The Last Wizard Saga
Tamesan: Sample Chapter
One
Marc rubbed his thick stubble, his fingers tracing the long white scar running from his left eye to his collarbone. He was completing his day of sea-watch on White Eagle’s Ledge promontory and he was grateful that the late summer weather was warm. A lazy westerly breeze drifted from the ocean’s empty reaches to break the day’s rising heat and he knew the dragonship’s passage would be slow. He imagined that the Dragon Head, Kevan, would be chafing at the lassitude and cursing the delay and the dragonwarriors would be tired and bored, but in the absence of a strong southerly no one could truly estimate the ship’s time of return.
The villagers waited nearly ten weeks for the dragonship to come home. People who feasted on rumours of tragedy and misfortune were peddling tales of disaster – warriors torn asunder by a mighty dragon, rocks ripping the heart out of the dragonship in a surging storm – but Marc was too old to listen to morbid imaginings. He knew the weather’s vagaries and why the ship was late. Before he received the near-fatal wound that left him scarred and unable to wield a battle-axe or pull an oar, he spent fifteen summers on the dragonship. More than anyone who remained in Harbin while the dragonwarriors searched for the fabled dragon treasures, he understood what might delay the ship.
Marc stretched his left arm in the warm afternoon light and stared across the deep grey water towards the village. A dark smudge against the light green forest, the village huts, the Warriors’ Hall and the Long Hall clung like a bramble vine to the fertile strip nestled beneath the steep shoulders of Dragon Mountain. He was born in Harbin, thirty-five summers ago, first son of Arken and Jenna. His brother, Hendrik, became a dragonwarrior four summers after he did, but Hendrik was killed on his third journey. Dragonwarriors needed good fighting skills and luck, and Hendrik had only one of those things.
Marc sighed, shifted his stance against the granite rock, and squinted into the sun’s glare on the grey ocean. Gulls dipped and rolled near Varst’s Bluff on the bay’s northern side, tiny dots flashing white when sunlight caught their feathers. Free creatures, scavengers perhaps, they came and went as they pleased, and he wondered if they ever considered the affairs of men, ever wondered why he and other men stood sentinel on the spray-moistened rocks while they wheeled and dipped above the ocean. ‘Foolish thoughts,’ he chided himself, but he had a lot of time for foolish thinking while he was on sea-watch. Strange ideas invaded his mind when he was alone, and he sometimes wondered if great Varst was playing tricks on him. He shook his head, as if that would clear his mind, and turned his gaze south.
That’s when he saw the dragonship’s red square sail rise into view. He blinked and checked again. It was the dragonship. He knew it well. Even as a man of thirty-five summers, he felt elation at the ship’s appearance. By his estimation the dragonship would reach Harbin by nightfall, and in a few short hours the whole village would leap into celebration. How he loved to dance and sing the old dragon-hunting songs! There would be tales tonight, new tales to add to Harbin’s rich history of dragon hunters.
He reached into a cleft between the granite rocks to retrieve the ivory horn handed down through generations of sea-watchers from Nakiades’ era, and as he ran his calloused fingers across the fine carvings, pictures of powerful warriors locked in mortal combat with fearsome dragons, he felt a pang of regret for the old days, long gone before he was born. He yearned to be a hero, to have his likeness carved into the artefacts of his descendants, to be remembered by the future.
He shook his head and pushed the daydream aside. ‘Too many foolish thoughts,’ he reminded himself sourly. He sucked in air as he lifted the horn to his lips and blew hard and long, and the sound raced across the water to echo against the small islets and the great mountains. Summer was over. The Dragon Fang, the dragonwarriors of Harbin, were coming home.
+++++
Joy passed from mouth to mouth, shared by the women and children, as the sea-watcher’s distant signal reached Harbin. Outside the Dragon Head’s cottage, Eesa slapped a paddle against the interior of her heavy wooden butter churn, muttered an oath to Procra, the Mother Goddess and called, ‘Chasse!’
