Consorts of Heaven (15 page)

Damaru grew fractious, becoming withdrawn, grizzling and fussing if he was disturbed. Fychan did as Kerin had asked and shadowed him. When Damaru became distressed, Fychan came to find Kerin and she left Sais’s side to comfort and cajole her son. Sais had been wrong to suggest that Fychan held a grudge against Damaru: to Fychan, Damaru was an unpredictable and dangerous force of nature, like fire or lightning - not a cause for hatred, only caution.

Around midmorning of the fourth day in the drylands, the wind rose, gusting up dust eddies like conjured spirits. Soon Kerin found herself blinking grit out of her eyes, barely able to see the cart ahead. What had started as a gentle sigh grew, with fearsome speed, to a deep moan.

The cart slowed, then stopped. People were shouting and animals bellowing, unseen beyond the whirling dust. The carter came up and shouted, ‘Get under the cart, woman!’ Kerin shook her head, pulled her shawl up around her face and struck out to where she had last seen Damaru. She found him crouched on his heels, his hands brushing ineffectually at the dust flying round his head. By the time she got him to his feet and led him to shelter, the dust was coming at them like knives in the wind.

She installed Damaru under the cart, then looked across to where Sais lay in his makeshift bed. He rested in a hollow in the centre of the luggage. Though he was in the lee of the wind, the bedding heaped on him was not, and as she watched, the end of his bedroll flapped free. She grabbed for it, and, stretching out over the rocking cart, caught an edge. As she grasped the bedding more firmly she climbed up the spokes of the wheels. She felt that if she let the wind get under her now, it might whisk her away into the wild sky, flensing the flesh from her bones. She pressed herself into the bundles, slithering over them until, half-falling, half-rolling, she fell into Sais’s nest and rested beside him while the wind screamed overhead.

When she had got her breath back she checked Sais over. Dust crusted his nostrils and his breath wheezed and whistled. Left unprotected, he could suffocate. Kerin pulled her shawl up and held it out on her outstretched arm, forming a makeshift windbreak to protect his face.

Then she began to pray.

She reached the end of every formal prayer for deliverance she knew, and made up several more, yet still the storm raged. Her arm ached and threatened to collapse. Beside her, Sais burned hotter than ever.

Now out of prayers, she began to talk - or rather shout - against the wind, against the fear. ‘Do not die, Sais! You must live, do you hear me?
Live!
’ She paused, knowing no one would hear her, and wanting to say the words because she would not die without uttering them. ‘You have to live. We must both live because I love you.’

As though it heard her, the wind dropped for a moment. It picked up again almost at once, and she felt suddenly foolish. When had that happened? When had she given this stranger her heart? And why? For all she knew, he had a wife waiting for him in the lowlands!

She put her head down, pressing it into the bundles, smelling coarse fabric, leather and dry dust. She had never felt so exposed, so alone, in her life.

 

Eventually, the storm blew itself out. As it abated, Kerin uncovered their faces and tried to massage some life back into her arm. Grit trickled over them and settled into every nook and cranny.

Sais’s pulse was running weak and slow. The danger from the storm was past, but the falling fire had him deep in its grip. Around her she could see people standing up, brushing themselves off. She sent more dust cascading over them as she climbed down to check on Damaru, but he had already crawled out from under the cart.

He ignored her queries, which she took to mean he was unharmed, but indicating Sais with a nod of his head he said, ‘Fading.’

‘Aye, he is, Damaru,’ she admitted sadly.

‘Do you make medicine?’

‘I would if I thought—’ She stopped. If she
thought
indeed - this terrible place had driven all the sense from her. Perhaps she did have the means to save him!

As he huddled under the cart with the wind howling overhead, Einon wondered what in the name of Heaven he had done to deserve such suffering. Most likely he was a victim of others’ schemes; much as he might wish the Tyr to be purely a seat of learning, it was the heart of power too, and politicking between the Escorai was ever apt to disrupt the lives of those serving them.

Yet that earthly explanation might merely be the means, not the cause. Could this punishment be a Heavenly judgment? He had been worried about his discovery, concerned that the Mothers had deliberately not granted their children the knowledge he had found, and so he had shown his researches to his Escori.

Urien had reassured him that his theories did not contravene the will of the Mothers - yet only a week later the Escori of Carunwyd had disappeared, and shortly after that, Einon had received the letter banishing him to these uncivilised western wastes. There
had
to be a connection. He prayed he would live long enough to uncover it.

The wind eased off, and with the danger passing, his fears of divine retribution felt rather foolish. If the Mothers had wished to show their displeasure he would never have survived the journey out here to meet the drove.

Nor would he have been blessed by the discovery of a skyfool. Damaru’s rout of the reivers was the talk of every campfire, with the bard from his village called upon to recount it nightly in his quaint upland style of musical storytelling. Einon’s own examination of the boy backed up the drovers’ conviction: most souls Einon sensed showed up as a tangled mess, with flashes of guilt or greed or love or other small, difficult emotions. He had felt a strange emptiness in Damaru, as though the boy were a blank piece of paper waiting for words to fill him, but at the same time the immensity of that emptiness had been frightening. It was like looking through a window, expecting to see a closed courtyard, and instead glimpsing the glory of Heaven.

A candidate that promising needed a priest to accompany him to his meeting with the Beloved Daughter of Heaven, and it was Einon’s duty to take on that task. The Mothers had given him a reason to return to the City of Light.

The boy’s mother might be a problem. He had still not discovered how the woman - Fychan said her name was Kerin - had managed to inveigle her way onto the drove, and he was already regretting his decision to let her bring the sick man with them. Two more cases of the falling fire had developed in the drylands, and they had been left by the side of the trail, as this man should have been. It did nothing for Einon’s standing amongst the drovers that he should give in to a woman, then deny the wishes of men.

