Path of Revenge (61 page)

Robal sighed. ‘So, the only way we can know for sure—’

‘Is to ask him ourselves,’ Stella finished for him. ‘A course, as I know you are aware, I have already decided to pursue. You have simply given me more questions to ask him.’

‘Aye, I knew where you intended to go. I thought perhaps you were looking for an answer to your loneliness.’

‘So that is what was behind your odd behaviour,’ she said, her eyes softening. ‘I meant what I said. I’m not worth your attention.’

The guardsman looked directly into her eyes with a gaze so intense she felt herself stir. ‘I have never thought that, Stella. And if there was a possibility that you might…that any of our ideas might have some currency, we should pursue this until we find out the answers.’

‘And if our pursuit takes us to Bhrudwo? To Andratan?’

‘Then we will be careful, but we will go.’

She found herself unable to hold back her tears. It seemed to her she cried enough to create an oasis in her own desert. An oasis that, after years of barrenness, might, perhaps, be something more than a mirage.

Conal clicked his tongue for the hundredth time. Reduced to driving a wagon through this hateful desert, a wagon pulled by a donkey, no less, and a stupid one at that. His pale skin burned and peeled no matter how many times he applied the stinking cream Kilfor had given him. He never got enough to eat or drink; his voice rasped from a parched throat. Not that
he was given much chance to use it, except to chastise the stupid,
stupid
donkey. All this while others, less qualified than he, spent their days talking about the issues
he
had studied.

Stella had sent some Dhaurian lackey to ask him to join their discussion. Hadn’t come herself. There was absolutely no reason for him to feel hurt. He’d declined the offer without thinking, without offering an explanation. Better no involvement at all than being treated as a thirteenth soldier.

Not since Dribna the guard had whacked the Wodrani boy over the head with his oar had Conal thought so little of their enterprise. A great deal had changed since he had been commanded to follow the Destroyer’s Consort. Worryingly, the command had not come directly from the Archpriest; the assistant royal physician approached him in order that the Archpriest could truthfully deny the mission. So the physician had said. More than once since, Conal had doubted the wisdom of accepting the commission. The worst of his fears, greater than his dread of death, was that he would return to Instruere to find the Archpriest had not authorised his disappearance.

The scenario played out yet again in his mind. He returns with a tearful and repentant Destroyer’s Consort, brings her into the Archpriest’s study, trailed by an increasing number of awestruck Halites, and watches as Stella abases herself before his master. The Archpriest rises, then demands Conal explain his absence. He tries to speak, but his master begins the dreaded ritual: ‘By the authority of the Koinobia, and as the representative of the Most High in the world of men, I cast you from our fellowship. I bind your soul. I declare you
losian,
rejected of the Most High. Be now gone from our presence.’

He is not allowed to return to his room; his notes and scrolls are lost forever. His desperate arguments
and pleas for clemency are ignored. Everyone turns their face from his. As he stumbles from the study he sees the Archpriest reach down, take Stella’s hand and pull her gently to her feet. ‘You are mine now, my dear,’ he says, but the voice is that of Robal the guardsman.

Conal opened his eyes and wiped the cold sweat from his brow. When had this happened, this darkening of the Archpriest in his mind? Had Stella so thoroughly subverted his allegiance?

A Dhaurian, a pretty young girl with her hair in three pigtails, jogged past the wagon, on her way to the rear of the train. A few minutes later she returned, settled to a walk, and turned her sun-dark face towards him. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, in a throat-wrenching accent. ‘I am looking for Cone the priest.’

‘Conal,’ he said.
The famous Cone, whose name shall be mispronounced throughout the world.

‘My apologies,’ she said, colouring. ‘The
dominie
has requested your presence.’

‘The who?’ He knew his tone sounded abrupt, even rude, but the vision of his own humiliation was still too fresh in his mind to allow him to offer the required apology.

‘Phemanderac the
dominie
,’ the girl repeated patiently.

‘Oh. What does he want?’

‘My lord, I do not know,’ she said, finally showing some anger. ‘Come or do not come. His is the covered wagon near the head of the train.’ She made to leave.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Tell him I cannot come, I am busy driving our wagon.’ A ridiculous excuse; he could easily ask Sauxa to look after the wagon. And he longed to be part of their discussions. But they had waited too long before asking him. It was, he assured himself, a matter of principle.

