Child of the Dark Star

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1

Untimely Birth

The land lay stained and blotched with shadow. Only the high ground still caught the full rays of the setting star, the Red Star, star of guardians and governors, and of hunters.

Firilla knew that she should go back to the farmhouse before the dread Dark Star swallowed all the light and left the fields, the hills and the valleys in icy desolation. But the zorrel crop was good, and her foster-father Bridin needed all the coin he could earn to build the new barn he needed. Firilla was with child, her infant due at the next turning of the heavens, when the dark would have left and the glow of the Blue Star would illumine everything with a soft and beautiful light.

‘Just one more row,’ she thought, ‘and I’ll go back.’

The soil was already becoming hard and cold and the tough, prickly little plants more difficult to pluck. Her hands were stained with the juice that flowed from their fluted stems, and the hem of her skirt was dusty and full of marra burrs, the seeds of the pesty little weeds that always sheltered under the red zorrel. But she sang as she worked, happy to think that her child, conceived at the highest point of the White Star’s influence and due to be born under the Blue Star, would have a good chance of being a priest-seer of exceptional ability.

She was smiling when a chill shadow touched her.

She looked up startled, the smile fleeing from her eyes. A giant garrar beast was there, hovering immediately above her, its huge wingspread cutting out what was left of the light, the heat of its breath scorching her skin.

She screamed and ran, dropping her load, stumbling over the furrowed field, the zorrel thorns catching at her legs. She tripped, and in steadying herself found a sharp stone which she seized and flung with all her might at the winged beast. It must have struck home, for the creature shrieked. Firilla scrabbled frantically for another sharp stone. The garrar was wounded, and it was angry.

It swooped, and Firilla, with the strength of a mother desperate to protect her young, rammed a stone into the creature’s beak as it opened to tear at her. But as she turned, feverishly trying to avoid its claws, the weight of the child within her making her clumsy and slow, the talons closed over her and the garrar lifted to the sky in triumph, Firilla gripped in its claws.

With extraordinary clarity, as though the pain and the terror had sharpened her senses, she saw the landscape slide beneath her: crop-fields in neat triangular segments spreading from the central villages like spokes of vast wheels, and outside the cultivated circles the wild, waiting-to-reclaim-the-land tangled forests of tree-garths, their branches interlaced so tightly to feed off each other that no light reached the ground and only blind creatures hunting by dark could survive. Occasional flashes hurt her eyes as the wheeling flight of the garrar caused her to catch the reflection of the dying star in the smooth mirror of the waterways. But these soon disappeared as the open land disappeared. Beyond the forest, even darker and more sinister, a ridge of jagged mountains rose. For the villagers they had always been a source of legend, a place of thunder, remote and inaccessible — and Firilla saw with horror that her captor was making straight for them.

Strangely, she could hardly feel the pain now, nor see as clearly. It was as though darkness was rapidly spreading from the huge circle of the horizon until her vision constricted to one small brilliant point, and then that, in its turn, was snuffed out.

She did not see the scarlet figure of the hunter as he drew the gut string back and aimed his shaft, nor did she sense the rush of air as the wood and metal found its mark; only the spin and spiral as the garrar fell, still tenaciously gripping her.

Swiftly the hunter sent another arrow to the garrar’s heart, and then, sure that it was dying, climbed down the cliffside from where he had first seen the beast and its burden. Precariously he held to root and outcrop, finding hand and footholds where he could. When he reached them the garrar was dead, its slimy blood soaking the soil. Mercifully the girl had been flung free in the beast’s last convulsive twitching and was lying some distance from the body, her fall broken by a mezmer bush, most of its white puff-balls snapped clear and filling the air with a miasma of fine seed-dust.

The young hunter, barely able to control the nausea caused by the smell of the garrar’s blood, and afraid that the hallucinogenic effect of the mezmer seeds would get to him and destroy his resolve and sap his strength, dragged the girl hastily clear, ripping her clothes on branches as they went. She was bleeding badly and several bones were clearly broken, but she was alive.

He lifted her over his shoulder and staggered off, determined not to stop until he was out of sight and up-wind of both the carcass and the debilitating seeds. He knew the garrar’s mate might well be near and all his skill as bowman and strength as a man might be needed.

