The Wars of Light and Shadow (9) - INITIATE'S TRIAL Page 2

  The veiled woman wept in sympathy with him. While his music transmitted the relentless sting of his cringing nerves, she did not spurn him with scorn. As if he was not wretched, or defiled beyond bearing, she answered with consolation.

  ‘You are not all they say. Truth has many facets, and your eyes have borne witness to more depths than most. If anyone claims that you sold yourself out, and betrayed every love you once cherished, I say otherwise. Your past never followed the ruinous path, as your captors claim, to your detriment. Oh, you have wept! You have survived horrors. Truly, you have suffered all measure of grief, your inner heart cannot lie to you. But emotions can be manipulated to extract an undue toll of cruelty. Never bow to defeat! Not once have you forsaken the ground you stood with steadfast integrity, and even bled to secure.’

  He let his notes answer, distrustful of words. What facts supported her bed-rock assurance? Against the conditioned responses he knew, her contrary statement meant nothing.

  She did not disagree. Would not belittle the terror that clamoured, racing his breath until the black-out pall of self-hatred threatened to crush him.

  ‘Doubt frames the walls of your prison,’ she said. ‘Some of your uncertainties hide deeper truths. Others mask distortions and outright falsehoods, crafted by design to break down your spirit and finally destroy you. Are you alive enough to fight back?’

  Battle, he knew. His bitter contests with uncounted free wraiths affirmed his hard-won experience. No matter how often he tasted defeat, his core fire would not stay doused. He might not remember his history, or the deeds he had written by choice, under Name. But through his skilled hands upon the lyranthe, his defiant joy shouted, undimmed and unbeaten.

  Behind her grey veil, the old woman laughed. ‘True as the line of your birthright,’ she mused. ‘Never let go! Not until you reclaim the blood-born right to your whole being.’

  She extended her hand and dangled before him a shining white crystal, strung on a silver chain. ‘This quartz holds the spell that imprisons your spirit. Sing for your liberty with passionate grace, and the matrix that binds you must shatter.’

  Urgency thrummed the strings under his hands. His rushed pulse chased the reach of his terror. Yet no hesitation remarked the shift as he changed the intent that founded his next measures. Where, before, his shaped art aligned outward to seek the Name of another, now, he pitched his quest inward to ignite the lamp at the source of himself.

  The first clear notes he struck from the heart collapsed the sensory web of his perception. Falling, he tumbled. His aware grasp on the lyranthe dissolved as his balance upended.

  Then a snap! ripped through his tumbling frame. The old woman vanished, along with the featureless, dreary envelope that sealed his long-term confinement.

  In place of the null grip of emptiness, he stood, ankle deep in muddy loam. Disoriented, utterly, by the nip of brisk wind, he smelled damp leaves, and the tang of hoar-frost on thickets and grasses. The sudden shock of concrete awareness smashed over his uprooted perception and shattered his equilibrium. Dizzied by the abrupt transition, he crashed to his knees. The jar of firm ground jolted his bones and snapped his teeth shut, while panic spurred his raced pulse and tensioned his breathing.

  Who was he? Where was he? No memory of the bodily self he inhabited explained how he came – from where – to awake as though dropped from the void into this sere autumn garden. He stared, benighted, and left at a loss.

  Grey mist dripped off a tangle of grape-vines, laddered up a weathered trellis that leaned on a ruined stone wall. The chill in the air suggested daybreak, thickened by the mouldering fust of turned leaves. Whiskered ice silvered the vegetable plot where he shivered, distressed and disoriented. The last hardy stems and a few runners of gourd still hoarded the green bestowed by the last kiss of summer. A wooden rake lay fallen nearby. Sweat laced his wrists, and mud stained the patched cuffs of his shirt and breeches. As if all along, he had laboured to mulch the tough stubble left after a late-season harvest. He had worked the earth here – who knew for how long – to tidy the rows of a field bedded to lie fallow for winter.

  Which situation made no living sense, disconnected from all that he knew of existence.

  He traced the coarse, callused skin of his palms with a shudder of stark disbelief. These cracked nails and chapped knuckles had not, in this place, ever wrought superlative music on the fret and string of any earthly instrument. Every artful line of his own refined melody deserted his cognizance, lost to him as though hurled to oblivion.

