Land of the Silver Dragon

THIRTEEN

Gurdyman was back in his house. Although ashamed to admit it, he found it a vast relief. I do not like the outside world, he thought. It really was ironic, he reflected once more, that a man who was devoting so much effort to trying to map out the far places never willingly ventured further than the pie stall at the end of the alley.

Perhaps it was because he had travelled so far in his childhood and as a young man — all the way to Santiago de Compostela, although he’d been too young to appreciate the place. Then, as soon as he was old enough to begin exploring the world by himself, all over Spain, both the Muslim and the Catholic regions; out to the wild trio of islands off Spain’s eastern coast, and thence on to North Africa. On, always on, to Egypt, to the Holy Land and far beyond; away from his parents’ hearth for more than a decade, so that they gave him up for lost and erupted into tears of joy when finally he returned.

He smiled, shaking his head as if to deny that the young man who wanted to see everything should have changed so conclusively into an old sage more than content with his own walls. To whom even the short journey to an obscure fenland village had taken so much effort that, home again, he felt both physically and mentally exhausted.

But perhaps that was due to the harrowing nature of his mission. Lassair was not at Aelf Fen, and she had not been waiting for him when he returned to Cambridge. It was enough to make anyone depressed and anxious …

He and Hrype had agreed not to say anything to the girl’s family; Hrype had even undertaken not to tell Edild, and Gurdyman appreciated how hard that was going to be. They had reasoned that there was no point in worrying anybody else. ‘Not,’ Hrype had said bitterly, ‘when the two of us can worry enough for all.’ There had been no word from Lassair; as far as her kin were concerned, she was safely in Cambridge, working hard with her wizard mentor.

If only she was, Gurdyman thought sadly.

He was sitting out in his little courtyard, face turned up to the early summer sun, when there was a knock on his door. Hurrying along the passage, his heart leaping with hope, he opened the door to reveal Hrype. One look at his expression answered Gurdyman’s unspoken question: Lassair had not returned.

In his face Gurdyman also read guilt. Recognizing it, he felt the same emotion burn through him.

‘He’s been seen again,’ Hrype said baldly.

‘The red-headed giant.’ Gurdyman nodded slowly. ‘Yes. And …?’

‘No news of her.’

‘Is that a hopeful sign, do you think?’ Gurdyman asked.

Hrype shrugged. ‘Those who have been keeping watch on my behalf report that he has at least five brawny young men with him; very likely more. I have not managed to locate the secret place where he’s moored his ship, and it is possible that he’s keeping her aboard. However, I do not think so, for by all accounts he is still searching.’

‘It could be that she is his captive and he has not yet managed to make her tell him what he wants to know.’ Putting his worst fear into words made Gurdyman feel sick to the heart, but it was surely better to face up to the possibility than pretend it did not exist.

‘She cannot tell him what she does not know,’ Hrype said softly. ‘Nevertheless, I am confident that he does not have her. Yet,’ he added ominously.

Unconsciously, his hand had gone to the small leather bag hanging from his belt, in which, Gurdyman knew, he kept his precious rune stones. Gurdyman nodded. ‘And do the stones tell you where she is?’ he murmured.

Hrype gave a twisted smile. ‘I see locations, Gurdyman, and I sense that, although she was at first terrified, she is no longer in fear of her life. In fact — ’ his brows drew together in a puzzled frown — ‘if I read the stones aright, it would seem she is actually … excited — even, could I make myself believe it, happy,’ he finished. He shrugged. ‘I am not even sure if either is the right word. I cannot perceive what the runes are telling me.’ He shook his head violently, obviously angry with himself. He would never blame the stones, Gurdyman reflected; only his own failure to understand the message.

‘Are we to think, then,’ Gurdyman said cautiously after quite a long silence, ‘that the person on whose orders she was taken is someone altogether more — ah — benign?’

Hrype’s head shot up, and his strange silvery eyes met Gurdyman’s. ‘I pray that is so,’ he whispered fervently.

There was another silence. Again the one to break it, Gurdyman said, ‘How much, do you think, does Edild know?’

Hrype grimaced, a look of pain on his face that was caused, Gurdyman guessed, by the reminder of having to keep the terrible secret of Lassair’s abduction from the woman he loved so deeply. ‘Her instincts tell her what is true,’ he said, ‘and in her head I believe she accepts it. But in her heart …’ He did not go on.

Gurdyman nodded. ‘The old woman spoke only to you, then.’

