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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90025257424975539942018-05-28T22:12:09.788-07:00The Refuge of Fanesa fantasy by amanda prantera. scroll down to readamanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-77765552601871115742010-08-01T05:25:00.000-07:002010-08-01T05:30:42.356-07:00chapter six and afterwordIt was evening. One of those beautiful warm evenings in early autumn when the sun seems to have lost its path and slipped back out of habit into its summer ways: burning, lingering, flooding the mountains with a bright pink light that streams off their flanks and reaches everywhere, even - just a flush of it – into the deepest crevices and valleys.

I remember this because I remember afterwards, when the sun set, how grey it was and how cold – despite the furnace. And I remember because of the Raietta and the way it sparkled in the last slanting rays, catching the light on one of its faces and tossing it off again from another in a shaft of rainbow colours, before it too, along with all the other stones, lost its glow.

If I could forgive Tarlui the actual wrongs he did (which I can't and don't think I ever shall be able to) I still couldn't forgive the way he set about breaking the news to us: sitting down like that on the bench outside the forge where the chuffs perch in winter, in the dwindling patch of sunlight, and taking the bundle out of his sleeve, or wherever it was he was keeping it, and unwrapping the folds of material and shaking them free and letting the light from the jewel within suddenly blaze forth with its terrible message. Words, however cruel, would have been kinder. But words were unnecessary. We already knew what was inside the package: Lidsanel's mother's wedding present; her 'trinket', her dying gift to her baby son.

And when I saw the gift I recognized it under another name: the Raietta. It was the Raietta – the stone that my mother Sommavida had taken with her as bartering tender when she had left the camp. (Which meant… Or did it? Or did it mean nothing? Quick, pass on. Do as you do when the ice is cracking underfoot: jump, do not tarry or you will fall through one of the cracks and be lost for ever.) And when I saw the look on Tarlui's face - a look of calm, amused and absolute triumph – I recognized him too. The various bit of information had been there all along, lying separate in my mind like so many shards: greed, gold, age, danger; magic stone, black moon, white, all white hair – more unusual in men than in horses. Now, suddenly, they came together to form a whole. I even remembered the name. 'You're Mulebones,' I said in a voice that seemed to come from someone else standing way behind me: hushed, remote, almost dreamlike. 'You're not Tarlui at all, you're my father's tutor Mulebones. You're Mulebones the traitor.' Then, louder, seeing that the words had no effect on the man (if man he was) save to sharpen the curve of his placid, waxen smile, 'What do you want from us, Mulebones?'

'Oh, now!' He said in the gentlest voice imaginable. 'What a question! Nothing so very terrible, my Lady. Nothing that you will not be able to give. And be willing to give, unless I am much mistaken.' Here he paused and twirled the stone in his hand so that the single multicoloured ray seemed to split into dozens, each one shedding a light brighter than the core of the sinking sun itself. 'Yes, willing to give. I'm not sure about his Lordship here,' and he tilted his head towards where Lidsanel was standing, giving me a wink as if he and I were accomplices and Lidsanel our dupe, 'but you, Lady Mara, will already have begun to grasp the nature of the pretty little knot into which you have tied yourselves, you and your… What shall we call him? Husband? Yes, let us continue for a while to call him your husband. However, have no fear: your secret is safe with me. And I, in a manner of speaking, am safe with your secret. I think we will find a very comfortable way of putting it to rest on the one side and to fruit on the other. Rest, fruit. How neat that is. Do you follow me, or do I go too fast?'

No, I will never forgive his cruelty, never, never, never. He – Tarlui, Mulebones or whichever his name was – took such relish in my puzzlement; in watching my mind run, like a captured mouse that still figures it is free, from place to place, from thought to thought, only to end in the jaws of the inevitable conclusion that I hesitate, even now, to write down on paper. (And not only for reasons of pickles and discretion.) I know this because I watched him watching, and read the pleasure in his eyes, dazed though I was and milky bland though they were. My grandmother depicts him as cold, unfeeling, uninterested in human beings except as counters to be moved around on the board of his ambition, but I think she was mistaken. I think vapours lay coiled inside him instead: hot, poisonous vapours of hatred, hungry to break forth and destroy everything they touched.

Lidsanel's figure had in the meantime become a blur to me. Mercifully, because I didn't want to watch him blundering through the maze alongside me: my own course was painful enough as it was. 'I don't know what secret you mean,' I finally managed to say, using as firm a voice as I could summon. 'Lidsanel and I have no secrets. And why, pray, should you not refer to us as husband and wife? That is what we are, aren't we?'

Only the last two words I added after a pause and in a different tone, and immediately wished I hadn't. They made me feel even faster in Tarlui's clutches. 'I wonder,' he said in reply, lifting his feet so that they stuck out before him, and tapping them together like a gleeful child. 'Interesting point. Yes, I wonder. Let me see now: if a mother has a daughter, and then goes off and leaves her and has a son; and if daughter and son grow up separately, unaware of each other's existence, and meet later on as strangers, or so they think; and if…'

A noise interrupted him, and I realised to my surprise that it was a kind of gurgle coming from my own throat. It was a ghastly noise but I seemed unable to stop it. I looked across at Lidsanel, suddenly desperate for contact, but already it was as if a chasm had opened up between us. His eyes stared straight into mine without seeing me at all. 'Stop that,' was all he said in a funny dull voice. Then, when at last I had stopped, he turned to Tarlui and in the same voice said, 'What's all this? Say it again, would you – that bit about the daughter and the son.'

'No, don't! I screamed. It wasn't that I thought Lidsanel hadn't understood: I just didn't want to hear the words repeated. Because I already knew, you see, even through they came from the mouth of a traitor and a thief and a liar, that the thing they hinted at was true.

And so did Lidsanel. 'Yes, do,' he insisted. He sounded even stranger now, almost as if he was laughing. 'Pay no heed to her, old man, do what I say instead. Go ahead and tell everything you've got to tell. I'm all ears. All big, big goblin ears.' And he put his fingers to his ears and wobbled them up and down. I thought the shock must have sent him mad.

Tarlui too seemed, just for the space of a breath, to be a little taken aback by such odd behaviour but he soon recovered his poise. Addressing himself to Lidsanel now he repeated the words that had fetched the gurgle from my mouth. Only not in 'if' form this time but in 'once upon a time' form, as if they were part of a story. 'Many years ago now,' he said, 'twenty four to be precise, a small dark lady of sloppy habits but the very highest rank gave birth to a little girl – well, quite a big girl really, she was, considering. Now, for reasons nobody ever told me, but which the Lady Mara here' (a mocking bow in my direction) 'might be able to supply, half a dozen or so years after the birth of their daughter this same lady suddenly left her husband and child – or perhaps it was the other way round and they left her – and took to roaming the woods like the poorest of Wanderers. Only,' and he gave another spin to the Raietta to mark what he was saying, 'with a little difference: namely that she wasn't really poor at all but had with her, sewn into the lining of her waistband, one of the biggest and brightest and most valuable jewels that has ever been seen.

'This lady also,' he went on after a leisurely pause (he could have paused all night and still kept our attention and he knew it) 'had something else under her waistband, something in her eyes even more precious that was to cause her a great deal of trouble in months to come. She had a child, another child, a boy this time: a large, heavy-boned baby boy, far too big for her to be delivered of him in the natural way that other babies take. Aie! Aie! Poor lady! What a fix! Her life, or the life of her child!' And he paused again and smiled at Lidsanel, who to my amazement smiled back.

If turning your mouth into a blade shape and uncovering your teeth can be called a smile. 'How did it get there, old man?' he hissed softly at Tarlui through the teeth. 'How did the child get there? Who put it there and when?'

Tarlui pretended to look nonplussed, but you could see it was just another way of spinning out the fun. 'Who?' he said. 'When? How? What questions you do ask, my son. Anyone would think your parents had never told you…' Then, still feigning, but this time with a different emphasis, he clapped a hand to his brow, the way players do but nobody else to my knowledge, and added hurriedly, 'Ah, I see what it is. I've as good as said it. My son, eh? Your parents, eh? You want to know about your father – who he… whether he… Yes, naturally you do, naturally. How inconsiderate of me. Well, my son,' and he repeated the term deliberately, it obviously tickled him so, 'I can oblige you there in any manner of ways. You have only to say which one you would prefer. We can have the poor lonely straying Princess Sommavida taking up with almost anyone we like: a hunter, a shepherd, a pedlar, a hulking great Trusani soldier who only stayed long enough to pass the time of day. Or a medical man, yes, a medical man like myself, why not? What an enviable position to be in, I do declare: it's not everyone who can choose their own father.'

Tarlui's tinted eyelashes beat rapidly as he looked at Lidsanel and then away again. For a second time I had the feeling that something in Lidsanel's bearing or behaviour had thrown his listener – slightly, very slightly - off balance. 'What was that?' he asked. 'Ah, I see, you don't like the thought of your mother flitting fancy-free through the valleys, forgetful of her Lord and husband? No, I suppose you wouldn't. Well, then, there's always the other option. But think hard, my son, before you pick it. A prince for a father is all very fine, but what would that make you and Lady Mara? Full brother and sister, that's what. And what would that make of the child that is to be born? I will tell you, it would make it an outrage against nature, a monster, an abomination. Did you know that such infants, as a mark of their shame, are generally born with the head of an animal in place of a human one? Often a lizard's, I don't know why. Or else a pig's, or a sheep's, it depends. Did you know that they are sometimes born without a head at all? Oh, yes, they are. And did you know that in all cases they are sickly and diseased and suffer the most terrible pains all their short lives long on account of…'

How long this game would have continued it is hard to say, but I imagine Tarlui, like all practised tormentors, would have gone on racking his victims for as long as he dared without one of them actually tearing under the strain. (And here he may have miscalculated because Lidsanel did tear, perhaps had already torn.) If this was Tarlui's plan, however, I spoiled things for him by reaching straight away the very worst conclusion. It took no reasoning or guesswork on my part: my memory did it for me. One moment I was there in the fading sunlight, all my attention on Tarlui's chalky lips to catch what they were saying over the purr of the smithy ovens, and the next I was back in the camp with Odolghes on the evening we set off on our quest, watching my mother sink to her knees in the firelight and make over her belly that clutching gesture that had struck me as peculiar even then. Not the stomach ache, no, of course not, but the knowledge that she was carrying a second child. Odolghes' child, my brother Lidsanel.

For some reason, when I cut short Tarlui's filthy blatherings and told Lidsanel the truth, I felt as if I was bringing him good news, not bad. And as such he seemed to receive it. I reckon anything was preferable to him at that moment to being Tarlui's son, and I reckon he was right. He gave a great sigh and then bent his neck from one side to the other and flexed his shoulders, as if a real weight like an ore sack or a load of wood had been lifted from them. (Or as if he had removed a metal arm. How could I have failed to recognize him all this time: at that instant he was so like Odolghes it could actually have been him, come back for his revenge.) I waited for him to speak – I longed for him to speak – but he said nothing. Plans of any kind always filled his head completely, leaving room for nothing else, and I realize now that that was what he was doing: planning, trying to create a little foothold of future for us – for me and the baby.

It's sad that no more tenderness was ever to pass between the two of us again, but there it is. And it's agonizing sometimes that so many blanks in the story were left unfilled, so that although I can piece together many parts without difficulty, other parts remain loose and jagged and always will. Tarlui was called in for the birth of Lidsanel, for example; he got that far with his account, and that far I believe he was telling the truth. But who called him? Who did my mother live with in the last months of her time? Where did she find shelter? What company did she keep? I tell myself that if only I knew, I could go and seek out whoever it was and put my questions to them instead. But it's a vain hope: the answers lie buried in the depths of Tarlui's carbon heart. Was the birth really as difficult as he made out? Was it really a matter of saving my mother's life or the child's? And if so, was it really and truly my mother who made the choice, or did Tarlui step in, the way he did on other occasions, and steer things in the direction he wanted. (By which I mean – though it hurts to say it to myself so starkly - did he kill her? Knowing how precious they were, did he kill her in order to steal from her the child and the Raietta? Or is his version true, and did she entrust him with both her treasures to take care of, of her own free will?)

I shall never know. Just as I shall never know either about the Fever, and whether Tarlui simply sat himself down outside our gates and waited – patiently, day after day, month after month – for the disease to break out of its own accord, or whether by some secret method only he was capable of using (brewing it out of those disgusting powders of his maybe, or uncorking it from one of his bottles) he actually caused it. That he tried to bring about my death that way, is one of the few things of which I am absolutely certain, but as news it's of no interest to me any more, let alone help. All it tells me is, one, that Tarlui did indeed consider me about as important as a pot fowl, to be done away with as need arose; and two, that before the fatal day by my bedside when the other (far better, far surer) plan first began to form itself in his mind, he must have had the intention of setting Lidsanel on the throne in my place and using him as a puppet.

Which just shows what a strange thing cleverness is, and how someone can know all sorts of difficult things – like, exactly, mixing poisons and brewing up diseases and so forth – and yet not know the first thing about a person they have lived with for years and watched turning from a little, biddable child into a full-grown man with a mind and a will of his own. Tarlui evidently feared nothing – from either of us. If he had done so, not only would he have chosen a different place for our meeting but he would have taken some further precaution, constructed some trap, left a sealed packet with a third person, containing our dreadful secret: 'To be Opened in the Event that an Accident Should Befall the Writer'. Something like that. It is what I would have done myself in his position, and I am not a vastly old magician of vast experience and cunning like he was.

Although, wait. Perhaps he did leave a message. Perhaps that was what he was trying to tell us with such urgency as Lidsanel bore down on him and swept him towards the entrance of the forge. I don't know; it's difficult to say now, it all happened so fast. And Lidsanel was so quick to muffle the voice, almost as if he didn't trust himself, should he hear it, not to obey its commands or believe its lies. All I remember hearing, and that not very distinctly, was something to do with Fate and Punishment and our sins 'Coming to Light' unless Lidsanel freed Tarlui that instant. Which is the sort of thing a man in that position would have said anyway.

And then I myself was making such a racket, screaming with my mouth wide open one long, uninterrupted, Noooooooh!!!! Like my mother's cry when Odolghes and I left her, only deeper, worse. I wasn't certain yet what Lidsanel planned to do, but I knew it was something terrible, life-rending, from which there would be no turning away, no recovering, no going back. I could tell by the way he acted: deft but at the same time uncontrolled, if you know what I mean, as if his body was an empty carriage careering down a hillside: no brakes and no one driving. He leapt on Tarlui like a wildcat, fell on him like a fiend – laughing, shouting, roaring, you couldn't really say which. He leapt on him and – just like Odolghes had done with Tusky over the business of the tree, although with more effort because Tarlui was bigger – hoisted his opponent into the air and twisted him sideways and placed him under his arm, pinning him so tight that Tarlui's hands and feet could do nothing but claw and kick the empty air.

His free arm he then clamped over Tarlui's face, covering the mouth entirely and pressing the neck back so that it looked as if it must snap. (Blocking on the instant, as I said, the flow of words, and with it any last chance Tarlui might have had of talking himself free.) Then with his burden he ran, light-footed, almost skipping, straight into the forge. There was only one furnace going at this time of day: the big one, stoked to bursting point to keep it burning through the night.

He screamed something at me in passing – probably that I was to help him open the oven door, or pass him some instrument that the Smelter used for this purpose – but I was screaming so hard myself I didn't catch his meaning. Nor would it have made much difference if I had: it takes four men, wrapped up in wadding from head to foot, to shift aside the door of the main furnace.

I ran close on his heels but his fury seemed to give him wings, and by the time I entered the forge and discovered his whereabouts he had already accomplished what he had set out to do. Half accomplished, that is, for he was still clinging to the scorching surface of the furnace door with all his strength, and Tarlui – or that part of Tarlui I could still see and recognise – was still writhing.

I stood there, numb, helpless, watching it happen. I have a feeling I went on screaming, because my throat was sore for days afterwards, but I could be wrong: I could just have watched in silence and the soreness could have come from tears. Slowly, so slowly it seemed to take forever, Tarlui's writhing turned to twitching and then stopped altogether. After the last twitch, so feeble it was just a tremor really, Lidsanel's frame seemed to relax and his hold on the door to slacken, although by now I think he must have been past feeling. I hope so anyway. With a last scrap of willpower - that may not even have been that, merely his body adjusting itself to death – he shifted himself closer to the lethal surface and spread his arms across it in what looked like an embrace. And when I saw his head also, which so far had remained upright and defiant, roll against the door and stay there in apparent comfort, I too relaxed, knowing that it was over.

Not until the sharp smell of burning hair reached my nostrils did I stir myself, and then it was only to wander out into the open, calling vaguely – not for help, there was no question of that, but for assistance in recovering what was left of the bodies. Luckily, before anyone answered my call, I must have noticed the Raietta lying where it had fallen from Tarlui's grasp in the struggle, and must have picked it up and put it away in my pouch together with the other stone – the iron-finding stone that I kept there always - because it was there that I found it, days later, when I finally shed my clothes. Its presence would have complicated the sad simple story of an accident, which was how I explained things to the rest of the tribe when they gathered round. Poor frail old Tarlui stumbling against the furnace by mistake, and brave young Lidsanel giving up his life in a vain attempt to save his father… It made a very moving tale.

So moving that no one thought to consider the details, like the severity of the burns and the curious lack of Tarlui's footprints in the sandy floor. Nor to wonder at the depth of my despair. Sometimes I wish I had been called Zita, it would have made this type of tag more difficult to invent, but M's are plentiful in Miner language and I now began to be known as Mara the Miserable. People praised my courage, but I don't know that I could have gone on for long in that fashion: my monster child inside me, growing and growing, and my heart shrinking and shrinking for the want of Lidsanel and the horror of what had happened to our love. There was no one I could talk to, you see, no one at all.

Indeed had it not been for Aunt Lujanta I might not have managed. But, with her trick of appearing at exactly the right moment, she turned up one day, just like that, with a crowd of followers in tow and announced that she had come to live with us, true to the promise she had made to Odolghes at the time of their parting. She brought a plan with her too, which I think, even more than the novelty and the company, was what kept me going through the bleak and lonely months ahead. We were to return to Fànes. Miners, Salvans, Fanes, half-breeds and quarter-breeds all blended together like the ingredients of a pudding – we were to return to Fànes and start the rebuilding of our future homestead. Metal work would continue but new hands brought new skills and we would do other things as well for a living: carpentry, wood carving, dairy farming and the rearing and training of sled dogs, just to name the most important. Heedful of our mistakes in the past we would make gold and work gold, but we would sell the product afterwards, not hoard it in a chest, and the same went for jewels. We would make no war unless forced to do so at spear point, we would build no walls, we would carry no weapons. Settlers, travellers, strangers – all would be welcome provided they were clean and busy and healthy and (my condition: you can't play too safe with wizards) did not dye their hair. Instead of Rock or Stronghold or Castle we would call it the Refuge, the Refuge of Fànes.
And it is from here, from the Refuge of Fànes, that I write these words. We moved in nearly a month ago now, on the third day of spring. Then I could see my toes still – just. This morning all I could see was the outline of a pair of little heels straining against the skin of my stomach as the child moves around inside. The moment is close; it is very, very close. In fact it is so close, and the child has gone so still of a sudden, and I am so scared and tired and heavy that I'm not sure I won't put away my writing things for today and…

Oh, Spirit of Fànes that my grandmother called on in her exile, help me. I have no fire, no mistletoe, no Schniappa, no eagle's wings, I don't even know what words to use to invoke you, but help me, please. Help my lizard-headed baby. Help us all.

AFTERWORD

He is born. He is beautiful, healthy, whole. There is nothing wrong with him at all. No lizard's face, no cleft tongue, no blemish whatsoever - although he is covered in wrinkles. But Aunt Lulu says all babies are and he will smooth out later. I've been shaking like a leaf ever since out of relief and happiness.

I don't know what I shall call him yet: there is time; there is plenty of time.

This morning I make this last entry in my book before wrapping it up in rushes and burying it. Aunt Lujanta has already prepared the place. She went down before daybreak into one of the cellars and came up again, her fingernails rough and grubby, a smile on her face as wide as a fishpan. 'Look what I've found,' she said. 'They must have been hidden there on purpose when the Fanes left. My mother must have done it. I thought the spot looked soft, that's why I chose it. Now this, I should imagine,' (shaking out a horrid matted object that rattled and gave off a cloud of sandy dust) 'is her famous chamois-horn headdress. And this must be Dolasilla's crown with the ruby the Miners sent as a gift.' She examined it critically. 'Hmm. It is, I must say, rather mingy for a royal present.'

She was about to add something else but I beat her to it. It was so very obvious. The Raietta. We must replace the ruby with the Raietta; put back the Raietta in the crown where it belonged. An old/new emblem for an old/new kingdom. Under its lucky beam Fànes would indeed live again. I fished out the famous stone from the bag where I had been keeping it all this while and passed it to Aunt Lujanta who said, Whew! and 'Ciara mo!' and held it up against my forehead.

'Perfect,' she said, meaning of course the stone. Then she looked closer. 'But wait,' she added. 'What are those little dirty bits? Those scratchy lines that make that shadow on the wall? A jewel like this shouldn't have flaws in it, surely?' And she twisted the Raietta this way and that until it caught the full light from behind, and there, reflected on the wall, appeared the legend:

Odolghes ¬+ Sommavida

 Lidsanel + Mara

The Child of Shame

Lidsanel's and my brief and branchless family tree. Our sins 'Coming to Light' exactly as Tarlui had foretold. Only, fortunately, with only Aunt Lulu and myself to see the stain.

Aunt Lulu whistled and said, 'Ciara mo' again, this time more softly. 'There's malice for you,' she said. 'Stinking old bonebag, I hope he's watching.' Then she turned to me and took my hand and led me across the one-time courtyard, still strewn with odds and ends of baggage, and down a flight of rocky stairs into the cellars from which she had come. The candle she had used earlier for her exploring work was still there burning beside the pit she had dug. 'Look, Mulebones!' she cried. 'Wherever you are, watch me, watch what I am doing!' And with a quick flick of her wrist she threw the Raietta into the hole, spat after it contemptuously, and started filling in the hole with sand.

This gave me an idea. I reached into the bag at my waist and drew from it the other stone - more valuable still and the cause of far more trouble: even Odolghes had admitted that – and held it over the pit, waiting for Aunt Lulu's approval before throwing it inside. I even made a little speech for her benefit, filled with the noble notions her plan had inspired in me: all races together, no more greed, no more strife, no more walls, just a village with an inn at its centre, open to all comers.

But she stopped me before I had finished, took the magic iron-finding stone from my hand and put it back in its place at my waist. 'Nice idea,' she said, smiling Odolghes' smile, 'if we were living in a story. In real life it would just be daft. We can't go backwards, Mara, remember that. Difficult though it may be we must always go ahead.'

So that is where I hope we are directed – all of us, the new Fanes of the new Fànes, and our children and our children's children, years without number. I hope. I sperun, i sperun tagn.

(And that's it for now! New story coming shortly - end of August or thereabouts. Have a good summer meanwhile, signed amanda)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-78411096549249882632010-07-25T01:19:00.000-07:002010-07-25T01:21:56.633-07:00part two - chapter fiveWe should have followed Lidsanel's urge. We should have run there and then and never looked back. It was our only chance for a life together and we should have taken it.

Instead we stayed, and speeded up the preparations for our wedding. All the while keeping a close watch over Tarlui to make sure he wouldn't spoil things for us by doing something shameful like stealing the wedding presents. It was absurd of us really, now I come to think of it. I was so sure that that was where the danger lay: in the marriage being hindered, postponed or in some way prevented from taking place. I was sure that that was where Tarlui's revenge, if we should chance to provoke it, would be directed. The truth of the matter never occurred to me, but why should it have done? How could it? On the contrary, I began to think that Tarlui had been speaking the truth when he told Lidsanel he had no interest any more in thievery. He seemed so genuinely pleased about the wedding. And so helpful. So humble. If there was anything he could do to assist my Ladyship in these busy days? How about the sweetmeats? He had a delicious recipe for walnut cake. Might he also be allowed to pen a few lines of poetry to be read at the service? What if he were to give a hand with the lighting arrangements?

'My son, alas, comes to you in the clothes he stands up in,' he said, close to grovelling, on another occasion. 'And even those are due, in part, to Your Ladyship's bounty. His mother, poor woman, left him a little trinket on her deathbed, but she instructed me to give it to him after he was married, not before, and I think, if you do not mind, that we should respect her wishes.'