‘Very well,’ said the girl, shaking her pigtails in disapproval. ‘I will tell him.’

After she left him Conal stared out into the wilderness, his mind in free fall. So many religious metaphors came from the desert. Human rhetoric depended on expressing extremes, and the wasteland the camel train struggled through was certainly an extreme. An absence of water to bring life and to soften the hard edges of the land; speaking to Conal of a life lived outside the refreshing presence of the Most High. So few paths, so many opportunities to become lost, to die of thirst or to be burned up by the sun. Life was like that. One’s whole future dependent on a simple choice, the significance of which was never obvious at the time. The desert was infertile, yielding nothing of value to humans; a metaphor, perhaps, for a life wasted on one’s own selfish pursuits. A place where all the choices were hard, often made between one danger and another. A place to travel through, not to linger in. A place too vast for the human spirit to encompass. No wonder the First Men spoke of the desert with a combination of nervousness and respect.

A cruel place. How many steps to cross the desert? A thousand times a thousand? Place your feet on the trail nine hundred and ninety-nine times and no one praised you for it; they just expected you to keep going. But make one wrong step and the wilderness swallowed you up. There was no sense of balance, of fairness, here. The blazing sun did not ask you if you meant to become lost; the choking sand would not listen to your explanations for the choices you made.

‘Friend Conal, would you spare me a moment?’

A tall, elderly man walked beside the wagon. A man with a long face, exquisitely ugly, sporting a nose that looked like it had been stung by a bee and sparse grey hair atop a misshapen crown. He wore a plain brown tunic and loose-fitting trousers, emphasising his gauntness.

The priest knew who this was, but said, ‘I’m sorry, you have the advantage of me.’

The man began to breathe heavily as he tried to keep up with the wagon. ‘I am Phemanderac, a friend of Stella. She has asked me to speak to you, and encouraged me to give you a gift. Will you receive me?’

‘Very well,’ Conal said, pulling the wagon aside from the train. Sauxa waved to him as the last wagon passed. Phemanderac waited for the dust to clear and then accepted a hand up to the tray.

The Dhaurian had what looked like a large scroll under his other arm. Placing it on the wagon beside him, he turned his disturbing gaze on the priest.

‘What is it you wish to see me about?’

‘Stella is very keen for you to read this history I have written. I, also, would appreciate the attention of a learned Instruian scholar.’ He indicated the scroll lying beside him, a faintly anxious expression on his face. ‘It is my only copy,’ he added.

‘Very well,’ Conal said, trying not to feel flattered. He couldn’t pretend not to know of the Dhaurian’s formidable reputation, though the official view of the Koinobia was that he was of no account. ‘I will care for it as though it were one of my own.’

He chivvied the stupid donkey until it bore the wagon back to the rear of the train, then helped the aged scholar dismount. Kilfor, who was spending time with his father, took Phemanderac into his own wagon.

Conal drove on for a while after the strange Dhaurian left him, then found he could resist the scroll no longer. The author was a man who had witnessed with his own eyes many of the events of the Falthan War. For the knowledge contained within, surely the Archpriest could forgive Conal any indiscretion. He transferred the reins to his left hand,
kept half an eye on the trail ahead, and began to unroll the scroll.

FLICTOPHILIA: THE LOVE OF WAR

Conal puzzled over the title for a moment. Perhaps the old man had brought with him the wrong scroll? He read on:

A History of the Falthan War

Phemanderac, dominie of Dhauria

The scroll itself was of the highest quality vellum, the calfskin a work of the most splendid craftsmanship in its own right. Of equal quality, the beautiful penmanship beguiled his eye.

To his chagrin, the rough trail frustrated his attempts to read the scroll. When he placed a hand on the calfskin to steady it, the stupid,
stupid
donkey baulked at his one-handedness on the reins. With two hands on the reins, the scroll kept rolling closed. The hours until the train halted for the night’s camp were a severe torment.

As he dismounted from the wagon he was greatly tempted to give the donkey a kick. He restrained himself: the evil beast would probably give him better than it received.

