The Keeping Place

The Winding Path

1

It was a chill moonless night, the only light a raw glow from a fire in the stone-lined pit that reflected dully on the cobbles around its edge, and barely reached the walls surrounding the courtyard. Everything that lay outside the reach of the fire's broodish lume was lost in that blackest shadow which always seems to attend any night light. Sometimes I think the dark is drawn to the light as a moth to flame. Maybe it is the nature of all things to be pulled towards their opposites.

I dragged my eyes from the hypnotic lurching of the flames, determined to read on while I was yet undisturbed. Holding the pages instinctively to the light, though the marks on them would have been all but invisible even in daylight, I ran the tips of my fingers over the rough lines of holes in the paper. I had learned the code of prickings much as I once learned my letters, and the words they shaped were ones I knew, yet skimming over what I had read before, it seemed to me that other meanings hovered above them.

Perhaps this was only because he who made them did not see the world with his eyes, but with his other senses – touch, smell, hearing. I could smell and hear and taste too, of course, but not as well as Dameon. Lacking sight, his other senses had gained strength to compensate.

Had Dameon realised when he pricked his thoughts into the pages that he had been sending me more than the words he set down? I could not doubt it, knowing him, for he was ever subtle. As an empath he had the power to read emotions and transmit them, yet I had always attributed his keen perception to his blindness rather than to his Talent. Of course it was impossible and even foolish of me to try to separate their effect on him, for together they made Dameon what he was.

Yet it seems to me that sight is the most easily deceived of senses and the having of it makes us blind in other ways. Even so, I would not wish my sight from me.

I missed Damean, and perhaps that was what made me strive for the essence of him within his letter, carrying it about with me despite its bulk, and snatching what moments I might to read a few lines. With him gone, it was as if Obernewtyn had lost something vital to itself, some necessary spark so modest as to reveal its importance only in its absence. I did not know what name to give to it. Miky said we lacked our heart without him, and Angina said it was the soul we missed with their master away. Rushton called Dameon his conscience and regretted the loss of his sharp-honed ethical sense, but I thought it had some finer shading than all of those things. To my mind, Kella told it best when she said she missed Dameon's sweetness.

'Funaga-li need names for all things, even that which cannot be named,' Maruman sent sardonically from where he lay on the bench seat behind me.

The old cat used the derogatory form of funaga, which was the thoughtsymbol beasts use for humans, but his mental voice lacked its usual bite. No doubt because he had been all afternoon lolling in the sun.

'Maruman does not loll,' he sent indignantly. I turned to find his single yellow eye regarding me balefully, but the rest of him, his many scars, his battered head and torn ear, the empty socket of his ruined eye, were hidden in my shadow and the general darkness. These injuries had been incurred during his increasingly rare visits to the Blacklands. I had never been able to discover why those poisoned regions drew him so, for he went there during the periodic fits of madness that overtook him, led by his strange wild visions. If he remembered anything of his terrible journeys when he limped back to Obernewtyn after his wits returned, he could not or would not speak of it.

He was bad-tempered and difficult at the best of times, yet there was no beast so close to my heart. His had been the first mind I touched with my own. Later he followed me to Obernewtyn, convinced that I was destined to lead beasts to freedom from humans. I had long argued with him that I was not the Innle of beast-legend, a beast thoughtsymbol which translated in human speech as the Seeker. But I had been called this title now in too many strange circumstances to reject it or any task connected to it outright. Nonetheless, I sometimes wondered why, desiring freedom from humans, beasts would want a human saviour.

'One does not want a tree or the sky, but they are. Nomore do beasts desire a funaga-li to lead them. But we accept/know/see what is/will be. Unlike the funaga always asking whywhywhy,' Maruman sent rudely. 'Funaga-li rushrush body and mind here/ there/ otherwhere to prove they exist.'

I made no response other than to give the old cat's intrusive probe a mental shove to shift it outside my mindshield, much as I sometimes pushed him from my lap when my knees had grown stiff from the weight of him. But he was right. We humans did seem to love our busy-ness for its own sake. Possibly it was the nature of our kind, for though our thoughts did flurry here and there, from that frenzy came whatever shaped us.