By all means, Tarlui, by all means. I was almost sorry now that I had thought such evil of him, and had to repeat to myself, 'but he called me an old hen, an old hen' in order to remember the reason. And as for fear – why, in his present state he seemed about as dangerous as an earthworm. On Lidsanel's suggestion I laid a trap, wrapping in a cover a stone of the same size and shape as the magic stone and then leaving it, as if by mistake, right under Tarlui's nose to see if he would pocket it when I was gone. But he didn't so much as touch the thing. 'Lady Mara,' he called out before I was half way to the door, 'there's a little packet here I think you must have forgotten.' And indicated it promptly, dutifully, with a tap of his forefinger.

Even the business of the mask turned out to have an innocent explanation that made you feel sorry for him rather than otherwise. It turned out that Tarlui was old, and what crime was there in that? On the night before the wedding Lidsanel and I were not supposed to see each other, that being the tradition for betrothed couples, but shortly after I had gone to bed he came to fetch me, saying to come quickly: Tarlui was up to his monthly trick behind the curtain, and if one of us could manage to hoist the other onto the roof we might be able to find out what it was he was doing, simply by taking a look down the smoke hole.

Only we soon discovered that looking down the smoke hole was not a thing to be done simply. We didn't want to be seen, for one thing, and for another we didn't want to be heard. Particularly not by Tarlui. Lidsanel made several attempts to heave himself up to roof level using my clasped hands as a stirrup, but he was far too noisy, and so heavy that the rafters, which were only cane, threatened to snap under his weight. So then it was my turn. I shot up easily enough, almost too fast for comfort, but once up I found it impossible to move any further, the slope being too steep and the reeds of the roofing too tightly packed for my fingers to get a grip on. Eventually Lidsanel realised where the problem lay and went to get a broom and then a ladder to stand on, and by planting the broom under my feet and pushing hard managed to ease me slowly up the rise until my head was on a level with the smoke hole.

From the hole a few wisps of smoke were still coming out, so I had to hold my breath and force my eyes to stay open while I poked my head rapidly through the opening, hoping that Tarlui would not be looking upwards at this precise moment. As soon as I had seen enough I was then to signal to Lidsanel with three kicks on the broom head to let me down, but the scene that met my eyes was so intriguing that I kept on looking.

There was no need to worry about Tarlui seeing me, no matter how long I stared. His attention was quite elsewhere. He was crouched on the floor of the hut in front of a basin of foul looking, brownish black liquid to which he appeared to be paying homage or confiding secrets, so deeply and closely did he bow down before it. Opposite him, on the far side of the basin, was propped a plate of metal, highly burnished, flanked by several lamps that winked and glittered in the shiny surface of the liquid.

My first thought was that I had surprised him making offering to some private God: he had never shown much respect for out Earth Goddess, so perhaps he had a religion of his own that no one was supposed to know about, not even Lidsanel? But then I realised that it was something much less uplifting: he was washing his hair. Dipping his head into the basin, rubbing the black liquid into his scalp and admiring the result as reflected in the metal. No, not washing, dirtying. No, not dirtying either, dyeing. He was dyeing his hair – to exactly the same colour as before. And why should he want to do that?

Despite the smoke I continued to watch, fascinated, for some time before giving Lidsanel the signal. Noticing two extra things: one, that Tarlui was concentrating more on colouring the roots of his hair than the ends, and two, that he daubed some of the liquid on his eyebrows and eyelashes as well, and was very particular afterwards to wipe away the stain from his skin. Which, incidentally – the skin, I mean – was different from usual now that the ponytail was untied and the hair hung loose: it was saggier, more wrinkled. More yellowish too, though that may only have been due to the effect of the lamps.

'He's old,' I whispered to Lidsanel when I was back on the ground again, having come to this conclusion during my descent. 'He's really, really old. He must be. I remember my father telling me once about a person he had known – a magician, I think he was, or perhaps a teacher – so old that his hair had turned completely white. Well, I think that's what has happened to Tarlui: I think his hair has gone white, and he's ashamed to wear it that way so he's dyeing it dark again. You needn't worry, that's all he's doing in there behind the curtain: colouring over the growth of his white hair. For the wedding, I should imagine. So as to look his best.'

Lidsanel seemed disappointed by this news: I think he'd been hoping for us to discover something terrible that would have enabled him to disown Tarlui as a father and cast him off for ever. 'His best,' he said, curling his lip in a way that didn't become him at all. 'For me he'd look his best from the back, walking out of Mill Brook for good and all, pushing his belongings on a barrow.'

It was a sight neither of us was ever destined to see. Tarlui's departure was close, already written on the face of the coming moon, had we but known it, but it was not scheduled to happen in such a homely fashion – through a gate, carrying his baggage. Fate had devised for him quite another exit.

But I am getting ahead of myself again in my anxiety to be through. I must tell things as they happened. First there was the wedding, and a very fine wedding it was too. None of the events in my life so far had been marked by pomp or ceremony of any kind. No coming-into-the-world party because I was a girl. No welcome home party because my grandfather had just died. No coming to womanhood party on account of Friska being jealous, just a garnet brooch from Odolghes on the quiet, the colour of the blood I had begun to shed. No coronation party either because of the Fever. The wedding made up for all these missed occasions. Miners seldom if ever dance; not, as the rumour goes, because our feet aren't up to it, but because we are taught as children that all that jumping and stomping is disrespectful to the Earth Goddess. That night, by common consent, we made an exception and danced until we fell down dizzy. Our craftsmen had made lanterns for us out of wrought iron and precious stones (small wonder Tarlui was so keen to help out with the lighting arrangements), and the shafts of light from these lanterns played over the tables of food and the surface of the dancing floor and the faces of the dancers, giving the impression that we had been invaded by a cloud of multicoloured fireflies. It was like being in Aurora, but the dream Aurona, not the real place. Squabbles were forgotten, weariness was cast off with the shoes, and the entire tribe, with me and Lidsanel in its midst, ate and drank and sang and danced, stamping and jumping for all we were worth, until the great fireball of the next day's sun appeared in the sky, making our jewel lights look suddenly pale and tawdry and bringing the party to an end.

Most married couples are given a period of pampering, if circumstances allow it, to help them start their life together under the right star. A hut of their own, no sharing; extra large food rations and delicacies such as nuts, sweets, raisins with every meal; light work in the day time, no night work at all, and no housework either. It is known as the Honey Month – a sort of collective wedding gift from the whole tribe. My duties as Chief, however, couldn't be slid onto other shoulders the same way as mining sacks, and for Lidsanel and me everyday life resumed immediately, the morning after the wedding. And in a sense I am glad about this because otherwise I would never have known what everyday life together with him was like: there would have been no time. Barely a month later, you see, I was already sure of something I had suspected for some time, namely that I was expecting a baby. And a month and four days later I was…

But, no, wait a moment, I'm overreaching again. Loath as I am to do so I must go back to a month and three and a half days later, when we have just announced the good news about the baby to the whole tribe in an assembly, and afterwards Tarlui, in quality of future grandfather, comes to the forge to congratulate Lidsanel and me in private on the happy event. (At least this is what we think he has in mind: his insistence on such an out of the way meeting place has already set us wondering.) Earlier on I managed to spare the reader the details of a tragedy, and spare myself too, but this time I'm afraid they are part of the story and will have to be told.

Deep, deep breath, then, before I go on.

(Next chapter next sunday August 1st 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-50682269216839496502010-07-18T00:37:00.000-07:002010-07-18T00:46:23.666-07:00midword and chapter 4MIDWORD

Last night I don't know what came over me. Whether it was my longing for Lidsanel growing worse again now that I have begun to write about him, or worry about the future as the dreaded day grows closer and closer, or a bit of both, but when Aunt Lujanta came to say goodnight to me I went all to pieces and fell on her neck and told her. Everything. Every single thing.

Can you imagine anything feebler? Holding out all these months, when the wounds were really fresh and painful, and then, just as the pain had begun to ease a little and the scars to heal over, letting go and caving in like a trampled mole-hole. It makes me want to bite my fists.

She took the news very calmly – although the calmness may have applied to her outside only. All the way through the story she hardly moved, but I noticed a slight twitching of her ears towards the end, which came from either emotion or an itch, and I suspect the former. When I had finished she asked me simply, without any comment, if I had told anyone else. And when I said I hadn't she looked relieved and said, 'Good. Good girl. The fewer the better. Just in case we have to… you know…'

I knew exactly: my secret was safe in her hands, but her hands were tough and workmanlike and would deal with things if necessary in a tough and workmanlike way. This is probably why I found myself arguing so passionately in favour of finishing my written story and not destroying it afterwards, the way Aunt Lujanta insisted I should: I was defending the survival of something more than just a pile of papers.

'No good keeping our mouths shut if you're going to put it all down in a book,' she pointed out, unmoved by my appeal. 'Books are like pickles, they keep. And anyone can dip into them at any time.'

'But what if we hide the book,' I pleaded. 'Hide it properly, somewhere safe, so it remains hidden for ages, the way I intended when I started writing. There's history, you know, inside these covers. There isn't just any old made up story, there's facts, there's knowledge. If I'd had my grandmother Alexa's book to dip into when I felt like it, I almost certainly wouldn't be in the plight I'm in now. Think of that turning of the medal… almost the very same words: 'Look, Highness, on one side the head of a man, and on the other the image of a she-wolf. Two different faces but only the one medal.' Why, I'd have known in a trice; I'd have recognised him; I'd have been able to defend myself.'

The argument was sound but I think it was the magic word 'History' that did the trick: like all Salvans Aunt Lulu is impressed to the marrow by anything that smacks of learning. 'Very well, picera,' she said after a longish think (overlooking the fact that I am hardly picera any more). 'I suppose there's no harm in your finishing the last few chapters, not now you've got so far. But remember to keep the manuscript locked away when you're not working on it. And remember, when the time comes,' and she turned away, trying to make the words sound careless so as not to scare me, 'remember to tell me where you put the key.'

So, having saved at least one thing that is dear to me, at least for the time being, here I go with the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.

However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other's company: me taking on some of Lidsanel's health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.

So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won't mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, 'Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!' and, 'Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!' and, 'Big filly needs a big rider!' It was their way of saying that they approved the match.

Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel's presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.

And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, 'Leave off, Mara,' or, 'Let me alone, I'm not in the vein,' or, 'What do you mean, what's wrong? Nothing's wrong. Everything's as smooth as a hedgehog's ruddy hindpiece.' Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.

At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.

In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners' speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel's telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.

And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn't happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.

This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet's pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he'd ever been a thief or a thief's son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.

'I grew to hate him, you see,' Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. 'And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.'

I didn't want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui's cruelty, or Lidsanel's outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn't think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn't Tarlui changed since he'd settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. 'You will soon be free of you father altogether,' I pointed out. 'In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.'

I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel's voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. 'Oh Mara,' he said. 'Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn't, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,' he added, bitterer still, 'don't keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.'

The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. 'How can you know these things with such certainty?' I asked.

'Because…' He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. 'Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…'

I knew the day he meant all right. 'Go on.'

'Well, afterwards…' He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. 'I swear, Mara, I hadn't said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.'

I believed him; that was not the trouble. 'I promise.'

Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. 'Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he'd always known I'd come in useful sooner or later, and how right he'd been to give me the benefit of the doubt. 'It's an old hen makes the best broth, eh?' he said. And then he made a clucking noise. 'Well, we'll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.' That is what he said.'

I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn't look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an 'old hen' that hurt the most. 'And you?' I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. 'What did you say?'

He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. 'I laughed too,' he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. 'I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn't catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners' magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it'd make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.'

Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn't supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn't a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel's slowness got on my nerves. 'So then what did you do?' I snapped at him. 'Laugh again?'

His face was russet all over now but he still didn't blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. 'Then I told him,' he said. 'I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.'

This was better. 'And what did he say to that?'

Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. 'What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I'd misunderstood him, that he'd only been joking, that he'd known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he'd only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He'd made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.

His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui's forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.

'Not a real mask, silly,' Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. 'No, no, it can't be,' he went on, shaking his head. 'No. What am I thinking? No, it's impossible. Impossible.'

What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.

'Nothing,' he said. 'It's just that ever since I've shared a hut with Tarlui I've noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can't see what's going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he's doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I've always had a feeling he's altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…'

Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. 'But didn't you ever look behind the curtain?' I asked.

'I tried,' Lidsanel said. 'Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.'

I don't know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.

We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. 'And the business about stealing the stone?' I asked after a while in a whisper. 'Did Tarlui realize you didn't believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?'

Lidsanel hugged me tighter. 'I'm not that stupid,' he said. 'Leastways I'm clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid's the best thing to look. No, I don't think he noticed, in fact I'm sure he didn't. Why, what were you thinking?'

I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui's intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.

Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. 'His worst,' he said. 'He'll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he'll interfere with ours.'

I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel's past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. 'And then you and I,' I pointed out to Lidsanel, 'would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn't want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That's the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn't be too bad, would it?'

'Oh Mara,' Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. 'Oh Mara, if only it were so.' Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, 'I know. Why don't we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let's leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.'

CHAPTER FOUR

Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.

However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other's company: me taking on some of Lidsanel's health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.

So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won't mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, 'Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!' and, 'Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!' and, 'Big filly needs a big rider!' It was their way of saying that they approved the match.

Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel's presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.

And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, 'Leave off, Mara,' or, 'Let me alone, I'm not in the vein,' or, 'What do you mean, what's wrong? Nothing's wrong. Everything's as smooth as a hedgehog's ruddy hindpiece.' Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.

At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.

In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners' speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel's telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.

And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn't happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.

This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet's pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he'd ever been a thief or a thief's son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.

'I grew to hate him, you see,' Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. 'And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.'

I didn't want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui's cruelty, or Lidsanel's outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn't think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn't Tarlui changed since he'd settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. 'You will soon be free of you father altogether,' I pointed out. 'In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.'

I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel's voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. 'Oh Mara,' he said. 'Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn't, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,' he added, bitterer still, 'don't keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.'

The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. 'How can you know these things with such certainty?' I asked.

'Because…' He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. 'Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…'

I knew the day he meant all right. 'Go on.'

'Well, afterwards…' He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. 'I swear, Mara, I hadn't said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.'

I believed him; that was not the trouble. 'I promise.'

Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. 'Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he'd always known I'd come in useful sooner or later, and how right he'd been to give me the benefit of the doubt. 'It's an old hen makes the best broth, eh?' he said. And then he made a clucking noise. 'Well, we'll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.' That is what he said.'

I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn't look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an 'old hen' that hurt the most. 'And you?' I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. 'What did you say?'

He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. 'I laughed too,' he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. 'I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn't catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners' magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it'd make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.'

Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn't supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn't a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel's slowness got on my nerves. 'So then what did you do?' I snapped at him. 'Laugh again?'

His face was russet all over now but he still didn't blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. 'Then I told him,' he said. 'I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.'

This was better. 'And what did he say to that?'

Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. 'What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I'd misunderstood him, that he'd only been joking, that he'd known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he'd only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He'd made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.

His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui's forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.

'Not a real mask, silly,' Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. 'No, no, it can't be,' he went on, shaking his head. 'No. What am I thinking? No, it's impossible. Impossible.'

What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.

'Nothing,' he said. 'It's just that ever since I've shared a hut with Tarlui I've noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can't see what's going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he's doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I've always had a feeling he's altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…'

Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. 'But didn't you ever look behind the curtain?' I asked.

'I tried,' Lidsanel said. 'Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.'

I don't know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.

We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. 'And the business about stealing the stone?' I asked after a while in a whisper. 'Did Tarlui realize you didn't believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?'

Lidsanel hugged me tighter. 'I'm not that stupid,' he said. 'Leastways I'm clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid's the best thing to look. No, I don't think he noticed, in fact I'm sure he didn't. Why, what were you thinking?'

I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui's intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.

Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. 'His worst,' he said. 'He'll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he'll interfere with ours.'

I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel's past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. 'And then you and I,' I pointed out to Lidsanel, 'would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn't want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That's the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn't be too bad, would it?'

'Oh Mara,' Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. 'Oh Mara, if only it were so.' Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, 'I know. Why don't we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let's leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.'

(Chapter 5 coming up next sunday, 25 july 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-55234311361246399762010-07-11T05:01:00.000-07:002010-07-11T05:03:11.382-07:00chapter 3I can't remember exactly how long it was after granting his petition that I began to notice Tarlui had a son with him, not included in the request. And I can't remember either how long it was before I began to notice the son – not just as one of Tarlui's belongings like his medallion or his clasp-knife or the many bags and bundles and bottles that cluttered up his hut, lining it almost to the smoke-hole, but as a person in his own right.

Probably, as regards the first point, it was just under a year. This may have been because Tarlui had told the boy to lie low and not to mix with Miners until it was certain the Fever danger was past, or it may have been that the boy himself was shy and kept out of my way, or it may simply have been because I had other things to think about. Like trying to fulfil our outstanding contracts with only half our former workforce, and cadge new orders for the coming year when most of our clients were too scared of infection to come anywhere near us, and keep the books, and pay for goods, and settle disputes, and generally carry out all the umpteen boring tasks that now fell to my lot as leader. (And a leader, what was worse, without the aid of any advisor at all. Because when in due course I proposed making Tarlui my secretary – as a first, cautious step towards appointing him Counsellor in Tusky's place, Tusky took such offence and stirred up such a shindig about 'foreigners' and 'pale-eyes' and 'nosepokers' and 'bloodsuckers' that I had to change my mind and withdraw the offer. And by then I was so cross with Tusky that I couldn't work with him either, so in the end I had to keep my own counsel and be content, for copying and checking, with lazy Bruno, my former tutor.)

Anyway it can't have been more than a year because I clearly recollect seeing the boy with the other children at the commemoration ceremony in honour of the Fever victims, exactly one year later, and feeling a stab of sympathy with him on account of the way he stuck out from the group, with his long bony legs and skimpy hand-me-down clothing and undressable hair, worse than a pony's forelock. I imagined they had names for him already and wasn't a bit surprised to discover that they did, and that he was know as Cafusc: a shepherd's word, very coarse, meaning dark of pelt, and used for those brackish coloured sheep whose wool nobody wants and that are looked on as pretty well worthless, save for chops. If ever I spoke of him, which I suppose I might have done now and then, I think I probably called him that myself – his real name, with its flavour of Lists and Bouts and Combatants, being absurd in one so small and scruffy. How is little… Whatsit… um… Cafusc getting on, Tarlui? Is he growing used to Miner life? Is he working at his singing?

As regards the second point: my seeing him as an individual in his own right, I have no such convenient marker to aid me, but I reckon it was closer to five years than to one, and maybe even closer to seven than to five, and seem to remember that it came about in bits and pieces over a longish period of time – coinciding, I suppose, with his final, amazing burst of growth. Voice; eyes; a foot (yes, definitely a foot if not both: I always notice people's feet); a sunburnt forearm; a twitch of the plait that he tied his hair in when he was working; a sudden glimpse of his shoulders, stripped bare for washing – separate items like those that gradually, barely denting my awareness, in the way you might hear a whinny one day and see a hoof print the next and a fleck of piebald amongst the trees the next and finally say to yourself, Ah, yes, there's a horse somewhere about, must have been there for some while – that gradually came together to form the whole person. Although more than person, to tell the pure and unpolished truth, what they really came to form was Man, with a big bold capital M, as written on the milk buckets to stop them getting muddled with the others.

It was awful, it was so shaming. And yet it wasn't, it was wonderful. I was in my early twenties by the time it came about – an oldish woman by Miner standards, getting on for granny age – and I'd never been courted by anybody or felt as if I wanted to be. The whole business of choosing a partner and fiddling around with them in the dark and then exchanging vows and leaving one household for another and starting a family and all that fuss was a complete mystery to me; I couldn't think why people bothered. I presided over the marriages because it was my duty, and said all the right words, and handed out the rings to put on the newlyweds' fingers and sprinkled gold dust over their beds and so forth and entered their names in the register in big curly letters, but the reasons for what I was doing, or, more to the point, for what they were doing, were an unsolved riddle in my mind.

Even when Jet fell in love – as she did, desperately, miserably, with our best splitter, Peres, who was already married – I wasn't much the wiser. Every night for months on end I used to listen to her wails and try to sound sympathetic and give advice, but really, for all the sense it made to me, she might have been speaking Ampezzani-gabble.

'Forget about him, silly. Set your cap at someone else who's free.'

'I can't, I can't. There isn't anybody else!'

Which besides daft was simply false. The Fever had thinned our numbers maybe, but there were still plenty of spare males in the tribe for the picking, even for someone of Jet's age. Half a dozen widowers at least, seeing that she liked them weathered, and even one or two tough old boots who'd never married and were always on the lookout, like Willy the Welder and Tusky himself. I would list their names for her, and she would shudder and wail all the harder. Peres! Peres! Peres was the only man in the world she wanted.

'Then take him,' I would advise, losing patience. 'Take him as your lover and keep quiet about it.'

But this wasn't much help to her either. She wanted that, of course she did, but she wanted other things as well.

'Like what?' On this head I was quite interested.

Oh, silly things, she explained, like wanting to take care of him and boil his soup and mend his mitts, and be there to say goodnight to him at the end of the day.

That sounded workable. 'Then ask his wife. I don't know about your hanging around in the evenings but I'm sure she'll be willing to let you give a hand during the day with the cooking and darning.'

At this point Jet would usually break down altogether and accuse me of being unfeeling. Which of course is exactly what I was. Odolghes was so far the only man I had ever wanted to do things for in the way Jet described, but he had been my father and therefore did not count. Then there had been the boys, my little half brothers, but they had been babies and didn't count either. Otherwise my closest experience to anything resembling what Jet described was my interest – and I'm not sure it was even that because he was dead boring when I got to speak to him – in a young Trusani horseman who used to come as an outrider with the wagon to collect orders, around the time the wall was being built. He was tall, taller than I was by a head at least, even out of the saddle, and despite his height he stood up straight, on widely planted feet as big as snow shoes. It may have been just this – his size and swagger – but I remember thinking him very fine, and running to the gateway, season after season, each time I heard wheels, in the hope of seeing him. And of seeing him see me, too, and stare at me in a way none of my fellow tribesmen ever did: appreciative, hungry, with a sort of smouldering, melty quality in the eye that I associated for some reason with gold parting – perhaps on account of the shiver it sent down my spine.

With Lidsanel all this changed in the space of a dozen or so heartbeats. And what heartbeats! As I said, I don't remember much about the early flirty stages of our affair, because I was still in my cocoon or shell or husk or whatever it was that sealed me off so tightly from the world of lovers; but I remember clear as rock crystal the moment I emerged from it and knew, beyond doubt and beyond going back and beyond caring what the gossips might say about it, that this was love and that I was in it. Like everybody else (which was a relief: to know that I was normal and not, as I had heard Tusky call me behind my back, a blooming great she-mule), and at the same time like nobody else had ever been before or ever would be.

I was in bed and ill. I remember that too, indeed it would be difficult now to forget. Over the past year I had often been ill. Nothing terrible and sudden like the Brain Fever, but a creeping, nagging, lingering malaise without a name and without a place either, that would come and go and stop and start and rise and fall, as capricious as a mist. Sometimes it would be in my stomach, making me sick and putting me off my food; sometimes in my head, causing the most fearful aches behind my eyes. At other times it seemed to sink right down into my feet, which became all chapped and dark, quite like a Miner's should be, only in my case the dark would not wash off; and at other times still – and these were the most frequent – it would seep everywhere and I would become tired and listless, and my hair would moult in handfuls, and my heartbeat would thud slower and slower, like the plod, plod, plod of an old pack-dog, until it seemed it must stop altogether.

Tarlui tended me, assisted as a rule by Jet, who was as clever as her mother used to be at measuring out all the powders and potions and stuff that Tarlui insisted I should take. (And clever at getting them down me too. Poor, zealous, well-meaning Jet, how hard she used to plead with me to swallow them!) But on this particular day she must have been resting or busy elsewhere, because Tarlui came into the sickroom accompanied not by her but by this unobtrusive son of his – Lidsanel, known as Cafusc – whom so far I had seen and not seen, in bits and bobs or altogether as maybe, and noticed and not noticed, but who already had the power, when he drew close to the bed, to send the old pack-dog rhythm of my heartbeat racing like a harrier's.

He told me later he was convinced I was dying, or he never would have had the courage to behave the way he did, being so much younger and the son of a hireling; but I'm not sure this is quite true. My suspicion was, and still is, that he cheated a little, like I did myself, and used the illness as an excuse. As a kind of lovers' cattle goad, if such a thing can be imagined, designed to chase us without further delay into each other's arms.

