“Yrkman?” The soldier makes it sound wrong.
“I’m a traveller. From the mountains.” Gallar realises the hands holding the knives are too dark for any Yrkman or Fryth. Even in high summer the men of Fryth never scorched to such an olive tone.
Behind the boy’s eyes Sarmin recognizes the men as soldiers of his army of the White Hat, men from Nooria or the cities strung south along the Blessing. Far from home.
“Come.” And the tall soldier leads off, one of his companions moving back up the trail.
A prod from the sword or spear at his back gets Gallar’s feet moving. In the stories Voice Zanar told this would be where the hero made his escape. A lunge, a twist, and he’d be off with a stolen weapon and men bleeding in his wake. But Gallar finds himself nailed to reality by certain knowledge that a spear thrust would outpace any move he might make and that his shaking hands have no chance of stealing a blade.
They cross the clearing, following the gradient in a series of rough steps, aimed for the far side. Soon enough Gallar understands what had first caught his eye. Men swinging from the boughs of a mountain oak, ropes about their necks. Ten or more, swaying gently, toes pointed to the ground, hands bound behind backs. Closer still and even the twilight can’t hide their faces, dark with blood, eyes bulging in unreal almost comic exaggeration of what should be possible. Their heads, cocked to the side at broken angles, recall how the soldier had first looked at him. Is this his fate then, to cross the high pass just to die choking on a rope?
It starts to rain. At first Sarmin only hears it, pattering on the leaves above. He wonders what it is. The first droplets find Gallar, spilling from leaf and twig, cold and shocking. The tempo builds until it’s a downpour beating at the canopy. Sarmin has never seen such rain, a season’s water will fall in an hour.
The soldiers here are not so well hidden, and more plentiful. Dozens of them emerge, their armour foreign to Gallar’s eye, overlapping scales of iron on linen. Most hold long spears with narrow steel heads, weapons unsuited to the forest. One approaches, this man with bronze chasing on each scale of his armour, his white helm without camouflage, its back extending into lobstered iron plates to guard his neck and running with water. Sarmin knows him for a first-spear captain.
“Yrkmen?” He speaks the word better than his men.
“I’m from the mountain tribes.” Gallar can’t keep the terror from quivering in his voice. “I’m not from Yrkmir or Fryth. From the mountains.” He tries to point towards the peaks but the man behind him slaps his arm down.
The officer shakes his head. “You are from Yrkmir I think. A spy. There is room for you on the tree.”
Sarmin tries to order the captain to stop. He knows this is memory. It has to be memory. But even so he tries, and fails.
“No, don’t!” Gallar falls to his knees in the soft dirt, as if that might stop them. “I’m from Hollow!” He screams as two men drag him to his feet. “I hate the Yrkmen.” Someone loops a rope about his neck, a coarse thick rope that makes him retch even before they tighten it. “No! They killed my mother! All my people! With magic!”
“Hthna.” The officer holds up a hand. Hearing Cerantic through Gallar’s ears is strange and for the first time Sarmin realizes Gallar is thinking and speaking a language he doesn’t understand. The captain steps closer. “Hanging is easy, boy.” A pause here and there to select his words, his lips struggling with their shapes. “You die hard if you lie to me.”
“I’m not lying, I’m not, I never lie.” Gallar rushes his words, speaking too fast for the man but unable to stop. “I saw it. I saw them die. They put a pattern on us. Everyone died-”
The man’s hand closes around Gallar’s throat, intense dark eyes on his, face close enough to smell the spices on his breath. “A pattern?”
“I swear it. A pattern. I swear it by the highest rock. By my home-stone.” He remembers the lines curling over everything, everyone, his mother becoming dust even as he told her to run. None of them would listen. He remembers the pain as the pattern lines wrapped him too, the agony as the scars of the old pattern, the illness that had made him Many, had flared into angry echoes of their old form and burned the new marks from him.
Even in the midst of this remembered suffering Sarmin can wonder-how can this be memory? This boy was cured of the Pattern Master’s curse. I saved him.
