Читать книгу The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy: Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, Renegade’s Magic - Робин Хобб - Страница 14

I opened my eyes. The dark had not yet thickened into the full blackness of a night on the plains. I remained motionless, pushing my senses to their limits to discover what had awakened me. Then I knew. The silence. I had dozed off to the relentless chorus of insects and frogs. Now they were still, concealing themselves from something.

My stick was still beneath my hand. I tightened my grip on it and rolled my eyes to find Keeksha. The mare stood, ears pitched forward, intently aware. I shifted my gaze to follow hers. There was nothing to see, and then there was. Dewara stood outlined against the darkening sky. I instantly rolled to my feet to face him, bringing my stick up into the guard position as if it were a proper pike instead of a brittle pole. The surge of hatred and fear that I felt surprised me. Dewara’s swanneck was sheathed at his side. I suspected it was still slick with my blood. I had only the stick, and I was suddenly painfully aware of my gangly fifteen years pitted against the mature and solidly muscled warrior.

He did not make a sound, but stalked slowly down the incline to my pond. I held myself ready, and felt suddenly very calm as I knew I would die here. He met my gaze as he advanced and then a slow smile bared his pointed teeth. ‘You learn the lesson I teach, I think,’ he said.

I kept my silence.

‘Nice ear notch,’ he said. ‘I marked you like a woman marks a goat.’ He laughed aloud. I hated him then with a hate that boiled my blood. He knew it, and didn’t care. He hunkered down as if I were no threat to him at all. He scratched his shoulder, and then reached inside his loose robe. He pulled out a packet and opened it, and shook out a stick. My nose told me it was smoked meat. He made a show of holding it up for me to see. My deprived belly growled loudly at the smell of it. He stuffed it into his mouth and chewed noisily, smacking his lips. ‘You hungry, soldier’s boy?’ He waved the packet of jerky at me.

‘Give me meat,’ I demanded. I had not known I would say the words and regretted them. I was powerless to force him to obey my command. My mouth had filled with saliva at the sight of the food, and I swallowed it almost painfully. Need for what he had swept through me and I suddenly knew that I was going to fight him for it. I would rather die fighting than starving and defeated, I decided. I began to move toward him in a slow but purposeful way, keeping my pathetic weapon at the ready. He marked my intent and smiled his carnivorous smile again. I saw that gentling of his muscles as he relaxed into his body and readied it for my onslaught. I kept one eye on his swanneck as I moved toward him.

I was within ten feet of him when he abruptly stood up straight. I had not seen him draw it, but his swanneck gleamed in his hand. ‘You want the meat? Come and take it, soldier’s boy,’ he taunted me.

I do not know which of us was more surprised when I charged at him with my stick. I tried to sweep his feet from under him, but the brittle sapling cracked off when it connected with his shin. He roared, more in anger than in pain, and a swipe of his swanneck chopped what remained of my stick into two useless pieces.

I threw the two pieces of stick at his head, missing with both of them. Then I charged him, hoping feebly that I could get inside the sweep of his swanneck and do some damage before he killed me. To my shock, he reversed his grip on his blade and rammed the short haft of it directly into my belly. The force of the blow lifted me off my feet and threw me backward. I hit on my back, my head striking the packed earth hard enough to blast light into my eyes. His strike had driven the air from my lungs. Pain radiated from the centre of my body.

I gasped for air and black spots swam at the edge of my vision. I sprawled on the sand, almost too frightened to be humiliated as I tried to pull air into my emptied lungs. He walked a few steps away from me, straightened his robes and sheathed his swanneck. All that he did with his back to me. I could not miss the meaning of that; I was too feeble an enemy to be considered a threat. When he turned back toward me, he laughed, as if we had shared some joke, and then pulled out a strip of the smoked meat. I had rolled to my side and was struggling to rise. He tossed the jerky at me, and it landed in the dirt beside me. ‘You learned the lesson. Eat, soldier’s boy. Tomorrow’s lessons will be more challenging for you.’

It was several more minutes before I could even sit up. Nothing that had happened to me before had ever hurt as bad as this. Compared to this, the bruises from Sergeant Duril’s rocks were a mother’s kisses. I knew there would be blood in my piss; I only hoped there was no serious damage inside me. Dewara was moving unconcernedly about my pond. He picked up a broken piece from my stick and stirred the water thoughtfully, perhaps to disperse the gore frogs.

I had never felt more defeated and humiliated in my life. I hated him passionately and hated my own ineffectualness even more. I stared at the meat in the dirt, wanting it desperately and shamed that I’d even think of taking food from my enemy. After a time, I picked up the jerky. I remembered Sergeant Duril telling me that in a dangerous situation, a man must do all he can to keep his strength up and his mind clear. Then I wondered if I was just making excuses for my weakness. I still feared a trick. I sniffed the jerky, wondering if I’d be able to smell poison. At the smell of it, my stomach lurched with hunger and I felt dizzy. I heard Dewara chuckle. Then he called across to me, ‘Better eat, soldier’s boy. Or did you learn the lesson too strong?’

‘I learned nothing from you,’ I snarled, and bit into the meat. It was too tough to rip a bite free. I had to chew it soft and then tear it off. I swallowed it in half-chewed bites that scraped down the inside of my throat. It was too soon gone. Never once had I taken my gaze from Dewara. It grated on me that he seemed to regard me with approval. He made a noise, a clicking of his teeth, and a moment later I heard the thud of his mount’s hooves. Dedem appeared at the lip of the hollow, and came down in haste. He waded out into the shallow water and began sucking noisily.

Dewara moved toward the other side of the small pond. I watched him kneel. He used his hands to smooth the coating of plantlets away from the water’s surface before he bent his head and drank. I hoped that he would suck up a frog.

Having drunk, he moved back onto drier ground and settled himself for the night that was now closing around us in earnest. I watched him, seething. His bland assumption that I was no danger to him, his mocking dismissal of how he had mistreated and maimed me affronted me beyond insult. I choked on the indignity of it. ‘Why did you follow me?’ I burst out at last, and hated that I sounded like a child.

He didn’t even open his eyes. ‘You had my taldi. And I told you. Kidonas keep their word. I must take you back safely to your mother’s house.’

‘I want no help from you,’ I hissed.

He leaned up on his elbows and looked at me. ‘Not even my Keeksha, that you ride? Not even the meat you just ate?’ He leaned back, scratched his chest and made the small sounds of a man settling for the night. ‘Eat your pride tomorrow, I think. You have lots. Very filling. Tomorrow we start to make you Kidona.’

‘Make me Kidona? I don’t want to be Kidona.’

He laughed briefly. ‘Of course you do. Every man wants to become the man who has bested him. Every youth with a thread of war in him wishes to be Kidona in his heart. Even those who do not know what Kidona is yearn for it, like a dream still to be dreamed. You wish to be Kidona. I will waken that dream in you. It is what your father wanted me to do, I think, even if he dared not say it.’

‘My father wishes me to be an officer and a gentleman in his majesty’s cavalla, follow the ancient traditions of knighthood and bring honour to my family name as the men of my line have always done, since ever we fought for the kings of Gernia. I am a soldier son of the Burvelle line. I desire only to do my duty to my king and my family.’

‘Tomorrow, we will make you Kidona.’

‘I will never be Kidona. I know what I am!’

‘So do I, soldier’s son. Sleep, now.’ He cleared his throat and coughed once. Then he fell silent. His breathing deepened and evened. He slept.

Full of fury, I walked up to him and stood over him for a time. He opened one eye, looked up at me, yawned elaborately and closed his eyes again. He did not even fear that I’d kill him in his sleep. He used my own honour as weapon against me. That stung like an insult, even though I never would have stooped to such a dastardly act. I stood over him, aching for him to make some sort of threatening move so that I could fling myself on him and try to throttle the life out of him. To attack a sleeping man who had just by-passed the opportunity to kill me while I sprawled at his feet was beyond dishonourable. Humiliated as I was, I would not and could not do it. I walked away from him.

I made my bed a good distance away from him and huddled in my nest of dry grass, feeling queasy still. I thought my anger and hatred would keep me awake, but I fell asleep surprisingly quickly. At fifteen, the body demands rest regardless of how sore the heart may be. Somehow I had completely forgotten my plans to ride in the darkness, letting the stars guide me home. Years later, I would begin to comprehend how neatly Dewara had put me under his control again. I would comprehend, and see how it was done to me, but I would never understand it.