The cottage wooden door swung open, hinges whining, and a willowy, broad-shouldered youth emerged, rubbing his eyes against the bright mid-afternoon sunlight. He flicked a loose forelock of red hair aside and stared at his mother’s figure hunched over the churn, but when he heard the familiar bellow of the horn across the bay, and the excited cries swelling through Harbin, his pulse quickened. This time next year, sixteen summers old, he would be coming home aboard the dragonship as a dragonwarrior, as a man who faced a dragon’s wrath and took a dragon’s hoard to mark his coming of age.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Eesa demanded, waggling a butter-smeared finger before the boy’s face to interrupt his reverie.
‘Yes, Mother,’ Chasse answered.
‘Then do as I ask and find Tamesan. I need all the help I can get to prepare for the men’s return. You make sure your sister comes back here.’
Chasse suppressed a smile at the sight of his mother, the wife of the Dragon’s Head, the most powerful warrior in Harbin, standing with her sleeves rolled up, goat fat smeared to her elbows and across her forehead and cheeks, looking like a common village woman. His mother was considered a beauty, he knew that, but her beauty was hard to see when she dressed like a drab.
‘Chasse!’
‘I’m going,’ he replied hurriedly, and he scampered away to find his sister.
+++++
Sitting cross-legged on the mountain ledge, Tam watched the solitary red sail, that hung above the bay’s grey waters like a statement of intent, move painfully slowly in the eddying breezes. Beneath the red square, the hull was a darker suggestion on the watery mass, a shadow, and fractious gulls stooped and circled, acting as winged heralds to the ship’s approach. The last sail she saw in Harbin Bay was moving rapidly seaward ten weeks earlier, carrying the village’s dragonwarriors and a handful of would-be warrior youths into the untamed world of heaving ocean and dragon tales, seeking treasures, adventure and manhood, and Tam watched the ship leave with her usual mixed emotions of excitement and concern – and envy. Her father, Kevan, was perched on the curving prow, his mane of greying hair and full beard emphasising his status. As Dragon Head, it was his duty to lead the men on their annual pilgrimage to slay the fearful dragons, creatures that lurked in the wilderness and terrorised less fortunate villages along the coast.
Tam studied the sail’s progress and assessed it would be late afternoon before the ship docked at the wooden jetty jutting from the stone embankment below the village. There would be rejoicing and reunions as families welcomed the safe return of their fathers and sons, husbands and brothers, but the night’s celebrations would be neither lavish nor long because the dragonship’s return was the forerunner to the Dragon Feast, the annual Harbin festival during which treasure gathered from the slain dragon’s den would be shared among the villagers. On that night, a good deal of food and wine would be consumed, while the men told tales of their recent adventure, and sang older ballads about the past deeds of great dragonwarriors, like her father. They would share the traditional stories of their ancestors who first sailed into the bay, led by Nakiades, the legendary warrior who fought the silver dragon so that his people could settle in Harbin and start new lives. At the festival’s close, the men would present the initiates who sailed away to battle the dragons for the first time. They would no longer be regarded as immature, eager boys, like her brother, Chasse. They would be true dragonwarriors, accorded the rights and trappings of the men who formed Harbin’s Dragon Fang.
A pebble rattled above Tam and clattered down the rocky escarpment to her left. A second pebble ricocheted off a flat rock to her right. She shook out her finely braided red-gold hair, glared at a clump of bushes directly below, and said with mock anger, ‘I know where you are, Chasse.’ A third pebble arched out of the thick clump and clunked harmlessly against the granite rock face behind her. ‘Chasse!’ she warned. A red head popped into view from behind the largest bush, and a broad bright grin creased her brother’s face. Disarmed by his comic appearance, Tam broke into a smile and asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘The ship’s coming,’ Chasse said.
‘I know,’ Tam replied. ‘I can see it from here.’
‘Mother is calling for you.’
‘Let her call,’ Tam answered abruptly.
‘I’m coming up.’ Chasse disengaged from his cover and scrambled up the rocks to sit beside Tam in the early afternoon sunlight, and he gazed at the sun-speckled bay glittering like mica flecks in blue-grey granite. ‘They return on a dark sea,’ he murmured absently, recalling a village proverb.
