Stygmarsh. Chapter 1. Roads to Tawfen

Chapter 1. Roads to Tawfen

         In a broken moss-draped turret of the old watchtower, a watery blue eye appeared at a tiny knot hole in a cunningly hidden trapdoor. It peeked about, and the door was flung open with a bang!
         Jed Haffedyke pulled his old bones from the hole with a curse and drew a stepladder after him. He busied himself with attaching a block and tackle from a huge beam above him and lowered the hook back down into the hole with a shout of warning. Slowly the hole disgorged planks and boards and barrels and wheels, loaded onto the hook by hands unseen, and in a short while the skeleton of a wagon lay about the tower. A curly mop of brown hair surfaced from the trapdoor, and a man leapt nimbly up. Little more than a youth with a handsome face and easy grin, Manon dusted himself off and helped the older man, whistling happily.
         With a great groan and a shove the last wheel was finally on the wagon. Old Jed, the handyman and guardian of the lad, wiped the greasy cloth across his forehead, though it made little impact on either.
“S’done it!” he said proudly.
“C’mon! Let’s go!” the lad needled insistently, “Let’s go!”
“Well listen you ‘ere! If we don’t get the rest of the stuff up, we don’t be going nowhere!”
“I’ll get the ‘orse,” Manon said, jinking past him towards the field at the center of the ancient ruined castle.
“I dunno what yer fatha be thinking...” the old bandit muttered, disappearing through the trapdoor and down the tall ladder into the cave below. “Young snip like you being allowed to the Bell Fair! An’ me ‘aving to looks after your runny erse all the while! Still orders be orders..” his voice was trailing, echoing off walls below, “But no good’ll come of it, mark my words…”
         Manon scurried out of the ruin by a gap in the walls to the east, down a slight slope and disappeared into a patch of scrubby woodland beyond. Well away from the road, an old dappled gray nag was chewing contentedly in a concealed clearing. Manon loaded her up with saddlebags, blankets and meal sacks from a shed half buried in the undergrowth, and then, carefully looking about, he took another more precious bundle hidden in a barrel and stowed it on the horse.
“You’d better be alright for this journey, Violet,” he whispered into her ear, “I’ll be sorry to leave you, sure I will, but I ain’t staying ‘ere no longer.” And he gave the nag an apple from his pocket and led her through an alder-woven gate and along a little path that came out near the side entrance to the watchtower.

         Life in the bandits winter quarters was boring at the best of times for those who had to stay there all year round but, funnily enough, it wasn’t so bad in the winter. Although most of the Clan went to their real homes outside the marsh in winter, those that were left would at least drink and joke and tell high tales in the caves below the watchtower. Then Manon could chat and sing and have company whilst Jed repaired the damages to their kit and whatever stolen goods had not already been taken away and would be worth something as salvage. But those who did winter there were rootless folk that had only each other and their drink; their horizons were limited and their aspirations simple. As for Manon own father, there was the cruel twist, it seemed to him, for Tier Suryev was the leader of the bandit clan. He would often be away but even if he was not, he preferred to be alone, brooding over his maps and books. He had no time for Manon or indeed anyone else. Nobody would disturb him then without good cause and they would keep the noise and banter low.
         It was widely rumoured that these bandits of the west marsh were led by a sorcerer and so they were often referred to, fearfully, as the Hexmen. This particular rumour was true, Manons’ father was a sorcerer.

         Manon couldn’t quite remember when he had first learnt to see things in his mind and make them appear outside of it. Of course his father had taken care of his general education. Education from the women and men who had stayed with the Clan and taught him the letters and let him read the damp books, until their ransoms had been forthcoming. But when, three winters back, Tier had arrived back from the east and found his son was capable and grown, he came to sudden decision and summoned him for another, different education; the Art of Illusion. During these winters, locked in the serviceable east tower, the windows heavily draped against the cold, his father had shown him the wonders, the magic that a mind held within it. It had not been difficult for Manon to grasp, and the boy worked hard to please his father who, though taciturn to the point of rudeness, now came to notice his son as if for the first time. Yet to get to know the man who taught him the mental mathematics of shapes, who showed him the mental nature of light itself; to actually get some human reaction from the stern face from one who was so wrapped in the course of his mysterious life, was beyond the boy.

         The first time Manon had applied the Art it had shocked him, and he instinctively reached out for the juicy red apple he had created. Of course it wasn’t there – nothing was actually there, but if you didn’t know that you would believe your own eyes. Until you touched it and discovered it was thin air of course. Then your mind would sort of ‘double-take’ and would ‘see through’ the subterfuge. The change was akin to watching a cloud reflecting off a marshpool and then suddenly catching a glimpse of a fish moving about in the waters below. Only then could you switch your perception back and forth, from fish to cloud, from cloud to fish, and know the images for what they really were.

