34
‘I am trying to help you.’
Nestled deep within the netherdark, Hestillion made herself small and pliant in an attempt to disguise her growing irritation. Ygseril’s dreaming mind was brighter than ever, a great diffuse cloud of light that hung over her as the tree-god’s branches once had, but his physical body remained inert – the grey bark did not grow warmer, no leaves grew, and most importantly, no sap flowed. She was no closer to understanding what had happened, and how it could be solved.
Why?
Ygseril had asked this before. No answer seemed sufficient.
‘Because you are the god of my people,’ she said evenly. ‘Without you, we are dying.’
Living things die. Matter is consumed. Other things grow.
‘Of course, my lord, but for an entire people to die? It is a tragedy.’
When the voice spoke again, the light was a little brighter. Any people?
If she had possessed her physical form, Hestillion would have bitten her lip. Conversations with Ygseril seemed to go nowhere, every attempt to extract information thrown off with incomprehensible questions.
‘We are the god-touched, lord. You raised us above all the peoples of Sarn to be your glory.’ Hestillion paused. Had Ygseril decided they were not worthy of saving? Did he no longer love his own creatures? That would explain the centuries of deathly silence. ‘But without your sap, we wane.’
You are so determined. The voice sounded amused now. Hestillion swallowed down the surge of impatience that threatened to close her throat, but frustration shivered through her voice like the strings of a plucked instrument.
‘I only wish to restore you, Ygseril. Please, tell me what you need and I shall see that it is done. My resources are so much greater than they were – I have much of Sarn dancing at my fingertips! Whatever it is you need, we can find it.’
Whatever it was, she needed to figure it out soon. The humans easily outnumbered them now, and she knew that if they truly wanted to enter the Hall of Roots, they could. And if that happened, any chance that Hestillion had to keep this secret – this incredible, this desperate secret – to herself would vanish, and with it her chance to be the one to save Ebora. She would never have the time alone with him, and she was sure that was the key.
It is so dark down here. We only seek the light.
Hestillion frowned. She had not heard Ygseril refer to himself as ‘we’ before.
‘Do you require more light? Is that it?’
It couldn’t be. They had tried that, more than once, over the long quiet years of slow death, and it had never made any difference. But Ygseril didn’t answer, and as she waited, the soft cloud of light slowly faded away, until she was alone in the shadow roots.
It was intolerable.
Aldasair stood very still, feeling his discomfort prickle up his back like the legs of some great insect. There was no escaping. They were everywhere, blocking his every escape route.
‘But there’s nothing to do here!’
A small fist clutched at his cuff. It was probably a sticky fist. He looked down at the human child and attempted to arrange his features into something approaching affable, if not exactly friendly.
‘Can you not amuse yourselves? When I was a child –’ Aldasair cleared his throat. He hadn’t been a child for hundreds of years. ‘When I was a child we learned how to play musical instruments or paint pictures.’
The look the human child gave him made Aldasair realise that all the frustrated looks shot his way by Hestillion over the years had actually been remarkably polite.
‘We don’t have musical insraments.’
So many of Ebora’s visitors had brought children with them that it had been decided that a particular place should be found for them – much of the city was still unsafe, after all, populated by hungry wolves, and dotted with buildings on the point of collapse; curious children exploring such a place could mean disaster. Aldasair had brought them to the old ballroom, thinking of long-ago evenings full of music and laughter, but of course there was no music any more, and it was a vast, lonely place despite the tall windows filled with light. Now, it smelled strongly of dust and mould, and the human children – around twenty of them so far – seemed distinctly unimpressed. They clustered around him, staring openly at his face with very little of the reticence of their parents.
‘If you could, if you could just –’ He took a slow breath. So much talking, after so many years of silence, and all these eyes watching. ‘Please. Just –’ He took a few steps backwards, and half of them shuffled with him. ‘Whatever you would do, in your own homes, if you could—’
A tall figure swept into the room from behind him, picking up the child at his sleeve and whipping him into the air as though he were made of feathers.
