Alys Clare - The Way Between the Worlds

‘Tell me more about this pit,’ he said when I had finished. ‘You have seen it before, I think. With an occupant, as I recall.’

‘Yes, that’s right. It — the body isn’t there any more. It was empty when I — when I went inside.’

‘Is it close to the ruined building?’

I pictured it. ‘Yes. It’s beside a structure that looks like a hearth, and there’s a stumpy, square pillar nearby with marks carved into it.’

Gurdyman was nodding even before I had finished speaking. ‘Yes, yes, it all fits,’ he muttered. Then he looked down at me and gave me a beaming smile.

‘You know this place, don’t you?’ I whispered.

‘I believe I do,’ he agreed. ‘The terrain that you describe is familiar to me.’ He paused, frowning, and I sensed his attention had momentarily gone far away. With a small shudder, he brought himself back. ‘I told you yesterday about the soldiers’ religion, Lassair. These same soldiers were sent to guard the great wall that their emperor ordered to be built up in the north, and there they made the caves where Mithras was worshipped. Everywhere they went, they kept their god close. I told you too about the ordeals that the men endured in order to progress to higher degrees. Fire was frequently required, and sometimes the ordeals involved being buried alive in order to be reborn into a better, more refined state. I think you saw a certain Mithraeum on the great wall. You saw the hearth, and you saw the altar: what you described as a short, stumpy pillar. The hole in the ground where you tried to hide was the ordeal pit.’

I looked at him. ‘Have you been there?’ I whispered. He must have; it was the only explanation.

His expression was enigmatic. ‘I have seen the place,’ he said.

‘It is surely a long way to travel,’ I persisted. ‘Did you-’

He held up a hand. ‘Enough, child,’ he said, mildly but firmly. ‘It is not for you to enquire.’

For a moment I felt the very edge of something. . some great force that existed within him but that usually was kept well concealed behind the genial facade. It frightened me. I wrapped the blanket more closely around me and seemed to feel myself shrink.

When he spoke, his voice was as friendly and cheerful as ever. ‘I wonder,’ he mused, ‘why you should be sent this image so insistently.’ He looked at me, his face creased in a frown. ‘Is it possible that one of your kin lives there in the north?’

‘No,’ I said, without hesitation. I knew the full tally of my kinsmen and women — it was part of my job as the family’s bard to memorize not only the past generations, right back to our first occupation of the fen lands, but also the details of the living.

‘Could anyone be visiting the region?’

‘No. None has any reason to be so far from home.’

As I spoke my mind was distracted. A suspicion was beginning to grow, at first no more than the first tiny patch of cloud that will later bring a storm. Nerving myself, I stared at him and said, ‘What is there up there, where you say this Mithraeum is? What sort of a place is it?’

‘It is border country, a place where two kings fight for possession,’ he replied. ‘Both men wish to reinforce it to protect their own land.’

My small cloud was waxing steadily. ‘Is there danger there?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He looked grim. ‘I fear that there is.’

‘Could — might a man be hurt there? Could he be injured, if there was fighting?’

‘Yes, child.’

Such a wounded man, far from home and friendless, might need a place to hide. A place deep in the earth where, like a wounded animal, he could lie and lick his wounds. Call out, perhaps, to someone he loved. Dream of her; send his essence to appear in her dreams. .

I knew then who I had seen lying in that pit. I knew who had called out to me, who had said, again and again, come to me , and then, where are you? I need you!

Half of me wanted to sing and shout with joy because he had not forgotten me. In need, perhaps in pain, it was I to whom he had called out in his despair.

The other half was plunged into an abyss of dread because he was hurt.

He had been in the north country for twelve long months, and he longed with all his heart and soul to leave.

He longed for her, too. For that slender but tough girl with the watchful, wise eyes who had flashed so briefly into and out of his life and yet left such an enduring impression in her wake. The total amount of time they had spent together might have been brief, but what had happened to them on the island of Ely seemed to him to have linked them in some way.1 He hoped — he was almost sure — it was the same for her.

Even before the terrible thing had happened, he thought of her constantly, and he felt that he carried her with him, inside himself. Once he had seen her in a flash of waking vision. He had been jubilant, full of the thrill of battle, the blood lust still on him. He thought he heard her call out to him, and then he saw her. She was pale, her face tense, and the scar on her cheek that she had won when she fought side by side with him had stood out livid white. She was in danger — he knew that, although he had no idea how he knew — but in the same instant that he felt the stab of fear for her, he understood that she was stronger than her opponent and would not die.

He lay in his secret place, the pain from his wound so severe that he knew he would not sleep. He understood that he must keep his mind occupied, for if he did not, he might give in to the despair and the loneliness. Death was lurking; if he did not fight it, he could easily succumb. Slip into its kindly embrace. Wasn’t he already lying in his grave? This was what could so very easily happen, if a man proved himself too useful to his king. .

Enough, he told himself firmly.

He tore his mind away from the present and went back to the day when it had all begun. .

One of the many problems besetting King William II was that which his mighty father had always said to avoid if at all possible: fighting enemies simultaneously on two fronts. Early in the fourth year of his reign he sailed for Normandy, where the ongoing problem of his younger brother, Duke Robert, had broken out once again, with Robert nibbling away at William’s possessions in the region and going so far as to besiege the castle of one of William’s loyal barons. On arrival William immediately outbid his brother for the support of the barons and the services of the mercenaries, who abandoned Robert and flocked to William. Robert had no option but to come to terms with William, resulting in a treaty to which both brothers signed their names.

William, however, was not given long to savour the victory. Word reached him while he was still in Normandy that King Malcolm of Scotland had invaded northern England, advancing across a wide front and pushing on determinedly until the local inhabitants organized themselves sufficiently to drive the Scots back. William raced back to England, where he hastily gathered a large army and sent them north, some by sea and some travelling overland.

It was by then September, and one of the worst early autumns men had ever known. It was cold, it was wet, and the wind blew with a steady, brutal, unvarying force that drove people half-mad. William’s army, making what haste they could to shore up the northern border, suffered appallingly. Those in the land-army were beset by severe cold and by hunger that had many soldiers weak from near starvation. The ship-army fared even worse, for the equinox brought gales of such strength that their ships foundered and sank and almost all the men perished.

What remained of William’s army found King Malcolm calmly waiting, in an area of Lothian south of the Forth that was English to its very bones. Malcolm was the aggressor, but William, far from his power bases in the south and with half his army dead, was in no position to use force. The two kings negotiated a settlement: Malcolm agreed to become William’s vassal, giving him his allegiance as he had done to William’s father. Such support was not lightly given, and William well knew it. In exchange, he offered to return to Malcolm the twelve English townships that the Scottish king had held under the Conqueror, as well as an additional gift of twelve gold marks, to be paid annually.