         It was the early spring of 941, as men reckoned time from the Dark Wars, and the Hexmen were reassembling at the watchtower as usual in preparation to ride east to their favoured sites of brigandage on the pilgrim roads. It was an exciting time for Manon to see them drift in, more or less intact as luck and disposition dictated, greeting each other with curses and tales. More than one commented on how Manon had grown and there arose in the lad an expectation that this time he’d be leaving with them. Yet when his father talked at length with Jed the outcome was that Manon was under strict orders to stay at the watchtower all year. All Year! Manon watched the Clan ride off with a sense of crushing disappointment.
Jed instructed Manon of the task that his Father had provided for him, now he was ‘with the art’. He was to use his new talents to make the old watchtower seem haunted if anyone passing along the road below became too inquisitive. He was to be the puppet master of white specters dancing and screeching horribly on the decaying ramparts. Jed tried to cheer Manon up insisting his was ‘a reet-most important job’, but nobody ever came up to the ruin and it seemed to Manon to be a mostly impotent job, dreary and useless.
“What if they see through ‘em? What if they attract the marsh rangers?” Manon had whined, trying to get out of it, but Jed had waved his worries away.
“If anyone approaches too close,” Jed told him, “A ghost is a ghost is a ghost. What do it matter if you can see through ‘em? And you would ‘ave to be uncommon brave or foolhardy, in these superstitious times, to want to find out. ‘Sides, Mani, there are ghosts. I seen ‘em in Lantern Bog, and there be worse things besides in the Stygmarshes.”

         Life resumed its dull pace. The same snotty faces and the same conversations. Supper with Jed and Jed’s wife, Milly. Milly was always kind to the lad and fretted over his sullenness. She had taken the most care of Manon throughout his childhood, for his Mother had died in childbirth and was never talked of.
“No good comes o’ diggin’ up the past,” she would tell him when he asked of her, “Some things is better left alone. Take what the Angels give you an’ don’t complain.”
It was alright for her, for Jed, for the whole world of Terra – Manon thought sourly. Everyone, it seemed, was getting on with their life except for him. Life was just passing him by on the cracked marsh road.
But then Manon had discovered something that had quite cheered him up. His father had given permission for him to accompany Jed on a trip outside the marsh to the Mayfair at Tawfen. Now that Jed had rebuilt the wagon to go and fence all the stuff he had worked on to salvage that winter, Manon saw the opportunity to escape had been waiting for.

         By midday they were packed, and with a wave to a tearful Milly and a few of the others, they rattled slowly down the uneven track and onto the old marsh road heading north toward Tawfen. Manon had been given a patched leather jerkin, covered in rusted plates, and a battered short sword, and Jed had a fierce-looking crossbow hidden by the wagon stoop, for the road held its dangers even for bandits. They stopped before dusk and took the wagon off the rutted way into some briars where Jed brewed up green leaf tea and they ate their bread and beans. Round the fire Jed repeated his warnings for the hundredth time, or as Manon, who had a particular mind for figures knew, the twelvth time.
“Keep yer eyes and ears open, an’ yer trap shut. We is traders, see, from across the marsh – we be from wherever they ain’t, or we’ll ‘ave the rangers on us, see?”
“Yes,” Manon sighed.
“An’ if you gets Ol’ Jed in any bovver, yer fatha will be a hearing of it, see?”
“Yes! Yes!” the lad repeated, thoroughly bored.
“An’ mind yoursel’. Those Priest folks don’t like that trickin’ art. You don’t wanna end up in the slammer – or wurse! They burn wizards in some parts.”
“I won’t.”
“Yer a good lad, Mani,” the bandit said with a kindly sigh, pouring the pot onto the embers “Lets get some kip,”
         Manon looked up at the stars, suppressing a thrill of excitement, before snuggling down to sleep.
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         James Barley loved the marsh. He loved its solitude, its changing character with the seasons and its challenge. Some people, he had heard, had starved to death or died of exposure in the marsh. He couldn't understand how they had managed it when there was food and shelter aplenty. Others he had heard had drowned or been sucked into bogs. There was little reason for that to happen either, if you read the signs. Clearly these people posessed little in the way of wits or had ignored the wisdom passed around in the Thanehalls. Either way they had no business being in the marsh in the first place. He was more inclined towards the explanation that Charlie Luftsonn had put forward; “Thems that live outside the marsh is strange folk”. Others told stories of fires that burnt from stones, of crocodile-headed men and spirits, demons and devils that devoured the unwary. Jim had not experienced anything of these, though he had always kept to the trapping grounds and waterways that skirted the marsh, or to the few roads that could be used in the drier seasons. He rather thought these were told by the Thanefolk to scare the youngsters in the longhalls. Yet, when wise old heads had drunk their fill of mead and the hall fire was low, they would sometimes tell of things in the deep marsh, dark things, and nobody laughed or made foolery then.