At last he found a safe place. It was beside a stream, and he bathed the girl’s wounds, marvelling at the miracle of her survival. Her hair was harvest colour, brown and red-gold, her lashes long, her nose and mouth, as he wiped the blood from them, small and fine. Through her torn clothes he could see that her body, though at the moment distended with pregnancy, was young and beautiful.

She opened her eyes, staring with amazement into his. For a moment there was no fear, then memory returned. She started, her face darkened, her grey-green eyes anxiously seeking what she dreaded over his shoulder.

‘It’s dead,’ he told her quietly. The shadow lifted from her face as the darkness lifts from the land at the rise of the White Star.

He squatted down beside her. Was it the effect of the mezmer seeds that made him feel as though, looking deeply into her eyes, he had always been with her? Tentatively he put out a hand and brushed a strand of hair from her cheek. She turned her head as though to hide a twinge of pain. The shadows were returning.

‘What can I do?’ he asked. He could see that she was trying to lift her head, though the effort was almost too much for her. He put his hand at the back of her neck and gently helped her. She looked down at her body. The leather of his shirt had been slit into strips and both her legs were bound to sticks.

‘Broken,’ he said as she stared at them.

She looked at her torn clothes, the hump of her unborn child. Pain came in a dark and uncontrollable wave, distorting her features. ‘What is it?’ he asked sharply.

‘My child...’ she whispered. ‘My child must not be born now!’

The pain had passed, but she knew what it meant. Her eyes, filled with horror, looked at him, and he understood. The Dark Star’s shadows were closing in on them and any child born now would be born under its baleful influence. ‘Can’t you... can’t you... hold it back?’ he cried, though he knew that she couldn’t. He could see her lips, almost blue with cold, moving as though she were praying. He broke into a sweat; he was a bowman-hunter born under the Red Star, trained to bring death, not to attend birth. He crouched beside her helplessly as she doubled up with another contraction.

‘What must I do?’ he pleaded. ‘Tell me... tell me... what must I do?’

‘Build fire,’ she murmured as the wave of pain spent itself and withdrew. ‘Build it close.’

She was shivering in the rags the garrar claws and mezmer branches had reduced her to, and he had already used his shirt to bind her legs. He set about gathering wood, relieved to have a task, stumbling on the rocks in his haste and the growing dark, never going far from her, returning every few moments to look anxiously at her. The pains were frequent and severe, but she seemed calmer, knowing that what could not be avoided must be faced. The stubborn instinct of the mother, to bring her child to birth no matter what the circumstances, sustained her.

His hands were shaking as he mixed the fire-powders from the two pouches at his belt, and at last flame leapt in the darkness and took the kindling he had gathered.

Suddenly she screamed, unnerving in the silence, and with a last push brought her child into being. It lay between its mother’s legs, in darkness, the flickering glow from the fire making a play of grotesque shadows. He stared fascinated, horrified. A child of the Dark Star!

‘Help me,’ the woman cried, as he did not move. ‘Cut and bind the cord. Keep the child warm.’ Obediently he did as he was told, gathering the child up, wiping it clean with rags from its mother’s dress, and handing it, squalling, into her arms. She wept as she kissed her son’s tiny forehead.

The young man stared at her, shaken, doubt in his eyes as he watched her caress.

‘You’re not going to keep him! Surely you’re not thinking of keeping him?’ She did not reply, but when he looked into her eyes he knew his answer. ‘But...’ he whispered, ‘but...’ He shivered as the dark stirred dangerously around him.

She looked up beyond the red sparks of the fire that spiralled above them into the vast realms of sky through which those other stars, the distant points of brightness that gave no light to the world, mysteriously and magnificently took their course. Was there no higher court to which she could appeal, beyond the rigid laws of the Seven Stars of Agaron?

‘I will keep him!’ she whispered fiercely. ‘The Lord of Darkness has no right to him.’

The young man, Glidd, was confused. Seeing Firilla propped against a rock, holding with such love the soft and innocent creature at her breast, he found it hard to believe that the boy was destined to become one of the dreaded outlaw caste of those born under the Dark Star.

