Chapter 6
The march to Hermit's Ridge seemed longer than on Jac's previous visits, though one had been on shorter legs and the other whilst bleeding. The shadows lengthened and so did his stride. His mind raced with questions and with accusations. Some said the hermit could see the future. Anyone who had seen Jac's future and not warned him about it held part of Milo's death in their hands. The hermit had said years ago that Jac would want someone to kill him soon enough. What was that if not a prediction? Jac drew one of Rennor's knives. The one that had taken a life in the cellar just a day before. He would have his answers.
As on his last visit the sun was riding the ridge by the time Jac reached the slopes. The sky burned red, cloudbanks tinged with flame. Behind Jack's eyes another fire licked around the beams of his cottage once again. He began to climb, cold in his resolve.
What drew his attention from the faint path before him Jac couldn't say. Perhaps a whisper, or a glimmer, or nothing. But there in the dying light, across slopes where bracken and gorse struggled to keep a foothold, a sword lay. It had been left upon a flat boulder and the sunset echoed along its blade. Jac knew it well. He had owned that sword since he was seven and taken two lives with it.
Jac sheathed the knife he had been carrying and advanced on the rock. He kept his eyes upon the sword, somehow worried that if he looked away it might vanish.
When the ground gave way beneath him he didn't even have time to yell.
If Jac had fallen the distance to the cave floor beneath in Jacob Summer's body he would have broken an ankle at the least, probably a leg. If Armston had fallen he would have broken his good leg and his wooden one, and maybe his neck. Rennor knew how to fall. He absorbed half the impact in both thighs and the rest as he rolled to the side. Even so it winded him and for a time he lay on his back staring up at the slot through which he had fallen. A slow rain of debris sifted down as the remains of the twigs and bracken set to cover the hole followed his fall.
Eventually Jac's lungs agreed to allow him more than a gasp of air and he sat with a pained wheeze. His shoulder hurt but nothing seemed broken. He edged around the space that held him, feeling his way as the light from above was too weak to reveal much.
"Hell." The cave ran the same way the crack above ran, too broad to reach both sides together, tapering to a fissure at either end, the roof closing above him too high to reach, even with his fingertips at a jump. The walls were wet and offered too little purchase for escape even if it were a straight climb with no overhang.
A trap then, baited with his sword. Jac sat with his back to the wall. He would try to climb out when the daylight returned. Then at least he could look for cracks where he might wedge his knives and hunt for handholds. But the hermit didn't want him climbing out, so it seemed unlikely that it would be easy or even possible.
Gaia had asked him, what if you freeze? What if you hang? Would you die then? Jac supposed that the question was now, what if you starve in a hole, licking the rocks for moisture? He felt that the answer would be that it would make a true end of him. The blood had felt vital every time. The touch of his blood on skin. On the skin of the one that killed him.
The night passed by in pieces, broken by dreams of murder and of falling, punctuated by periods where Jac lay shivering on the cold earth beneath the hole. For a while the moon reached down to touch him, but her caress held no warmth.
Dawn found Jac climbing, falling, cursing, and climbing again. By wedging his blades into one long crack he could reach the ceiling but where it curved away toward the fissure above he could make no progress. He was an insect trapped in a jar, waiting to die.
After his twentieth fall he sat back against the wall once more, raw fingered, hungry and thirsty. He had left the remains of the food with Gaia. He was glad of it. It would just be wasted in the hole, along with his life. He wondered when the hermit would come to cover the slot over again and reset his trap. The next victim would find Rennor's bones here and know himself doomed. Perhaps the hermit would eat his flesh. Jac remembered those narrow, yellowed teeth. How else could the man survive out here?
A hollow laugh escaped Jac. He had found a power unmatched in any story Elder Ethan had told around the fire on holydays, and yet here he was, trapped in a hole. The hermit must have set the bait. The ridge no doubt had caves aplenty, the limestone lay rotten with them. Had it even been his sword? Jac had felt so certain...
A distant cry reached him. He almost dismissed it as the call of a gull. But ... there was something more to it?
It came again.
"Jac?" Faint but unmistakable.
"Here!" His dry throat barely made a croak. He coughed and tried again. "Here! In this hole!"
