The call of the sword tcoh-1 Read online

  He laid the sword down and stared at it. Then some-thing occurred to him and he raised his hand as if to halt the memory before it moved on.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said, and he walked over to the end of the workshop where he kept his collection of books; all manner of dissertations and commentaries and lore about carving. Strictly speaking the collection was not his, it was the Guild’s, he being its trustee as First Carver until one more worthy came along.

  His craggy block of a head nodded up and down slightly as his finger tapped its way along the old spines, and he put out his tongue like a ‘do not disturb’ sign.

  ‘Aha.’

  He reached down an ancient tome and, after blow-ing the dust from it, began gently turning the pages. Without looking up from the book he motioned to Loman.

  ‘I thought I remembered,’ he said. ‘Look.’ Loman gazed at the book blankly.

  ‘This is a very old book, Loman,’ Isloman explained needlessly. ‘And it’s written in a tongue and a style which I can barely understand. But look… ’ His heavy finger tapped a diagram lightly. Loman squinted at it and frowned.

  ‘It means nothing to me, Isloman,’ he said. ‘It’s one of your carvers’ drawings.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ muttered Isloman to himself, engrossed in the page and not hearing his brother. ‘As far as I can make out, it says that following the Rise of Six… someone or other, before the Age of the Great Alliance, I think, and long before the Golden Age, certain weapons were forged… or re-forged by Theowart… Sph… Sphaeera, and… Enartion, with earth, water and air taken from the Places of Great… that might be, or Old, Power. And they were blessed by Ethriss… and consecrated to life.’

  He nodded his head in satisfaction.

  ‘So?’ queried Loman.

  ‘So,’ said Isloman. ‘This diagram… ’ He prodded the picture in the book. ‘This diagram shows a sword like that.’ He pointed to the sword on the table.

  Loman looked intently and disbelievingly at the diagram. ‘Does it say anything else?’ he asked.

  Isloman scanned the page again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But, as I said, it’s a very old book, and it talks about times that were ancient when it was written.’

  Neither spoke for a long time and the sound of chil-dren playing in the distance filled the room again. Very softly, Loman began to speak about things they had not discussed for many years. There were no records of Anderras Darion ever having been open, other than in children’s tales. In the past, the skills of generations had failed so totally to open its Great Gate or gain access in any way, that all attempts had long since been aban-doned, and public wonder at the castle had been confined solely to the Gate. Then Hawklan had come out of the mountains one bleak winter when all paths were impassable, and opened it with a key and a word. A man with no memory, who knew the castle as if he had lived there all his life. A man who was a healer, not a prince or a warrior as might be expected. And now this mysterious sword had sought him out.

  ‘Who is he, Isloman? And what does all this mean? Your book doesn’t tell us much. We know that this sword is far beyond our understanding. But it seems to presage danger. Danger for Hawklan, danger perhaps for us all. What shall we do?’

  Isloman answered without hesitation. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘We can’t do anything but wait. If Hawklan needs help and we can give it then we will, won’t we? Some-thing’s happening which we can’t begin to judge. But I know this, and so do you-there’s no evil in that sword, and no evil in Hawklan. And I trust Hawklan’s sight without question.’

  Returning to the castle, the two brothers found that Hawklan had taken Isloman’s advice to find clothes more appropriate for the long journey to the Gretmearc than his long loose habit and soft shoes.

  As they entered his room with the sword, Tirilen was eyeing him critically and making small, pecking adjustments to his unfamiliar garments.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely?’ she said, a cryptic expression on her face. She took him by the elbow and turned him round to face them. Hawklan looked faintly embarrassed. Loman and Isloman exchanged brief glances although neither spoke, nor made any other outward sign of what they had seen. Each knew the other had noted Hawk-lan’s remarkably changed appearance.

  Loman covered their awkwardness by stepping forward and looping the sword belt around Hawklan’s waist. For a moment he looked like a faithful squire attending on his lord.

  ‘What did you find out about it?’ Hawklan asked.

