chapter 3

At first, far from making up for lost time, we lost still more of it: I had no more idea the Odolghes did where the Cajutes’ stronghold lay, and we stumbled around the mountains for another whole day and night, getting tireder and tireder and hungrier and hungrier, before we finally met up with some shepherds who put us on the right track. And even then the way was so long it was almost sundown when we came out of the shadows of the last valley and caught sight of the castle on a pink-lit hill before us.

I had never seen a real castle at close range before, except once, in winter, when we did some mining work for the Latrones. Who are a shabby sort of tribe anyway, and keep their livestock indoors with them and live much the same easy-going, muck-and-manger life.

The home of the Cajutes was altogether different. It was a huge stone dwelling in the shape of a slightly wonky necklace, covering the entire hilltop, with high walls running all the way round and towers let into them at intervals, like beads. On top of the walls were wooden spikes, thick as bullocks’ shinbones, pointing outwards in an unfriendly fashion, and on top of the towers were piles of just as unfriendly looking stones. Like a well made necklace, too, at first sight you could hardly see where the opening was, but as my father and I drew nearer we caught sight of a narrow black slit at the base of one of the towers, which we imagined, for want of any other hole to choose from, must be the entrance.

‘How do the horses get in without being squashed?’ I whispered to Odolghes, scarcely moving my lips. We were still too far away for anyone to see us but I reckoned it was best to be careful.

‘Hang the horses!’ he said crossly, so I realised he was a bit jumpier than he let on. ‘How do we get in without being squashed? There are sentinels posted on every blasted tower. Look, you can see the points of their helmets sticking up behind the crenels.’

I couldn’t see anything, but then my eyes aren’t very good, never were. Mole eyes as Alexa called them. Maybe it’d have helped if I’d known what crenels were. ‘Wave your zither at them, Father,’ I suggested. ‘Start up some music so they know we’re not dangerous.’

Odolghes nodded and unstrapped the zither and passed it on to me. We were dangerous, he said in a tough voice meant to reassure both of us; we were dangerous as wolves if only the Cajutes knew it. ‘And you start up the music, Bossy Breeches. That’s what you’re here for.’

So, my fingers trembling a little, I began playing a few strummy bits on the zither, and Odolghes, rather too loudly to sound comfortable, began singing one of his back-to-front songs, and in this way we approached the castle, right up to the door, without any trouble at all, not even a stone in our faces.

The Cajutes must have been keener on music than we’d dared hope, and starved of it too, because there was a whole crowd of them waiting inside the narrow doorway to meet us, eyes popping and mouths gaping and feet jiggling up and down in the rudiments of a clumsy dance. Not at all the ferocious welcome we had feared from the spikes.

But not a kind welcome either, more of a greedy sniffing at something appetizing that had come their way. Their language was quite similar to ours really, though they spoke it with a funny accent, so I was able to pick up some of their words straight away. Speelers, they gabbled to one another excitedly, Sengers (meaning singers). Guk at en (look at them) – un mon end un kidden. (That was me, the kidden.) Wofon kommen en? Wàswara wollen en? Was it safe (their word was ‘sikker’, like our ‘secure’) to let us in?

Although maybe I am wrong and they were talking about sicker in the sense of disease, because they drew back a bit now and made signs at us to open our mouths and undo our clothing at the neck and bare our chests at them, and didn’t in fact let us past the door until they had looked us all over like livestock at a fair. It was a good thing they didn’t touch as well as look, or they might easily have discovered the iron arm, and with it Odolghes’ identity, but all they did when they noticed it hanging lifeless by his side was to point to it and say, ‘Brocken?’ To which Odolghes replied, ‘Brocken’, and that was it.

And the music, they wanted to know? The kidden would play the music? Yes, the mon would sing and the kidden would play the music. The kidden wouldn’t sing because the kidden’s voice was brocken like the mon’s arm, but the kidden would play the music.

If the outside of the castle was grand, the inside knocked me speechless (really speechless, not just pretending) by its finery and the number of things it contained. There were rooms for everything: for cooking in, for eating in, for sleeping in, even for dawdling around and talking in, the way most of the high rank Cajutes seemed to do most of the time. The rooms weren’t just empty shelters either, like our Miners’ tents, there were cupboards in them to keep things in – bundled away, out of sight – and tables to put things on, and hooks to hang things on, and shelves for stacking and chairs for sitting and hammocks for reclining and little low footstools for propping up the feet: every sort of contraption for making life comfortable.

Odolghes seemed to take all this splendour in his stride and told me, later that night when we were safe in our sleeping quarters near the kennels, that Fànes had been grander still, grander that I could ever imagine, with embroidered hangings on the walls and copper candlesticks and cushions stuffed with feathers to rest your backside on, and fancy things like that. But whether this was true or he was just boasting, to me our new surroundings were quite magnificent enough.

