Stands a Shadow

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Bilge Town

The forest was a world within a world, his mother, the Contrare, had liked to say.

As he staggered into its outer treeline, dripping wet from his river crossing and with the rags hanging off him, he sensed the difference in the air, the change of scents in his nostrils, the softening of light as it fell through the high canopy, and realized that it was true.

He ventured onwards, deeper into the Windrush until his legs would carry him no further. He collapsed onto the soft floor of leaves and dirt and slept a dreamless sleep of oblivion.

When he awoke, Bull knew he could go no further without first regaining some strength. He set about making a camp for himself not far from the trickles of a wide, shallow stream. He burned dead-wood that was wet and smoky, moved a large log in front of it for a seat. For food he ate berries and caught what fish he could with a sharpened stick, even chanced the mushrooms that looked familiar enough to his city eyes. Nuts too, of all kinds, were in abundance, though they lay heavy in his stomach if he consumed too many.

When he fell asleep those first nights on a carpet of soft moss, with the stars shining through the leaves overhead, and the trees surrounding him like the walls of a home, he knew the world beyond the forest was diminishing in his mind, its troubles and conflicts no longer his own. He was at peace at last in this quiet, lonely place of his mother’s people. He wished never to leave it.

On the fourth morning of his convalescence, Bull was wakened by a sharp stab to his side, and he sat up to find a group of male Contrare gaping down at him. Warriors, by the looks of their painted faces, striped green and black from ear to ear, and the crow feathers and bone charms adorning their long dark hair.

‘ Chushon! Tekanari!’ One of the men demanded as he jabbed his spear at him again. The warrior seemed the youngest of them all.

Bull grabbed the shaft of it and plucked it out of his grip.

At once, a dozen spear-tips were pressing against his flesh.

‘Whoah,’ Bull told them as he held up a hand. He tossed the spear back into the hand of the startled warrior.

‘Calm down. I’m one of you, see?’ And he gestured to his face as though it was obvious.

The men glanced at the young warrior. They wanted to kill Bull here and now, he could see.

With graceful movements the young warrior planted the end of his spear in the earth and plucked at the knees of his trousers to bend down before him. Tentatively, he grasped Bull’s face and turned it one way and then the other. He studied the sharpness of his cheeks, the swarthy complexion of his skin. He peered closely at the horns tattooed on his temples, and nodded his head in appreciation.

‘Then welcome home, brother of the tribes,’ the young man said in rough Trade, and helped him to his feet.

Ash wandered through the rain, lost and aimless. His mind had sunk into his feet, and he released himself to the feel of the hard rounded cobbles against the soles of his boots, letting them take him wherever they would.

Hermes the agent had offered him a room to stay in for as long as he needed it. Numbly, Ash had thanked him but declined, and had left the man standing at the front door with the birds shrieking behind him.

‘I’m not certain what I do now, Ash. Are we finished then? Is it over?’

Ash had only waved a silent farewell.

He didn’t realize he’d been walking south towards the Shield until he sniffed the scents of fish and seaweed and brine, and looked up from beneath the brim of his dripping hat, and saw the Sargassi Sea and the calmer waters of the east harbour before him. The countless ships that sheltered there bobbed and rocked in the gentle swell, while gulls wailed forlorn and hungry, sweeping back and forth through the sheets of rain. Men with fishing rods sat on stools along the waterfront, clad in hooded ponchos to protect themselves from the weather. Their demeanours were calm and patient as they chewed on tarweed or smoked from clay pipes.

To Ash, just then, they looked like the most contented men in the world.

The Shield was visible from here above the huddle of All Fools. The Lansway it stood upon stretched out across the water into a dull obscurity. He could see little of the ongoing assault itself out there; just plumes of smoke rising from the outermost wall, and the occasional flash of fire. The scene was muted, the sea breeze carrying the sounds elsewhere into the city.

Pressing onwards, he came to a busy junction overlooked by inns and merchants’ storehouses. The junction was the scene of a vagabond street market. Fancy carriages attempted to force their way through the crowds, which were mostly street vendors, brash prostitutes, the occasional gang of roaming urchins. A hill rose steeply ahead of him into leafy streets and high, marble mansions fronted by spike-topped walls, an enclave of Michine and wealthy common-born. The Congress of the council could be found up there, he recalled.