  ‘Nothing definite,’ said Loman. ‘Isloman thinks as I do. It’s very old and it’s done some rare deeds in its time. It was made by craftsmen of… ’ He paused, at a loss. ‘I doubt a finer weapon exists in the whole Armoury… or anywhere for that matter.’

  Hawklan turned directly to Isloman, trying to ignore Tirilen still moving around him making final adjust-ments to his clothes. ‘And the hilt?’ he asked.

  ‘It has the qualities that Loman tells me are in the metal. They’re quite… overwhelming. I certainly don’t understand them fully and I doubt I could explain them to you even if you weren’t rock-blind,’ said Isloman.

  Hawklan nodded. ‘What about the device in the hilt? Did you recognize it?’ he asked.

  Isloman told him of the old book and its obscure references to times long gone. At the names Theowart, Sphaeera, Enartion and Ethriss, Hawklan seemed to hear again the distant note he had heard when he first handled the sword, but it slipped from him just as before.

  He looked at his two friends, dominating the room with their massive presence. They were looking at him strangely although patently trying not to. Tirilen too, had an uncertainty about her as she stood back to examine her handiwork.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. Both the men seemed to start a little at the question.

  ‘Oh nothing. You just look different in your travel-ling clothes,’ said Loman with a slightly nervous smile. Hawklan knew they were keeping something from him, but he did not press them. They would not deceive him in any serious matter. He probably looked rather foolish in the clothes that Tirilen had found for him and they were too embarrassed to tell him. That would be typical of them.

  But it was not that. Quite the contrary. Hawklan wore the clothes and the sword as if they were a natural part of him. The brothers saw before them the man they knew as a healer: a gentle, slightly innocent man, full of stillness and light. But his healer’s cowled robe had been laid aside and, standing armed, breeched, and booted, in a metal-buckled jerkin and with a long hooded cloak over his shoulders, the whole in black, his bearing was purely that of a warrior and leader. A warrior and a leader the like of which could be seen in the thick of battle in many of the carvings that filled the Castle.

  * * * *

  Before he left, Hawklan asked Loman and Isloman to teach him some basic sword skills, but, strangely, they both refused.

  ‘If I try to use it I’ll probably cut my foot off… or worse,’ he protested jokingly. ‘I’ve never handled a sword in my life.’

  But the two men did not respond to his levity. They shook their heads. ‘That sword’s far beyond our understanding, Hawklan,’ said Isloman soberly, almost reverently. ‘We can only learn from it, not teach.’ Then, as if reluctant to deny a friend such help, ‘But I doubt you’ll be able to draw it in an ill cause. You must do as we must. Learn from it. Trust its judgement. It sought you out, not you it. Have faith in it.’

  Chapter 7

  Hawklan was gone. Off on his strange pilgrimage to the Gretmearc. It thus fell to Tirilen to repair her uncle.

  Isloman had spent the whole day in a towering fury-his hand gashed by his new chisel and, worse, far worse, his precious, long sought rock tortured by the rending scar the chisel had made when it slipped from his hand.

  ‘Months this rock and I have searched for one an-other,’ he fumed, as Tirilen treated and bound up his bleeding hand. ‘And for this to happen. To me of all people.’ He leaned forward and put his head in his hands in distress.

  Tirilen had been busin
esslike in treating the hand, although the cut had an unpleasant quality about it, but she was at a loss to contend with this uncharacteristic outburst, following as it did his equally uncharacteristic rage. After a moment, she put her arms around him hesitantly and held him almost as if he had been a hurt child. Eventually he sat up and looked at her.

  Putting his large hand against her cheek, he said quietly, ‘You’re very like your mother, Tirilen. In many ways. I’m sorry I’ve been such an old woman. I shouldn’t have burdened you with my carelessness and its consequences.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, uncle,’ she replied. ‘It was an ugly cut. You couldn’t have left it.’ She frowned a little. ‘That tinker was like a bad wind. He threw dust in our eyes, and whatever he was, we couldn’t see him for it. I’ve set aside the pendant I bought from him. Look what it did.’