I smiled at myself wryly, for was I not guilty now of another human trait, which was to take ourselves too seriously, ever devising clever ways to prove to ourselves that all we do is vital simply because we do it.

My smile faded, for it came to me that this very characteristic was responsible for the doom the Beforetimers had brought to their world. I say their, because it is impossible for us to think of them as our ancestors, even though we who live in these times after the Great White are descended from the survivors of the holocaust and dwell in what little remains habitable of their world.

What we know of them is incomplete and difficult to understand, being gleaned from ruinous bits and pieces left over from their time, most of it utterly disconnected from whatever gave it meaning. We know that they were very numerous and had divided themselves into a number of great nations. We know from time to time wars were waged between them, though there were always attempts to reconcile as well. Their civilisation had spanned the Earth, and the Beforetimers, whether they dealt gently or harshly with their own kind, had used the natural things of the world ruthlessly for their gain and their amusement, to the detriment of all non-humans. We knew from the Teknoguild's researches that they had created machines that enabled them to think with incredible speed, fly and speak from one side of the Earth to the other and build their cities of shining towers. This ability to make machines whose powers exceeded their own had been the secret of their might, but it had led them into folly, for they had made weaponmachines which finally put an end to all their terrible cleverness.

None would ever know what had possessed them to create the means of their own doom. How had they not lived in terror that the machines would be used? The Teknoguildmaster Garth says it was pride that made them desire to create such things, and believe they could control them, but that does not explain to my satisfaction why they made them. For their wars, Rushton says. To be sure they would win. But what good was a weapon that destroyed everything including its user? There could be no winner in such a game. Yet they had made them and used them and so had they severed themselves from us, and were now naught but mythical beings which grew in power and stature as those that people tales are wont to do.

Some say it does not matter that our memory of them is fragmented and fantastical, since their time is gone for ever, along with all they wrought.

I wish that were -truly so.

Chilled by where my pondering had brought me, I folded Dameon's letter into my pocket, arched my back to stretch the ache from it, and gazed about the company beginning at last to assemble. I could see only the parts of them that faced the fire, and at first glance it seemed that disjointed fragments of people and beasts were about me. Things that held the light caught my eye; the gleaming gold of the Beastspeaking guildmaster's arm band, the shining curls of the empath-enhancer, Freya, the pale shimmer of Avra's mane and ear tips, and the ruff of the great white ridgeback she-dog that sat between them.

I studied her with interest. The ridgeback had come to the mountains at the melting of the wintertime snow that each year blocked the narrow trail connecting us to the rest of the Land. She had led a great limping horde of half-starved domestic animals. One of the coercers on duty at the pass had notified Obernewtyn of their approach, and Avra and two beastspeakers had hastened out to meet the unlikely company.

The mountain pony explained, as she did to all new beast arrivals to the mountain valley, that Obernewtyn was a secret refuge for humans and beasts. The newcomers could find food and healing there, and other help if they wanted it. At first the travellers had refused the invitation, patently dismayed to learn that the free-running barud the white she-dog had promised them was occupied by humans. Avra pointed out mildly that though not vast, the valley was a free-running barud for beasts, and that the humans who dwelt there did not interfere with them. As the travellers were exhausted and in need of food and treatment, she argued persuasively, they might just as well come to Obernewtyn and see for themselves.

The healers who treated the new arrivals said that all bore signs of savage treatment but it was the Beast-speaking guildmaster, Alad, who told me their story. They had all come from a farm just below the Gelfort Range. One day the white ridgeback, Smoke, turned on her master and killed him. Then she had convinced the other animals to come with her to seek the fabled freerunning barud. It was a remarkable journey they had made, all the more because the beasts had no survival skills, being bred and reared by humans. But for the will and determination of the she-dog, they would doubtless have been recaptured or killed by wild beasts or they would have perished simply because of their inability to shelter and feed themselves. She had made them travel at night, fighting off predators, hunting for food and forcing those who could not eat meat to forage for roots and grains to sustain them. When they would have given up, she drove them with threats that she would eat them if they fell by the wayside. Arriving in the White Valley at last, they managed to eke out a bare existence waiting for the pass to thaw.

