The Girl and the Guardian

  ‘Now we are back in the wilds, without any sure refuge,’ said Korman when they finally stood blinking in the golden mid-morning sunlight under the cliff face, wet and cold from the amber floodwaters which burst out of the cave mouth and roared away through the massive boulders. ‘We are going deeper into the Badlands, and we must watch every step. There will be Kiraglim about, after your narrow escape in the Dreamweb. They know you are in this area, because news will have reached them of the boys’ raid on the Deathwagon. And now they know you are from Kor-Edartha, they will be very eager to find you. In fact you will be Hithrax’s prime quarry, and he will be hunting for you ceaselessly. Let us hope they did not pick up Bootnip’s trail. I should not really have taken him…’ The little anklebiter seemed to understand, and burrowed nervously into Korman’s pack, where it found the crystals, curled up around them and fell asleep.

  ‘I don’t ever want to meet that Hithrax,’ replied Shelley with a shudder. ‘So, let’s get it over with – find that village, Pebblebrook, and then… How far is it to Ürak Tara, did you say?’

  ‘I did not. I do not know the way yet. As a Guardian, duty kept me close to the Tree and the Tor Enyása. Then after being outcast, I was given a new vigil, at the Portal: waiting for you, for seventy-three years! So there are many places on Aeden I have never seen, including the hidden refuge of Ürak Tara. And along the way, even the places I did know will have changed. There will be many thorn dens, between here and there – wherever “there” is. We must go one step at a time. We may have to go a roundabout path. As is often the Way, I have found.’

  ‘Korman, if I’m really going to go through with this, I want to start learning about this Way. I want to be a warrior like you!’

  ‘I have already begun to teach you. But do not expect to learn always what you expect to learn. It is often something different. You may have to learn patience, for example.’

  ‘Ok… got it. Patience. Now can we go?’ she joked.

  But Korman was focussing on the cliff face, his staff raised. The dark opening wavered and disappeared. Soon all that could be seen was a spring bubbling up from the boulders at the foot of a sheer cliff in the bright sun.

  ‘Can you teach me how to do that?’ said Shelley, in awe.

  ‘Perhaps later,’ he replied with a slight smile.

  Shelley knew she was being tested, and decided not to show her impatience. She plodded after Korman all that afternoon as he picked a path through bramble-filled gullies where the air was hot and full of buzzing flies, over scrubby ridges where the breeze cooled them but they had to bend double to avoid being seen, and down several cliffs. After the last and most difficult of these, Shelley was shaky from the climb and hunger, so Korman let them stop for a brief meal under an overhanging rock which jutted out from the cliff-face. Tiny greenish birds like wax-eyes with long beaks warbled in the bushes at the foot of the cliff as they ate, but there was no sound of bigger creatures – or Trackers.

  They set off again, always walking on the rockiest ground to leave no footprints. At last they came to a little stream at the bottom of a bush-filled gully. ‘This is the Pebblebrook, I think!’ said Korman. ‘It winds down to the village we are looking for: Pebblebrook, so named for the stream which waters it and provides power for its mill.’ They followed the stream down the gully, treading warily. It ran through a tunnel of overhanging brambles and other bushes, greener and broader-leafed than those further up in the hills. At each turn of the gully Korman scouted ahead, then beckoned to Shelley to follow. She was amazed at how quietly the big man crept along, and how he merged with the surroundings. Sometimes she lost sight of him altogether and only saw him again when he waved her on. When he reappeared his face seemed brighter, as if he had seen something wonderful but invisible to her. He looked at her as if he thought she saw it too. ‘He’s practising the Way of the Lady, walking in Faery,’ she thought, and she felt envious. She thought back to the mindstone visions, so puzzling and fragmentary, and Korman’s great vow, when he swore never again to draw his great sword Arcratíne until he learned the Way of the Lady and walked with her in Faery again. ‘Well, he’d better not walk into Faery and leave me behind!’ she thought, and she resolved that she would learn to do it too. ‘If it’s really true and not just some mind-trick,’ she muttered. ‘He could be mad, after all; I don’t know him well enough to be sure he isn’t. Maybe this Lady drove him mad. He does seem to be obsessed with her.’

