Tigana (52 page)

He could scarcely speak, and he was bleeding, she saw. There was a gash in his right side, another along his leg. When he straightened to move to the river she saw that he was limping. He was doing it though, he was moving
forward, even into the face of what was being levelled at them. Elena felt a sob escape her dry throat.

And now the Others were coming again. The wounded man beside her struggled gamely up from his knees, holding his sword in his left hand, his useless right arm dangling at his side. Further along the bank she saw men and women as badly wounded or worse. They were all standing though, and lifting their blades. With love, with a shafting of pride that was akin to pain, Elena saw that the Night Walkers were not retreating. None of them. They were ready to hold this ground, or to try. And some of them were going to die now, she knew, many of them would die.

Then Donar was beside her, and Elena flinched at what she saw in his white face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is folly. We must fall back. We have no choice. If we lose too many tonight it will be even worse next spring. I
have
to play for time, to hope for something that will make a change.’ The words sounded as if they were scraped from his throat.

Elena felt herself beginning to cry, from exhaustion as much as anything else. And even as she was nodding from within the abyss of her weariness, trying to let Donar see her understanding, her support, wanting to ease the rawness of his pain, even as the Others drew near again, triumphant, hideous, unwearied, she abruptly realized that Baerd wasn’t with them on the bank. She wheeled towards the river, looking for him, and so she saw the miracle begin.

He was never in any doubt, none at all. From the moment the mist-wrapped figure appeared on the black hill Baerd knew what it was. In an odd way he had known this even
before
the shadow-figure came. It was why he was here, Baerd realized. Donar might not know it, but this was why the Elder had had a dream of someone coming, why Baerd’s steps that night had taken him to the place where
Elena was watching in the dark. It seemed to have been a long time ago.

He couldn’t see the figure clearly but that didn’t matter, it really didn’t. He
knew
what this was about. It was as if all the sorrows and the lessons and the labours of his life, his and Alessan’s together, had brought him to this river under this green moon that someone here might know exactly what the figure on the black hill was, the nature of its power. The power the Night Walkers had not been able to withstand because they could not understand.

He heard a splash behind him and knew instinctively that it would be Mattio. Without turning he handed him his strange sword. The Others—the Ygrathens of his dreams and hate—were massing again on the western bank.

He ignored them. They were tools. Right now they did not matter at all. They had been beaten by the courage of Donar and the Walkers; only the shadow-figure signified now, and Baerd knew what was needed to deal with that. Not a prowess of blades, not even with these swords of grain. They were past that now.

He drew a deep breath, and he raised his hands from his sides and pointed up at that shrouded figure on the hill, exactly as the figure was pointing down at them. And with his heart full to overflowing with old grief and a young certainty, conscious that Alessan would say it better, but knowing that this had become his task, and knowing also what had to be done, Baerd cried aloud in the strangeness of that night:

‘Be gone! We do not fear you! I know what you are and where your power lies! Be gone or I shall name you now and cut your strength apart—we both know the power of names tonight!’

Gradually the raucous cries subsided on the other side of the river, and the murmurs of the Walkers faded. It grew
very still, deathly still. Baerd could hear Mattio’s laboured, painful breathing just behind him. He didn’t look back. He waited, straining to penetrate the mist that wrapped the figure on the hill. And as he stared it seemed to him, with a surge in his heart, that the upraised arms were lowered slightly. That the concealing mist dissipated a very little.

He waited no longer.

‘Be gone!’ he cried again, more loudly yet, a ringing sureness in his voice now. ‘I have said I know you and I do. You are the spirit of the violators here. The presence of Ygrath in this peninsula, and of Barbadior. Both of them! You are tyranny in a land that has been free.
You
are the blight and the ruin in these fields. You have used your magic in the west to shape a desecration, to obliterate a name. Yours is a power of darkness and shadow under this moon,
but I know you and can name you, and so all your shadows are gone!
’

He looked, and even as he was speaking the words that came to him he saw that they were true! It was happening. He could see the mist drifting apart, as if taken by a wind. But even in the midst of joy something checked him: a knowledge that the victory was only here, only in this unreal place. His heart was full and empty at one and the same time. He thought of his father dying by the Deisa, of his mother, of Dianora, and Baerd’s hands went flat and rigid at his sides, even as he heard the murmurs of disbelieving hope rising at his back.