The next morning, Dewara greeted the new day with enthusiasm and extended his good wishes and warm fellowship to me. He behaved as if all differences between us were settled. I was mystified. I ached still and a private inspection of my chest and belly showed me the deep bruise I bore. My slit ear still burned from my morning ablutions. I itched to carry on my feud with the man; I almost hoped Dewara would somehow abuse or challenge me so that I could fight him. But he was suddenly all good-natured jests and companionable conversation. When I reacted to his friendly overtures with suspicion, he praised me for my caution. When I maintained a surly silence, he praised my warrior’s quiet demeanour. No matter what I did to express my defiance of him, he found something in it to compliment. When I sat absolutely still, refusing to respond to him in any way, he commended my self-control, and said it was the wise warrior who conserved his energy until he understood his situation.

In every imaginable way, he was a different man from the one he had been the day before. I vacillated between being stunned by the change in his demeanour to being certain that his apparent sincerity was a mask for his contempt of me. His friendly behaviour made my hostility seem childish, even to myself. His affability made it difficult for me to maintain my antagonism toward him, especially as he endeavoured to include me in every one of his activities, beckoning me repeatedly to come closer while he explained his actions in detail. Nothing in my life experience had prepared me for something like this. I wondered if he were mad, and then wondered if I were.

A confused boy is easy to manipulate.

That morning, he offered me meat without my asking, and showed me how he used the water plants as a filter when he filled his long tubular waterskins. I think they were made of gut. He also caught several of the gore frogs, taking great care not to touch them with his bare hands. He carried them away from the sike to a large flat rock and marooned them there. The little red creatures swiftly baked flat and brown in the hot sun of the day. He made a packet from the tough, flat leaves of a swort bush and carefully stored the dried frogs in one of the inner pockets of his loose robe. I was beginning to realize that although I had believed we had both ridden away from his camp empty-handed, Dewara had actually been very well supplied for our sojourn. He had with him all we both needed to survive. To get it from him, he would force me to admit my dependency on him.

He was so cheerful and affable with me, it was bewildering for me to sustain my wariness, but I managed. He suddenly stepped into the role of instructor, as if he had finally decided he would teach me the things my father had wanted me to learn. When we mounted up that first morning by the pond, I thought we would go straight back to his camp on my father’s lands near the river. Instead, he led and I followed. We stopped at mid-day, and he gave me a small sling, showed me the Kidona style of using it and told me to practise with it. Then we left our taldi and moved into scrub brush along the edge of a ravine. He stunned the first prairie grouse we flushed and I raced up to wring its neck before it recovered. His second one, he broke the wing, and the bird led me a merry chase before I caught it. I could not hit a bird for the life of me until the late afternoon, when I actually killed one with my stone.

That night we had fire and cooked meat and shared his waterskin as if we were companions. I said little to him, but he had become suddenly garrulous. He told me a number of battle tales from his day as a warrior, back in the time when the Kidona raided their fellow plainsmen. They were full of blood and rape and pillaging, and he laughed aloud as he joyously recalled those ‘victories’. From those tales, he went on to ‘sky legends’ about the constellations. Most of his hero tales seemed to involve deceit, theft or wife stealing. I perceived that a successful thief was admired among the Kidona, while a clumsy one often paid with his life. It seemed an odd morality to me. I fell asleep as he told a story about seven lovely sisters and the trickster who seduced them in succession and had a child with each one of them while marrying none of them.

His people had no writing, yet they kept their history in their oral accounts. I was to hear many of them in the long nights that followed. Sometimes when he told tales, I could hear the echo of the years of repetition in the measured way he spoke. The oldest tales of his people spoke of when they were a settled folk and lived in the skirts of the mountains. The Dappled People had driven them out from their homes and farms, and a curse from the Dapples had made his people wanderers, doomed to live by raids and thefts and blood instead of tending plants and orchards. The way he spoke of the Dapples as immensely powerful sorcerers who lived in ease among their vast riches confused me for several days. Who were these people with patterned skins and magic that could cause a wind of death to blow upon their enemies? When I finally realized that he was speaking of the Specks, it was almost like seeing double of a familiar image. The image and opinion I had of the Specks as a primitive woodland tribe of simple-minded people was suddenly overlaid with Dewara’s image of them as a complex and formidable foe. I mentally resolved it by deciding that the Specks had, somehow, forced the Kidona to retreat from their settled lands and become wanderers and scavengers. Therefore Dewara’s people had endowed them with tremendous and legendary power to excuse their failure to prevail against the Specks. This ‘solution’ troubled me, for I knew it didn’t quite fit. It was like rough boards nailed over a broken window. The cold winds of another truth still blew through it and chilled me even then.

I never felt any warm glow of friendship or true trust of Dewara, but in the days that followed, he taught and I learned. From Dewara, I learned to ride as the Kidona did, to mount one of his taldi by running alongside it, to cling to the mare’s bare smooth back and guide her by tiny thuds of my heels, to slide off my mount, even at a gallop, into a tumbling roll, from which I could either fling myself flat or come easily to my feet. My Jindobe, the trade language of all the plainspeople, became more fluent.

I had never been a fleshy youth, always rangy and, thanks to my father and Sergeant Duril, well muscled. But in the days that I was in Dewara’s care, I became ropy and tough as jerky. We ate only meat or blood. At first, I knew a terrible hunger, and dreamed of bread and sweets and even turnips, but those hungers passed like ill-advised lusts. A sort of euphoria at my reduced need for food replaced them. It was a heady sensation, difficult to describe. After my fifth or sixth day with Dewara, I lost count of the days, and moved into a time where I belonged to him. It was ever after difficult for me to describe the state of mind and body that I entered into, even to the trusted few with whom I discussed my sojourn with the Kidona warrior.

Almost every day we hunted pheasant and hare with slings, and drank blood drawn from our mounts when our hunt failed to produce a meal for us. He shared his water and dried meat with me, but sparingly. We often made camp without water or fire, and I stopped regarding such lacks as a hardship. He told stories every night and I began to have a sense of what passed for wrong and right amongst his people. To get another man’s wife with child, so that another warrior laboured to feed your get, was a riotously good jest upon that fellow. To steal and not be caught was the mark of a clever man. Thieves who were caught were fools and deserved no man’s mercy or sympathy. If a man had taldi, a wife and children, then he was wealthy and beloved of the gods, and the others of his tribe should pay heed to his counsel. If a man was poor, or if his taldi or wife or children sickened or died, then he was either stupid or cursed by the gods, and in either case, it was a waste of time to hark to him.

Dewara’s world was harsh and unforgiving, bereft of all the gentler virtues. I could never accept his people’s ways, yet in some curious fashion, I became more capable of seeing the world as he saw it. By the harsh logic of the Kidona, my people had defeated his and forced them to settle. They resented and hated us for it, and yet by their traditions, we could only do those things because the gods favoured us over them. Therefore, our wisdom was to be considered when we spoke. Dewara had been honoured when my father sent word that he wished him to be my instructor. That during the course of teaching me he could bully and mistreat me was a great honour to him, one that all his fellow Kidona would envy. Dewara had the son of his enemy at his mercy, and he would have no mercy for me. Freely he rejoiced before me, that I would carry a notch in my ear from his swanneck to the end of my days.

He teased me often, telling me that I was not bad, for a Gernian cub, but no Gernian cub would ever grow to be as strong as a Kidona plateau bear. Every day he taunted me with that, not cruelly, but as an uncle might, several times, holding his full acceptance of me always just out of my reach. I thought I had won his regard when he began to teach me how to fight with his swanneck. He grudgingly conceded that I attained some skill with it, but would always add that that evil metal had ruined my ‘iron-touched’ hands, and thus I could never regain the purity of a true warrior.

I challenged him on that. ‘But I heard you asking my father to trade guns for what you are teaching me. Guns are made of iron.’

