollow quite clearly; now, it was shrouded in an ominous gloom.
Even by this dwindling light, she noticed something else that set her nerves on edge. There were shadows drifting silently down almost every aisle Faysa could see, streaming in through the entrance and passing quickly into the furthest recesses of the Hollow. She saw women and children, the elderly and the sick, all of them carrying bundles of food and clothing. She could make out few of the faces, but those she could looked pale and dazed, as though lost in some terrible dream.
And then she spotted Filimaya walking down the steps into the chamber with the last straggling few. She too was weighed down with packs of food and bedding so that she stooped, walking without her usual grace and ease. But it was not this that frightened Faysa. What struck her to the core were the tears in Filimaya’s eyes.
Unconsciously she slipped her hand into her father’s and held it tightly.
For some moments she watched Filimaya guiding the last of the newcomers down the central aisle until their shadows faded into the half-light. Then Faysa remembered something else of her trip to Sinci with her father all those years before. As they had made their way between the drab grey bluffs and gaping chasms of Shame Pass, and the misery of that place had started to take its toll, he had taught her a song to keep up her spirits. “An old Suhl battle song,” he had called it. “Perhaps the only one there ever was.”
Faysa pulled her father’s hand to her chest and reached out for Espasian’s. Then, very softly, she began to sing:
“With the wind, we breathe; with the earth, we sleep,
With the dawn, we sing; with the stag, we leap.
We are the roots of the ancient trees,
We are the hills, we are the seas!
Suhl! we cry. Suhl! Suhl!
“With the hare, we run; with the gull, we cry,
With the wolf, we hunt; with the hawk, we fly …”
“For most, the term ‘Motherland’ conjures a place of belonging, sanctuary and unconditional welcome. For the Suhl, it evokes only revulsion and fear.”
THE WINDS WERE HOT and humid, and Sylas’s and Naeo’s clothes clung uncomfortably to their skin, sweat pooling between their palms. Still they held on tight, anxious not to lose their connection even for a moment.
The Windrush was flying now, skipping over the humming, pungent waters of the delta, heaving from side to side as she veered round bends and darted between vessels. Some of these – the larger ones with square sails – were easy enough to spot in time, but the smaller ones made with woven reeds kept everyone on edge, and more than once Simia had to scream a last-minute warning to Sylas and Naeo to avert calamity. She too was dripping with sweat as she pointed left and right, pausing only to consult the map, or to confer briefly with Triste at her shoulder.
Sylas allowed himself a smile at the thought that Simsi had managed to take command of the Windrush. Of course she had.
And it was just as well. The delta was a labyrinth of perilous twists and dead ends, riddled with vessels of all shapes and sizes. But Simia and Triste were a formidable partnership. She would read the map and the river while the Scryer saw what she could not: the telltale auras, fogs and trails of people, which for him blazed bright long before anything could be seen by eye.
Already Sylas had lost count of the number of villages and towns they had passed, all of them sweeping by before he even had a chance to turn his head. Normally the first they knew of them were clusters of five or six humble huts sometimes surrounded by a wall. The nearer the centre of the town, the more substantial became the dwellings, until they were villas, painted white, decorated with hieroglyphs or grand murals depicting people and beasts in battle, or sometimes the staring visage of Thoth.
Always, in the middle of every settlement, there was a plaza – sometimes dirt, sometimes tiled, invariably centred round a gigantic flagpole like those Sylas had seen in the slums of Gheroth. And, as in Gheroth, each one was topped by Thoth’s standard, his hollow eyes gazing over his homeland, as though reminding everyone that he was everywhere and that he saw all.
The other common feature of these plazas was the perimeter of statues, sometimes carved of wood, sometimes of stone, but always half human, half beast. Sylas heard the crew whispering strange names like Anubis, Wepwawet, Hathor and Ra, the names of the gods the statues represented.
As the Windrush darted close to one such gallery of idols, he realised with a chill that many of them looked like Thoth’s own creations. There was a jackal-headed beast just like the Ghor or Ghorhund, and a baboon-headed creature that could have been a Hamajak. But the largest of all was a female goddess with the head of a cat, which looked exactly as Ash and Naeo had described Scarpia, in her new transfigured form.
“Bastet,” said a senior member of the crew. “The goddess of war.”
So that was how Thoth had chosen Scarpia’s new appearance, thought Sylas.
The Windrush sped on, and the further she travelled into the delta, the larger and grander became the towns. The buildings at their centre rose to several storeys, topped with elegant, clay-tiled roofs. Plazas the width of several streets sprawled next to the river, and now the statues were two or three times the height of a person. The Imperial flags were no longer mounted on flagpoles, but streamed out from gigantic tapering pillars of stone topped by a pyramid.