‘The White Star of his conception and the Blue Star that was foretold for his birth will hold him in their influence,’ she pleaded as Glidd stood silent, wanting to believe that this were possible. The child’s actual birth-time had been an accident and it may be that his destiny had already been fixed under the Birth-Star assigned to him. But only an Astrologer would be able to tell them for sure, and decisions had to be made at once.

Glidd walked away from Firilla and wrestled with his conscience. She had been through a great deal and could not be expected to be thinking clearly. He remembered nights at the lodge when he and his friends had discussed just this kind of situation, not dreaming that one of them would be called upon so soon to make an actual decision.

How much easier it had been to talk! He had seen too much of the ravages of bandits, the cruel wantonness of the marsh-dwellers, to rest easy in his mind if he let the child live to grow up as one of these, and yet... and yet... As a young boy he had been with his father when he had left his own newborn brother to a slow and painful death in the desert... No parent who so exposed a child born under the Dark Star considered themselves to be guilty of their death, nor, if the child survived, would accept responsibility for its life.

Glidd paced back and forth as the woman dropped her cheek to the soft head of her child and dozed off. He knew very well what he should do — and to do it quickly would be merciful.

He drew his dagger and approached the sleeping child, but as he drew back his hand to strike, the baby stirred, its tiny fingers uncurling, its mouth pursing, sucking on a dream of milk. Glidd paused, and on that pause the whole shape of the planet’s future hung.

Firilla jerked awake, her eyes blazing with extraordinary strength and anger as she saw the knife. No sound was made, but between them at that moment a force that seemed to belong to neither of them was at work.

Glidd tried to bring his knife down upon the child, but he could not. He knew already that it was too late and was startled to catch in the girl’s eyes a look of ferocious triumph totally out of keeping with the impression he had formed of her. But even as he caught it, it was gone, and she broke down and wept.

‘I’ll prevent him from doing harm. I swear it! Let me keep him!’

‘How can you swear that?’ he said sadly, putting his knife away.

‘I will watch him and guide him every moment of his life. I will not let him go to the marshes, nor to the villages or the towns. We will live here in the mountains. No one will know. No one will be harmed.’

He wanted to believe her, but his heart was heavy with foreboding. He bowed his head. ‘It is your child. Your decision.’

She dropped her cheek to her child’s soft head with relief. ‘My prayers will always be with you,’ she murmured.

‘And mine with you,’ he said gently.

* * * *

He did not leave her alone with her child in the mountains as she requested, but stayed with them and found food for her. He built her a rough shelter against the weather and the smaller wild creatures of the place. When he had seen her settled on her bed of leaves, a store of berries and his freshly filled water bottle beside her, he left her to return to his lodge, promising that he would return with other comforts she would need, and special herbs for her wounds.

For a long time he kept looking back, hesitating to leave her, and she lifted her head, straining to follow him with her eyes until there was no trace of the torch he carried. Only then did she fall back upon the leaves, trying to blink the tears away, not knowing if she would ever see him again, the soft breathing of the baby in her arms the only thing keeping her from despair.

Firilla had never known the fear of darkness so overwhelmingly before. As a child it had always been held at bay by the circle of firelight, by her family and friends gathered round her, by the walls of her home and the thin fabric of her windows. She had shuddered at tales of what happened under the Dark Star, but always from the safety of her home. Now she was vulnerable to it, utterly exposed, the huge rocks of the mountains surrounding her, pressing towards her with their heavy, silent shadows, their dark presence oozing into every c***k of her shelter, every pore of her being.

She held the child so tightly she almost squeezed the life from him. Her tears fell on his head. ‘Please let him return,’ she whispered, shivering, thinking of Glidd.

At last she slept. She woke and suckled her son, and slept again.

How much time passed she could not tell, but at last she heard Glidd calling, and then saw the light he carried. When he was near enough to hold it over her to see her face he was shocked at the desperation he saw. He knelt beside her. ‘It’s all right,’ he murmured. ‘It’s all right. I’m back. You’re safe.’

Safe? With the Dark Star like a huge incubus in the sky above them, and the Lord of Darkness himself abroad and on the prowl?