Ash saw little point in going that way. He carried on along the seafront, the road curving out to skirt the base of the hill. After a row of rowdy taverns and sleep-easies, the road eventually petered out into a shingle track, with the hill on his left fronted by limestone cliffs.

The coastline here was a narrow, windswept strip of rock between the cliffs and the sea. Shanties had been erected amongst pools of brackish seawater that plopped and shimmered in the rainfall. Ash meandered between the shacks, stepping over the occasional crab or bundle of seaweed. The flimsy domiciles were propped high on stacks of flattened stones, and wooden boards ran between many of them.

He’d heard of this district in his previous visits to the city, though he had never visited before. The Shoals, the city-folk called it, due to the tides that swamped it in heavy weather. It was said to be the poorest district of the city, the place where people landed when they could fall no lower. Many penniless sailors came here and waited for news of ships hiring men. They had their own name for the place.

They called it Bilge Town.

Ash smiled without humour, wondering at the irony of his life.

The area stank of running sewage and rotting fish. Picking his way along the rocks, he risked straining his neck by looking up to the very top of the cliffs. Seabirds were spinning in the updraft rising past the Michine villas, where orchards overhung the crumbling edges of limestone. Kings had once lived up there. For a thousand years they had lived in the Pale Palace with their families and courts, ruling over all of Khos.

Ash slipped on something beneath his heel and caught himself just in time. He looked down at a sour apple, fallen from one of the high overhanging trees of the orchards, smeared flat and brown beneath his boot. A gust drove the rain into his face. Ash shivered.

He headed towards the cliff face, where the rocky shore rose sharply and the shanties huddled together more densely than they did below. The shingle paths wound between dwellings both small and weatherworn, leaning against each other for support, clinging to the slopes all the way to the face of the cliffs. In the cliffs themselves, within depressions in the chalky face of stone, structures were perched in enclaves that seemed impossible to the eye. High above them caves had been carved out, connected by ladders and swaying gantries.

He trod upwards along a path that switchbacked between shanties and the occasional two-storey structure. Women hung clothes out to dry beneath stretches of tarpaulin, their heads and shoulders wrapped in shawls, faces reddened by the wind. Babes cried indoors. The street children chased after dogs or skipped to odd chanting rhymes, or struggled with bulging waterskins up the slopes. There seemed to be fewer men than women, he noticed.

Already the ache in his head was returning, despite the leaves still bundled in his mouth. His eyes swam with a kind of fog, and Ash blinked hard to try and clear them. He took more of the dulce leaves, and stood for some moments until his vision cleared a little, though the pain remained, stabbing his forehead to the beat of his heart. He began to feel sick with it.

He stopped a local – an old, hungry-looking, grey-haired man carrying a straw umbrella – and asked where he might find some room and board. The old man looked at him curiously, but was helpful enough. Ash followed his directions, climbing ever upwards.

The Perch was a ramshackle establishment that occupied a shallow ledge on the cliff wall. The sign above the door swung creaking in the wind, as old and decrepit as the rest of the long, narrow building. The flaking picture showed a rat squatting on a sea-tossed barrel, its own tail clamped in its mouth in apprehension.

Smoke was billowing from the taverna’s central chimney. Laughter could be heard from within.

Ash pushed through the doors into the taproom. A squall of rain followed him in, causing the lantern light in the dim, smoky space to flicker against the walls. A few heads turned to appraise the newcomer.

‘Shut that door!’ shouted a man behind the bar, a fat bald-headed man with thick tattooed arms. ‘You’re letting the cold in, man!’

Ash pushed the door closed, warped and ill-fitting in its frame, and shook his coat dry as a pool of water gathered at his feet, soaking into the rushes that covered the floor. It was hot in the narrow room. A log fire crackled fitfully in the hearth. Ash removed his hat and stepped to the bar, trailing water.

The proprietor was playing a game of ylang with a woman sitting on a stool and wearing an expression of boredom. The man moved one of his black pebbles across the board, and looked up at Ash as he approached.

‘What can I get for you?’ he asked.

‘Cheem Fire, if you have any.’

His eyes brightened. ‘Then you’re in luck. I probably have the last case in the whole city.’