The further they travelled into the delta, the more its sights and sounds had started to bring back the many things Naeo had learned about the Motherland as a young child. She remembered that the boats they had passed were made of acacia and cedar, and that the huts were built of reeds and mud, baked into bricks by the sun. She recalled that the bigger houses were whitewashed to reflect the heat and that their entrance halls served as a shrine to Thoth, or the lion dwarf god, Bes.
They passed through one town so large that it could have been a city, and it was here that they saw the first fortress. It had high stone walls and timber towers that looked out across the town, and what appeared to be military vessels moored at its front, two of them manoeuvring with the disciplined stroke of dozens of oars. Even here, their luck seemed to hold. The Windrush threaded her way safely between them and passed without cries of alarm, or the garrison beating to arms. It was only as they sped off into the distance that Naeo thought she heard the piercing note of a horn hanging in the air. Triste too briefly peered back from the ship, his brow furrowed with concentration. But whatever the noise had been it quickly faded, and both of them were soon consumed by the river once again.
As they swept through a vivid green landscape of cultivated fields, Simia pulled Triste over to show him something on the parchment. They both hunched over it for a moment, speaking quietly to one another, then Simia turned back towards Sylas and Naeo.
“We’re nearly there!” she called, breaking into a grin. “Two more turns and we’ll be on the Nile!”
“We all yearn for the end of this long journey, but do any of us know what the end might look like? And more importantly, do we know how it might feel?”
“IT’S LIKE THE END of the world,” breathed Dresch.
“It is the end of the world,” said Lucien.
Between wafts of thick, acrid smoke, they glimpsed hell itself. Distant palls flashed white, dappling the dark. Flares blazed, fizzing with a sulphurous glare. Searchlights sent up fingers of fire, clawing at the night. Above, a swarm of insects swelled, stretched and spilled, filling what was left of the sky. Below, the broken earth glistened with the Black, reflecting the chaos of the heavens.
Everything shook and growled and huffed like some beast of the underworld raging against its bonds.
On impulse Dresch reached out for Lucien’s hand and found that he too was trembling. She looked up into his face, now white and slick with sweat, and she smiled.
“We’re not going to get through this, are we?” she said.
Lucien shook his head.
She squeezed his hand. “Then, James, I’m glad I’m with you.”
“Me too, Martha,” he said.
They held on for a moment, then reluctantly drew their hands apart, pulling out their Merisi gloves and slipping them on.
Dresch found the touch of the silver-gold embroidery peculiarly comforting: cool and solid like metal, but also oddly supple like common thread. At the end, she thought, as her world of reason and science was undone, she had only this. It made no more sense to her than the Black, the insects or the beasts, but at least this ornament of Quintessence was beautiful and good. And for once she did not find its mysteries perplexing or frustrating; they folded about her like the glove itself, warm and close, and made her feel that she could do what needed to be done.
Together they began to walk towards the maelstrom of light and smoke, picking their way round buckled earth and brimming craters. They saw now how the Black retreated from them as it had in the laboratory, its dark surface rolling away in waves, slapping lazily against the sides.
The noise of battle seemed to intensify with every step, becoming an ear-splitting, skull-thrumming clamour, and their entire bodies shook with the convulsions of the earth. Just beyond the halo of the flares, they saw the place where once had been the serene stones of Stonehenge, now a pandemonium of fire.
Dresch felt Lucien take her hand once again, and then he was drawing her close. He held her tight to his chest, and for the briefest time she lost herself, as though there she was safe. Lucien too gave in to her, and closed his eyes, and breathed slow and easy.
After a moment he started to pull away, but she still held him tightly. She looked up at him, her face lit by a blinking white light, her hair a fiery blaze. She was so beautiful to him then. So safe and gentle – all the things that this place was not. Moments passed, he could not tell how long, and then he leaned down and tentatively they kissed. For an exquisite, precious second everything else fell away.
And then darkness became light.
At first Lucien thought it was a trick of the mind, an explosion of some inner fire, but then he felt Dresch stiffen. He realised that the blaze was burning through his eyelids and, when he tried to look, the brightness seared his eyes. He raised his hands against it, and out in the blackness he saw a perfect disc of electric light: a searchlight somewhere across the field of battle, bathing them in its glare.
“Come on!” gasped Dresch, slipping her hand into his.
They walked on together, picking their way over the broken ground, until another searchlight swept down and flooded them with a new blaze of light.
“Let them see the glove!” exclaimed Lucien, suddenly understanding. “They need to know why we’re here.” Then he added: “But don’t let go.”
“I won’t,” said Dresch.
They continued on into the searchlights and the din, with their Merisi gloves held high and their free hands entwined. A third searchlight fell upon them, and then a fourth, so that they could barely see anything but the light, and yet they could tell that something beyond the glare had changed. The last crump of an explosion had echoed into silence, and they could no longer hear the whine of helicopters. Now, the only sound was the low drone of the insects high above.
