The Witch of Glenaster (23 page)

“Where are we going?” I asked
him, for I found, though I trusted him, that I feared him also.

“There are places to hide, away
near the river,” he said urgently, and there was a slight wheeze to his chest
as he breathed.

“Why near the river?” I said,
almost tripping, for he was half-pulling me along now, and my legs protested.
He stopped then, for a moment, and turned, and I saw that his face and clothes
were streaked with grey powder, and his eyes were full of sorrow.

“That is where I am headed. It
seems I have no choice now but to take you with me. Is that not what you
wanted? Above everything else, even your brother’s safety?” His tone was
bitter.

As he turned away, I saw my
hand strike his face, and heard the slap, before I even realized I had done it.
He simply hung his head then, his hair a tangle of ash-coloured strands lying
heaped and lifeless against his cheek, the wind nudging it gently, this way and
that.

“How can you say that?” I
demanded, stung by his reproach. “You think I am heartless to want to leave my
brother behind. Very well! I will go back for him. I do not want your
judgement. You can go hang!” And my voice was hoarse and broken in my throat.

“Esther!” he cried, and pleaded
with me; but already I was turning back towards the lodge, the fury of grief
bellowing my brother’s name in my chest.

I was so angry I did not feel
the first blow.

The second, however, caught me
so hard about the face that I was knocked to the ground, and could not get up.

At first I thought it must be
Thomas, and I cursed his name. But then I realized it was not him; there was
someone standing over me - a figure I did not recognize - and Thomas had
disappeared. Then, as I struggled to put some will into my legs, and crawl to
my feet, I heard a howl, and saw a desperate struggle above my head, a blur of
arms and hair and teeth, and the clash and roar of a death-duel.

My vision was misted and
unclear, but I could see that the man, if man it was, who had attacked me was
very tall – hardly an inch off seven foot – and had a face all but covered by a
thick beard and a mane of raven-black hair, which reached past his shoulders.
He wore a tunic, dirty-white in colour, and fixed across the waist by a wide
belt, frayed and worn from use. His legs were covered by woollen trousers, and his
boots were scuffed and ill-fitting, and seemed too large for his feet, which
despite his size were small and almost dainty. One does not always notice a
person’s clothes, especially if they are not otherwise remarkable; but my
assailant was memorable for more than just this, for apart from his height and
tireless ferocity he had one other important attribute.

He could fly.

In all other respects he was
more like a beast than a man; but he had the ability to launch himself from the
earth clear into the sky, a good twenty feet or more, high enough to catch the
branch of a tree and swing himself from it at great speed.

This Thomas soon discovered,
and it cost him a boot to the head that nearly knocked him unconscious, so that
he lay for a good few seconds dazed and stupid on the ground, and I feared he
would not get up. But he did, and the second time the tall man tried such a
trick he was able to partially deflect the blow, though still caught a stinging
kick to the shoulder that sent him spinning against the stump of a dead oak.

My senses were returning now,
and I could see a commotion of noise and smoke coming towards us from the
direction of the Towers. I tried to move my legs, and though at first they
seemed alien to me, after a while, and with much pushing against the tree at my
back, I managed to stand. I watched as Thomas drew his
seax
,
his long dagger, and held it in his left hand, with his sword in his right, and
waited for his opponent to come at him again.

This he seemed in no hurry to
do, and merely stood watching for a moment, his lips chewing against
themselves, and his mouth moving to form what may have been words, but in no
language I recognized. I suspected they were only meaningless ramblings, and,
when his mouth was open, saliva would pool and slide from its corners, as if he
were no more sensible than a dog. I wanted Thomas to kill him now, despite our
argument. I wanted to see this monster die.

Finally, he ran at him again,
and this time Thomas was able to trip him with the point of his sword before he
was able to lift himself off the ground, and he gave a yelp, and his gruesome,
hair-filled face creased in pain and confusion. He roared out then, and I saw
there was blood soaking his trousers, where his left leg met the top of his
boot.

He staggered towards Thomas,
who backed away a little, but seemed surer now of how to deal with him, and did
not panic. He attempted to leap into the trees once more - but it looked like
he had lost the ability, for he had a noticeable limp now, where his leg had
been hit. He lumbered in an unsteady circle around Thomas, who kept his eyes on
him, and waited.

They marked each other in this
way for several minutes, slowly moving, never breaking eye contact,
the
giant occasionally bellowing his rage at Thomas, whose
face was set, unreadable. I found myself shouting, screaming, begging him to
run the creature through, to spill his guts on the cold earth; and from the
giant’s throat I heard a low, guttural snarl, and knew he would tear me apart
if Thomas was killed.

