Solem Read online

  Solem

  Clive S. Johnson

  Daisy Bank

  This eBook edition first published in 2016

  All rights reserved

  © Clive S. Johnson, 2016

  Ver 3001/3

  The right of Clive S. Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the author, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  All artwork: cover and maps by the author. Copyright applicable.

  Also by Clive S. Johnson

  The Dica Series:

  Leiyatel’s Embrace (Book 1)

  Of Weft and Weave (Book 2)

  Last True World (Book 3)

  Cold Angel Days (Book 4)

  An Artist’s Eye (Book 5)

  Starmaker Stella (Book 6)

  Vivere Credendum est Solem

  Table of Contents

  1 A Window from Her World

  2 A Long Hope Dashed

  3 To an Adventure

  4 Of Bogymen and Demons

  5 Sharman Comes

  6 A Hot Soak Likely Postponed

  7 To Fleabag Fulmer’s

  8 An Unexpected Delivery

  9 Aveir de Peis

  10 What’s in a Name

  11 The Rousing of a Problem

  12 The Dusting Off of a Rule

  13 Confederates in Crime

  14 Dawning of a New Day

  15 The Espousal of Gryff

  16 Grosswilleal and Beyond

  17 Subterfuge

  18 On a Dwelgefa’s Errand

  19 Curiosity

  20 A Wonderment’s Meaning

  21 Geetholden

  22 Bewitched

  23 An Inquisition

  24 Waiting Upon a Reply

  25 Where Goes an Answer

  26 Discoveries

  27 Youthful Impetuosity

  28 To Strike Off

  29 Solem

  30 A Proposed Union

  31 Then They were Legion

  32 A Dark Past

  33 Thoughts to Higher Places

  34 A Daunting Prospect

  35 An End in Sight

  36 So Near yet so Far

  37 A Grace Imparted

  38 To Draw Upon a Grace

  39 To Business

  40 All Bar a Shake of the Hand

  41 A Smile Soon to be Missed

  42 A Last Embrace

  43 Where All Demons Must Go

  44 Of Serum and White Powder

  45 Together, as One

  46 The Wisdom of Solem

  47 Of Long Forgotten Miracles

  48 In Solem She Trusts

  49 Janeen Speaks True

  50 Overseer of Works

  51 The Good Word Spreads

  52 An Awakening

  About the Author

  Dwelgefa Woodwright’s hand-drawn map

  1 A Window from Her World

  The soil beneath Janeen’s hoe broke up with little effort, the blade sinking satisfyingly into the friable earth. She’d already accumulated two rows of now wilting early Spring weeds and had nearly uprooted a third. She planned to do another two before pulling the wheelbarrow along the central furrow and gathering them all up.

  She could hear her younger friend Lyvinia’s own hoe not far behind her and so Janeen stopped when she reached the border between their two plots. Lyvinia’s shorter height and her hoe’s long handle made for harder work in the weeding of her own family’s patch.

  Only here, in this small clearing, did the bright morning light flood down through the forest’s dense canopy, enough to strike the black earth with its nurturing warmth. Only here did it glint so starkly from Lyvinia’s red-flecked, mouse-brown hair, a sharp contrast against her drab tunic and skirt. Slighter and much shorter than Janeen, her actions were abrupt, her fourteen-year-old arms having to jerk against the weight of the hoe and its charge of soil.

  “You should get your dad to shorten that handle,” Janeen commented when Lyvinia finally finished off her one uneven furrow.

  She stood beside Janeen, arched her back and quietly groaned.

  “He says I’ll grow into it,” Lyvinia made light to say, trying to brighten her face with a grin.

  Janeen slowly shook her head as she rolled her eyes heavenward, where her gaze became caught.

  However many times she’d worked in the clearing, the lure of the cloud-flecked blue sky would at some point prove irresistible. Each time, for a few moments at least, she’d find her gaze held by its otherworldly smoothness. And sure enough, she again couldn’t bring herself to lower her eyes, this time to meet what she knew would be the intent stare of her friend. Lyvinia was prying once more, prying into that one subject Janeen herself preferred to ignore.

  “Johan’s asked me again,” Lyvinia was saying. “Wanted to know this time what we intended doing once we’ve finished here.”

  The calm patch of sky still held Janeen’s gaze: something about its wayward depth, its promise of a distance far outstripping even the lofty reach of the forest’s dark and cluttered canopy. A hazy memory nudged at her mind.

  “I told him I didn’t know yet; that we hadn’t decided.” Even the uncertainty in Lyvinia’s voice couldn’t break the spell in which the sky held Janeen captive. “He seemed really disappointed; kept glancing over at you, with that hangdog look of his.”

  Janeen almost convinced herself she could see something beyond the few clouds visible, beyond the rectangle of pale blue against which they drifted. The limited view, framed by the forest’s dark tangle of rippling leaves and crisscrossed branches and trunks, now looked like a streaked window, as though a crowd beyond frantically raked hands across its steamed-up glass.