The bottles were hidden behind the bar in a locked strongbox chained to the floor. The proprietor fumbled with a ring of keys that hung from his belt, then unlocked it and removed a bottle with an exaggerated show of care. The cork squeaked as he pulled it free with his teeth. He swirled the contents of the bottle, allowing the aroma to waft into his flaring, hairy nostrils.

‘Only the finest,’ he purred as he trickled out the tiniest of portions into a glass tumbler, chipped but reasonably clean. He was about to add some water into it when Ash held his hand over the glass.

‘And leave the bottle,’ Ash told him.

Suspicion, suddenly. ‘It costs half an eagle for a bottle of this stuff. It isn’t watered down already, you know.’

The coin skittered across the bar, turning every head in the room.

The proprietor licked his lips. He took the gold eagle and hefted it for weight. His tongue poked out and he dabbed it against the coin.

‘Very good,’ he proclaimed with satisfaction. He left the bottle where it stood and took out a chisel and small mallet from beneath the bar. The eagle, like all eagles, was stamped with two deep lines across its face, one crossing the other so as to divide it into quarters. He aligned the end of the chisel with one of the lines and pounded once, hard, with the mallet. The coin broke in two. He scooped up one half, returned the other.

Ash swirled the contents of the glass for a moment, took a sniff, then downed it.

The swarthy woman was studying him with her kohl-lined eyes. She looked Alhazii, he saw. Her eyes seemed overly fascinated with his skin.

‘What brings you to Bilge Town, stranger?’ she asked of him, and her voice was deep and rich, and it made him think of dusk.

‘My feet,’ he said, and threw the fiery liquid to the back of his throat, and refilled his glass to the brim.

Ash hired a room for the night, a dreary upstairs cubicle barely large enough for its dusty bed, where he left his sword and nothing else. He went back downstairs, and sat in a corner of the taproom with his bottle of Cheem Fire, where he began the slow but appealing process of drinking himself into the ground.

He spoke to no one all that long evening, and the look of him told them all to leave him be. The Cheem Fire soothed the pain in his skull, but most of all numbed him to himself. When the proprietor finally called for time, Ash found himself unwilling to climb to his empty room just yet. The drink had made him melancholy. He knew he would find sleep difficult, and would dream of things he would rather not be dreaming.

Ash finished off the glass in his hand and banged it down on the table. He took the bottle with him as he gathered his longcoat from the cloakstand and put on his hat, then tugged the door open.

Outside, the rain had turned to sleet, and the wind was tossing it about so that it stung as it struck his face. It was bitterly cold even with the coat fastened tight about him, and the hat tied firmly to his head. The tide was washing in with the high swells, and much of the lower Shoals was submerged in a foot or so of churning water. Ash clutched his bottle of Cheem Fire and staggered down through the dark shingle street towards it.

He tracked along the water’s edge, negotiating the shacks that perched in his way. Once or twice he stumbled, had to catch himself before he fell into the surf. He walked until the dwellings petered out, and the slope ended at a bluff that ran down into the sea.

He sat on the flattened top of a boulder with his feet dangling above the lapping waves and the rock smooth and chilly against his haunches. He stared out at the wildness of the sea, watching the sleet falling as though from nowhere. In the distant darkness, the Lansway stretched towards the far continent, and the great walls of the Shield stood tall and black. Explosions flickered across the scene occasionally, their low grumbles reaching him a moment later.

Ash wondered how much longer they had left to them. It certainly felt like the end now, though perhaps that was only his own end he was sensing.

In ruins, Ash. In ruins.

He could not stop thinking off Sato, and all those who had been slain when the Mannians had struck; most of all the few surviving comrades from the People’s Revolution, men who had shared the same fate of exile as himself.

It should be fury he was feeling now. Yet all he truly felt was despair and isolation, a mood only deepened as he watched the bombardment against the far walls continuing. Once this city fell like Sato, the island would fall too, and then the rest of the Free Ports would be starved into submission. The darkness would finally have conquered the flame.

Strange, how only now he felt such a bond of solidarity with these people, now that he had lost everything to Mann, now that they stared defeat in the eyes. But then, perhaps it was not so strange. He had been the same with Nico. Unable to open up to the boy, to invest himself in what he could never bear to lose again. Like everything else that had ever mattered in his life since being cast from the old country.

He saw the full awful waste of his life, and could hardly bear it.