  Nameless, rudderless, homeless, he wept shining tears for he knew not what – perhaps he ached for gratitude, perhaps for grief, perhaps for a talent he may never have owned, except in the fled echo of dreams.

  Or maybe he cried for the merciless hurt inflicted by bewildered confusion.

  The only congruity left was the scars, graven into the chapped grain of his skin. They alone marked the frightful proof of a history that some event, or someone had snatched away, then left him bereft. Beneath a brightening sky, buffeted by a southerly wind that forepromised the misery of cold rain by evening, he shook off his distress and reclaimed his feet. A resiliency he had forgotten he possessed raised his courage to survey the landscape. Ahead, a wrought-iron gateway led through the crumbled wall. The barred portal hung open. Chafed mad by confinement, he kicked clear of the furrow that mired his toes. Whether the way out was a baited trap, he welcomed the reckless risk. Though the impulsive presumption should kill him, he assayed the first bold step towards the overgrown lane, that led towards the unkempt fringe of autumn woodland beyond the gap.

  No one’s hand stopped him. When no outcry arose in alarm, he tried another stride, then another. Then he stumbled headlong into a run, upon legs that felt clumsy and strange, bearing his ungainly weight.

  He never sighted the lady in grey though she observed his terrified departure. Concealed in one of the tangled thickets that bounded the deserted garden, she took extreme care not to draw his attention. Motionless, she watched his panicked spurt down the carriage-way, once in antiquity paved with white gravel to welcome refined guests to an earl’s summer palace. The ancient woman relaxed her clasped hands and sighed in grateful relief.

  Blessed she was, to assist the release of a spirit intact and unbroken.

  For the prisoner just restored to liberty had endured an incarceration far longer than any mortal being should ever be made to withstand.

  Once his flight reached the tree-line, barely moments after his lonely form vanished from sight, the crone knelt amid the browned stems of wild thorn. She opened her clenched and bloodied palms and buried the smeared fragments of shattered crystal and broken links that remained of the sigil-forged chain that had bound him. Tears of bitter anger striped her withered cheeks as she rammed cold earth overtop the unpleasant remnants. For his life’s sake, no more could be done to assist his escape without danger.

  Her fugitive must be left alone on the run. To survive the long reach of his enemies, he would take the harsh road to rediscover himself. If he had been granted the most slender chance to foil the deadly pursuit of the captors who soon would be hunting him, she could not spare him from the brutal whip-lash of consequence: the obliteration of his identity provided his only protection. No friendly hand could shield him from the blow, when in due time he encountered how sorrowfully he had been sold out and betrayed.

  The crone’s prayer was not empty as she turned her back on the man whose charge had encompassed her life’s work. ‘May Mother Dark’s powers lend you the strength to stand your firm course through the maelstrom.’

  On the very same crisp autumn morning, already saddled with troubles that threatened a crofter’s mean livelihood, two brothers worked side by side, set at odds, as they hitched the yoked ox to the wagon shafts. Neither guessed, at the time, what that fateful market-day trip into Kelsing would bring. Except for the unusual, fierce pitch of their argument, nothing about their hard-nosed, haunted quiet seemed out of the or
dinary. The bushels of apples and crates of runt poultry bound for sale had already been loaded. Square jaws clenched, their seething rage crammed into hurtful silence, Efflin and Tarens both struggled, and failed, to bury the axe resharpened by their wounded grief.

  The toll taken by last summer’s outbreak of fever had been too swift, and their losses, too tragically recent. No more would their badgering nephews pull pranks. No filched lengths of garden twine, strung underfoot, tripped up the feet of the unwary. No rash little hands misdirected the buckles and entangled the harness, or exasperated them with the endearing hindrance, as hysterical poultry flapped free of mischievously unlatched crates. Never again would their chatterbox aunt pounce into the fracas, or tuck in loose shirttails with floury hands. Adult males and wild offspring alike would not wince as she scolded over their foolish laughter and larking idiocy.

  Which hurt that much worse, when the shouting match over the surly bull’s fate devolved from scorched language to fisticuffs. Big men, as honest with fights as they were with the stewardship of family assets, both brothers now puffed, grazed scarlet as schoolboys, stiffly nursing the sting of scuffed knuckles.