Then, suddenly, he bolted,
half-leaping, half-scrambling up a great fir tree, so fast we were left staring
after him; and we saw now that he was jumping from tree to tree, high above our
heads, and was obviously not so badly wounded as he had seemed.

I heard Thomas curse then, and
call upon the giant to come down, and face him like a man; but the giant did
not – he knew he had the upper hand – and I could see how impotent and angry
Thomas felt, his weapons and all his skill useless against such tricks. Then
there was a loud rustle of branches, and the man seemed to swing away into the
wood, leaving us alone, quiet, in the still night.

Thomas leaned over, catching
his breath; and when he complained he was getting too old, I couldn’t help but
laugh, and this made him laugh also; and he wiped down his blade with a cloth,
and was just walking over to see that I was all right, when suddenly the giant
returned, from the opposite direction in which he had gone, scurrying like a
wolf along the ground, and barrelling into Thomas with such a speed and fury he
sent him crashing against a tree, and knocked him senseless to the ground.

He seemed about to rip him to
pieces, until I started to shout and swear at him, in words my mother would have
been ashamed to hear, calling at him:

“Hey! Here! Over here! You ugly
son of a whore!”

And he did turn his gaze on me
then, and I swallowed hard from fear.

His eyes were bloodshot and
dark, and his arms shook as he stared at me, savage and unsure, and I wondered
how far I would get if I tried to outrun him.

Then, suddenly and quickly, he
came straight at me, loping like an excited dog, and I felt a great hand, as
wide it seemed as the tree I was resting against, grab my throat, and squeeze.

The feeling of discomfort and
shock soon switched to panic, and then raw terror. My heart drummed its warning
in my ear: I must breathe, or I would die.

My eyes scanned the ground for…
something. What was I looking for? What did it matter? I felt my brain dying. I
wanted to pee. I looked at the man’s face, his breath as foetid as a corpse,
his eyes wild. What had he been like as a child, I wondered? Had he even been a
child? Apart from a lover, no one presumes such intimacy with another living
being as a murderer.

And then, as the cloud filling
my mind started to cover every other thought, I felt the pressure relax, and at
first supposed I must be slipping out of consciousness, and into death. But
then I realized I was still alive, and that his hand had released its grip.
There was a look, almost of relief, on his face, and the wildness in his eyes
seemed to have gone. He looked like a friend might, on waking from a nightmare.
He took a couple of steps back. He had Thomas Taper’s sword sticking out of his
chest.

Thomas had some difficulty
retrieving the weapon, so deep was it embedded; but finally, with a snap and
creak of gristle and bone, he did so, and wiped it clean. Then he put his hand
to my forehead, and looked carefully into my eyes. When he spoke, he did so quietly
and urgently.

“Esther? Can you see? Can you
walk? We must go now. There will be more like him, and I cannot fight them
all.”

I looked at him for several
good moments, and, finally, sensing my own vulnerability, and with no more
energy to do otherwise, simply nodded.

We pushed our way through the
dense firs, and I hardly had the strength to fight back against the twitching
branches that plucked at my clothes, and scratched my skin. Thomas managed to
slice a pathway of sorts with his knife, but still we both stumbled, and at
times it became so dark I had to clutch at the tail of his coat for fear of
getting lost.

Eventually we reached the
northern wall of the Cities, and felt our way along the coarse brickwork, bound
with vine and creeper, until we found a clearer road, that shadowed the wall,
and threaded through the trees towards the north gate.

The gate was deserted, and I
supposed the guards had left to help repel the attack to the south, or else fled
another way; for who but a madman, and a madman’s apprentice, would head north,
when all that lay beyond were the unforgiving waters of the Soar, and, on the
other side, the miles of barren rock that people called the Lessening Lands.
And beyond them, where the winter cold was fiercest, and the sun most distant,
the lair of the Witch,
Glenaster
.

The Histories tell that
Glenaster
was once a beautiful and sacred land, and that,
despite the cold and the difficulty of the journey, many folk used to travel there
in the Forgotten Days, before the seas rose about the known world, and cut it
off forever from the gods. Then there were no demons, nor witches, nor warlocks
by the Dying Sea, and men used magic only for good. But then the Witch arose,
and fear and hatred with her; and
Glenaster
became a
desolate place, where people feared to go; and the Witch made it her home, and
so had remained there ever since.

The gate was open, though only
by the merest fraction, and we squeezed our way through, for the great iron
hinges would not move, and the whole edifice seemed sunk into the ground, and
stuck fast.