Mattio whispered something in a choked voice. Baerd knew it would be a prayer.

The Others were milling about in disarray west of the stream. Even as Baerd watched, motionless, his hands held outwards, his heart in turmoil, more of the shadows cloaking their leader lifted and spread, beginning to blow away over the brow of the hill. For one moment Baerd thought he saw the figure clearly. He thought he saw it bearded and slim, and of medium height, and he knew which of the
Tyrants that one would be, which one had come from the west. And something rose within him at that sight, crashing through to the surface like a wave breaking against his soul.

‘My sword!’ he rasped. ‘Quickly!’

He reached back. Mattio placed it in his hand. In front of them the Others were starting to fall back, slowly at first, then faster, and suddenly they were running. But that didn’t even matter; that didn’t matter at all.

Baerd looked up at the figure on the hill. He saw the last of the shadows blowing away and he lifted his voice once more, crying aloud the passion of his soul:

‘Stay for me!
If you are Ygrath, if you are truly the sorceror of Ygrath I want you now! Stay for me—I am coming! In the name of my home and of my father I am coming for you now! I am Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar!’

Wildly, still screaming his challenge, he splashed forward and clambered out of the stream, scrambling up the other bank. The ruined earth felt cold as ice through his wet boots. He realized that he had entered a terrain that had no real place for life, but tonight, now, with that figure before him on the hill, that didn’t matter either. It didn’t matter if he died.

The army of the Others was in flight, they were throwing down their weapons as they ran. There was no one to gainsay him. He glanced up again. The moon seemed to be setting unnaturally fast. It looked as if it was resting now, round and huge, on the very crown of the black hill. Baerd saw the figure standing there silhouetted against that green moon; the shadows were gone, almost he saw it clearly again across the dead lands between.

Then he heard a long laugh of mockery, as if in response to his crying of his name. It was the laughter of his dreams, the laughter of the soldiers in the year of the fall. Still laughing, not hurrying at all, the shadow-figure turned and stepped down from the crown of the hill and away to the west.

Baerd began to run.

‘Baerd, wait!’ he heard the woman, Carenna, cry from behind him. ‘You must not be on the wastelands when the moon goes down! Come back! We have won!’

They had won. But
he
had not, whatever the Walkers of the highlands might think, or say. His battle, his and Alessan’s, was no nearer resolution than it had been before tonight. Whatever he had done for the Night Walkers of Certando, this night’s victory was not his, it could not be. He knew that in his heart. And his enemy, the image of his soul’s hate, knew that as well as he and was laughing at him even now just out of sight beyond the brow of that low hill.

‘Stay for me!’
Baerd screamed again, his young, lost voice ripping through the night.

He ran, flashing over the dead earth, his heart bursting with the need for speed. He overtook stragglers among the army and he killed them as he ran, not even breaking stride. It hardly mattered, it was only for the Walkers in their war, for next year. The Others scattered north and south, away from him, from the line that led to the hill. Baerd reached the slope and went straight up, scrabbling for a foothold on the cold waste ground. Then he breasted the hill with a surge and a gasp.

And he stood upon the summit, exactly where the shadow-figure had stood, and he looked away to the west, towards all the empty valleys and ruined hills beyond, and saw nothing. There was no one there at all.

He turned quickly north and then south, his chest heaving, and saw that the army of the Others, too, seemed to have entirely melted away. He spun back to the west and then he understood.

The green moon had set.

He was alone in this wasteland under a clear, high dome of brilliant, alien stars and Tigana was no nearer to coming back than it had ever been. And his father was still dead and
would never come back to him, and his mother and sister were dead, or lost somewhere in the world.