I wish I could say the same for the Cajutes themselves, only I can’t; I find it hard to say anything nice about them at all. That first evening at their court I was too tired and hungry and worried about playing properly to notice much about them; all I remember is a line of wobbly faces staring down at Odolghes and me from behind the grease-lamps on the high table, tilting this way and that as the diners listened to our music, and later on a jumble of legs and skirts and feet and corns, very close to us, as all of them – eaters and servers and cooks and children – took to the floor in a wild after-supper stampede. Next day, however, I began to pick out details and to realise that, for all their riches, we had indeed entered the homestead of a very rough and savage lot of people. It showed in various things: in the way they groomed their hair, for example, or the way they didn’t groom it but twisted it up in a fat-smeared topknot and left it there, never more to disturb save for poking in a bodkin now and again to still the itching. Men, women, even children, even babies, it made no difference, all sported the same greasy, wispy knobble. It showed in the way they wore their clothes, which, fine though they were, they seldom changed, not even to go to bed. And it showed in the beds themselves: feathered and pungent as the earths of foxes and, like them, full of scraps of left-over food for the occupant to chew on at night, or else breakfast on without bothering to leave the bed.

Because, gracious, they were an idle lot for a warrior race. Miners aren’t that famous for their cleanliness, I know, but at least we have a reason for being dirty, and at least we try to get the worst of the grime off. These people, no, they seemed to glory in it. I saw one of the women change her baby’s dress once (it must have got too small for the child to wear), and, I swear, the discarded dress, instead of flopping to the ground, stood straight up like a tent, it was so stiff with ugg.

‘A nos ne san valel nia,’ as the Fanes say, according to Odolghes who had taken to speaking to me in his own language now when we were alone. No business of ours. But it wasn’t just the dirt, or the smells, or the way they peed (and worse) wherever they happened to be standing, or the way they kept the blood on their hands after hunting and licked at it, and messy things like that, it was the sullenness of their characters that really made them so unpleasant to live with and work for. They rarely smiled; their eyes rarely lit up, either with interest or with anything else. Even when they danced there was something dull about them, something heavy and plodding and ox-like that prevented them from having what I call fun.

Odolghes and I had feared questions, but after the first quizzing on our arrival they didn’t ask us any. We were there to serve them music when they felt like it, not to speak to or bother about. What we did for the rest of the time didn’t concern them, any more than it concerned them what the dogs did in the kennels next door when they were not wanted for hunting.

We were the ones anxious for information. Whereabouts were the Cajutes’ metal works now that they did their own excavating and forging? Were they inside the castle precincts or somewhere outside? Where did they store their metal? Where did it come from? Who brought it to the works, and when, and how often? Until we knew the answers to these questions our search for the magic stone couldn’t even begin. And both of us, I think, were becoming more and more eager with every passing day not only to begin it but to end it as soon as possible.

Lacking the language and not wanting to draw a shred of attention to ourselves, not even from the castle cats, we started by just looking. Roaming around the various courtyards, pretending to practise our songs, and looking for all we were worth. Music was hardly ever called for in the daytime except when there was a hunting party setting off or the Queen felt whimsy, so we were usually free to go where we liked. Nobody seemed to mind us, nobody seemed to care. Sometimes one of the guards - probably an officer, only they were all so crusty it was difficult to tell - would prod his scabbard into my father’s stomach and grunt, ‘Seng!’ at him, and we would have to do as we were bid and seng; but usually they just let us go on our way without comment, chewing on whatever plant it was they chewed all day long and scratching their mail-clad backs against the wall.

One or two of the smaller children sometimes showed a bit more interest, staring at me with my zither and pointing and making hopeful ‘Brrm’ noises, but usually its mother clapped it on the head to silence it and hauled it away. Not angrily, just forcefully, the way you would haul a hay bale.

‘They’re so slack we could steal anything from them,’ I whispered to Odolghes after our first stroll, which had taken us to the bakery and the dairy but no further. Free to roam we might be, but we wanted things to stay that way.

He shook his head and told me not to count on it. They were confident, he said, they had nothing to fear, and why should they? There was no other tribe could match their strength, not while they’d got the stone to find their metal for them.

Mmmn, I agreed, only half convinced, but what if they didn’t have the stone? Odolghes seemed so sure they must, but what if this Mulebones character or whatever his name was had kept it for himself? Sold the secret of the iron making but kept the stone for future use? That’s what a really clever person would have done, surely? And by all accounts Mulebones was the cleverest man alive.

Odolghes shrugged his shoulders and winced: the arm didn’t fit very well and often bothered him. Seeing that we were alone in our hut and unlikely to be needed till evening he began unstrapping it, but then thought better and let it be. ‘Alive…’ he said slowly, as if weighing the word inside his head or testing it out in some way. ‘Hmm, alive. Now that’s one thing he can’t be. You may be right about the stone, my sweet: it is just possible Mulebones hung on to it, or tried to, although I think it very unlikely, knowing how greedy he was for the gold. But that he’s still alive, no, that’s out of the question. His hair was white already when I knew him. All of it.’

