The Wanderer's Tale (11 page)

He did not have to look up or even open his eyes to know that the night-hued raven was back. Just as it had to be, to receive that part of the sorcerer’s soul which he was now lending it.

‘Raven,’ he intoned hoarsely, the astringency of the concoction stinging his throat, ‘take this, my spirit, into your eyes. Go now, and show me your master’s intent.’

With the help of the Bucca’s flesh, Wodeman had become a medium. The ignorant folk of Nordwas would never believe that a wild man of the woods could do this; they assumed that mediums only communicated with the dead. And for their own priests maybe that was true. But for a nature-priest such as Wodeman, a medium was a conduit, a path that allowed the Earth-Spirit’s divinity to flow into the mind of Man. Thus had he now become, like the tree, a thing that joined heaven to earth.

He seemed now to be rising, leaving his cage of flesh behind and ascending into the highest branches of the trees. Up there he found himself looking through the eyes of the raven, seeing all that it saw. Delaying not an instant, it and he took off from this lofty perch and soared above the treetops, witnessing a thousand shades of green in the mellow, late-spring sunlight. They glided on over the open pastures beyond, everything looking so sharply defined from up here, and Wodeman’s soul thrilled with the exhilaration of it all. Soon they were flying over the rippling, cream-coloured fields outside Nordwas, and above farm buildings that looked like little wooden toys. The people who worked there were like ants running around on a path.

Then the raven turned, and Wodeman could see that they were approaching the town itself. In particular they seemed to be heading for one lofty tower that Wodeman recognized as part of Wintus Hall. The raven glided closer and closer, until finally it flapped down to perch upon a window sill.

Suddenly, Wodeman felt troubled. This vision was beginning to fade long before it should do. Something was trying to intervene, to interrupt the vision before it could tell him anything meaningful. Erce, no, not after all he had just been through!

He had to work fast. On an impulse, Wodeman sent the raven into the room beyond, in a last desperate effort to glean as much information as possible.

There was not much to see there: just a stranger sitting on the edge of his bed, intent on honing an axe. He had thinning, curly brown hair, and the definite look of a foreigner. The man looked up sharply, but made no attempt to disturb the raven.

It was only a glimpse he received, but Wodeman knew he would remember this man: the premature lines of a hard life etched into his face, the troubled look in the eyes – and those odd images of dragons tattooed on his hands.

Then the dream faded, and he was back in the hazel-grove by the stream.

‘Oh, come on!’ he called out in frustration to the trees. ‘Is that all I get for risking my life with a Bucca?’

But no answer was forthcoming, and he felt cheated. All he could assume was that the Skela, they who governed even the gods themselves, including Erce, had for some reason of their own interfered.

‘This must be serious indeed,’ he muttered to himself.

Wodeman bit his lip in anxiety. Clearly much was now expected of him, but as yet he had not the slightest clue what that was. All he knew was that the man seen in his vision was the key. Of course, he could march into the tower and simply ask the stranger, but what would he say to him? ‘Excuse me, but I believe you are very important to my god. Now, please tell me how.’ No, that would not do. The folk of Nordwas already considered Wodeman some sort of lunatic, and this would merely confirm that belief.

For now, he would just have to cast the man’s runes, and hope to discover more later.

The magician proceeded to do just this, kneeling down upon a patch of dry soil by the bank of the stream. His knotted fingers with their sharp, strong nails slipped under the wolf-pelt and drew out a small leather bag that contained something that rattled. He untied the thong, placed the bag on the ground between his knees, then lifted up his arms. Then he raised his face to the sun and let out a long sigh.

All about him became still. The birds ceased their chattering, the breeze died down and the leaves rustled no more. Into this sudden quiet, Wodeman began to chant. At first his voice sounded like the warning growl of a great cat, bestial and threatening, almost evil. Then this gave way to a low moaning from the pit of his stomach, issuing from his mouth like the breath of a phantom. Gradually it began to grow sonorous, and hypnotizing in its constancy. No man of Nordwas would have guessed there were words contained in this dirge, but words there were, words of power from an ancient and secret tongue known only to the Torca.

Wodeman stopped, and the chant was over. He opened his eyes and blinked against the sunlight that dappled his face. Looking down at the bare, cracked earth of the stream-bank, he suddenly had a vision that all around him was black, and only a small circle of earth could now be seen. But it was not earth – rather it looked to the sorcerer like cracked flagstones glowing under a sputtering orange torchlight. He could smell the warm fug of a horse, and hear a strange kind of whimpering, like that of a woman . . . And the air was
freezing
.

