Prisoner of Fate (6 page)

The man who stopped the fracas faced Bill and Meg and bowed his head slightly. Noting how his moustache and beard were trimmed close to his skin and that he was well groomed, Meg assumed him to be the commanding officer. ‘Please accept my apologies for my men’s misinterpretation of my orders,’ he said in fluent Andrak. He looked at Bill’s injury. ‘I will have a surgeon look at that. It will need sewing.’

Bill shook his head, still angry. ‘My lip’s fine. I want my wagon back.’

The man shook his head as if he was disappointed by something. ‘I am sorry, but your wagon is now the property of the Ranu People’s Army. You think that you have more need of it than we do—I understand that—but we need good transport for our supplies and wagons are becoming harder to come by out here.’ He smiled. ‘Please. I am Rasu E’mal Kareem, military commander of the Ranu People’s Army, son of Eman Rasu Kareem.’ He bowed as he completed his introduction. When he straightened, it was obvious that he expected them to introduce themselves. He was smiling at Bill.

‘Bill Runningriver,’ Bill muttered through his aching jaw and bloodied lip.

‘Rees Feond,’ said Meg when she noticed that Rasu wasn’t looking at her.

‘I’m Lee Runningriver,’ Lee interrupted. ‘Can I look at the big peacemakers?’

‘Lee!’ Bill remonstrated, but Rasu smiled and beckoned to a soldier.

‘Show the boy the cannon,’ he instructed.

Lee looked up at Bill. ‘Dad?’

‘It will give you time to get that lip mended,’ Rasu encouraged. ‘The boy will learn something.’ Bill met Rasu’s gaze. ‘He will be safe,’ Rasu assured him. ‘My word is law.’ Bill nodded to Lee and the boy ran off ahead of his soldier escort.

‘If anything happens,’ Bill muttered.

Rasu smiled and nodded. ‘A good father is always protective of his firstborn son for in the son is the father’s hope. It’s an ancient Ranu saying. The Ithosen still teach it. Come with me and we will find a surgeon for that lip.’

‘
Y
ou are very tall for a woman,’ Rasu remarked, as he escorted Meg along the riverbank. ‘I have never seen Andrak women as tall as you.’

‘My father was tall,’ Meg replied, watching the wooden ferry chugging across the river, its steam-powered engine hauling the heavy cords out of the water as it crawled along them from bank to bank. Soldiers, horses and vehicles packed aboard pressed it perilously close to the waterline.

‘And what did your father do?’ he asked.

Meg looked down at him, seeing the dark eyes studying her. ‘He was a farmer,’ she said.

‘Like your husband,’ Rasu noted.

Meg left the comment unanswered. Rasu assumed that Bill was her husband and Lee her son, and she saw no reason to correct him. ‘How many soldiers in your army?’ she asked.

Rasu paused on the bank and looked across the river at the men waiting to board the ferry. ‘It will take three days to cross over,’ he said in response.

‘Why cross here? You could have followed the others to the bridge at Bridge Crossing.’

Rasu smiled. ‘Western Andrak is a large piece of land. Some of it lies to the south and that is what I have been assigned to acquire.’ He turned to Meg and added, ‘Now that I have told you my military secrets I will have to have you killed.’

Meg stepped back in alarm, but Rasu broke into laughter. ‘Oh please,’ he chortled. ‘I am joking.’ He looked back across the river, still chuckling. ‘There are no secrets to this war. We are invading the Andrak provinces and soon they will all be Ranu. My task is to take the southern section of Western Andrak. When that is done, I will become the provincial official and I will work to bring order and prosperity to everyone.’ He turned and seeing that Meg was still standing back from him he asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Have you ever considered that the Andrak people don’t want to be under Ranu control?’

He nodded. ‘Ah, yes—the issue of freedom of choice,’ and he turned away to gaze across the river again. ‘The fundamental rights of all people. The most important philosophers always dwell upon this matter and this always weighs upon my conscience. I often ask myself who am I to invade another’s land? What right do I have to do this?’ He turned back to her. ‘You see me as the invader, an enemy who comes to destroy, don’t you?’

‘That’s what you are doing,’ Meg confirmed. ‘You’ve come uninvited.’

‘Uninvited by your government, yes, I would agree with that. But what about you? Why do you care whether you have an Andrak government or a Ranu government? What will change?’

‘You take things away. You kill people,’ she accused.

‘The wagon? It’s nothing—a trifle. When the war is over your husband will get a new wagon—a better one even. Besides, what is material is not important. A little
inconvenience now in the greater cause will lead to prosperity tomorrow.’

‘You see it that way, but we don’t. The inconvenience now matters to us. And you still kill people.’

