Chapter fifty-six

The Southern Plains

 

The healed man woke up suddenly – as if he had been disturbed by a loud noise or the contents of a bucket of water. He looked down at the rug on the floor of the tent. He had no idea where he was. He had been woken by an idea. Or maybe it wasn’t even an idea  – perhaps it was a concept: a concept, maybe, of a world that had never existed and never would exist. He was cured of madness but he was not how he had been before. The taint had distorted his mind and the old grey god had wiped it clean. What had now filled it were his most fantastical hopes.

Dawn was beginning to colour the sky and the guards, set there by Rem and who had no clear idea of who their captive was anyway, were fast asleep – they had given up waiting for him to awaken. It was simple for him to walk past them, and, of course, he had no idea that they had been set to guard and protect him. The rest of the settlement was still slumbering and no-one else was about. 

It was cold in the open air but he wandered anyway. His mind was resetting and re-evaluating, but with almost no information to process. It knew, though, that it needed a plan.

Eventually it devised one. He had to go home, although he only had the vaguest idea where that was. What was the name of his home city? He searched around in his now almost emptied mind: what was it called? The answer came to him in a rush – Claria, the city of teak. He could see it so clearly in his mind’s eye, although he had never been there and the image of it that he carried in his mind was from a beautiful book, an old book of engravings that had been written more than a thousand years before.

Where was Claria? He had no clear idea, except that it must be east of where he was now, because it had always been east of everywhere that he had ever been. Without hesitation he walked towards the rising sun.

 

***

In the days that followed he drifted on an erratic path from one tented settlement to the next. All the Plains Dwellers that he met thought him a mad Algharian beggar – they were unaware of how rare such a pale skin was among the desert nomads. They gave him food and shelter and he was very grateful. He asked everyone that he met to show him the way to “Claria” but no-one had heard of it, and that was because it had long since ceased to exist. 

Beyond the plains he came hard against the Spina Montes, which separate East Visneoria from Tlaxaca. Unpassable and unbearably cold in late December, he could go no further that way and so he made north, as some instinct told him that to the south was only the endless sea.

It wasn’t long before the Orbiverdi found him and gave him shelter. They remembered Baron von Eisen well in this part of the Empire and had no love for him, but now he was unrecognisable, his hair long and his beard unkempt. And he had no memory of his earlier life with which to remind them of his evil deeds. Just like the Plains Dwellers they assumed that this poor man was mad; which had been true, but, in fact, was no longer. All he was now was emptied and filled. Filled with old hope. This was his reflex, like a homing pigeon released into the unknown but still able to find its way home.

They didn’t try to keep him in their mountain fastness. They let him wander on to the wide pass over which their new city overlooked. He was scarcely different from a beggar by then, asking every person that he met for food and water. No-one turned him down. At the end of the pass, however, the help faded away – all there was the  sub-tropical grassland that led down to the old city of the White Devil.

He followed the road for day after day, learning to find and ambush the little antelopes that wandered across the plain. He was still a strong man and he learned to wield a rough-hewn club as well as his grandmaster’s sword. He discovered how to make a fire from the dry acacia kindling. And he learned to skin, gut and cook an animal using a flint blade. He carried on walking. Occasionally the fragments of his old memories tried to surface, but he learnt to push them back down. He had no interest in his past; he could all but taste its bitterness on the tip of his tongue.

 

***

 

It was his newly-developed hiding and sneaking skills that saved him. The army appeared out of nowhere; a sea of red, thousands of them, all human soldiers; cavalry and infantry. And with them huge siege engines – rams and ballistae. And scattered among them were the Summoners, who, if he had remembered anything at all, he would have known were able to call forth creatures of fire from the earth itself.  It was a much bigger force than before, but he had no idea where it might be heading. He only knew that they were undoubtedly enemies. He hid under his newly acquired impala skins in a hollow under a huge banyan tree. They passed him by without even looking properly, he was just a heap of fur and rags: sometimes it was better to be weak.

He waited for a long while after their tumult had passed, shivering with fear under his makeshift shelter. The sound and fury of the army had been too much for him; he feared the trampling of their implacable feet and the thud of their stamping hooves.  He wondered where they were going and who they went to fight. What was west of here, he wondered, but all he knew of were the gentle plains and kind mountain creatures who had helped him. Who would want to hurt them?

After that he travelled mostly at twilight, just after dawn and just before dusk. He passed a strange pyramidal city at a distance, crawling through the long dry grass where there were many of the red army. Leading straight away from the deadly city he found a road, an old wide road. He knew enough now to avoid these structures, if seemed that humans were warlike and foul. He had not seen his reflection for a long time, but he could guess how similar he looked to those soldiers. He pushed that thought away – he was another sort of creature, surely, a hunting thing; a wolf perhaps. 

He knew that it was too dangerous to use the wide road, and he had no idea where it led. He was a long way away from anywhere that he knew and there were enemies everywhere. He began to wonder if he should go back to wherever it was that he had come from. He should perhaps retrace his steps back to safety.

He had turned and begun to plod westward when the black coyote appeared. The scraggy wolf began following him, a few yards behind. Every time he stopped the beast would stop too, patiently waiting. Its eyes were unsettlingly blue.  He tried to ignore it but it kept running up to him and yapping, and then running back the opposite way to where he was walking. He stopped.

‘What do you want?’ he asked, glaring at the creature. He half expected an answer.

The coyote looked at him, expectantly.

‘Do you know the way, dog?’ he asked, ‘do you know where Claria lies?’

No sooner had he said that than the wolf sprinted away from him, back down the way he had come. It stopped a little way away and howled softly.

‘How can you know the way?’ he asked.

For a moment the man thought the howl sounded like laughter.  Then the wolf was away again. The emptied human had no other plan, so he followed. The coyote kept up a fast pace, but the man had never been leaner or fitter. Whatever lay in his past, locked away somewhere deep in his mind, was becoming harder and harder to recover. He didn’t mind that at all.

The coyote led him far from the road, far from all named places. Soon all that he could see was the tree-lined savannah, dotted with giraffes and termite mounds. It was a long route and with no certain destination.  For the time being, however, he was content. He would keep moving.