  Their shadows were long in front of them as they followed the stream out of the bushes. The gully had now opened out into a small valley. A track appeared beside the stream, with green pasture bathed in the late golden sunlight, and scattered trees on either side, bearing nuts like the ones in the gardens of the Padmaddim, that looked to Shelley like macadamias.

  ‘Ours will be nearly ready to eat,’ thought Shelley. ‘I bet that Mark will already be cracking them open, before they’re properly ripe.’ She felt a wave of nostalgia, followed by that hollow feeling, knowing that her father was only her stepfather… It was too hard to think about. She wrenched herself back to the here and now. She noticed the track. ‘Oh good, a track at last!’ she said.

  ‘Do not walk on it!’ warned Korman. ‘We must continue to walk in the stream bed, to keep the Kiraglim off our trail.’

  ‘Where are the people who use the track?’

  ‘The shepherds have already put their sheep away for the night, and the people will be safely indoors also. It is not safe to be outside at night in the Badlands,’ said Korman.

  ‘What are the people like?’ Shelley asked, to keep her mind off the dangers, as they picked their way along the stream, which was now up to her ankles, and pleasantly cool to her tired feet – bare, as she was carrying the boots Barachthad had given her (she made sure to keep them well away from Bootnip, who eyed them now and then from Korman’s pack).

  ‘Peace-loving shepherds and spinners of wool, mostly,’ Korman replied, ‘and loyal to the Old Order, or what they remember of it – mostly superstitions and old wives’ tales. They do not take kindly to being told the truth.

  ‘Before the coming of the Thornmen they had not been up onto the Plateau of the Tree, the Tor Enyása – not for generations. They no longer trusted us, the Guardians who protected it. They thought the place was haunted and dangerous. Then, seventy-three years ago the Aghmaath came in force and we were overpowered. The Aghmaath told all the villages round about that the Guardians had betrayed the Order of the Makers, and that they, the Aghmaath, had been sent to restore order on the Tor Enyása. A new order – the so-called “Order of the Aghmaath.”

  ‘And the villagers believed this lie – at least at first. They just wanted to be left alone, and anyway had no desire to go up to the haunted Plateau. But the power of the Great Sphere of the Makers began to wane after the Arcra-Nama had gone, as the Tree languished and dark thoughts crept into their hearts, and droughts and dust storms increased.

  ‘Then the Aghmaath began to send out many colonists to the Northwest Arm of Aeden, which belonged in ancient times to their fellows from the Aghmaath world, Phangkor, before that world fell into darkness and was cut off from the Order. But in happier times it was called Kor-Zürglim, which means ‘World of flight from crystal mountains,’ and it was beautiful. So these Aghmaaths, claiming to be the rightful heirs, took over the harbour villages and the Tower of the Northwest Arm. They renamed that beautiful harbour Phagra, which means Gutwater, or Blackwater, and they defiled it with the waste of the Nered factories which they built to make new weapons of bondage and destruction, such as the Deathwagon which captured you.’

  Shelley shuddered at the memory. They crunched on the gravel of the now-cold stream bed while the sun sank lower towards the hills behind them. Korman continued:

  ‘And lately they have grown thorn dens on all the main roads leading to the Tor Enyása. Now they send out their missionaries to persuade, and their Kiraglim to hunt those few who, like the Boy Raiders, seek to resist them. And the tho
rn spores begin to take root all over the land, while the Dreamcasters darken the minds of all who are unwary.’

  ‘Will the villagers trust you, Korman, if you’re one of the Guardians?

  ‘We will appear to them as refugees. Some will remember me and welcome us for the sake of news from abroad – I hope.’

  ‘And put us up for the night?’

