Mordraud, Book One Read online

  “Don’t you know what to reply? Are you already tired of living with me?” Varno asked her, squeezing her hips. A twist of unwelcome fear hovered in his words.

  “No, I was just thinking that coming here with you was more natural than I would have believed,” Eglade answered, transfixed by that warm moment, with Varno behind her and the last of the day’s sunlight filtering through the window. “I suffered in the beginning, of course I did... I was afraid... Then, gradually, I realised there was nothing for me to be homesick about. Two separate worlds don’t exist. We’re the ones who invented them, by hiding ourselves away... and you, by forgetting about us. We hoisted up a wall between our peoples. We built it with our fears, and sealed it with hatred.”

  “I’m the one who should be saying romantic things, and instead...” Varno muttered apologetically. “But I’m ignorant, I’m not like the Aelians...”

  “Say nothing more,” Eglade broke in, turning in his arms. “Comparisons mean nothing. I love you, Varno... and I like you as you are, even though you’re always worrying the opposite is true. I liked you the instant I met you, because you managed to convey to me how much you cared about living. I too wanted to feel that same passion for my own life, yet I realised I’d been born to resign myself to a senseless exile. I was born to merely await death. You’ve given me so much... I came away with you, because I wanted you. And I wanted this house and this child...”

  Eglade moved her hand to her stomach.

  “You can’t even begin to imagine the boredom of never being able to do anything different, except waiting for something to happen,” Eglade sighed gloomily to herself.

  “I was tired of feeling bound by a limit I failed to comprehend.”

  Varno stood in silence for a moment, enjoying the sensation of his fingers on Eglade’s belly. A simple emotion – just the sort he liked.

  “And if I were to tell you I’m happy to live with you... simply because I love you?!” Varno exclaimed, laughing, bending forward to kiss her. Eglade returned the kiss, but had to pull back at once, startled. Varno stared at her in concern.

  “Can you stay home off work for a couple of days?”

  “Why?” Varno inquired, holding his breath.

  Eglade took his hand and placed it beneath hers, just at the height where the tiny heart was beating, muted and distant like a war drum.

  “It won’t be long now. Not long at all.”

  Varno nodded, inebriated on delight. And perhaps a glass of wine too many, drunk in the village before returning home. “Have you decided what you’d like to call him?” Eglade asked.

  “What do you suggest?”

  She considered for a moment. She had a name in mind, but wanted to hear what he thought too. She liked the idea of calling him after her grandfather. A good Aelian. Famed for his intelligence and sophistication.

  “Dunwich... What do you think?”

  “Hmm... Dunwich,” he repeated, savouring the word like a tasty morsel. “Dunwich, son of Varno... It sounds a bit eccentric, but... I like it!”

  “So that’s settled!” she burst out, throwing herself into an awkward sort of embrace hindered by her belly.

  “Our son will be called Dunwich.”

  ***

  Eglade hadn’t been wrong. The next night she brought a male child into the world, without the need of assistance. As handmaiden to the older women, she’d helped at many births, and it was quite easy for her to put into practice for herself the arts she’d learnt: she knew which herbs were right for soothing pain, and which could relax the muscles.

  The baby was born strong and healthy. At just a few months, he already had a thick mane of black hair and two alert bright blue eyes, which shone like his mother’s. He didn’t look much like Varno, except for the colour of his hair, and this was the source of not minor sadness for his father. The beauty and elegance of his features came from his mother, yet he lacked that unreal perfection that would have made him a true Aelian. Dunwich was almost entirely Khartian.

  Right from the first years of the child’s life, what was instantly obvious to Varno was his incredible swift mental development, paired with a slothly growth. Well before he could walk, he’d already learnt to speak both Cambrian and Aelian fluently. Eglade also taught him to write, draw and make calculations, and Dunwich seemed to pick it all up so quickly that even she was astounded.

  “But are all your people’s children smart?!” he asked her one day. He was watching Dunwich in amazement as the baby struggled to crawl across the floor while reciting off by heart a story his mother had taught him a few moments earlier.

  “When they’re young maybe, but I couldn’t say... No, an Aelian usually takes a long time to grow, and to learn to speak... not to mention to write...”

  “Is that why time doesn’t seem to pass for him? Could it be your blood?”

  “Maybe. But he is growing fast, compared to the normal rate for my people... It must be due to the Khartian he has flowing in his veins,” she’d replied, as surprised as he was.

  The years went by, but only for Varno. Eglade was exactly the same as the day they’d met. Dunwich grew slowly. At six he looked as if he were barely two, but spoke with the precision and complexity of a grown-up.

  “Daddy, want to play with me?” he asked one evening, when Varno had come home from work. He hated being a blacksmith. It was too hot, too physically demanding, and he earned too little. He often found himself drifting back to his old life as a mercenary, and even if it had ended rather badly, he still missed it sometimes, after all those years. An indistinct and distant sensation. A niggling presence.

  “What shall we play?” Varno replied, getting up off the chair he’d placed in the yard to drink a nice glass of wine in the peace of sundown. He’d occasionally go down to the village for a chat of an evening, but only rarely. He didn’t want to give the tavern those few coins he’d toiled for, and anyway he preferred to keep Eglade company and spend time with his son whom, as abnormal as he may seem, he loved more dearly than anything else.