The soldier barks a command and steps back. He waves to the left and with a tug of the rope Gallar is led deeper into the woods. They pull him choking through a wall of thorny bushes into the beaten-down circle at their midst. Two white helmed soldiers stand guard over a hunched figure crouching at their knees, a stick figure in wet rags, hands bound at the wrists to a heavy wooden yoke across its shoulders. The prisoner looks up as Gallar stumbles in, bright eyes staring at him through a dirty straggle of hair.
“Megra!” he gasps.
“I know my name, boy.” And her gaze returns to the leaf mould and broken thorns.
“You ran and left us!” Gallar spits the words at old Megra, crouched in the tatters of the woolen shift she had always worn so proudly.
“Stayin” wouldn’t have helped,” she mutters, eyes bright behind grey straggles. A dark gap stands where one of her teeth should be, old blood at the corner of her mouth. “A hundred winters and I still got my teeth,” the Megra had been wont to boast. His Ma used to whisper the Megra was a lot more than a hundred winters and that she stole her teeth from corpses. Whatever the truth, she has one fewer now.
The soldiers thrust Gallar to the ground, broken thorns jabbing through his leggings as he falls. He gathers himself up and crouches opposite the old woman, pausing to pull prickles from his hands then wipe the rain from his face. He tries to take the noose from about his neck but one of the men barks at him, lowering his spear.
“You could have told Hound Marka…” Until this moment, until he actually sees her Gallar has accepted the Megra’s treachery, but now she lies within arms’ reach he can no longer credit it. The woman had watched Hollow grow, known its children from birth to death, and their children after them.
“Hound Marka paid more attention to bird song than to me. Woken in the night he would have thrown me from his hall.”
“You could have tried! Someone would have listened.”
“Did they listen to you?” The Megra shakes her head. “Hollow would have argued until dawn and died all the same. The rock clans won’t leave their home-stones on the say so of an old woman.”
He wants to shake her, to hit her, the need for it itches across his knuckles, he wants to see her spit the rest of her teeth into the gloom. “They’d listen to you before a boy like me. You could have done something.”
She shakes her head. “The austeres were already writing their trap around Hollow when you came to my hut.” Overhead the rain beats at the leaves, loud and furious, running down to pour on all below in spurts and dribbles. The Megra hunches, old and frail, a knot of misery in human form. The rope itches at Gallar’s neck and the memory of the sensation as it had tightened below the bulge of his throat makes him retch again.
Gallar wipes sourness from his mouth and says nothing. The Megra is right and it angers him. Her fear angers him, a worse betrayal than any other-that the Megra, so old, and tough, has surrendered to her fear. And now she hunches in the rain, utterly defeated, the pivot of old tales, a threat to scare children, just an ancient woman, soaked and waiting to die.
The people of Hollow would not have left. But even so, she should have stayed to try. The Rock Hounds would have waited on their enemy, stood their ground, the common people too. The Hollow had been watered with their blood for too many years to just leave it. None of them had any give in them. The sharp-angled language of the soldiers returns him to the moment as they exchange an observation.
“Who are these people?” Gallar asks, leaning in towards the Megra.
“Cerani.” Her hair hangs before her face, water drops forming and falling from the ragged curtain of it, forming and falling.
Gallar can make no sense of that. Desert men from the ends of the world, here where the mountains keep Mythyk from Fryth? He wants to ask more but sounds of shouting, louder than the rain, turn his head towards the clearing. He stands, cold water running into the few dry places remaining to him. The Megra stays huddled as if she knows nothing good is coming. Be brave. He remembers the words from the Megra’s ring and wonders why they come to him now, demanding to be spoken. “Be brave,” he says. “We’re none of us just one thing.” It seems important to say those words, to remind her. Perhaps he forgives her too, but those words won’t come.
The shouts grow closer, several men, then a sudden silence filled by the drone of rain on leaves.
“What did the ring say for you?” he asks, wondering if the soldiers have taken if from her or is it hidden, or lost.