He shrugged. ‘Your father ruined me when he shot me with an iron ball. Then he bound my wrists with iron, so that all my magic was still inside me. It has never fully come back. I think a little bit of his iron stayed in me.’ And here he slapped his shoulder, where I knew he still bore the scar of my father’s shot. ‘He was smart, your father. He took my magic from me. So, of course, I try to trick him. If I could, I would take his kind of magic from him, and turn it against his people. He said “no”, this time. He thinks he can keep it from me always. But there are other men who trade. We will see how it ends.’ Then he nodded to himself in a way I didn’t like. In that moment, I was completely my father’s son, the son of a cavalla officer of King Troven, and I resolved that when I returned, I would warn my father that Dewara still meant him harm.

The longer I stayed with him, living by his rules, the more I felt that I straddled two worlds, and that it would not take much to step fully into his. I had heard of that happening to troopers or those who interacted too freely with the plainspeople. Our scouts routinely camouflaged themselves in the language, dress and the customs of the indigenous people. Travelling merchants who traded with the plainspeople, exchanging tools and salt and sugar for furs and handicrafts, spanned the boundaries of the cultures. It was not uncommon to hear of Gernians who had gone too far and crossed over into plainspeople ways. Sometimes they took wives from amongst them, and adopted their way of dress. Such men were said to have ‘gone native’. It was recognized that they were useful as go-betweens, but they were accorded little respect, less trust and almost no acceptance into gatherings of polite company, and their half-breed children could never venture into society at all. I wondered what had become of Scout Halloran and his half-breed daughter.

I could never conceive what would prompt any man to go native, but now I began to understand. Living alongside Dewara, I sometimes felt the urge to do something that would impress him, according to his own standards. I even considered stealing something from him, in some clever way that would force him to admit I was not dull-witted. Theft ran against all the morality I had ever been taught, and yet I found myself thinking about it often, as a way to win Dewara’s respect. Sometimes I would snap out of such pondering with a jolt, surprised at myself. Then I began to wonder whether stealing something from Dewara would truly be an evil act, when he seemed to regard it as a sort of contest of wits. He made me want to cross that line. In Dewara’s world, only a Kidona warrior was a whole man. Only a Kidona warrior was tough, of body and mind, and brave past any instinct for self-preservation. Yet self-preservation was high on a warrior’s priority list, and no lie, theft, or cruelty was inexcusable if it was done with the goal of preserving one’s own life.

Then one night he offered me the opportunity to cross over completely to his world.

Each day of our hunting and wandering had carried us closer to my father’s lands. I more felt this than knew it. One night we camped on an outcropping of rocky plateau that fell away in gouged cliffs. The altitude gave us a wide view of the plains below us. In the distance, I saw the Tefa River carving its way through Widevale. I made our fire Kidona-style, as Dewara had taught me, with a strip of sinew and a curved stick as my fire-bow. I was much quicker at it than I had been. The narrow-leaved bushes that edged our campsite were resinous, but even though the branches were green they burned well. The fire crackled and popped and gave off a sweet smoke. Dewara leaned close to breathe in the fumes and then sat back, sighing them out in pleasure. ‘That is how the hunting grounds of Reshamel smells,’ he told me.

I recognized the name of a minor deity in the Kidona pantheon. So I was a bit surprised when Dewara went on, ‘He was the founder of my house. Did I tell you that? His first wife had only daughters, so he put her aside. His second wife bore only sons. The daughters of his line wed the sons of his line, and thus I have the god’s blood in me twice.’ He thumped his chest proudly and waited for me to respond. He’d taught me this game of bragging, where each of us tried to top the other’s previous claim. I could think of no reply to his claim of divine descent.

He leaned closer to the fire, breathed the sweet smoke and then said, ‘I know. Your “good god” lives far away, up past the stars. You are not the descendants of his loins but of his spirit. Too bad for you. You have no god’s blood in your veins. But,’ he leaned closer to me, and pinched me hard on the forearm, a physical gesture I’d become accustomed to. ‘But I could show you how to become part god. You are as much Kidona as I can make you, Gernian. It would be up to Reshamel to judge you and see if he wished to take you to be one of us. It would be a hard test. You might fail. Then you would die, and not just in this world. But if you passed the test, you would win glory. Glory. In all worlds.’ He spoke of it as another man might gloat over gold.

‘How?’ The word popped out of me, a query that he took as assent.

He looked at me a long time. His grey eyes, unreadable even in the day, were a mystery in the twilight. Then he nodded, more to himself than to me, I think.

‘Come. Follow me where I will lead you.’

I stood to obey him, but he did not seem in a hurry to go anywhere. Instead, he bid me gather more leafy branches and build the fire up until it burned like a beacon. Sparks rose on its smoke whenever I threw more fuel on, and the heat of it made the sweat run down my face and back while the resinous aroma wrapped me. Dewara sat and watched me while I worked. Then, when the fire was roaring like a beast, he slowly stood. Walking to a nearby bush, he tore a fresh branch free, and then wrapped the leafy ends of it in several smaller branches. He wove the smaller branches deftly in and out of the larger one until he had a stick with a dense wad of foliage on one end. When he thrust it into the fire, it kindled almost immediately. Bearing this torch, he led me to the edge of our rocky campsite. For a very brief time he paused at the drop-off, staring out over the plain. In the distance, the land slowly swallowed the sun. Then, as full inky blackness poured over the low lands before us, he turned to me. The torch made his face a shifting mask of shadow and highlights. He spoke in a singsong voice, very different from his usual tone.

‘Are you a man? Are you a warrior? Would Reshamel welcome you to his hunting grounds, or feed your flesh to his dogs? Have you courage and pride, stronger than your desire to live? For that is what makes a Kidona warrior. A Kidona warrior would rather be brave and proud than alive. Would you be a warrior?’

He paused, awaiting my answer. I stepped into his world. ‘I would be a warrior.’ Around me, the wide plateaus and the prairie below seemed to catch their breath and wait.

‘Then follow me,’ he said. ‘I go to open a way for you.’ He lifted his free hand and seemed to touch his lips. For two breaths, he stood there, the flame-light etching his aquiline features into the night.

He stepped off the cliff’s edge.

In shock, I watched him fall, the flames of his torch streaming in the wind of his descent. Abruptly, he vanished. I saw the glow from the torch, but could not see the flame itself. Then even that faded to only a vague nimbus of light. Dewara was gone.

I stood alone on the cliff’s edge. Night was black around me. The wind pushed at me gently but insistently, bringing the sweet scent and heat of the roaring bonfire. It urged me toward the edge of the cliff. What I did I cannot explain, save by saying that Dewara had led me slowly into his world and his way of thinking and his beliefs. What would have been insane and unthinkable a month earlier now seemed my only possible path. Better to fall to my death than be seen as a coward. I stepped off the cliff’s edge.

I fell. I did not scream or even shout. I made that passage in silence, the wind ripping at my worn clothing as I fell. I cannot now judge how long or how far I fell. My feet struck something, and my knees buckled under the impact. I wind-milled my arms wildly, trying as much to fly as to catch my balance. In the darkness, a hand caught me by the front of my shirt and jerked me close. A voice I did not recognize as Dewara’s said, ‘You have passed the first gate. Open your mouth.’

I did.

He thrust something inside it, something small and flat and leathery hard. For a second, it tasted not at all, and then my saliva wet it, and a pungent taste filled my mouth. It was so strong that I smelled it as much as I tasted it. I felt it, too, a strange tingling that sent saliva cascading and made my nose run. An instant later, I heard the taste as well, as my ears began to ring. All my skin stood up in gooseflesh, and I felt the press of the night, not the air, but the darkness, touching my body. Darkness was not the absence of light, I suddenly knew. Darkness was an element that flowed in to fill spaces such as the one I now occupied. The hand that gripped my shirtfront pulled, and I stumbled forward. Somehow, I walked out of darkness and into another world. Light and the sweet scent of the burning torch overwhelmed my senses. I tasted light and heard the smell of the torch. I felt Dewara was there, but I could not see him. I could not see any distinct object. All distance around me faded to an equal blue. All of my senses were aware of every sensation.

A god spoke to me. ‘Open your mouth.’

Again, I obeyed.

Fingers reached between my lips and took a frog from my mouth. The man who smelled like Dewara set the frog on the flames of the torch that was suddenly a tiny campfire on a hearth of seven flat black stones. The frog burned and sizzled, and sent fine threads of fiery red smoke up along with the sweet smoke. The man pushed my head forward, so that I leaned over the tiny fire, breathing the fumes. The smoke stung my eyes. I closed them.