We should have joined the Few, when they first began writing to Osh.

We should have chosen a side.

Ash made a toast to the brave people of Bar-Khos, and drank deep.

The old Roshun sang sad drinking songs from Honshu as he worked his way through the rest of the bottle. He steadily grew wearier and drunker and colder, and all the more dull-headed for it. At last, the bottle produced only a single drip against his tongue.

Ash clutched the empty bottle to his chest. He spoke into it.

‘Hello,’ he said in a mocking voice that was deepened by the echo from the glass. ‘I’m stranded. Nowhere to go. Send help. More drink.’

With a few moments of concentration, he stuffed the stopper back into its neck, hefted the bottle, and flung it as far out as he could.

His eyelids drooped. Tired. Time for bed.

Ash lay down on the rock and curled himself into a ball. He began to snore.

The falling sleet grew worse.

In his dreams Ash climbed the valley towards the monastery of Sato, the slope growing steeper with every step that he took.

He pushed on, trying to hurry, keen for a glimpse of his home amongst the forest of mali trees shivering in the wind.

He couldn’t see it at first, even as he grew closer. Panic filled him as he rushed headlong through the trees. At last he stopped before a great mound of smoking ashes.

He could not comprehend it, that scene.

It must be a mistake, he thought. In my old age I’ve gone and hiked up the wrong valley.

He could feel the soft fall of ashes against his face, strangely cold, and against his lips, as tasteless as ice.

Ash squinted, peering closer at the ruins.

From the centre of the mound of ashes, a single young mali tree was growing. Its bronze leaves were shaking in a gust he could no longer feel. Already, around it, as Ash looked on, the wind was scattering the ashes to nothing.

A figure picked its way through the falling sleet. It carried a bundle of driftwood in its arms, and occasionally it stooped to gather up another branch or a broken length of planking left stranded by the waves. The figure stopped when it came across the huddled form of a man curled on the rock. He was shuddering, and moaning something in his sleep.

‘ Hmf,’ Meer said, and nudged him with a toe.

The sleeping man groaned louder and shifted in his sleep.

‘An old fool farlander,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll die of exposure sleeping out here on a night like this.’

Meer sighed, dropped his armload of wood, and with effort hoisted the man from where he slept and slung him over his shoulder. He adjusted the weight of him, then turned and went back the way he had come, past the bluff of rock, further away from the shacks.

Ash had to stop waking up like this, stiff necked and in a place he did not expect.

It was early morning, judging by the pale daylight that filtered in from behind him, casting a bluish tint to the smoke that rose from the small fire in its hearth of rounded stones. He was lying on a reed mat, and was covered in his longcoat with his head resting on one of his boots. It was a cave, this place; manmade, by the looks of it. The curving walls were covered in sky-blue plaster, though the plaster was damp and flaking in many places to reveal the naked rock behind.

A shrine, thought Ash. It looks like a shrine.

Some possessions were piled against the opposite wall: a wooden begging bowl, a canvas bag, a gnarled stick, a neatly folded blanket, a pile of parchments pressed within a canvas binding, an ink pot, some candles, a large jug.

Ash crawled to the jug and peered inside.

Water.

He drank half of it in one tremendous gulp, spilling even more of it down his tunic. He grunted as the frigid water crashed into his stomach and tried to come back up.

A scratch of footsteps caused him to look over his shoulder.

‘Ah, you’re alive, then.’

The words stomped through his head with every syllable, making Ash wince.

The speaker was a monk, it appeared, for his head was shaven and he wore a black robe and sandals on his feet. Forty years of age perhaps, but with the glittering, fascinated eyes of a youth.

The monk dropped an armful of wood beside the fire. He hiked up his robe to reveal white, powerful legs, and squatted by the fire to poke some life back into it with a stick.

Ash crawled to the entrance with his eyes squinting against the daylight. He was high in the cliff face here, staring out at a grey sea feathered with white. He looked down. A ladder ran down to a narrow path at the bottom of the cliff.

He inhaled the sea wind and tried to clear the fog from his head.

‘How did I get here?’ he asked as quietly as he could.

‘Eh? You flew in last night, like a leaf tossed by the wind. Gave me quite a start, I can tell you.’

Under different circumstances Ash might have appreciated this man’s sense of humour. Instead he ignored it, and sat up and began the slow, awful process of pulling on his wet boots.