It took another half-hour to get the campsite prepared. Sauxa and Kilfor assisted the priest after they finished setting up their own camp; Robal and Stella arrived a few minutes later, laughing together about some inanity. The guardsman made eyes at her; for a wonder, she didn’t chastise him for it. Conal turned away, sickened, and busied himself with stirring the stew.

The evening meal could not pass quickly enough.
Let the others tidy up.
He took the scroll up into the wagon, lit the small oil lamp and opened the treasure.

Within minutes he was lost. Not because he failed to understand what he read, but because he understood it too well. The writer—surely not the juiceless old man
who had brought him the scroll—knew human nature as no other he’d read. This was so much more than a history: indeed, it was not even presented in chronological order. Instead, it seemed to comprise a series of themes, each targeting a particular human trait, showing how the war might have been avoided or minimised had people behaved differently. The prose, the passion and the sheer force of the arguments all combined to capture him.

He read further down, coming across a map drawn in four colours. It was a detailed chart of Vulture’s Craw, the last great battle of the Falthan War. Breathtaking in its simplicity. Conal rolled the scroll closed, his hands shaking.

I cannot surrender these ideas to the Archpriest.
Their elegance would be despoiled by the man’s intellectual clumsiness, their depth and power mined for political gain.

He had no way to verify the facts presented in this history. Many of them differed significantly from the Seven Scrolls of the Halites. Undoubtedly they would be suppressed by the Archpriest and his senior scholars: how could they possibly allow the whole foundation of their teaching to be challenged? Already, in the few sections he had read, the writer asserted that Leith made a decision at Aleinus Gates that cost nearly ten thousand lives, that the despised
losian
were absolutely essential to the victory at Skull Rock, and that soldiers of Straux committed atrocities on the bodies of dead Bhrudwan soldiers at the orders of their king. None of these events featured in the Halite scrolls.

The ideas contained in the document acted as water to his soul. He forgot about whatever mundane conversations Stella might be having with the Dhaurian philosopher. This, the scroll he held in his hands, could be the most important treatise he would ever read.

Conal the priest took a deep breath, checked that no stray dirt adhered to his hands, then unrolled the scroll and recommenced his reading.

The days ground into weeks, and every day Stella gave thanks that they had joined with the well-provisioned Dhaurian camel train. Two of the wells they had intended to use on the way east were dry, one having dried up in the month since the Dhaurians had passed this way travelling westwards. The Dhaurian chatelaine, Fenacia, managed the rationing of water very carefully; everyone felt thirsty, but none died. This was unusual: death attended even the most well-organised desert crossing, awaiting a single lapse in attentiveness.

There came a day when the sand gave way to thorn bushes and sickly scrub, then waving grasses. With surprising rapidity they left the desert behind, coming to a land of cooler breezes and running water.

In the late afternoon the camel train came to a halt, spreading to the left and to the right. Stella sat beside Robal as he gentled Lindha and the trapdown a moderate slope towards the head of the train. Behind them Stella could hear Conal muttering as he read Phemanderac’s scroll.

‘Why have we stopped?’ Kilfor shouted as he drove his wagon up to theirs.

His father leaned over. ‘Because the Dhaurians have finally realised my son is a tick on their hide, sucking them dry. They will send him back across the desert minus his tongue, with his pony on his shoulders.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Stella, standing up in the tray. ‘But we have arrived.’

Robal eased Lindha to a halt. He and Stella leaped from the wagon and ran forward like excited children.

‘What’s happened? Why have we stopped?’ No one responded to the priest’s plaintive voice.

‘Ohhh,’ Stella breathed, unable to help herself.

She stood on the very edge of a chasm of stupefying depth, looking down into a deep, wide valley. Little fluffy clouds some distance below them indicated how high the cliff-top was; below the clouds—a long way below—wind-whipped whitecaps rippled across deep blue water. Her gaze was drawn to the opposite shore, a dark line suggesting a precipice of at least equal height, hazy in the remote distance. The water continued many leagues to her right, to the southwest, and in this direction the far cliff receded until it was barely visible. In the distance a bank of storm-clouds hung above a grey curtain of rain. But to her left spread the scene that had taken her breath.