White? All white hair? That was more unusual in people than in horses; I didn’t think I had ever seen anyone with all white hair. Streaky, yes, like my grandfather’s, but not all over white. I was very relieved I’d never have to meet such a man, although for some reason he fascinated me, this Mulebones, and I wanted to know more about him. ‘If he’s dead like you say,’ I insisted, ‘then where’s all the gold got to? What did he do with it? Who did he leave it to?’

My father forgot his arm and shrugged again, and winced again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is something we’ll probably never know, but we won’t let it bother us either. Once we have the stone, and some proper organisation, we can turn it into as much gold as we like.’

Could we, I wondered? How? But I didn’t have time to ask because at that very instant a young Cajute soldier barged into the hut without warning and clicked his fingers at us and said we were wanted in the great hall, on account of there being ‘Guesters’.

How wise Odolghes had been to keep his arm on. I promised myself to follow his example and play safe always. I had seen the spikes on the wall at close range now and noticed some very nasty bits and pieces clinging to them, not unlike the pumpkins of Alexa’s description.

(Chapter 4 coming up next Monday, May 10 2010)

chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO



How did my mother know the change in Odolghes was so serious? How did she know what it would lead to? Do wives have a secret way of finding out these things? Do mothers? Or was it that she had always known in her heart of hearts that her misfit husband was lent to her by Fortune, not given for keeps? ‘Who do you belong to, Honeycake? To me, to Sommavida.’ Was that why she had to repeat this phrase so often: because she knew it wasn’t really true and never would be? Poor Mother, so drab, so plain, like a little brown she-sparrow, with her beautiful captive eagle that was now spreading its wings and preparing to fly. What could she do to stop him?

In fact she could do quite a lot, and did. Although her strongest weapon she was too generous, and perhaps too proud, to use. For a start she persuaded her father (not that that was very difficult) to give Odolghes no help in his task. He wanted to forge an iron arm for himself, did he, to wear under his cloak so as to hide his deformity? Very well, let him forge it himself if he was able. He wanted a companion to take with him and play the zither? Let him whistle for one: no Miner, male or female, young or old, would have the Chief’s permission to leave the camp. Then, when these threats failed, and Odolghes could be seen busy at the anvil every day, pounding away with his one good arm, using toes and teeth and the little red stump of a hand that grew on his right shoulder, she refused to pack his bags for him, or plait his hair or tie his laces, or do any of the two-handed tasks she had always done for him so willingly before. And when it was clear not even this would thwart him, she began secretly, as a last resort, to add poppy juice to his evening meal, hoping in this way to bring the clouds back. Which it might well have done, had not one of the cooks eaten some of the food on the sly and gone all dopey, exposing the trick.

I don’t know about my father, whether the shock helped him speed up his decision to leave, or whether he was ready in any case, but as far as I was concerned it was this business of the poppy juice that made up my mind for me. I had been wondering for days, Whom should I side with? Which parent should I choose? Loyalty told me, my mother, who needed me and worked so hard for me. Pity told me, my mother, who would miss me terribly. Caution told me, my mother; comfort told me, my mother; even greed told me, my mother (because what would I get to eat if I had to rely on Odolghes’ cooking?). But pity also told me, my father, for having treated him so badly in the past and paid so little heed to him. Loyalty also told me, my father, who’d never had any from me yet. And another thing – I don’t know what it was: curiosity, daring, sense of adventure – told me my father too. My father, and new places and new people, and the court of the Cajutes with the riddle of how to get in and how to get out again, and the thrill of coming back with the famous stone that everyone set such store by, and hearing them say (instead of Mara the Mongrel), Mara the Marvellous did this with her brave and clever dad!

The two pulls remained about equal though, so I really didn’t know which way to go. Not until I saw the cook lying by the fire with his upturned belly and his squiffy, dreamy eyes, and then anger at my mother for wanting to reduce Odolghes to this state in order to keep him, got the better of me and I made my choice.

Or, as Alexa would say, I cast my die, whatever a die is. Quickly, stealthily, without saying anything to anybody, I collected a few useful things like clothes and nuts and cheese and toothpicks (I hate having bits of nuts in my teeth) and tied them into a bundle, of a size I could easily carry. I put on my strongest shoes too, the ones I used for ore-crushing, and my leather hat and jacket and my thickest fur-lined breeches. Then, fat as a thrush, with the bundle on my back, I went and sat in the shadows, a good distance from the fire where all the fuss was going on, and waited for my father to finish his leave-taking. He was so furious I knew he wouldn’t be long.

From where I was, it was difficult to hear what he was saying, but words reached me like ‘trap’ and ‘cage’ and ‘smother’ and ‘apron strings’, and I guessed he was accusing my mother – perhaps my grandfather too – of treating him as a sort of prisoner all these years. Which I suppose in their different ways they had.