  She lifted up her chin and showed him a small but angry red mark where the pendant had rested against her. ‘And it was so pretty when I bought it.’

  Isloman scowled and clenched his fists menacingly. Tirilen became businesslike again.

  ‘Where’s the chisel now?’ she asked before he could speak.

  He answered a little shamefacedly. ‘I… threw it away when… ’ He indicated his damaged hand. Tirilen stopped winding up a bandage and looked at him, her face a mixture of concern and surprise. Nothing was ever ‘thrown away’ in Orthlund. Everything had its use and its time, its place in the Great Harmony.

  ‘Threw it away?’ she echoed in a tone of disbelief.

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid so,’ Isloman replied, looking even more shamefaced. Tirilen laid the bandage neatly in its place in her box, and took his hand.

  ‘You must go and find it, uncle,’ she said firmly. ‘Straight away. Who knows what harm it might do left lying idly?’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. Then looking at his bandaged hand he nodded and, standing up, gave her a kiss on the forehead. ‘You’ve done a fine job on this,’ he said briskly. ‘Hawklan would be pleased with you.’

  ‘You were very lucky,’ she replied. ‘It came very close to doing you an injury that even Hawklan would have found difficult to mend. You could have been crippled for life. Now go and find that chisel right away.’

  Isloman pursed his lips regretfully. ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be young to be foolish, do you?’

  As he was leaving, Tirilen spoke again.

  ‘Uncle. You can’t work properly today. Both your hand and your heart are too hurt. Go round the village and see what other harm has been done by this tinker’s wares.’

  Isloman, his huge frame filling the doorway, looked at her steadily. She was so different now from the boisterous child she had been. More and more she’s growing like her mother, he thought, and an old hurt throbbed briefly.

  His tour of the village turned into a dark pilgrimage of his own as he wended his way round the clean sunlit streets and sharp-edged houses. People came out and, without speaking, gave him things they had bought and now rejected. In the end it was four or five of them, heavily laden, who left the tinker’s wares in a pile outside the leaving stone of the village, marking it with the ancient sign for ‘Unclean’ as a warning to passers-by.

  Doubtfully, Tirilen laid words on it to protect any plants and animals that might light on it. She wished Hawklan were here. She did not have this kind of skill.

  Isloman looked down at the tools, fabrics and jewel-lery, even toys, and shook his head sadly.

  ‘Is this all we can do with them, Isloman?’ asked Ireck, his friend and an Elder of the Guild. Isloman did not answer.

  ‘What else can we do,’ said Otaff, another Elder of the Guild. ‘They’re tainted in ways we cannot read. Who can say what blinded us into accepting them. Perhaps when Hawklan returns he’ll know what to do. For now we must hope that the signs and Tirilen’s words protect the unwary and the innocent.’

  He looked sadly at the pile. ‘This must remain here. Outside the village. To mark our shame.’

  No one dissented from this unhappy conclusion, and the group dispersed slowly without any leave-taking.

  * * * *

  Tirilen sat on a wide ledge in a room high in the castle, staring out across the countryside. Her blonde hair hung loose, shining in the bright spring sunshine. She pressed her nose against the window.

  ‘What’s happening, Gavor?’ she said to the raven, currently examining some fruit in a bowl on the table. He walked across to her purposefully and then flitted up on to her shoulder and peered earnestly in the direction she was looking.

  ‘You’re steaming up the window, dear girl, that’s what’s happening,’ he said after a moment. Tirilen glowered sideways at him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  An insect collided drowsily with the window and lurched off into the clear air erratically. Tirilen curled up her knees and, wrapping her arms around her legs, rested her head on them.

  ‘Steady, dear girl,’ said Gavor, tottering at this unex-pected manoeuvre. ‘I’m used to a bigger perch than this you know.’

  Tirilen smiled. ‘Yes. A lot of us are missing Hawklan in one way or another.’