Again, I closed them.

But the landscape that had opened up around me the moment I shut my eyes did not disappear. I could not close my eyes to this world, for it existed inside me. We were on a steep hillside. Huge trees surrounded us, blocking the twilight that filtered down to us, and the forest floor was almost bare of plant life. It was carpeted instead with centuries of fallen leaves. A fine rain of dewdrops fell from the leaves above. A fat yellow snake slithered by, sparing us not a glance. The air was cool and full of moisture. The world smelled rich and alive.

‘This is an illusion,’ I said to Dewara. He stood beside me in that twilight world. I knew it was he, even though he was several feet taller than I was and wore a hawk’s head on his shoulders.

‘Gernian!’ He spat the word at me. ‘You are the one who is not real here. Do not profane the hunting grounds of Reshamel with your disbelief. Go.’

‘No,’ I begged him. ‘No. Let me stay. Let me be real here.’

He just looked at me. His hawk’s eyes were gold and round. His beak looked very sharp. His fingernails were black and curved like talons. I knew he could reach into my breast and lift out my beating heart if he chose to do so. Instead, he waited, giving me time to think.

Suddenly the right words came to me. ‘I would be a man. I would be a warrior. I would be Kidona.’

In some distant place, I was ashamed of myself for disowning my heritage and becoming a savage. Then like a bubble popping, that life no longer mattered. I was Kidona.

We journeyed in that place. I do not remember what time passed, and yet I do. I cannot, for the most part, summon up what we saw or did or spoke there. It is like trying to recall a dream after one has fully awakened. Yet to this day there are moments when I smell a resinous fragrance or hear a distant roar of rapids, and it will bring a sudden vivid recall of a moment in that place and time. I recall that Dewara wore a hawk’s head, and that I sometimes rode on a horse with two heads, one the bristle-maned head of a Kidona pony and one very like to my own Sirlofty. The memories come, sharp as broken glass and then ripple away like a disturbance in a pond. Sometimes I wake from ordinary sleep, grieving that I cannot recall the dreams of that place.

Only one incident remains clear in my mind from that experience. There was a time, neither evening nor morning, yet twilight all the same, as if twilight were the only time that place knew. Dewara and I stood on a bare bluff of deep blue stone. It was the place we had been journeying to, all that time. The forest on the steep hills behind us was a crouching guardian that watched over us. Before us was a chasm, sculpted more by wind than water. Within it, like strange towers of churches built to a wild god, tall pinnacles of stone rose from the distant floor of the canyon. The blustering air had carved spiralling towers and bulging knobs from the rock as neatly as a good cabinet-maker might turn a spindled leg for a chair. The freestanding spires of deeply swirled blue stood like a stony forest in the chasm before us. In the distance, I saw the sag and swoop of the wandering bridges that led from the stony cap of one hoodoo to the next, a meandering pathway across the divide. Dewara pointed across the rift that blocked us, to a land where slices of yellow light revealed stripes of ancient forest and rippling meadowland. The light moved across the land in the same way that cloud shadows dapple over a hill when the wind blows them.

‘There,’ he said, speaking loudly above the whispering sweep of a fragrant wind. He pointed with a long hand, and there were tufts of feathers at his wrist. ‘Over there, you behold the dream home of my people. To get there, one must make a leap, and then cross the six spirit bridges of the Kidona tribe. All it once meant to be a Kidona lived in those bridges. They were built from the stuff of our souls. To cross them was to affirm to our gods that we were Kidona.

‘It was never an easy crossing; always it required courage, but we are a courageous people. And we knew that beyond the challenge of the shaman’s crossing was our homeland, the birthplace of our souls, our place of dreaming, the place to which our spirits ultimately return. But now it has been generations since any Kidona could complete the journey. The bridge was stolen from us. The Dappled Ones robbed us, and made the passage their own. They will suffer none of us to pass.

‘Once, it was our custom that every young warrior and maiden should make this journey. From here, each would cross to the dream place, and sojourn there until a beast of that world chose him. Ever after, that beast would be the guardian of his spirit, offering him wisdom and advice. Our warriors were mighty, and our fields were fertile. In that time, the gentle hills were ours, and we lived well. Our cattle increased every year until they covered the foothills like stones beside a watercourse. We raided far, but for honour and treasures rather than sustenance, for we had a home that yielded all we needed. The Kidona were a mighty people, content with our blessings and a glory to our gods. All that, all that, was taken from us by the Dappled Ones and we were doomed to become nomads, herders of the dust storms, planting only bodies and reaping only death.’

He dropped his hand to his side. He bowed his bird’s head, expressing a sorrow beyond words and stared with longing across the divide.

‘What befell your people?’ I asked at last, when it was plain he intended to say no more.

He heaved a great sigh. ‘In those days, we lived far to the west, in the foothills of what Gernians call the Barrier Mountains. A foolish name. They are not a barrier, but a bridge. The mountains are full of game and rich with trees bearing flowers, fruit and running with sweet sap. Their thick forests are shady and cool in the heat of summer. When the storms of winter blow, the tree canopies are shelter from deep snow and the sweep of the wind. The forests gave us everything we needed. The streams that run down from the high snows teem with fish, frogs, and turtles. Once, they were ours, our land to hunt and forage, and we were a wealthy people. In the forests, we hunted and harvested the same lands as the Dappled Folk. But we also ventured out onto the plains, standing out in the full sun, as they did not dare to do, for their eyes and skin cannot tolerate the full brightness of day. They are creatures of the shadows and twilight times. On the plains at the foot of the mountains, the Kidona kept our herds and flocks in the summer. There we built our towns and cities, our monuments and roads. In the winters, our herdsmen took our beasts up into the shelter of the forest. We prospered. Our herds increased. Our women were thriving, our men full of vigour and so many children were born to us that yearly we had to build new rearing temples to house them.

‘All would have been well, save for the Dappled Folk who infested the mountain forests above us. They resented the increase of our herds, and strove to prevent our expansion of our grazing lands and our taking of timber for our towns. They said that our sheep and our kine ate too much, and that our taldi trampled the winding forest paths into wide roads. They complained of the land that we cleared for fields and mourned every tree that fell to our axes. They claimed the forest as their own, and wanted it to remain as if no man had ever trod there. We wished only to be allowed to have our children, to hunt and harvest as our fathers and grandfathers had done before us. We argued with the Dappled Folk. And eventually, we fought with them.

‘The Dappled Folk are a loathsome race, sly and slick as yellow and black salamanders under a rotting log. We did not seek a grievance with them. We were willing to exchange goods with them, but when we traded with them, they cheated us. Their women are lustful as war chiefs, but will not keep to one man’s bed nor acquire cattle and manage wealth as befits a woman. They ruined our young warriors with random bedding and children they could not know were truly theirs. They set our warriors to fighting amongst themselves. The Dappled men are worse than their women. They would not fight warrior to warrior with swannecks and spears, but struck from a distance, with arrows and stones, so that the souls of the warriors they killed did not reach the territory of the gods, but fell unaware, disgraced as slain prey, like rabbits and grouse, no more than meat. We did not seek grievance with the Dappled Folk but when they forced it upon us, we did not shrink from it. When we rode through their villages and slew all those who did not flee, they vowed revenge on us. The winds of death they sent to us, so that men died coughing, huddled in their own filth. They orphaned our children and left them to die instead of taking them into their families. They set disease on us like dogs on wounded deer. Such deaths end a man completely; there is no after life for men who are betrayed by their own bodies.’

Dewara fell silent, but his feathered chest surged with his emotion. It was the brooding, seething silence of a man who hates and hates without hope of satisfaction. Then he spoke softly, saying, ‘The warriors of your people are on the edges of the mountain forests claimed by the Dappled Folk. Your warriors are strong. They defeated the Kidona, when no other plainspeople could stand against us. I speak to you of our ancient defeat by the Dappled Folk. I reveal to you this shame of my people, so that you may understand that the Dappled Ones deserve none of your good god’s mercy. You should show them the same sword’s edge you showed us. Use your iron weapons, to slay them from a distance, and never go near their people or their homes, or they will work their sorcery upon you. They should be trampled underfoot like dung-worms. No humiliation is undeserved by them, no atrocity too vicious to inflict on them. Do not ever regret anything your folk do to them, for behold what they did to my people. They severed our bridge to the dream world.’ His hands fell to his sides. ‘When I die, my being will end. There is no passage for me to the birth lands of the spirits of my people.