‘Yes. She trusted that I would know what to do with the information. Although now I doubt very much that her trust was justified,’ he added bitterly.

‘This is not over yet, my friend,’ Gurdyman said calmly. ‘Do not judge either her wisdom or your own until every outcome is known.’

Hrype turned to him, frustrated fury in his face. ‘Not over?’ he echoed. ‘How can it ever be over when the whole picture is not known to any one of us?’

He had a point, Gurdyman acknowledged. ‘Can you not reveal to Edild what you know?’

‘I wish I could,’ Hrype replied fervently. ‘But the secret is not mine to tell.’

Silence fell once more. The sun moved a few degrees through the heavens, and then Gurdyman said, ‘What will you do now?’

Hrype gave a sort of snort. ‘What can I do? Go home, wait for Lassair to come back.’ His face contracted in a fierce scowl. ‘I have never felt so impotent!’

‘Will you send word as soon as there is news?’ Gurdyman asked, getting to his feet to see his visitor to the door.

‘Of course. And you too, notify me if … if anything happens?’

‘I will,’ Gurdyman promised.

He watched Hrype reach the end of the narrow alley and turn the corner, out of sight. Then he closed and locked the door and returned to his sunny courtyard.

Einar and two of his crew rowed me up the winding waterway and dropped me in exactly the same spot that we had started from — or so I guessed. I’d had a sack over my head when they bundled me aboard Malice-striker’s little boat and rowed off with me.

Now that the moment had come, I discovered it was going to be hard to part from them. Despite our inauspicious start, Einar and I had become friends. He was the tough, silent type; bound by all sorts of obligations — to his kin, to his home, to pride and honour, to his father’s expectations — and, knowing him a little now, I understood just why my jibe about his Malice-striker being a cargo ship and not a warlike longboat out of the age of heroes had wounded him so deeply. He had apologized again for hitting me, and this time, perhaps feeling that he knew me better too, it had been sincere. I’d been prompted to say sorry for what I had said. ‘I did not mean to hurt you,’ I added.

He’d given me a wide, true smile. ‘Nor I you.’

We grinned at each other, and I knew we would not say another word about it.

I stood on the low bank and watched the little boat disappear round a bend in the river. I started to raise a hand to wave, but made myself stop. I wasn’t at all sure that big, brawny Norsemen went in for sentimental farewell gestures.

I shouldered my satchel and turned for home. I was dressed in my own clothes, and I had bundled up my new gown and apron into a tight roll, which I’d tied on top of my bag. With no idea of how I’d begin to explain my finery, I hoped nobody would see it and ask where it came from.

I was heading for home, but I wasn’t going to tell anyone what had happened. I’m not sure why: I was obeying an imperative instinct that was commanding me not to reveal where I’d been and what I had learned. Somehow I knew this wasn’t over. For one thing, this Skuli, who had been so desperate to find the shining stone that he had been prepared even to kill, was still out there. The thought had given me a shudder of fear, although Thorfinn and his tough band of warriors had promised that they would be watching over me.

Thorfinn had held me by the shoulders as we’d said goodbye on board Malice-striker, staring down intently into my eyes. ‘We shall meet again,’ he had said. I believed him.

There was still something he wanted from me, although he had not told me what it was. Now, trudging home to my village, I felt as if I were on some secret mission for him. I didn’t mind; in fact, I relished the prospect. It appeared that, some time over the past days, I had come to trust him. With any luck, my family would assume I was arriving home from Cambridge, and I would let them. It wouldn’t exactly be lying; merely allowing them to believe something that wasn’t actually true. I thought I could probably cope with that.

My homecoming was exactly as I had foreseen it. My father’s face lit up in his usual smile of pleasure when he saw me. My mother, preparing food, remarked that, true to form, I had arrived just in time for a meal. But she also gave me a quick, tight hug.

Assuming, just as I had hoped, that I was fresh from Cambridge and my studies, my brother Squeak asked if I could turn him into a frog yet.

I stayed for four days — I was, after all, pretending to be on a visit to see my family, so I could hardly depart again before I’d spent some time with them — and I was constantly troubled by the vague, uneasy sense that I was waiting for something. My instincts told me that there were invisible patterns shifting just below the surface, and I did not understand. The one person I really wanted to see was Hrype, and he was not in the village. I spent a day with Edild, working on the suddenly abundant supplies of plants now available, and making large quantities of the remedies we used most. She was clearly on edge, although, when I cautiously asked, she gave me such a short answer that I did not dare pursue it.

