Brian Ruckley - Exile

Men hauled on the ropes; the tillerman leaned and heaved; the oarsmen strained. The Clade boat came swinging into the flank of the barge, crashed against it and stayed there. The two boats raced on down the Hervent, locked together.

Wren was still struggling with her disbelief at that when they started to come over the side. One, then two, then three vaulting up and over and landing on the deck with swords already half drawn, fierce intent in their piercing eyes.

The barge’s captain approached them, hands raised. He looked like a man resigned to a sorry fate.

‘What’s happening?’ one of the Clade warriors snarled.

‘The Free,’ the captain blurted out, glancing towards the three figures still standing, still quite calm, at the prow.

‘Always a delight to come across the Clade in the course of our labours,’ Hamdan said, yet there was nothing of delight in his tone or expression. Only ice; only a hard contempt.

The Free were no friends to the School. Everyone knew that. Wren clung to it, a raft in the flood. Perhaps the Clade were here for the Free. Perhaps larger, fiercer contests than her own little adventures were being played out. She shrank back among the other passengers, edging her way as far from those blue tunics as she could without attracting notice. So she hoped.

‘We’re on the King’s commission,’ Hamdan said loudly. ‘Not to be stayed or delayed. This barge serves our need.’

Kerig and Ena Marr were moving just as slowly and carefully as she was herself, Wren noted. They were not retreating or hiding though. They were giving themselves room. Arraying themselves to face the three Clade warriors. It seemed absurd that anyone would offer violence to the Clade, but then the Free wrote their own rules. It was their nature. Their purpose, perhaps.

The Clade men did not quail before the challenge. Nor did they take it up.

‘We’re not here for old arguments,’ their leader said.

‘They’re not as old as you think,’ Kerig muttered, but he was ignored.

The blue-shirted warrior turned away from the Free and looked towards the little crowd of passengers and nervous crew.

‘There’s people think the wild times up here give them shelter and disguise,’ the Clade swordsman said, drawing his blade and taking a long step closer. ‘Smugglers and fugitives and thieves. Every boat on the river gets searched. Every pack gets emptied.’

And Wren felt the lurch of the world turning against her once more. Felt the trap closing. It showed in her face, that feeling. She could not help it. It showed in the slumping of her shoulders. She betrayed herself.

‘You,’ – the Clade man stretched his arm and pointed levelly at her with the tip of his blade – ‘Stand still.’

He twisted his head slightly, calling over his shoulder without taking his eyes off Wren.

‘Captain, who is this?’

The other passengers were drifting away from her. Abandoning her. As she would have done, she supposed, if someone else had drawn this terrible attention.

‘I don’t know,’ the barge captain stammered. ‘Just that she wanted to go to Hamming Ferry.’

Wren took a step backwards.

‘Let her be,’ Hamdan said.

The Clade ignored him. The three of them advanced over the deck.

‘Stand where you are,’ one of them told Wren. ‘Set down your staff.’

Kerig tripped him just as he completed the command. The Clade man toppled in a blue-tinged flurry of loose arms. He fell heavily, cracking his knees hard on the planking.

‘Sorry,’ Kerig said.

Again, Clade faced Free, and this time the air all but sang with imminent violence.

‘Will you test the Clade today?’ the man Kerig had felled demanded as he got lithely to his feet.

He leaned in close to Kerig, and the two of them locked gazes, neither flinching.

‘Is it to be today?’ the Clade man shouted into Kerig’s face.

Wren saw Hamdan looking at her. He was frowning slightly. Then his mouth twitched, and he hung his head.

‘No,’ he said.

He did not sound cowed, or defeated. If anything, there was perhaps just a hint of disappointment.

‘Not today,’ he said quite clearly. Which to Wren sounded like the end of hope.

She moved back as the Clade came on. The barge, which had seemed so huge when she first saw it, now was small and tight. She felt the gunwale against the small of her back. Nowhere else to go. She turned and faced the huge expanse of the Hervent and beyond it the high, snow-crowned ground of the north. She threw herself over the side of the barge.

She fell and heard people shouting. She hit the water hard and its cold punched the breath out of her. The river took hold of her clothes and pulled her down.

She was aware of all of this and yet not, for as she went she opened herself to the Autumnal entelech. It had been her constant companion since childhood. Always there, always churning away just beyond the edge of her awareness like a storm beyond the horizon. The one of the four entelechs that called to her, that shaped itself most easily to her will and imagination.

Earth, rain, decay. Time, change, melancholy. They and a thousand thousand other possible shapes of the Autumnal filled her as she sank. Not rivers or swimming or floating. Nothing obviously connected to not drowning. As the Hervent turned her slowly in its dark grip, ever further from the light and from the air, she heard her own death in the overwhelming rumble of the vast water. Felt it in the awful weight pressing in on her.

Panic stirred as she sank and rolled in the remorseless depths. It pushed away clarity of mind. She gathered the entelech to her. The season was in her favour: the year was waning, and the Autumnal coming into its strongest time. Power and possibility trembled in her mind, in her body. She was blind, here in the chill darkness; deaf to all save the river’s dull roar. She did not know which way was up. But she had the entelech, and she had the one thought that stayed clear and sharp: I’m not dying now. I’m not finished yet .

There was enough in the bottomless silt of the river’s bed that spoke of the Autumnal to give her mind a grip upon it. She could shape it and move it by melding her will with the entelech.

She felt grit on her face. Imagined herself wreathed in a rising cloud of water-borne dirt and clay. Imagined the very earth beneath the Hervent reaching up to embrace her and save her. But the imagining was hard. The visions she tried to shape and express through the entelech were indistinct, blurred by fear and desperation. There was only one answer to that. She let the Autumnal pour through her like a torrent. She did with raw, brute power what she could not do with precision.

Pain convulsed her. Her bones felt as though they crumbled to dust within her. Hot needles rooted around behind her eyes. She saw, within the creaking box of her own skull, the riverbed rushing up, turning the water to thickening mud. A terrible pressure swelled in her chest and rose chokingly through her throat and burst out of her mouth. She breathed in.

When Wren opened her eyes she saw a dark rock dressed in slick, wet green slime. It was so close that her eyelashes almost brushed it as she blinked. She smelled vomit: her own, spilled among these jumbled boulders.

She made to rise, and her body shook and creaked in protest. She had to give up that first attempt and sink back into soaking, aching immobility. There was a dangerous appeal to the idea of just lying here, letting the sleep she could sense in the cloudy corners of her mind wash over her. Not a sleep she was likely to wake from, she knew. The air had a cold edge to it, sharpened by a fluttering breeze, and she was as wet as it was possible to be. Her clothes felt like iced lead on her back.