  ‘Could be we’ll regret not keeping yon beef on the hoof to ease the pinch at midwinter,’ said Tarens. Tenderly, he fingered the bruise that swelled into a noxious, black eye. Not the price of his brother’s mulish punch, but from a headlong bash into a fence-post, caused by the cantankerous, four-legged creature his argument still defended.

  ‘Be claimed off us for our unpaid taxes, first!’ Efflin snapped, shoulders hunched, with his back turned. Leaf brown beside his younger sibling’s blond fairness, he scowled under his hat brim and waited. Since the snorting, loose bull still rampaged at large, not yet ready to settle and graze, he declared, ‘Sell that brute for a breeder, we could pay off the debt. Maybe have a little left over. A brace of coneys could set young in time for the feast over solstice.’

  ‘Without corn to fatten them? They’d just grow ribs.’ Tarens braced himself upright, forced to maintain a resentful stand-off while the parked wagon propped his shaky legs. ‘Shadow take the damned coin and the rabbits! We can’t brazen through a live sale since you know the randy calves by that bullock would be hell-bound to suffer abuse.’

  Efflin rounded, fists cocked to strike, when their younger sister Kerelie burst, railing, out of the cottage door.

  ‘Leave you to yourselves, and here’s both of you, trading blows like two frothing theosophers!’ She snatched her embroidered skirt clear of the frost-rimed mud. A wet dish-cloth bunched over her stout forearm, she thrust into the fray with a raw slice of meat robbed off the hook in the pantry. The cut was too choice to succour a sibling, never mind one whose daft habit of sentiment had lately laid him out cold in the barn-yard. ‘Here’s a fine supper, wasted! Aren’t we burdened enough, without you louts bickering fit to break your necks?’

  The work and the winter would not forgive the fact they were drastically short-handed. Still huffing, Kerelie tossed the chilled meat to the reeling victim. Then she laced into her unrepentant older brother, whose level good sense had flown south since their untimely inheritance placed him at the head of the household. ‘Tarens is right! ’Tis a hazard to breed that cantankerous beast, and no! You will not sell it dear for its ugly temperament! That’s cruelty. The dastards who buy such rogues use them to bait their vicious dogs for blood-sport wagers!’

  Efflin tipped back the lumpish felt hat that lent him the semblance of an unsheared ram. Eyebrows raised, without sympathy for his battered younger brother, he stonewalled his sister with a stoic shrug, wiped a blood smear from his split lip, and that fast, caught the black bullock. With its nose ring roped fast to the tail-gate, the brute pawed and gored the stout slats, unaware it had wrecked its last claim to long life and a docile maturity.

  The beast snorted yet when the wagon rolled out, dragging it towards the stock-yard and slaughter. The brothers perched side by side on the seat, their broad shoulders rubbed by the jounce at each bump. They winced with the same hissed breaths as the vehicle swayed to the rake of the furious animal’s capped horns. The bone-jarring journey to Kelsing market promised them no respite from their ill-gotten injuries. A stupid predicament, which once would have made them the butt of their uncle’s banter.

  But the care-free family of those days had gone. Truth brooded amid their sullen silence: that the bull’s sale might buy a month’s time but not turn the tide of bad fortune. Rigid tradition still ruled in the westlands: a married man always left home to increase the prosperity of his wife’s family. This moment’s immoderate pain was a pittance against straits that could force them to sacrifice their remaining measure of happiness.

  The wagon rolled into the morning’s choked mist and turned north on the rutted trade-road that wound through the wood. Already, the maples had shed their foliage cloaks of bright russet and flame. The crabbed oaks wore drab brown, shorn of acorns. The spoked wheels turned, sucking, through the ice-glazed puddles, and grated where frost crusted the verges. Only the mourning doves’ doleful calls fluted through the overcast gloom.

  Determinedly buoyant in his muddy clothes, Tarens started to whistle, while Efflin clutched at sore ribs and withdrew, his scowl ingrained as chipped wood. The patience that had been his virtuous mainstay had disappeared with their burned dead. Soon enough, his tense brooding would drop a wet blanket back over his brother’s vivacious spirit.

