Ides of the May (Children of the May 2 - updates weekly)

Chapter Eleven: An Encounter on the Road

We were nearly two weeks on the road. On the sixth day we passed the abandoned Roman wall. Although we crossed it at collapsed section, I had never seen something so impressive. The wall stretched east and west as far as the eye could see, punctuated at intervals by abandoned forts. Brunor had feared that Arthur might have kept these forts garrisoned, as he had armed them the previous autumn, but there were no sentries or guards that we could see.

Once on the wall’s south side we veered sharply west, and slowly the land began to resemble my home. Forests became more extensive and more lush, the lands rockier, and the descents and climbs more sharp and treacherous. I began to think of the lakes as lakes again, rather than lochs. On the eighth day War-Strider succeeded in unseating Garnish, and the big lad caught a sharp blow on his forehead that put him to sleep for more than hour. He was melancholy when he awoke, and started talking about his mother, a wise woman who had taught him what magic he knew. It was the first time I had heard him talk about his family. It seemed he had not meant to join with the May-children at first; he had been returning home after Castle Spar-Longius, but found his parents’ cottage nearly destroyed.

‘It was horrible.’ Petal told me later. She had been travelling north with him. ‘His dad was dead when got there, slaughtered in the normal way. But his mum... she was still alive. You know how he’s always going on about how clever she was? She was reduced to an idiot. It was as if someone had hollowed her out, like you scrape the seeds from a marrow.’ Petal shuddered. ‘Her eyes were the worst. It was like you were looking through them straight into her head, and all you could see were clouds. We tried to bring her north, but one night we woke up and she was gone. Garnish found her at the bottom a high rock, but whether she fell by accident or threw herself deliberately we couldn’t tell.’

As our journey progressed the heavy centre of what I assumed was Merlin’s magic became impossible to ignore. It sat in my head like a permanent headache, seeming to warp the world around me in strange ways. The effect was like – I don’t know quite how to describe it – it was as if I was seeing the world through a curved glass, or the reflection in a polished bowl. The world was distorted at the fringes of my vision, as if it was a cloth with one over-tight thread dragging in the edges. The others seemed unaware of the effect, but as the other magician in the party, I thought Garnish might have some sense of it.

‘I can feel something,’ he told me, ‘but only faintly, and only when it moves. I’m not a natural magician like you.’ His eyes, as ever, started to fill with tears. He was very quick to weep; though now I had heard the story of his parents I could understand that more. ‘I learned little tricks from my mother and from books, but I never breathed in from the Cave of the Dragon like she did. I’d like to go there some day. But even if I do, I’ll never have the same sense of the magical fabric of things as natural magicians like you and Epicene.’ He shrugged, and offered me one of the sweet nuts he snacked on from one meal to the next.

One of the strange things about travelling for a long time with people is how easy it is to become fond of them, even if you start from a position of great mutual dislike. I suppose it beats the alternative, which is to fight and argue, making a difficult and potentially dangerous journey even more so. So it was that as the days went on, and the rawness of my departure from Palomina lessened, I grew to enjoy the company of Garnish, Brunor, Petal and, yes, even Bellina Saunce Pité. By the eleventh evening of our journey we were all getting along very well.

Bellina and Petal had developed a fascination with my glamour, and I began to try my hand at making temporary glamours for them, according to their instructions. I called them ‘glimmers’. Brunor enjoyed very much seeing how the two girls, who were both extremely pretty to begin with, contrived my help to make themselves stupendously beauteous. Helens, Brunor called them, laughingly suggesting that the wars over the two them would last not ten years, as the Trojan War had, but thirty or forty.