‘I’m hungry,’ declared Bern the Younger to the room at large. ‘This rabbit looks about the right size for me.’ He slung the child, who was shrieking with delight, over his shoulder. To Aldasair’s amazement, the other small humans were grinning at him too. ‘Or, let me check – not sure there’s enough flesh on his bones.’ He tickled the boy, who yowled and wriggled with laughter so violent that Bern swept him back down to the floor.
‘Bern! Bern!’ One of the smallest girls ran over and hugged his knee. ‘It’s so boring, Bern, will you play with us, Bern?’
‘What’s this chicken clucking at my leg? Are you laying an egg, little chicken?’ Bern straightened up and looked around at the room. ‘Well, this is certainly a big place. I am afraid, noisy chickens and skinny rabbits, that I have lots of important work to do, and so does Lord Aldasair here, but, I do have something for you.’ He reached into a small leather bag at his belt and brought out a handful of perfectly round grey stones. They were all carved with symbols Aldasair didn’t recognise.
‘What’s that, what’s that?’ The small girl threw herself at Bern’s legs with all her might, not moving him in the slightest.
‘These are Thump Stones.’ He looked up and surveyed the room before gesturing to a lanky human boy with braided blond hair. ‘I see you lurking at the back there, Raggn. Do you feel like teaching these smelly animals how to play Thump?’ He reached back into the bag and retrieved two smaller bags made of yellow cloth. ‘I have enough here to set up a tournament.’
The tall boy grinned lopsidedly.
‘Aye, Bern, it’s no trouble.’
The big man passed the stones to the boy, then looked at Aldasair for the first time. ‘It’s easy to learn, Thump. All Finneral children learn how to play it as soon as they can hold a stone. You’re not especially fond of those windows, are you?’
Aldasair blinked rapidly, trying to locate his voice. ‘What?’
‘Oh, and I’ve something to show you, if you don’t mind?’ Bern smiled, his eyes merry. ‘Unless you’d like to stay here and learn Thump also?’
Aldasair followed Bern outside and across the palace grounds. It was a brighter day than they’d seen in some time, yellow tufts of clouds streaking across a blue sky.
‘Thank you,’ he said, fingering his sticky cuff. ‘I did not know what to do with them.’
‘Ah, well. I have eight brothers and sisters, all younger than me. I’ve always been good at controlling a crowd.’
They walked to the west, the ground growing steeper until they came to the black stone path of the Hill of Souls. It had been cleaned, Aldasair noticed, the foliage cut back from the path.
‘You have been busy,’ he ventured. Bern nodded. He wore a light tunic, his shirt sleeves rolled up to reveal his brawny arms, and he had discarded the fur-lined cloak Aldasair had so often seen him with, but his hefty axes were still slung on his belts. Seeing Aldasair looking at them, he patted the flats of their blades almost affectionately, as though they were faithful hounds.
‘The Bitter Twins,’ he said, smiling. ‘My very own storied weapons. But here, they have been useful for clearing away some of the smaller trees. My father would have my guts for using them that way, but needs must.’
‘You have great need of weapons in Finneral?’
Bern’s normally merry face grew sombre. ‘We have done, certainly. When I was a very young man, we were constantly involved in skirmishes with our neighbours, the Sown. Every girl and boy grew up knowing how to use a fighting axe then. The Sown are a fearsome people.’ He grimaced. ‘We used to say that they raised their babies on cow’s blood, to give them a lust for battle.’
‘I have not heard of these wars.’
‘No reason you should have. Not all conflict is with the worm people, my friend. Though our greatest warlord married his son into the family of their king, and now all is smooth as milk with the Sown. You’ll have seen some of them ride in with us – they would have been the terrifically ugly people.’
Aldasair looked up, shocked, but Bern was grinning at him again. ‘A jest. They are actually very similar to my own people, really, but with appalling taste in rum. Do not drink their rum. Look, here we are.’
The war-beast shrine still sat at the end of the grove of trees, but already Aldasair could see that it had been transformed. All the debris had been cleared away from beneath the trees, and one or two that were dead had been reduced to stumps. The rough clay of the shrine had been washed and rubbed down, shedding its crispy patina of old leaves and mud, and all of the windows had been cleaned. The path leading to it was clear, and for a moment Aldasair experienced a strange doubling of memory; he had stood here once, more than once, with his clay war-beast clutched in his hands, his friends all around him.
