Next
morning they made their way along the road, trying to get to the wall as
quickly as possible. Sedum was in the front with two soldiers carrying some of
his equipment. He was weak and feverish and had not responded to any of the
herbs and medicines that they had brought with them. They needed a healer, but
they did not have one, as the few who remained in Ortia were still required for
the wounded from the siege.
Viola and Potentilla were at the back, making
sure that Kath didn’t dawdle. The human had been even more sullen since her
encounter with Luxia.
‘You
did a good job with that Portalian, ma’am’ said Potentilla as they hurried along,
‘and sorry about the sword thing – you were a step ahead of me…’
Viola found it odd that Potentilla insisted
on calling her ‘ma’am’ even when they were talking as friends. It seemed
incongruous, particularly given everything that they had been through together.
Still, there was nothing she could say given that Potentilla was an imperial
soldier and Viola outranked her. That left her with one civilian friend in the
party, and Kath wasn’t talking to her.
‘It
seemed like the only thing to do and it may buy us some time’
‘She was an odd thing, wasn’t she?’ continued
Potentilla
‘Odd? I suppose so – but I’d say more
misguided and terrified’
Potentilla considered this point at unusual
length. Viola had never seen her as hesitant about anything before.
‘I was wondering how an elf got to be like
that…’
‘I know. It’s worrying isn’t it?’
Potentilla nodded.
‘I was taught that elves are basically good’
‘Yes, I was too’
‘And that no elf would knowingly do evil’
‘Well, that seems to be wrong, for a start’
‘Maybe Luxia didn’t know she was doing evil.
Could that be it?’
Viola stopped on the long road for a second
to consider this. Kath caught up with them, and, despite herself she stopped
next to them.
‘Well, I don’t really know’ repied Viola,
‘she didn’t look evil, certainly’
Kath had been determined to stomp past them,
but she had to ask about this.
‘What are you two talking about?’
Potentilla flushed slightly. Viola looked up
at her and realised that this would be a very tricky area to discuss with a
human. Still, it would be worse to exclude her completely from the
conversation.
‘We were talking about Luxia’
Kath screwed up her face and for a second the
two elves thought she might spit on the ground. She shivered with the memory of
intelligent beings who would eagerly kill plains-dwellers.
‘Why waste any breath on her? I think she’s
best forgotten about completely’
‘But she was an Elf, Kath’ Potentilla said, half-aware
that this might be a contentious thing to say.
‘Well, not just that…’ said Viola,
half-heartedly.
‘Eh?’ said Kath, ‘what difference did it make
that she was an elf?’
Potentilla looked at her commanding officer
for guidance. Viola refused to meet her gaze. Apparently she was going to have
to explain this awkward belief herself. She might as well just go straight to
the point.
‘We have this belief that all elves are
innately good’ Viola explained, wincing.
‘Come on now’ said Kath, ‘how could that be
true? Nobody’s born inherently good’
‘Or everyone is’ murmured Viola
Potentilla couldn’t let this go unchallenged.
‘No, ma’am, that’s not true. Elves are born
good, just as we were just discussing’
Kath cocked her head. She wasn’t sure whether
to frown or smile.
‘And Humans, Tillie, what are humans born as?’
They had fallen quite a way behind the others
and Viola was shooing them forward. They began to walk on very slowly. Viola
had half-hoped that the walking would disrupt the conversation, but it hadn’t.
‘Humans?’ replied Potentilla, ‘well they’d be
neutral I guess, or maybe just a little bit bad. Same as dwarves, oh and Rem’s
people and so on’
‘A bit bad?’ snorted Kath, ‘how do you work
that out?’
Viola had given up trying to avoid a racial
incident. She walked slightly ahead and let them get on with it. She could
always break them up if they came to blows.
‘Well, you’re second-made’ Potentilla
explained, ‘while we’re first made’
‘What on earth does that mean?’
‘It means that the elves were made first and
are perfect and the other races were made later, and are not so…umm… well made.
That’s what I was taught at school.’
‘I’ve never heard that before. How can that
be true?’
Kath walked rapidly forward a few steps to
catch up with Viola.
‘Vee’ she said, ‘is that what you were
taught?’
Viola was very glad to hear Kath call her by
that name again, but was seriously unhappy about being dragged back into the
conversation.
‘They’re just fables. Don’t take them
seriously’
They were losing sight of the soldiers ahead
of them.
‘Come on, we must catch up – we can talk
about this later’
They jogged forward and the conversation
ended.
***
They
saw The Great Wall at about two o’clock in the afternoon. For Kath and
Potentilla this was just the mirror image of how they had approached the wall
on the other side; for the others it was a slowly emerging wonder of the world.
The slightly bent grey object on the horizon slowly metamorphosed into a huge
wall, far too high and far too magical for any to climb. As they approached the
structure it loomed higher and higher above them. They needed to be on the
other side of it, but they still weren’t sure how they would ever get there.
They stopped a few yards in front of its
slate grey expanse. Viola indicated that they should rest.
They had some of their rations and shivered
slightly, even in the lee of this great windbreak. Kath sat at the base of the
wall with her ear pressed firmly against it.
‘There’s always music’ she said, not talking
to anyone in particular, ‘with Quiena there’s always music hidden inside
somewhere. But I can’t quite make out the shape of it…’
Potentilla, forgetting that Kath might well
be angry with her, sat down beside her, and listened too.
‘I can hear some sounds’ she said, ‘but it’s
not really music’
Kath threw her a withering glance.
‘That cannot be true, surely, Lieutenant, how can you be perfect and
yet not hear it?’
Potentilla looked mystified for a second and
then laughed.
‘That’s so funny, Kath’ she said, ‘good one!’
By now the other soldiers wanted to see if
they could hear the music. One by one they trooped up to the wall and listened,
and then one by one they retreated, disappointed. Only Viola was left, and she
seemed disinclined to try it out.
‘Ma’am’ said Sedum, ‘are you not going to
listen?’
A mild bantering grew up among her squad.
There were gentle suggestions that she might be scared of the wall, or
possibly, and even worse, tone deaf, and eventually she had to agree to do it.
It seemed such an absurd thing, however.
She sat down next to Kath, and astonishingly,
Kath smiled at her. She did a double take, and the smile had gone, but it was a
step forward.
She put her ear rather tentatively against
the cold granite surface of the wall. Instantly she heard music play in her
head; a long and beautiful but intensely sad melody. It began in a major key,
confident and bright, but as it played on its colour darkened into the relative
minor, and it ended in poignancy and uncertainty. Then it started up again:
thirteen bars of four beats, repeated eternally.
‘What can you hear, Vee?’ asked Kath,
eagerly.
Viola began to sing out the tune in her clear
alto voice. No-one spoke.
After a little while Kath nodded, ‘oh that’s
it, of course’ and she began to sing along, hesitantly to begin with and then
with growing confidence. Their voices wove together.
Ophia’s old song of loss, her song without
words, filled the still East Visneorian plain. They were all gripped by
memories of their own lives and of the terrible mistakes that each of them had
made, and for a few seconds everything seemed very bleak.
Then Potentilla remembered that she was very
hungry and that she needed to eat as soon as possible.
‘Shut up you, two’ she shouted, and the spell
was broken. It was lunch time and they laid out their provisions in the shelter
of the curving wall.
No comments:
Post a Comment