They slept the one night in the dormitories of the city, the animals stabled nearby. It was a fitful, wary sleep. There were sounds which would have been better not to have heard and a poisonous smell to the air, no feasting or drinking, but only dull food gulped down in silence with even that silence seeming perilous. By morning they were all looking over their shoulders at nothing, eager to be out of the place. The horses were hitched with almost frantic haste.
As they lined up, just inside the gates, with the heavy gates slowly creaking open, the caravan leader rode down the line of wagons telling this one and that one to stand off and go to one side. AH the men told off were from among the new men, and Alan was one of them. They went, murmuring, casting curious glances at the black-robed inhabitants who surrounded them. Then, all at once, there was a shout, and the men were surrounded and struck down by the black robes while the drovers cracked their whips and ran the wagons out through the gates onto the echoing pave. Medlo was still on the wagon, trying frantically to get off, but he was being held and struck. Through the dizzy shock of unexpected pain he heard Alan calling, ‘Medlo, help me, ooh, Medlo and through a bloody haze he saw Alan beaten down to the ground. When he regained consciousness, the forest surrounded the wagons in looming silence, but he heard Alan’s voice still calling. His head had been bandaged, and the surly drovers evaded his eyes.
Later, the caravan master spoke off-handedly to him, saying that the contract with Murgin always included both grain and men; that the men were chosen by lot; and that it could as well have been Medlo himself. It had been Medlo, himself, insofar as Medlo understood it. Medlo had been attacked, borne down, hurt, killed or enslaved. At some point in this conjecture his mind always stopped short of remembering precisely what the sounds of Murgin had been. He was not grieving for someone else, he was swearing vengeance for himself.
He could not move well for some time, for they had strained his shoulders when they held him and had then tied him up until they were far into the forest. He did not complain about this, but merely kept silent, waiting, letting his fury warm him. After he could move easily once more, he waited until the caravanners were very drunk one night on newly-bartered-for wine. He killed those he felt had known in advance of the contract with Murgin, fired the wagons for good measure, and departed into the forest.
The way through the forest was lost, desperate, and suicidal. Medlo did not die. He felt that he was dying, perhaps tried to die, but did not. He felt already half dead, half missing, crippled and maimed in some way he scarcely understood. He felt Alan as a man feels the phantom fingers of an amputated hand, but he did not grieve, only burned with anger. He turned back toward Murgin time after time, only to be driven westward by storm and the onset of winter. Finally, he stopped feeling anything.
But he began to listen to Alan. When the skirts of the sky were stained with the wine of sunset, Medlo would comment on it to himself, nodding, saying, ‘As you once said, Alan.’ He remembered all Alan had ever said, everything. What he could not remember, he heard inside his head as though newly spoken. And, always, he searched every face he met to see whether Alan had come there before him, whether he himself had come there to find that part of himself which had been lost.
CHAPTER TEN
LEONA
Year 1165
For some seasons, Leona wandered the broken lands between the Jaggers and Fenlees. She spent two winters time-lost in sleep in a snow-buried cave warmed by subterranean steams which boiled in the deeps. She spent a summer along the shores of the Fenlees among the reedy hummocks where stilt-legged birds piped endlessly beside grey seas which broke on the fangs of the Shambles to send icy spray far inland. With no more knowledge of the world than a blind kitten, she had searched among the ghost cities of the Jaggers and found a ruined library in a language she could spell out. She had devoured pictures and words and pages which told of the world as it was and had been and was thought to be. Always she sought for references to that Vessel of Healing which the man at Stony croft had spoken of, but she found them seldom and vaguely written. At times she came away to seek food or to rest eyes wearied by faded print on stained pages. She seemed not to feel the cold. Even the summers here were chill, for the frigid northern seas swept down from the icelands along the shores of Anisfale to strike upon the Scruff before turning at the Scut to flow westward into Vastnesse, called by some Wasnost.
She stood long hours upon