‘Our president has issued strict instructions for us to kill only when it is necessary to ensure victory in this war. Soldiers are not people. If we do not kill your soldiers, your soldiers will kill ours. It is one.’

‘And people who are not soldiers,’ Meg asserted.

‘When? My men haven’t done this. Where have you seen ordinary people killed by Ranu?’ She was about to describe the encounter with the dragon eggs that left her stranded, but instinct warned her to stay silent. ‘You see?’ Rasu said triumphantly. ‘This is a war between governments. The people stay the same.’ He shook his head. ‘No. The people will be better off with a Ranu leader who is compassionate and who wants a better future. This is a just war, a war for the good of people. Why do you think so many of your people simply agree to let us march through and let us take what we need? They know there is a better life coming.’

Tired of the man’s diatribe, Meg began walking along the bank. He caught up and walked beside her. ‘I have a question,’ he said. When she didn’t speak he continued. ‘Where were you going this morning?’

‘To Marella,’ Meg replied without looking at him.

‘Why?’

‘My daughter is there. I want to see that she is safe.’ She saw no reason to lie about her mission. If Rasu was genuine in his belief, then he would have no cause to stop her.

‘How old is your daughter?’ he asked.

‘Twenty-three.’

‘You must have been very young when she was born,’ he remarked, but she ignored his clumsy compliment. Rasu touched her arm. She flinched and
stopped. ‘My apologies if that was a rude thing to do. You are a married woman and I meant no offence. I merely wanted you to stop.’

‘No offence taken,’ she curtly replied.

‘If it is important for you to go to Marella, I would like to offer an escort to accompany you there so that you are not treated with indignity.’

Meg stared at the Ranu commander, puzzled by his show of generosity. ‘Why are you doing this?’ she asked.

Rasu blushed and bowed his head briefly before explaining. ‘No doubt you will find me impertinent for saying these things, but I have always been an honest man in my dealings with people. There is an Ithosen saying that he who speaks with an open heart will only suffer the truth.’ He paused to check her reaction. ‘You are a very beautiful woman. I should not say this to you because you are married, and in my land such a rash statement would bring me shame and I would be forced to compensate the husband with a payment, but I am honest and I believe war affords me the right to say what is true. So you might think me shallow to offer you an escort just because I see you as a beauty, but beauty is deeper than the outside and I saw in you when my soldiers were rough and rude a strength that warned me you would not let anyone treat you in that manner.’

I was afraid
, Meg thought.
Once I might have been brave, with the amber magic, but I was afraid.

‘I have two daughters at home in Tul Nathir,’ Rasu continued. ‘They are of similar ages to your daughter and I am already blessed with grandchildren by them. I know what it is like. So I make my offer as I would hope you would make an offer to me if our circumstances were reversed. This is also an old Ithosen teaching.’

‘Are the Ithosen religious men?’ she asked.

Rasu shook his head. ‘No. They are philosophers. In ancient times they were religious leaders with mystical powers, so the legends say, but now they are thinkers and lawmakers—wise men.’

Meg gazed at the ferry which was disembarking troops on the near bank. ‘Bill and Lee will go home. I will travel to Marella with your escort,’ she said. ‘Will you honour that request?’

Rasu bowed his head. ‘A woman should not travel alone. My men will guard you as they would guard me, but will your husband allow this?’

‘Bill is not my husband,’ she said bluntly, and she walked briskly towards the tents where Bill was resting after the surgeons had treated his injury to tell him that she was leaving.

The Ranu soldiers never spoke to her throughout the journey except with gestures for basic needs, like eating, mounting and dismounting. True to Rasu’s promise, the escorting soldiers were distant yet polite, according her respect as if she was an important person, and she felt safe in their company.

They shadowed an ancient forest throughout the first day after crossing the river, before turning north and joining the main road to Marella late on the second morning. Meg had only seen the forest from a distance as a dark smudge on her annual journeys to Lightsword, and to travel within a stone’s throw of it made the place mysterious and intriguing. It was different to what she remembered of the Whispering Forest in Western Shess—the trees were taller, broader, thicker, older, the trunks gnarled with wisdom and wrapped with vines. It was a forest that had seen history pass and somehow escaped destruction, the kind of place that she imagined A Ahmud Ki might have roamed.

The Andrak had myths associated with a forest-dwelling culture called the Lendel and she had heard stories about them from people in Marella over the fifteen years, but she also remembered that A Ahmud Ki used another name, similar in sound and yet different.
Aelendyell
, she recalled suddenly, as a breeze whispered to her, and she shivered as if fingers had stroked her bare arm. She glanced at her Ranu escort at that moment, but they seemed oblivious to the forest’s presence or the breeze’s message.