Real danger there was, however, in the three more familiar two-legged forms; Marsh bandits, Goblins and Bigmen. Bandits were seldom a trouble near the Thanelands and were soft and cowardly, and Bigmen he'd only ever seen once, from afar on a boat, for they shunned all others. But Goblins were a different matter. The Goblins had tribelands in the western hills and they were an altogether most crafty and dangerous adversary. Jim had been brought up to fight and kill Goblins as any true ranger of the Thanelands was. His father and his father’s father had ranged the south marshes and killed many, and now Jim, who had ‘come into his weapons’ these three years expected to kill Goblins in his turn. Except he wasn't, because, since the Truce of Threeways, it had been forbidden. For over ten years, in fact, peace had occurred between the Goblins and the ranger folk, and if there was little contact and certainly no fraternization between the peoples, laws were laws. Yet the Thanefolk of the West Peats, nearest the Goblin desmaine, were always watchful, always suspicious.

Jim had killed two of the miserable creatures when they had sneaked into his camp to steal. He had shot one through with his great bow and stabbed the other with his broadsword. It had been his first real fight and he had not wavered. He had left them for the crows, though half starved as they were, the crows would have not thought it a feast. But he had killed them by Marshlaw, for robbing, not because they were Goblins.

Jim had spent the spring trapping the otter and fox in the Southmarsh. Although it was lonely work and cold, it suited the man’s temperament, for he was content with his own company and had little time for words. He had now gathered the cured skins, collected his sturdy horse from West Peat and had travelled north across the marsh, as the roads allowed, towards the Mayfair in Tawfen.
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         One rotten apple can sour the barrel it is said. The folks roundabout Elmtree Farm, the quaintly named hovel where Tomas Rickie was born, joked that Ma Rickie had a barrel load of sour ones. But they did it behind their hats.
Fifteen living children she had, each kissed into the world by her cyder breath, and sent to work in the streets of Angel Falls in the Kingdom of Nasturia. And work there was a plenty in the Papal State; begging, cheating and thieving from the pilgrim folk on the Holy Road.

         Young Tomas was no more or less rotten than his barrel mates, but he was unluckier, and had soon been fingered by the Templar sergeants for a particularly brutal robbery and beating. Fingered, yes, but not collared for Ma Rickie had gotten word of it. When they came for him, he was long gone over the fields and headed north on the Holy Road across the border into the Young Kingdoms. He spent a hard winter in Styghead. Hunger had accented his natural leanness and sharpened his keen eye for a steal. Yet necessity had not been enough in this new friendless environment and he had stooped to honest work to make ends meet whilst his agile mind learnt the tongue of the Young Kingdoms.
         It was after the mysterious disappearance of a church pax box, that he found himself footloose again. He strode with a chilly spring along the Pilgrim Way that wove its way west, skirting the great Stygmarsh. He walked from hamlet to hamlet, seeking odd jobs and pilfering where opportunity allowed, and it wasn’t long before he arrived at the Mayfair at Tawfen.
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         Isambard Brannigan, third son of Kingdom Brannigan the elderly Squire of Tawfen, was a dissatisfied young man. Ever sickly as a youth, his bookish nature had surfaced with his maturity and further alienated him from his boorish, and to his mind, rural, Father. His two elder brothers had already flown the sleepy, damp nest of the marsh town, for the altogether more illustrious world of careers in the service of Church and State in the wider Kingdom of Ember, leaving their sibling the odious duty, it seemed, of inheriting the acres of marshland. A farmer, even one who commanded the respect that his father undoubtedly did, Isambard was not. Yet a farmer it seemed his lot to become, had not Rudolphus Truscott, his uncle on his mothers side, stepped forward at the last minute to rescue his ambitions. Uncle Rudi was a scholar of the Church of Saint Nicolas in Ember City, the very capital of the Young Kingdoms, and when a letter arrived to invite the young Brannigan to attend Greyfriars College, his father could not refuse. Strings had been pulled, favours called in and monies far beyond the means of the Squire of Tawfen had been forthcoming, and for three glorious years, Isambard had strode the courtyards of the prestigious college.