My mother’s voice was shriller and carried better. ‘Go then, you antwit,’ she shrieked at him, ‘if that is what you want! Go and play the hero! Walk right into the ogre’s den! Show everyone how brave you are! Nice satisfaction it’ll bring you when you’re roasting on the Cajutes’ gridiron, to know that everyone thinks you’re brave!’

Odolghes must have said something soothing at this point about performing his task in a twinkling and coming back soon, but it didn’t seem to soothe my mother. Her voice went down a notch but remained just as loud. ‘If you do ever come back I shan’t be here!’ she shouted, biting at her hands until it looked as if she must wound them. ‘Remember that. If you leave me now it is for ever!’

It was her last desperate attempt to keep him, but my father was unmoved. I don’t think he believed her really, any more than I did: she was always threatening to do drastic things if she didn’t get her own way, it was something to do with being the Chief’s daughter and an only child. And even if he had believed her I don’t think it would have made much difference. Not that he wasn’t fond of Sommavida, but in his new state he needed to prove so many thing to himself, not least that he could manage without her help. It’s sad isn’t it, between couples, how the needs on one sometimes go flat against the needs of the other?

I saw him turn from her curtly, shrugging his shoulders so that the new false arm swayed and looked for a moment as if it might come off. He was so keen to be going, I’m not certain he even said goodbye. And then, as I got up and prepared to follow him, I saw my mother (and will always see her so, whenever I think of her) sink to her knees and take her hands from her mouth and cross them over her belly, as if all the wrangling had given her the tummyache. Only it wasn’t that, I know that now.

It was almost dark by this time, and I am not at ease in darkness, being only half a Miner, but I didn’t catch up with my father to let him know I was there until we were miles away from the camp: I was afraid he wouldn’t want me and would send me back.

It was hard going. Odolghes had good ears, and I had to keep a fair distance between us, so I was in constant danger of losing him. He didn’t know the country either, or even where he was going, and instead of sticking to the paths he wove around all over the place, stomping through woods and slopping into streams, climbing and descending all the steep places, walking, in short, like a blind man.

The Salvans say that with animals nerve is everything, and perhaps his stumbly, noisy progress was not such a bad idea because we had no trouble from the night prowlers, I didn’t even hear a growl. Eventually we hit on a track of some kind, man-made and widish, and it was here, when he reached the first clearing and tripped over a tree stump, that Odolghes took a breather and I made my presence known.

As I feared, his first reaction was to tell me, pretty sharply, to beat it back to the camp. He couldn’t possibly take me from my mother, he said, she was unhappy enough as it was, and he couldn’t possibly take me where he was going because it was far too dangerous.

Now I am not wily and I am not particularly clever at getting round people, but in this case I was so anxious to share Odolghes’ adventure that I did just the right thing to persuade him: instead of pleading or wheedling or indeed saying anything at all, I tied up his trailing laces for him that had been part of the reason for his tripping, fixed his plaits and his undone cloak-strap and ran my hands over the strings of the zither hung round his neck, making a loud Ploing! noise in the darkness and conveying my message for me: I can be you right hand for you, Odolghes, I can be your music-girl, take me along and you will not regret it. Then, still without saying anything, I opened my bundle and took out some nuts and began to crack them. Because I knew unpractical Odolghes would have forgotten about food.

A proper grownup father wouldn’t have been won round so easily maybe, but mine was not a proper grownup father, not yet, and he laughed and squeezed my hand and took some nuts from me and said, hardly bothering to think the matter over at all, ‘Very well then, Miss Mongrel, so be it, we will go into the ogre’s den together. You’re not afraid, are you?’

‘Ttt,’ I shook my head. If we went as music makers I reckoned I wasn’t afraid. Nobody kills singers; at worst they push them out into the cold if they don’t like the song.

‘Good,’ my father said. ‘No more am I.’

‘You mustn’t call me Mongrel though,’ I warned him, ‘or the Cajutes may begin to wonder who we are. Not Mara either. And I mustn’t call you Odolghes. We mustn’t use any Miner words when we are together; we must be new, mysterious people from a far off place nobody has heard of. I know! I could pretend to be dumb and you could talk to me in sign language – like that we can be sure we won’t make any blunders.’

‘Ye-es,’ said Odolghes doubtfully, and then ‘Yes’ again as he warmed to the idea. ‘But what about my songs? I can’t very well sing them in sign language, can I? What do I do about my songs?’

Of course, I was forgetting, the songs were in Fanish, and Fanish was more dangerous for us than Miner-speak. ‘You make up new words for them,’ I said after a moment’s thought. ‘Or else you sing the old words backwards.’ I nearly added, ‘And then, when you have picked up enough of the Cajutes’ language, you sing to them in that,’ but I didn’t, because the thought of a long stay with such horrible people as the Cajutes made me shiver.

