He must have awoken that morning in the turgid miasma of his own mortality. Wearing down, wearing out. And studying the mists wreathing the low hills and glades edging the fields, he must have held a silence in his hands, and in his heart. We pass on. All that was effortless becomes an ordeal, yet the mind remains lucid, trapped inside a failing body. Though the morning promised a fine day, night’s cold darkness remained lodged within him.
He had three sons but all were in the levy and off fighting somewhere. Rumours of some uprising; the old man knew little about it and cared even less. Except for the fact that his sons were not with him. In motions stiff with pain he had hitched up the mule to a rickety flatbed wagon. He could as easily have chosen the cart, but the one mule he owned that wasn’t too old or lame was a strangely long-bodied specimen, too long for the cart’s yoke and spar.
The efforts of preparation, concluding with loading the flatbed, had taken most of the morning, even with his half-blind wife’s help. And when he set out on the road, quirting the beast along, the mists had burned off and the sun was high and strong. The stony track leading to the section road was more suited to a cart than a wagon, and so the going was slow, and upon reaching the section track and drawing close to the high road, he had the sun in his eyes.
On this day, in a heap of stones in the corner of a field just next to the high road, a civil war was erupting in a wild beehive. And only a few moments before the farmer arrived, the hive swarmed.
The old man, half-dozing, had been listening to the rapid approach of a rider, but there was room on the road-it had been built for moving armies to and from the border, after all-and so he was not particularly concerned as those drumming hoofs drew ever closer. Yes, the rider was coming fast. Likely some garrison messenger carrying bad news and all such news was bad, as far as the farmer was concerned. He’d had a moment of worry over his sons, and then the swarm lifted from the side of the road and spun in a frenzied cloud to engulf his mule.
The creature panicked, bolting forward with a bleat. Such was its strength, born of terror, that the old man was flung backward over the low seat back, losing his grip on the traces. The wagon jumped under him and then slewed to one side, spilling him from it. He struck the road in a cloud of dust and crazed bees.
The rider, on his third horse since fleeing the city, arrived at this precise moment. Skill and instinct led him round the mule and wagon, but the sudden appearance of the farmer, directly in the horse’s path, occurred so swiftly, so unexpectedly, that neither he nor his mount had the time to react. Forelegs clipped the farmer, breaking a collar bone and striking the man’s head with stunning impact. The horse stumbled, slammed down on to its chest, and its rider was thrown forward.
Her uncle had removed his helm some time that day-the heat was fierce, after all-and while it was debatable whether that made any difference, Abrastal suspected-or, perhaps, chose to believe-that if he’d been wearing it, he might well have survived the fall. As it was, his neck was snapped clean.
She had studied those events with almost fanatic obsession. Her agents had travelled out to that remote region of the kingdom. Interviews with sons and relatives and indeed, the old farmer himself-who had miraculously survived, though now prone to the falling sickness-all seeking to map out, with precision, the sequence of events.
In truth, she’d cared neither way for the fate of her uncle. The man had been a fool. No, what fascinated and indeed haunted her was that such a convergence of chance events could so perfectly conspire to take a man’s life. From this one example, Abrastal quickly comprehended that such patterns existed everywhere, and could be assembled for virtually every accidental death.
People spoke of ill luck. Mischance. They spoke of unruly spirits and vengeful gods. And some spoke of the most terrible truth of all-that the world and all life in it was nothing but a blind concatenation of random occurrences. Cause and effect did nothing but map out the absurdity of things, before which even the gods were helpless.
Some truths could haunt, colder, crueller than any ghost. Some truths were shaped by a mouth open in horror.
When she stumbled from her tent, guards and aides swarming round her, there had been no time for musings, no time for thoughts on past obsessions. There had been nothing but the moment itself, red as blood in the eyes, loud as a howl trapped inside a skull.
Her daughter had found her. Felash, lost somewhere inside a savage storm at sea, had bargained with a god, and as the echoes of cries from drowning sailors sounded faint and hollow beneath the shrieking winds, the god had opened a path. Ancient, appalling, brutal as a rape. In the tears swimming before Abrastal’s eyes, her fourteenth daughter’s face found shape, as if rising from unfathomable depths; and Abrastal had tasted the salt sea on her tongue, had felt the numbing cold of its immortal hunger.