  ‘We will have to hope so.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very hopeful at all!’ groaned Shelley.

  It was already getting darker. The sound of a huge gong rang out, echoing up the valley.

  ‘Is that coming from the village?’ asked Shelley in alarm.

  ‘No, not this village. The one further down the valley, Milltown, has already been converted to the worship of the Void, or so Barachthad tells me. If so, it will not be long before they come up the valley to Pebblebrook.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do to stop them?’

  ‘I will try to speak to the villagers, and warn them against believing any of the false promises of the missionaries. But people who live in fear want to believe comforting propaganda.’

  They rounded a bend, and at last there below them was the little village of Pebblebrook, with a narrow cobbled street winding down by the stream, and little whitewashed houses crowding on either side of it, and to Shelley’s delight, the waterwheel Korman had spoken of. It was turning slowly, taking water into its wooden buckets from the race above and spilling it into the pool perhaps twenty feet below. She wondered what machinery it drove.

  They paused awhile, looking down into the valley. There was just enough light to see the terraced gardens in the hills above the houses. Higher up on either side of the village were olive groves, then bare rock rising steeply to a jagged skyline, where some crags still glowed in the setting sun.

  Smoke came from one or two chimneys, but no one was out on the street, as far as Shelley could see. A little higher up from the houses, down some steep steps cut into the rocky path just below where Shelley and Korman stood, was a larger stone building, very old-looking, built of weathered blue-grey limestone on a foundation of massive flint-like blocks, its rounded end rising to a stone tower with a green copper dome surmounted by a flagpole. The flag was hidden, limp in the calm evening. There were gleams of light coming from tall stained-glass windows along the walls.

  ‘There is a meeting going on in the town hall,’ said Korman. ‘Let us go down the steps and join them.’

  By the time they got down to the level of the hall, it seemed much taller. Shelley began to be nervous. There was a guard at the door, and he seemed suspicious, but he let the two strangers in after Korman laid down his sheathed sword and staff. There was a little low growl from Korman’s pack, but no one heard it. They went in quietly and sat on a bench at the back. The hall was dimly lit by three nine-branched candelabra hanging from the massive oak roof-beams.

  On a white cloth on a table at the front was a pile of rosy apples. The rich smell of them, combined with the beeswax from the candles, wafted down the room and made Shelley’s mouth water, and she realized how hungry she was. But there was something too sweet, too drug-like, about the smell of the apples, like the poisonous datura, or angel’s trumpet as her mother called it, which pours its perfume into the night air. She remembered her dream in Barachthad’s cave, and shuddered.

  A man standing next to the table was addressing a gathering of maybe a hundred folk, men, women and children, who sat on benches in rows. He spoke the language of Aeden, and in spite of the rustic burr to his accent, Shelley found, to her amazement, that she could understand his speech.

  ‘The missionary who came today,’ he was saying, ‘gave us this answer: he brought these new apples so we could taste and see for ourselves. And my brother Yewbow down at Milltown said one of these a day keeps a full-grown man alive for a hard day’s work in the fields, and he doesn’t even feel tired, but he just sort of floats through the day. They’re our answer to the shortages, he reckons. And -’ (here he lowered his voice, almost whispering) ‘he reckons they open the Third Eye to see a whole new world.’

  ‘What’s wrong with the old one, I’d like to know, Bill?’ called a woman.

  ‘And who caused the shortages in the first place? Who dried up the springs?’ said a man sitting beside her: her husband, Shelley thought.

  ‘Don’t think you can pull the wool over our eyes, Bill Crabapple,’ the woman went on. ‘We all know it’s since those Thornmen came that the rains have been staying away, and the Fairies, that used to help with the crops…’

  ‘You still believe in Fairies, and you expect us to listen to you, woman! And it’s Mayor Crabapple. It’d pay you not to forget it,’ interrupted the mayor scornfully.

  ‘…and the thorns and thistles have been getting into the crops more every year and making hybrids that can’t be eaten!’ she persisted.