  Lyvinia’s voice was fast becoming ever more distant, more so as Janeen stared the harder at what she now envisaged as the firmament’s streaming windowpane. “You know what?” Lyvinia could hardly be heard to say, “I think he’s taken a shine…”

  Always the same direction, Janeen thought; the rivulets always raced away from the Sun. But how did she know this? How could she be so certain?

  She now saw the sky shake, blurring its stream of tears. The square of skylight lurched and swayed within the shadowed roof of limb and leaf. It smeared Janeen’s vision as a grip at her elbow cracked open one of its imagined panes, letting in the echo of a familiar voice.

  “Janeen? Janeen? Are you all right? You don’t look…”

  The moment Janeen thought to answer—but before she could stir her lips—she’d become convinced a great, white hand had pressed against the seeming windowpane. She saw it smear aside the remaining condensation to reveal a startled face, vast eyes bursting wide as it stared down, straight into her heart.

  On the tail end of Lyvinia’s surprised intake of breath, it seemed to Janeen that she herself was borne aloft, blazing like a sun, bleaching the forest with a light that streamed from her heart. Her whole body shook but soon only trembled, trembled at the flood of words now pouring from her mouth, up through the clearing’s sparkling window and out into the vastness of space.

  2 A Long Hope Dashed

  Softly closing the door to Janeen’s bedroom behind him, her father quietly made his way back down the short timber-walled passage and into the kitchen.

  “How is she, Bardwyn?” his friend Calver asked from where he sat at a large blea
ched-wood table that dominated the small uncluttered room.

  Bardwyn ran his hand through his hair, avoiding Calver’s gaze. “Sleeping at last.”

  “Hmm,” and Calver tapped on the table top before pointing at a mug sitting before the place opposite. “Get some of that down you before it goes cold.”

  The creak of the wickerwork chair Bardwyn slumped into turned the normally convivial warm embrace of the kitchen into a cold, tut-tutting rebuff. The chair continued to complain as he leant forward and lifted the mug to his lips. He stopped, though, when he caught Calver staring at him, the look on his old friend’s face drawing the words he’d hoped he’d never have to utter.

  “At seventeen, I was convinced she must’ve grown out of them.”

  “Hmm. Clearly not,” Calver directed at the boards of the table as he crossed his arms on its top and lowered his head to them, aiming his bald pate at Bardwyn.

  “Must be six years now at least,” but the top of Calver’s head seemed not to be listening. “The last one were back when she were ten or so.” Bardwyn let out a strangled breath. “I thought, after that, she’d finally come to terms with her mother’s passing,” and he swallowed hard. “Oh, how I’ve missed you over the years, my darling Marita.” He tipped the mug and forced himself to drink, only the creak of their chairs filling the returned silence after he’d thumped his drink back down on the table.

  Bardwyn looked over the top of Calver’s still lowered head. Beyond him, through a long, low, lichen encrusted window frame, dappled verdant light seeped in to colour the earthy tang of the forest’s cycle of growth and decay that had long filled the room. The whoop and trill of burrowbows and the plaintive churring trill of a nightjar lent strident voices to the forest’s evening stillness.

  Calver lifted his head and stared at Bardwyn, open mouthed for a moment. “When do you think she’ll be up to it?” he finally summoned, prising a narrowed stare from Janeen’s father, but nothing more. “You know what it means, Bardwyn, as well as I do, if not better.”

  Bardwyn only continued staring at him.

  “Janeen is fast coming of age, my old friend. It can’t be left any longer, not now everyone’s going to know for certain—”

  “I understand well enough what’s needed, Calver,” Bardwyn said, somewhat louder and more forcefully than he’d intended, his voice quickly dropping lower. “You don’t have to remind me. I know what I have to do.” His jaw had frozen beneath the cold stare he’d aimed at his friend, but his whole face softened when Calver reached out a hand to his arm, a hesitant offer on his lips.

  “If this is too hard…well, of course it will be, but if it’s too hard to do yourself, then… Then I’m offering to do it for you.”

  “Nay, Calver. I can’t let you do that, my friend. No, though it’s kind of you, it’s something I have to do myself—on my own.” Bardwyn placed his hand on his friend’s, where it still clutched his arm. “She’ll be well enough by tomorrow, I’m sure. You’ll see. Janeen was always fully recovered come the day after her fits. I’m sure it’ll be the same this time.”

  “In which case, at least let me sort out the stuff you’ll need from the elders.”

  “Ah, yes. Perhaps if you wouldn’t mind. I’d appreciate that. Don’t think I could take their ‘We told you so’.”

  “Best be off, then. They’re bound to have heard by now. I’ll try keep them out of your hair, long enough to give you time to prepare.” Calver had stood, momentarily frozen, as though recognising the need to say or do something reassuring but too embarrassed by the familiarity it would demand.

  Bardwyn swept up the cold mugs and carried them to the sink, clanking them dully down against its glazed earthenware, his back now to Calver. Bardwyn’s “Thank you” was enough to break Calver’s indecision, to let him loose of the room, quickly down the passage, out of the front door and back into the forest once more.