Tarlui was already at work in the far corner of the hut with his weights and scales and spoons, preparing my medicine (or whatever I should call it), but apart from the tinkling of his instruments, which set up a treble to the low boom, boom, boom of my suddenly racing heart, I barely noticed him. I think he may have called out something to Lidsanel by way of instructions – something not very pleasant, something like, 'Don't just stand there loafing, boy. Make yourself useful. Put the bed to rights. Empty the squat-pail. Get her to sit up if you can.' But if he did, Lidsanel didn't appear to notice him either.

It was weird. So weird that if we'd had any sense we should have stopped to ask the reason. We were separate from one another: he standing by the bed, me lying on it; he male, me female; he young, me not so young; he healthy, me quite the reverse; but in some way it is hard to describe (I think from habit in terms of metal fusion, only it was even queerer and faster than that) we were already as united and indivisible as the two sides of Tarlui's famous medal.

For what seemed ages we just stayed still in this position, staring at one another: a couple of sun-dazed owls. Stare, stare, stare, all else forgotten, on my side even breathing, until my chest lost patience and did it for me. We said nothing either, but messages seemed to course between us all the same: desire, love, need, astonishment – I don't know what it was that they contained. 'Don't die, don't leave me. Not now that things are just beginning.' 'Who talks of dying? Can't you see how alive you make me feel?' 'What a lot of time we've wasted.' 'Never mind, time's our slave, when we are together we can make it stop.' 'When we are together we will have other things to do than bother about time.' 'When we are together?' 'Yes, when we are together. Properly. Just the two of us and nothing in between.' Then, as if to give me a foretaste of what he meant, Lidsanel bent down and took my hand, which was lying on the covers limp and white as a fish's underside, and carried it to his mouth where he pressed it to his open lips so that I could feel the heat and wetness and the pressing of his tongue inside.

I also felt my hand change colour instantly as did my whole body, and in my embarrassment I remembered Tarlui. What was he doing? Was he watching us? Had he noticed what had happened between us, or was he still too busy with his mixtures?

He had noticed all right, I could see that the moment I turned my head in his direction and away from Lidsanel. He had noticed, and he was watching us with evident interest, his head cocked to one side and a funny smile on his face, musing and amused. 'Ho, ho,' he seemed to be saying to himself. 'Ho, ho, so that's the way it is. Well, well, well. My boy has found favour with the hefty Miner maiden, has he? Well, well, well.'

It was unusual for me to be able to read his thoughts in this way. It was unusual for anyone. Although he knew most of our folk inside out by now, from looking down our throats and into our ears and between our toes and places, the opposite did not hold true, and to us Miners he was still in many ways as much of a stranger as he had been when he first arrived. If we had parties, to celebrate a birth or a marriage or the clinching of a good contract or the like, he never came, so we never saw him drink or sing or do anything foolish or what you might call let his hair down at all. (His hair. More about that later.) If you asked him questions about his past, or about his origins, or even about his tastes in food or music – anything that went beyond the strict limits of business – he never answered them. It wasn't that he refused to answer – he was far too polite for that – but he turned his politeness into a sort of shield with which to fend off the enquiry. 'I like all the food that is served in Mill Brook, Lady Mara. I like all the music that is played. My home country? My youth? My childhood? Ah, I would not be bothering you with talk of such faraway things, not now when I have so many patients to attend to. Some other day perhaps…' But that other day never came. His very face, with its fine drawn-back skin that had no give in it, and the thin, beardless mouth and pale-as-silver eyes, seemed made, like caskets are, for holding things in, hiding them from view. Thus I never knew either, not really, not then, whether he was content with his doctoring work or whether Tusky was right to be jealous of him, and all the while he was chafing with impatience, itching to be offered some other more important job and furious because it had been denied him.

And yet now, just for a moment, as I lay there awkwardly on the bed with my raised hand glued to his son's mouth, the casket had opened and I had seen real interest on his face, and real, fast-moving thoughts behind it.

Or had I? No sooner was Tarlui aware of my movement than his head dropped promptly back over his pounding bowl, and when he looked up again, as he did almost immediately, leaving me just enough time to free my hand from Lidsanel's clasp and place it demurely back on the covers, his face was smoothed again into a tactful, line-free blank. 'And how is your Ladyship feeling today? Am I mistaken or is that a little more colour I see in your cheeks?'

I said as loudly as I could that I was feeling a lot better.

'Good,' he said, tilting his head as before and showing just the inkling of another smile. 'Then perhaps it is time for us to pass to another mixture, a lighter one. In fact,' and he set aside the mortar and gave it a little shove with his toe, upsetting it and spilling its contents on the floor, 'we might try something quite different altogether. Yes, why not? Lidsanel!'

By my bedside I felt Lidsanel stiffen with resentment: despite having given him such a high-sounding name, Tarlui usually ordered him around like a scullery boy, and newly declared lovers are very anxious about dignity, I know I was. But the older man for once was gentle with him, almost respectful. 'Lidsanel, my son, lend a hand to your old father, would you, in his work? Nip over to the dairy and see if the cowman can give you a bowl of milk for her Ladyship's new potion. And mind it be fresh.'

'A good boy,' he said to me in a confidential voice when Lidsanel had gone, lowering his head to pillow level and peering at me closely with his keen medicine man's eyes. 'Handsome too, wouldn't your Ladyship say? Or is that just a father's partiality? Oh, I know by Miner standards a great cuckoo chick like him doesn't cut much of a figure, but I think myself… well, that swag of hair, those thick dark eyelashes he takes from his mother, those long brown limbs, the muscular torso… My word! I was right, your Ladyship's colour is definitely improving… Yes, I think myself they are points in his favour rather than defects. But I may be wrong. What is your Ladyship's opinion?'

My Ladyship's opinion was too intimate to be voiced. Now I knew exactly what Jet had been on about: mitts and soup wouldn't have come top of my list perhaps, but I would have loved to do things for Lidsanel – anything, big or small, easy or difficult, to make his life nicer, give him pleasure. I lay outwardly still, inwardly bubbling like dross, until he came back with the milk, and then I think from weakness and excitement I must have fainted clean away.

And then have passed from swoon to sleep with no interruption, because the next thing I remember is waking up with the dark drops of an evening rainstorm seeping through a hole in the roofing and dripping onto my bedcovers, and feeling more comfortable and happy than I had felt in years.

On account of the change of 'medicine'? Very likely on account of that as well. But mainly because a world than contained Lidsanel was no longer the drear and lonely place it had seemed to me without him, but a place in which everything, even rain, even leaks, seemed packed with promise.

(next chapter sunday july 18 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-89653954868987841342010-07-04T09:48:00.000-07:002010-07-04T09:51:04.907-07:00chapter 2If Tusky meant good in the sense of useful (and there's no point measuring the other sort of good yet, not until I know for sure the final outcome), then he was wrong. Tarlui was still there all right, in his hut by the gate, and Tarlui came, and did more, much more than make suggestions.

My first sight of him was off-putting, indeed off-scaring. He was slight and bent and ragged and filthy looking and wore a mask over his face which left only the eyes showing. Strange, pale coloured eyes like those of the mixed-blood Fanes I had met at my Aunt Lujanta's, but with darker lashes, darker brows. I thought he must have the bone-rot and covered his face for that reason, but when he heard my gasp he was quick to reassure me. It was protection, he said, a measure for keeping diseases out, not in. We must all start wearing masks now; would I please get the housekeeper to start tearing up some linen strips with no delay.

His voice was quiet, lilting, no edge to it at all. I wasn't expecting to be given such a strange order at such short notice by a total stranger, and a beggar at that, but I found myself rushing to the linen chests to do as I was bid. We had no real housekeeper because Friska never trusted anyone but herself with housework, so I just grabbed an armful of cloths and carried them back to Tarlui like a well-trained hunting dog. If I'd had a tail I'd probably have wagged it to show willing.

'Excellent, my Lady,' he said, making me wonder for a moment who he was talking to, and began dividing the cloths into strips himself with the aid of a dainty little clasp-knife which he pulled out from somewhere under the rags, measuring each strip carefully so that all were exactly the same size.

Appearances can be misleading because, dirty though he appeared on the outside, the man had a deep, almost religious regard for cleanliness. The next thing he did, after lining everyone up and handing out the masks, was to issue each of us with a personal chunk of soap from the stores. This chunk, he instructed, was to be kept knotted in a handkerchief tied at the waist, so as to be always readily available, and must be used every time the owner's hands were in the least bit grubby. Fingernails would not pose much of a problem because Miners scarcely had any, but those who were in the habit of keeping one long nail for head scratching and teeth picking and whatnot must cut it short immediately. And the same went for toes. Bedding must be aired daily: taken out into the yard and shaken and beaten; garments must be washed; every healthy person must bathe every single day in the river no matter how cold the water, breaking a hole in the ice if need be. Food must be washed too. Spitting must cease. Noses must be blown into handkerchiefs.

Oh, and a hundred other fussy little rules of this kind. I remember getting more and more fidgety and finally interrupting him: he was here for sick, I reminded him, not for the healthy. My father was lying on his bed in agony, so were his sons, so were dozens of my kinsfolk; surely lessons on nail clipping and nose blowing could come later?

Tarlui, I was soon to discover, set nearly as much store by politeness as he did cleanliness, but on this occasion he was downright rude. If the lessons came later, he said, almost barked, they would come too late. Did I want him to fight the disease or didn't I? Because if I did, I must let him go about it his way. The sick? Forgive his bluntness but there was nothing to be done for the sick, save, as an extreme remedy, the boring of a hole into their skulls to take the pressure off. And since very few ever recovered from that treatment, the longer we could wait before resorting to it, the better. Now, if I would please order the return of the shift workers and anyone else who happened to be outside the settlement for whatever reason, he would go through the drill a second time for their benefit.

If there had been anyone else to turn to, anyone else with the shadow of an idea of what to do, even if it had been only an old Tchicuta woman with poultices, or an Aguana with a dowsing twig, I think I would have sent Tarlui packing after this speech. (Or tried to: given the scale of his preparations it would not have been easy.) But there was no one. Friska was with her children, and she was already feeling ill herself. Jet was ailing too. Tusky was hopeless in emergencies, and for all I knew had already carried out his threat and jumped into the river with his pockets full of slag. Not such a bad idea either, I was beginning to think. After all, what was this newcomer offering us? Nothing but soap and masks and scrubbing brushes. And now a suggestion so horrific it made me want to strike him. Oh, how glad I am I never allowed him to go near Odolghes or any of the others with his disgusting skull-saw. I shouldn't really have let him into Odolghes' chamber at all, with or without saw, but there was no knowing that at the time so it's useless to blame myself. Luckily Tarlui kept his mask on, but even so I'm not sure that Odolghes didn't… just for a moment… before his wits went entirely, that is…

But better not to think about that. Better not to think about anything connected to those dreadful last days of the Great Ravage, as it is now called in our ballads. At the time, we survivors plodded on with our everyday business, heads down like beasts at the treadmill, and this still seems to me the only way forward out of any fix, be it a mine accident or a wet harvest or simply, like the one that threatens me now, a whirlpool of horrors in the head. Let me just say that together with Odolghes and my stepmother and brothers the Fever carried away in all a hundred and forty six members of our tribe: slightly under half the total population. The elderly and the young were the worst affected, although about twenty victims of my own age group were stricken also, among them most of my old school mates. Only one sick person recovered, and that – thank the niggardly Goddess for a scrap of mercy – was Jet. She trailed her foot a bit afterwards but otherwise was quite her old self.

More than this – the facts, the numbers – I am not able to give. My grandmother in her book writes at length about her parents' deaths: what noises they made and who heard them and who found them afterwards and in what positions, but she never loved them like I did mine, and never behaved badly towards them either. After the Friska business I had always meant to draw close to Odolghes again, confess I was jealous, ask his forgiveness for being so standoffish and cold and assure him that I had loved him always; but the Fever robbed me of my chance, and this is probably what causes my silence now. Regret. Sadness. Guilt sitting on my heart like garlic on the stomach, going neither up nor down.

And even if I could – force myself, I mean, to dig down into the muddy depths of memory where the pictures lie and bring them to the surface and clean them up and take a proper look at them and then set down what I see – it would make miserable reading. With Alexa it is different, she can sort of laugh and cry about things at the same time and make the person reading do the same, but I don't have this gift, I have too much gloomy Miners' blood in my veins. Better from everyone's point of view therefore if I simply skip the medical details entirely, forget the funerals, and take up my story a fortnight or so later when the Fever has stolen its last victim and we have said the last prayers and felled the last tree, and are trying – without much success in my case – to pick up the fragments of our shattered world and stick them together again so that life can continue.

Here I am in the throne room. True daughter of the Floor-mop, I have never felt so limp, so wrung, so wretched. Not even in the final rages of the snowstorm did I feel as bad as this, because then there was Odolghes' shoulder to lean on and hide my face in, and now there is no one's. I am sitting by myself, hunkers, on the floor, staring at the empty throne, trying to accustom myself to the idea of having to occupy it and dreading the moment – next morning probably, when families will have to be re-grouped and questions of inheritance gone into and all sorts of tricky things like that – when I will have to do so for the first time in full view of the whole tribe. Or what is left of it. Odolghes never used the throne willingly either, and although he went to great pains to have it smartened up and regilded, that was just for show, and he much preferred sitting cross-legged on a simple low wooden stool. Must have been his musician's training.

This morning Tusky, with no ceremony at all, just a quick shove and an ill-tempered mutter, 'All yours now, kiddo,' has passed on to me the feathered headdress, the magic stone in its little leather bag, and Odolghes' unset golden crown. The full apparatus of Chieftainship. I know it isn't time for frills but all the same I would have appreciated a gesture of some sort to mark the occasion of what I suppose was in effect my coronation, even if it had only been a clearing of his throat and an 'Erm…' before he spoke.

I am holding the headdress in my hand now: it feels like a dead crow. Miserably embarrassed even though there is no one here to see, I place it gingerly on my head and creep up to the throne to see my reflection in the smooth part on one of the legs. It looks like a dead crow. I look like an outsize female of uncertain age and race, neither girl nor woman, Miner nor Fane, pretty nor ugly, with a dead crow on her head. How under earth am I going to get people to take me seriously, accept me as their leader, listen to what I say? And what am I going to say? I have sat through dozens of meetings chaired by Odolghes, but now I can't even remember how he opened the sessions. There is a rigmarole of some sort, full of g's: Guide us Goddess, good as gold, Grant us… And there like a ninny I get stuck.

As I crouch there worrying and peering into the shiny metal surface, a tiny sickle-shaped image appears behind mine, like a black moon rising behind a tree, and then grows and stretches as whatever it is draws near. I whip round, expecting to see a wraith or something worse, but it is only Tarlui, curved to this shape by the metal of the throne leg. (That 'only' looks woefully out of place beside his name now, as it would beside 'earthquake' or 'end of the world', but stories have to be told in an orderly fashion, and that was the word I would have used then: 'only'.) He makes a little bow and then straight away, no probing, no questions, dips into those mysteriously well-stocked garments of his and draws out a medallion on a chain, gold on one side, some other dark material on the other, and begins turning it over and over in his hand. 'See?' he says slowly. 'Same medal, two faces. Now if you always looked on the shiny side you would think this was a very precious trinket I had here, no? Solid gold through and through. And if you always kept the dull side uppermost you'd think to the contrary it was just a worthless bit of old lead. Well, life's much the same: there's always a black side but there's nothing to be gained by staring at it to the exclusion of the other. What I am saying, Lady Mara,' he goes one still more slowly, bending closer so that I can no longer see the distracting swinging motion of the medal, only his dark-rimmed eyes with their pale, pale centres looking deep into mine, 'what I am saying is, put the past behind you. Think only of the people who are left, not those who are gone. Think of the good times you had with your father, not the bad. Whenever your mind serves you up a helping of something sad, clamp a dish-cover on it and send it back to the kitchen, so to speak, and order something cheerful instead. It shouldn't be difficult, not for a brave-hearted Miner princess like yourself.'

Now there is nothing particularly new or special about this advice, which when you look at it closely is merely a long way of saying, the way everyone does, Look on the bright side, but in my present state I find it so comforting I am moved almost to tears. I have learnt from Odolghes that a leader should never show weakness, but Tarlui seems to have seen so deep into me already that it hardly matters; and so, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until the words tumble out like stones from a chute, I confess to him all my troubles, all my fears. From the biggest, like my hating to give orders and not knowing the first thing about government, to the smallest, like forgetting my lines for tomorrow and feeling such a fright under all these feathers.

Tarlui listens in silence, smiling slightly and wagging his neat little ponytail of hair from side to side, and when I have finished he rummages in his clothes again and takes out his clasp-knife and does something to the headdress, nicking off a few feathers here and there and parting others. It is not much, but when I look at my reflection in the chair leg there is a mysterious difference: the cap, so unbecoming before, almost suits me. 'There,' he says, and from behind the cap the blade flicks forward and takes another snip. 'There. Chickens have feathers but so do swans, it's just a question of placing.' Then he gently turns me round to face him, tells me to take a deep breath and to run through the 'Goddess' rhyme for him – as far as I can remember it, no bother if I can't – just to give him an idea of how it goes. And to my surprise I recite it perfectly from start to finish.

'See?' he says again in that comforting, friendly way, tapping his finger on my forehead. 'Your Ladyship needn't worry. It's all here. All here for when you need it.'

But I do worry, still, quite badly. 'And what if it isn't?' I ask. 'What if my head goes all empty like it did a while back?'

'Ah,' he replies easily. 'In that case you have your advisor to fall back on. That's what he's there for.'

'My advisor?' My voice ends on a high, slightly uncertain note: I don't think I have an advisor, I only wish I did.

But, 'Yes,' Tarlui confirms, 'your advisor, your father's Counsellor and your grandfather's before him, the faithful and resolute Master Tusky. Who else? He'll always be at hand for you to lean on in a crisis.'

Oh, for sure: Tusky. Who else indeed? So faithful he once attempted to thrust Odolghes aside and rule in his place. And as for resolution and support in a crisis – well, I might as well lean on a pile of puffballs. But before I can begin to explain as much to Tarlui, he taps his toes together, makes another little bow and departs, as rapidly and glidingly as he came.

I watch his retreat in the gilded metal, the same way I did his appearance, but I see differently this time: not a black moon or anything menacing like that, but the dwindling reflection of a small, trim, kindly man who has risked his life to help us and asked nothing in return. How hard and generously he has worked. How good he is at solving problems. Unlike Tusky, what a perfect Counsellor he would make.

Just imagine how pleased I am, therefore, when a few days later Tarlui approaches the throne at petition time, all meek and dejected, dressed in his travelling gear already, and begs to be allowed to stay on with us in Mill Brook, working in whatever capacity I see fit. Not only do I grant his request immediately but feel, more fool I, as if something really joyful has happened, like the coming of the swallows or a sudden burst of sunshine.

Tusky stands behind me grinding his teeth harder than a millwheel. But this only makes me smile the wider. Serve him right, I think, the jealous old fool.

(Part 2 chap 3 next sunday, july 11th 2010)amanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-33810219221999137562010-06-27T08:03:00.000-07:002010-06-27T08:10:26.627-07:00PART TWO: LIDSANELCHAPTER ONE

In a way – in many ways, indeed in almost all save one – instead of beginning a whole new part of it I wish I could finish my story here. Just adding a little tailpiece to say that the storm in the mountains was the last danger that ever threatened us, and that after we got back home to Mill Brook Odolghes and I settled sown to a quiet, regular, humdrum life: he looking after the Miners and getting good contracts for them and sorting out their squabbles, and me looking after him and doing my lessons and receiving a pair of gold earrings on my next birthday, and another on the next, and so on until my lobes were loaded with them. No more adventures, no more changes, nothing to break the peace except the usual workaday upsets like collapsing tunnels and the odd trapped leg and corroded toe.

Unfortunately, though, our mother the Earth Goddess, or whoever it is decides these things, had different plans, and of changes and upsets we were to see all too many all too soon. Barely a month after our return Odolghes went and married this Friska woman he had been making up to, and she came to live with us and took over the running of the household. Altering all our habits and shifting our possessions and – probably without malice, merely because with my mother still unaccounted for she was unsure of her position – digging a kind of invisible ditch between Odolghes and myself which neither of us was ever really able to fill in again, not completely. We used to make up songs together, for instance, almost every night before I went to bed; Friska stopped that, she said the music made her mopey. We used to laugh together about silly things that happened during the day; Friska stopped that too by asking, every single time, what it was we were laughing about and then staring at us with wide blank sheepy eyes when she was told. If I was given something, she wanted it too: bigger, better. If I had a ring she wanted a bracelet, if I had a new dress she wanted three. At first Odolghes tried to find time for both of us, but days were short and he was busy, and eventually, to my surprise and disappointment, it was the new wife who won most of his attention. If I'd known more about marriage I would have understood and waited for the Dove Days to pass, but I was ignorant and proud and my nose was badly out of joint, so I turned my back on Odolghes, pretending it was me who had no time for him and not the other way round. Then it was he who took offence, and so it went on.

These were private changes that touched the lives of just the three of us. The other changes, which started up a little later, were not only to touch but rock, and in some cases wreck, the lives of everyone. It was round about the time Friska's first son was born, if I remember rightly. (She had three sons altogether: Handsome, Huge and Strongbones – not names I would have chosen myself). Yes, it was round about then that we started having what Odolghes called Rich People's problems. First it was just hungry outside workers turning up now and then looking for a day's hire. Then it was beggars hanging around on the outskirts of the settlement, scavenging among the slops, seeking leftover food and cast-off clothes. Then it was Outcasts creeping out of the woods at night, clanking their bells, terrifying everyone. Then a whole group of hangers-on of various kinds came and camped in the field on the opposite side of the road, practically on our doorstep, refusing to be shooed away.

We put up with them all, bearing them like an oak tree does its mistletoe: Odolghes said it was our duty – the price we had to pay for being so strong and thriving so well. We were not to fill these people's bellies for them - that would be foolish – but we were not to leave them empty either, because that would be wrong. We must ride a middle course. Like the tree and the creeper, we must learn to live together.

And so we did, on our side, for a while. Only need is a powerful spur, and not very long after the arrival of the campers the thefts started. Food, tools, poultry, odds and ends of jewellery, and finally someone broke into the gold store itself and tampered with the padlock on one of the chests (which luckily held). This caused such outrage that some of the older Miners wanted to go back to Aurona on the spot, regardless of discomfort; but eventually it was decided by vote that we would stay where we were and build a proper wall instead – all around the settlement. Shutting us in and shutting trouble out.

A good idea? Probably not, seeing that trouble, when it came, came over or under or through the wall (we shall never know which) as if it were not there at all. But at the time it seemed we had no choice. Just as we had no choice, once the wall was in place, but to man it. Which meant forming a guard. Which meant training the Miners to become soldiers and to carry arms themselves instead of merely digging up the metal to make them for other people. (Which meant, incidentally, great fun for Odolghes, who I'd never seen so happy as he was then, turning his diggers into warriors insofar as he was able.) But military strength, like the sword which is its emblem, had two edges: it makes you feel safe, but it makes your neighbours feel uncomfortable; it fends off attackers, but at the same time it encourages other forces to attack who otherwise might never have thought it worth their while. I won't say our new defences led us into war – despite what the songs say, our 'battles' were never anything more glorious than a few scuffles over firewood with the Latrones, and a night raid or two from bands of travelling robbers which we beat off easier than a swarm of gnats – but they put us on a different, more prickly footing with our former friends. People still came to do deals with us, but they came in bigger groups now and kept their weapons by them and rode off as soon as the deal was struck. They no longer unsaddled their horses and sat down by our fires to warm themselves, calling for a song, or asking to be shown a pair of Miner feet so that they could marvel over them. The Wanderers too, when they came by with their wares, no longer pinched our children and called them names. We were not just metal-grubbers now, to be hired for a task and then left to our own devices, we were a proper fighting tribe like all the others, to be reckoned with, respected, and by the same token mistrusted and feared.

I remember these years as being long and empty, and (although it is silly to think of years as having colours) in my memory they form a large sort of brownish grey path like the stripe on the back of a donkey. Silent, awkward, resentful of my little brothers and yet deeply fond of them, I was no longer looked on as the heir to anything, except possibly Odolghes' role of singer when his voice went. Sommavida's name was mentioned less and less often and then pretty well forgotten; mine went back to being Mara the Mongrel or, occasionally, Mara the Moody or Mara the Mute. Friska, who love to poke fun at me, put about word that I was in love and shy on that account, but this was untrue, I felt no attraction to my male companions at all. Partly, I suppose, due to the fact that I had grown so tall I could only see their scalps most of the time, and partly (mostly?) because they felt no attraction towards me.

