Ibryen

Chapter 12-2

Ibryen laid a fatherly hand on his shoulder. ‘One thing we’re fortunate in here is that we’re not short of food yet,’ he said. ‘Not much variety, I’ll grant you, but it’s good simple fare. Eat what you can while you’re with us and relish it. Get back some of your strength, you’re going to need it, and your going hungry won’t fill the bellies of your comrades in the city. If you think it’s safe you can take some back with you when you leave.’

The reassurance seemed to ease Iscar just as giving it seemed to help Ibryen, the one exhausted and fretful following his difficult journey, the other still trying to come to terms with the startling news he had just received.

‘What shall we do, Count?’ Iscar asked as he regained his composure.

‘What have you already done?’

‘Nothing,’ Iscar replied hastily. ‘Everyone’s stunned and the city’s closed. All we could think of was to let you know what had happened.’

Ibryen nodded slowly. ‘Have there been any signs of disturbance or disaffection amongst the Guards or the army?’ he asked.

‘No. The only thing out of the ordinary was that they tolled the Dohrum Bell twice,’ Iscar replied. Both Ibryen and Marris straightened in surprise at this, but Ibryen simply asked how quickly the army had been brought in to help with the purging.

‘Almost immediately,’ Iscar replied.

Ibryen frowned. ‘No one can accuse the Gevethen of being incompetent when it comes to controlling their fighters.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You’re right to have done nothing. The world can’t be other than a better place with Hagen gone from it, but I fear that any precipitate action would be foolish at best. It occurred to me that perhaps the killing was part of a rebellion by the Gevethen’s own people. But from what you say, it seems that it was nothing more than a random act by someone deranged.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘It’s good that something like that can suddenly strike so close to the Gevethen’s heart — perhaps it’ll teach them about the vagaries of chance, or about the consequences of using force to repress a people, though I doubt it — but it’s tragic that neither we nor you are in a position to take any tactical advantage from it. Tragic.’ Wilfully he sloughed off the mood and became authoritative. ‘You and your people must concentrate on surviving until the purging’s over. Stay still and silent. Take no risks. Some other time will come.’

He would have preferred a more rousing conclusion. Marris echoed the sense of anticlimax. ‘The death of such a man in such a way should have heralded great events.’

‘Perhaps it does,’ Ibryen said thoughtfully. ‘If we’ve got the vision to see them. Many things today are different from what they were yesterday, aren’t they?’ He looked at the Traveller. ‘Perhaps what we need to do is look and listen to what’s happening beyond the immediately apparent.’ The idea intrigued him. ‘With Hagen gone, there’ll be a rare scrambling for position amongst their followers. Right from the top to the bottom. Change all the way through. And who can say what that’ll bring?’ He spoke to Iscar again. ‘Tell your people to watch and listen. To find out what promotions are being made, what new rivalries begun, what quarrels.’

‘And what scores are being settled,’ Marris added.

‘But take great care,’ Ibryen went on. ‘We know to our cost that the Gevethen have more unseen and unknown servants than liveried ones and the change will affect them too. Take care who you bring new to the cause.’

‘Informers are a problem we’re well aware of,’ Iscar said with a hint of reproach in his voice. ‘The death pits contain more than just the Gevethen’s victims.’

The mood around the table changed perceptibly at this dark observation. Iscar’s attention returned to the Traveller, though he did not speak.

Ibryen addressed the unspoken question. ‘Nothing as momentous as your news has happened here, Iscar, and what has happened I can’t tell you about. But change has come here too, and a new strategy is under way that will take us directly to the heart of the Gevethen.’

Iscar’s eyes widened and he made to speak but Ibryen’s hand held him silent. ‘For the time being, I can tell you neither the time nor the events that will mark this, but inform your people that it will come when they least expect it and they will have their part to play in it.’ He leaned forward earnestly. ‘Suffice it that the Gevethen will be attacked from a direction that they did not even know existed.’

Iscar glanced quickly at the Traveller and then at Marris, but the Traveller was gazing idly around the Hall, apparently indifferent to the conversation, and Marris’s face was unreadable.

‘You must rest now,’ Ibryen said, ignoring the mute appeal. ‘Leave me your messages to study and I’ll reply to them before you go.’

It was an end to the brief conference. Iscar struggled for a moment with the questions that Ibryen’s announcement had loosed in him, but left them unasked.

A little later, Iscar was resting in one of the rooms off the Hall, while Marris and the Traveller were sitting with nothing to do other than watch Ibryen as he read through the papers that Iscar had brought. Marris was restless, several times catching his muscular fingers on the verge of beating out a devil’s tattoo on the table. As Ibryen turned over yet another page, Marris’s patience ended abruptly.

‘What did you tell him that for?’ he hissed.

Only Ibryen’s eyes moved as he looked over the page at his questioner. ‘I’m reading,’ he said.

‘What did you tell him that for?’ Marris repeated.

‘Let me finish,’ Ibryen replied, with an edge to his voice which stopped Marris pressing his question further, but made him even more restless than before. Finally Ibryen laid down the papers and pushed them across to Marris, his face grim. ‘Morale’s better than we deserve,’ he said before Marris could speak. ‘It’s not easy living here, but it doesn’t compare with what our people in Dirynhald are having to tolerate. Living in squalid daily hardship and helpless in the face of a terror that can arbitrarily snatch them from their firesides at any time without even the vaguest pretence of lawful authority. We forget too easily that for some of them each passing moment is a nightmare, each passing footstep, each knock on the door the possible harbinger of untold horror.’