‘What is this place, a shrine?’ He gasped for air, one loose boot still facing him.

‘Yes,’ the monk replied, looking about the dismal space. ‘Very old, I think. I was told there was once a bronze statue here of the Great Fool. It stood right there where the fire is now.’ The monk wiped his hands together, held them out for warmth. ‘The local people, they say they used to leave offerings and prayers written on rice paper. And then the statue was stolen one day, and it took them a long time to raise the money for another. That one they chained to the floor. But it too was taken by a thief.’

The monk kneeled on the floor with spine erect, right hand resting in his left; the position of chachen meditation. ‘When I moved in here last winter I took the statue’s place. And here I sit, every day, waiting to be stolen.’

Ash grunted, and with a final effort managed to pull on the other boot. He exhaled with relief, though the boots were cold and wet and little comfort; and then he looked at the slimy laces, overly complex just then, and he blinked with dismay. They would have to do like that, he decided.

‘My name is Meer, by the way.’

Ash barely heard him. Memories were flickering through his head. He could recall singing on a rock, and throwing the empty bottle into the sea, and curling up to sleep. It had been falling heavy with sleet last night.

‘Thank you, for bringing me inside last night.’

Meer nodded, a smile in his eyes. ‘You are from Honshu, are you not?’

Ash nodded, noticing how he used the real name of his homeland.

‘Then I hope you can tell me about that country some time. I have never been there, though I would dearly like to see it. I’m a traveller, you see.’

‘Yes. When I have the time.’

‘You are going somewhere?’

Ash looked up from the flames, struck by the question. He was not sure of the answer. What was left for him in Cheem, if the monastery was gone, and Osho and Kosh and the rest of them?

‘I do not know,’ he said aloud. ‘I thought I would be returning to Cheem, to my home there, if I could find a boat to take me. Now, though…’ and he shook his head.

The monk was peering through the rising smoke, his expression suddenly keen. ‘Cheem, you say?’

‘Aye. What of it?’

A shy smile. ‘Nothing,’ he told him, shaking his head.

‘I should tell you, they were talking about you this morning in the Perch, when I was doing my rounds with my bowl. They said a rich farlander with a sword had come to drink away his sorrows. They thought you had thrown yourself into the sea last night.’

‘I am sorry to disappoint them’

‘They were only showing their concern for you. The people are like that here. You know, I thought at first you were only hungover from drink. But now I have had a proper look at you, I think you are truly unwell. Is there something that afflicts you, my friend?’

‘Yes. The curiosity of others.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Meer. ‘I don’t mean to pry.’

The words struck a chord with Ash. He was being rude to his host, he could see. He might be dead from exposure if it weren’t for this generous stranger.

‘I have an illness,’ he admitted. ‘My father died from the same thing, after the pains in his head grew so bad he could not see. It grows worse in me.’

‘I see. Then perhaps I can help you with those head pains. I know of a few remedies. I could make a special brew of chee for you, if you like?’

He nodded, not entirely convinced.

‘But there is something else, no?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something that troubles your spirit, I think.’

Ash tried to calm his thumping heart.

‘It is hard to talk of this, yes?’

He could only nod. Something was building within him. Something needing to be released.

It took Ash a long breath before he could speak. ‘I lost someone,’ he said at last. ‘A person close to me.’

With feeling, Meer nodded. Just then he reminded Ash of Pau-sin back in his home village of Asa, the little monk who would listen to the villagers’ problems without judgement, only sympathy. He had a way of drawing out words from the heart too.

‘Yes?’ prompted the monk.

‘Now, all that is left of the boy are ashes scattered over a chicken yard, and in a jar I gave to someone for safekeeping. Most likely, the jar sits next to a pile of rubble that was once my home.’

Meer considered his words. Ash had not the vaguest notion what he was thinking.

‘I see. You don’t believe you can go on any longer, with so much grief inside you. You think life is not worth living if it’s to be as terrible as this.’

Ash could not look away from the man’s steady gaze.

‘This is why you wish to drink yourself to death.’

He wondered if the man was a Seer. Some had the knack without any training at all.

Ash watched as the monk stepped to the entrance of the cave and sat down next to him with his legs dangling over the edge. The wind ruffled the folds of his black robe.