I don't know what my life would have been if the disaster hadn't happened when it did. There was a woman among us called Sarry who'd never married and belonged to no particular family and did no particular job and whom everybody used as a kind of spare aunt, dumping their babies on her when they were busy and getting her to do their mending and stuff: I suppose I would have ended up like her. Minding my brothers for Friska, helping Odolghes with his reckonings, counting things for Tusky, doling things out, cleaning things up, storing things away. Knitting mining mittens perhaps in my spare time if I was granted any – clickety, clickety, click.

Instead, at the age of sixteen and a bit, I suddenly found myself, in the space of a few horrendous days, seated on the newly gilded throne left empty by Odolghes, ruling in his place. Oh, the nightmare of it all. The speed, the shock. The sufferings of those that went. And the dreadful, aching loneliness of those others, like myself, who remained. For almost a year afterwards I would wake up in the morning unawares and then recoil, like someone lobbed by a swinging sack of sawdust, as the terrible weight of reality hit me. I don't know why I couldn't have kept the memory in my head while I slept, it would have been better. But no, for some reason I had to wake up happy and then go through bereavement afresh each time.

The disaster began harmlessly enough, almost comically, with just a chorus of sneezes. Everyone was sneezing that morning. Choo! went the cook into the junket. Choo! went Odolghes as he helped himself and the others and passed around the bowls. Snissh! went Friska as she blew on the children's portions. Whh… whh… whharrgh! went the other breakfasters, one after the other. I had a cold already and had had it for days and I was past the sneezing stage. I mopped Handsome's none too handsome nose for him and told him not to laugh and to get on with his meal. Outside in what was now the courtyard, the second mining shift was preparing to relieve the first, and you could hear 'Watchoo!'s issuing like trumpet blasts from dozens of noses.

'It's like the nits,' Friska remarked. 'It's catching.'

And so it was, but it was not like the nits. By mid-morning several of the mineworkers had come back, pleading headaches. There was a bit of grumbling from their replacements, some of whom were also feeling off colour, but no real objections; the sick workers were sent off to the kitchens where the work was lighter and the air warmer, and that for the time being was that.

Odolghes too had a headache. I remember because I was with him that morning, helping with the bookwork, and halfway through he pulled off his Chief's headdress saying it was too heavy. It was made of feathers, as I think I've already said: it weighed hardly anything at all. By noon he, my three brothers, and a score of others had given up resisting and taken to their beds. It was snuffling now, instead of sneezing, to be heard on every side. Snuffling and one or two moans.

Friska was still bustling around – she didn't give up till the morning of the next day when the second batch was struck – and we did the rounds of the sickrooms together. None of the snufflers had an appetite, and none of them was so bad that they couldn't reach the squat-pail, so there wasn't really much for us to do in the way of nursing. Their heads hurt, that was all, and their noses ran and their eyes tickled and they complained of being too hot; so Friska and I went round with strips of linen soaked in flower-water and spread them on the burning foreheads, and fanned the flushed faces, and pulled to the shutters to keep the light out of smarting eyes, and generally tried to make everyone comfortable and unafraid.

It was easy to be reassuring at that stage. We were unafraid ourselves: what was there to fear in just rheum, a distemper, a collection of runny noses? Not so many of us down together maybe, but we had outbreaks like this every winter. By evening, however, the screaming of the worst affected victims had started, and Oldoghes, in whom the disease seemed to run fastest of all, had begun holding his head the way he'd done on the day his memory came back, and rolling about on the floor of his room. Not screaming – he didn't scream until he'd lost the knowledge of who he was and what his duty was as Chieftain – but groaning quietly, moaning, begging for something to be done to ease the pain.

It was the prologue to panic. The sick screamed; those on their way to sickness screamed too, knowing what they were in for; and the healthy screamed for the poor screamers – children, sisters, mothers, brothers – watching their agony grow and grow, unable to understand what was happening, powerless to help.

Tusky, drained of all his colour so that his knobbly face under his hat looked like a dusty old cauliflower, said he'd heard his grandfather speak of the disease, or one very like it. It was called Brain Fever because the brain was where it lodged, and it was the worst and deadliest illness in the world – worse than the Cheese Sickness that makes holes all over your skin, worse than Rabies, worse than the Bone-rot that tormented the poor Outcasts. There was no remedy for it and no safeguard against it and precious few recoveries either: once you'd got it you were as good as gone. We were lost, he said between sobs, taking my hand and squeezing it (and then, forgetting he was still holding it, raising it to his mouth and chewing on it instead of his own). Lost. Condemned. Done for, all of us. It was the end of the Miner people, the worst end our cruel Goddess could devise for us; u fin du Ratt was nothing in comparison. Farewell, Mistress Mara, and forgive him: while his head was still whole he was going to go and put slag cakes in his pockets and jump in the river. Quicker that way. Quieter. Cooler.

I had always disliked Tusky since the business of the tree. Now I felt I loved him like a dear irreplaceable friend. 'You can't do that, Tusky,' I said. 'You can't leave us. There must be something we can do, someone we can turn to? What about the Chief Smelter? He knows all sorts of things about heat and burns and dressings. Why don't we ask him?'

The tears were coursing down Tusky's face now and he wiped them away fiercely, still using my hand. 'Smelter's low,' he sniffed. 'One of the first to go down.'

This was bad news indeed. 'How about his second in charge, then? What's his name.. Rudy?'

Tusky shook his head. 'Rudy's a rough nugget. Knows nothing beyond his own job.'

'And Jasper - the one who looks after the horses when they're poorly?

'Nagra!' Tusky dropped my hand at last and waved his own dismissively. 'Jasper doesn't know that first thing about horses, he's scared stiff of them. Anything that crops up, he has to call in Tarlui.'

He pronounced this second name with even more scorn as if saying, Has to call in a rat, or, Has to call in a beetle, but all the same it had a sound to it that made me curious. Perhaps, without registering it, I had heard it already. 'And who's Tarlui?' I asked. 'And why can't we call him in too?'

Tusky said, 'Nagra,' again and shrugged his shoulders. 'Tarlui's just one of the beggar people,' he explained. 'Well… their leader, sort of. Their wise man. He knows a thing or two, it's true, but we can't ask him in or we'd never get rid of him. Probably gone by now anyway. They all will be, poor blighters, if they've got any sense.'

Yes, but what if they weren't, what if he wasn't? The position was so dire that, like a pit-worker stranded down a shaft, I was ready to grab at anything that came my way, even a root, even a grass blade, even a spider's thread. 'Go and look for him, Tusky,' I pleaded. 'Before you jump in the river go and look for this Tarlui or whatever his name is. And if you find him, talk to him, tell him what is happening and see if he can't come up with some suggestion.'

Tusky looked at me blankly. For a moment I thought he hadn't followed what I was saying, perhaps hadn't even heard. Then he shook himself and a few more tears squeezed out of his eyes and began to tumble down his face along the wide wet tracks already drawn. 'Very well, Mistress Mara,' he agreed in a tired voice, 'but it won't do any good.'

I felt suddenly different, I don't know why. Hopeful, almost confident. 'Don't be such a raven, Tusky,' I said, but not crossly, merely impatiently, to get him to make haste. 'That's something we can't know until we've tried.'

(Chapter 2 will be posted Sunday 4th July 2010)amanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-62262405183667727922010-06-20T02:32:00.001-07:002010-06-20T02:38:36.894-07:00chapter 10Morin in Salvan language means a mill, and deep down under the living quarters there was in fact a grinding apparatus for corn and spelt and other grainstuffs, powered by an underground watercourse. That night I could only hear a faint purring through my pillow as I dropped off to sleep again, but next morning in the eating room, which was one level lower, the sound was unmistakable, almost a roar.

Aunt Lulu, as I had been told to call her for short, said what with noise and low ceilings and lack of light there were days, particularly in the summer, when she thought the place would drive her crazy. She had lived there all her life so she should know, but to me it seemed a perfect home. I loved the clean earthy smell of it, the warmth, the comfort, the well-swept corridors with the bunches of herbs and roots and onions hanging on the walls. I loved the kitchens, where the cooks spoilt me and fed me titbits and told me about my grandmother and how beautiful she was and how she had taught them all their best recipes. 'Didn't want to get on the wrong side of her, though,' they added with great admiration. 'Oooh, no, no, no!' I loved the schoolroom and all the funny children who gathered round to say hello and stare: woolly blondies, smooth-skinned darkies, long-eared lankies like my aunt, every sort of mixture of tall blond Fane and small dark furry Salvan that you can imagine.

Especially I loved my grandmother's sitting room where she had spent the winters while the Salvans slept, and where the traces of her presence were most evident. I said at the beginning I never knew her directly until I read her book, but this is not quite true. Although she had been dead for three years and the room was now used partly for storage, her character was stamped on it as clearly as if it had been burned there with a brand. There were molehills in a corner, for instance, that she had never allowed to be destroyed because the scratchings of the moles kept her company; same thing for cobwebs of which there were festoons. There was a bird perch for the tame owls she kept as pets (that must have been slightly unnerving for the moles), and a hole in the ceiling through which they had used to come and go as they felt inclined – like cats in other houses, Odolghes remarked. There was her old sewing basket – dreadfully untidy, with all the needles missing and the threads rolled into a ball. There were her painting brushes in a jar, heads like teasels, handles chewed to pulp; her carpentry tools, bent and chipped and most of them unserviceable. From these and other signs it was her impatience that came over strongest: her impatience and her solitude and her courage in fighting against both. 'Boil Nurse!' she had carved on the tabletop that had served as her writing desk. And a little lower down: 'No company is better than bad company.' Only this she had altered various times, switching the No and the Bad until you could hardly tell which was the version she finally settled for. I imagine, cooped up for so many winters with the Nurse and the babies as sole wakeful companions, she was uncertain about it herself.

Aunt Lulu seemed to be suffering from the same problem, although not so severely because she was half Salvan and therefore of a calmer temper. When we had got our strength back and it was time for Odolghes and me to leave, she grew very sad and dreamy for a practical person like her and said, Oh how she wished she was coming with us, to a proper house above ground where daylight shone through the windows all year round. Life was so short, it seemed a crime to spend half of it dozing in the dark, and brothers and nieces like us were so few and so precious, and the Great Battle had been such a long time ago…

'Then come, for the Sun God's sake!' Odolghes interrupted her, speaking sharply and staring into the distance. They had grown thick as thatch during the three days of our stay and I think he was just as upset about their parting as my aunt was, only he showed it in a different way. 'Don't just stand there snivelling, round up your people and come. There's room for everyone in Mill Brook, I've already told you. Work too. And if it's the Cajutes you're worrying about, don't: they live too far away and are too busy fighting the Ampezzani now to bother about a warrenload of Salvans and a bunch of intermingled Fanes. You'll be every bit as safe as you are here, and a darn sight warmer and better fed.'

'I know, Eaglet,' my aunt said. It was funny to hear him called by his Fanish name; made him sound like a child. 'We've been over all this before. And I've already given you my answer. I can't, not while so many of the old ones are still alive. It wouldn't be fair on them, they wouldn't fit in, wouldn't adapt to the noise and the bustle. Try to understand. I long to join you myself and so do the youngsters, but it'd be asking too much of the others, poor dears, to change their home and habits at their time of life.'

Odolghes blew through his lips and said that the noise question could easily be dealt with by stowing the Deep-sleepers away for the winter in packing cases in the cellars, the way he remembered his mother used to do with her Salvan companion, Sonia. But he said it without conviction: Aunt Lujanta had left this unsaid, but the older Salvans didn't take to Miners much, nor the other way round, on account of those years of Alexa's regency when the two tribes had been enemies. The first day some of them had even wrinkled up their noses at me: a rude way of showing me they didn't like my smell.

So in the end Odolghes shrugged and gave up, and he and I left Morin de Salvans alone, on foot, with nothing to remind us of Lujanta except the food she gave us for our journey, a copper circlet for me that had belonged to my grandmother, and a few vague promises of a future life together in Mill Brook when the 'old' Salavans were dead. Aunt Lulu was getting on for being an old Salvan herself: I didn't say so to Odolghes but I feared she might be dead too before she could set about keeping her word.

END OF PART ONE (beginning of part 2, LIDSANEL, coming up next sunday June 27th 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-67561479572818591632010-06-13T01:40:00.000-07:002010-06-13T01:43:06.756-07:00chapter 9Yes, Odolghes was a good keeper of promises. When I woke up, the storm was over and I was lying, snug and dry, in a strange prickly bed that smelt of heather and rustled when I moved. I could hear Odolghes' voice quite close by, speaking in an easy chatty tone, so I wasn't scared, but the room was dark, and when I stretched out my hand it met with earth: earthen floor and earthen wall beside me and low earthen ceiling overhead. Under the bedcovers I was naked as a worm. I decided we must have died and returned to the belly of the Earth Goddess. Ah well, it was a good sight better than the rock.

I was so comfortable that I didn't call out but lay quiet where I was. When I turned my head in the direction of Odolghes' voice, something brushed against my face and I realized that the darkness was due to a curtain which shielded my bed from the rest of the room: I was lying, so to speak, in a cupboard, a recess carved out of the wall. Gently I lifted the curtain and looked out onto a still darkish but definitely bigger and brighter space – you could hardly call it a room – lit by a fire and by what I suppose served as an oil lamp but was in fact just a bowl of grease with a flame in the middle. On one side of the fire sat Odolghes on a heap of leather cushions, his legs crossed elegantly, his hand twiddling at his hair, the way it did when he was interested in something. Apart from his breeches he too was naked, and I thought this very odd because he was usually careful to cover his armless shoulder in the presence of strangers.

On the other side of the fire, her foot rocking at the greasebowl so that the flame wobbled, now lighting her features, now shading them, sat, not merely a stranger but one of the strangest strangers I had ever seen. A woman, I supposed she was. Quite old, very tall, very straight, with long pale hair the colour of hay, which she appeared to be in the process of combing, or perhaps drying over the flame. The comb, or brush or instrument she was holding, she passed from hand to free foot unconcernedly, using whichever was more convenient. Her toes and fingers were in fact of equal length, midway between what they are on a normal person, and the nails of both were long and curved and looked as if they would take an awful lot of cutting.

The only other truly unusual thing about her was her ears, which stuck out from under the hair like a horse's from its mane and, like a horse's, were long and pointed and furry; but the rest, by its very familiarity, was even stranger. Her voice when she spoke was a little higher maybe but otherwise identical to Odolghes'; her laugh when it came was just like his. I didn't notice the eyes until later of course, which were dark and slanting and quite, quite different, but the brows and forehead were the same shape as his too, and so were the nose and chin and mouth. Except for the oddities I've mentioned she could have been his twin.

They seemed to be getting along together very well for two people who have only just met. If she was indeed the Earth Goddess, I reckoned we were in for a good stay. 'Tell me more about her,' Odolghes was asking eagerly. They were evidently discussing some friend they had in common. 'What did she do all day in the wintertime? How did she keep herself amused?'

'Oh, this and that,' the woman said. 'She scribbled a lot, she painted, she gave lessons. She wasn't alone, you know, there was the Nurse and the five Fanish babies who escaped with her, and there were four other grownup Fanes who turned up later and stayed a while before they got bored and moved on – quite a little band. And then there was me: I used to keep her company often. I don't sleep that deep in winter, you know, not like the rest of the tribe.'

'Don't you?' Odolghes asked, leaning forward and lifting the curtain of her hair. He sounded very amused by this rather dull piece of information. 'Neither do I. I always thought that meant…' And then he laughed and didn't finish.

'Doesn't mean anything,' the woman said, tossing back her hair and laughing too. 'We could be full, or we could be only half. What difference does it make? The important thing is, we've found each other.'

'You found me,' Odolghes corrected, 'and very grateful I am that you did. You seem to be quite an expert in rescuing Fanes from desperate situations. But…' And here he paused and his voice turned a little wistful, 'I sometimes wonder… What about later when things quietened down? Didn't any of you ever come to look for me? Didn't she?'

I was beginning, slowly, to realize who this 'she' they were talking about was: it was Alexa, my grandmother, Odolghes' mother. So she hadn't been killed in the fall of Fànes after all, she had been rescued by this curious creature and had come to live with her in this curious place, well out of sight and reach of her enemies. Not such a bad idea.

'Of course she did,' the woman said firmly. 'She never stopped. But it wasn't easy: there were Cajute spies all over the place. Messengers to the Miners were sent out dozens of times but each time they had to turn back. And each time, while they were gone, the rest of us had to change our hiding place, just in case the messenger was caught and made to talk. No, it wasn't easy, and it wasn't very popular either. Then, to complicate matters, when at last one of our best scouts did get through to the Miners' camp he found it empty and came back with the message undelivered and the news that the Miners had left for good and taken to the road like Wanderers. So? What could our mother do, poor woman? Just sit tight and go on hoping.'

Our mother? Our mother? Yes, of course, how could I have been so silly: this weird underground creature was not the Earth Goddess but my aunt. My Aunt Lujanta, the one who had been stolen from the cradle by an eagle when she was a baby. No wonder she looked so wild. And no wonder my grandmother settled down here and lived with her all those years: they weren't just rescuer and rescued, they were mother and daughter.

'It was rather touching really,' the woman was now saying. 'Every year, when the spring started, she used to herd us all out into the open and hold a special ceremony in memory of Fànes. She used to light a fire – very risky, but no one dared tell her so – and then circle round it throwing dried mistletoe and stuff onto the flames and chanting, 'Spirit of Fànes, keep burning, keep burning in our hearts'. I was meant to play the part of an eagle and swoop out of one of the tunnels with my mouth filled with Schniappa, beating my arms like wings, and then spit the Schniappa onto the fire to make the flames flare up, but I felt such a fool I usually managed to persuade one of the children to do it instead.'

'That was for me,' Odolghes said rather proudly after a short silence. 'The eagle stood for me, the Eagle Prince.'

'Yes, well,' the woman agreed. 'Probably it did. But I still felt a fool. The last years luckily she didn't feel up to it, so I rowed her over the lake instead in a boat, and she threw her mistletoe and whatnot into the water and did her chantings from there. I don't think she believed in the magic, it was just a way of keeping in touch with the past.

'When did she die?' Odolghes asked after another silence.

The woman – Aunt Lujanta, that is – was braiding her hair now, going at it full speed, all twenty toes and fingers flying. She slowed down out of respect. 'Only three winters ago,' she said quietly. 'You'd have had plenty of time to see her if only you'd known. What a shame – for both of you. She talked about you endlessly; I think she missed you more than she did Dolasilla.'

'Did she?' Odolghes sounded rather pleased at this news. I could understand the way he felt: my case was different, but I too liked to imagine that my mother, wherever she might be, was missing me and trying to get in touch.

Aunt Lujanta nodded, not briskly but like one who has given proper thought to the matter, and then went on, 'Of course your marriage would have horrified her. She was always saying, 'Let's hope the Miners don't play false and bind him to that hideous little…'

'Sssh! Careful,' Odolghes interrupted, and pointed to the bed where I was lying. 'The child speaks Fanish, I taught her.'

My aunt must have noticed the raised curtain because she got to her feet and came over to the recess. I pretended I had just that moment woken up, but she wasn't convinced. 'Anyway,' she said, winking at me so that I could see she was trying to undo the damage, 'it worked out all right because this one's a poppet. What's your name, Eaglet's daughter?'

I told her. Despite the bad beginning I decided I liked her already.

'Well, Mara,' she said, bending down over me and enveloping me in a smell that reminded me of dogs' paws: warm, musty, friendly, not especially clean. 'You had a narrow escape. Welcome to Morin de Salvans.'

(Chapter 10 coming up next Sunday, June 20th 2010 (If and only if my server works in the sticks where I'm off to)amanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-49253948207028840142010-06-06T04:38:00.000-07:002010-06-06T04:41:18.510-07:00chapter 8This morning as I sat scribbling I could hear someone singing the song that was written about Odolghes after his death. I suppose it is a good cheering song for an occasion like this, being all about building and achieving and winning through, but on me it didn't have that effect, it just made me sad.

Because I miss him. And because, even though the song is one of those long ones with a list of deeds and virtues and achievements that seems to go on for ever, his actual period of leadership was all too short. Saba de Fek, the song calls him: Sword of Fire, his battle name. 'Saba de Fek, the one-armed, the fox-brained, the bull-hearted, led us Miner people back to Aurona. Aurona of the glittering halls, home of our forbearers, palace of our dreams…' And so on and so forth.

Well he did of course, it is perfectly true. After all the shouting that went on that night of the gold parting, he could hardly have one otherwise. But what the song fails to mention, perhaps because such a crestfallen thing does not fit very well to music, is how long we actually stayed there. Which was, if I remember rightly, one month and six days, and even that seemed far too long.

The home our elders had dreamed of, moped over, drooled over all these years and described to us younger ones as a kind of wonder-palace, encrusted with jewels and more splendid that the sun itself, turned out when we reached it to be nothing but a huge great empty cave, riddled with draughts and packed full of bats, situated on the top of one of the bleakest mountains of the entire range. There was no handy water source, no nearby wood for fuel gathering, precious little grazing either, and every single thing we needed, except for air of which there was far too much, had to be dragged up through the underground mountain pathways in the same way metal ore has to be dragged out of the earth: that is, with a great deal of bother and boneache and blisters all round. It was mining all over again: a double dose.

We stuck it for a while – chiefly, I think, because the place was so sacred in our lore that nobody dared say outright how dreadful it was – but when Odolghes called us together and announced that he was thinking of re-opening the smelt pits of Mill Brook and needed a few volunteers to accompany him to have a look around, there were so many takers and so much jostling and squabbling and shouting of 'Bags I!' and 'Take me!' and 'Wait, I'm coming too!' that our move was practically decided on the spot.

Mill Brook was not poetic like Aurona, it was not beautiful, not the subject of songs or dreams or yearnings, but it too was our home, or had been once. Our working home as opposed to our party home (just as there are working clothes and party clothes). And like working clothes always are, it was much more practical and comfortable. Especially after the rigours of Aurona. I have a great fondness for tents, from having been born in one, but of all the various places I have lived, I don't think I have ever been so happy anywhere as I was in the wooden huts of Mill Brook in that first busy year of our settling in.

The smelt pits, when they started up again, made for a lot of grime and noise, and in the summer the heat was ferocious, but the rest of the time it was cosy, and the noise was company, and I kept a very clean house for Odolghes, and covered the food in the larder with muslin so that the grime couldn't taint it, and put wool in my ears when I slept and made Odolghes do the same, and all in all we had a very good, very easy life.

Our parents being rich now, we younger ones had to do lessons, which I know some children consider terribly hard work, but after ore-crushing nothing seems tiring, and we sat through them happily – the longer the better – doing whatever we were told. Our teacher was called Bruno. Where Odolghes found him and how he came to hire him, we were never told and it seemed rude to ask, but Jet said she had heard her mother saying that he came straight from the market and had been bought, not hired. Which, if true, meant that he was ours for ever. Not such a bad bargain really because as long as no one bothered him with questions, which he hated, he was kind and patient and never chided us and was quite content to pass lesson times the same way we did: with a minimum of fuss.

On my eighth birthday Odolghes said I could have a holiday from lessons and choose whatever in the world I wanted as a birthday present, so I chose that we spend the day together, just the two of us, looking for my mother. It was not a tactful choice: Odolghes had recently begun paying court to a certain Friska, one of my mother's cousins twice removed, and there was already talk of his remarriage - a search for her predecessor was not likely to go down well with his new fiancée. Nevertheless, Odolghes granted my request immediately, making no bones: the offer, after all, had been his, and he was a good keeper of promises.

We set off early, on two of our smart new horses, taking with us food for the entire day. The sun rose and then shone on us, warmer and warmer; the snow on the mountaintops went from pink to gold to white; the air was so clean it seemed to have been washed in ashes. I turned to Odolghes and smiled and he smiled back, and I knew he was thinking, like I was, of the other journey we had made together, and of how much our lives changed since then.

'Well, birthday girl, and where shall we look?' he asked, trying to seem serious but not really succeeding. I fear the new lady had pretty well cured him of Sommavida: I must admit, she was a good deal younger and better looking.