‘When I was a young man, before our war with your people, I vowed I would reopen this passage. I made my vow before my people and my gods. I captured and shed the blood of a hawk to bind me to it. And so I am bound.’ He gestured at his bird form. ‘Twice I attempted this passage. I crossed and did battle with the terrible guardian they have set upon our way. Twice, I was defeated. But I did not surrender, nor did I give up. Not until your father shot me with his iron, not until he sank the magic of your people deep into my chest, crippling my Kidona magic, did I know that I could not do this myself. I thought I had failed.’

He paused in his account and shook his beaked head. ‘I had no hope. I knew I was condemned to the torment of the oath-breaker when I died. But then the gods revealed to me their way. This is why they allowed your people to make war upon us and conquer us. This is why they showed up the power of your iron magic. This is why your father sought me out and gave you to me. The gods sent me my weapon. I have trained you and taught you. The iron magic belongs to you, and you belong to me. I send you to open the way for the Kidona. It has taken all the strength of the feeble magic that remains in me to bring you this far. I can go no further. I redeem my oath in you and bring great glory to my name forever. You will slay their guardian with the cold iron magic. Go now. Open the way.’

‘I have no weapon,’ I said. My own words made me a coward in my eyes.

‘I will show you how, now. This is how you summon your weapon to you.’

He stooped impatiently and dragged his finger in a crescent in the dust. It left a line. He stooped, and blew upon the dusty stone, and as the dust flew away from his breath, a shining bronze swanneck was revealed. He gestured at it proudly. Then he lifted it from the ground; its outline remained in the stone of the cliffs, like the imprint of an animal’s hoof near a streambed. With a powerful blow, he drove the gleaming blade into the blue stone at our feet. ‘There. That will hold this end of the bridge for the Kidona people. Now, you must summon your own weapon, to use against the guardian. I cannot call iron.’

I pushed my doubts away. I stooped and in the dust, I drew an image I knew well. It was an image I had idly drawn a thousand times in my boyhood. I drew a cavalla sword, proud and straight, with a sturdy haft and dangling tassel. As my fingers traced it against the stone, I suddenly hungered for the weapon to be within my hand again. And when I stooped and blew my breath across the dusty stone, the sword I had left at Dewara’s campsite was suddenly there at my feet. Triumphant, yet wondering, I lifted the blade from the earth. Its imprint remained behind beside the swanneck’s. When I proudly flourished it aloft, Dewara shrank from it, lifting his arm-wing to shield himself from the steel in my hand.

‘Take it and go!’ he hissed, his arms lifted to mimic the aggressive stance of a bird. ‘Slay the guardian. But bear it away from me before it can weaken the magic that holds us here. Go. My swanneck anchors this end. Your iron will hold the other.’

I had become so much his creature that I could not think of any alternative to doing what he had commanded. In that time and place and uncertain light, there was no room for me to think of disobeying him. So I turned from him and walked along the stone ledge to the cliff’s edge. The rocky chasm gaped bottomlessly before me. The standing hoodoos of stone and the flimsy bridges that connected them were my only possible passage to the other side. My destination was faded by distance, as if smoke or fog hung in the air and curtained it. I could see no detail of it. The sculpted pinnacles varied in size; the tops of some were no bigger than tables, whilst others could have supported a mansion. The capstones of each spire were a slightly different grey-blue, a harder stone than that of the softer columns that the wind had eroded away beneath them. There was no bridge between the cliff edge and the first hoodoo. I would have to leap to it. It was not an impossible distance, and my landing place was large, as big as the beds of two wagons. If I had been leaping over solid ground, it would not have been so daunting. But below me gaped the seemingly bottomless ravine. I gathered my courage and my strength for the leap.

Then, as I watched, a bronze path, no wider than the blade of the swanneck, flowed from the embedded weapon to the top of the first hoodoo. Like an unfurling ribbon, the tongue of shimmering metal reached out across the void until it touched the first hoodoo. It was not a wide bridge, but it spanned it. I thrust my cavalla sabre into my belt, spread my arms for balance, and stepped out onto the bronze path.

Almost immediately, I lost my footing. The sword in my belt suddenly seemed to weigh as much as an anvil. I wrenched my whole body against the drag, started to topple the other way, and responded by sprinting forward along the length toward the hoodoo. Its top was slightly rounded, like a very large bed-knob. A gritty layer of sand coated the capstone and I skidded in it and fell to my knees as I tried to stop, halting less than an arm’s length from the edge. For an instant I crouched there, catching my breath and calming my heart. Grinning foolishly at my near mishap, I glanced back at Dewara. He was unimpressed. Impatiently, he gestured me on.

The scant layer of sand crunched under my feet as I stood. I looked down at the footbridge that awaited me. It was narrow and insubstantial. Bits of brightly painted pottery floated in a net of spider web. At my feet, three hawk feathers stood upright, their shafts wedged in tiny heaps of sand. The wind stirred them and they swayed. Gossamer threads reached from these foolish anchors to the footbridge that spanned the gap. I did not think a mouse could safely cross such a frail construction, let alone a man. I looked again to Dewara for guidance. He opened one wing wide and pointed at a gap in his flight feathers. This magic belonged to him, then. He obviously had full faith in it, for he flapped his arms at me, shooing me on. Later, it would seem foolhardy to me, but at the moment, I felt I had no choice. I stepped out onto the bridge. It gave beneath me, sagging so that my foot sank, just as if I had stepped out onto netting. It was the weight of my iron, I knew, that burdened the bridge. On my next step, it sagged even more, and swayed. It was like trying to walk across an insubstantial hammock that was decorated with shards of ceramic and stretched beneath my weight. Yet even that does not describe it at all. I suppose it was an experience of that world, and thus untranslatable to this one.

There was nothing certain about my footing. The bits of pottery sank unevenly beneath me and the bridge swayed with every step I took. Sometimes I sank so deeply that I had to lift my foot unnaturally high to step to the next stone, as if I were climbing a very steep stair. The pottery fragments that floored the path were marked with distinctive patterns that I had never seen before. Some of them were fire-blackened, as if from much use. Sometimes I sank almost waist deep in the netted path so that I had to wallow onto the next section of trail, which in turn sank under me. It was more exhausting than breaking trail in deep wet snow, and yet I pushed on, for I could not turn around and go back. It was a narrow way, and to either side, the bottomless chasm yawned. Once, panting, I rested and looked down. I had thought to see a river carving its way amongst those natural monuments. Instead, the spiral stone pillars seemed to descend endlessly into a shadowy distance. If I fell, I might die of starvation before my bones were ever shattered by the impact. I shook my head at that thought, and forced myself to go on.

After a long struggle, I reached the second hoodoo of turned blue stone. I dragged myself up from the path onto the rounded top of the spire and lay there, catching my breath. When I looked back, I was shocked to find I had come a very short way. Dewara stood on the cliffs, staring at me, his hawk’s beak ajar. He shifted from foot to foot uncertainly.

‘The path seems difficult but sound.’ I said the words first and the air swallowed them. Then I shouted them, and saw Dewara cock his head, as if he knew I had spoken but could not hear my voice. And yet it did not seem he was that far away from me.

Slowly I got to my feet. I was not rested yet I felt driven to go on, as if I only had a certain amount of time in which to accomplish my task. I eyed the new section of trail before me. Fine threads, braided and interwoven, made a softly gleaming trail. I knelt and touched it. Hair. Human hair, I judged, in every shade from blackest ebony to pale gold. I patted it with my hand. It seemed sound. I rose and again stepped from the dome of stone onto the strange floating pathway. I walked out feeling relieved at the sturdiness of this new path. But three steps from the rock, it swayed beneath me as if I stood in a swing.

My sisters used to play a game with tops, trying to make one walk the length of a tautly strung ribbon. I was the top, and the ribbon I traversed was not taut. The farther I went from the rock spire, the more it sagged beneath my weight. I drew my sword and gripped it, holding it horizontally with both hands as if it were a balance pole. Briefly it made a small improvement. Then the bridge began to swing, like the lazy swinging of a girl’s jump rope. I felt sick with dizziness, but pressed on, now edging upward on the sag of matted hair. Behind me, Dewara shouted something, but his words seemed distant and I dared not look back at him.