Silence. For a long and heart-breaking moment he thought whoever was calling had gone beyond earshot.
"Jac?" Then closer. "Jacob Summer!"
"Here!" he managed to roar it.
Ten heartbeats later a head appeared at the slot above him, black against the sky.
"Jac?"
"Gaia? What are you- Is Rula all right?"
"She's with me. How can we get you out of there?"
Jac considered. There were no trees close by and Gaia wouldn't have the means to cut off a large enough branch to be of use in any case.
"I have a coat." She dangled a heavy sheepskin with wooden toggles to fasten it. "Ivar Miller didn't need it any more. I could hold it and you could climb."
Jac narrowed his eyes against the light. The coat might bear his weight. "I'd end up pulling you in too," he called up.
"I'm stronger than you think, Jacob Summer." Gaia rose and a moment later she had both feet braced against one side of the slot above him while pressing her backside to the other.
"Careful!" Jac moved to catch her if she fell, his heart in his mouth.
"Stay back." Gaia motioned at her unseen daughter. She tied one of the coat sleeves to a heavy stick she must have brought with her. She swore as she struggled at the awkward task of wrapping and twisting the heavy skin about it. Curses that would make most men blush. Jac covered a grin. When finished Gaia hiked up her skirts and set the stick across her upper thighs. "Climb fast!" She sounded nervous now.
Jac pulled his knives from the wall and returned them to his scabbard. Rennor's distress at their treatment echoed through him. He looked up at the climb offered to him. He would have liked to set his weight gently against Gaia's strength to test her resilience but the shortened coat now hung above his reach.
"How sure are you?" He would have to jump to grasp it, making her suddenly support his whole load.
"Sure that you'll die down there otherwise. And Rula can find help if things go wrong." She sounded increasingly scared and Jac didn't blame her. He didn't think the child would be much help but then his own child would be lost to him forever if he didn't get out.
"Brace yourself!" He leapt for the sleeve, caught it, and hung for a moment.
Above him Gaia grunted with effort. Soil rained down to either side and small stones rattled by, but she held.
With his own grunts of effort Jac hauled himself up hand over hand. Moments later muddy fingers clasped a slightly cleaner thigh and with a few desperate struggles, thinking all the while that she would buckle and fall, Jac climbed over Gaia to safety.
"Gods above and below!" He fell into the bracken. "Are you all right, can you get clear?"
Gaia groaned and rolled away from the slot. She pushed her skirts down and, with Rula fussing over her, rubbed her legs. "Let's not do that again."
Jac got to his knees and scanned the slopes. "What are you doing here? Is someone chasing you?"
"No. We came chasing you." Gaia sat up slowly, still massaging her legs. "We decided that we were going to be in danger whatever we did and that we would rather be in danger with someone we knew than with strangers." She put her arm around Rula. "Also, Catalin is my friend, one of my oldest friends. And Baya was Sharli's best friend, and Rula loves her too. So if you're going to find them, we're going to help."
"I-" Jac had been going to say that he didn't need any help. "Thank you..." He looked around again. "How did you find me? I mean how did you know where to shout?"
Rula pointed down at the heathland to the south where the faintest of trails led off in the direction of the village. "We saw you from down there last night. You were going too fast for us to catch up."
"One moment you were there, and the next you were gone," said Gaia. "We thought maybe the hermit's cave was lower down than they say and that you had gone in." She frowned toward the slot in the ground. "That's not it ... is it?"
"It's up there." Jac pointed to the ridge. "This was a trap. For stupid people." He glanced at the rock where the sword had been. Or at least where he thought he had seen it. There was nothing on it now. He stood and stretched, cold in the wind. "I'll go and see him now."
"We'll come too." Gaia stood, offering him the coat. She had her own and Gaia wore a mud-fringed one that reached to her ankles.
"Would you wait for me here?" Jac held her gaze with his. He felt guilty saying that he would go alone, but it seemed that the hermit knew more about him than he knew about himself. If such things were to be spoken of then he would rather be the first to hear them.
"We will." Gaia gave him a dark-eyed speculative look but pressed her lips firmly together and said no more.
Jac nodded, and stretching back his shoulders on he went up to the ridge.