I shook my head, defeated before we had even begun. I wanted to say, Everywhere, but that was a tall order for a day, so I said, The place she's most likely to be, leaving the choice with him.

This did sadden him a little, I think, because although we had made enquiries with all our customers and alerted the Wanderers and offered huge rewards, no news of my mother had ever come to us, not even of a sighting. 'No, Mara,' he said in a different voice, much older sounding. 'Not the place she's most likely to be, that's not a good idea at all. No, I think we'll try the one place we haven't yet searched where she just possibly might me if she's still alive.'

'And where's that?'

He gestured vaguely with a tilt of his head. 'Up. Up, up on the high ground where the Salvans used to live. There are caves there, and wild goats, and berries and roots and things to live on. You never know, if the Salvans managed it…'

The Salvans were half animals according to Bruno. He made us draw one once and told us to put thick fur all over its body and a tail, like a marmot. My mother didn't have that sort of covering; how could she survive two winters at that altitude, in a cave, eating berries? And why on earth should she want to when she had a perfectly good home to return to? All the same I could see Odolghes' point: there was nowhere else above ground left to search. And the mountains did look enticing on a day like this.

So that was where we went: higher and higher into the mountains, past the lakes and the poppy fields and the summer grazing grounds, up and up until we reached the frost line beyond which the snow no longer melts, and could see the crest of Aurona below us, looking quite niggling and unimportant. Searching in such a vast and rugged area was impossible really, you'd have to be an eagle with an eagle's eyes, but the further we rode the less this seemed to bother us, and in the end we stopped bothering altogether. We rode purely for the pleasure. When the sun reached its highest we got off and rested the horses and ate some of our food and drank some wine, which was another luxury we had started buying now, and I went looking under the snow for fallen stars, and Odolghes, who had drunk five time more wine than I had (I knew because I'd counted), lay down on his cloak on a dry patch under an overhanging rock and went to sleep.

I must have done much the same thing myself when I got tired of star hunting, for the next thing I remember is waking up to a clap of thunder and seeing Odolghes loping along the track just below where I was lying, waving his cloak and shouting like a herdsman. All sorts of rude Miner words, which at first I thought were meant for me for having strayed, but soon realized were aimed at the rumps of our two horses, galloping in the homeward direction in a cloud of powdered snow and fast disappearing over the ridge. 'Too late!' he called out when he saw me. 'They've gone now, the nervy brutes. Should have tethered them. Forgot. Blast and Roast and Counterblast! Took my arm with them too: it was tied to the saddle.'

'Don't worry, Father, I called back. Even at this distance I could see he was in quite a state. 'They'll find their own way home, horses always do.' But when I reached him on the track and looked back at where I'd come from I could see the real cause of his worry. The thunder clap was the signal of no ordinary light summer storm that come and shakes itself over you like a wet dog and the goes again: looming behind the mountaintop was a huge barrier of clouds the colour of slag. Even as we watched I could see it coming closer and feel the wind on which it rode.

'It's a bad one, isn't it?' I whispered. Next to u Fin du Ratt it was the thing we had been taught to fear most: not bears, not wolves, not forest fires or wraiths or even landslides, any of which you can dodge if you're lucky and keep your wits about you, but being caught out on the mountaintops in a really heavy storm. It's the cold, you see: unless you're properly prepared there's nothing you can do to fight it off. We'd lost several of our kinsfolk like that over the years: picked off by blizzards on their way to work or back again; and when we found them they had been crouched up in ball and frozen so solid we couldn't unwind them, not even for their funerals.

Odolghes nodded and took my hand. 'It's a very bad one, picera,' he said. 'But there's no running away from it without the horses. We'd better go back to the rock and take shelter before it breaks.'

His voice was calm but his movements weren't. When we reached the rock he wrapped me up in his cloak and bundled me under the shelf of rock, together with the leftover food and wine flask. Then, clumsily, with his solitary hand, he began scooping up snow and packing it into lumps, working so fast he looked as if he had the Tanners' Twitch, or whatever the disease is called.

Protection, an icehouse to hide in. We had been taught in the nursery how to build one of these, as a sort of game, but I'd never seen one built in earnest. I made to help him, but Odolghes pushed me back under the ledge again saying at all costs I must keep dry. After finishing a dozen or so lumps – just enough to build a low wall in front of our niche, nothing more – he had to stop and come and join me inside, because the wind was lashing so hard it threatened to drag him away. In his company I wasn't frightened, or at least not yet. If you've got somewhere to shelter where the sleet can't freeze you or the lightning frazzle you, and if you don't lose patience and venture out too soon and get lost, the danger with storms is of the slow, creeping kind: it depends on how long they last and whether, to put it bluntly, they last longer than you do. We had some food left, we had wine, we had each other to cling to and Odolghes' thick warm cloak to cover us: I reckoned – we both did – that we were good for quite a nice long while.

Our reckonings, however, were made without consulting the innkeeper, or whatever the saying is. And the innkeeper – or the skykeeper in this case – was the storm. It howled over us and round us, and inside our ears and mouths and nostrils, and under and through the cloak, for so long and with such force that it beat us almost senseless. Dark came and still there was no letting up. Light returned – a livid, soupy light only a few shades paler than the dark – and then faded again as a second night fell. I was so cold and wet and cramped I begged Odolghes to let us leave our niche and run – anywhere, just to feel my feet belonging to me again - but he said no, we were still better off where we were. He made me do pretend running, though, by waving my legs in the air and then clapping my hands until my fingers burned and I thought they would drop off, but this made me so tired that afterwards I fell asleep and woke up even colder.

Worst of all, the constant screeching and battering of the wind played on our nerves, so that instead of being affectionate and saying kind things to one another as we clung together, we grew rattier and rattier, me in particular. I blamed Odolghes for drinking so much wine, for nodding off, for not spotting the change in the weather when he should have done, for flapping at the horses instead of trying to calm them – for everything I could think of. He in return told me I was spoilt and difficult: I hadn't really wanted to look for my mother at all, I had just wanted to get him away from Friska for a day because I was jealous. Well, I'd succeeded all right: if the storm didn't stop soon it was goodbye Friska for ever, and goodbye everyone.

The storm did not stop, either soon or late: it went on and on and on until we lost count of the days. Our food ran out; we finished the wine and had to slake our thirst with snow. Eventually I stopped feeling thirsty and was pleased about this because it meant I wouldn't have to pee any more: there was no worse moment of either day or night than when you had to take down your breeches and pee.

I still wasn't frightened, I still trusted Odolghes to pull us through, even though he seemed a lot colder now and a lot lazier and spent most of the time asleep – like I did. But when I woke up from one of my dreams to find him in a really loving mood for a change, cradling me tight in his arms and planting kisses on my forehead, I knew things were getting very serious, and would have trembled if I hadn't been trembling already from the cold.

'Sssh, picera,' he said when I tried to speak, and closed my lips with his own so that I could taste the ice on his whiskers. 'Sleep now, sleep.'

'But you said to fight against the drowsiness…'

He turned his head so that his cheek lay against my mouth, stopping it entirely. 'I know, sweetheart, only now it's different, now you needn't fight any more. Let yourself sink into a nice deep sleep and when you wake up the storm will be over, I promise.' And then (and this is the very last thing I remember of that particular day or night or whichever it was) he began singing one of his Fanish songs. The saddest one of all, the one about the little warrior princess whose luck runs out on her: 'I sun na era der sfortunada…'

(Chapter 9 coming up next Sunday June 13th 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-73161407429036797022010-05-30T05:50:00.000-07:002010-05-30T05:52:25.983-07:00chapter 7Odolghes had promised that once we had what he called some proper organization, the small grey stone we had gone to such pains to retrieve could be turned into unlimited quantities of gold. Meaning that it would make us rich again. It seemed a puzzling and far-fetched claim when I first heard it, and even now, when I understand what Odolghes meant by organization and have seem the claim fulfilled beyond his boldest dreams, some of the puzzle still remains as regards the actual way the transformation came about.

It happened swiftly, yet in such tiny steps we were hardly aware of taking them. The stone, you see, didn't alter our work much, not as far as methods go, but it helped us to carry it out far more efficiently in far less time. If we had an order of, say, two cartloads of iron ore, which was the usual amount customers wanted, we could now deliver in a fortnight instead of the three or four months it had taken us before when we had no pointers to guide us but our eyes and noses. This meant, to begin with, merely that we could take on more work. Which we did, job after job, so that in terms of health and comfort we were worse off than ever before: tireder, hungrier, grimier and with such sore feet that when the evenings came round some of us – particularly the crushers like me and the other children – could scarcely hobble.

Another month, another fortnight even, of such punishing effort and Odolghes might have had a rebellion on his hands. Or hand. Our people were intrigued by him, were lured by the promises he made, but the old habit of mockery had left its trace and they weren't quite prepared to follow him yet, not the way they had followed my grandfather before the toothache – right or wrong, thick or thin. A state of affairs which Tusky, sapping away like a mole - a dig here, a tunnel there – was quick to exploit. I caught him more than once spreading grumbles, calling Odolghes 'the half-man' and accusing him, on account of his disability, of doing only half the amount of work. 'Yet he eats twice as much as you and me,' he went on each time, giving his listener a double prod in the belly so that the reckoning would be clear. 'And he is twice as big. Remember we used to call him Cuckoo-pate? Well, that's what he is: a cuckoo, a great idle cuckoo in our nest, growing fat while we little birds slave to do his bidding. Where's all the gold he promised us, eh? Where's the food? Where's the perks?'

Still inside the stone, would have been Odolghes's answer. Work, have faith, have patience, and you will see. And luckily, before Tusky's grumbles had any real effect, see we did. With all the work offers, the Miners who had left began to come back. First in drips, then in a trickle, then in a steady flow – at least two families a day. They came back thin as sticks, and in filthy tempers, but more workers meant shorter shifts, and we gradually found ourselves with time for other sorts of jobs which hadn't been done in a long, long while, like rubbish carting and de-fleaing the dogs and mending clothes. The camp began to look smarter as a result, so did we. Perhaps this gave us confidence, bargaining power, because we began to up our prices and be a little bit choosier about the contracts we accepted. I can remember the first time Odolghes actually turned down a customer, hunching up his unlevel shoulders and striding away from the man – I think he was a Trusani – telling him we wouldn't even dig for wurzels on those terms. And I remember too how the man, after a moment's surprise, began hurrying after Odolghes, insisting and coaxing and offering higher and higher payment, almost with every step. It was strange, like seeing an almsgiver and a beggar suddenly change places, or a mouse suddenly begin to eat the cat that has caught it.

I have been rich and then poor, and happy and then sad, enough times to know that the two highs and the two lows don't necessarily go together, but the period that now began for us brought a kind of upward thrust of its own which it was difficult to resist. I felt like a noodle in a pot: obliged to come to the surface by the force of the bubbles. Even the thought of my mother, which troubled me often, especially at nights, couldn't keep me down for long. And the same went for Odolghes and indeed all of us, with the sole exception of Tusky, who continued to grumble even where there was next to nothing to grumble about.

Every day brought improvements of some kind to our lives. New tastes, new smells, new feelings – all of them nice. The taste of butter on our corn-cobs, for example, that since babyhood we had gnawed on dry, butter being too precious a remedy against metal poisoning to waste on children. The smell of soap, that we could now afford to buy again off the Wanderers (thus doing away with a lot of other smells I won't list). The feel of warm beds and full stomachs and proper fitting breeches with no holes in them to let the weather through. The still more foreign feeling, on a rest day, of wanting to get up and do things instead of just lying still and dozing. And most thrilling of all – to the older people anyway, who seemed to prize it more highly than butter or soap or clothes or bounce – the sight of an empty tub we had used to keep nuts in, slowly filling up with more and more lumps of finest, purest gold, just like Odolghes had promised.

The making of this gold went on at night, amid such buzz and excitement that any outsider watching would have thought it was a game and not at all the hard, skinblistering work that in fact it was. What was called the 'parting' of the gold from the baser metals had not been performed in the camp since the beginning of the Great War, and there was consequently a whole new generation of Miners who had only heard talk about it, never seen it done, and to whom the idea of learning this secret skill and putting it at last into practise was like the coming true of a dream.

We children were not supposed to take any part in the proceedings at all (for safety reasons: what you don't know you can't tell), but on the night the first parting was due to take place the atmosphere in the camp was so tense, and the young Miners so eager to get started, and the old Miners so busy looking out old bits of equipment and preparing new ones and grinding bones and pounding ashes and whatever else it was they had to do, that nobody paid much attention to us, and under cover of darkness a small group of us was able to creep up behind the shed where the work was going on and crouch down outside and watch – the whole procedure, almost from beginning to end. We saw quite well, too, because the walls of the shed were full of holes to let the heat out and there were many more holes than we had eyes.

It made a fascinating sight. In the middle of the shed a smelting furnace had been set – one of the little round open-air ones that were used on digs for ore testing, but much fatter and squatter, with extra reinforcements at the base, and drain spouts coming out of the sides. Called tap holes to be correct. It must have been lit much earlier because its lid was already glowing; and in the light cast by the glow, the faces of those present in the shed could be seen to be glowing on their own account with a mixture of heat and sweat and keen expectancy. Some of them looked close to melting. That, incidentally, was another reason why we youngsters were kept away: our skins would not have withstood the blast.

To one side of the furnace, just out of scalding range, all the special long instruments for smelting were set out in a huge sand-filled tank, ready for the Master Smelter to grab at as needed: rods, rakes, rabbles, rammers, ladles, crowbars, tapping-bars, chipping-bars and many other bars – some so peculiar that they had no real names, only nicknames, like Nobby and Hookie and Little Scratcher. They were planted upright, in a special order, heads down and handles uppermost, and put me in mind of the prickles of a porcupine. The Smelter must have had a wonderful memory to pick the right prickle each time, because with their tops hidden they all looked exactly alike.

A little further off on the opposite side lay the fireproof vessels – dipping pots, crucibles, cupels and whatnots – again carefully arranged by shape and size so that the Smelter's assistant could pass them over to him in a trice. And beyond these, in tidy piles of varying height – the lower closer, the higher farther – were heaped all the different materials used for the parting, each one marked with a little coloured flag planted at its base: white for salt, yellow for sulphur, green for beech ash, red for bonemeal, black for lead powder. A sieve, a pair of scales and a measuring mug completed the set-up, plus naturally the measurer in person: Jet's mother, who had the only really trustworthy pair of eyes in the entire camp.

The arrangement looked finicky, and sounds more finicky still, but once the work started in earnest you could see there was a reason to be tidy. Any muddle, any delay, any tripping over a crucible, or passing the wrong amount of whatever it was, and the whole process might have been wrecked. It was that precise, that touch-and-go. Added to which, the furnace itself needed tending constantly. But this was done from the back, by the stokers, so as not to interfere with the rest.

'She's not breathing right!' the Chief Smelter would shout at them, when his expert ear picked up some tiny variation in the furnace's roar. Or else, 'She's caking up! She's clogging! She's running too hot! To cool! She's dying on us! She's choking!' And the stokers, after bandaging up their heads and dunking them in water (which they had to do each time afresh or their brains would have broiled), would gather round the stoke-hole and open it up and begin fanning or feeding or raking or blowing or smothering or whatever it was needed doing to put things right.

It shows my ignorance, but what with the noise and the bustle, and the water-carriers coming and going, and the full round furnace sitting there at the centre of things, puffing and wheezing while everyone else hovered around it in a high state of excitement waiting to see what would come out, the scene reminded me of the Queen of the Cajutes' lying-in. So much so that when at last the Smelter reached for his tapping-bar and began, one by one and with extreme caution, to ease open the tap holes coaxing, 'There we are now, sweetheart. Gently does it, outcha come, outcha come,' I expected the gold to issue forth like a baby does, ready made and shining.

Instead of which, all that trickled into the dipping pots placed beneath the taps was some dirty black dross, lumpy and scummy, which was quenched at once by the water carriers, and then glanced at briefly by the Smelter and tossed onto a cake pile in the corner and forgotten.

The Smelter didn't seem too displeased with this result, though, and neither did the other Miners, since they went on working just as hard and cheerfully as before, but most of my companions felt the disappointment and, one by one, yawning and stretching and rubbing at their eyes, they left their spy holes and nipped off back to bed. 'Parting!' I heard one of them mutter. 'Farting's what I'd call it. Didn't see no gold, just muck and bubbles.'

In the end only Jet and I remained at our posts, and after we had watched the same disappointing process several times over with no change in it at all, except that the cakes of dross got slightly smaller and paler with each tapping, we too were about to call it a night and take ourselves off to bed, when suddenly the Smelter fished out from the sand-tank a crowbar in place of his tapping bar and began thumping it endwise on the ground to gain attention. 'Time's ripe!' he announced. 'The dross is off and our beauty should be in there now, clean as saltlick. No crowding round, please…' (In their excitement some of the onlookers had already surged forward towards the centre of the shed). 'No scuffling, no sneezing neither, last thing we want is dust. Everyone keep nice and still – that's it, that's it – while I just life the cover here…'

And so saying he fitted the head of the crowbar into the ring on top of the furnace lid, placed a tall metal pole underneath the staff, and with a loud grunt, almost a groan, levered the lid into the air and swung it sideways, revealing the raw, red belly of the furnace with at its centre a small round dish containing a ball of something so fierce and bright it made the rest of the fire seem almost colourless in comparison.

'There she is!' he shouted. 'There's the button, bless her scorching heart! Whadderyersay, Miners?'

I had never heard gold referred to as a button before, but that in fact is the proper metal worker's term for it. I suppose, by giving it such a homely name, they think they can control it better.

The light from the furnace fire lit my kinsfolk's faces in a strange way, casting heavy shadows and making them look ugly, even those few that weren't. 'We say Oyoyoy!' they screamed. 'We say Oyoyoyoyoyoyoy!'

'And whadderwewant, eh?' the Smelter asked, slightly condescending, as if he was the teacher and everyone else his pupils.

'More! We want more!'

'That's right. And when we got it, whadderwedo with it?'

There came a brief puzzled silence, during which I too wondered what the Smelter was angling for by way of reply. What do you do with a great deal of gold? You can't eat it; you can't wear it – not much of it anyway; it doesn't keep the cold out; it doesn't really, when you come to think of it, serve any useful purpose at all.

'We put it in the tub,' came an uncertain voice from the back.

'Yeah! Grubagrub grub, we put it in the tub!' the others joined in.

But this was still not what the Smelter was after. 'And then?' he urged. 'And then? Where do we put the tub to keep it safe, eh? Where did out grandparents keep their gold, and their grandfathers before them? Think, you blockheads! They kept it in Au… in Au…'

'In ore stacks?' came the same voice as before.

'In orchards?' came another.

'I know!' squeaked Jet at my elbow before I could stop her. 'In Aurona! They kept it in Aurona!'

Silly Jet, but it didn't really matter because the last word was snatched out of her mouth almost before she had finished saying it and taken up by the entire assembly and shouted for so long that we had plenty of time to run back to our beds without being discovered. From where we could still hear it, booming out into the night like a stag's love cry. Or, noisier, like the roar of an avalanche as it hits the tree line. 'Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona! Au-rona!'

Next morning a crown was presented to Odolghes for him to wear on special occasions. The smiths had made it from the button overnight: a thick ring of beaten gold with an empty space in the front for the setting of the famous Raietta stone. He never wore it, however. First because he said he was not a King but a Chief and preferred the old feathered headdress, and second because when the casket containing the Raietta was opened there was found to be no stone inside, simply a note from my mother saying, Sorry, but for her journey she needed something valuable and easy to carry, and this bauble was just the job.

(Chapter 8 coming up next sunday, 6th june 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-46509482822696333972010-05-23T01:06:00.000-07:002010-05-23T01:11:00.600-07:00chapter 6Magic stone back in Miners' hands again, Odolghes and me swept into the camp in triumph, my mother there to welcome us, my grandfather too, everyone anxious to hear our story – I had expected our homecoming to be one of the happiest moments of my life. Instead it was one of the saddest.

There hardly was a camp to speak of any more. We had been away -what could it have been? It seemed a lifetime to me but probably wasn't more than half a year, if that, and in this space of time our former home had seen terrible changes. Most of them linked to our departure, too, which made it all the sadder when we found out about them.

The first thing I noticed was the tents. Before – well, I had never really counted them but there must have been close on a hundred. Now there were less than half that number. Thirty-nine to be exact. Before, too, each tent had been carefully looked after: cleaned, mended, neatly pegged out, with in most cases a goat outside on a tether and a little patch of vegetables, just beyond reach of the goat. Makeshift maybe and always ready for a new move, but ours had been a proper village in its way. Now it was like a Wanderer's squat: everything, from the roaming, hungry-looking dogs, to the sagging grubby tents, to the scarred patches of earth where other tents had been planted and now were gone, spoke of abandon and neglect. Save for one area, in the centre, where a huge pine tree grew, and this spot was crowded with people, milling about untidily without direction, the way bees do when they have lost their queen.

Odolghes and I walked right into their midst almost unnoticed, and when we were noticed you might have thought we were ghosts, from the silence that fell and the stares we were given. Old Tusky, my grandfather's bailiff and chief advisor, was the first to find his voice. Brushing Odolghes aside with a, 'Huh! You! Fine time to show your face!' he came towards me and took me, quite roughly, not at all in his usual friendly manner, by the elbow. 'So,' he said, 'you're back. Our young mongrel princess is back. He brought you back. Well, better late than never, I suppose. At least you'll have time to see him before he goes.'

See who? And why was Tusky wearing my grandfather's helmet with the blackcock feathers on it?

'She's back, folks,' he announced to the gathering of ditherers around the tree, making no mention of my father.

Several of my old playfellows were there among the crowd: Spino, Franci, Agnes, Agnes's sister Jet, but they gave no sign of recognition and waved no waves. 'So we see,' said one woman, a relative of my mother's, almost an aunt, speaking very flatly. 'So we see,' another echoed, just as flat. They seemed resentful, almost hostile, and very soon I was made to understand why: in the shadow of the tree, so thick and dark that it took time for your eyes to pierce it, my grandfather lay dead and awaiting burial. Dead of a poisoned tooth as immediate cause, but since the toothache had come upon him when he was out combing the valleys in search of my mother, and since my mother, true to her word, had left the camp not long after Odolghes and I had embarked on our adventure and had not been heard of since, I was partly held responsible. Although it was Odolghes, of course, who was blamed the more.

And in part to punish me, they told me these thing all in a rush, just as I have set them down here, so it was some moments before I could sort out the bad from the worst, and longer still before I could fully take them in. Missing? How could my mother, who had always been there when I needed her, be missing? Where had she gone to? Why? Why hadn't she waited for our return? When would she be back? Would she ever be back? Oh cruel, cruel world – how could I live in it without a mother? How could I live, not knowing where she was or what had become of her? And dead? How could my grandfather be dead? Of a toothache too? He had so few teeth, and the ones he had were so crumbly – how could a tooth have killed him?

At this point, in my strange rusty voice, I let out a wail of such misery that my kinsfolk relented and began crowding round, behaving in a much kinder fashion and saying much kinder things intended to cheer me up. There, there, I wasn't to take on so. It was my mother's fault as much as anyone's. She wouldn't listen, wouldn't reason. Always had been like that: a hothead, proud as a hawk. Flouncing out of the camp the way she had done, without a word, just because for once she had been crossed – why, it was a shocking way to behave. She ought to have told her father where she was headed, and then he wouldn't have caught his death going to look for her. And he ought to have wrapped up warmer, and worn his hat, and come back the moment the tooth started playing up. Stubborn old man, rest his bones. And as for the others – the ones who had lost heart and moved off already – they ought to have had more faith, more patience. True, the old Chief had lingered, and work had become very scarce and food scarcer in the meantime, but at the very least they ought to have waited for the funeral.

In the face of so many disasters, our finding of the stone seemed a slight achievement, hardly worth mentioning. And in fact Odolghes didn't mention it, not yet. Tactfully, discreetly, he remained on the fringe of the assembly where Tusky's push had sent him, waiting for things to calm down and tempers to settle and for everyone to go back to doing what they'd been doing when we had interrupted them.

Which was not, as it had seemed to me at first sight, dithering without purpose, but chopping down the pine tree as a token of honour to my grandfather. A sacrifice of something grand and noble that would strike the ground with force, to warn the Earth Goddess that a person of consequence was on their way.