Tam glanced up at the patchy ceiling of light grey clouds. The blinding sun hung in one brilliant patch of azure sky as if determined to warm the world, and she reflected on the village lore that they grew up with but never fully understood. A dark sea presaged a storm or conflict. The old village women spoke in riddles of red sunsets and grey seas, and ice on summer ponds, as if these events were portents of what was to come, but Tam saw little to prove the accuracy of their predictions. She recalled how so many of so-called confirmed predictions made by old crones like Sharmine, or the bent and wizened Marissa who claimed she could foretell the coming of bad things by reading fish entrails, were retrospectively assigned to earlier signs they claimed to have observed. The only time that Tam expressed her scepticism with her mother, Eesa bluntly warned her to be respectful of her elders and less critical of others until she was perfect herself before she handed Tam the mucking shovel to clean out the chicken roost. Tam never broached the subject again in her mother’s hearing. ‘Do you believe all that stuff?’ she asked.
Chasse turned his bright blue eyes towards her, and Tam found herself feeling sorry for all the girls who would fall victim to her brother’s handsome looks. ‘Sometimes,’ he answered cryptically.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning I don’t really know,’ he replied, grinning. ‘Sometimes things happen and it’s easy to see there was a warning about it. Like when Defra fell into the stream at Watersdrop last year. The old women said Sharmine saw a red flower in the stream two days before and she called it an omen.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Tam snapped. ‘The old women make it up to feel important. It’s like they want to keep everyone aware of their presence.’
Chasse didn’t pursue the argument. He was familiar with his sister questioning every value that their father and mother held sacred, and he enjoyed provoking her by taking their parents’ side in discussions, but recently he found her criticisms of the village’s customs and beliefs too passionate to be fun. She seemed to be brooding on a deep anger that was becoming more determined, obsessive. He was always close to her, being barely a year older, even despite her being a girl, but lately that closeness was changing. Someone he didn’t recognise was emerging from within his normally effervescent sister, a stranger whose mood swung into serious contemplation on a whim or a thought, and he found that person frustrating.
Tam shifted her focus from the dragonship tacking in the mouth of the bay to the spread of slate-shingled roofs clustered along the strip of curved shore directly below her mountain perch. The incoming ship would berth at the finger of planking and poles forming the jetty. Moored fishing boats bobbed on the ocean swell and seagulls circled. Moving dots of colour on the jetty were the first people preparing for the dragonship’s arrival. She knew her mother would be among them.
As wife of the Dragon Head, Eesa would ensure the jetty was clear of fishing nets and tackle and clutter that might hamper the disembarking warriors, and she would be accompanied by other wives, women she could cajole because they answered to her in the absence of their husbands, but she would already be cursing her daughter’s tardiness. Eesa frequently berated Tam for lacking the necessary sense of duty expected of a girl-child of the Dragon Head, but Tam hoped that the occasion’s importance would diminish her mother’s anger by the time she descended the mountain to lend a reluctant hand.
Further up the steep bank, people moved between the wooden huts, going about their menial duties, apparently oblivious to the dragonship’s return – especially the few remaining men – but Tam knew that most would be preparing for the dragonship’s arrival. People were carrying bedding and furs to the Warriors’ Hall, and gathering firewood, and taking food and mead to the Long Hall for the night’s celebrations. Goat herders were mustering their free-ranging stock from the lower hillside and driving the patchwork animals towards the rough-hewn pens built to hold them until the ones to be killed for the feast were selected. The bustling village activity would intensify as the ship neared mooring.
‘Coming down?’ Chasse asked, tilting his head and cocking an eyebrow.
‘Have I choice?’
‘You’re a girl,’ he mocked. ‘You have no choice.’
Tam laughed politely at his condescending observation, knowing he was teasing her, but the truth behind his statement rankled. She was a girl and, in the village, she had no choice but to do as she was told. That was law. ‘I’ll come down, brother Chasse,’ she said, with feigned diffidence, ‘but only because I choose to come down.’
‘I’ll tell Father that when he arrives,’ Chasse threatened with a grin, and he began to slide down the rock. ‘You know what will happen then.’