‘But why did you tell Iscar we had some great plan in hand?’ Marris blurted out, though less forcefully than before.

‘Because we have,’ Ibryen replied.

‘What!’ Marris exclaimed.

‘Because we have,’ Ibryen confirmed. Marris’s face showed surprise and alarm in equal proportions. ‘It’s all right,’ Ibryen said. ‘I’ve not taken leave of my senses.’ He cast an uncertain glance at the Traveller. ‘In fact, it may be that I’ve just come to them. Hear me out, then you can say whatever you want.’

He became both urgent and purposeful. ‘There’s nothing in what I’m going to say that you haven’t foreshadowed countless times yourself, Corel. Whenever I’ve said “if”, you’ve always replaced it with “when”, haven’t you? A dark joke between us — mentor and pupil. Now, after what’s happened over the last few hours, I think — no — I know, we must accept that you were right.’ Without turning from Marris, he indicated the Traveller. ‘Whoever this man is, from wherever he’s come, his assessment of our position is beyond reproach. I suspect we’ve accepted that already, at heart. Accepted that we’re doomed here unless we do something radically different from what’s been our strategy since we escaped the city.’

‘A successful strategy,’ Marris interposed dutifully.

‘Yes, I know, I know,’ Ibryen hurried on. ‘But doomed for all that. Attrition will finish us, even if luck stays with us. There’s no other outcome possible. We must grasp that at any cost. Our strategy’s served its time. Now we must change it.’

Marris managed not to demand, ‘To what?’ though it lit his face.

Ibryen turned to the Traveller. ‘I’m far from clear in my mind why I’ve allowed you to be privy to all this but that’s by the by, now. Today should have been as any other day when winter’s almost gone and spring’s almost here. Everyone in this valley knew what was expected of them, and why. Nothing was purposeless. And tomorrow would have been much the same. And the day after. Only a gentle and steady change like the season itself with occasional storms and showers as we laid plans to draw our enemy’s forces out and harry them or returned to some victory celebration. On and on. But instead, the cycle’s been broken. Where there should have been silence has come the din of two messages. One from you, strange and enigmatic, from a direction unknown to us, and one from our own kind, blunt and stark, telling us of the greatest blow against our enemy that we could ever have expected short of their actual death.’ He paused for a moment, staring fixedly ahead. ‘Whatever else these messages have told us, they’ve blown the mist from our eyes and left us gazing unblinking at the truth.’

Unexpectedly, he smiled. The smile was strained, however. ‘But where’s it left us, apart from dazzled? We can do nothing about Iscar’s message other than at once celebrate and grieve, though I can try to encourage and hearten my people with a few words.’ He tapped the papers that lay spread on the table in front of Marris, untouched. ‘But while we must conduct ourselves as before, for our safety’s sake, we do need a completely new strategy... one which cannot be attained by continuing as before. A paradox. So we must look for the way that can’t exist, mustn’t we?’ The Traveller looked uneasy. Ibryen did not release him. ‘How should I attend to the message that you’ve brought, Traveller?’

The little man hesitated. ‘I doubt I’m the one to advise you in such matters, Count,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m not...’

‘...used to people.’ Ibryen finished his plea for him. ‘Yes, I know. You’ve mentioned that once or twice already. Nor are you a soldier. But most of the people in these mountains who are fighting for me weren’t soldiers when they arrived, so that’s of little consequence. The fact is, the wind that brought you here, left you. Tell me again the message you heard, and tell me what I must do.’

Marris looked at him anxiously, increasingly concerned about the direction of the conversation. For a moment, the Traveller looked as if he was considering fleeing the Hall, but it passed. ‘I don’t know what you must do, Count, but the message, more and more clear to me now as I look back, was, “Help me. I am nearly spent.”’

Ibryen leaned forward intently. ‘You said that what you heard was hung about with the aura of the Culmadryen.’ He laid a hand on the papers. ‘I have to read between the lines of these letters to see into the hearts of my people and discover the truth. Now, tell me everything about what you heard so that out of the plethora of change that’s swept over us today I can perhaps find one small thing that will point me towards a right action.’

Marris’s gaze flickered between the two men.

The Traveller sniffed and shook his head. ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said weakly.

Ibryen was unyielding. ‘You’ve no choice. You must tell me what you know for sure, and what you think, however unsure, and any speculation that comes to mind. You must tell me everything whether you think I’ll understand or not.’

The Traveller did what Marris had assiduously been avoiding doing, he drummed a flurrying tattoo on the table with his fingers. It ended with a resounding slap. Ibryen waited, his gaze allowing the Traveller no escape.

‘What I know for sure I’ve told you,’ he said eventually. ‘The call was faint and distant, rising and falling on the wind and echoing and re-echoing off the crags and pinnacles, but it was plain and simple, and it was crying for help.’

‘A sound?’ Ibryen asked.

The Traveller frowned. ‘Of course it was a sound, what else could I hear?’ He relented abruptly with a moue of self-reproach. ‘But not such as you could hear, I think, nor in a language that you could understand.’

‘What language was it in?’

The Traveller gave a chuckle like a parent being asked an honest but impossibly taxing question by a child. ‘I’m not as my forebears were, Count, but like them, and unlike you, I’m not separated from my own, or, for that matter, from many other things, by the limitations of language as you know it. What I heard was spoken in what you would call the language of the Culmaren.’ Strange resonances filled the word ‘spoken’, bringing together song and rhythm and dance and joining and many other images into a totality of meanings which made both Ibryen and Marris catch their breaths.