‘Those waves down there. Do you see them?’

A cough to clear his throat. ‘I am not blind yet.’

‘Sometimes, when I hear of such thing as this, I am reminded of how those waves are very much like ourselves, only that they live much shorter lives. I watch them come rushing for the shore and see how they tumble in equal creation and destruction, so captivating to my eyes. And I see how it is the force of the wind riding through them that keeps them alive. It borrows the water of those waves so it may pass its force through them. How many laqs, I wonder? How far have they travelled from the distant storm to reach here?’

Ash was listening with his full attention, his hangover momentarily forgotten. The dull sea made the monk’s eyes a dark green. They turned to regard him now.

‘You wish to hear this? I’m not boring you?’

A shake of his head.

Meer looked back out at the sea.

‘You see, I watch as they crash against the shore and fizzle out to nothing. The end of their journey; the end of their existence. And it becomes clear to me, in those moments, how their end is what makes them complete. It’s what gives them meaning, what gives their life form. What would that be, if they simply surged around the oceans of the world without ever ceasing? What is creation without destruction? Something bland and uniform and unchanging. Something truly dead.’

Meer leaned back and breathed deeply, as though returning to himself. He looked once more at Ash with his vibrant eyes, surveyed his expression to see how much Ash comprehended.

He seemed to decide that it was not enough.

‘I will tell you something,’ Meer said. ‘In the end, death is a gift of life. I know: it’s a hard thing to appreciate when you lose those you love so fiercely. But without death we would not be living. Those you have lost would not have lived at all.’

Ash moved to squat in front of the fire, his back to the monk now. They were fine sentiments, these words of Meer. Yet they were still only that: words and ideas. They did not dispel his suffering.

‘I will tell you this also. Call it an advance for all the stories you will tell me of Honshu.

‘When I visited the Isles of Sky, I saw how the people lived. They are almost immortal there, did you know that? They have ways of sustaining life, even of cheating death itself. But I thought, ultimately, their longevity brought them much harm. They seemed inhuman to me. Even with all their miracles and wonders, they lived in great boredom and listlessness. Worse, much worse – they could no longer see the poetry in the world around them, so buried in themselves had they become.’

Ash turned around slowly, a single eyebrow raised in disbelief. ‘The Isles of Sky?’

‘It’s true.’

‘I thought only the longtraders of Zanzahar knew the way.’

Meer shrugged. ‘Maybe when you tell me of Honshu, I will tell you more of my own tales. How does that sound?’

Ash opened his mouth, closed it again with a snap of teeth.

Meer was wrong about sharing his burdens. He felt even worse now than he had only a few moments before. He groaned as he staggered to his feet and threw the longcoat over his shoulders.

‘Thank you, again,’ Ash said, and left for the comfort of his room and a long hot soak in a tub.

The regulars were talking of the war the next afternoon when Ash finally rose from his bed, and stuffed some of the leaves into his mouth, and went downstairs to find himself a drink.

Against the bar he sat on a stool with a half-finished bottle of Cheem Fire, and played a game of ylang with Samanda, the dark Alhazii woman he had seen on his first night here, and who turned out to be the proprietor’s wife. Lars, the proprietor, seemed much infatuated with his young wife. He rarely complained at the fact that she refused to do any form of work about the inn.

‘I sleep with you, that is work enough,’ she replied the one time he bordered on criticism, and he lowered his eyes, and skulked away, muttering.

Ash scratched the bites from the bedbugs and listened to the gossip of the men around the room. They were talking of the latest rumours, of how the Matriarch had died from the wounds she had gained in the battle of Chey-Wes.

Ash longed for it to be true. He barely listened as they went on to describe how the imperial invaders were fighting now amongst themselves; how the defence of the Shield was going badly, how Kharnost’s Wall was about to fall.

Ash lost the game of ylang, his mind no longer on it. Drunk and in need of a walk, he excused himself and took his bottle with him and went outside. Dead leaves covered the pathways, piled in drifts against buildings, making for treacherous walking. The wind was jagged with cold today. It felt as though winter was arriving early.

Near the edge of the Shoals, close to the waves, he spotted Meer the monk sitting beneath a raised lean-to close to the sea, with a group of children gathered around him. Ash stopped, and lowered his bottle of Cheem Fire to watch.