When I reached the third pinnacle of stone, I clawed my way onto it and sat down to catch my breath. I glanced back at Dewara then, but he had sunk his hawk’s head down upon his hunched shoulders and perched motionless on the edge of the chasm. I could read nothing in his bird’s eyes, and his arms were clapped to his sides. There was no help or advice for me there.

I looked to the next hoodoo. A longer path separated it than the three I had trodden. That next resting place looked smaller, too, and even more rounded. The path to it was an interlocking web of plants. Tiny white flowers, smaller than my smallest fingernail, blossomed thickly on the matted vines. Suspicious, I pushed hard on it with my hand before venturing forth. The tough roots held. When I poked at them with my sword, they browned and shrivelled away. That would not do. I had no desire to weaken the path by killing the plants. I placed my sabre once again through my belt. This path was wider, also, and the roots of the plants seemed anchored to the pillar on which I stood, reminding me of ivy climbing up the trunks of trees and the walls of houses.

I set out across the path more boldly than I had the previous two. It bore me up firmly and although the plants and their tough vines crunched underfoot as I stepped on them, it did not sway nor give beneath my stride. The fragrance of the crushed flowers and foliage was oddly pungent, but surely a smell could not harm me. I was halfway across before my hands burst into tiny white blisters. They itched painfully and I longed to scratch them. Even clutching my hands into fists caused the tiny blisters to burst. The liquid that flowed from them seared my skin, and left a second crop of white blisters in its wake. I held my hands away from my body and tried to ignore the searing pain. How grateful I was that I wore boots and not the low, soft shoes of a plainsman. If the plants had affected my feet, I do not think I could have gone on. As it was, my eyes began to burn and my nose to run. It took stern discipline to keep my hands away from my face. I stumbled on, and when I reached the next stone support, I found it as small as it had appeared. I stepped away from the loathsome plants and perched on a hoodoo cap no larger than a dinner platter.

Almost as soon as I had stepped onto the stone cap, my agonies ceased. The sores on my hands ceased burning. I still dared not touch my face, but when I turned my face to my shoulder and rubbed my streaming eyes on my upper arm, my symptoms began to clear. I would have felt much better, had I not been perched on such a tiny island. There was not room enough to sit down and rest, and so I moved on.

The next bridge was made of bird bones, cleverly bored and bound together with fine thread ligaments. Occasional beads of shell or polished stone glittered in the network. Perhaps they had been bracelets or necklaces before they had been re-wrought into a suspension bridge. The tiny bones clicked together as I ventured over them. Despite the fragility of the fine white bones, none of them gave way beneath me, nor did the bridge sway or give to my weight. Only the rising wind gave me pause as it tugged at my clothing and whispered past my ears. The wind carried a strange and distant music. I paused to listen to it. The distant whistling of flutes and rattle of bone castanets marked it as Kidona music. It was foreign to me and yet I sensed its significance. I looked down at the bridge beneath my feet and suddenly knew the bird bones were parts of a musical instrument. The music sang to me in a language I almost knew. I stood still, trying to comprehend its meaning. I think if I had truly been a plainsman, it would have been more compelling in its efforts to lull me. As it was, I was able to shake off its influence and walk on. I completed that leg of the journey, reaching a much larger pinnacle of stone.

This refuge was as generous as the last one had been mean; I could have stretched out and slept upon it with no fear of tumbling off. The very temptation to do so warned me against it. I had finally sensed something about the bridges that I should have suspected all along. This pathway was not for me. Dewara had done all he could to make me think like a Kidona, but I was not truly Kidona. I traversed stretches of meaning that eluded me. I suspected there was great significance to each crossing, symbolism and subtext that did not reach my Gernian soul. For some reason, that made me feel diminished and ashamed, like an uneducated man unable to comprehend the cultural significance of a lovely poem. I did not even understand the full significance of the challenges I faced, and thus they did not truly challenge me. Chastened, I did not even glance back at Dewara, but crossed the capstone to where the next bridge began.

This bridge was all of ice, not the solid ice of a frozen pond in the dead of winter, but the fantastic ice that festoons glass into a garden of fern fronds. It seemed no thicker than window glass, and I could see through it into the deep blue distance below me. I was only a few steps out onto it before the cold bit deeply into my bones. I listened for the sound of running cracks. I shivered as I went, and my footing was slippery and uncertain. Memories not my own shivered around me. There had been a time of great hardship, a time when the old and the young died, and even the strong faced desperate decisions in order to survive. Had I truly been Kidona, the heartbreak of those recollections might have driven me to my knees with weeping. But those horrors had happened to a people not my own in a distant time. I could sympathize with their sorrows, but they were not my sorrows. I walked on, past that season of heartbreak and reached the next pinnacle of respite.

Bridge after bridge, each a test of my courage, had zigzagged me slowly across the chasm. Yet as I stood facing the next bridge, I had the uneasy feeling that I had cheated, as if I had strode unchecked through a child’s hopping game. Did my lack of roots in the Kidona culture or my cold iron make me impervious to the challenges of this task? I looked back to Dewara. He perched still and distant at the beginning of the bridge. Suspicion tapped softly on my shoulder, breathed chill down my neck. Did he hope I would succeed, or was I a stalking horse for some incomprehensible plan of his foreign mind? I stood at the lip of the next bridge and doubted all he had ever told me. Nonetheless, I went on.

The next bridge was of mud brick, solid and ancient. The bridge had block walls along each side and towers at the midpoint. It was wide enough for an oxcart to traverse. It did not swing nor sway. I should have felt safe crossing it, yet the hair stood up on my head, arms and neck. Haunted. That was the word that came to me. The bridge spoke of a time when the Kidona had built things that would stand in place for generations. Dim memories of lively towns tried to reach me. I could not believe them. As I walked out onto the bridge, its ruin was revealed to me. Rain and wind had rounded the corners of the mud bricks. Cracks wandered through the walls that edged it. Time had sucked on this structure, softening and dissolving the decorative carvings that had once stood in bas-relief on its balustrades and arches. This mighty work of the Kidona people was dwindling away, one layer of red dust at a time, just as the Kidona people were dwindling away. I felt a sudden awareness of the connection. When this weakening bridge was gone, eaten by wind and rain and time, the Kidona people would also be gone, not just from this world but from my own as well.

The farther I went, the more obvious was the decay. There were gaps in the paving under my feet, and blue distance showed in the holes. I began to encounter thin runners of vine twining along the walls of the bridge. Tiny, flowering plants had found homes in the hollows of the disintegrating bricks: Their roots pried into the cracks, and their crawling foliage snaked over the Kidona bricks, obscuring them.

I walked on, into a strange dusk. When I looked back, the long afternoon seemed to linger in the distance. The sun’s warm light shone on Dewara’s crouching figure. But the light faded gently around me as I ventured on. Plant life grew thicker on the bridge. Small trees had found places to root, and tussocks of grass grew around them. I began to hear insects and to smell the fragrance of the blossoms. Less and less of the brickwork was visible; the encroaching forest had swallowed it, cloaking it with greenery and taking it over. The walkway beneath me became ropy with vines and crawling creepers. They engulfed the turrets of the bridge and reached out over my head to tangle with one another. The bridge had become a tunnel of greenery. The twilight sky and the depths below me peeked at me from irregular openings in the foliage.

At some point, I halted, feeling more than seeing that I had left the Kidona bridge behind. I now stood upon the forest that had enveloped and devoured it. It felt oddly foreign to me, as if I had left the last vestiges of a familiar world behind and now ventured into a place where I had no right to be. A pervasive sense of wrongness thrummed through me. My body as much as my mind commanded me to turn back. The passage before me radiated hostility. All of those sensations reached me through a sense I had no name for. I saw a lovely woodland path before me in the evening twilight. A cool sweet wind blew, carrying the scent of evening flowers. I could hear birdcalls in the distance.