When he was sure the storm had blown over, Einon got up and brushed himself off. What he would not give for a hot bath - but no chance of that until they reached Plas Aethnen and he could call upon the hospitality of the Reeve. For now he must check that everyone had survived the storm.

No one had been hurt, though a steer had fallen and broken a leg. Einon showed the required regret, whilst secretly looking forward to a meal of fresh meat.

When he approached the invalid’s cart, ready to perform his evening prayers, he smelled not just the aroma of roasting beef now drifting over the camp, but a different scent, not one he would have expected to encounter out here.

Kerin, leaning over her patient and squeezing a cloth into his mouth, did not see Einon approach, and she jumped as he asked her, ‘Where did you get the Byth Melys berries, Chilwar?’

She made the circle, the cloth still in her hand, and said, ‘Is that what they are? My husband traded for them on his last drove. I hoped they might help.’

‘That is unlikely, Chilwar.’

‘Why not?’ she asked boldly. ‘Are they not medicine?’

‘Heavens, no! They are, ah, a delicacy in the City, well flavoured and keeping their taste for many years - but medicine? Only, perhaps, for the spirit in their toothsome and sweet flavour.’ How uneducated these uplanders were!

Kerin flinched as though she had been slapped, dropped the cloth back into her bowl and glared at him.

Einon relented and added, ‘I suppose your husband could not, ah, be expected to know that, and if some unscrupulous trader told him so—’

When she continued to stare at him in silence he felt his anger rise. It was almost as if this obstreperous, ignorant woman were somehow blaming him for her patient’s condition. ‘I have no time for this! My prayers will do far more for this man than giving him children’s treats, so kindly remove yourself and allow me to petition the Mothers on his behalf.’

She turned on her heel and left without tracing the circle.

Einon sought out Fychan later that evening. ‘The woman, Kerin,’ he asked. ‘Is her husband dead?’

‘Aye, Gwas.’

It was as he had suspected, both because the husband was not here standing guardian to his son, and from her own unruly ways. What was less obvious was why she was going out of her way to help the sick man. ‘And this Sais,’ asked Einon, ‘what, ah, what is he to her?’

‘I do not know,’ said Fychan, and Einon sensed the truth of his words.

‘Tell me what you know of Sais,’ commanded the priest.

When Fychan spoke of the man’s lost past, Einon’s interest was piqued. Here, at last, was a mystery worthy of a servant of the Mother of Secrets - always assuming the man lived, of course.

Perhaps the Weaver had set him on this path for a good reason after all.

Those tears of anger and frustration that escaped before Kerin could stop them dried quickly, leaving chill, taut trails on her cheeks. She hoped her ignorance had amused the priest.

She went back to the campfire to do some sewing. She had finished assembling the skirt; embroidering it would increase its value. Whilst looking for her threads she found the folded square of Sais’s fabric. She pulled it out and ran it through her fingers: she would make a shirt out of it, for him to wear when he recovered - for he
would
recover; she had decided that. She set to her task at once, though she found the cloth surprisingly hard to cut.

The next day they came up onto a high plateau where pockets of frost lay in the hollows and everyone’s breath steamed. They camped by a brackish lake edged with fragile fans of ice. When the animals approached to drink, swarms of black flies rose from the water. Though they did not bite, the flies investigated every crack and crevice, and Kerin wrapped Sais’s head in her shawl for protection.

As she lay down by the cart to sleep that night, Kerin wondered if the priest had been to Dinas Emrys - he had mentioned the City, after all. Perhaps he had even witnessed a skyfool’s testing. Getting him to tell her about it would be another matter.

The next day the land began to slope downwards. They followed the stream that issued from the lake. The ground started to support scrubby bushes and patches of wind-blown grass.

Kerin found herself increasingly glad of Fychan’s watchfulness. As Damaru’s irritation with this tedious place grew, so he took to misbehaving more than usual, deciding to lie down and stare at the sky in the middle of the day, or hiding amongst strangers, as though the other drovers were the most interesting thing he could find up here. Kerin was constantly being called over, and began to wonder about giving him the bogwood bark herself.

That night she took Damaru aside and asked him to play the harp, partly to divert him, partly because she had run out of ways to help Sais. She knew the falling fire was nothing like the malady that had first afflicted him, but her powerlessness in the face of his continuing illness twisted in her guts. But the harp strings went out of tune quickly in the high, dry air and Damaru gave up in disgust.

Sais remained unchanged: barely conscious, hot as the sun at noon, his body periodically afflicted with cramps and contortions.

The following afternoon they spotted the end of the drylands. At first Kerin could not make sense of what she saw: it looked as though the land fell away into white nothingness. Then she realised she was looking down onto the tops of clouds. They camped in a wide saddle at the head of the slope, where the sigh of the wind competed with the crash of the stream tumbling over the edge.

The next morning the carters had the strongest men from each village surround the carts to stop them running away during the descent.

Kerin was treated to the sight of the sun rising over a fluffy rose-gold landscape of mist and light. Damaru stared at the view, an absent smile on his face, until she dragged him away. The descent was nothing like as steep or narrow as Piper’s Steps, though they had to zig and zag their way down meandering switchbacks. The stream took a more direct route, down a deep channel; the only sign of it was the roar of falling water and the occasional puff of spray.

As the morning warmed, the clouds dispersed and a rolling, fertile landscape appeared out of the mist below. Kerin was filled with joy to look upon green growing things after days of parched brown.