         Isambard took to the scholarly life with the hunger of a lone wolf. The library was his bakery, the great books his bread, the scrolls his crusty slices and drizzled over these were the piquant texts of history, logic, theology and astronomy. He made few friends, suffering in the beginning for his accent and manners, though acquaintances abounded. His return visits to Tawfen were marked by arguments with his father, lecturing him over the portwine, about duty and silage, reeds for fodder rather than papyrus. He started to spend college recesses at Hawthorns, the rectory where Uncle Rudolphus had retired to outside Ember, and for some reason the stern and disapproving bachelor took a liking to the young Squire, and he was soon helping the old scholar in his more esoteric pursuits.
         The Rector may have been retired officially, but was still visited by couriers bearing seals of the Church who were received in his private library where Rudolphus was always working on his researches. Many strange books the Rector had accumulated, that spoke the Old Kingdom tongue and told of past times. Times of ancient Cataclysm and battles on the land of Terra between Angels and Devils, and of the Dark Wars a millennium past when the Holy City had been taken by the Southern Necromancers and Goblins, the age when the Old Kingdom had been shattered. Isambard discovered too, that the old man kept from him other books; secret books, books he knew he must read, and read them he did.
         So it was that Isambard learnt of the writing of Runes. Those sacred shapes said to have been brought to mankind by the Angels and to harness the very words of the Creator. Those texts taught Isambard how the power of the mind could be focused and poured into these perfect shapes, to empower them with sacred magic. If these Runes were then broken, the magic would be called forth from the shape and work its power in the world of Terra.
         Finally the old man had found him out, caught him inky-fingered with the forbidden texts one night. He had thought it would be his last night at Hawthorns, but Rudolphus responded not by reprimand but by encouragement. That night Isambard began his life work in earnest, as assistant to the Rector in his Runecraft for the Angelic Church of St Nicolas.
         Much of the work that Rudolphus was engaged in was difficult for the old man to perform himself. Isambard would be asked to inscribe tiny Runes within the illuminations of a codex, or on a casket for religious texts so that the Rector could then empower them for the Church. Rudolphus showed the young Squire how an empowered Rune could be drained and made harmless; how the Rune could be crafted to release its energy not only by breaking the shape, but also by striking the symbol sharply or even by the feather-lightest of touches. He taught his eager pupil that a Rune could even be conditioned to respond specifically to the presence of anything, or anyone, as long as such presences were present and combined at the moment the power was focused, and as a result such an empowered Rune could be used to guard a door or a sacred text from unauthorised persons.
“How did you think I knew to find you that night when you were reading my works?” Rudolphus chuckled, pointing to the smallest of shapes in the cover of one of the texts. “It whispered to my ear that someone, other than I, had opened it.”

         Yet as suddenly as the door to knowledge had been opened, so it had closed when the old Rector was called away to the Holy City on Church business, and the Squire found himself back in his old haunts in Tawfen and in opposition to his father. No letter came from Ember and he received no reply to his enquiries at the Rectory. Under the threat of being turned out penniless, and with some reluctance, Isambard was forced to accede to pressure to become a useful member of the family. So, carefully hiding the texts he had brought from the Rectory, Isambard began work in the magistrate’s offices.
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         Brother Michael Stone had spent the morning rushed off his feet with preparation for the arrival of Bishop Towton Townsend from Farvelor, and had not even had time for elevenses. Michael was newly ordained to Tawfen’s Cuthbertian Church of St Cessaly-on-the-Marsh, following the Angelic faith according to their Saint Cuthbert, and to have a Bishop of the Nicosian Church visiting was a great honour. Old Father Compton the incumbent vicar of the small parish, had spent the morning dozing as usual, having prepared his welcoming address to the new vicar, Brother Frances Moregrin, who was to arrive that mayday. At least Michael desperately hoped he would arrive that day, because the new vicar of Tawfen had been at a mission way across the marsh to the south and the Sexton, Tam Amersham, had left in his wagon to fetch him a month ago. They had been expected for a week now.

         Michael and Frances went back a long way. They had taken their first steps in the Order together as novices and had shared a cell at St Justs College in the extraordinary city of Oracle. Their friendship had grown steadily and by the time they had taken their vows of Ordination, they had become Spiritually bonded together through the sacramental powers of the Angels. Such a conjunction was rare, but was permitted under the Cuthbertine rule amongst those to whom the powers were granted. Frances was always the more outgoing of the pair and it had come as no surprise that he had opted for missionary work and gone to foreign lands. That he was now to become the vicar of Michael’s own parish might had filled a lesser soul with envy, but in truth Brother Michael could think of no one he would rather serve under. The prospect of once more debating the Passions and Decalogues with his old friend filled him with delight for, it must be said, the religious sensibilities of the gentlemen farmers of Tawfen provided for rather shallow discourse. As for the other church in Tawfen, the Chapel of St Noes followed the Angelic preachings of Saint Nicolas, and whilst Father Compton was on polite terms with Father Rummbold, Michael found him dreadfully stuffy and pompous.

         What with the Bishop Townsend traveling especially to conduct the ceremony of inauguration, it would be a frightful embarrassment for Brother Frances Moregrin and the Church of St Curthberts to miss it. Yet Brother Michael was not too worried on this occasion, though he worried a lot in general. He was not worried because with his gifts from the Angels he could sense his friend in his prayers and his Faith told him he had been nearing Tawfen all week.