The funeral catafalque being so close to the trunk, it was of course important that the tree should fall in the opposite direction, or the ceremony would have been a shambles. And to this end, ropes had been tied to the branches for everyone to pull on at a given signal. When all the bad news had been broken, therefore, and they had nothing left to tell and no more comfort to offer except a few more Never mind's and She'll be back soon's and pats on the head, my kinsfolk went back to their task. Two to the saw, already deep in the base of the trunk, and the rest to the guide ropes.

Tusky, puffed up with importance, placed himself alone on the danger side, acting as overseer. Or underseer, considering that he was looking upwards, towards the crown of the tree. 'Steady!' he ordered everyone, sounding anything but steady himself. 'No tugs yet, or you'll trap the saw. Plenty of time, plenty of time. No panicking, it's all going as it should.'

Was it though? Tree felling is a very delicate business. I remembered that my grandfather had used to have rope-holders on all sides, not just one, to check any swing the trunk might make in the wrong direction. Did Tusky really know what he was up to?

As if in answer there was a sudden creaking noise; the pine tilted right over my grandfather's casket in a kind of bow and stayed there swaying, and the two sawyers shot from their posts like rabbits, leaving the saw twanging in the cleft. Everyone dropped their rope ends and began shouting at once. This side! That side! Hold it! Run for it! Save the Chief! Leave the Chief, he's dead already! Too late! Gerraway, gerraway! Back! Back! Back! It was like being down a mineshaft when the danger gong is sounded.

Tusky, his face and indeed all his visible skin parts the colour of a ripe plum, tried to make himself heard above the din but in vain: his orders just added more noise. Then the treetop did another little series of bobs, settling each time lower, and in the sudden hush that greeted this development I saw Odoghes come forward quietly and begin picking up the discarded cords and handing them out again, one by one, telling each holder what to do and where to stand. In no time at all it looked as if he would have everything safe and right again, but Tusky, whose voice could now be heard very clearly, must have spotted a different kind of danger: a personal one, to his authority. Strutting, clucking, and indeed looking just like the bird whose feathers he was wearing, he hurried over to Odolghes and gave him another hefty shove. 'Out of the way, Moon Eyes!' he ordered. 'Out of the way! This is no time for fiddling. This is men's work, this is. Stand clear and let us get on with the job, there's a good fellow.'

I half expected Odolghes to obey without murmur, and half expected him to do just the opposite: tower over Tusky and roar at him that he was not a good fellow, that his obeying days were over and that he was Chief of the Miners now. But he did neither. Like a large animal bothered by a gnat he simply lifted his good arm and swatted out at the bailiff, sending him flying one way and the helmet the other, and went on handing out ropes and giving instructions until he had got everyone placed exactly where he wanted them.

By the time Tusky had overcome his surprise and collected the headdress and jammed it on his head again, the tree was already well under control and leaning in the reverse direction, ready for the ceremonial drop. The rope holders' eyes, out of habit, swivelled towards him and away from Odolghes. Perhaps, even now, it was from their old deputy leader that they ought to await the final command? Or not?

Tusky was quick to spot his chance, and at the top of his voice began calling out the farewell count with which the new leader salutes the old and sends him on his journey: 'Ten: message from the world of men. Nine: hear the falling of the pine. Eight: hear the knocking at…'

But Odolghes seemed to have been expecting this ploy, and instead of trying to silence the little man or shout him down he merely crossed over to where he was standing, picked him up, tucked him under his arm and began to count with him. The next two couplets came out a bit confused, losing much of their solemnity in the process, but by the time the count reached, 'Four: grant him rest for evermore', Tusky had given up his struggles and Odolghes was in full and undisputed charge of the ceremony.

And indeed of everything else. It is often hard to put a finger on a moment in time and say, It was now that such a thing happened, or first began to happen: like winds or currents, events are never usually that clear-cut. But in the case of Odolghes' leadership of our tribe, I think it can be traced back, without any fear of error, to that very instant. Exactly and precisely from the 'Four' onwards. At 'Ten' his claim was still dubious, at 'Eight' it looked to be overthrown, by 'Six' it had crawled back again and hung wobbling in the balance, but on the 'Four' he was in effect, without anyone realising it yet, not even himself, the new Chief of the Miners.

I didn't realise either, no, not then, but I remember standing there watching my father conduct the opening stages of the burial service, and feeling suddenly, in the midst of all my uncertainty, a great sense of safety. I suppose because for the first time I had seen his strength put to use, and seen others see it too. Three:' his loud, calm voice rang out, unchallenged by Tusky's (which had dried up completely now: it is difficult to give convincing commands from under someone else's armpit). 'Set his soul for ever free. Two: Earth Goddess, we pray to you. One:' and with a lift of the chin he signalled to the rope holders to let go their cables, so that his last words were almost lost in the crash that followed, as the pine fell dead on target, harming no one, landing just where it should. 'Welcome back your Miner son.' And then, with his musician's sense of timing, while everyone was standing there in perfect silence listening to the echoes of the crash, he clinched the matter of leadership for good by fishing under his cloak for the magic stone and holding it up high for all to see.

(Chapter 7 next sunday, May 30th 2010)amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-71705733010203384682010-05-17T00:32:00.000-07:002010-05-17T00:36:51.228-07:00chapter 5At first Odolghes tried to be angry with me for what I had done, but he was so pleased with the findings he couldn't keep a cross enough face. 'You're sure, aren't you,' he kept asking, uncreasing his frown each time in his eagerness, 'those weren't just breadcrumbs in those pouches?'

Yes, I was sure. Bits of metal fuzz were still lodged under my nails. Take a look if he needed convincing. Besides, no one, surely, no matter how greedy, had a secret pouch specially sewn into all their dresses for keeping bread in.

The brow smoothed altogether and the eyes underneath sparkled like azure chips. I loved the colour of his eyes; mine are just an ordinary brown. 'Then our job's as good as done. All we've got to do is to winkle the stone out of the dress the Queen is wearing and make off with it as fast as we can. Simple.'

'With the stone, Father, or the dress?'

Odolghes didn't think this was funny. Nor did I really because the problem that faced us was enormous. It was quickly said, Winkle the stone out of the Queen's pocket, but to do it, to actually stand there and winkle it, that was another matter. We had agreed at the start that the Cajutes' habit of seldom changing their clothes was their affair, but now, suddenly and most inconveniently, it had become ours.

I had the bright idea, seeing how the other ladies had reacted, of getting Odolghes to tell the Queen he'd seen a mouse run up her skirt, in the hope she'd go berserk and strip all her clothes off on the spot, or at least the bits of clothes we were interested in, but it didn't work very well when he tried to put it into practice. 'A mouse?' was all she said incuriously, lifting her eyes from her weaving as if they were tied to the warp and yawning straight into his face. 'Whereabouts, pray?'

'There, Majesty!' Odolghes cried, pointing to where the Queen's waist should have been if she'd had one. We had agreed beforehand it was best to aim high. 'Right up there! With respect, I can see it moving, I can see the bulge!'

Thwack! she went with they shuttle on the place he had indicated. 'Bet you don't see it moving now.' And without more ado went back to her loom. No, undressing the Queen, unnerving the Queen, or even unsettling the Queen by so much as a whisker twitch was no easy task.

Luckily, though, nature was on our side, since there is one thing you can't very well do with all your clothes on, no matter how unparticular you are, and that is have a baby. I don't know whether the whack had anything to do with it, or whether her time was up anyway, but only a short while after this incident the Queen went into labour, giving us what both Odolghes and I realized immediately was likely to be our only chance, if we were not to wait for the next royal farrowing. Briskly for a change she took to her bed; the dress was – at long last – removed and stuffed into a clothes-basket on the landing, and in the hurry and flurry of the birth, with all the ladies rushing backwards and forwards carrying things and tripping over one another and sloshing water and swearing in a most unladylike manner, I was able to sit on the landing unnoticed, in the lee of the basket, and winkle at my leisure.

Over what to do afterwards, Odolghes and I had had our first real quarrel since we were in partnership, and I have to admit that this time he showed more sense than I did. I was for stealing and running: making off down the underground passage with our prize, overcoming the guard at the other end, preferably with a swipe of Odolghes's hard metal arm, and then footing it as fast as we could through the mine tunnels and out into the open country. But Odolghes said this was madness and that I needed my head trepanning. What we must do, he insisted, was to keep our nerve and sit tight and make sure nobody connected us with the missing stone, either now or later. Missing stone, mind you, not stolen. Because when I did my winkling I was to make a hole in the pocket of the dress so that it would look as if the stone had simply fallen through it by mischance, plop, somewhere onto the ground. Then, once we had the stone safely in our possession, we would hide it in an unfindable place (what place? Why, in a stony place of course, you ninny: up on the ramparts, in the middle of a pile of sling stones) and wait until all the fuss died down before collecting it and making our departure. Departure, mind you again, not escape. For we would run nowhere, we would just grow more and more slipshod with our singing, and repeat ourselves over and over, until the Cajutes grew so tired of us they would chuck us out themselves and send us on our way.

Odolghes's plan had its dangers: 'chucking' was not the sort of thing the Cajutes were likely to do in a tender fashion, and their boredom would probably be just as nasty as their rage - to us on the receiving end. It also had the drawback – almost unbearable to me, who was getting very homesick by now and longing for my mother – of being slow. However I had to admit in the end it was better than mine, that was no sort of plan at all, and the moment I felt the stone slip through the broken seam and into my grasp I closed my hand over it in triumph, wiggled quietly out of the bustle, unseen, and obediently took it straight to the agreed hiding place on the ramparts.

Once I had found a suitable hole for it, though, on the side of one of the heaps of stones, and fitted it into place, a worrying thought struck me. Would we be able to find it again when we wanted it? Would anyone? A little darker maybe, a little rougher to the touch, but it looked like all the others. (Indeed to be quite honest I was already having slight difficulty picking it out. Was it this one? No, silly, it was the other one, next door, the one that was still warm from my hand.) I looked around for a marker but found nothing, not even a twig or a leaf, so I just had to be content with rubbing my foot on the face of the stone in the hope the smell would linger, and numbering the stone's position: seventh pile ahead as you emerged from the stairwell, eighth layer left-hand side from top of pile, fourteenth stone from left-hand corner, twelfth (not counting a tiny one which was out of line) from the right.

These numbers I muttered to myself all the way back to our hut and then repeated them to Odolghes, who, not being very strong on memory, engraved them on his iron arm with the tip of a knife. Once he'd done that, see, he explained, whistling while he scraped away, we were in the cow's belly. Meaning that we were sitting comfortably as regards the stone. Stones didn't move and numbers didn't lie, and when we needed our precious pebble, there it would be, in that exact position.

Cow's belly? Well, all I can say is our cow must have had the collywobbles for all the comfort its belly gave. The rest of our stay with the Cajutes, waiting and indeed working for our dismissal, was so grim and wearisome I hardly like to record it. Odolghes was right and nobody thought of linking us to the disappearance of the famous iron-stone, let alone blaming us, but tempers were so soured by the loss that we came in for a good share of punishment all the same. And that was before we began muffing our songs.

Together with the other serving people we were made to crawl on hands and knees criss-cross all over the castle grounds, picking up whatever stones we found there and putting them into a special basket for the Queen to examine. This search, all the drearier to us who knew that it was useless, lasted for three whole days. (Which sounds nothing, but just you try it.) Then we were taken to the mines, along the underground passage trodden by the Queen, and made to repeat the same procedure: up and down every corridor, in and out of every nook. My breeches had holes in the knees by the end of the second day, and after that it was the knees themselves. I kept begging Odolghes to change his mind and let us escape from this drudgery, especially now we had learnt the way out but, although he paled when he saw my sores and carried me on his back from then on to stop them worsening, he wouldn't listen. 'We have put up with a great deal, picera,' he said (picera meant little one, or loved one, in Fanish and was a name he had never called me by before), 'we must grit our teeth and put up with a teeny bit more.'

Only it wasn't a teeny bit, it was a lot. Having fed and housed us for so long, the Cajutes were unwilling to let us go, no matter how slack our performance. If we played worse they would treat us worse, this seemed to be their reasoning: they would take away our mattress, skimp our food, deny us rest and get their outlay back that way. Dud dogs that didn't do their work on the hunting field were given kicks and cornhusks; dud musicians would fare the same.

Odolghes stole food for me when he could, and gave me his when he couldn't, and tried to shield me from all the cruellest insults and hardest kicks, but by the time the winter weather started to set in I could see from the way he looked at me, and especially from the way he felt my knobbly wrist bones and listened to my night time coughing, that he was changing his mind about escape. In fact we had already begun to plan our route, or at least to talk about it at night to keep our spirits up, when suddenly, almost magically, a stray flute player turned up at the gate, rather like we had done ourselves all those months ago, and in the space of a pot-boil – the time it took for the flute player to get the Queen's new baby off to sleep – we found ourselves dismissed.

With such harshness, too, as you can imagine, and such a shower of Scram's! and Good Riddance's! and Clear out, caterwaulers! from the soldiers who came to deliver the news, that we scarcely had time to do the most important thing of all, namely to go and fetch the stone from its hiding place before we left.

Luckily we were given a few moments alone for the packing of our belongings and the cleaning of the hut: it must have been needed for the flute player. So while Odolghes, deliberately slowly and clumsily, was doing just this, I clambered up to the ramparts as fast as I could and made straight for pile no. 7 where the stone was hidden.

Or should have been, according to my calculations. But when I reached the spot, instead of searching or counting, I just crumpled up in despair and began to cry. It wasn't a question of numbers or smells or remembering or not remembering: the pile was quite a different shape. For some reason – perhaps because it had collapsed in the rain, or the stones had been used for bird shooting, or maybe for no reason at all, just evil luck – it had been completely rearranged. Although disarranged is the better word. Before, it had been tall and square-based and the stones had been in layers; now it was a mound shaped like a pudding, with the stones jumbled about any old where.

Through my tears I sniffed the contours of the pile, trying to pick up a trace. Half-heartedly at first, then with no heart in my search at all. The stones smelt of wet and nothing else; the one I wanted might be right in the middle or might not be there at all.

I was still sitting there, snivelling rather than sniffing, when Odolghes emerged from the stairway, wild-eyed and out of breath. 'Got it?' he puffed, running towards me with his funny lopsided run. 'Give it here! We've got to go now. The guards will be back in a shake to hoof us out. There's one on my tail already.'

So then I told him what had happened and waited to see how he would take it: whether he would be cross with me or the Earth Goddess or with himself, or whether he would just be sad.

He wasn't any of these, he was wonderful. He sat down beside me and took me in his arm and said, Too bad and, Who cared, and to stop crying because anyway, stone or no stone, we were free now, and perhaps it was better so. The magic stone had caused such trouble in the past: perhaps it was better lost, with no one to claim it but the soil. And so saying he hoisted up his false arm, which felt no pain, and swung it hard against the pile, as much as to say, 'There, take that! Go your way, stone, we can do very well without you!'

A moment later, mind you, he seemed to change his mind and began scrabbling urgently at the heap with his good arm, picking out several stones at random and asking me, 'Is this the one? Is this the one? Is it this? Could it be this? Or this?' But he had to stop quickly and shove them back in again, as the guard who had been following him appeared in the stairway and began scanning the ramparts to see where we were.

Having spotted us, he came towards us threateningly, walking crab-wise, hand on sword hilt. What was this shifty Senger couple up to? Couldn't trust them a spit span. But as he drew nearer he relaxed and allowed himself a superior kind of smile. Whynen, he said to Odolghes, pointing at me and then tapping his cheeks just under his eyes to indicate tears. (As if we didn't know what whining meant.) The kidden was whynen, didn't want to leave, didn't want to lose its bread, that's why it had come up here to hide. Ha! Too late now for whynen. Should have done its job better and then it could have stayed. Pouss! March! Both of us! Foui! At the doppel!

Still barking out commands he chivvied us down the long twisting staircase and out into the courtyard, where the rolled up bundle of our belongings was already waiting for us, spattered with what looked like raindrops. Only it wasn't raining so I'm afraid it was something else. On top of the bundle lay the zither.

To more taunts from the bystanders we picked up our gear and, eyes screwed up against any more drops of whatever it was, we walked across the courtyard, through the narrow, unwelcoming threshold, and began to cross the drawbridge, towards freedom and the outside world.

The Cajutes were taking their precautions though. Halfway across the bridge another pair of guards stopped us, felt us all over with probing fingers the way they had done on our arrival, made us turn out our pockets, splay our legs, open our mouths, raise our arms, brocken one excepted, and, on finding nothing, told us with very bad grace to leave our bundle and continue without it. I looked pleadingly at Odolghes - the things inside were nearly all mine, and there was food for the journey as well – but he shrugged and made sign to do as the guards said.

'Zitter too!' they ordered. And without even waiting for it to be properly unstrapped, the more senior of the pair dragged the zither from around Odolghes's neck and threw it on the ground, where he trampled on it like a child in a temper until it was only splinters.

So it was with completely empty hands and empty pockets and empty stomachs and empty everythings that Odolghes and I finally made our getaway from the Cajutes' fortress. No clothes except the ones we wore, no food, no pay, no means of earning any without our instrument. No toothpicks either, unless you count zither fragments, some of which I had picked up as a keepsake: it was such lovely wood. And, saddest of all when you think how hard we'd worked for it and all the risks we had run, no Miners' stone.

Or so we thought. Right up to the moment when Odolghes decided we were far enough away from the castle for him to remove his arm, which was chafing more than usual. And then, clinging to the lower part of the arm, near where the wrist was, quite as if it were a living thing with a mind and a will and a strength of its own, we found it.

Magic? Yes, but not as magic as you might think. Nor as we thought ourselves in our first rush of amazement. Later, when we put our heads together, we worked it out and did some trials to prove it. The stone could find iron, you see, but by the same token iron could find the stone. Not at any great distance - the range was about a thumbnail's breadth - but placed within that range the two materials, iron and stone, would seek each other out and strain to come together, quivering like the noses of two truffle hounds. It was fascinating to watch, and rather frightening when you consider that neither nose was alive.

So when Odolghes had struck out at the pile like that with his imitation arm, that is what must have happened: by incredible good luck he must have touched the stone, or at any rate come very close to touching it, and strain and quiver and seek and reach, the invisible pull had done the rest. Another long hungry journey lay ahead of us now, but this time we felt so light inside we sped across the mountains like chamois. I didn't talk much because my voice had gone rusty from lack of exercise, but Odolghes sang at the top of his, and now and again he tossed the arm in the air, with the stone still sticking to it fast, and looked at me as he caught it again, and together we laughed and laughed.

(Chapter 6 next sunday, may 23rd 2010amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-46071815863007681692010-05-09T23:52:00.000-07:002010-05-10T00:15:32.482-07:00chapter 4The 'Guesters' were Latrones: three of them, two men and a woman. Youngish, gawky, dressed like scarecrows - all rags and fray-ends and bits of twine. The woman stared at me and Odolghes when we came in and I was afraid for a moment she might have recognised us from the winter we had spent working in their mines, but it wasn't that, she was just eyeing our clothes with envy. Think of being envious of my bulgy breeches.

It was the first of several visits from neighbouring tribesfolk, and since the Cajutes were very proud of having some kind of entertainment to offer and show off about, Odolghes and I were now kept very busy. After the Latrones we played for Peleghetes, Trusani, Lastojeres and for a group of noisy Ampezzani who talked in gibberish to each other all the way through, greatly annoying the King. I felt very sorry now for the birds we Miners took down the earth with us in cages, because that was what I felt like: a caged-up song bird. My fingers were starting to peel from all the playing, and Odolghes' voice was getting hoarse.

(I felt quite sorry for the Ampezzani too, because after they had left the chamber, the King turned to the Chief Counsellor and made a slitting motion across his throat with his finger and said, 'Schlagen!' and the Chief Counsellor motioned back and nodded. Stiff punishment, just for not appreciating music.)

It seemed like ages before we were able to go back to our quest again, but when we did we learnt a lot. We learned, for example, that the iron works were situated close to the castle but not inside the walls, and that they were reached by an underground passage whose entrance lay in the scruffiest and remotest corner of the castle, close beside the sheep pens. We worked this out for ourselves, without so much as setting a foot down the passageway, on account of the metal dust that wafted out of the entrance and settled on the sheep's legs and bellies, turning them black. We discovered, from seeing some children sneak into the passage laughing and then shoot out again holding their backsides and not laughing any more, that the entrance was guarded on the far side and that no casual visitors were allowed in.

The deliveries of metal puzzled us for a while because we never seemed to see or hear carts of any kind coming up the hill, but one day when we were exploring the tower in the same far-off area, trying to get a bird's eye view of the forge and outbuildings, we felt a kind of rumble under our feet and the mystery was solved: the underground tunnel continued in the other direction as well, right down to the bottom of the hill, and it was through this unseen pathway that the carts passed on their way to the forge.

Odolghes looked very pleased about this discovery and I couldn't think why until he explained it to me. I thought it meant the mines must be miles away from the castle. But 'Just the opposite,' he said. 'It means they're close, right under our silly noses. Why should the Cajutes go to all the bother of digging an underground passage for the iron to come through? It's not as if they had anyone to hide it from. If it came from far afield it would come openly, along the road. No, they're working the veins in this very hillside, and it's in this very hillside, somewhere, in someone's bag or someone's pocket or in some secret place that only the person who uses it knows about, that the magic stone is kept.'

So at last we could set about our main quest. Who was it that used the magic stone or was allowed to use it, and where did they keep it when it wasn't in use? I thought it would most likely be entrusted to the head metal scout, or else to the master smith or someone like that with a high-up job in the armoury process, but Odolghes disagreed. 'Use your muffin, Mara, I mean Vanna,' he said. Vanna was the new name he was supposed to call me by but he kept on forgetting. 'It's not the sort of thing you leave to a worker, not even a head worker. You know who used to use it in the old days when it belonged to your kinsmen? Your great grandfather in person. The other Miners knew about it and what it looked like, but he was the only one with the right to use it. My mother saw him at it, several times. He used to wait until the scouts thought they had found a good thick vein, or a good place for the diggers to start their chipping, and then he'd go down and check it for them, spreading his cloak around him like a tent so that nobody but he could see the actual way the stone performed its magic. That's how secret it was.'

'So you think the King is the one to watch out for, eh, Father?' That would make things difficult. The King was hardly ever to be seen in the castle except at suppertime, and by then he was usually dribbling drunk and halfway under the table.

'The King,' Odolghes said, 'or the Chief Counsellor, or the Commander of the Guard. One of these three, I should say for choice. We'll have to keep our eyes skinned to find out which. It shouldn't be too difficult. Whoever it is is bound to be using the passage fairly frequently, every time a metal check is needed, so all we have to do is to stay as close to the entrance as we can, as often as we can, and keep watch.'

'And keep count.'

'Of course, and keep count.' I'm not sure Odolghes like me telling him what to do all the time, it may have reminded him of my mother. 'And keep our mouths shut, dumb girl,' he added rather tartly.

So that was what we did. Every moment we were not working we spent sitting in the far-off area by the sheep pens, trying to look natural, as if we were there because we liked the sheep and felt at home among them, but in fact observing all the comings and goings through the underground passage.

In the course of the next fortnight we saw the King go down there and out again twice, the Commander of the Guard fourteen times, once a day exactly, the Chief Counsellor twice, with the King, so that didn't help much, not for drawing differences. And once, just once, we saw the Queen do so, all on her own, without any of her usual attendants.

Odolghes wouldn't pay heed to me at first. For some reason (probably to do with Sommavida again and the way she bossed him) I don't think he wanted the guardian of the stone to be a woman. But I was sure from the moment I set eyes on her that it was the Queen, the person we were looking for. She was hugely fat for one thing, and she was expecting another baby on top of it: what was she doing visiting the iron works in that condition? Certainly not in order to fit herself out with armour. And what was she doing there alone? She was never alone; always with a fluttery group of older ladies round her, winding her wool for her and straightening out her skirts and brushing away the flies and doing things she could perfectly well have done for herself. 'Here, you Majesty, There your Majetsy, Let me, your Majesty, Oh, let me, let me.'

'She could just be nosey,' Odolghes said shortly, dismissing the matter. He was plumping for the Commander and his count of fourteen.

But the Queen wasn't nosey, she was about the most droopy and lethargic member of the whole Court, and that was saying something. Odolghes hadn't observed her properly like I had; hadn't seen the way she huffed and puffed and trailed her fat swollen feet as she waddled down the opening of the passage, kicking up the iron-dust. She wasn't making the trip out of curiosity or pleasure: she was going because she had to, because it was her duty.