‘You won’t live that long!’ Tam retorted, and she scrambled over the lip of the ledge to pursue him.
By the time the pair reached the base of the mountain, their faces were flushed, and they were breathless. Though he was a summer older, Chasse barely escaped his sister. Tam’s agility impressed him, and she obviously knew the mountain and forest paths better than anyone, but that was because she spent a lot of time wandering the mountain, a habit that angered their mother. She was his sister, but he also loved her because she was so unlike the other village girls, and sometimes he wished that she was a boy, a brother, because she was willing to play the games he enjoyed. But he was leaving childhood, almost a man, and it was unseemly for him to be seen too often in her company, especially playing games. Tam would be a poor brother anyway, he decided. She was too different, not because she was a girl but because she had different ideas, different habits. Tamesan was unique. That word best described her.
Chasse heard the old woman, Sharmine, whisper the word to another when they were talking about Tamesan. They thought no one could overhear their conversation, but they didn’t see Chasse bent over a fish barrel retrieving a leather-wrapped ball that he was throwing with Aska and Marron.
‘Eesa will rue the day she bore that child,’ Sharmine said solemnly. ‘She doesn’t want to be a woman. She sees this world too clearly, and I fear she doesn’t like what she sees.’
The other woman – Chasse remembered she was called Laryssa; she died in the recent winter – shook her head and whispered a reply Chasse couldn’t hear, but Sharmine’s crusty old face wrinkled with mirth, and she said, ‘I remember well enough what it was like. Oh, but I did infuriate my father then, and my mother swore she would throw me off Watersdrop to purge the village of me and my ways.’ Her laughter subsided to a chuckle, and she made a sign with her open hand, the same sign she always made when she claimed to foresee an event. ‘But this daughter of Eesa and Kevan is not like we were, Laryssa, not like us at all. We had a place here, and we knew it. It simply took us a little time to settle down, the way it does for some girls. This one is different. There is something in her presence, in her bearing, something that makes her unique. I fear she will bring great sorrow to her household. Some things I’ve seen are mere trifles, but this girl’s future is as true as if Procra herself whispered it to me.’
Laryssa made a similar motion with her open hand, and started to reply, but Chasse moved away because his friends were calling.
The word ‘unique’ was new to Chasse then, so he asked Eesa what it meant. Eesa explained, but when she asked why he wanted to know he replied only that he heard it being used. The word merged with his vision of Tamesan thereafter, and he couldn’t look at her or think of her without remembering Sharmine’s prophecy. Tamesan was unique, but one day she would bring great sorrow to her family.
‘Come on, Chasse!’ Tam cried, and she sprinted across the open pasture where the village goats grazed, red hair streaming behind her like a banner. Hearing her challenge, Chasse took to his heels, drawing on his boyish pride not to be beaten to the village outskirts by a girl.
They reached the junction of paths inside the village, side by side, but stopped short when they spotted their mother, arms akimbo, blocking their way. Eesa met them with an angry glare, before fixing her attention on Tam, but her first words were for Chasse. ‘Your father returns, boy. Get to the jetty with the other boys and do whatever tasks are required to ensure the dragonwarriors can disembark unhindered.’
Chasse mumbled a reply, briefly brushed Tam’s hand, as if reassuring her he was only leaving because of his duty, and he ran past Eesa into the village.
Eesa’s green eyes narrowed. ‘Are you too proud to answer the sea-watcher’s horn?’
‘I came,’ Tam replied, trying to judge her mother’s mood and intent.
‘I had to send your brother to fetch you, and your brother is nearly a man,’ Eesa said, anger bristling. ‘Men do not chase after foolish girls who think life is for nothing better than sitting on mountaintops to gaze at the sky. Your brother has far more important matters to attend. As do you. The men are coming home. Your father is coming home. And you will prepare for him, and for all the men of Harbin, like every other girl in this village. Do you understand me? No more foolishness. You are the Dragon Head’s daughter. Behave accordingly!’
Tam nodded. She knew better than to publicly protest when her mother was angry. Her mother’s will was also village law. Her only choice was to obey.
