The Scarecrow (excerpt)

by Sean Williams

The sun had barely touched the western horizon when they reached the outskirts of Samimi. The town didn’t announce itself — there was no wall or gate as Ros had seen elsewhere. Samimi made itself known by degrees, first by a house or two hugging the road, then by a caravan stop where several trading families congregated, preparing a fire for the night’s communal meal. Other roads joined theirs, and soon the sound of voices was louder in the dusk than the birds calling to each other over rooftops.

Ros felt a familiar nervousness creep over him at being around people again. As much as he had been anticipating their arrival, he greatly preferred the road to any kind of crowd.

The atmosphere of Samimi was thick with smoke and cooking smells, and behind it all a spicy, exotic tang he couldn’t immediately identify. Dogs barked at the coming night, and cats skulked along fences. A baby’s cry caught Ros’s ear from far away. There were families in Samimi. People lived ordinary lives here. Towns like this one were what most people thought of as normal.

‘Wait here,’ said Varis, dismounting and handing Adi the reins. ‘I’ll find us a room.’

He left them waiting at a crossroads that sported no fewer than three two-storey inns. A steady stream of dark-skinned people flowed by, on foot or by any other means available, including camel, horse-drawn cart, and even a strange wheeled contraption that propelled itself with a terrible racket up the centre of the street.

Ros had never seen anything like it. Neither strand beast nor tractor, it possessed two glowing lamps that cast beams of white light into the thickening gloom. As it passed, Ros felt a tingle of the Change rush through him. Whatever it was, its engine ran on more than just alcohol.

Behind him, he heard Adi unwrapping the pouch her father had given her.

‘Tally Wiskins,’ she read from the instructions within. ‘That’s who we’re looking for.’

‘She with the salt. We’ll ask around tomorrow. Him or her?’

‘Her,’ Adi said. ‘She has connections offshore, so she should be able to help both of us.’

Ros nodded, thinking of the blue haze to the south that was no longer visible from Samimi’s built-up streets. The sea was something he had only ever heard about before. He was keen to see it with his own eyes but in less of a hurry to venture out on it. Only the knowledge that a boat was the best way to reach the deep ocean convinced him that he should risk it.

Varis came out of one inn and moved on to the next. His cool gaze took in the street and his charges with one sweep. Ros wondered how they looked to others’ eyes: two unattended young travellers, one light-skinned, one dark with white-streaked hair, riding a camel heavily loaded with baggage and leading a horse similarly burdened. Their clothes were dusty but fine — much finer than any Ros had ever owned before, thanks to the generosity of the Clan. The two of them had clearly travelled far and seen much. How much, he hoped the people of Samimi would never know.

Varis appeared again and, after making sure they were still safe, entered the third inn. Adi leaned against Ros’s back. He didn’t mind taking her weight. He had grown in recent weeks: hard work for the Clan had both strengthened and lengthened him. The ache in his back and legs was at least partly from growing pains, not just sleeping on the hard ground.

‘Who are we this time?’ Adi asked, her voice muffled by his shoulder.

He thought quickly, taking the letters of their heartnames and shuffling them using the cipher Vasoph the man’kin had given him in Jakati. ‘Paril’ led to ‘Sovan’, a name he had used as an alias before. Adi’s heart-name, Jelena, took some more thought.

‘Hakamu,’ he said. ‘That’s your name today.’

‘Nice.’ She shifted slightly against him. ‘Sovan and Hakamu.’

‘And Varis.’

‘Yes. Him too.’

Ros rubbed absently at one of the bee-sting scars on his right wrist until the Clansman returned.

‘The Exchange has the best rooms,’ Varis said, ‘but the Coach and Camel has the better rate. Which do you prefer?’

‘I like the name of the Coach and Camel,’ said Ros.

‘And I like the rate,’ said Adi, straightening in the saddle.

‘Then we’re agreed.’ Varis took back Leda’s reins and patted her muscular flank. ‘Let’s get settled. The evening meal starts in half an hour.’

Ros’s stomach rumbled at the thought. He was a much better chef now than he had been when he’d first run away from home, but he always relished the chance to let other people do the cooking.

* * *

They stabled Know-It-All and Leda at the back of the inn, where several other beasts were already grazing, then took their luggage inside and deposited it in a long but narrow upstairs room. It contained nothing but three sagging cots and the air was musty, but to Ros it seemed like luxury. There was enough room for him to stretch out, and a working indoor toilet just up the hall.

‘This is the life,’ he said with a grin.

‘Easily pleased, you,’ said Adi. ‘I’m hoping there’s a bath.’