  Like Kerelie, Tarens refused to dwell on the problem, that the croft demanded more coin than they owned. Half of the harvest rotted in the field for the lack of strong hands to wield the scythe and hay-rake. The milch-cow in the barn was too aged to breed, which a healthy bull’s service to a neighbour’s dairy herd might have done something to remedy.

  ‘The pair of you ought to be facing the butcher’s knife, and not that savage wretch of a beeve, who should’ve been culled as a yearling!’ The puckered scar on her cheek shadowed under the rim of her pert straw bonnet, Kerelie wrung out the dish-cloth and gave up her effort to dab the stains off her holiday finery. The spatters of meat juice already set, without lye soap and a pail of hot water.

  Her grumbled oath made the jaunty tune pause.

  ‘Forget that we never asked for a nurse-maid,’ her cheerful brother pointed out, reasonable. ‘Are you going to geld me to settle the score?’ Tarens liked his risks spicy, though usually not by acting as shield for star-crossed, recalcitrant livestock.

  Efflin risked a baleful glance sidewards. ‘More of somebody’s bloodshed never did gag a woman hell-bent on a scolding.’

  ‘I ought to whack someone’s bravado, straight off!’ Kerelie shoved a strayed wisp of wheat hair underneath the delicate row of blue flowers stitched into her headscarf. Flushed pink, she gazed fondly at her brothers’ broad backs, alike in size and yet so different in demeanour.

  Of course, the belligerent idiots behaved as though neither had just hammered the other to pulped flesh and cracked ribs. Tarens returned a wolf’s grin, brazen calm flaunting his innocence, while Efflin goaded the plodding ox with his felt-cap jammed down to his ears. The odd little goat-bell some past affectation had tied onto the band gave sweet tongue, belying his sour expression. The tucked feather, sported for the courtship that, somehow, he never found time for, defied the low cloud that threatened a drizzle.

  Kerelie attacked, moved by fierce affection. ‘A good thing you bumble-butts have no children to hobble the next generation.’

  Where Tarens’s gleeful insouciance failed, Kerelie’s nagging at last lifted Efflin’s grim mood: the brothers exchanged pointed glances from equally guileless blue eyes. Having made rueful peace, in sore need of distraction from their hitched groans of discomfort, they vied to see which one would bait their sister’s flaying tongue first.

  ‘Stubborn? Me?’ Efflin snorted. His flicked finger jingled the ridiculous bell, mocking her fire-brand common sense. ‘I can’t take that prize, sweet. Not since the time you kissed the neighbour’s mule on the muzzle in
an attempt to make friends when it bit you.’

  ‘Once!’ Kerelie howled. ‘I was three years of age!’ Would anyone ever mature enough to overlook that blighted mistake?

  As Tarens’s broad smile renewed the embarrassment, Kerelie slapped his wrist, then masked her rioting blush, bent in half, as a squabble among the crated hens drew her repressive notice. More than one stabbing beak sought to rip the rush baskets and peck holes in the harvested apples. Through a shriek meant to shock thieving poultry out of their natural appetite, she buried the branding humiliation: that her face was grotesquely spoiled, no matter how neatly the village healer had stitched her ripped cheek. She cringed to count the grasping suitors lately chased from the door with thrown pots. None of them had trampled the garden-path muddy before Uncle’s death left an inheritance.

  She would be forced to marry. If her brothers remained too kindly to speak, they must broach the sore subject, and soon. A croft in dire straits for the lack of grown field-hands could not stall for long while she pined for a love match.

  ‘Folly lights up no candles, dear girl,’ Efflin soothed, wisely quick to dismiss the mishap that marred her porcelain complexion. ‘And Tarens won’t sow anyone’s moronic by-blow, today. The strumpets will snatch coin for his kisses, up front. Unless, with that toad’s mug, he plans to hide his licks at the butcher’s?’

  ‘Why would he?’ Kerelie shot up straight in offence. ‘Most women turn into simpering idiots shown a damned fool with an injury!’

  ‘And you never dote on the lame ducks, yourself? Then I don’t smell cinnamon bread in that basket, and we all never noticed how much you loathe baking.’ Tarens’s snorted laughter transformed to a cough, as her toe poked into his banged ribs. Sobered, not chastised, he ploughed ahead, ‘A bashed eye from a bull is no hero’s fare.’