Baerd sank to his knees on the ruined hill. The ground was cold as winter. It was colder. His sword slipped from his suddenly nerveless fingers. He looked at his hands by starlight, at the slim hands of the boy he had been, and then he covered his face with those hands for the second time in that Ember Night, and he wept as though his heart were breaking now and not broken long ago.

Elena reached the hill and began to climb. She was breathless from running but the slope was not steep. Mattio had grabbed her arm when she started to enter the river. He had said it might mean death to be among the ruined lands after moonset, but Donar had told her it would be all right now. Donar had been unable to stop smiling since Baerd had made the shadow-figure withdraw. There was a stunned, incredulous glory in his face.

Most of the Walkers had gone back, wounded and weary, intoxicated with triumph, to the field where they had claimed their weapons. From there they would be drawn home before sunrise. So it had always happened.

Carefully avoiding Mattio’s eyes, Elena had crossed the river and come after Baerd. Behind her as she went she could hear the singing begin. She knew what would follow in the sheltering hollows and the darkness of that field after an Ember victory. Elena felt her pulse accelerate with the very thought. She could guess what Mattio’s face would have revealed as she walked away from him into the river and then across. In her heart she offered him an apology, but her stride as she went did not falter, and then, halfway to the hill, she began to run, suddenly afraid for the man she sought, and for herself, alone in all this wide dark emptiness.

Baerd was sitting on the crown of the hill, where the
shadow-figure had stood in front of the setting moon just before he fled. He glanced up as she approached, and a queer, frightened expression flickered for an instant across his face in the starlit dark.

Elena stopped, uncertain.

‘It is only me,’ she said, trying to catch her breath.

He was silent a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting anyone. For a moment … for a moment you looked almost exactly like a … like something I saw once as a boy. Something that changed my life.’

Elena didn’t know what to say to that. She had thought no further than getting here. Now that she had found him she was suddenly unsure of herself again. She sat down on the dead earth facing him. He watched her, but said nothing else.

She took a deep breath and said, bravely, ‘You
should
have expected someone. You should have known that I would come.’ She swallowed hard, her heart pounding.

For a long moment Baerd was very still, his head tilted a little to one side, as if listening to the echo of her words. Then he smiled. It lit up his young, too-thin face and the hollow, wounded eyes.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for that, Elena.’ It was the first time he’d used her name. In the distance they could hear the singing from the cornfield. Overhead the stars were almost impossibly bright in the black arch of the sky.

Elena felt herself flushing. She glanced down and away from his direct gaze. She said, awkwardly, ‘After all, it is dangerous here in the dead lands, and you wouldn’t have known. Not having been here before. With us, I mean. You wouldn’t even know how to get back home.’

‘I have an idea,’ he said gravely. ‘I imagine we have until sunrise. And in any case, these aren’t the dead lands any more. We won them back tonight. Elena, look at the ground where you walked.’

She turned to look back. And caught her breath in wonder and delight to see that along the path she’d taken to this hill white flowers were blooming in what had been barren earth.

Even as she watched she saw that the flowers were spreading in all directions from where she had passed. Tears sprang to her eyes and spilled over, gliding unheeded down her cheeks, making her vision blur. She had seen enough though, she understood. This was the Earth’s response to what they had done tonight. Those delicate white flowers coming to life under the stars were the most beautiful things she had seen in all her days.

Quietly, Baerd said, ‘You have caused this, Elena. Your being here. You must teach Donar and Carenna and the others this. When you win the Ember war it is not only a matter of holding the line of battle. You must follow the Others and drive them back, Elena. It is possible to regain lands lost in battle years before.’

She was nodding. Hearing in his words an echo of something known and forgotten long ago. She spoke the memory: ‘The land is never truly dead. It can always come back. Or what is the meaning of the cycle of seasons and years?’ She wiped her tears away and looked at him.