Farlander Read Free Page A

a palm.
    ‘On one condition, and it is not open for debate.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘You will take an apprentice at last.’
    A gust pressed the canvas of the tent against his back. Ash stiffened. ‘You would ask that of me?’
    ‘Yes,’ snapped Osh. ‘I would ask that of you – as you have asked of me. Ash, you are the best that we have, better than even I was. Yet for all these years, you have refused to train an apprentice, to pass on your skills, your insights.’
    ‘You know I have always had my own reasons for that.’
    ‘Of course I know! I know you better than any soul alive. I was there, you recall? But you were not the only one to lose a son in battle that day – or a brother, or a father.’
    Ash hung his head. ‘No,’ he admitted.
    ‘Then you will do so, if you make it safely out of this?’
    Still he could not look directly at Osh; instead his eyes were filled with the scattering brilliance of the oil stove’s flames. The old man did know him well. He was like a mirror to Ash, a living breathing surface that reflected all that Ash might try to hide from himself.
    ‘Do you wish to die out here alone, in this forsaken wilderness?’
    Ash’s silence was answer enough.
    ‘Then agree to my offer. I promise you that, if you do, you will make it out of this, you will see your home again – and there I will allow you to continue in your work, at least while you train another.’
    ‘Is that a bargain?’
    ‘Yes,’ Oshtold him with certainty.
    ‘But you are not real . I lost this same tent two days ago . . . and you were not journeying with me when I did. You are a dream. An echo. Your bargain means nothing.’
    ‘And yet still I speak the truth. Do you doubt it?’
    Ash gazed into the empty mug. The heat had faded from its metal curvature, leaching the warmth from his hands.
    Ash, long ago, had accepted his illness and its eventual, inevitable outcome. He had done so in much the same way as he accepted the taking of those lives he took in pursuit of his work; with a kind of fatalism. Perhaps a touch of melancholy was the result of such a vantage, that the essence of life was bittersweet, without meaning save for whatever you ascribed it: violence or peace, right or wrong, all the choices one made, though nothing more – certainly nothing fundamental to a universe itself purely neutral, seeking only equilibrium as it unfolded for ever and endlessly from the potentials of Dao. He was dying, and that was all there was to it.
    Still, he did not wish to end it here on this desolate plain. He would see the sun again if he could, with eyes and mouth open to savour its heat; he would inhale the pungent scents of life, feel the cool shoots of grass against his soles, listen to the flow of water over rocks, before that. And here, in his dream fantasy, Oshwas a creation of that same desire: in that moment, Ash dared not hope that he could be anything more.
    He looked up, speaking the words as he did so. ‘Of course I doubt it,’ he replied to his master’s question.
    But Oshwas gone.
    *

    It was a slow, nauseous pain that now came upon him, sickness washing his vision. The headache tightened its vice-like grip against the sides of his skull.
    It drew him out of his delirium.
    Ash squinted through the darkness of the ice hut. His naked body shook, convulsed. Minute icicles hung from his eyelashes. He had almost fallen asleep.
    No sounds intruded through the hole in the roof. The storm had ceased at last. Ash cocked his head to one side, listening. A dog barked, followed by others.
    He blew the breath from his lungs.
    ‘One last effort,’ he said.
    The old Rshun struggled to his feet. His muscles ached, and his head contracted with pain. He could do nothing about that, for now, since his pouch of dulce leaves had been taken from him, along with everything else. No matter, it was hardly a serious bout yet; not like the attacks he had experienced on the long voyage south, confining him in agony to his bunk for