‘You smell okay.’

‘I wasn’t talking about me.’ She returned his smile with white teeth gleaming. ‘I’ll suffocate if I have to stay in here a minute longer.’

Ros felt his mood lightening as the three of them headed downstairs. The interior of the Coach and Camel was bigger than any eating-house they had seen since leaving the Clan on the road to Moombin over a week earlier. The smell of food filled his head and he could barely contain his impatience as Varis paid for them to join the small group gathered at long wooden benches to eat. They looked like a mix of traders and official travellers, all men bar one small woman in the blue robes of an official from the Haunted City. Ros had learnt very little about the Strand since crossing the Divide, but he knew the name of the capital and he knew how to tell the difference between a Sky Warden and an ordinary functionary. Anyone wearing a glass collar was bound to be strong in the Change and best avoided. This woman seemed unthreatening, but he kept an eye on her all the same.

The meal came, a simple but tasty broth of whitefleshed fish and soft green vegetables, with baked grain rolls on separate plates. Bowls of butter and salt were passed between everyone. Strand cooking lacked many of the spices Ros had become accustomed to using with the Clan, but was much more adventurous than anything cooked at Mount Geheb. He didn’t share Adi’s disdain for food that failed to make her eyes water.

There was a map of the Strand stretching across two whole walls of the eating hall. Ros idly studied it while he ate, noting the names. Samimi was marked with an arrow towards the middle of the long, unbroken coastline.

‘Do you think you’ll do it here?’ Adi asked, following the direction of his gaze.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe, if it’s safe.’

‘Safe for who? You or Escher?’

They could speak openly knowing that no one would recognise the former name of the Golem of Omus.

‘Safe for everyone,’ he said. ‘What if he got out? It would be a disaster.’

‘Nothing’s going to happen to him at the bottom of the ocean. And the sooner he’s gone the better, I say.’

‘So you can get on with your mission?’

She shrugged and dipped a crust of bread into the broth. ‘This isn’t a holiday, you know.’

‘I do know that. You want to prove yourself to your father, and I want to help you. I just —’

He stopped as the chef emerged with a bowl of leftovers and put it down on the next table along.

‘I just want seconds,’ he said instead of what he had been intending to say, which was that sometimes he was afraid of finishing what he had started.

As Ros returned to his seat with bowl replenished, the inn’s front door creaked open, admitting a strikingly tall man with a curling grey beard. He carried a light pack, and wore a close-fitting cap, which he removed immediately, liberating a mane that matched his beard.

After exchanging a private sentence or two with the innkeeper, he shrugged out of the pack and came to join the others.

‘My thanks, but no,’ he told the chef on being offered a dinner bowl. ‘Ale is sufficient. Your finest, please, and in pewter if you have it.’ His voice was liquid and easy on the ear. To the room he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my joining you while you eat.’

A murmur of assent encouraged him to find a space. The table at which Ros, Adi and Varis were seated was the closest. He settled himself next to Ros and smoothed down his clothes, raising a faint odour of smoke and mule. ‘It was my intention to reach Bohm before full night,’ he said, smiling his thanks for the mug of ale when it arrived. ‘My steed is ailing, however, and the day crept away from me. So here I linger, grateful for the chance to enjoy civilised company a little longer. You are travellers too, I presume?’

Ros would have preferred to avoid conversation, but doing so would attract more attention than putting up with it.

‘We’re from Showell,’ he said, picking a name at random from the map.

‘But originally from the north, yes?’ The question was directed at all three of them. Although darker than Ros, Varis and Adi were lighter in colour than anyone else in the room, marking them as foreigners. Instantly, the man waved the question away, as though sensing that he was being intrusive. ‘No matter. I ask only because I have cousins in Yamarna. Distant cousins, not worthy of the family name. You wouldn’t have heard of them.’

He looked despondently into his ale and Ros felt bad for being rude. Offering his hand, and ignoring Varis’s surreptitious head-shake, he said, ‘I’m Sovan, and this is Hakamu and her uncle, Varis.’

Adi nodded hello, although she too looked more cautious than welcoming. Varis ate silently, acknowledging their companion with only his eyes.

‘Welcome to you,’ said the tall man, ‘from Arden Quirk.’ He patted his chest, which made a faint jingling sound, as though he was wearing a mail undershirt. ‘This is a fine town for visiting, which I’m sure its residents will tell you, although it’s drier and browner than normal thanks to a lack of rain. Not far from here is the Well of Yunda, where you’ll find a hole in the ground no bigger than you are from which a giant lizard supposedly burrowed to eat a flock of sheep. While you’re there, don’t miss the Proclamation Tree. It may be drooping a little now, but Gerd Yunda himself stood in its shadow, ’tis said, and declared the town to be his.’