Marc rubbed his thick stubble, his fingers tracing the long white scar running from his left eye to his collarbone. He was completing his day of sea-watch on White Eagle’s Ledge promontory and he was grateful that the late summer weather was warm. A lazy westerly breeze drifted from the ocean’s empty reaches to break the day’s rising heat and he knew the dragonship’s passage would be slow. He imagined that the Dragon Head, Kevan, would be chafing at the lassitude and cursing the delay and the dragonwarriors would be tired and bored, but in the absence of a strong southerly no one could truly estimate the ship’s time of return.
The villagers waited nearly ten weeks for the dragonship to come home. People who feasted on rumours of tragedy and misfortune were peddling tales of disaster – warriors torn asunder by a mighty dragon, rocks ripping the heart out of the dragonship in a surging storm – but Marc was too old to listen to morbid imaginings. He knew the weather’s vagaries and why the ship was late. Before he received the near-fatal wound that left him scarred and unable to wield a battle-axe or pull an oar, he spent fifteen summers on the dragonship. More than anyone who remained in Harbin while the dragonwarriors searched for the fabled dragon treasures, he understood what might delay the ship.
Marc stretched his left arm in the warm afternoon light and stared across the deep grey water towards the village. A dark smudge against the light green forest, the village huts, the Warriors’ Hall and the Long Hall clung like a bramble vine to the fertile strip nestled beneath the steep shoulders of Dragon Mountain. He was born in Harbin, thirty-five summers ago, first son of Arken and Jenna. His brother, Hendrik, became a dragonwarrior four summers after he did, but Hendrik was killed on his third journey. Dragonwarriors needed good fighting skills and luck, and Hendrik had only one of those things.
Marc sighed, shifted his stance against the granite rock, and squinted into the sun’s glare on the grey ocean. Gulls dipped and rolled near Varst’s Bluff on the bay’s northern side, tiny dots flashing white when sunlight caught their feathers. Free creatures, scavengers perhaps, they came and went as they pleased, and he wondered if they ever considered the affairs of men, ever wondered why he and other men stood sentinel on the spray-moistened rocks while they wheeled and dipped above the ocean. ‘Foolish thoughts,’ he chided himself, but he had a lot of time for foolish thinking while he was on sea-watch. Strange ideas invaded his mind when he was alone, and he sometimes wondered if great Varst was playing tricks on him. He shook his head, as if that would clear his mind, and turned his gaze south.
That’s when he saw the dragonship’s red square sail rise into view. He blinked and checked again. It was the dragonship. He knew it well. Even as a man of thirty-five summers, he felt elation at the ship’s appearance. By his estimation the dragonship would reach Harbin by nightfall, and in a few short hours the whole village would leap into celebration. How he loved to dance and sing the old dragon-hunting songs! There would be tales tonight, new tales to add to Harbin’s rich history of dragon hunters.
He reached into a cleft between the granite rocks to retrieve the ivory horn handed down through generations of sea-watchers from Nakiades’ era, and as he ran his calloused fingers across the fine carvings, pictures of powerful warriors locked in mortal combat with fearsome dragons, he felt a pang of regret for the old days, long gone before he was born. He yearned to be a hero, to have his likeness carved into the artefacts of his descendants, to be remembered by the future.
He shook his head and pushed the daydream aside. ‘Too many foolish thoughts,’ he reminded himself sourly. He sucked in air as he lifted the horn to his lips and blew hard and long, and the sound raced across the water to echo against the small islets and the great mountains. Summer was over. The Dragon Fang, the dragonwarriors of Harbin, were coming home.
+++++
Joy passed from mouth to mouth, shared by the women and children, as the sea-watcher’s distant signal reached Harbin. Outside the Dragon Head’s cottage, Eesa slapped a paddle against the interior of her heavy wooden butter churn, muttered an oath to Procra, the Mother Goddess and called, ‘Chasse!’