Of course I might have been wrong: her purpose might have been quite different. But a hunch is a hunch, and my hunch was so strong that I decided to follow it up - without saying anything to Odolghes who would only have fussed about my safety. Next morning I told him I had a pain in my middle, and stayed put on the mattress while he went back to our lookout post to continue the watch over the passage. When he was gone, I got up, put on my shoes, thought better of it and put on my bed socks again, and slowly, cautiously, stopping every now and then in the shadow of the walls to make sure nobody was paying attention to me, made my way towards the large round tower where the large round Queen's apartments were.

I had no intention really of doing anything except look, the way Odolghes recommended. (Even if I was secretly getting a bit fed up with all this caution and longed for us to be doing something more adventurous.) I reckoned either that the Queen herself would be there breakfasting, or whatever she did at this time in the morning, or else that the place would be full of her attendants, smartening things up in her absence. However, when I reached the doorway and peered inside, all was emptiness and silence, save for a boy pushing a grey rag about the floor with his foot. He stood with his back to me, so I couldn't resist padding a little way up the staircase, just to see what went on on the floor above. I suppose it was risky, even foolhardy, but it didn't seem so at the time, it seemed the obvious thing to do.

The stairs were wet under my socks: the boy had already wiped them. Good, that meant he wouldn't be coming up again in a hurry. The upstairs floor, when I reached it, was dampish too. It didn't take me long to find the Queen's bedroom because there was only the one round room occupying all the space. It was divided into four by curtains, but the Queen's bit was easy to recognize on account of it being much bigger and with a much wider bed. Who slept in the other sections? The little Princesses, I imagined, and the Queen's ladies.

And perhaps the Queen's dogs. The smell from the bedclothes was so strong it made me want to sneeze, and I put my finger under my nose just in time to stop a snorter. If I was caught downstairs I could bluff my way out of it – me being mute, the Cajutes all thought I was half-witted as well – but up here was a different matter. In next to no time I would find myself out on my ear and dangling from one of the spikes.

I drew the curtains of the Queen's compartment together, screening myself from the rest of the room, and began looking around. Not searching for anything in particular – you couldn't hope to search in such a higglepiggle – but just curious to see the way she lived. There was a metal pot beside the pillow. What was that for? To drink out of? Ugh! No, it was for piddling in! Just imagine keeping a piddling-pot right under your nose while you sleep. My mother would have had a fit. And what was that beside it, all covered with brownish spots? It looked like a lynx fur but, oh, no, it wasn't a lynx fur, it wasn't a lynx fur at all. And all those chests? What were they in aid of when the Queen and the Princesses so seldom changed their clothes?

Gingerly I opened the lid of the largest one and began examining its contents: they were clothes, they were dresses, dozens of them, all different stuffs and colours. I had never seen so many dresses before belonging to one single person. They must be part of the Queen's dowry: outfits for a lifetime. Some of them were lovely too, with ornaments sewn on the front: corals, beads, feathers, all sorts of pretty, dangly things.

One by one, I began taking the dresses out of the chest to have a closer look at them, and laying them on the bed. From my gropings I could feel there was something else in the chest underneath, something different, harder, lumpier: maybe shoes, maybe jewels. All Miners are fascinated by jewels and I was no exception. Just as I was getting down to the interesting part, though, I heard a noise of feet on the stairway, and then voices – women's voices. It was the Queen, or the Queen's ladies, or both, coming back from breakfast. Help! I must cover up my traces before they found me.

Hastily I started packing the dresses back in the chest, but for some reason, perhaps because I didn't fold them properly, they wouldn't fit. Still more hastily, close to panic now, I yanked them out again and stuffed them under the bed, upsetting the contents of the metal pot as I did so and splashing some of the hems. Would anyone notice? I doubted it. They would notice the empty chest, though, if anyone chanced to open it. So instead of crawling under the bed with the dresses, as had been my plan, I snatched up a few of the ones that had lain on top and jumped into the chest with them, covering myself entirely (or so I hoped), then pulled shut the lid and began praying as hard as I could to the Earth Goddess to watch over me. Not that she is a very reliable deity, but she is supposed to protect Miners in tight spots, on account of all the service we do her with our digging.

I was only just in time. The footsteps were inside the room now – more than one set of them, stompity, clompity, stomp - and from my muffled position I heard a swishing noise as the curtains were swept aside, and then a groan and a creaking sound, horribly close to my ears, as someone of considerable weight plumped themselves down right on the chest where I was hidden. The Queen?

'Fatty's slopped her night-pot again,' said a voice. Or something of this kind: many words of the Cajutes' language were still strange to me but I could nearly always pick up the gist. 'Dirty swinchen. Lazy hen.'

No, it was not the Queen. And yes, whoever it was had noticed the spillage.

'All the better,' said another voice, and there came a great thud as its owner flopped down on what I presumed from the sound of it was the Queen's mattress. 'Less work for us.'

'Gerrup, you ninny!' came a third voice, an older sounding one. 'Off the bed. She'll have you skinned if she finds you there.' But the order was given without much drive, and shortly afterwards there was another, lighter flop and a murmur of, 'Move over, then, make room for a littl'un,' as the older speaker joined her colleague on the mattress.

After this there was silence, at first welcome, but then, as it began to be riven by grunts and one or two actual snores, rather worrying. I could foresee the chest, which had been my refuge, turning into a death-snare. I tried to move the lid a titch to let some air in, but it was useless, you might as well try to move aside a mountain. It is the Miners' nightmare to be buried alive under a heavy weight; the stories I was told as a tiny child were always full of it: villains being crushed by landslides, heroes wiggling their way out of underground prisons. We call it the Mouse's End – 'u Fin du Ratt' – and now it looked as if I might be going to suffer it myself. Oh, Earth Goddess, I pleaded silently, hear me! Do something, I beg of you! Save me from such a fate!

The Earth Goddess gave no sign – trust her. So to take my mind off things I began feeling around with my fingers, trying to identify the objects underneath me in the bottom of the chest. As I thought, they were mostly trinkets and jewellery, and very uncomfortable too if you had to lie on them for any length of time. I began cautiously to shift the sharpest objects to one side, out of spiking distance. If I could still bother about that, it struck me that suffocation was not yet a problem: air must be getting in somehow even if I couldn't see from where. This calmed me down a bit, and from the jewellery I passed to the dresses, which were easier to get at, being on top. What sort of fastenings did they have? How well were they sewn? Did they have any pockets? And if so, was there anything interesting inside?

Timewise, I suppose, it must have been round about now that I made my great discovery, but what with the fright and the kafuffle its significance didn't sink in till later, when I was telling Odolghes all about it in the safety of our hut. I remember coming across the three identical little secret pouches, sewn into each dress at exactly the same spot, and remember probing my fingers into them by turn and feeling the same prickly, gritty substance inside that clung to my fingertips and slid under my nails, but I think that was as far as I got.

I must have made a noise, you see, or made some sudden movement. Large posteriors are probably more sensitive than we give them credit for. Anyway, one moment I was lying there in total darkness, fiddling around with these pocket arrangements and their contents of grainy powder, drawing my conclusions or not as may be, and the next moment a bright shaft of light shot down the side of the chest as the lid was taken off.

I still couldn't see anything but material: the dresses luckily covered me completely, but I could hear much more clearly than before. And what I heard made my scalp prickle. My hiding place had been discovered and I was being ordered, in the plainest possible terms, to leave it. 'Yaar! Gotcha! Come on out, you little varmint! I know you're there, I heard you scratching around!'
I was about to obey – it seemed I had no choice – but then the voices of the other two ladies, aroused from their slumbers, started to join in, and I decided to stay where I was.

'Wàswara?' they shrieked together. 'Wàswaraaa?!' And I heard the bedboards creak as they leaped off the mattress to their feet. Was it a snake? Was it a rat? Let it be, Hedjar, for the sake of gravy! Don't go prodding around or the wretched thing would bolt and then they wouldn't know where it was. Better in the chest than running loose around the room. Ugger! Shugger! Eeeyak! Horrors! I have never heard such a fuss over a small wild animal, which was fortunately what they thought I was. These ladies should have taken a turn down the mines.

'I think it's a rat, not a snake,' the Hedjar woman said, her voice fading a little as she backed away. She was evidently braver than the other two, but not that brave. 'A big one. Un grosser. I'll show it, the cheeky beast, scrabbling about right under my you-know-what!' And through the folds of the dress that covered me I saw the point of something – maybe a stick, maybe the tip of a shoe – make a light dent in the material and then a heavier one.

 One toe's breadth deeper and I really would have been done for, but the fright of the woman's two companions must have been catching. Either that or else they must have bounded towards her and grabbed her, because amidst a noise of crashing and flapping and struggling, the stick or shoe or whatever it was suddenly withdrawn, and the next thing I heard was the sound of all six of their feet clattering across the room and down the stairway to safety.

So the end of the mouse is not always a bad one, not when there are stout-hearted warrior ladies like that around. Quickly, before anyone else arrived on the scene, I climbed out of the chest, piled all the dresses back into it any old how – the mouse would take the blame for the untidiness – and slipped across the room and down the stairs the way I had come in. Past the boy, past the three women, who were still there shouting orders at him, and out into the open unnoticed. I must say, I was glad to see the sky.

(Chapter 5 coming up next Sunday, 16 May 2010)amanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-91665287207903004392010-05-05T04:48:00.000-07:002010-05-05T04:54:04.400-07:00chapter 3At first, far from making up for lost time, we lost still more of it: I had no more idea the Odolghes did where the Cajutes' stronghold lay, and we stumbled around the mountains for another whole day and night, getting tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier, before we finally met up with some shepherds who put us on the right track. And even then the way was so long it was almost sundown when we came out of the shadows of the last valley and caught sight of the castle on a pink-lit hill before us.

I had never seen a real castle at close range before, except once, in winter, when we did some mining work for the Latrones. Who are a shabby sort of tribe anyway, and keep their livestock indoors with them and live much the same easy-going, muck-and-manger life.

The home of the Cajutes was altogether different. It was a huge stone dwelling in the shape of a slightly wonky necklace, covering the entire hilltop, with high walls running all the way round and towers let into them at intervals, like beads. On top of the walls were wooden spikes, thick as bullocks' shinbones, pointing outwards in an unfriendly fashion, and on top of the towers were piles of just as unfriendly looking stones. Like a well made necklace, too, at first sight you could hardly see where the opening was, but as my father and I drew nearer we caught sight of a narrow black slit at the base of one of the towers, which we imagined, for want of any other hole to choose from, must be the entrance.

'How do the horses get in without being squashed?' I whispered to Odolghes, scarcely moving my lips. We were still too far away for anyone to see us but I reckoned it was best to be careful.

'Hang the horses!' he said crossly, so I realised he was a bit jumpier than he let on. 'How do we get in without being squashed? There are sentinels posted on every blasted tower. Look, you can see the points of their helmets sticking up behind the crenels.'

I couldn't see anything, but then my eyes aren't very good, never were. Mole eyes as Alexa called them. Maybe it'd have helped if I'd known what crenels were. 'Wave your zither at them, Father,' I suggested. 'Start up some music so they know we're not dangerous.'

Odolghes nodded and unstrapped the zither and passed it on to me. We were dangerous, he said in a tough voice meant to reassure both of us; we were dangerous as wolves if only the Cajutes knew it. 'And you start up the music, Bossy Breeches. That's what you're here for.'

So, my fingers trembling a little, I began playing a few strummy bits on the zither, and Odolghes, rather too loudly to sound comfortable, began singing one of his back-to-front songs, and in this way we approached the castle, right up to the door, without any trouble at all, not even a stone in our faces.

The Cajutes must have been keener on music than we'd dared hope, and starved of it too, because there was a whole crowd of them waiting inside the narrow doorway to meet us, eyes popping and mouths gaping and feet jiggling up and down in the rudiments of a clumsy dance. Not at all the ferocious welcome we had feared from the spikes.

But not a kind welcome either, more of a greedy sniffing at something appetizing that had come their way. Their language was quite similar to ours really, though they spoke it with a funny accent, so I was able to pick up some of their words straight away. Speelers, they gabbled to one another excitedly, Sengers (meaning singers). Guk at en (look at them) – un mon end un kidden. (That was me, the kidden.) Wofon kommen en? Wàswara wollen en? Was it safe (their word was 'sikker', like our 'secure') to let us in?

Although maybe I am wrong and they were talking about sicker in the sense of disease, because they drew back a bit now and made signs at us to open our mouths and undo our clothing at the neck and bare our chests at them, and didn't in fact let us past the door until they had looked us all over like livestock at a fair. It was a good thing they didn't touch as well as look, or they might easily have discovered the iron arm, and with it Odolghes' identity, but all they did when they noticed it hanging lifeless by his side was to point to it and say, 'Brocken?' To which Odolghes replied, 'Brocken', and that was it.

And the music, they wanted to know? The kidden would play the music? Yes, the mon would sing and the kidden would play the music. The kidden wouldn't sing because the kidden's voice was brocken like the mon's arm, but the kidden would play the music.

If the outside of the castle was grand, the inside knocked me speechless (really speechless, not just pretending) by its finery and the number of things it contained. There were rooms for everything: for cooking in, for eating in, for sleeping in, even for dawdling around and talking in, the way most of the high rank Cajutes seemed to do most of the time. The rooms weren't just empty shelters either, like our Miners' tents, there were cupboards in them to keep things in – bundled away, out of sight – and tables to put things on, and hooks to hang things on, and shelves for stacking and chairs for sitting and hammocks for reclining and little low footstools for propping up the feet: every sort of contraption for making life comfortable.

Odolghes seemed to take all this splendour in his stride and told me, later that night when we were safe in our sleeping quarters near the kennels, that Fànes had been grander still, grander that I could ever imagine, with embroidered hangings on the walls and copper candlesticks and cushions stuffed with feathers to rest your backside on, and fancy things like that. But whether this was true or he was just boasting, to me our new surroundings were quite magnificent enough.

I wish I could say the same for the Cajutes themselves, only I can't; I find it hard to say anything nice about them at all. That first evening at their court I was too tired and hungry and worried about playing properly to notice much about them; all I remember is a line of wobbly faces staring down at Odolghes and me from behind the grease-lamps on the high table, tilting this way and that as the diners listened to our music, and later on a jumble of legs and skirts and feet and corns, very close to us, as all of them – eaters and servers and cooks and children – took to the floor in a wild after-supper stampede. Next day, however, I began to pick out details and to realise that, for all their riches, we had indeed entered the homestead of a very rough and savage lot of people. It showed in various things: in the way they groomed their hair, for example, or the way they didn't groom it but twisted it up in a fat-smeared topknot and left it there, never more to disturb save for poking in a bodkin now and again to still the itching. Men, women, even children, even babies, it made no difference, all sported the same greasy, wispy knobble. It showed in the way they wore their clothes, which, fine though they were, they seldom changed, not even to go to bed. And it showed in the beds themselves: feathered and pungent as the earths of foxes and, like them, full of scraps of left-over food for the occupant to chew on at night, or else breakfast on without bothering to leave the bed.

Because, gracious, they were an idle lot for a warrior race. Miners aren't that famous for their cleanliness, I know, but at least we have a reason for being dirty, and at least we try to get the worst of the grime off. These people, no, they seemed to glory in it. I saw one of the women change her baby's dress once (it must have got too small for the child to wear), and, I swear, the discarded dress, instead of flopping to the ground, stood straight up like a tent, it was so stiff with ugg.

'A nos ne san valel nia,' as the Fanes say, according to Odolghes who had taken to speaking to me in his own language now when we were alone. No business of ours. But it wasn't just the dirt, or the smells, or the way they peed (and worse) wherever they happened to be standing, or the way they kept the blood on their hands after hunting and licked at it, and messy things like that, it was the sullenness of their characters that really made them so unpleasant to live with and work for. They rarely smiled; their eyes rarely lit up, either with interest or with anything else. Even when they danced there was something dull about them, something heavy and plodding and ox-like that prevented them from having what I call fun.

Odolghes and I had feared questions, but after the first quizzing on our arrival they didn't ask us any. We were there to serve them music when they felt like it, not to speak to or bother about. What we did for the rest of the time didn't concern them, any more than it concerned them what the dogs did in the kennels next door when they were not wanted for hunting.

We were the ones anxious for information. Whereabouts were the Cajutes' metal works now that they did their own excavating and forging? Were they inside the castle precincts or somewhere outside? Where did they store their metal? Where did it come from? Who brought it to the works, and when, and how often? Until we knew the answers to these questions our search for the magic stone couldn't even begin. And both of us, I think, were becoming more and more eager with every passing day not only to begin it but to end it as soon as possible.

Lacking the language and not wanting to draw a shred of attention to ourselves, not even from the castle cats, we started by just looking. Roaming around the various courtyards, pretending to practise our songs, and looking for all we were worth. Music was hardly ever called for in the daytime except when there was a hunting party setting off or the Queen felt whimsy, so we were usually free to go where we liked. Nobody seemed to mind us, nobody seemed to care. Sometimes one of the guards - probably an officer, only they were all so crusty it was difficult to tell - would prod his scabbard into my father's stomach and grunt, 'Seng!' at him, and we would have to do as we were bid and seng; but usually they just let us go on our way without comment, chewing on whatever plant it was they chewed all day long and scratching their mail-clad backs against the wall.

One or two of the smaller children sometimes showed a bit more interest, staring at me with my zither and pointing and making hopeful 'Brrm' noises, but usually its mother clapped it on the head to silence it and hauled it away. Not angrily, just forcefully, the way you would haul a hay bale.

'They're so slack we could steal anything from them,' I whispered to Odolghes after our first stroll, which had taken us to the bakery and the dairy but no further. Free to roam we might be, but we wanted things to stay that way.

He shook his head and told me not to count on it. They were confident, he said, they had nothing to fear, and why should they? There was no other tribe could match their strength, not while they'd got the stone to find their metal for them.

Mmmn, I agreed, only half convinced, but what if they didn't have the stone? Odolghes seemed so sure they must, but what if this Mulebones character or whatever his name was had kept it for himself? Sold the secret of the iron making but kept the stone for future use? That's what a really clever person would have done, surely? And by all accounts Mulebones was the cleverest man alive.

Odolghes shrugged his shoulders and winced: the arm didn't fit very well and often bothered him. Seeing that we were alone in our hut and unlikely to be needed till evening he began unstrapping it, but then thought better and let it be. 'Alive…' he said slowly, as if weighing the word inside his head or testing it out in some way. 'Hmm, alive. Now that's one thing he can't be. You may be right about the stone, my sweet: it is just possible Mulebones hung on to it, or tried to, although I think it very unlikely, knowing how greedy he was for the gold. But that he's still alive, no, that's out of the question. His hair was white already when I knew him. All of it.'

White? All white hair? That was more unusual in people than in horses; I didn't think I had ever seen anyone with all white hair. Streaky, yes, like my grandfather's, but not all over white. I was very relieved I'd never have to meet such a man, although for some reason he fascinated me, this Mulebones, and I wanted to know more about him. 'If he's dead like you say,' I insisted, 'then where's all the gold got to? What did he do with it? Who did he leave it to?'

My father forgot his arm and shrugged again, and winced again. 'That,' he said, 'is something we'll probably never know, but we won't let it bother us either. Once we have the stone, and some proper organisation, we can turn it into as much gold as we like.'

Could we, I wondered? How? But I didn't have time to ask because at that very instant a young Cajute soldier barged into the hut without warning and clicked his fingers at us and said we were wanted in the great hall, on account of there being 'Guesters'.

How wise Odolghes had been to keep his arm on. I promised myself to follow his example and play safe always. I had seen the spikes on the wall at close range now and noticed some very nasty bits and pieces clinging to them, not unlike the pumpkins of Alexa's description.

(Chapter 4 coming up next Monday, May 10 2010)amanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-47456315889972016242010-04-25T05:17:00.000-07:002010-04-27T05:04:17.055-07:00chapter 2CHAPTER TWO

How did my mother know the change in Odolghes was so serious? How did she know what it would lead to? Do wives have a secret way of finding out these things? Do mothers? Or was it that she had always known in her heart of hearts that her misfit husband was lent to her by Fortune, not given for keeps? 'Who do you belong to, Honeycake? To me, to Sommavida.' Was that why she had to repeat this phrase so often: because she knew it wasn't really true and never would be? Poor Mother, so drab, so plain, like a little brown she-sparrow, with her beautiful captive eagle that was now spreading its wings and preparing to fly. What could she do to stop him?

In fact she could do quite a lot, and did. Although her strongest weapon she was too generous, and perhaps too proud, to use. For a start she persuaded her father (not that that was very difficult) to give Odolghes no help in his task. He wanted to forge an iron arm for himself, did he, to wear under his cloak so as to hide his deformity? Very well, let him forge it himself if he was able. He wanted a companion to take with him and play the zither? Let him whistle for one: no Miner, male or female, young or old, would have the Chief's permission to leave the camp. Then, when these threats failed, and Odolghes could be seen busy at the anvil every day, pounding away with his one good arm, using toes and teeth and the little red stump of a hand that grew on his right shoulder, she refused to pack his bags for him, or plait his hair or tie his laces, or do any of the two-handed tasks she had always done for him so willingly before. And when it was clear not even this would thwart him, she began secretly, as a last resort, to add poppy juice to his evening meal, hoping in this way to bring the clouds back. Which it might well have done, had not one of the cooks eaten some of the food on the sly and gone all dopey, exposing the trick.

I don't know about my father, whether the shock helped him speed up his decision to leave, or whether he was ready in any case, but as far as I was concerned it was this business of the poppy juice that made up my mind for me. I had been wondering for days, Whom should I side with? Which parent should I choose? Loyalty told me, my mother, who needed me and worked so hard for me. Pity told me, my mother, who would miss me terribly. Caution told me, my mother; comfort told me, my mother; even greed told me, my mother (because what would I get to eat if I had to rely on Odolghes' cooking?). But pity also told me, my father, for having treated him so badly in the past and paid so little heed to him. Loyalty also told me, my father, who'd never had any from me yet. And another thing – I don't know what it was: curiosity, daring, sense of adventure – told me my father too. My father, and new places and new people, and the court of the Cajutes with the riddle of how to get in and how to get out again, and the thrill of coming back with the famous stone that everyone set such store by, and hearing them say (instead of Mara the Mongrel), Mara the Marvellous did this with her brave and clever dad!

The two pulls remained about equal though, so I really didn't know which way to go. Not until I saw the cook lying by the fire with his upturned belly and his squiffy, dreamy eyes, and then anger at my mother for wanting to reduce Odolghes to this state in order to keep him, got the better of me and I made my choice.

Or, as Alexa would say, I cast my die, whatever a die is. Quickly, stealthily, without saying anything to anybody, I collected a few useful things like clothes and nuts and cheese and toothpicks (I hate having bits of nuts in my teeth) and tied them into a bundle, of a size I could easily carry. I put on my strongest shoes too, the ones I used for ore-crushing, and my leather hat and jacket and my thickest fur-lined breeches. Then, fat as a thrush, with the bundle on my back, I went and sat in the shadows, a good distance from the fire where all the fuss was going on, and waited for my father to finish his leave-taking. He was so furious I knew he wouldn't be long.

From where I was, it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but words reached me like 'trap' and 'cage' and 'smother' and 'apron strings', and I guessed he was accusing my mother – perhaps my grandfather too – of treating him as a sort of prisoner all these years. Which I suppose in their different ways they had.

My mother's voice was shriller and carried better. 'Go then, you antwit,' she shrieked at him, 'if that is what you want! Go and play the hero! Walk right into the ogre's den! Show everyone how brave you are! Nice satisfaction it'll bring you when you're roasting on the Cajutes' gridiron, to know that everyone thinks you're brave!'

Odolghes must have said something soothing at this point about performing his task in a twinkling and coming back soon, but it didn't seem to soothe my mother. Her voice went down a notch but remained just as loud. 'If you do ever come back I shan't be here!' she shouted, biting at her hands until it looked as if she must wound them. 'Remember that. If you leave me now it is for ever!'

It was her last desperate attempt to keep him, but my father was unmoved. I don't think he believed her really, any more than I did: she was always threatening to do drastic things if she didn't get her own way, it was something to do with being the Chief's daughter and an only child. And even if he had believed her I don't think it would have made much difference. Not that he wasn't fond of Sommavida, but in his new state he needed to prove so many thing to himself, not least that he could manage without her help. It's sad isn't it, between couples, how the needs on one sometimes go flat against the needs of the other?