My father laughed again and kissed my fingertips and said he was glad to have me with him. Then in a different voice, hesitant, slightly uncomfortable, he said, Sorry to ask such a question, but how old was I?

I tried not to sound surprised. In fact I wasn’t really surprised: the years without memory must have passed for him in a muddling, stretchy way, sometimes long, sometimes short. ‘I’m six and a half, Father. The age you were when you came to the camp.’

‘Six and a half.’ He cracked a nut with his iron hand, picking it up with the other and letting it fall hard on the tree stump. (He mustn’t do that in front of the Cajutes.) ‘Six and a half. Well, well, well. How time gallops.’ And then, still more uncomfortable, ‘And I? Do you know how old I am?’

Poor Odolghes, so he didn’t know this either. I wondered whether to lie to him but decided truth was better. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘You are twenty-two.’

The iron hand jerked again, but from the shoulder this time, unaided. ‘Twenty-two!’ he echoed. ‘Twenty-thundering-two! Trust me: backward in everything! That makes - what is it? Sixteen, sixteen lost years. Gone. Wasted. Chucked out with the slag.’

There was little I could say to this because at twenty-two Odolghes was one of the oldest fathers in the camp, and this had used to embarrass me about him too. Old a babyish together, what could be worse in a parent? However the ‘visidàja’ and the easy life must have kept him fresh, because luckily he didn’t look his age at all. ‘Don’t worry,’ I comforted him, reminding him of all the excitement in store once we got inside the Cajutes’ castle. ‘We’ll make up for lost time now.’


(next chapter next wednesday, may 5th 2010

the refuge of Fanes - Part One: The Stone

FOREWORD

Strange. In the turmoil of the past few days, with everything so upside down we can’t even find our cooking gear and have to heat up our food in buckets and stir it with sticks, my grandmother Alexa’s book, which Aunt Lulu has been looking for in vain for months, has suddenly come to light.

Not all of it unfortunately – the second volume is still missing – but the most interesting part, the part that goes from Alexa’s twelfth birthday at the castle of Fànes to that terrible night, fourteen years later, when she escaped from the same castle through an underground passage in the company of her daughter Lujanta (Aunt Lulu to me) and a small band of survivors, never more to surface. Or not permanently, that is, not to settle, not to live.

I have been reading it: there’s not much else for me to do in my present condition, I certainly can’t help with the unloading. And I have been thinking, why shouldn’t I write my story too? Alexa wrote at a time of great distress, alone save for snoring Salvans, hidden in a burrow, betrayed, bereaved, defeated in all her aims, and seems to have drawn great comfort from her scribblings. The story gets grimmer, I mean, as it goes on but the actual hand gets perkier and perkier, and so does the tone. Why shouldn’t I do the same, with the same results?

Because your story is untellable, says a voice (I think it must be my own, coming from deep inside). Your story, you know quite well, if it is not to end in disaster for everyone, must remain a secret.

Yes, I know this. I have fought for this and paid for this and I am not likely to forget it. But Alexa’s book has shown me, amongst other things, that it’s not the keeping or telling of secrets that is important, so much as a clear setting out of the facts. Secrets lose their punch, like beer does, with the passing of time; go all flat and watery (and please the Gods my own will do the same). Who gives an apple pip now about the workings of the mysterious twin-swapping pact that caused Alexa such anguish, or about who sired her three children, or who they took after – the dirty Duke or the sleepy Salvan – or whether they had fingers or paws or hair or fur? Not even my father and Aunt Lulu, who were directly concerned in the matter, were much interested when they discussed it, that I recall.

But the facts, no, they keep their value. So much so that I am tempted as I read and come across certain descriptions to bite at my hands in typical Miner fashion and say to myself, if only I had know this before, perhaps I would have realised in time and wouldn’t have…

Which is silly and leads nowhere: what is done is done, and it is the future I must worry about, not the past. So I will write, because if I don’t I think I will go mad, waiting to know the worst; and then I will either tear up what I have written or else (if the worst turns out to be the best and my untellable crime goes unpunished) I will do as Alexa did and hide the manuscript in a clever place for some great-great-great-grandchild to find during a spring turnout.

What follows I dedicate to her, the grandmother I never met, save now, in her writings. I wonder what she would have thought of me? In her book she is often rude about Miners, unfeelingly likens my poor great-grandparents’ lopped-off heads to ‘a couple of undersized pumpkins, badly rotted’, mocks their stature, calls my mother ‘the Floor-mop’ on account of her ugliness and grubby clothes. What would she have said, I wonder, had she known it would be me, half Miner myself, the one to carry on her story – and perhaps (a big perhaps) her line?


CHAPTER ONE

My mother the Floor-mop was a princess, and Odolghes my father was a prince (even if he had forgotten he was one for the time being), so I must have been a princess too, like Alexa, but I was known from as far back as I can remember as Mara the Mongrel.