The cottage wooden door swung open, hinges whining, and a willowy, broad-shouldered youth emerged, rubbing his eyes against the bright mid-afternoon sunlight. He flicked a loose forelock of red hair aside and stared at his mother’s figure hunched over the churn, but when he heard the familiar bellow of the horn across the bay, and the excited cries swelling through Harbin, his pulse quickened. This time next year, sixteen summers old, he would be coming home aboard the dragonship as a dragonwarrior, as a man who faced a dragon’s wrath and took a dragon’s hoard to mark his coming of age.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Eesa demanded, waggling a butter-smeared finger before the boy’s face to interrupt his reverie.
‘Yes, Mother,’ Chasse answered.
‘Then do as I ask and find Tamesan. I need all the help I can get to prepare for the men’s return. You make sure your sister comes back here.’
Chasse suppressed a smile at the sight of his mother, the wife of the Dragon’s Head, the most powerful warrior in Harbin, standing with her sleeves rolled up, goat fat smeared to her elbows and across her forehead and cheeks, looking like a common village woman. His mother was considered a beauty, he knew that, but her beauty was hard to see when she dressed like a drab.
‘Chasse!’
‘I’m going,’ he replied hurriedly, and he scampered away to find his sister.
+++++
Sitting cross-legged on the mountain ledge, Tam watched the solitary red sail, that hung above the bay’s grey waters like a statement of intent, move painfully slowly in the eddying breezes. Beneath the red square, the hull was a darker suggestion on the watery mass, a shadow, and fractious gulls stooped and circled, acting as winged heralds to the ship’s approach. The last sail she saw in Harbin Bay was moving rapidly seaward ten weeks earlier, carrying the village’s dragonwarriors and a handful of would-be warrior youths into the untamed world of heaving ocean and dragon tales, seeking treasures, adventure and manhood, and Tam watched the ship leave with her usual mixed emotions of excitement and concern – and envy. Her father, Kevan, was perched on the curving prow, his mane of greying hair and full beard emphasising his status. As Dragon Head, it was his duty to lead the men on their annual pilgrimage to slay the fearful dragons, creatures that lurked in the wilderness and terrorised less fortunate villages along the coast.
Tam studied the sail’s progress and assessed it would be late afternoon before the ship docked at the wooden jetty jutting from the stone embankment below the village. There would be rejoicing and reunions as families welcomed the safe return of their fathers and sons, husbands and brothers, but the night’s celebrations would be neither lavish nor long because the dragonship’s return was the forerunner to the Dragon Feast, the annual Harbin festival during which treasure gathered from the slain dragon’s den would be shared among the villagers. On that night, a good deal of food and wine would be consumed, while the men told tales of their recent adventure, and sang older ballads about the past deeds of great dragonwarriors, like her father. They would share the traditional stories of their ancestors who first sailed into the bay, led by Nakiades, the legendary warrior who fought the silver dragon so that his people could settle in Harbin and start new lives. At the festival’s close, the men would present the initiates who sailed away to battle the dragons for the first time. They would no longer be regarded as immature, eager boys, like her brother, Chasse. They would be true dragonwarriors, accorded the rights and trappings of the men who formed Harbin’s Dragon Fang.
A pebble rattled above Tam and clattered down the rocky escarpment to her left. A second pebble ricocheted off a flat rock to her right. She shook out her finely braided red-gold hair, glared at a clump of bushes directly below, and said with mock anger, ‘I know where you are, Chasse.’ A third pebble arched out of the thick clump and clunked harmlessly against the granite rock face behind her. ‘Chasse!’ she warned. A red head popped into view from behind the largest bush, and a broad bright grin creased her brother’s face. Disarmed by his comic appearance, Tam broke into a smile and asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘The ship’s coming,’ Chasse said.
‘I know,’ Tam replied. ‘I can see it from here.’
‘Mother is calling for you.’
‘Let her call,’ Tam answered abruptly.
‘I’m coming up.’ Chasse disengaged from his cover and scrambled up the rocks to sit beside Tam in the early afternoon sunlight, and he gazed at the sun-speckled bay glittering like mica flecks in blue-grey granite. ‘They return on a dark sea,’ he murmured absently, recalling a village proverb.