  ‘My brother Yewbow knows, and he says that’s blasphemy, Ira Steadman. The Thornmen offer us new crops, ones that take no weeding and need next to no water. Anyway, it rained just last night.’ There was a murmur of agreement from some of the front benches.

  Ira’s husband spoke up again.

  ‘Are you telling us to throw away all the Makers taught our foreparents about the land and how to care for it? What is the end of this? If we listen to these Travellers, the land could end up a desert, with us their slaves. You must all have heard the rumours.’

  ‘Aye, rumours, Grim, rumours,’ said the mayor. ‘Didn’t the Travellers deal with the Guardians, up on the Plateau after the Guardians destroyed the jewel in the Tree of Life and the skybeams went out and the so-called “renewing lightning” stopped? Hasn’t it been near on seventy-three years since that day, and has the sky fallen? No! Because the Aghmaath were up there to put things right. And because the old myths are wrong, the Tree of Life isn’t what keeps us alive. And now the Aghmaath are coming down to us, to help us. To tell us new truths. Anyway, they have powers we don’t. They destroyed the Guardians, didn’t they? What makes you think we could stand up to them even if we wanted to?’

  ‘Is that a threat?’ said Grim.

  ‘Maybe,’ said the mayor.

  The people went very quiet.

  Then an old man at the back struggled to his feet. ‘I still remember that day, seventy-three long years ago, when the sky beams went out. It wasn’t the Guardians that did it; it was a thief from Kor-Edartha! The Aghmaath are liars! The Guardians would never betray their trust. Never! They guarded the Tree of Life faithfully since the Makers left to battle the Dark Entities. It wasn’t their fault that Athmad and Ewana, our foreparents six thousand years ago, betrayed the Makers and stole the Jewel of Knowledge, and were banished to Kor-Edartha, and Kor-Edartha was closed off from Kor-Aedenya.’ He shook with anger, and gasped for breath from the passion of his speech.

  ‘There, you answer yourself, old man, with your Kor this and Kor that!’ said the mayor. ‘If Kor-Edartha was closed off from Kor-Aedenya, how could a thief from Kor-Edartha have taken the Life Jewel? Your precious Korman, the Outcast, Korman of the withered arm, he was lying to you!’ Shelley glanced at Korman. Apart from involuntarily rubbing his thin arm, he sat impassive, but alert. The old man sat down, confused. The people stirred, looked to the mayor approvingly. Some of them laughed at the old man. He had them in the palm of his hand now.

  ‘And so I hereby announce to you a brave new world, where the Plateau is open to the holy Void at night, and we can fly up there, and the good Aghmaath, our elder brothers, look after us and make us citizens of the Kingdom of Peace.’ His voice rose, impassioned. ‘PEACE! From failing crops and weeding and struggle! PEACE! From old wives’ tales about the Makers! PEACE! Through the Apples of Peace!’

  ‘Peace! Peace!’ the people began chanting.

  Korman whispered to Shelley, ‘The mayor has already eaten of the evil apples! The Aghmaath Dreamcasters are speaking through him!’

  ‘Come forward and eat, and know the peace of the Void!’ said th
e mayor, in triumph, and bit noisily into an apple, and the red juice of it stained his chin. The people began to come forward. Grim and Ira and the old man were the only villagers still seated now.

  Then Korman stood on the bench and cried in a great voice:

  ‘STOP!’

  All the people turned to stare at the stranger. ‘I am Korman the Outcast. I was the Tintazürash, the Guardian of the Tree of Life and its Jewel.’ There were gasps and a few jeers from the gathering, but Korman went on:

  ‘The Tree was not destroyed by the Guardians; they were the Tintazürim, the Tree-guards, and their lives were bound up in the life of their trees. They were faithful to the end. I failed; it was stolen. And now, slowly but surely, the vital power of this once most-blessed land is ebbing away as the Tree dies, and the power of the Great Sphere of the Old Order is waning. That is why the crops are failing and you are filled with doubts and confusion, and are tempted by the false peace of the Aghmaath.