My parents’ was not a popular marriage. My grandfather probably thought he was doing a very cunning thing in luring the heir of Fànes to his court and wedding him, still a child, to his only daughter Sommavida, but as things turned out it was a great mistake in policy. Only a short while after the wedding, Fànes fell to its enemies in the great battle described at the end of Alexa’s book, its inhabitants were slaughtered (all of them, it was thought at the time), its timbers burned, its walls flattened, and instead of the heir to a rich and powerful kingdom he had set his hopes on, my grandfather found himself landed with a one-armed son in law who had no prospects and no connections and no memory, and nothing to recommend him at all except a sweet singing voice and a pretty pair of dark blue eyes.

The Miners were furious with my grandfather and I think quite rightly: as their Chief it was his duty to see clearer into the future. But the marriage knot had been tied and there was no untying it, so the Miner people just had to accept the fact that their beloved baby princess was spliced for life to this large, strange, moony, malformed pauper boy who could do nothing to earn his keep but sing songs in a language they hardly knew. When his voice started breaking they wanted to castrate him, so I’m told, in order that the voice at least would keep, but my mother, who could evidently see further into the future than her father, wouldn’t allow this. She couldn’t have been more that seven at the time but apparently she flew into a great temper and said that her husband’s body was incomplete enough as it was, thank you very much, and she would stand for no more missing bits.

Good for her. If left to himself, I doubt my father would have raised a finger in protest, because at that time – before his memory came back, and with it all the rest – he was still in what the Fanes call ‘visidàja’, or waking sleep, and what the Miners called, much more simply, the clouds. The voice kept anyway; got even better when it changed.

He was a terrible embarrassment to me. It was bad enough being Mara the Mongrel, twice as tall as the other children and with great big sturdy feet and floppy hair, without being the daughter of the Loon, the Crooner, the Empty-Head and all the other rude names they called him by. Sometimes I even used to think I hated him, but I didn’t because you couldn’t hate him, he was so gentle, so patient, so good-natured. And of course the memory trouble made him so easy to hurt. ‘Where d’ya come from, Woad-eyes?’ the young men used to taunt. ‘Why don’t ya go back there? Lost yer way? Lost yer wits? Or did you never have none?’ And instead of answering back my father would blink at them, worried, and his brow would go all wrinkly as he tried to jolt his sleeping memory back to life.

Who was he? Where did he come from? Who gave him this strange name Ododghes, which meant eagle, or baby eagle, in Miner language, and made everyone laugh and flap their arms at him when they said it? Who taught him the songs that only he, among this race of little dark hireling metal-grubbers, appeared to know? Why was he such a misfit? Why could he never do anything useful to please people? Why was his own daughter ashamed of him, to the point of hiding her feet in shoes by day and bed socks by night and chopping off her lovely rippley hair? They told him he was a Fane, but what was a Fane? Was it a disease? It certainly felt like it. These are the thoughts that I now imagine used to go through my father’s poor misty head in the days of his visidàja, but at the time I didn’t imagine anything, I just turned my back on him like everyone else and laughed.

My mother was the only person who seemed to care for him, but even she did so in an offhand, jokey way. He had come to her as a playfellow, and a playfellow he had remained, even if their games had changed a bit in the meantime. She used to plait his hair for him, I remember, in the evenings, twisting his head from side to side as if he were a doll, and dress him up nicely and play the zither for him while he sang his songs. ‘Odolghes,’ she used to say, ‘Honeycake, Sweetiepud, who do you belong to?’ And then, not waiting for a reply (because questions of this kind always puzzled him), ‘To me, that’s who. To Sommavida. You are Sommavida’s pet eagle.’ Only she treated him, of course, like we all did, more as a pet duck.

I have already said how pointless it is to ponder over the past with it ifs and might-have-beens, but all the same I can’t help wondering what would have happened if those Wanderers with their strange package had never arrived that evening in our camp. Or if they had never unwrapped the package, the way they did, in order to try and sell its contents to us. Would my father have gone on always the way he was: a harmless, dreamy creature, bumbling about in uncomplaining idleness on the fringes of our lives, singing on command, smiling always, holding pins in his mouth for my mother while she sewed and smiling even then? Or would something inside of him have stirred at some point and eventually led him to rebel?

And what about our Miners’ way of life? Would we have continued our perilous hoppings from place to place in search of work that was less and less easy to come by? Carried on with our ill-paid scrabblings for metal that was harder and harder to find? We were like Wanderers ourselves in those days. Worse, we were like bears: used, like them, to sniff out the honeycombs and then hunted for our skins. I was born to such a life so I saw no hardship in it, but the elders, round the dampened embers of our fires at night, used to moan and grumble and speak of happier times when the Miner folk had been rich and respected. ‘Aurona,’ they used to sigh. It was a good sighing word. ‘Those were the days, before the wars, when we lived in Aurona. Remember? Didn’t have to douse the fires then. Used to let them burn into the night like beacons.’ And someone else, always an oldie, would grunt and say sadly, Yer, yer, how could they ever forget?