The first night, they rested in a village at the forest’s edge. The locals stared at her until she greeted them in Andrak, and shared her name, and then they were full of questions.

‘Why are you being escorted?’

‘Are the Ranu brutal?’

‘Will they take everything?’

‘Have you seen prisoners?’

She answered the questions as honestly as she could, telling the dozen men and women outside the village tavern that she was on her way to Marella. ‘There’s been trouble in Marella,’ a man with a red eye-patch and a limp in his left leg told her. ‘You shouldn’t go there.’

His comment stirred her uncertainty. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Rebels,’ he said. ‘The Ranu were ruthless with them. That’s why we’re scared that you’ve brought these four here. How many more will come?’

‘What have the Ranu done in Marella?’ Meg asked.

‘Burnt houses. Hung those who resisted,’ said the man. ‘There’s a curfew and it’s hard to get in or out.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I was visiting when the Ranu came, but I left when the trouble started. My sister lives there. Dyan Trapper. Do you know her?’

Meg nodded. ‘We work together in the shirt factory.’

‘I’m Liam Woodburner,’ the man said. ‘If you’re going there, look out for my sister for me.’

‘I will,’ she promised, but her heart was in turmoil for Emma’s safety now that she knew there had been conflict in Marella. When the curiosity dissipated, and the people dispersed, she accepted a woman’s offer to sleep overnight in her cottage and not on the ground in the company of the Ranu, but she took a long time to get to sleep and it was a sleep overwhelmed with dreams.

She stood on deck of a ship, staring away from the setting sun at the endless ocean expanse. The waves rolled beneath her feet and she knew she was sailing towards Western Shess. She felt that she had been away from home a very long time and it was as if she had been waiting to make this journey.

The old dream, standing on the battlements of a wall, came and went. Surrounded by people, she was facing a storm coming towards the walls, a storm with a blue glow at its base, and beside her were people for whom she felt an enormous love.

Another new, brief dream startled her. She was in a space dimly lit from an unseen source, but she sensed that all around her were books, endless shelves of books, and there was someone else too, the disembodied voice of an old man.

The dreams remained with her as she rode out of the village before sunrise with her silent Ranu escort and she puzzled over their meanings. Clearly she was meant to return to Western Shess, just as she knew that one day she would inevitably travel east to a strange ruin,
and that she was fated in her future to face something terrible from the battlements of a castle. The reasons why she would do these things eluded her, but the glimpses of the future—that was what she’d learned through her experiences that these dreams were—only made her frightened and more determined to avoid them.

The Claarn-to-Marella road was busy with war traffic—marching soldiers in white uniforms, wagons of goods, grey weapons on carriages. Occasionally she spied Andrak people, some going about their daily business, some carrying personal belongings or pulling them behind on dogcarts, and most greeted her as she searched for familiar faces, but she recognised no one. Low grey clouds closed in the world, adding gloom to her increasing anxiety as she passed through the familiar green landscape, and when she spotted the charred ruins of a farmhouse a short distance before Marella, and saw thin smoke rising above the low hills, she knew that Liam Woodburner’s warning was grounded in truth.
It wouldn’t affect Emma
, she told herself.
My daughter has no cause against the Ranu.
But fragments of the dream that prompted her to leave Lightsword flashed into crystal clarity and she tightened her grip on her horse’s reins as her troop crested the last gentle slope before descending into Marella.

Ranu troops were everywhere, lounging in groups, marching in columns, standing on relaxed guard at street corners, their white uniforms oddly pristine, as if the dust and sweat of daily duty couldn’t stain the material. And there was evidence of a brutal battle—ashes of buildings, scattered grave mounds, two corpses swinging from ropes by the ruin of the courthouse. Meg blanched at the sight of the crass display of Ranu justice, the corpses dangling, heads to one side, dishevelled dirty clothes and bloated bodies. One wore
the remnants of the Andrak uniform, a tattered dark-green coat over dirt-stained cream trousers. The other was naked.

She urged her horse forward, steering through the troops, ignoring the protests from soldiers she nearly trampled, and broke into a canter as she headed for the intersection and the road along which her cottage stood. Her accompanying guides followed dutifully, although one stopped to talk to three soldiers who tried to stand in her way at the intersection and were brushed aside. As she galloped towards her home her stomach churned. Ashes and charred wood.
No!
she silently pleaded, her arms weakening.
No!
She wrenched at the reins and fell from her mount, stumbling three paces before she collapsed into the destruction of her flower garden. She pushed to her feet, and plunged into the ruined cottage, burnt door and wall frames like blackened skeletons, sinking into the ashes. ‘Emma!’ she sobbed. ‘Emma!’ she screamed, while her Ranu escort silently dismounted on the road.