‘Are you well?’
For all the strength in his arms, Bern’s touch on his shoulder was light. Aldasair shook him off, and then vaguely regretted doing so.
‘My apologies. It’s just that I had thought this place lost, and you’ve brought it back.’
‘Here. Let’s go inside.’
Bern led him through the door – there was no creak, and it opened smoothly – and the room within gleamed. The stone benches, once lost under dirt and ancient animal corpses, now shone with polish, and the floor was covered with fresh rushes, lightly scented with something floral Aldasair couldn’t place. There was a single lantern sitting on the lowest step, letting off a warm orange glow.
‘You’ll forgive me for the floor, I hope. The stones have cracked in several places – ice, I suspect – and it spoiled the impression I wanted to give. My mother insisted on clean rushes in the long hall, and I had some oils I use for me beard . . .’ He trailed off, and cleared his throat. ‘Not very Eboran, I know. As if you’d have rushes on your fancy marble floors! But they’re easily taken away again. Oh, your skylight.’
Bern nodded to the ceiling and Aldasair looked up, belatedly realising that the tone of light was different. Where the broken glass and leading had been was now a clean stretch of a translucent skin of some sort, carefully caulked at the edges.
‘I’ve no glass, of course, but we use these whale skins to let a little light into our tents when we’re travelling. It’ll keep the water out, for now.’
‘Whale skin?’ asked Aldasair weakly.
‘Yes!’ Bern’s face lit up. ‘Albino spear whales. They live in pods off our coast, and they have these extraordinary hides – pale, but strong, and water cannot get past them, yet they let the light in so well.’ He shuffled his feet. ‘Well, as you can see yourself.’
‘Why?’ said Aldasair eventually. He could not believe the change in this small room. Before it had been a sad, broken thing, a remnant of lost history, echoing with all the people who had gone. Now, it was cosy. Comforting even. ‘By the roots, why have you done this?’
To his surprise, the parts of Bern’s face not covered by his golden beard turned faintly pink. ‘’Tis a gift,’ he said, his voice gruff now. ‘A kindness. Ebora is –’ he tugged at his beard once, twice – ‘Ebora is a place of myth and story for my people, and by the stones, you can still see what it once was. You have been lost a long time, and no one should be left to wander alone.’
Aldasair looked up at the taller man. ‘It is,’ he said, with more feeling than he intended. ‘It is a kindness. You cannot know . . .’ He dipped his head once. ‘Thank you for your kindness, Bern the Younger.’
‘Here, look. There is another reason I wanted you to come up here.’ Bern crossed quickly to the stone benches and picked up a wooden box. When he brought it over to Aldasair, he saw that it contained around twenty clay figurines, in varying states of completion.
‘Most of them, I’m afraid, were all fallen to bits,’ said Bern. He looked apologetic, which Aldasair found extraordinary. Humans were so strange. It was hardly Bern’s fault that the Hill of Souls had been abandoned for so long, and yet there he was, looking sorry about it. ‘A few were just sludge. But these ones were mostly intact. You can still sort of see what they were, I think.’ He looked up at Aldasair, his expression uncertain now. ‘I wondered if you wanted to put them into the earth. You said that’s what you did with them, and I didn’t want to just – well. Seems to me like these were special to someone once.’
For a moment the room seemed to spin around Aldasair, and Bern’s face doubled, and then tripled. Aldasair thought of sitting at the long table of tarla cards, day after day after day, and the fat spider that had died in the middle of them all. Why hadn’t he got rid of it?
‘Yes,’ he said. His voice sounded firmer than it ever had done to his own ear. ‘We will take them, and find a good place for them to be.’
‘Should it not be secret? Do you not wish to find other Eborans to do this with?’
‘No.’ In truth, he knew that to let a human participate in the rites of the Hill of Souls was unforgivable, but who was there now to oppose him? Should he go to the last Eborans, dying in their rooms, and ask their opinions? Or Hestillion? She wanted nothing to do with him. ‘In a few days’ time, it will be the turning of the half-season moon. Once, it was a sacred day. We had a lot of sacred days, but no one remembers them now. We should bury them then. The moon was always special to the war-beasts.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I would be very glad if you would come with me, Bern the Younger.’