I did screw up my courage and ask where Hrype was, to which a terse ‘No idea’ was the reply.

Oh, dear …

I was out searching for dew-fresh blackberry leaves — they stop wounds bleeding and are also useful to lessen diarrhoea — early the next morning, when it happened again.

Someone jumped me.

I could not believe it.

At first I was just so angry that it drove out fear. Whoever held me was yet another huge man, and when I beat my fists against his broad, bare arms, it felt like striking hard old oak.

He carried me away from the track into a small stand of hazel trees, my face thrust into his chest so that my cries were muffled and I could barely see. Just as on the previous occasion, he — they — had chosen the spot well: there was nobody around.

The man carrying me dumped me on the ground. I stumbled and fell, then leapt to my feet, spinning round to stare in panic at the circle of hairy, heavily armed giants surrounding me.

One of them had long, flowing hair and a thick, abundant beard. Both hair and beard were light, coppery red.

His blue eyes were on me and they burned as if he had a fever. Even in that very first moment, my healer’s instinct told me there was something deeply amiss with him. Not thinking what I was doing — I was far too terrified to think at all — I sent out a feeler towards him, and in return got such a jolt of wrongness that it made me stagger backwards away from him.

He was like a flying arrow, directed with furious purpose in one direction. His fanaticism bordered on madness, and I was at his mercy.

A sob rose in my throat, and I only just managed to suppress it.

‘You know who I am,’ he said, his voice a low, guttural growl. I nodded. ‘They have told you, my kinsmen, what I search for and why I want it.’ Again, I nodded. He knew I knew, it seemed, so there was no point in denying it. The last thing I wanted to do was antagonize him.

‘I must get to Miklagard, you see.’ Now he sounded reasonable, as if he was stating something that everyone ought to understand. ‘The Great City,’ he added, ‘which you may know as Constantinople.’

I barely knew it as anything. It was a word on Gurdyman’s map. ‘Yes,’ I whispered. It sounded more like a whimper.

‘I cannot make the journey without the stone,’ he went on, pacing to and fro before me as if he could not contain the destructive energy coursing through him. ‘My grandfather tried, you know, and he failed. He is no more now than a name on the stone that marks the death place of so many brave men. I will not be one of them!’ he shouted, his voice rising alarmingly. ‘I will not,’ he added, softly now. ‘But I need the shining stone. It is mine — it should have been passed down to my grandfather and my father, and, had events turned out as they should, it would now be in my hands.’ He raised those great hands, turning them this way and that, then clasping them close together as if they held a round object. It did not take much imagination to know what that object was.

His eyes were on me again, burning into me. ‘You know where it is,’ he said, and the sudden chill in his voice made me shiver. ‘You will take me to it.’

‘I can’t!’ I cried. ‘I don’t know where it is — truly, I don’t!’

Slowly he shook his head. ‘I do not believe you. My kinsmen did not go to all that trouble with you merely to have you tell them I don’t know where it is.’ His parody of my high-pitched voice, shaking with fear, was cruelly accurate.

‘But I-’

He cut off my protest. ‘I do not know where Einar took you, but it is not important. You have revealed to them everything you know, no doubt convincing them that the precious object is perfectly safe wherever it is that it lies. Now you will tell me, and then we will go to where my stone is hidden and I will take possession of it.’

‘I don’t know anything!’ I squeaked. ‘I can’t find the stone for you because I have no idea where it is.’

If I’d believed repetition would work, I was wrong. Skuli drew a long knife from his belt and slid his finger along its brilliant edge. A thin scarlet line appeared in the fleshy pad of his fingertip. I felt sick.

‘I could cut you,’ he mused, ‘or I could cut that pretty little brother of yours — Leir, I believe, is his name. Or, tenderer flesh still, your baby nephew, the child that your brother and his dark-haired wife dote on.’

He knew all about us! Well, I thought, my mind racing, of course he did. He had broken into all our homes. Searched the graveyard where he thought my Granny Cordeilla lay interred. Killed my sister’s mother-in-law and my aunt.

‘I cannot tell you what I do not know.’ My mouth had gone so dry that I could hardly get the words out.

He moved as fast as a snake. His arm was round my chest, the knife tip pushing into my face just under my left eye. I froze.