After their first disappointment, the beasts began to see that Obernewtyn was not like any funaga place they had known. Once they were healthy they were taught the human fingerspeech devised by the rebel, Brydda Llewellyn, which mimicked the gestures and movements that animals used to communicate at the most rudimentary level. When Avra finally offered the choice of remaining and working as free beasts and members of Obernewtyri s community, with the right to speak in Beastguild, or of leaving to dwell in the wilds, many chose to stay. For those few who wanted to leave, the Beastguild appointed a teacher, usually one of their own kind, to show them what they would need to know in order to survive in the wild. Some few chose to live outside Obernewtyn, but to work on the farms in exchange for food and for refuge in the long harsh wintertime.

The ridgeback had been among those who stayed, and looking at her, I found myself wondering why. She was clearly capable of fending for herself. She was very big and had an untamed air despite being raised among humans. Possibly she had wolf blood in her, for men had bred them together from time to time. The oddest thing about her though, was that the beasts she had led to the mountains would have been prey under other circumstances. Why had she not simply made her break for freedom alone? Why, having delivered her followers to safety against all odds, had she chosen to remain in a human establishment?

Without intending it, my mind reached out to her. Immediately, I felt her awareness of me, but before I could address her mind it spat out a rush of images that flowed so fast I felt my breath taken out of me.

I saw a man cut the throat of a cow. The red line at its throat was like a gaping mouth, and as the beast fell, a bloody froth bubbled from its mouth to stain a snowdrift. I heard the keening anguish of its newborn calf, and felt the departing mindforce of the dying cow brush me; felt the sweet sigh of its farewell to the watching dog, and her calf. The man turned to lift the tottering calf's neck back, baring its throat, and I felt the hot terrifying fluidity of the dog's fury roar through her veins.

I tried to deflect her rage, but to my helpless horror, it drove down like a dark fist into the very deepest part of my mind where my ability to kill lay coiled and almost forgotten.

I felt her shock as it stirred.

'No!' I cried in my mind, and thrust her violently from me.

I stared across the fire pit into her eyes; so pale blue as to be almost colourless.

'The master-li killed the bovine and would have killed her calf because it lacked an ear,' she sent in a powerful mental voice. 'I do not know why. Allbeasts know not all of a kind are born alike/exact. None can know what darkness /madness drives the funaga.'

'Why did you show that to me?' I sent, shaken to the depths of myself by the hot hungry power that she had almost roused.

'Because the funaga should know what their victims feel.' She added thoughtfully, 'Oldstories tell that the Innle who will lead beasts to freedom from the funaga has the power to kill by will alone.'

'I have thatpower but I do not use it,' I temporised.

'I felt/smelled the use of it on you.'

'Once only. Knowledge of it firstcame when the life of mymate was in danger and I used it to save him. But notnow/nevermore.'

The dog gave the mental equivalent of a shrug. 'It is nature to defend one's mate. It is nature for somebeasts to kill and for others to be killed. The funaga are meat eaters, and killing is nature for them, but they seldom hunt their meat with courage. They trap/breed/chain/ fence until the killing, which is done without respect/ dignity. Beasts eat flesh but the funaga do what nobeast would. Funaga eat freedom.'

'No funaga here eats flesh. We/I think it is unnature for our kind of funaga to kill for any reason. It is unnature for yourkind to kill in revenge/anger. Nature wills beasts to kill for food /protect the young. That cow wasnot yourkind.'

'Truly she was not. I am unnatured as are allbeasts who dwell with the funaga-li. I am what the master/ funaga-li made of me.'

'Why did you come here?' I asked. 'Why do you stay?'

She turned her pale eyes on me. 'I came to seek my death.'

'We all journey towards the longsleep, for that is where the road of life leads,' Gahltha sent, his cool mental probe cutting between us. 'But now Avra would speak and we must listen.'