I saw him turn from her curtly, shrugging his shoulders so that the new false arm swayed and looked for a moment as if it might come off. He was so keen to be going, I'm not certain he even said goodbye. And then, as I got up and prepared to follow him, I saw my mother (and will always see her so, whenever I think of her) sink to her knees and take her hands from her mouth and cross them over her belly, as if all the wrangling had given her the tummyache. Only it wasn't that, I know that now.

It was almost dark by this time, and I am not at ease in darkness, being only half a Miner, but I didn't catch up with my father to let him know I was there until we were miles away from the camp: I was afraid he wouldn't want me and would send me back.

It was hard going. Odolghes had good ears, and I had to keep a fair distance between us, so I was in constant danger of losing him. He didn't know the country either, or even where he was going, and instead of sticking to the paths he wove around all over the place, stomping through woods and slopping into streams, climbing and descending all the steep places, walking, in short, like a blind man.

The Salvans say that with animals nerve is everything, and perhaps his stumbly, noisy progress was not such a bad idea because we had no trouble from the night prowlers, I didn't even hear a growl. Eventually we hit on a track of some kind, man-made and widish, and it was here, when he reached the first clearing and tripped over a tree stump, that Odolghes took a breather and I made my presence known.

As I feared, his first reaction was to tell me, pretty sharply, to beat it back to the camp. He couldn't possibly take me from my mother, he said, she was unhappy enough as it was, and he couldn't possibly take me where he was going because it was far too dangerous.

Now I am not wily and I am not particularly clever at getting round people, but in this case I was so anxious to share Odolghes' adventure that I did just the right thing to persuade him: instead of pleading or wheedling or indeed saying anything at all, I tied up his trailing laces for him that had been part of the reason for his tripping, fixed his plaits and his undone cloak-strap and ran my hands over the strings of the zither hung round his neck, making a loud Ploing! noise in the darkness and conveying my message for me: I can be you right hand for you, Odolghes, I can be your music-girl, take me along and you will not regret it. Then, still without saying anything, I opened my bundle and took out some nuts and began to crack them. Because I knew unpractical Odolghes would have forgotten about food.

A proper grownup father wouldn't have been won round so easily maybe, but mine was not a proper grownup father, not yet, and he laughed and squeezed my hand and took some nuts from me and said, hardly bothering to think the matter over at all, 'Very well then, Miss Mongrel, so be it, we will go into the ogre's den together. You're not afraid, are you?'

'Ttt,' I shook my head. If we went as music makers I reckoned I wasn't afraid. Nobody kills singers; at worst they push them out into the cold if they don't like the song.

'Good,' my father said. 'No more am I.'

'You mustn't call me Mongrel though,' I warned him, 'or the Cajutes may begin to wonder who we are. Not Mara either. And I mustn't call you Odolghes. We mustn't use any Miner words when we are together; we must be new, mysterious people from a far off place nobody has heard of. I know! I could pretend to be dumb and you could talk to me in sign language – like that we can be sure we won't make any blunders.'

'Ye-es,' said Odolghes doubtfully, and then 'Yes' again as he warmed to the idea. 'But what about my songs? I can't very well sing them in sign language, can I? What do I do about my songs?'

Of course, I was forgetting, the songs were in Fanish, and Fanish was more dangerous for us than Miner-speak. 'You make up new words for them,' I said after a moment's thought. 'Or else you sing the old words backwards.' I nearly added, 'And then, when you have picked up enough of the Cajutes' language, you sing to them in that,' but I didn't, because the thought of a long stay with such horrible people as the Cajutes made me shiver.

My father laughed again and kissed my fingertips and said he was glad to have me with him. Then in a different voice, hesitant, slightly uncomfortable, he said, Sorry to ask such a question, but how old was I?

I tried not to sound surprised. In fact I wasn't really surprised: the years without memory must have passed for him in a muddling, stretchy way, sometimes long, sometimes short. 'I'm six and a half, Father. The age you were when you came to the camp.'

'Six and a half.' He cracked a nut with his iron hand, picking it up with the other and letting it fall hard on the tree stump. (He mustn't do that in front of the Cajutes.) 'Six and a half. Well, well, well. How time gallops.' And then, still more uncomfortable, 'And I? Do you know how old I am?'

Poor Odolghes, so he didn't know this either. I wondered whether to lie to him but decided truth was better. 'Yes,' I said, 'You are twenty-two.'

The iron hand jerked again, but from the shoulder this time, unaided. 'Twenty-two!' he echoed. 'Twenty-thundering-two! Trust me: backward in everything! That makes - what is it? Sixteen, sixteen lost years. Gone. Wasted. Chucked out with the slag.'

There was little I could say to this because at twenty-two Odolghes was one of the oldest fathers in the camp, and this had used to embarrass me about him too. Old a babyish together, what could be worse in a parent? However the 'visidàja' and the easy life must have kept him fresh, because luckily he didn't look his age at all. 'Don't worry,' I comforted him, reminding him of all the excitement in store once we got inside the Cajutes' castle. 'We'll make up for lost time now.'

(next chapter next wednesday, may 5th 2010amanda pranterahttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9002525742497553994.post-16963303517296022202010-04-18T07:29:00.000-07:002010-04-18T07:44:28.401-07:00the refuge of Fanes - Part One: The StoneFOREWORD

Strange. In the turmoil of the past few days, with everything so upside down we can't even find our cooking gear and have to heat up our food in buckets and stir it with sticks, my grandmother Alexa's book, which Aunt Lulu has been looking for in vain for months, has suddenly come to light.

Not all of it unfortunately – the second volume is still missing – but the most interesting part, the part that goes from Alexa's twelfth birthday at the castle of Fànes to that terrible night, fourteen years later, when she escaped from the same castle through an underground passage in the company of her daughter Lujanta (Aunt Lulu to me) and a small band of survivors, never more to surface. Or not permanently, that is, not to settle, not to live.

I have been reading it: there's not much else for me to do in my present condition, I certainly can't help with the unloading. And I have been thinking, why shouldn't I write my story too? Alexa wrote at a time of great distress, alone save for snoring Salvans, hidden in a burrow, betrayed, bereaved, defeated in all her aims, and seems to have drawn great comfort from her scribblings. The story gets grimmer, I mean, as it goes on but the actual hand gets perkier and perkier, and so does the tone. Why shouldn't I do the same, with the same results?

Because your story is untellable, says a voice (I think it must be my own, coming from deep inside). Your story, you know quite well, if it is not to end in disaster for everyone, must remain a secret.

Yes, I know this. I have fought for this and paid for this and I am not likely to forget it. But Alexa's book has shown me, amongst other things, that it's not the keeping or telling of secrets that is important, so much as a clear setting out of the facts. Secrets lose their punch, like beer does, with the passing of time; go all flat and watery (and please the Gods my own will do the same). Who gives an apple pip now about the workings of the mysterious twin-swapping pact that caused Alexa such anguish, or about who sired her three children, or who they took after – the dirty Duke or the sleepy Salvan – or whether they had fingers or paws or hair or fur? Not even my father and Aunt Lulu, who were directly concerned in the matter, were much interested when they discussed it, that I recall.

But the facts, no, they keep their value. So much so that I am tempted as I read and come across certain descriptions to bite at my hands in typical Miner fashion and say to myself, if only I had know this before, perhaps I would have realised in time and wouldn't have…

Which is silly and leads nowhere: what is done is done, and it is the future I must worry about, not the past. So I will write, because if I don't I think I will go mad, waiting to know the worst; and then I will either tear up what I have written or else (if the worst turns out to be the best and my untellable crime goes unpunished) I will do as Alexa did and hide the manuscript in a clever place for some great-great-great-grandchild to find during a spring turnout.

What follows I dedicate to her, the grandmother I never met, save now, in her writings. I wonder what she would have thought of me? In her book she is often rude about Miners, unfeelingly likens my poor great-grandparents' lopped-off heads to 'a couple of undersized pumpkins, badly rotted', mocks their stature, calls my mother 'the Floor-mop' on account of her ugliness and grubby clothes. What would she have said, I wonder, had she known it would be me, half Miner myself, the one to carry on her story – and perhaps (a big perhaps) her line?

CHAPTER ONE

My mother the Floor-mop was a princess, and Odolghes my father was a prince (even if he had forgotten he was one for the time being), so I must have been a princess too, like Alexa, but I was known from as far back as I can remember as Mara the Mongrel.

My parents' was not a popular marriage. My grandfather probably thought he was doing a very cunning thing in luring the heir of Fànes to his court and wedding him, still a child, to his only daughter Sommavida, but as things turned out it was a great mistake in policy. Only a short while after the wedding, Fànes fell to its enemies in the great battle described at the end of Alexa's book, its inhabitants were slaughtered (all of them, it was thought at the time), its timbers burned, its walls flattened, and instead of the heir to a rich and powerful kingdom he had set his hopes on, my grandfather found himself landed with a one-armed son in law who had no prospects and no connections and no memory, and nothing to recommend him at all except a sweet singing voice and a pretty pair of dark blue eyes.

The Miners were furious with my grandfather and I think quite rightly: as their Chief it was his duty to see clearer into the future. But the marriage knot had been tied and there was no untying it, so the Miner people just had to accept the fact that their beloved baby princess was spliced for life to this large, strange, moony, malformed pauper boy who could do nothing to earn his keep but sing songs in a language they hardly knew. When his voice started breaking they wanted to castrate him, so I'm told, in order that the voice at least would keep, but my mother, who could evidently see further into the future than her father, wouldn't allow this. She couldn't have been more that seven at the time but apparently she flew into a great temper and said that her husband's body was incomplete enough as it was, thank you very much, and she would stand for no more missing bits.

Good for her. If left to himself, I doubt my father would have raised a finger in protest, because at that time – before his memory came back, and with it all the rest – he was still in what the Fanes call 'visidàja', or waking sleep, and what the Miners called, much more simply, the clouds. The voice kept anyway; got even better when it changed.

He was a terrible embarrassment to me. It was bad enough being Mara the Mongrel, twice as tall as the other children and with great big sturdy feet and floppy hair, without being the daughter of the Loon, the Crooner, the Empty-Head and all the other rude names they called him by. Sometimes I even used to think I hated him, but I didn't because you couldn't hate him, he was so gentle, so patient, so good-natured. And of course the memory trouble made him so easy to hurt. 'Where d'ya come from, Woad-eyes?' the young men used to taunt. 'Why don't ya go back there? Lost yer way? Lost yer wits? Or did you never have none?' And instead of answering back my father would blink at them, worried, and his brow would go all wrinkly as he tried to jolt his sleeping memory back to life.

Who was he? Where did he come from? Who gave him this strange name Ododghes, which meant eagle, or baby eagle, in Miner language, and made everyone laugh and flap their arms at him when they said it? Who taught him the songs that only he, among this race of little dark hireling metal-grubbers, appeared to know? Why was he such a misfit? Why could he never do anything useful to please people? Why was his own daughter ashamed of him, to the point of hiding her feet in shoes by day and bed socks by night and chopping off her lovely rippley hair? They told him he was a Fane, but what was a Fane? Was it a disease? It certainly felt like it. These are the thoughts that I now imagine used to go through my father's poor misty head in the days of his visidàja, but at the time I didn't imagine anything, I just turned my back on him like everyone else and laughed.

My mother was the only person who seemed to care for him, but even she did so in an offhand, jokey way. He had come to her as a playfellow, and a playfellow he had remained, even if their games had changed a bit in the meantime. She used to plait his hair for him, I remember, in the evenings, twisting his head from side to side as if he were a doll, and dress him up nicely and play the zither for him while he sang his songs. 'Odolghes,' she used to say, 'Honeycake, Sweetiepud, who do you belong to?' And then, not waiting for a reply (because questions of this kind always puzzled him), 'To me, that's who. To Sommavida. You are Sommavida's pet eagle.' Only she treated him, of course, like we all did, more as a pet duck.

I have already said how pointless it is to ponder over the past with it ifs and might-have-beens, but all the same I can't help wondering what would have happened if those Wanderers with their strange package had never arrived that evening in our camp. Or if they had never unwrapped the package, the way they did, in order to try and sell its contents to us. Would my father have gone on always the way he was: a harmless, dreamy creature, bumbling about in uncomplaining idleness on the fringes of our lives, singing on command, smiling always, holding pins in his mouth for my mother while she sewed and smiling even then? Or would something inside of him have stirred at some point and eventually led him to rebel?

And what about our Miners' way of life? Would we have continued our perilous hoppings from place to place in search of work that was less and less easy to come by? Carried on with our ill-paid scrabblings for metal that was harder and harder to find? We were like Wanderers ourselves in those days. Worse, we were like bears: used, like them, to sniff out the honeycombs and then hunted for our skins. I was born to such a life so I saw no hardship in it, but the elders, round the dampened embers of our fires at night, used to moan and grumble and speak of happier times when the Miner folk had been rich and respected. 'Aurona,' they used to sigh. It was a good sighing word. 'Those were the days, before the wars, when we lived in Aurona. Remember? Didn't have to douse the fires then. Used to let them burn into the night like beacons.' And someone else, always an oldie, would grunt and say sadly, Yer, yer, how could they ever forget?

And me too? What about me? Would I have gone on despising my father, who I loved? Or would I have got over my shame and become friends with him, accepting his differences? I like to think I would have discovered him for myself, later on, and perhaps helped him to discover his past as well, which was part of mine. But anyway it wasn't necessary because the object inside the Wanderers' package did the work for both of us.

It was the oddest thing. It was latish when it happened, almost the time for drowsing, not for awakening. Work was over for the day and we younger ones were scurrying around doing all the usual things that needed doing every evening – fetching water for cooking and for the diggers to wash their hands in, stoking up the fires, putting away the tools and so forth – when suddenly the pack-dogs set up a great noise, and a group of four straggly Wanderers appeared out of the dusk, carrying something the size of a smallish piglet, wrapped in a blanket.

Not that there was anything so strange in this. The Wanderers always came by in the evenings, when they knew the camp was full. They always brought goods for sale too – mostly food, mostly stolen, mostly pretty stale. But this time you could tell from their faces and the care with which they handled the package, not letting any of us touch it or peek under the folds of the blanket, that they had come by something special.

'Where's Chief?' they asked, pinching at us rudely the way they always did. 'Where's all your mummies and daddies? Go and fetch 'em, truffle pups, we've got something they might like to see.'

Truffle pups! Normally I wouldn't have bothered about fetching my father, but he and my mother were together that evening, in one of their giggly plaiting sessions, so as chance would have it he came along too, together with everyone else. In fact he was one of the first to arrive and had a very close view.

When we were all gathered in a circle around them, the Wanderers, who have a great sense of occasion and are good about puffing up their wares, leaned forward in concord and took a corner of the blanket each between thumb and finger, ready to uncover whatever it was they lay underneath. 'Oohoo!' said their leader, 'Wait for it, wait for it!' Then with a loud, trumpety 'Ta-ta-ra-ta', he gave the signal to his companions to twitch away the cover.

Without Odolghes and his curious behaviour the object would have come to all of us, I think, as a disappointment. It was just another piece of blond iron – curiously fashioned, yes, very finely wrought and well decorated, but basically just another metal corselet of the kind worn by our one-time allies and now sworn enemies the Cajutes. Of which we had already seen more than enough.

The head Wanderer, sensing the letdown, had begun to add a bit more patter. 'Small,' he was saying. 'See? Miner size. Just the job. Lovely bit of work. Don't get this quality often, not on the market. Only one armhole, 'course, but that can soon be fixed. Must have been made for…'

But he never finished, because at that point, like a drunkard or a rabid dog, my father Odolghes reeled forward into the circle and began spinning round in circles of his own, his hands clasped to his head as if fearful it would burst open at the seams. 'It's my suit!' he screamed, to everyone's amusement and delight, and then consternation. 'It's my suit they stole from me! My birthday present that the traitors stole the night they left Fànes. Arrgh! Take it away! Cover it up!' Then, twisting and snapping, still more dog-like (because the Wanderers, alarmed by the mention of stealing, had begun to replace the blanket), 'No, don't! Leave it there! Let me look. It's coming back to me now. The suit of armour… The fittings with Nurse… My room in the turret… My cloth bear… Fànes, Alexa, Dolasilla… Everything… Arrgh!' And he screamed that throaty scream again and began hitting his head with his hands instead of holding it. 'What have they done to me? Where have they gone? Where have I been living all this time?'

The Wanderers, quite sure by now that they were being accused of theft, or would be in a moment, began protesting, and one of them tried to catch my father by his arm to stop him spinning, but everyone else seemed to understand that something important was happening inside his fuddled head. My mother most of all.

'Let him be, you silly pedlars!' she shouted. 'Leave the armour where it is! No one's blaming you for anything. Can't you see it's his memory coming back to him?'

And so it was. It must have been a terrible moment for my father. I sometimes try to put myself in his position and think what it must be like to have your mother and your sister and your father and your nurse, and your friends and your toys and your pets and your games, all whooshing into your head together like the waters of a blocked stream that has just come unblocked; churning and swirling and jostling for space, and shouting out, Here I am! Look at me, look at me, look at me! I'm your ma, remember? I'm your pa. (And what a pa!) Whooshing in and then – which I suppose must have been even worse – whooshing out again when you learn that they are all dead and gone and vanished for ever. No wonder Odolghes had to hold his headbones. No wonder, after we had bought the suit of armour off the Wanderers for him to keep, he spent the best part of the next fortnight crouched over it on all fours, murmuring to himself and tracing patters on the metal with his finger. He was travelling, you see. Backwards in time. Meeting people. Talking to them. Saying hello and goodbye. Forgiving them perhaps in some cases; in others not; in others still, just marking up the loss.

Our kinsfolk found him funnier than usual, and on their way to work would stop and ask him questions: 'How's it going, Odolghes? Found that cloth bear yet? Gonna wear that armour on your next birthday? Fit you a treat, it will.' Silly things like that, no harm meant. But I could already see a change in him, a look in his eye I had never seen before, and for once I played no part in the teasing but sat by him instead and tried to help him on his journey.

He didn't seem to notice me much but I think he was grateful, and, like the first stones of a wall that go underground but nevertheless keep the structure standing, I think this was when the foundations of my love for him were planted. Or perhaps they had been there all along. What is sure is that by the end of the fortnight, when my father finished his travelling in time and came to join us in the present as a proper thinking, feeling, remembering person, I was for the first time in my life, not proud exactly – that would come later – but unashamed to be his daughter.

I had learnt so much about him, you see, during this interval. Not from the story he told - which came out in bits and remained confused in my mind: just a jumble of treachery and bloodshed and poison and magic weapons and huge fat Dukes and wicked tutors and I know not what - but from certain incidents in the story that came across so clear they painted themselves inside my head like pictures. The day he received the suit of armour for his birthday, for example, and got such a wigging from his mother Alexa because he used the sword to chop up the toy bear that had been her present to him. I could just see him standing there in the huge castle bedroom, red-faced, puzzled, protesting, 'But it was a fair fight, Mother. I cut off its arm to make us equal!' Poor little Eagle Prince, caught up in things so much more complicated than he was, how could he understand the way Alexa felt about warfare, and why?

I could see him, too, on the dangerous day he came across the tutor, Mulebones, trafficking with the magic stone, and could hear the wobble in his voice (which luckily Mulebones missed) as he replied to the man's angry questioning. 'Notice? No, Muley. Why? What? I didn't notice anything, I swear, I just wanted us to play chequers.'

I could see him in the forge, watching the making of the deadly blond iron that had made his people so powerful and so detested; see him trotting along in the wake of his bossy elder sister Dolasilla as she trained for battle, copying her movements, trying in spite of his drawback to cut the same dash. But clearest of all I could see him, six years old and still a little lost in the grownups' world, as he climbed onto the Miners' sledge that was to carry him away from his homestead for ever. How much had Alexa told him? Did he know the peril that hung over Fànes and everyone who remained there? Did he know he was being taken to safety? Or did he think, as children often do when they are caught up in tragedy, that he was being punished for something he had done wrong? And, if so, was that why the clouds came down and blanketed his memory: to protect him from things that were too sad to dwell on?

Yes, I think that is the way it must have been. Anyway, a bit late in the day maybe, but now the clouds had lifted. That evening, almost as if he had forgotten his usual place by my mother's knee and took his new one for granted, he sat himself down in the middle of the ring of tired workers and asked for their attention. He got it too, more or less straight away, which shows how much he had altered in the interval. 'You have been good to me, Miners,' he began, quelling the titters of laughter with a flash of his new wide-awake eyes – still blue and kind but now not half so smiley. 'And you have been patient with me. It is time I did something for you in return. Until now I have eaten your food and sung songs for you, much like the linnets you keep in cages and take down the mines with you to warn you of the vapours. But now that I have more to offer than just my voice, I intend to show my thanks.'

Such a flow of words, so well strung together, seemed to act on my kinsmen like a biff on the head, half stunning them. Miners are gruff talkers themselves and have a great, if grudging, respect for fine speaking.

'You have always reminded me that I am a Fane,' my father went on in the silence. 'But in your kindness you have never reminded me what I owe you as a Fane. I was sent here by my mother as a guest, I remember that now, as part of an agreement. But I also remember – correct me if I am wrong – that another part of the agreement concerned the recovery of your most prized possession: your magic iron-finding stone. The Fanes, unless I am mistaken, undertook to find this stone for you and to return it to you at the earliest opportunity; and this, so far, has not been done.'

Nobody corrected him, although my grandfather, who was probably feeling a bit uneasy at this sudden and detailed awakening of his son in law's memory, down to the very terms of the agreement (which had said nothing about marriage), started to cough and mumble something about not keeping people to impossible promises and letting bygones be bygones.

'Ah,' my father intervened, pulling himself up to his full sitting height. He had always been large compared to the Miners but now he looked like a giant. 'That's just it. The promise is not impossible and I intend to keep it. Mulebones the Traitor stole the stone, I know this beyond a doubt. Just as I know what he did with it later: he sold it to the Cajutes along with the secret of the blond iron, in exchange for the gold.'

This last word broke the silence that up till now, apart from my grandfather's mutterings, had been almost total. 'Our gold! Miners' gold!' everyone shouted, rattling their knives on their bowls so loud that my father had to wait a while before he could go on again. 'Our stuff! Our pretty yellow treasure!'

'Indeed,' Odolghes said when his voice could be heard again. Which I thought was a very dignified way of half-agreeing: it was true, the gold had belonged to us Miners once, but my grandfather had spent it all in the wars, paying the Cajutes to fight on our side, and the expense still rankled. 'So who has the magic stone now, eh? The Cajutes, of course. And it is from them that I propose to rescue it and bring it back to its rightful owners.'

If there had been silence before, now there was a hush as deep as the one you get down a mine shaft on a rest day. Was this a joke, I could sense my kinsfolk thinking? Was this the Loon up to another of his fooleries, wasting everyone's time? Or was the fellow serious?

My mother was the first to find an answer to this question, but then she had been watching her playfellow-husband for days now, seeing him grow into something different and unpredictable under her troubled eyes. 'No, Odol, please!' she begged, breaking into the circle and rushing up to him and putting her arms round his shoulders. Protecting him like she always did. 'You're tired, you're confused, you don't know what you're saying! He doesn't know what he's saying!' she repeated loudly for everyone else's benefit. 'No one can enter the Cajutes' stronghold. How can he recover our stone for us?' This she repeated too, but quietly, in the other direction, towards my father. 'No one, sweetest, can enter the Cajutes' stronghold. How can you recover our stone for us? Be sensible, how can you?'

My father had always welcomed this way of hers of cushioning him against the world, acting as his mouthpiece and his interpreter, but this evening he seemed to resent it. He shook her hands off his shoulders almost rudely and addressed himself again directly to the Miners. 'Think of me what you like, Miner people,' he said, 'call me what names you like, but do not call me a braggart. I know I haven't done much so far to earn your trust, but, by the womb of the Earth Goddess whom you fear so greatly, I swear to you that from today onwards I will not rest until I have returned to you your magic stone.'

I think he added, 'And much else besides,' but it was lost in the hooha that followed. Cheers, clapping, footstamping, yells of 'Good old Cuckoo-pate, at last he's waking up!' more clattering of knives and banging of bowls, and above it all, on a thinner, higher note, the sound of my mother's wailing. 'No-oooo, Odol, no-ooo!' like a mother who has lost a child, or fears she is about to lose one. Which she was, of course, although nobody realised this yet, myself least of all.

(Chapter 2 will be posted on Sunday, April 26th 2010)amanda pranterahttp://firstname.lastname@example.com