AMONG THE LIONS
Among the ruins, late cabbages, carrots, and turnips grew in straight lines, overlooked by five lions with scrolled manes and smiling faces. Earlier in the year these lions had worn wigs of green leaves and scarlet flowers, but now the bean stems were brittle, and the flowers were gone. All that remained were large, dry pods rattling with the seeds of next year’s crop and a few tattered leaves.
It was autumn but the gardener was still working up and down between his remaining rows of plants, his bare back shining like copper in the autumn sunlight, his long black hair tied back with a plaited ribbon of flax. As he worked he whispered under his breath, smiling into the crumbling soil. His name was Heriot Tarbas and he was twelve years old.
As he worked he sang a little, then whispered again, happy at home on his farm, in his own place, among his own people. During the last three years the catastrophic headaches and the twisting fits that had marked his entire childhood had become much rarer. Of course the dreams hung on. He still dreamed that dream—the one in which he found himself sitting on the wide windowsill of an alien building, looking in at a boy several years older than he was and sending in an urgent message: “Know me! Know me. I’ll protect you until then, but you have to recognize me when the time comes. Then it’ll be your job to save me. I’ll need you and you’ll need me.” That dream, along with other less defined ones, certainly hung on, but at least he was growing out of the old feeling that something ravenous was feeding on him and tearing him into two. Perhaps, in time, the dreams would fade and disappear and he would become an ordinary man like his brother and cousins, just as hairy and just as strong.
A farm cat stalked toward him, sniffing at the freshly turned earth, and Heriot scooped it up, scratching it under the chin and staring deeply into its yellowish eyes, and as he did, someone said his name inquiringly, so he grew immediately quiet, anxious that his private conversations with cats and gardens shouldn’t be overheard.
His older sister, Baba, was looking over the wall behind him. Heriot looked back cautiously. Since she had grown up and been pulled in from the fields to work in the kitchen and dairy, she always seemed to be blaming him for something. But on this occasion at least, she was excited and cheerful.
Heriot had one particular eye—his left eye—that he called his puzzled eye. It didn’t always see straight. Now he covered it with his left hand and stared back at his sister, knowing she had come into the garden to tell him something exciting.
“The Travelers have arrived,” she announced. “Old Jen sent me to bring you in. But don’t think you’re getting out of work. You’ll be given some other job, that’s all.”
She grinned and vanished. Heriot cleaned his spade and hoe, then set off down the path that led from the garden to the walled courtyard of his sprawling home. He and his mother, the family herb woman, had planted ferns around the outside of the courtyard wall to keep witches at bay, interspersing them with daisies, well-known sun signs, now working their way into a prodigal autumn flowering.
The house had been built within the walls of a ruined castle, but these days it seemed to have become part of the castle, growing naturally out of the stone shell, for any of the first rooms that were still intact were either lived in or used for storage. Beyond those original, uneven walls, built of huge blocks of stone, Heriot could glimpse a dairy and an old barn, alongside the roof of a new one. Then, beyond all those roofs and walls, broad fields sloped upward, patching the hillside until, toward the top, the hill shrugged itself casually out of the farm’s control. From the very top of the hill the black rock Draevo, though eyeless, looked back at Heriot darkly, just as it had looked at him ever since he could remember.
Once or twice a year the Travelers would arrive in wagons painted all over with stiff, angular figures whose significances were forgotten, with star patterns, histories, and emblems, until it seemed that mere horses must find it impossibly heavy to pull so much art from one side of Hoad to the other. Looking at these designs, Heriot found himself believing that, beyond the farm, the world lost its reality.
Of course the farm was real—there was no doubt about that. Then beyond the farm lay other farms, mostly undivided by walls and hedges, and then a village, while on the other side of that line of hills was the sea and the dark shape of an island—Cassio’s Island, connected to the mainland by an amazing causeway three leagues long. But after that there was nothing for Heriot but dim space and echoing, meaningless names. To the north lay Diamond, the King’s city, and to the west lay Bucazaz, the inner plain where, years ago, his father had died in the King’s wars. At this very moment, Heriot vaguely knew, leaders and generals, even the King and his three sons, had gathered together along with their enemies, the Dukes of the Dannorad, and were negotiating to end such wars forever.
Beyond Bucazaz lay Cordandeygo and Rous Barnet (the city among the mountains). These were all a part of the land of Hoad, and where Hoad ended, across the mountains or the sea, other lands took over… the Dannorad, Camp Hyot, the Islands. The countries were described in books and pinned down with those meaningless names. All Heriot could picture was a mist in which those names came and went, undulating like dreaming fish.
© 2009 Margaret Mahy
Stuff
Adobe DRM