  ‘But there is still hope that the Jewel will be returned, the Tree healed, and the Aghmaath banished from Aeden. And that is our only real hope. For the Aghmaath will destroy Aeden, and yourselves and your children, little by little. Do not eat their drugged Apples of “Peace”. That will lay your minds open to them, and you would lose all power to resist. Do any of you know what happens to you, if once you have eaten the apples, and then try to stop? You will suffer torment of mind and body until you would kill to get another mouthful. So you will become their slaves, and then they will sacrifice you to the Void! But there is still hope, for the Aghmaath are still fewer in number than the people of Aeden. If we resist them and do not give up, the Chosen One will come to restore the Jewel, and the Order of the Makers will be restored!’

  ‘This sounds like hard work, “Korman the Outcast” – if that is who you are!’ said the mayor, contemptuously. ‘More likely, a wandering beggar and trickster! Show us this “Chosen One”! Or, better still, show us some of the power of the Old Order, and maybe we’ll be convinced. Heal your own withered arm, for a start.’

  ‘The power of the Order comes first from knowledge of the truth: the Concept. I tell you the truth now. If you reject it, I cannot help you. The magic will not work where there is faithlessness.’

  ‘Yours is only the truth of old wives’ tales, Korman of the Withered Arm! And your faith is as futile as theirs. I prefer the new truth, and the new faith, and a new order, the Order of the Aghmaath! Here’s the truth of the New Order!’ replied the mayor, and he began chanting in a deep voice that was not his own:

  ‘Peace! Peace! Peace!’

  Bootnip was growling and whining, looking out through a little hole he had chewed in Korman’s pack.

  ‘Peace!’ The people began to join in the chant again, and all of them turned away from Korman – all except the old man, and Grim and Ira Steadman, and their boy. These came to Korman at the back of the hall, and the old man said, ‘Welcome back, Lord Korman! I believed you all these years, and I still do. Long live the Makers, the Guardians, and the Concept!’ Korman, bowing to the old man, replied, ‘Greetings again, Elgar! It has been a long time. Well spoken in the meeting!’ Grim put in, ‘Yes, well spoken, Elgar. But now we’d better get out of here. You are all welcome to come to our house.’ Shelley was wobbly on her feet by now, too tired to care much about anything but rest, but horrified to see the people munching the Peace Apples, teeth stained red by the poisoned juice. Just then some of them turned and started shouting, ‘Get them! Make them eat the apples!’ But Korman and Shelley and their new friends seemed to have disappeared, and the villagers, confused, went back to their feasting. Some now lay on the floor or on the benches, in a drugged stupor, and their eyes moved as if they were seeing visions, and others laughed hysterically.

  In the darkened corner to which they had retreated, Korman took Shelley’s arm and they hurried out with the other faithful, picking up their packs and Korman’s staff in the vestibule where the guard had left them to join the apple feast. ‘Where is my sword?’ cried Korman.

  ‘And where is Rilke?’ cried Ira. She and her husband ran back into the hall to look for him, while Korman, looking around the room, saw a cupboard door slightly ajar, and strode over to it. Sitting inside was a little boy. It was Rilke. He had been trying to draw the sword. He cowered before the fierce warrior, and with an effort held the heavy sword out to Korman, who smiled and took it gently, too relieved to be angry. The boy jumped out of the cupboard and said, ‘Sorry sire, it’s just…’ Just then Grim and Ira ran back into the room.

  ‘Where were you?’ growled Grim as Ira took his hand.

  ‘I was just looking in this cupboard,’ said Rilke. Korman said nothing, and Rilke glanced gratefully up at him.

  As they went out into the night, the people in the town hall were still chanting, ‘Peace! Peace!’ and now some chanted, ‘The Void! The Void!’ with strange, fixed smiles on their faces.