This new vision faded.

Odd
, he thought.
I haven’t even cast the runes yet.

He shrugged, and plunged his hand into the leather bag, rummaging about. Eight runes he needed, one for each of the catkins on the hazel sprig the raven had brought him. As he did so, he asked his first question.

Who is the foreigner with the axe, residing with the Peladanes?

Averting his eyes, he then withdrew his hand from the bag, and cast its contents upon the earth.

‘Only one?’ he murmured. ‘Not much to go on . . .’

Only a single rune tile had been given. He had expected at least three. Nevertheless, he turned over the hazelwood tile, rubbing his fingers over its smooth, age-worn surface, and peered at the blood-marked symbol engraved upon it:

The Road.

On its own this told him little; it could signify a journey, a traveller, even a long distance. But, regarding the man in his vision, it was easy enough to assume he was a traveller from afar just from his appearance – and Erce would not waste a valuable rune in telling him that. No, in this case it had to signify a
quest
. The man must be travelling to seek something, something of great importance.

Still with seven runes remaining, Wodeman did not hesitate. Pausing only long enough to put back the Road rune, he asked his second question.

Where does this quest lead to?

This time there were two runes. The sorcerer picked them up, and frowned. This did not look good:

The Rawgr
– and
Ignorance
.

Very ambiguous indeed.
The Rawgr
could stand for literally that, a rawgr; or it could mean some disaster of another kind was imminent. To even begin to know which, he would have to ask that man who appeared in his vision.
Ignorance
, though, was a different matter. Did it mean the man was unaware of
The Rawgr
(or disaster), or was he on his way to avert some great calamity, but did not know how?

Worse still, was he on his way to
cause
a disaster, and did not know it?

Working on all three possibilities, Wodeman asked his third question, choosing it and phrasing it with care.

Which god causes the stranger’s ignorance?

This was presuming a lot, but if he had guessed the first three runes correctly, it was still a shrewd question. By asking this he was determining which cause the stranger would be working against, and thus whether he, Wodeman, was to help or hinder him.

He threw again:

The Rawgr
again, and
The Shield
!

This was good: it told him much. By equating
The Rawgr
with a god, it was clear that it was indeed a rawgr – and not merely some other disaster – that was the object of the traveller’s journey. And Wodeman was automatically
against
the destructive power of all rawgrs. Now he could well guess where he stood; if the man appearing in his vision was ignorant, and the rawgr stood to gain by this ignorance, then Wodeman’s role was to be present as a messenger of the Earth-Spirit to enlighten him.

But what of
The Shield
rune? It stood for the Skela, the ‘guardians’, but what did they have to do with the rawgr? He went over in his mind all that he knew of the Skela and their relationship with the gods. Soon he came to a conclusion; though it was clear that the rawgr stood to benefit from the mystery traveller’s ignorance, the chances were that it was actually the Skela who were responsible for this ignorance. For ignorance, the sorcerer knew in his strange way, was nearly always due to the Skela. They did not allow the gods to tell their adherents too much; a vision here, an omen there, perhaps the odd bit of rune-casting; nothing too obvious, just enough to keep them guessing.

In this case, due to the intervention of the Skela, the god that was the enemy of the rawgr had failed to get a message through to his servant. Exactly which god that was would be difficult to say at this point, for until he talked to the traveller himself he would not know which deity he served. Cuna the Lightgiver was the prime choice, for he was directly opposed to everything involving Olchor the Lord of Evil. But it could be his own god, Erce the Lord of Nature. After all, Olchor had never shown any regard for the land or anything that dwelt on it.

Yet the man he had seen through the raven’s eyes had looked nothing like a typical follower of either cult. Maybe he followed one of the lesser gods, or even a false one . . .

He then asked his fourth question. He had to know how he, and the traveller, could find out whatever it was the Skela were keeping from them.

How can we know that of which we are ignorant?

He looked down, surprised. Three runes lay upon the earth at his feet, all the last three runes of the hazel sprig:

The Wyrm of Erce
.
The Tree of Knowledge. The Moon.

These last three told Wodeman everything. The traveller was not a worshipper of the Earth-Spirit, but of some other deity. This same deity was being prevented by the Skela from granting the traveller the knowledge he needed to defeat the rawgr. But Wodeman’s god had found a way past the Skela; and Erce was slipping this tiny sliver of knowledge to the traveller behind the Skela’s backs! This knowledge, then, was to come – as the
Moon
rune, or rune of the night, signified – in the form of dreams.