I lifted my eyes and looked ahead. The dimming light revealed to me a grandfather tree at the end of the tunnel. The gnarled roots snaked out from that cliff’s edge and crossed what remained of the chasm to become the foundation of the path I now walked. Red flowers the size of dinner plates peeped out from the tree’s thick foliage. Butterflies played lazily about the crown of the big-leaved tree, and grass grew thick beneath it. It beckoned me as a place of peace and rest. Yet I regarded the great tree with suspicion. Was this the final guardian that Dewara had spoken about? I wondered if the sylvan serenity before me were a trap. Did it lure me to carelessness? Once I had trusted myself to the pathway of tangling roots, would it twist and tumble me into the abyss?

I looked more closely at the network of living vines and roots that would be the final link in my trail. Part of a skull, a yellow-brown dome of bone, protruded from the moss and vines. Beyond it, a skinny root snaked in and then out of a shattered leg bone, as if it had sucked the marrow there and gained sustenance from it. The bones were old but I took no comfort from that. Farther along the pathway, I glimpsed the corroded stump of a broken swanneck. I turned and looked back toward Dewara. He was a tiny figure at the end of a green tube. He perched on the edge of the bluff, watching me. I lifted my arm in greeting to him. He lifted his, not in response but to wave me on.

I took my sabre from my belt and held it at the ready. Some small part of me saw the innate foolishness of this. If I attacked the bridge and cut it through, would I have won? I wanted to look back at Dewara again, but I deemed that he would judge such hesitation as cowardice. Would I or would I not be Kidona? If I finished the crossing, would I have won the way for them again?

I stepped out onto the bridge of roots and tested my weight on it. It was sound. It did not sway nor creak, but held me as firmly as the brick walkway had. I moved forward in the warrior’s crouch Dewara had taught me. I kept my weight low and centred, my sword going before me.

When I was a third of the way across the living section of the bridge, the roots began to creak under me, very slightly, like straining ropes. I continued to move forward, placing each foot as securely as I could on the uneven surface of the root web and holding myself ready for the expected attack. My senses strained against their limits as I strove to be wary. The tree was the sentry, Dewara had said. I fixed my attention on it, searching it for signs of hidden attackers or unnatural activity as I eased toward it.

It did nothing.

I felt a bit foolish by the time I had traversed two-thirds of the forest bridge with absolutely no signs of hostility from the tree. I began to wonder if this were one of Dewara’s practical jokes. Usually, they were physically painful, but perhaps he simply meant to humiliate me. Or perhaps there was something about the tree that he wished me to see. I stopped watching it and studied it instead. The closer I came to it, the more immense it was. The trees I knew were the trees of the plains, bent by the constant winds. They grew very slowly, and the oldest ones I’d seen did not have a quarter of the girth of the tree before me. This tree stood straight and tall; she was thick of trunk and limb, reaching her branches wide to the nourishment of the sun. Her fallen leaves carpeted the earth below her, a thick, rich litter of humus and leaf skeletons and last year’s leaves gone brown but still recognizable. The red flowers had tall yellow stamens in their centres. When the wind puffed past them, they released their yellow pollen to drift like smoke. The wind blew some toward me; it smelled earthy and rich, but stung my eyes. I blinked to clear the pollen from my lashes, and when my watering vision cleared, a woman stood before the tree. I halted.

She was no guardian warrior! I stared at her, aghast. She was very old and very fat. She was someone’s fat old granny, save that I had never before seen a woman so corpulent. Her bright eyes were hooded with flesh and wrinkles. Both her nose and ears had grown with her years. Her lips were plumped and pursed at me as if she considered me in as much bewilderment as I did her.

I continued to stare, to try to make sense of what confronted me. Dewara wanted me to do battle with this? Her flesh girdled her arms and doubled her chin. Many rings were sunken into her plump fingers, and heavy earrings, thick with gemstones, had stretched the lobes of her ears. Her fallen bosom was enormous and rested on the rolling swell of her belly. Her hair, long and streaky grey as a horse’s mane, hung like a cloak over her shoulders and down her back. The persistent breeze toyed with its uneven ends. Her robe looked as if it had been woven from grey-green lichen. It hung nearly to the ground, tenting her immense girth, and her thick ankles and plump feet showed beneath it. She was barefoot. The sunlight breaking through the tree’s leafy canopy dappled her skin and garment with shadow.

Then she moved, and my image of her changed. When she shifted, the shadowy patterns on her skin and robe moved with her, independent of the true shadows of the leaves. Her feet, like her bare arms and face, were patterned with splotches of pigment. Even at that distance, I recognized it was neither paint nor tattoo. She was dappled, speckled with colour. It took an instant before I realized that, for the first time in my life, I was seeing a Speck.

The reality was far different from the images I had formed in my mind. I had thought a Speck would be speckled with small marks, like freckles. Instead, the colour that patterned her skin was uneven. It reminded me of the dappling of some cats, as if their stripes were left unfinished to become splotches and dots. Her dapples gave me that sense of a pattern interrupted. A dark stripe ran down her nose. Dark streaks radiated from the corners of her eyes. The backs of her hands and fingers were dark, like a cat’s sooty feet, but the colour faded on her forearms.

Entranced, I drew closer to her, almost forgetting Dewara’s warnings. My approach had become the cautious creep of the fascinated cat rather than the wary stalking of a warrior. Her face was still, her expression both serene and dignified. Now she seemed, not old, but ageless. Her face was lined but they were the kindly lines of a woman who smiled often and enjoyed life. In a woman of my own kind, I would have found her bulging flesh repulsive, but because she was a Speck, it seemed just another difference between us.

She spoke, asking in Jindobe, ‘Who approaches?’ Her expression remained grave, but her low voice was courteously neutral. It was the question that anyone might ask of a stranger approaching her door.

I halted. I wanted to answer her, but I could not remember my name. I felt that I had left it behind when I entered the Kidona world. I reminded myself that I had taken Dewara’s challenge in order to become Kidona. To become a warrior and gain Dewara’s respect, I had to defeat the enemy in front of me. Yet he had not warned me that the sentry might be an old woman. The part of me that was not Kidona felt shamed by the bare blade in my hand and my failure to reply to her courteous question. A Gernian soldier did not bear weapons against women and children. I felt a strong tug from that self, and found myself lowering my sword. I tried to be chivalrous and yet warrior-like as I said, ‘The one who brought me here calls me “soldier’s son”.’

She cocked her head to one side and smiled at me as if I were very young. Her voice rebuked me gently, as a kindly old woman might recall manners to a youngster. ‘That is not your proper name, nor any way to introduce yourself. What is the name your father gave you?’

I took a breath and found a truth I had not previously known. ‘I do not think I can say that name here. I came here to be Kidona. But as of yet, I have no name in Kidona.’ After I spoke, I felt suddenly childishly foolish, to have confided this information to my enemy. I hardened my muscles and brought my blade up to readiness again.

She seemed singularly unimpressed with my sabre. She leaned closer, and as she did so, I perceived that her loose hair was snagged on the tree’s trunk, as if binding her to it. She peered at me and I felt that she looked deep inside me. In a quiet, almost confidential voice, she informed me, ‘I see your difficulty. He thinks to use you to force his way past me. He has made you believe that you must kill me to gain a man’s respect and standing. That is not true. Killing is only killing. The respect that Kidona will give you if you kill me is real only to him. No one else believes in it, least of all you. And you don’t have to kill me to earn true respect. My blood will only buy you that fool’s regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.’

I thought about what she said. They were an idealist’s words that made sense as a lofty philosophy. But on a day-to-day level, I knew that much of my world had been bought with blood. My father often spoke of that, that our soldiers, especially the cavalla officers, had ‘bought the new Gernia with their lives, made these lands ours when the soils of them were watered with the blood of our soldier sons.’

‘I don’t agree with you!’ I called out to her, and then realized I need not have spoken so loud. Somehow I had drawn much closer to her without being aware of it. I wondered if the root path had drawn me closer, unperceived by me. I glanced around but had no way to tell.

She smiled then, an elder’s smile. ‘The truth doesn’t need you to recognize it, young man, for it to be so. You need the truth to recognize you. Until you do, you are not real. But let us set aside the truth of the worthlessness of things bought with blood. Let us try to recall who you are in another way. We are not defined by what we die for, but by what we live for. Will you acknowledge that truth?’