And me too? What about me? Would I have gone on despising my father, who I loved? Or would I have got over my shame and become friends with him, accepting his differences? I like to think I would have discovered him for myself, later on, and perhaps helped him to discover his past as well, which was part of mine. But anyway it wasn’t necessary because the object inside the Wanderers’ package did the work for both of us.

It was the oddest thing. It was latish when it happened, almost the time for drowsing, not for awakening. Work was over for the day and we younger ones were scurrying around doing all the usual things that needed doing every evening – fetching water for cooking and for the diggers to wash their hands in, stoking up the fires, putting away the tools and so forth – when suddenly the pack-dogs set up a great noise, and a group of four straggly Wanderers appeared out of the dusk, carrying something the size of a smallish piglet, wrapped in a blanket.

Not that there was anything so strange in this. The Wanderers always came by in the evenings, when they knew the camp was full. They always brought goods for sale too – mostly food, mostly stolen, mostly pretty stale. But this time you could tell from their faces and the care with which they handled the package, not letting any of us touch it or peek under the folds of the blanket, that they had come by something special.

‘Where’s Chief?’ they asked, pinching at us rudely the way they always did. ‘Where’s all your mummies and daddies? Go and fetch ’em, truffle pups, we’ve got something they might like to see.’

Truffle pups! Normally I wouldn’t have bothered about fetching my father, but he and my mother were together that evening, in one of their giggly plaiting sessions, so as chance would have it he came along too, together with everyone else. In fact he was one of the first to arrive and had a very close view.

When we were all gathered in a circle around them, the Wanderers, who have a great sense of occasion and are good about puffing up their wares, leaned forward in concord and took a corner of the blanket each between thumb and finger, ready to uncover whatever it was they lay underneath. ‘Oohoo!’ said their leader, ‘Wait for it, wait for it!’ Then with a loud, trumpety ‘Ta-ta-ra-ta’, he gave the signal to his companions to twitch away the cover.

Without Odolghes and his curious behaviour the object would have come to all of us, I think, as a disappointment. It was just another piece of blond iron – curiously fashioned, yes, very finely wrought and well decorated, but basically just another metal corselet of the kind worn by our one-time allies and now sworn enemies the Cajutes. Of which we had already seen more than enough.

The head Wanderer, sensing the letdown, had begun to add a bit more patter. ‘Small,’ he was saying. ‘See? Miner size. Just the job. Lovely bit of work. Don’t get this quality often, not on the market. Only one armhole, ’course, but that can soon be fixed. Must have been made for…’

But he never finished, because at that point, like a drunkard or a rabid dog, my father Odolghes reeled forward into the circle and began spinning round in circles of his own, his hands clasped to his head as if fearful it would burst open at the seams. ‘It’s my suit!’ he screamed, to everyone’s amusement and delight, and then consternation. ‘It’s my suit they stole from me! My birthday present that the traitors stole the night they left Fànes. Arrgh! Take it away! Cover it up!’ Then, twisting and snapping, still more dog-like (because the Wanderers, alarmed by the mention of stealing, had begun to replace the blanket), ‘No, don’t! Leave it there! Let me look. It’s coming back to me now. The suit of armour… The fittings with Nurse… My room in the turret… My cloth bear… Fànes, Alexa, Dolasilla… Everything… Arrgh!’ And he screamed that throaty scream again and began hitting his head with his hands instead of holding it. ‘What have they done to me? Where have they gone? Where have I been living all this time?’

The Wanderers, quite sure by now that they were being accused of theft, or would be in a moment, began protesting, and one of them tried to catch my father by his arm to stop him spinning, but everyone else seemed to understand that something important was happening inside his fuddled head. My mother most of all.

‘Let him be, you silly pedlars!’ she shouted. ‘Leave the armour where it is! No one’s blaming you for anything. Can’t you see it’s his memory coming back to him?’

And so it was. It must have been a terrible moment for my father. I sometimes try to put myself in his position and think what it must be like to have your mother and your sister and your father and your nurse, and your friends and your toys and your pets and your games, all whooshing into your head together like the waters of a blocked stream that has just come unblocked; churning and swirling and jostling for space, and shouting out, Here I am! Look at me, look at me, look at me! I’m your ma, remember? I’m your pa. (And what a pa!) Whooshing in and then – which I suppose must have been even worse – whooshing out again when you learn that they are all dead and gone and vanished for ever. No wonder Odolghes had to hold his headbones. No wonder, after we had bought the suit of armour off the Wanderers for him to keep, he spent the best part of the next fortnight crouched over it on all fours, murmuring to himself and tracing patters on the metal with his finger. He was travelling, you see. Backwards in time. Meeting people. Talking to them. Saying hello and goodbye. Forgiving them perhaps in some cases; in others not; in others still, just marking up the loss.