  Gavor did not comment. He hopped off her shoulder and started walking up and down the room fretfully. He too was unsettled by the feeling of impending change that seemed to be pervading the castle and the village. Not the changes wrought by the coming of spring, but something more elusive and subtle; something alarm-ing.

  He tapped his wooden leg thoughtfully on the floor and mumbled to himself. The strange tinker and his appalling wares. Isloman injured and demented, albeit briefly. Hawklan gone. He, who never went more than a few days walk from the village. Gone on a wild trip across the mountains for no reason that he cared to state. And without him too. And that sword!

  Gavor felt the clouds on his horizon. Whatever was happening emanated from that tinker surely? But the change centred around Hawklan; his friend. His friend who had gone on alone. They had never been apart before.

  Temperamentally however, Gavor was not given to brooding. He regarded himself as a bird of action when times required, and this was such a time.

  ‘Rrukkk,’ he said.

  Tirilen looked at him coldly. ‘You should eat less,’ she said.

  ‘I shall ignore that remark, dear girl,’ he replied haughtily. ‘That was just an ejaculation. A punctuation mark in my thoughts as it were. I’ve made up my mind.’

  Tirilen was silent.

  He continued, slightly discomfited. ‘I’m going after Hawklan. The poor boy’s sure to get lost in those mountains. Especially with the directions Isloman has given him.’

  Tirilen’s eyes widened. ‘But he did say he wanted to go alone,’ she said, unconvincingly.

  Gavor bent his head. ‘I know. But I can’t leave him. He’s going to need someone. I can feel it in my pinions. He’s so naive.’

  Tirilen frowned thoughtfully, and then abruptly stood up and threw the window open. The warm breeze blew her hair about her face.

  ‘Yes. You’re right,’ she said, extending her arm for him to jump on. ‘Go and find him. Look after him. Watch over him.’

  A tear ran down her face as she held her hand out through the window. Gavor left his perch and soared off majestically, his black wings shimmering in the sunlight.

  Swooping back, he lay for a moment on the air ris-ing up the tower wall.

  ‘Don’t cry, dear girl,’ he shouted. ‘Gavor to the res-cue.’

  He extended his wooden leg and made feints and thrusts with it as if it were a tiny sword.

  ‘Oops!’

  His antics cost him his balance, and he dropped out of sight suddenly. Tirilen thought she caught a word she was unfamiliar with rising up from below, and then he flapped into view again.

  ‘And I’ll be able to practice my nightingale impres-sions in some privacy. Away from the scorn that greets me here,’ he said with great dignity.

  Tirilen laughed and waved to him, and then wiped her eyes
on her sleeve, briefly the little girl she had once been.

  As she watched Gavor disappear from view, she could hear him whistling awkwardly, and then clearing his throat and coughing.

  Chapter 8

  Two days after leaving the village, Hawklan was well into the mountains. As Loman had teased, it was further than he had ever been before, but he felt he was being urged forward rather than being drawn back, which was the feeling he had had in the past whenever he travelled any distance from the Castle.

  He was on the line of the River Road, which passed through the village and went straight into the moun-tains. It had ceased to be a road as such, many miles back, and was now only a rough track, though still well formed and quite easy walking.

  Coming to the top of a long steep incline, he paused for a moment, and took off his pack. Looking for a suitable place to sit, he turned round and saw spread before him the rolling farmlands and forests of Orthlund. It was an impressive and beautiful sight when seen from Anderras Darion, but here he was much higher and the air was wonderfully clear from a rainstorm earlier in the day.

  He had been plodding relentlessly uphill for some considerable time and had not once looked behind. The sudden sight overwhelmed him and the Great Song of Orthlund, rich in spring harmonies, flowed up the valleys and filled him with such joy that tears ran down his sweat-stained face. From somewhere deep inside came the thought that he would fight again to defend such a land, such a people, such a balance and harmony.

  The thought was so alien to him, and such a para-dox, that his head drooped and tilted to one side as if he were trying to hear from where it had come. Without realizing it he rested his left hand on the pommel of the black sword. His forehead wrinkled in puzzlement as he mouthed the words, ‘fight again?’