The cave stood silent as before. The bodies of the two Sverlanders were gone, perhaps found by their comrades. Jac curled his lip at the thought of men so concerned with their fallen and yet ready to swing their axes at children.
"I know you're in there," he called. "Come out and talk."
Silence.
"You left me to die in a hole. You owe me some answers at the very least."
Nothing.
Jac advanced into the cave mouth with a knife ready in his hand. That same sense of wrong shivered through the air, the one remembered from his visit as a child. The morning sun slanted in to illuminate a few yards of muddy floor, but daylight did nothing to dispel the feeling of being watched.
"You are here. I know that." Jac backed onto the slope again. He crouched and set his fingers to the stone where one of the dead raiders had lain. When he had taken their coin his own weakness and pain had closed him to the echoes of their deaths. Now though he emptied himself of tension in five deep breaths, each released slowly. Images seeped from the stone into his mind. Two Sverlanders, axes in their hands, approaching the cave, laughing as if they thought their quarry cornered inside.
The vision showed the hermit unfolding from the same spot where he had waited all those years before, his back to a natural niche in the rock, his thin arms hugging both knees against his chest. The hermit stood and the raiders saw him and stopped. Horror thrilled through Jac's fingertips, a raw, red horror like nothing he had ever known.
"Hells!" Jac snatched his hand away and stood. Slowly he advanced on the spot where the hermit had risen from. "You're there. I know it. Sure as the third brother walks among us, I know it." He pointed with his knife. "Right there ... tell me that I don't see you." Jac's eyes began to ache from staring. "But. You. Are. There."
And he was. Grey and brown like the rock, pressed to it and seemingly so patterned with its shades that, like the wall-moth, he could be one with the stone. The hermit looked up, and with that motion it seemed suddenly impossible that Jac ever could have missed him.
"To visit a man who has come to the wilderness for solitude might be considered ... rude. To do it once as a child is simply part of the ugly process of learning. To do it a second time in extremis might be forgiven as desperation. To come a third time bearing steel... Some would call that unforgivable." The hermit stood. He looked little different from when Jac saw him as a child. A touch thinner, a white wisp of beard on his chin, the same hollow eyes refusing to offer a colour to the world.
"You killed those raiders with fear," Jac said. "But me ... you set a trap for. You didn't want to face me."
The hermit bared his teeth. "You think I'm scared of you?"
"Yes." It hadn't occurred to Jac that the hermit might be until he said the words. Even when the hermit had spoken them they sounded like a threat, but Rennor had killed men, looked into their eyes over the blade of his knife, and he knew about fear. "Why are you scared?"
Jac stepped toward the hermit, returning his knife to its sheath. The hermit moved back, sliding along the cave wall.
"Why are you scared of me?" Jac repeated.
"Broken things can cut." The hermit licked his yellow teeth, nervous.
"Who am I?" Jac thought to test the man first, to have him prove his knowledge before trusting any answer to which he didn't already know the answer. Another gift from Rennor, an interrogation technique.
"You don't know yourself yet, Errobor?" The hermit met his gaze and Jac felt the pressure of that stare like a palm thrust against his forehead.
"Errobor?" He had invented the name rather than explain himself to Rula as they escaped Renstown. "Have you been following me?" Jac had thought the hermit might name him as Rennor Crow, or see through to the deeper truth and call him Jacob Summer.
A moment of surprise registered on the hermit's face, quickly hidden. "I owe you nothing. You come uninvited, knowing I seek only to be alone." He pointed behind Jac. "The world is that way. Let me have the solitude of this cave."
"You said this was my third visit. You know who I am. You know I'm Jacob Summer."
The hermit shrugged.
"You have my sword!" Suddenly he wanted it in his hand.
"Illusion. I don't have it. I just showed you what you want."
"What I want is my wife and child!" Jac found he was shouting. He raised an open hand between them, clenched it into a fist, and spoke more calmly. "So tell me what's happening to me! You knew that it would. You told me as much when I was a boy."
"So, you come as a raider. Blade bared. To take the only thing I have."
"I'm no raider." Jac spat on the rock. "They have my wife and my girl. All I want is answers."