“There is some shelter up
ahead,” said Thomas, striding quickly on into the darkness. “We should be safe
there until daybreak.”

And so we pressed on, across
the broad marshes south of the Soar, following the safe paths that Thomas knew,
and turning our backs on the peopled lands.

The shelter he spoke of was
hardly more than a hut, with tarred walls, and a copse of lime trees protecting
it from the bellowing wind. It was about a mile from the north gate of the
Cities, and I was happy to see it, rude and draughty as it was, because I was
weary in heart and limb.

I slept sound and long that
night, though the wind howled against the door; and Thomas stood sentry for
much of the darkest hours, still as a house, a trickle of moonlight
illuminating his face. He had brought some food with him in a bag – some banana
bread, a meat pie – and I was careful to ration them.

“I do not know when we shall
see food like this again,” he said.

Finally the sun marched boldly
up the sky, and a robin opened its throat to greet the cold morning.

We set off then, striking north
across the marshes towards the river. After a mile or so we found a causeway,
old but still sturdy, and followed it for six good miles through the wetlands,
the cold seeping into our bones, and the hour well past noon before we reached
its end. There Thomas stopped, and pointed ahead with a long finger.

“There it is,” he said.

And I stood up on tiptoe, and
rested my chin, damp with mud and rain, on his shoulder, and listened. And I
could hear the heavy rush of the River Soar, hardly more than fifty yards away,
its chilly waters sliding slowly by, its voice a song of longing for the sea.

We followed the river westward
for a good league or so, through drier country, the air still and silent except
for the shrill cry of geese. The winter sun set paths and hedgerows ablaze with
a keen light, but gave little warmth, and the bare and crooked trees that
marked our way cast long and sad shadows. We walked along, hardly speaking, and
now and then I caught a small noise – an intake of breath, a quiet sob – and
realized with some surprise that they came from my own mouth. Thomas, a few
yards ahead, hardly looked back; but from the shape of his coat as he held it
around him, and the way his head was hunched low into his scarf, he seemed more
alone than I had ever seen him.

By late afternoon we were near
to the Ice Bridge of
Sennow
, so called because of the
thick cluster of icicles which settles upon it during the deepest part of the
winter, and which forms the only crossing between the inhabited lands south of
the Soar, and the foreign wastes beyond it. As we sheltered beneath a birch,
stripped by the sighing wind, we saw a young man, dressed like one of the Green
folk, in a wide coat, and carrying a dead deer. He stopped when he saw us, and
nodded at Thomas.

“Brother,” he said, and his
voice was cracked, and sounded as if it was far away. Thomas nodded in reply,
and gestured to the animal, held upside down, the man’s gloved hand tight
around its legs.

“Can you spare any of that
meat, brother?” he asked, and looked hard at the man, who held his head a
little to one side, and said:

“I wish I could. This is for my
family, and they are not small in number.” Then he added: “I am sorry.”

Thomas only smiled, as if this
was the answer he was expecting.

“If you cannot spare any food,
perhaps you can tell us something. How goes it with the Green Cities? Have you
heard anything of Richard of the Towers?”

The young man looked suspicious
then, and backed away a little. Then he said:

“The Southern Acres are
overrun. I suppose you know this already. The Witch had been building a great
army in
Glenaster
: bigger than we had imagined
possible. Our complacency has cost us dear. There are some safe places left
within the Cities’ walls, but if you do not know where those are, I am afraid I
cannot tell you. Messengers have been sent to
Ampar
,
to ask the emperor for help; but I doubt anyone will come, or, if they do, it
will be too late…” And his voice trailed away, and he closed his eyes, and was
silent for a time.

After a while, he said:

“I do not know where you will
go. The servants of the Witch have closed off the roads south, and there is no
retreating that way. Unless…” And he looked at us, and his eyes widened a
little, as if the thought had only just occurred to him. “Unless you mean to
go…” And he pointed with his arm, toward the lands that lay on the other side
of the river. We did not reply.

He nodded again, and turned to
leave, but then, turning back, said, to me:

“You are welcome to hide with
my family, if you wish. You are too young to cross the river.”

I must admit, I was tempted by
his offer, and felt Thomas’s eye on me as I considered it.

“Thank you, sir,” I said at
last. “But I have a companion on the road, and I do not think I will need your
protection as well. But I am grateful to you.”

The man hesitated slightly,
then bowed a little, and walked away, and soon disappeared amongst the trees.
And that was the last sane man we met before we crossed into the lands of the
Witch.