Chapter 3: The Wall
Tull did not like lying to his wife about his dreams. He had dreamt that night, fragmented troubling dreams that spoke to him of things faraway and perhaps things yet to come.
He could not know the truth of his dreams, if they were really of import, or if they were merely caused by the sense of an approaching storm, so he put it from his mind.
That morning after their wedding, he woke early to fix Fava breakfast, but Fava rose with him, and as he pulled out some presents that he’d bought for her at the market—figs from South Bay, candied hazelnuts, leatherwood honey for their bread—Fava had revealed some treats that she’d bought for him: his favorite pork jerky soaked in fish sauce and covered with ginger, lemon-mint tea, oatcakes.
He discovered that she knew his tastes perfectly, far better than he would have ever guessed.
As they moved through the room, setting the fire, warming the cooking pot, slicing meat and preparing breakfast, it seemed that they were dancers in the kitchen.
He’d known Fava since childhood, and when she moved to the right, or stepped back, he somehow anticipated her every motion, and she did the same with him.
She was eager to make breakfast for him, to show him kindness.
He’d never had that before. With his first wife Wisteria, she had been born to wealth, and offered no help in the kitchen. Tull had always felt as if he were her servant, and though he had never begrudged that, it felt good to realize that Fava was someone that enjoyed helping out, even in little ways.
With Fava, Tull discovered how intimate, how loving a small act like cooking muffins could be. As they moved around each other, he felt the warmth of her body, the power of her love, the strength of her devotion.
I have never known a love like this, he realized, and it was air to a drowning man. Our love will bind us together, become stronger than anything that I’ve ever imagined.
Still, that morning, Tull did not tell Fava the whole truth. He had felt compelled to come south, as if somehow in his bones he had known that he needed to sleep on that bed of stone. It was a place of power for Spirit Walkers, and perhaps something inside him knew that it was time to begin his training. The dreams he’d had that night troubled him, but they did not do much to enlighten him. The few that he remembered were mere phantoms that raced across his memory.
Now he felt constrained to sail north, so they ate that day, and left early in the morning and stopped at sunset. They did this six days in a row, so that on the sixth night they slept in their cabin at the Haystack Islands.
Tull wanted to go farther that night, return all the way to Smilodon Bay, but a bank of clouds came and the wind blew contrary and their light failed.
In his dreams on the bed of stone, he’d seen an old man, one who was running, a man whose mouth was sewn closed. Yet in the dream, Tull had seen into the man’s eyes, had felt that he was racing to Tull, to bear a message.
Tull felt sure that he would meet the man soon, that he needed to find the stranger.
He slept soundly, that night, partly from weariness, and partly because the thick clouds kept the night warm. Lightning played above the clouds, sent down a grumbling noise like a dog circling its bed, but the storm brought no rain.
At dawn as they lay in the cabin, Tull heard a guttural cry, and his eyes sprang open. He ran to the door and looked down into the forest.
The clouds above had dissipated, showing a pale blue, but the ocean was covered in fog, as was most of the forest. He heard the cry again, and the sound of branches cracking among the firs downhill. He grabbed his gun, loaded it, and stood at the door.
A Neanderthal came running toward them uphill in the deep ferns, his legs pumping mightily, weighed down by a heavy pack and thick winter furs that flapped as he moved. He was gasping for breath, his head rolling as he struggled uphill, and in one hand he carried a longspear, wrapped with dull red cloth, feathers tied around it.
He was an old man with silvering in his hair, fatigued, ready to drop. He shouted incoherently and fell in a bed of ferns.
Tull watched where he lay, saw him struggle to rise, then drop, resting his head on his forearm and gasping.
Tull’s breath quickened, for it was the man from his dream.
Through the silver mist downhill, from between the black trees, he saw the pursuers, two men all in crimson, startling red body armor of leather, brilliant red capes—yet their faces were black, hidden behind iron masks. The men loped uphill in step, as if they were a single entity.
“Blade Kin!” Tull whispered. Everything in him wanted to attack, yet Tull restrained himself, like a hunting dog awaiting its master’s orders before treeing a bear.
The fallen Neanderthal rose up on his hands, looked back, gave a wordless cry, lunged toward the cabin.