There followed a long and amiable description of Samimi’s attractions, which seemed far from impressive the way Quirk told them. Ros nodded politely and offered nothing, letting the man ramble on while they worked their way through the meal. A one-sided conversation with a harmless old crank would hurt no one.

It took him off guard, then, when the conversation suddenly shifted.

‘You’ve travelled further than anyone else in this room, I dare say.’ Quirk gestured indifferently at the others seated at the tables. ‘You’ve seen more and heard more still. Perhaps you could attest to the veracity of a tale that’s reached my ears from distant parts — a tale I can scarcely believe, for all that it comes with an assurance of utter truth.’

Ros froze in the act of swallowing his last scrap of bread. ‘What tale?’

Quirk’s eyes were sparkling and full of intelligence.

‘How the Golem of Omus has been vanquished by a new hero from the north: Roslin of Geheb, a Changeworker born a humble farmhand but now so powerful he makes the mightiest Stone Mages look like amateur illusionists.’ The man’s voice rose to fill the entire room. ‘Not satisfied with defeating one of the world’s oldest enemies, he single-handedly took on dust devils, a Bandit King and the dreadful Bee Witch, and as an aside rescued an imprisoned Desert Queen from a fate much worse than death.’

People were looking up from their meals, and Ros quailed inside, knowing what was coming next.

‘Before he could be thanked, he rode off into the desert on his trusty camel, accompanied only by the Clan Princess he loves and whose life he has saved twice already. Have you not heard of him?’

Ros was still frozen with a lump of dead food in his throat. Adi was flushing furiously, unable to meet anyone’s eye. It was Varis who answered, speaking for the first time in Quirk’s presence.

‘We’ve heard the tale,’ said the Clansman whose name was unknown outside his own family. ‘Surely, it is a fancy, nothing more.’

‘The story is said to originate with the heir of the Desert Queen himself, who befriended Roslin of Geheb in the desert. Could he be wrong? And the people who sing from Ulum to Mayr of the hero’s strength and honour, are they wrong too?’

‘If not wrong,’ said the Clansman, ‘then at least exaggerating wildly.’

At that, Quirk nodded. ‘Yes. That is the nature of such tales. But a kernel of truth likely exists.’

‘Many young men ride trusty camels. That much truth, and no more.’

Quirk nodded thoughtfully and stroked his beard. ‘A camel he earned in the first of his many adventures, they say, given to him by a trader he defeated in a battle of wits.’

At that, a stocky man seated by the empty fireplace snorted and rose to his feet.

‘You don’t believe either?’ Quirk asked him, clearly annoyed by the interruption.

‘I have no appetite for lies.’ With that, the man strode out the front door, shutting it with a loud bang behind him.

Quirk turned back to Varis with a raised eyebrow, his composure quickly restored. ‘Exaggerations, fancies or lies? Perhaps we will never know. There is no harm in enjoying the tale regardless. It passes the time.’

The man garnered enough agreement from his audience to convince him to continue. He called for more ale and launched into a detailed telling of Ros’s adventures. His voice was rolling and hypnotic, but Ros was far from soothed. His hand gripped the leather pouch at his side. He wished that he was a thousand kilometres away, and that the friends he’d made in the deeper desert had tighter lips. From deep in his memory came the voice of Yury, the so-called ‘heir of the Desert Queen’, saying ‘You need to lighten up a little.’ That might be true; Ros knew he took things very seriously. But there was nothing wrong with that. It was in his character, ingrained by his life’s experiences. The things he had done had been forced upon him; he hadn’t sought them out or pursued them for selfish ends. Taking the camel, for instance, had been an act of desperation, not a stunt to show how clever he was. Fear had driven him, not bravery, and guilt still haunted him over some of the other things he had done.

If anyone was worthy of acclaim, it was Varis, who had protected them in a thousand small ways during their journey, and protected them now by standing and making excuses for them, saying they were tired and needed to retire ahead of an early start the next morning.

Ros felt Quirk’s gaze on him as they left, but the man’s recitation didn’t falter in the slightest. He had reached the encounter with the crabbler coven, one of the darkest and most terrible experiences of Ros’s life. In Quirk’s version it became a jolly underground adventure, with monsters fleeing at the very sight of him. No one knew how awful it had been, except Escher, the golem who had lied to him.

As they climbed the stairs to the first floor, he felt Adi’s hand reaching for his. He squeezed it, grateful for the comfort she offered and knowing that it went both ways.