Tam glanced up at the patchy ceiling of light grey clouds. The blinding sun hung in one brilliant patch of azure sky as if determined to warm the world, and she reflected on the village lore that they grew up with but never fully understood. A dark sea presaged a storm or conflict. The old village women spoke in riddles of red sunsets and grey seas, and ice on summer ponds, as if these events were portents of what was to come, but Tam saw little to prove the accuracy of their predictions. She recalled how so many of so-called confirmed predictions made by old crones like Sharmine, or the bent and wizened Marissa who claimed she could foretell the coming of bad things by reading fish entrails, were retrospectively assigned to earlier signs they claimed to have observed. The only time that Tam expressed her scepticism with her mother, Eesa bluntly warned her to be respectful of her elders and less critical of others until she was perfect herself before she handed Tam the mucking shovel to clean out the chicken roost. Tam never broached the subject again in her mother’s hearing. ‘Do you believe all that stuff?’ she asked.
Chasse turned his bright blue eyes towards her, and Tam found herself feeling sorry for all the girls who would fall victim to her brother’s handsome looks. ‘Sometimes,’ he answered cryptically.
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning I don’t really know,’ he replied, grinning. ‘Sometimes things happen and it’s easy to see there was a warning about it. Like when Defra fell into the stream at Watersdrop last year. The old women said Sharmine saw a red flower in the stream two days before and she called it an omen.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Tam snapped. ‘The old women make it up to feel important. It’s like they want to keep everyone aware of their presence.’
Chasse didn’t pursue the argument. He was familiar with his sister questioning every value that their father and mother held sacred, and he enjoyed provoking her by taking their parents’ side in discussions, but recently he found her criticisms of the village’s customs and beliefs too passionate to be fun. She seemed to be brooding on a deep anger that was becoming more determined, obsessive. He was always close to her, being barely a year older, even despite her being a girl, but lately that closeness was changing. Someone he didn’t recognise was emerging from within his normally effervescent sister, a stranger whose mood swung into serious contemplation on a whim or a thought, and he found that person frustrating.
Tam shifted her focus from the dragonship tacking in the mouth of the bay to the spread of slate-shingled roofs clustered along the strip of curved shore directly below her mountain perch. The incoming ship would berth at the finger of planking and poles forming the jetty. Moored fishing boats bobbed on the ocean swell and seagulls circled. Moving dots of colour on the jetty were the first people preparing for the dragonship’s arrival. She knew her mother would be among them.
As wife of the Dragon Head, Eesa would ensure the jetty was clear of fishing nets and tackle and clutter that might hamper the disembarking warriors, and she would be accompanied by other wives, women she could cajole because they answered to her in the absence of their husbands, but she would already be cursing her daughter’s tardiness. Eesa frequently berated Tam for lacking the necessary sense of duty expected of a girl-child of the Dragon Head, but Tam hoped that the occasion’s importance would diminish her mother’s anger by the time she descended the mountain to lend a reluctant hand.
Further up the steep bank, people moved between the wooden huts, going about their menial duties, apparently oblivious to the dragonship’s return – especially the few remaining men – but Tam knew that most would be preparing for the dragonship’s arrival. People were carrying bedding and furs to the Warriors’ Hall, and gathering firewood, and taking food and mead to the Long Hall for the night’s celebrations. Goat herders were mustering their free-ranging stock from the lower hillside and driving the patchwork animals towards the rough-hewn pens built to hold them until the ones to be killed for the feast were selected. The bustling village activity would intensify as the ship neared mooring.
‘Coming down?’ Chasse asked, tilting his head and cocking an eyebrow.
‘Have I choice?’
‘You’re a girl,’ he mocked. ‘You have no choice.’
Tam laughed politely at his condescending observation, knowing he was teasing her, but the truth behind his statement rankled. She was a girl and, in the village, she had no choice but to do as she was told. That was law. ‘I’ll come down, brother Chasse,’ she said, with feigned diffidence, ‘but only because I choose to come down.’
‘I’ll tell Father that when he arrives,’ Chasse threatened with a grin, and he began to slide down the rock. ‘You know what will happen then.’
