‘I felt him,’ I breathed. ‘I’m sure I did, I-’
Gurdyman held up a hand, and I knew I was not to say any more. ‘I believe you did, child,’ he said softly.
We sat in silence for some time. I heard a blackbird singing, and the sound seemed far too normal for a day when something so extraordinary had happened. As if the blackbird thought so too, abruptly the song ceased. After a while, I said, ‘How do you know, Gurdyman?’
‘Hmm?’
‘How can you be so sure about the merchant and the — and what he made down there?’
Gurdyman smiled. ‘You do not doubt what I say, then?’
‘No!’ It hadn’t even occurred to me. Deep within myself, I knew that all he had said was right.
‘Good,’ he murmured. Then: ‘As to how I can be so sure, there are ways, Lassair.’
The word seemed to hang in the air. ‘Ways?’ I repeated in a whisper.
‘The barrier that divides time can be crossed, you know,’ he said softly. ‘If one has the courage to try.’
Out of nowhere I heard my own voice, relating the tale of my ancestor Luanmaisi and her daughter, my namesake. ‘Luanmaisi walked with the spirits,’ I murmured, ‘and they took her between the worlds to encounter beings of other realms.’
My mind detached from the present and I remembered what else I knew. I seemed to hear Granny’s voice: Luanmaisi learned much powerful magic from the spirits and the elves, and it was said that her daughter surpassed even her mother. Both women were shamans, healers and shape-shifters. Luanmaisi’s animal spirit was the hare: solitary, independent, representing immortality and symbol of the corn spirit, a fighter who will always ferociously defend his own territory. Lassair’s was the silver fox known in the northlands: clever, adaptable, cunning, able to move unseen. Fox has great magic in his pelt, and his element is fire. .
I wondered now if it could be possible that either mother or daughter, or even both, became sufficiently great shamans that they left this world and went into another one, where they existed still.
Gurdyman’s eyes were on me, demanding my attention, and they seemed to bore into mine, as if he was trying to get inside my head. ‘She was of your blood, this woman?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘She bore a daughter, although nobody knew who the child’s father was. The daughter was called Lassair.’
Gurdyman beamed widely, as if something had just been proved to his enormous satisfaction. ‘Hrype was right about you,’ he observed. ‘Child, so much awaits you!’
‘Will I do it?’ I asked in an urgent hiss. ‘Will I cross the barrier and go between worlds?’
I thought for one wonderful, terrifying moment that he was going to answer me. But then he smiled very kindly, reached out to pat my hand and said, ‘Not today.’
And as if a vast door had slammed on a room full of golden light, suddenly the magic that had been humming and thrumming in the air was shut off. We sat, a round old man in a shabby robe and a thin girl who looked like a boy, on a spring day in the sunshine, and somewhere above us, unconcerned, a blackbird sang.
I was dreaming. .
I am up in that wild country where the humps of low hills march steadily along the horizon. I am very afraid. Someone is after me. The giant with the axe? I do not know, but the urge to flee, to run till I can’t run any more, is quite irresistible. My feet keep stumbling, the soles of my boots caught in something tacky, and I realize it is blood. I cry out loud, and my voice is swept up in the bitter wind that whirls and swirls, sending dark clouds flying across a low orange sun.
I have to find a place to hide!
I am in that strange place where the ruins are. Beside me, the open grave pit beckons. I would be safe in there, wouldn’t I? I bend and creep inside, but the soft earth crumbles around me, falling on my face, in my eyes, in my mouth, and I forget about having to hide and scream because I think I am being buried alive. Then there is a figure in a cloak with a knife in his hand, and he leaps on the back of a bull and slits its throat, and the blood spurts over me, warm, pulsating with each beat of the mighty beast’s dying heart. .
I woke up.
I was lying on the floor of the crypt beneath Gurdyman’s house, wet with my own sweat, hot with the fever of my dream and yet shivering with cold. Gurdyman was crouching over me. He had a thick blanket across his shoulders, and he removed it and wrapped it tightly round me. It was warm from his body. I realized I was sobbing and, with an effort, made myself stop.
I looked up into his kindly, concerned and — I had to admit — fascinated face. I understood something about Gurdyman then: he would always look after my welfare, but his overriding interest in me was because he recognized some potential in me that as yet neither of us fully understood.
I was a little disappointed. But it was better to know, then I would not expect more than he could give.
‘You have been sleepwalking,’ he said. He moved away from me slightly, going to sit down on his low cot. ‘Clever of you,’ he added in a light tone, ‘to have negotiated both the ladder down from the attic room and the dark steps into the crypt without mishap, but then it’s said that sleepwalkers rarely come to harm in their own houses.’
‘How did you know I was down here? Did I — did you hear me screaming?’ I was very embarrassed to think that again I’d woken him with my noise.
‘I did, but I was already on my way to find you. I had dozed off in my chair out in the courtyard.’ That was why he’d been wrapped in the lovely, warm blanket. ‘There was a disturbance in the air, and that was what woke me.’
A disturbance? I wondered what that meant. Had the power of my dream shaken the whole house? The idea scared me.
He was watching me, his expression unreadable. ‘I think you had better tell me what you saw,’ he said softly. ‘The spirits do not send a dream of such resonance unless they seriously expect you to pay heed.’
I drew a deep breath, gathered my courage and then made myself go back to those awful scenes. I spoke even as I thought; I knew that if I hesitated, I might not dare put them into words.
‘Tell me more about this pit,’ he said when I had finished. ‘You have seen it before, I think. With an occupant, as I recall.’
‘Yes, that’s right. It — the body isn’t there any more. It was empty when I — when I went inside.’
‘Is it close to the ruined building?’
I pictured it. ‘Yes. It’s beside a structure that looks like a hearth, and there’s a stumpy, square pillar nearby with marks carved into it.’
Gurdyman was nodding even before I had finished speaking. ‘Yes, yes, it all fits,’ he muttered. Then he looked down at me and gave me a beaming smile.
‘You know this place, don’t you?’ I whispered.
‘I believe I do,’ he agreed. ‘The terrain that you describe is familiar to me.’ He paused, frowning, and I sensed his attention had momentarily gone far away. With a small shudder, he brought himself back. ‘I told you yesterday about the soldiers’ religion, Lassair. These same soldiers were sent to guard the great wall that their emperor ordered to be built up in the north, and there they made the caves where Mithras was worshipped. Everywhere they went, they kept their god close. I told you too about the ordeals that the men endured in order to progress to higher degrees. Fire was frequently required, and sometimes the ordeals involved being buried alive in order to be reborn into a better, more refined state. I think you saw a certain Mithraeum on the great wall. You saw the hearth, and you saw the altar: what you described as a short, stumpy pillar. The hole in the ground where you tried to hide was the ordeal pit.’