‘Thorfinn was treated by a young woman who lived here-abouts,’ he hissed right in my ear. ‘She was a kinsman of yours. He left my stone in her care.’

And Skuli had burst into the places where my family lived, searching for what he believed was his, not caring what he broke, whom he hurt or killed, in the process.

The sharp little point was a constant pressure against my skin, not exactly hurting but, as it were, just about to. Quick as a flash, he moved it to my right eye, then back to the left. Into my mind flew the dreadful image of what it could do to me if he pushed a little harder.

‘I don’t know who she was,’ I whispered. ‘I’ve been trying to work it out,’ I added in panic as I felt the muscles tense in the arm that was holding the knife.

‘Try harder,’ he commanded.

‘I believe the healer might well have been an aunt of my mother’s,’ I said, the words tumbling out of me. I thought I was about to wet myself. ‘But I don’t know who she is or where she lives!’

There was a moment of utter stillness. I closed my eyes, committing to memory what might be my last sight of the world. Then, as if my own terror had somehow made him do what I so desperately wanted, the knife point was lowered. He removed his arm from my throat and shoved me away from him, so hard that I fell flat on my face.

I lay panting, trying to work out which part of me hurt the most and if any bones were broken.

Then he spoke. ‘Find out where this woman is,’ he ordered. ‘Then go and fetch my stone.’

I tried to get up on to my hands and knees, but the pain stopped me.

I felt a foot in the small of my back. ‘I will be watching you,’ he said, the cold words like a judgement. ‘If you fail or if you try to deceive me, I will cut off your baby nephew’s face before his parents, bring your little brother’s eyes to you, and then I will kill you.’

The vomit rose in a hot surge, up my throat and into my mouth, and I retched into the grass. When it was over, I raised my head and wiped the tears away.

They had gone. I was all alone in the hazel grove, and I wanted to die.

It was a long time before I dared go home. I’ve seen the effects of shock in others, and I knew very well what I must look like. I made myself collect more blackberry leaves, the familiar, routine task helping to calm me, but still I did not dare risk my aunt’s piercing glance. Like the coward I was, I waited till she was busy with a patient and left the basket of leaves by the door, calling out that I was off home now, to see my mother, and would return later.

It would be light for some time yet, and most of the villagers were still out working, up in the fields on the higher, dry ground or down by the water. Fortunately for me, in my family’s house everyone was absent except for my mother. She sat by the door in the sunshine, spinning wool and watching her sleeping grandson.

I went to sit on the ground beside her, leaning back against the sun-warmed wall of the house and closing my eyes. I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was. I could easily have fallen asleep, but I must not even think about it. I had a task to carry out; one which I dared not fail. I glanced over at the sweet little face of my brother’s baby son, and had to fight down another bout of nausea as Skuli’s words tried to force themselves into my mind. Ruthlessly I shut them out, and a spasm of pain shot through my head.

‘You all right, Lassair?’ my mother asked.

I opened my eyes. She was looking down at me, an expression of concern on her face. If I’d thought that she was a safer option than my keen-sighted, professional-healer aunt, I had underestimated her. Or maybe it was just that I looked even worse than I thought I did.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘A bit tired. It’s warm today, and I must have walked for miles.’

‘Yes, you were out a long time.’ There was a pause. ‘Want some nice, cold water?’

It was a long time since my constantly busy mother had offered to get up and fetch me a drink. On the few occasions in the course of a day that she actually manages to sit down, she tends to stay there. I smiled. ‘You’re occupied with your wool,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘I’ll do it.’

I sat sipping at the water, working out how to ask her what I had to know without raising her suspicions. I must not let out even the smallest hint of what this was really about, for my mother would tell my father, he’d get a band of kinsmen and neighbours together, and the next thing we knew, there would be a battle between my family and Skuli’s band of well-armed giants, and you didn’t need rune stones to work out how that would end.

After a while, I knew what to do.

I said, putting concern into my voice, ‘Mother, we’ve had all these awful attacks and assaults on us and on Father’s poor sister Alvela. But I’ve been thinking — do you know if any of your side of the family have also had their homes searched? After all, it’s-’

My mother’s scornful snort interrupted me. ‘Do you think we didn’t think of that?’ she asked shortly. ‘We’ve not been idle while you’ve been tucked up safe and sound in Cambridge with your wizard!’ The irony of that, when you considered what had really been happening to me, struck me quite forcibly. I suppressed a wry smile. ‘We all realized that my kin would likely be also at risk too,’ my mother went on, ‘but there’s not many of them left now and nobody living that close.’