The monk was holding up a slate and a stick of chalk. He was teaching the children how to read, and they were laughing, making a game of it.

Ash felt a semblance of peace as he gazed at the scene. He walked a few steps further onto the rocks and hunkered down with his bottle, still within earshot of the group, just out of reach of the hissing spray of the waves.

A fishing boat was out there in the heavy swell, struggling towards the harbour, its sails flapping in tatters and its crew straining with oars against the current. A hard business, thought Ash.

He settled into himself. Thoughts fluttered like falling leaves, glimpsed then gone.

A flake of snow ensnared itself in his eyelashes. He blinked it away and looked up at the clouds. More snow began to tumble down.

‘Look, children, snow!’ he heard the monk exclaim from behind.

The children instantly forgot their lessons and chased him over the rocks, overjoyed at the flakes of ice floating from the sky.

The wind felt cold on Ash’s teeth as he smiled.

The monk approached him as dusk was falling, a long fishing pole in his hand.

‘You look hungry, my sad friend.’

Ash’s stomach made an audible noise in reply.

‘Follow me. We’ll catch some fish and enjoy a supper together.’

He agreed, and together they found a flat spot next to the lapping water as the stars emerged, slowly populating the night sky with their shingle of light. Meer cast his line as far out as he could, then hummed a tune as they waited.

‘I thought the monks of Khos did not eat the flesh of fish,’ Ash said after a while, drawing his gaze from the eastern sky, where constellations were rising.

Meer drew in the line slowly, then tossed the hook, weight and float back out into the water. He sat down again.

A minute passed before he spoke. ‘I have a confession to make. I’m not really a monk.’

Ash saw that he was serious.

‘You’ve heard of fake monks before?’

‘Of course. Since the war only monks may beg for coin.’

The monk who was not a monk exhaled loudly. ‘I find it a useful way to live, whenever I’m here. It suits me best.’

‘So why tell me this?’

‘Because it’s no secret. If anyone asks me directly I tell them. And most people here don’t care what you are. I’ve helped them when I could, unlike a great many of the monks you’ll find on this island, locked away in their high sanctuaries. I must tell you. Even in my few months at the monastery, I thought most of them were more concerned with dogma and politics than in the Way.’

Meer glanced at Ash then, sideways, as though trying to read his reaction. ‘Besides, as soon as spring arrives, I’ll be leaving again to travel abroad.’

‘But I have heard them talk in the Perch of how you keep a vigil in the shrine every day, meditating deeply.’

‘ Pah. They call it what they wish to call it. In the shrine I merely sit and watch the world turning.’

Ash saw the irony in that. In the native tongue of Honshu, the meditative act of chachen meant simply to sit in stillness.

He watched the man and pondered.

‘I was coming to see you later,’ Meer admitted. ‘I’ve been talking with some friends in the city. Concerning your situation.’

‘ You have been doing what?’

‘I can get you to Cheem, if you want it.’

‘Oh? And I suppose we are flying, like a leaf on the wind?’

Meer showed him one of his quick, boyish smiles. ‘I have a friend who owns a boat.’

Ash’s expression clearly said it all.

‘It’s true,’ Meer chirped.

‘And tell me. Why would you go to all that trouble, simply for an old farlander like me?’

‘Because we’d want to come along with you. To Sato.’

Ash’s hand reached for his sword, though it grasped at nothing. He had left his weapon back in his room.

‘Who are you?’ he asked coolly. ‘How do you know of Sato?’

The man shrugged and held out his hands in a gesture of openness. ‘I am who I say I am. And a little more. All you need to know, in this moment here and now, is that I’m a friend to you, Ash. And that I have certain other friends. People who would dearly wish to have words with the Roshun order.’

‘There is no more Roshun order.’

‘Why not? Because the Imperials attacked it? Yes, we have already spoken to several of your agents in the Free Ports. They all said the same as you. Still, there might be survivors left in Cheem. If there are, we would like to make them an offer.’

Ash was on his feet now, though he could not recall standing.

‘You are with the Few?’

A modest twitch of the head.

‘Trust me – we only wish to talk with your people. And in return, I may just be willing to help you.’

‘Help me? With what?’

Meer stepped forward to set a hand on his shoulder. He looked Ash straight in the eye.

‘With your loss, my friend.’