  3 To an Adventure

  Although Janeen had woken a number of times, each had been into the midst of darkness, forcing her back into fitful sleep until morning light finally reached down to her bedroom and she could see to get up. Even then it must still have been early, for despite the large roof window she found it difficult selecting fresh clothes in the forest’s filtered dawn light.

  The passage into the kitchen still slept within the pitch black mantle afforded it by its lack of windows, and so Janeen was running her hand along its worn wainscoting when she almost collided with her father.

  “Argh,” she yelped, startling Bardwyn who let slip a bucket of water he’d been carrying. “What you doing up so early?” she finally said, once she’d stepped back from the spill and collected her breath.

  “Oh, er…didn’t sleep too well.”

  “Nothing’s wrong is there?”

  His eyes glinted redly in the diffused dawn light, then he blinked, coughed and looked down. “Better mop up this mess, although most of it will have run between the boards by now.”

  “You do that, Dad. I’ll draw some more water and make us both some camill.”

  When she’d finished brewing, Janeen finally set her father’s steaming mug before him and sat down opposite at the table. By now the skylight let in enough of the forest’s green morning light for Janeen to study her father’s face. He looked drawn.

  “Are you feeling all right, Dad? It’s not like you to sleep badly.”

  “Did you finish off the weeding yesterday, Janeen?”

  “The weeding? Well, of course I—” but for some reason she couldn’t quite remember how far she’d got. “I must have done, Dad. I started early enough.” She couldn’t see why she wouldn’t have done. Sometimes, though, the days did seem to run in to each other, especially when everyone was so busy with Spring preparations. There was so much to do, almost all mundane.

  “I’m going fishing today, down at the river,” Bardwyn said. “I think you ought to come along and keep me company.”

  “Fishing? But you always go alone. Why the—”

  “I just thought you’d been working a bit too hard of late. The river’s a good place to relax. The air’s so fresh there, and the sun will do you no end of good.”

  “But I feel fine, Dad, and there’s still so much to do. I’ve the trellis to repair for the sweet-tats, and there’s all the canes to put up for the peas, never mind the—”

  “Oh, come on, Janeen, a morning’s going to be neither here nor there, and anyway, I could do with having a bit of a chat with you. It’s something I should have done well before now.”

  Janeen remembered something from the previous day, remembered Lyvinia telling her about Johan’s interest. She started at the image of her mother’s loving face as it flashed before her mind, filling it with once wonderful but long since tainted memories.

  Janeen loved her father, as she knew he loved her, but it could never be a mother’s love. She knew this now from the things she’d recently picked up from Lyvinia, where her mother had explained to her about what becoming an adult meant. Did her father intend having that same talk with her today? Was that why he seemed so nervous?

  “Well, I suppose so,” she allowed. “It would be a nice change.”

  After they’d had breakfast, Bardwyn went off to his room and returned with a frame of fishing line, a long, thick roll of canvas and his tackle bag. As he shouldered the bag, she offered to carry the roll and line. They were both soon out of the front door and down the path through the ferns and between the great tree trunks that crowded nearest their log-built home.

  Janeen had rarely been as far as the river, the last time many years before, and so looked upon the trip as something of an adventure. It lent a bit of a spring to her step.

  Home soon disappeared from sight above as they descended the steep slope that led down to the stream where she regularly washed their clothes. The air had already become heavy and damp, the lower branches and undergrowth copiously draped with spiders’ webs thickly bejewelled by a lingering dew.

  Before l
ong they’d crossed the stream, stepping from boulder to boulder over the natural dam they formed below Janeen’s small washing-pool. On the far side, the forest floor climbed steeply, their ascending path marked only by a narrow cleft in the waist-high ferns.

  Her father led, his tread sure and unhurried. At the top of the rise, where the tree trunks were thinner and the trees themselves less crowded, the path became broader as it followed the ridge that hemmed in the stream’s valley.

  They’d been following this path for a good half hour when Janeen heard something heavy and fast crashing through the undergrowth, a little way ahead and off to one side. Her father stopped, but listened for only a moment before drawing her into the ferns where they both crouched down.

  The sound of breaking branches, snapping twigs and rustling leaf litter drew nearer until a huge black boar burst onto the path no more than a few yards ahead. Peering between the ferns, Janeen’s eyes grew larger, her breath stuck in her throat.

  The boar sniffed the air a few times, its glinting berries of eyes darting this way and that. It stood, stock still. Janeen was convinced it had seen them, but it only shivered its flanks before snorting once more and barging on, back into the undergrowth on the other side of the path. Again lost from sight, its determined progress steadily dwindled deeper into the forest, and Janeen at last breathed freely once more.

  “Lucky,” was all her father said at first. When she glanced at him, she saw how white he’d gone.

  “I’ve never been so close to one before,” she quietly breathed. “They’re so big!”

  “They don’t tend to go near the village. I don’t think they like the smell of us,” said Bardwyn, and slowly wet his dry lips with his tongue. “I should’ve thought to bring my staff. I usually do when away like this; just in case.”

  He peered up and down the path then cautiously drew Janeen from the ferns and they continued their journey. Half to himself, he said, “Let that be a lesson to us both.”