At first, Tull suspected that the Neanderthal had seen them and was calling for help, but then he realized that the old man was running blindly up a game trail, that his eyes did not focus on them, for the cabin was concealed between standing stones and had blackberry bushes trailing up the sides of it.
The old man rushed past the cabin, sweat pouring from his forehead, terror in his face, blue eyes wide with fear, his long red hair in tight braids, wrapped with green cloth. He stumbled past, clipping the branches of a tree.
Tattoos of ownership were on his left hand, and he clutched a long circular map case made of stained wood.
He rushed to a fallen tree, turned and leveled his spear at the warriors.
The armored Blade Kin charged uphill, seemingly unfatigued, fluid in their movements. In seconds they would have the fleeing slave.
Tull stepped forward, still in shadows, pulled up his gun and fired.
One Blade Kin was lifted from his feet, blood spraying from his face mask, and flew backward in the ferns.
The other warrior hesitated only a moment before reaching into his belt for a long-barreled pistol.
Tull didn’t have time to reload. He dropped his rifle, pulled his sword of Benbow glass and leapt downhill, gambling that he could attack before the slaver fired. Tull shouted, and the Blade Kin fumbled the pistol, misfiring as he yanked it from the holster.
For one crazy moment Tull was leaping toward the man, his sword gleaming in the morning sunlight as it flashed, and the Blade Kin put his hands up to ward the blow, and then Tull chopped through the Blade Kin’s armor with a whack, cleaving the man in half, right down the middle.
Tull saw movement downhill. The warrior he had shot was struggling to rise. The bullet had hit the man in the face, but his armor must have deflected the lead.
With a cry, Tull leapt onto the struggling warrior and swung, taking off the man’s head.
Tull stooped and grabbed the warrior’s pistol. He lunged downhill, and Fava shouted, “Where are you going?”
“There’s one more!” Tull yelled over his shoulder.
Fava cried out and ran to follow him, and Tull rushed down through deep fern beds.
The Blade Kins’ trail was not hard to follow—they had knocked the morning dew from ferns, and while the wet ferns gleamed, these seemed dull and lifeless. Tull ran as fast as he could, given the limp in his right leg, and Fava was hard-pressed to keep up.
When they reached the bay, through the fog he saw two sailboats in the harbor. In one sat a Blade Kin in red armor, fingering a pistol.
He looked up at Tull, pulled off a shot. The bullet exploded into a fir tree not three feet away. As the man hurried to reload, Tull raced to the water’s edge.
Tull leveled his pistol at the Blade Kin. The warrior tossed the gun, as if to surrender, and then reached for his sword.
Tull fired into the Blade Kin’s unprotected throat, blowing the man backward into the water.
He began to sink slowly as water filled his leather armor.
Fava came and stood, stunned. The fog around Tull and the boats dimmed the scene, making it seem surreal.
“Who were they?” Fava asked.
“Judging by their armor, palace guards to the Slave Lords in Bashevgo—a thousand miles from home,” Tull said, unable to stifle the awe in his voice.
He glanced back uphill. The old Neanderthal had come down to the ridge above them, and sat in the ferns, gasping, resting on his spear.
The feathers on his spear fluttered in a slight wind. Tull saw now that what she’d taken for furs were really ratty old woolen rags, the kind of clothes many others would throw away.
The old man tried to speak, grunting and making urgent gestures, but the slavers had removed his tongue, a practice common in the houses of the Slave Lords where secrecy was a way of life.
Tull’s eyes rested on the map case. The old Neanderthal held it protectively, as if to guard it even from Tull and Fava.
“I think he is a slave of some importance,” Tull said.
The whole incident seemed unreal, and he found himself shaking.
“How did you know there was a third Blade Kin?” Fava asked.
“I heard him running,” Tull answered.
“No you didn’t—he was sitting quietly in the boat. How did you know he was here? You couldn’t have seen him through the fog.”
Tull started to say something, and his eyes widened as he sought an explanation. “I just … I heard.…”
“Ayaah, you heard him,” Fava said, “just as I heard him a week ago, in my dreams while sleeping on the altar of stone.”
***