Yes. I brought to mind our family history. My mother had not originally been a local woman. Her family were all shepherds, living inland from the wet fenlands, on the firmer, dryer ground where the right sort of grazing is found. Her parents were long dead.

‘I’ve only the one brother,’ she mused, ‘and he and his family live over to the east, out beyond Thetford. My aunt Ama, too — that’s my mother’s sister — moved right way, to Fulbeach.’ She glanced at me. ‘You won’t have heard of it — it’s a tiny place, by all accounts, down south of Cambridge.’

I was tingling with excitement. My aunt Ama. Yes, Ama, that was her name; the name I didn’t think I remembered. Well, I had remembered it. She must be the little healer — Thorfinn’s saviour, the woman who brought him back when he was about to lose himself.

It must be her. Surely it was …

Feigning nonchalance, I said casually, ‘I’m not sure I can picture her. Have we ever met?’

‘No,’ my mother replied. She gave a short laugh. ‘And if you met her in the road, you’d never know she and I were close kin, it’s that different we look.’

Yes! Inside my head, I gave a cheer.

Silence fell between us. I could just make out the soft, rhythmic sound of my mother’s spindle as it spun this way and that through the still air, twisting the raw strands of wool into yarn. Presently, she started to hum.

I was thinking hard. My mother was wrong about Fulbeach’s obscurity: I had heard of it. It was half a day’s walk from Cambridge, south-east of the town, and its inhabitants frequently brought their wool into Cambridge, both to the town’s own market and to be shipped away from the quays. It was probably a day’s walk from Aelf Fen, yet my mother spoke as if the distance was an insurmountable barrier. It was the way of it, I reflected, when people lived each and every day in the same small place. In their minds, they created tall, insurmountable walls around them that became as forbidding as the real thing.

My mother had started talking again, remarking on how long it was since she’d seen her brother, and wasn’t it strange, how you all got so busy within your own lives that you just didn’t seem to find the time for the things you’d like to do, but I was barely listening.

I was thinking about my mother’s aunt Ama, the healer.

Given the unthinkable alternative, it looked as if I would have to go and find her.

I set out very early the next morning, on the pretext of more plant gathering. I had surreptitiously packed up some food and a flask of water, for I knew I would be gone all day. It would take some explaining, but I’d worry about that when I returned.

If I returned. An image of Skuli and his knife floated before my vision, and I tried to banish it. If he was having me watched — I was quite sure he was — then surely he would realize I was doing my best and let me get on with it? That would be the logical reaction. The trouble was, I was not at all sure Skuli was the least bit logical.

As I trudged along, keeping up a good pace, I thought about what I would do when I got to Fulbeach and located my mother’s aunt Ama. How would I persuade her to give up the treasure that a long-ago patient had left in her care? Dear Lord, would she remember that she even had it, let alone where she might have hidden it? I turned the questions this way and that, exploring possibilities. Could I get her out of her house on some pretext and search it? Could I pretend an interest in magical stones, and persuade her that I was just itching to have a look at the one I’d been told she possessed? Could I just tell her the truth?

I stopped before midday to eat. I was ravenous, having used up most of my energy in walking so hard. Then I got up and went on. I had reached the conclusion that I would just have to appeal to Ama’s healer’s instincts to save lives, and convince her that members of my family — hers too, since they were her niece’s kin — would suffer terribly and die if she did not help me.

With that feeble plan the best I could do, in the middle of the afternoon I walked into her village.

‘I’m looking for Ama. Ama the healer?’ I asked, over and over again.

I should have asked my mother more questions before I set out on my quest. I would have saved myself a long walk.

My mother’s aunt Ama wasn’t a healer at all. Like the rest of my mother’s family, she was a shepherd. Friendly people trying to be helpful pointed out her tiny house — on the edge of the village — and I saw the fields where her small flock had grazed; even, hanging on a nail in a tumbledown lean-to, the heavy shears she’d used to remove their thick fleeces. The shears were rusty now; the little house empty.

My mother’s aunt was dead. If she’d even known anything about a sick Norseman and a magic stone — which I now very much doubted — then she’d taken her secrets to the grave.

The best I could do was stand in the village’s burial ground and grind my teeth. Somewhere under my feet, her bones were rotting back into the earth.

Which was absolutely no good whatsoever to my family and me.