  “I want to be horseman!” Dunwich promptly responded, as if he’d been waiting for that moment for a long time.

  “Come on then!”

  Varno grabbed him by the hips, sat him on his shoulders, then began trotting along, jumping and snorting. Dunwich laughed like crazy, while pretending to be a charging cavalryman.

  “Men! With me! Follow my lance!” he yelled, waving his scrawny arms about. “Don’t break the advance! Onwards!”

  Varno ran around the woods, dodging the trees by hopping from one root to another, and finally returned to the path to take them back to the house. Satisfied by his great ride, Dunwich flopped onto his father’s shoulders, yawning from time to time.

  ‘He seems so tiny... yet it’s already been six years,’ Varno thought, with a shadow of sorrow. He had never lingered on how he would handle the passage of time. He’d never reflected long on the oddity of that pace with a different rhythm. He was ageing. They weren’t. It became more evident each day. What would he do when he was old and they were not?

  What would Eglade do – still stunningly beautiful as in the past – when he was covered in wrinkles, had white hair and was bent over with age?

  ‘What am I getting myself thinking about...? There’s still time, I’m only thirty-six! I’m still young...’ he mused, no longer paying attention to the path between the trees.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, my boy.”

  “You’ve fought in a war, haven’t you?”

  That was his favourite topic for the stories he liked to be told, even if Eglade wasn’t that pleased for him to hear them. The soldiers, the battlefield, the cavalry charges – they all excited Dunwich’s keen mind. Where Varno hadn’t been from personal experience, he went in his imagination. But he had to be careful. His son was extremely good at picking up on whether his tales were true or not.

  “Yes, many years ago.”

  “And did you see Cambria?” the child went o
n, his head lolling with sleepiness.

  “No, I only know it from descriptions. It’s huge, full of great residences and sumptuous gardens. Broad avenues unfurling before mansions built in the finest marble. Statues everywhere: high up on rooftops and in the centres of its one hundred squares. And then its large brass city gate...”

  “Will you take me there one day?”

  Varno tousled his thick black hair and started slightly, like a frisky horse.

  “Of course I’ll take you to Cambria. You and mum – all of us together.”

  But he’d need more money. Far more money.

  ***

  It was almost by chance that Dunwich got the opportunity, a few years later, to see Cambria with his own eyes. But not as an ordinary visitor.

  Varno observed in distress as his son grew more intelligent by the day. A swiftness of thought like Dunwich’s was wasted in a place like that, he told himself many a time. The boy deserved to study, but there wasn’t even the most basic semblance of a school in their region. Teaching was left up to the mothers and elder women of the villages. Dunwich was now nearly nine, and he yearned to learn everything he could. Eglade had told him all she knew, including many of the old Aelian legends, but he never seemed able to quench his thirst for knowledge.

  Varno had slipped into the habit, after finishing work at the smithery, of stopping off in the village for a glass of wine with some friends. Local people. Not the best crowd, but not unlike his old friends back when he’d set off to be a mercenary. Very rarely did he speak of his family, for fear of stirring too much curiosity. He’d already overheard some unwelcome comments on Eglade’s beauty and eyes bluer than the skies, and he had no intention of nourishing this interest.

  But one evening, after one glass too many, he started unburdening himself about how much smarter his son was than him, and of how the boy deserved to study at a good school.

  “But I don’t have the money, and I know nobody...” he repeated, with a heavy tongue and a purple face, to the men present. His dazed chagrin could have surfaced and been buried that evening. Instead, it sparked something unexpected. One of the inn’s customers, sitting alone at a table in a corner, stopped him outside the door when Varno was about to head home, tipsy and unstable on his feet.

  “I was listening in on what you were saying not long ago...”

  He spoke with a rather unusual accent, one Varno had only heard in the voices of Cambria’s army captains. Tall, slim and with a penetrating gaze, he didn’t seem at all like a soldier, nor a common traveller. He gave the impression of being quite wealthy, judging by his well-tailored clothes made of a lovely dark fabric.

  “Yes... So?” Varno replied, rather abruptly, keen to make his way home as soon as possible.

  “How old is your son?”

  He didn’t honestly know how to answer. He looked four, a little more perhaps, but was in fact almost nine. “Five... nearly five,” he stammered, uncertain of what he should say.

  “I heard you saying how intelligent he is...”

  “Pardon me, but who are you?!”

  “My name’s Seneo, and I teach Arcane Chanting in Cambria. However, please do not think I am here for... bellicose reasons,” the man explained at once. “I happen to be here as I’m visiting my father. He’s elderly. He lives nearby, in the Allied territories.”

  “Chanting, did you say?”

  “Yes, Arcane Chanting. I’d be most interested to meet your son, if that’s convenient. I teach many private students in Cambria, but in the case of gifted children... unusually talented ones... I’m sometimes willing to overlook my fee...”

  Varno couldn’t work out where the trick was. By his way of thinking, people never worked without adequate pay. It was an entirely abnormal idea that a man should offer to help him for free.