Somehow, the whole situation had changed. She was testing me now, rather than meeting my warrior’s challenge. I felt that she guarded the bridge, demanding that I prove myself worthy to cross. If I earned her regard, she would permit me passage. I did not have to be Kidona to cross.

Distant as a bird’s call on a hot summer day, Dewara’s voice reached me. ‘Do not talk with her! She will twist your thoughts like a twining vine. Ignore her words. Rush forward and kill her! It is your only hope!’

She did not lift her voice to reply to him. She spoke almost quietly as she said, ‘Be quiet, Kidona man. Let your “warrior” speak for himself.’

‘Kill her now, soldier’s son! She seeks to possess you!’

But like a distant birdcall, the sound of his voice seemed a territorial challenge that did not apply to me. I let his words go by me, my mind mulling over the tree woman’s words. Defined by what we live for. Was that how I defined myself? Should a soldier ponder such things?

‘The same things I live for are the things I would die for,’ I said, thinking of my king, my country and my family.

She nodded slowly, like the canopy of a tree swaying in a flurry of wind.

‘I see that. There is much in you that wants to live for those things. More of you wishes to live for them than to die for the Kidona man’s respect. He is the one who sends you to kill me. You do not have that quest in your true heart, but only in the heart he has tried to give you. He thinks he cannot lose. You are, still, the son of his enemy. If I die, you have served him well. If you die, he takes no real loss. But I think either death would be a loss for you. What was your real quest, soldier’s son? Why have the gods sent you to me, why have you managed to come past every trap unscathed? I do not think you are meant to die trying to kill me. There is more to you than that. You come as a weapon. Are you a weapon from the gods given as a gift to me?’

‘I do not understand.’

‘It’s a simple question.’ She leaned toward me, studying me intently. ‘Did you make the crossing to this world to take life or to give it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do I mean? Isn’t it clear? I ask you to make a choice: life or death. Which do you worship?’

‘I don’t … that is … I want … I don’t know! I don’t know what you mean!’ I groped within myself but found no good answer to her question. I suddenly knew that I was in very great danger, the sort of danger that lasts not a moment, but an eternity, and threatens not the body but the soul. All I wanted was to go back to my own world, to be my father’s son and live to be a soldier for my king. The answer came to me too late. I had no chance to utter a syllable.

‘I shall have to find out for you, I think. Live or die, soldier’s son.’

The roots parted and the bridge opened under me. The twining tendrils did not break; they opened their network to allow me to plunge through. As they gave way, I desperately lunged forward, running over roots that gave way beneath my feet, hoping against hope to reach solid ground.

I fell short. Suddenly there was nothing under my feet. My left hand scrabbled at roots that squirmed away from my touch, refusing me a grip. All the roots had fled, opening wide a gap in their web, leaving only bare stone cliff before me. In a stupidly futile act I jabbed my sabre toward the ground that the tip of the blade could barely reach.

It sank in, with a jolt that sent a shock up my arm, gripped unnaturally by the stone that had given way before it. It defied all physical laws I knew, and the fright of that was stunning. The tree woman gasped, in surprise or pain, I don’t know which. But I was still falling, and in foolish desperation, I grabbed the blade of my sabre with my left hand as my right came free of the hilt. The blade cut into my fingers, but that pain was nothing compared to the terror I felt at falling into that abyss. In an instant, I’d wrapped my right hand around the blade as well. I clung there, the weight of my body suspended from my hands gripping that carefully honed edge, the toes of my boots scrabbling against the undercut cliff. I knew it would soon be over. My mind’s command to my hands to grip would either give way to pain or be futile when I’d severed my own fingers from my hands.

‘Help me!’ I cried, neither to the tree woman who stood looking down at me mercilessly nor to Dewara who had sent me to this doom. Rather, I shouted to the uncaring universe, a desperate plea that something would take pity on this dangling bit of life.

The pain was agonizing and the blade was slippery with my own blood. I wanted to let go with one hand and try for a handhold on the bluish stone, but it was smooth and featureless. I closed my eyes, not wishing to see my fingers fall from my hands before I plunged to my doom.

‘Shall I take you up?’ the tree woman asked me.

‘Help me! Please!’ I begged suddenly, no longer caring if she was friend or foe. She was my sole chance for survival. My eyes flew open. She had come closer but was still out of reach. She stood, looking down at me curiously. I could see the fronds of ferns growing from her mossy dress.

‘Please, what?’ she asked me, gently, implacably.

‘Please help me up!’ I gasped.

‘Please take you up?’ she asked, as if she had to be certain she had heard me correctly. ‘You wish to live, then? To cross the bridge and complete it?’

‘Please! Take me up!’ I all but shrieked the words. Blood was running down my wrists. The edge of the blade had found the joints in my fingers and was slicing through them. I feared I would faint from the pain even if my fingers did not detach.

She was implacable. ‘I must give you the choice. You can say you wish to die, rather than have your life taken up. If you so choose, so shall it be. But if you wish to be taken up to this life, then you must choose it clearly. The magic does not take anyone against his will. Do you choose the bridge?’ She knelt at the edge of the cliff, leaning over me but still out of my reach. I could smell her odour, old woman and humus mingled in a sickening richness.

‘I … choose … life!’ My heart was pounding in my ears. I could barely find breath to get the words out. I could claim that I did not know what I was saying, but a part of me did. The tree woman was not speaking of death and life as I knew it; those words conveyed something else when she spoke them. I suppose I could have dangled there longer, and demanded that she explain herself. I feared I made a coward’s choice, choosing my life at some hideous expense that I could not yet comprehend. At the time, with blackness at the edges of my vision, demanding the exact terms of her bargain did not seem an option. I would live first, and then do whatever I must to make it right.

In the vast distance, I heard Dewara shout. ‘Fool! Fool! She has you now! You’ve become hers! You’ve opened the way and condemned us all!’ The words came tiny but clear to my ears. I thought my fear was as fierce as it could get, but Dewara’s warning sent a fresh rush of dread surging through my body. To what had I agreed? What would the tree woman’s victory mean to me?

Yet there was no triumph in the tree woman’s voice, only acquiescence to my wish when she spoke. ‘As you have asked it, so shall it be. I take you up. Come and join us.’

I had expected that she would grasp my wrists and pull me up. Instead, she reached down and I felt her fingers touch the top of my head. My father always kept my hair cut short, no longer than the tops of my ears, as befitted a soldier son, but in my time with Dewara, it had grown out. She gripped me by the hair on the top of my head. Even then, she did not pull me up, but seemed to twine my hair in her fingers, as if getting a better grip on it.

Dimly, I became aware that Tree Woman was speaking in a raised voice. She ignored me, and sent her words over the abyss to Dewara. ‘Was this your weapon, Kidona man? This boy from the west? Ha. The magic has chosen him, and given him to me. I will use him well. Thank you for such a fine weapon, Kidona man!’

Then her voice went very soft. I think I only heard it in my mind. The words reached me as I struggled to keep my grip. She pulled relentlessly upward on my hair now, but it did not seem to lift me.

‘Grab my wrists!’ I begged her, but she did not heed me. She spoke calmly, giving me instructions. ‘To you, the magic will give a token. Guard it carefully and keep it by you. And from you, I take a token of my own. It will link us, soldier’s boy. What you speak, I will hear. I will taste the food you eat, and in turn I will fill you with my sustenance. All you are, I will share and learn.

‘To you I will give a great task; you will stop the spread of the intruders. You will turn back the tide of encroachers and destroyers from our lands. Of you I will make a tool to defeat those who would destroy us.’ As my mind reeled with pain and I attempted to understand, she lifted her voice again. ‘He serves my magic and me now, Kidona man. And you gave him to me! Go back and tell your leather-skinned folk that! You gave your weapon into my hand! And now I take it!’

Her words made no sense to me and I had no time to ponder them. My panic increased as I felt her grip tighten on my hair. She pulled suddenly upward and I felt my hair ripping out of my scalp. The pain shot down my spine. I twitched like a gaffed fish. Deep inside me, something important gave way and was dragged out of me, like a strand of thread drawn out of a piece of weaving.

Suddenly her face was so close to me that I could feel her breath on my lips. The only thing I could see were her grey green eyes as she said, ‘I have you now. You can let go.’

I did. I fell into blackness.