"And that is the only thing I have - knowledge." The hermit narrowed his stare. "If I tell you you'll leave me alone?"
"Yes."
"And unharmed?"
"Yes. Of course." Irritation put an edge Jac's voice. He might wear a murderer's body but he wasn't a murderer.
"Ask your question."
Jac sighed. He had already asked it but he spoke again. "What am I?"
"A child of Caenor."
Jac flinched. Amnor, the God Above, was father to men. It was Caenor's to take them when their lives had run their course, and Beltan's lot to walk among them as they lived. "You lie!"
"Sometimes I do." The hermit scratched his ribs. Despite the cold he wore nothing save dirt and a loincloth. "But you are a child of Caenor."
"Why- How-" Jac forced himself to stillness and asked, "A child? There are others?"
The hermit offered a mirthless grin. "Oh yes. You have brothers, and sisters too. Not many, which is good, for you would not wish to meet them, not like ... this." He waved a hand at Jac.
Jac shook his head. "Kennan Summer was my father. I buried him myself."
The hermit showed his yellow teeth. "Kennan Summer was Jacob Summer's father. Caenor was Errobor's. But Errobor was foolish enough to let a child kill him. And fierce as Caenor's spawn are, they're no match for the fierceness with which a child consumes the world. You drowned in this boy, Errobor and even when he died you couldn't shake free of him. But maybe you'll chew your way out yet. Some said that even though you were the last born of all the spawn you were the one to fear most."
"I'm not Errobor." Jac said it more to strengthen his own conviction. All those years ago on that stinking battlefield ... the speared mercenary that had seemed so terrified of him ... and had attacked Jac's father so ineffectually. The mercenary had been trying to get Kennan to kill him, but Jac's father had wanted only to escape, and Jac had struck the fatal blow to save him. And Errobor had found himself drowning in the hungry mind of a child.
The hermit nodded as the silence grew between them. "You see it now."
"Why?" Jac demanded. "Why does Caenor put us in the world? Why isn't it in the stories or the sermons?"
"Stories?" The hermit shook his head. "Everything is in the stories. You've just not listened to the right ones. Your kind are new. Perhaps that village of yours should have invited better tale tellers to its hall. But some stories spread slowly. Especially the dark ones. And we are on the edge of things out here... The children of Caenor prefer company."
"Why am I here? Alive. What does Caenor want of me?"
"A good question. With a bad answer. I fear to tell you the truth. If I speak I will say no more thereafter. Will you remember your promise?"
"I'll leave you unharmed to ... stare at the darkness." Jacob couldn't imagine what it was the hermit did in his caves all these long years, and for that he was grateful.
The hermit drew a breath and hugged his narrow chest. He glanced at the walls as if they might conceal listeners. "Caenor has planted his seed in defiance of laws older than our kind. He believes that one of his children will build a ladder tall enough to reach his brother. And that you will kill him."
Jacob blinked, then laughed. "Build a ladder? Kill the God Above?"
The hermit backed into the shadows. "I am finished with questions. Remember your promise."
A cold thought rose from the back of Jac's mind, perhaps from the Beggar Bully, the notion that leaving the hermit in the cave further down the slope would not be harming him. Leaving him to starve in the trap that he set for Jac would be justice, and Jac had only said that he would leave him in his cave...
Jac shook his head to rid himself of such thinking, and when he looked again there was only an empty cave mouth before him. He shook his head once more, this time to deny the hermit's madness. Ladders and gods. He had thought he might get answers here.
Slowly Jac left the cave and descended from the ridge to where Gaia and Rula waited for him.
"Well?" Gaia hurried toward him in her relief, stopping short as the sight of a stranger close up reminded her how strange their situation was.
"Just nonsense and lies," Jac said.
"What will we do then?" Practical and determined.
Jac looked at Rula and let his gaze rest on her cheek where the birthmark spread. "We can't hide, so we'll go back. They won't expect that. I'll go to Gostle, the man who held you prisoner, and take the things we need from him."
"And what is it that we need?" Gaia asked.
"Money, resource, and answers," Jac said. "Lots of each."
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With sufficient interest from readers I'll add more when I get a chance.
Until then, check out my published work:
http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-guide-to-lawrence.html