  On the other hand, it could be a unique opportunity for Dunwich.

  “Tomorrow, here in the village?” he suggested, doubtfully.

  “Fine,” replied the man by the name of Seneo. Varno staggered off, stumbling on the path that crossed the woods, wondering whether he’d made a wise move.

  To tell the truth, he didn’t at all mind the idea of sending his son to Cambria. However much he adored the child, he felt in awe of him. He sometimes had the urge to escape, to take refuge among ordinary people.

  Among normal children, who spoke incorrectly and learnt slowly. Among women who aged at the same pace as their men.

  ***

  Varno and Eglade debated all night long about whether they should be trusting a stranger and his words, and in the end decided it was worth the risk. The next evening, Varno took his son to the village. As they crossed the small square of compact gravel, he noticed a man sitting outside the entrance to a house. He was staring hard at them. For an instant his eyes caught Varno’s attention. He couldn’t work out their colour. As if they didn’t have a precise steady tone. Varno blamed the glass of wine he’d drained at dinner to mellow his nerves. Once across the square, he turned round abruptly but the man was no longer there. He was heading off in the opposite direction, thinking about his own business.

  Seneo was waiting for them at the end of the path. The man from Cambria greeted the child and knelt down to study him carefully, while humming a little tune that made Dunwich giggle. Varno waited awkwardly, unsure of how he should behave on such an occasion. As far as he knew, the chanters were dangerous people. Those capable of mastering arcane chanting were held in high esteem by Cambria’s military council. What could they find interesting in a boy like his son, he asked himself in concern. How should he speak to such an important person? To avoid looking silly, Varno simply didn’t talk as he awaited an answer.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Dunwich,” he replied confidently. “And yours?”

  The man smiled and bowed his head politely. “What an unusual name. I’m called Seneo, and I’m an expert in arcane chanting. I live in Cambria and I teach at a great academy.”

  “Arcane chanting? Do you mean harmonies?” Dunwich asked with bright interest. Seneo stared at the child in genuine awe, and nodded.

  “How is it you know about harmonies? Do you know what they are?”

  Dunwich looked to his father for a second, unsure how he should reply. “I like to read and listen to people talking. Arcane chanting is developed from harmonies, isn’t it? And so do you study these?”

  Varno had been clear with his son. He was never to mention his mother and her origins. Not for any reason. And Dunwich was respecting the pact perfectly.

  “I teach pupils how to use harmonies. Do you like singing, Dunwich?”

  Seneo was left gaping when he heard the boy repeat to perfection the tune he’d hummed at their arrival. It wasn’t at all catchy, Seneo reflected. A rather well-structured variation on a singing exercise – not stuff for novices.

  What he was witnessing was astounding, to say the least.

  Dunwich had been born to sing.

  “He’s still very young, but he’s got great potential,” he told Varno, as stunned as the other man. “Now I have to go and visit my father. Then I’ll return to Cambria. When the time’s right, I’ll stop by here and maybe we could discuss how we can help this young unexpected prodigy study.”

  Seneo ruffled Dunwich’s hair kindly and went off humming another tune, a darker more melancholy and extremely more complex one.

  Dunwich clapped his hands in excitement as he watched that strange man disappear.

  “Want to be a chanter, my son?” uttered Varno as they walked home.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised... I really I wouldn’t be surprised...’

  ***

  During those hazy months of waiting, Eglade found she was expecting again. They’d spoken a lot, she and Varno, about how wonderful it would be to give Dunwich a little brother, or sister. As with him, they’d tried many a time but without success. Ten years had gone by since the birth of their first son. The discovery was welcomed by the Aelian with boun
dless joy, particularly after the decision to follow through on Dunwich’s talents and send him to Cambria to study. Seneo would return sooner or later, they were certain, and she’d have to see her beloved son leave their home.

  Varno was less excited, but he tried to indulge his wife’s happiness. The money he earned was meagre. It barely went far enough for the three of them. Besides, an unexpected fear was brewing inside him, and he didn’t know how to manage it.

  Dunwich had turned out to be anything other than his father’s son. What would another child be like, he wondered endlessly. Even smarter? So different to him? So slow in its growth?

  He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to find out.

  He’d known Eglade for sixteen years. She hadn’t changed in the slightest since the first day. As beautiful as ever. Tall, and with a presence that became increasingly striking. He instead was shifting dangerously towards middle age, and the wrinkles advanced ruthlessly on his face.

  Varno realised he was wildly afraid of those years that passed. He would compare himself to her day and night. Timeless and perfect. And he felt anything other than perfect. Even his son was a thousand times better than him. More handsome, more intelligent.

  More everything.

  The idea of returning to the mercenary life didn’t sound as foolish as it once did.

  Just a few days to go to the birth of his son. Eglade knew, as she had with Dunwich, that it would be a boy. “Another man to look after...” she murmured with a tinge of disappointment, as they talked about what name to give him. Varno wanted to call him Edio, after his father, or Edrin, like one of his many brothers. He’d always liked that name.

  “You know, I had a dream the other night...” Eglade tried to say, but his mind was made up. At last, a name connected with his family! A first step towards normality, he thought in satisfaction.