‘You won’t live that long!’ Tam retorted, and she scrambled over the lip of the ledge to pursue him.
By the time the pair reached the base of the mountain, their faces were flushed, and they were breathless. Though he was a summer older, Chasse barely escaped his sister. Tam’s agility impressed him, and she obviously knew the mountain and forest paths better than anyone, but that was because she spent a lot of time wandering the mountain, a habit that angered their mother. She was his sister, but he also loved her because she was so unlike the other village girls, and sometimes he wished that she was a boy, a brother, because she was willing to play the games he enjoyed. But he was leaving childhood, almost a man, and it was unseemly for him to be seen too often in her company, especially playing games. Tam would be a poor brother anyway, he decided. She was too different, not because she was a girl but because she had different ideas, different habits. Tamesan was unique. That word best described her.
Chasse heard the old woman, Sharmine, whisper the word to another when they were talking about Tamesan. They thought no one could overhear their conversation, but they didn’t see Chasse bent over a fish barrel retrieving a leather-wrapped ball that he was throwing with Aska and Marron.
‘Eesa will rue the day she bore that child,’ Sharmine said solemnly. ‘She doesn’t want to be a woman. She sees this world too clearly, and I fear she doesn’t like what she sees.’
The other woman – Chasse remembered she was called Laryssa; she died in the recent winter – shook her head and whispered a reply Chasse couldn’t hear, but Sharmine’s crusty old face wrinkled with mirth, and she said, ‘I remember well enough what it was like. Oh, but I did infuriate my father then, and my mother swore she would throw me off Watersdrop to purge the village of me and my ways.’ Her laughter subsided to a chuckle, and she made a sign with her open hand, the same sign she always made when she claimed to foresee an event. ‘But this daughter of Eesa and Kevan is not like we were, Laryssa, not like us at all. We had a place here, and we knew it. It simply took us a little time to settle down, the way it does for some girls. This one is different. There is something in her presence, in her bearing, something that makes her unique. I fear she will bring great sorrow to her household. Some things I’ve seen are mere trifles, but this girl’s future is as true as if Procra herself whispered it to me.’
Laryssa made a similar motion with her open hand, and started to reply, but Chasse moved away because his friends were calling.
The word ‘unique’ was new to Chasse then, so he asked Eesa what it meant. Eesa explained, but when she asked why he wanted to know he replied only that he heard it being used. The word merged with his vision of Tamesan thereafter, and he couldn’t look at her or think of her without remembering Sharmine’s prophecy. Tamesan was unique, but one day she would bring great sorrow to her family.
‘Come on, Chasse!’ Tam cried, and she sprinted across the open pasture where the village goats grazed, red hair streaming behind her like a banner. Hearing her challenge, Chasse took to his heels, drawing on his boyish pride not to be beaten to the village outskirts by a girl.
They reached the junction of paths inside the village, side by side, but stopped short when they spotted their mother, arms akimbo, blocking their way. Eesa met them with an angry glare, before fixing her attention on Tam, but her first words were for Chasse. ‘Your father returns, boy. Get to the jetty with the other boys and do whatever tasks are required to ensure the dragonwarriors can disembark unhindered.’
Chasse mumbled a reply, briefly brushed Tam’s hand, as if reassuring her he was only leaving because of his duty, and he ran past Eesa into the village.
Eesa’s green eyes narrowed. ‘Are you too proud to answer the sea-watcher’s horn?’
‘I came,’ Tam replied, trying to judge her mother’s mood and intent.
‘I had to send your brother to fetch you, and your brother is nearly a man,’ Eesa said, anger bristling. ‘Men do not chase after foolish girls who think life is for nothing better than sitting on mountaintops to gaze at the sky. Your brother has far more important matters to attend. As do you. The men are coming home. Your father is coming home. And you will prepare for him, and for all the men of Harbin, like every other girl in this village. Do you understand me? No more foolishness. You are the Dragon Head’s daughter. Behave accordingly!’
Tam nodded. She knew better than to publicly protest when her mother was angry. Her mother’s will was also village law. Her only choice was to obey.