Our kinsfolk found him funnier than usual, and on their way to work would stop and ask him questions: ‘How’s it going, Odolghes? Found that cloth bear yet? Gonna wear that armour on your next birthday? Fit you a treat, it will.’ Silly things like that, no harm meant. But I could already see a change in him, a look in his eye I had never seen before, and for once I played no part in the teasing but sat by him instead and tried to help him on his journey.

He didn’t seem to notice me much but I think he was grateful, and, like the first stones of a wall that go underground but nevertheless keep the structure standing, I think this was when the foundations of my love for him were planted. Or perhaps they had been there all along. What is sure is that by the end of the fortnight, when my father finished his travelling in time and came to join us in the present as a proper thinking, feeling, remembering person, I was for the first time in my life, not proud exactly – that would come later – but unashamed to be his daughter.

I had learnt so much about him, you see, during this interval. Not from the story he told - which came out in bits and remained confused in my mind: just a jumble of treachery and bloodshed and poison and magic weapons and huge fat Dukes and wicked tutors and I know not what - but from certain incidents in the story that came across so clear they painted themselves inside my head like pictures. The day he received the suit of armour for his birthday, for example, and got such a wigging from his mother Alexa because he used the sword to chop up the toy bear that had been her present to him. I could just see him standing there in the huge castle bedroom, red-faced, puzzled, protesting, ‘But it was a fair fight, Mother. I cut off its arm to make us equal!’ Poor little Eagle Prince, caught up in things so much more complicated than he was, how could he understand the way Alexa felt about warfare, and why?

I could see him, too, on the dangerous day he came across the tutor, Mulebones, trafficking with the magic stone, and could hear the wobble in his voice (which luckily Mulebones missed) as he replied to the man’s angry questioning. ‘Notice? No, Muley. Why? What? I didn’t notice anything, I swear, I just wanted us to play chequers.’

I could see him in the forge, watching the making of the deadly blond iron that had made his people so powerful and so detested; see him trotting along in the wake of his bossy elder sister Dolasilla as she trained for battle, copying her movements, trying in spite of his drawback to cut the same dash. But clearest of all I could see him, six years old and still a little lost in the grownups’ world, as he climbed onto the Miners’ sledge that was to carry him away from his homestead for ever. How much had Alexa told him? Did he know the peril that hung over Fànes and everyone who remained there? Did he know he was being taken to safety? Or did he think, as children often do when they are caught up in tragedy, that he was being punished for something he had done wrong? And, if so, was that why the clouds came down and blanketed his memory: to protect him from things that were too sad to dwell on?

Yes, I think that is the way it must have been. Anyway, a bit late in the day maybe, but now the clouds had lifted. That evening, almost as if he had forgotten his usual place by my mother’s knee and took his new one for granted, he sat himself down in the middle of the ring of tired workers and asked for their attention. He got it too, more or less straight away, which shows how much he had altered in the interval. ‘You have been good to me, Miners,’ he began, quelling the titters of laughter with a flash of his new wide-awake eyes – still blue and kind but now not half so smiley. ‘And you have been patient with me. It is time I did something for you in return. Until now I have eaten your food and sung songs for you, much like the linnets you keep in cages and take down the mines with you to warn you of the vapours. But now that I have more to offer than just my voice, I intend to show my thanks.’

Such a flow of words, so well strung together, seemed to act on my kinsmen like a biff on the head, half stunning them. Miners are gruff talkers themselves and have a great, if grudging, respect for fine speaking.

‘You have always reminded me that I am a Fane,’ my father went on in the silence. ‘But in your kindness you have never reminded me what I owe you as a Fane. I was sent here by my mother as a guest, I remember that now, as part of an agreement. But I also remember – correct me if I am wrong – that another part of the agreement concerned the recovery of your most prized possession: your magic iron-finding stone. The Fanes, unless I am mistaken, undertook to find this stone for you and to return it to you at the earliest opportunity; and this, so far, has not been done.’

Nobody corrected him, although my grandfather, who was probably feeling a bit uneasy at this sudden and detailed awakening of his son in law’s memory, down to the very terms of the agreement (which had said nothing about marriage), started to cough and mumble something about not keeping people to impossible promises and letting bygones be bygones.

‘Ah,’ my father intervened, pulling himself up to his full sitting height. He had always been large compared to the Miners but now he looked like a giant. ‘That’s just it. The promise is not impossible and I intend to keep it. Mulebones the Traitor stole the stone, I know this beyond a doubt. Just as I know what he did with it later: he sold it to the Cajutes along with the secret of the blond iron, in exchange for the gold.’

This last word broke the silence that up till now, apart from my grandfather’s mutterings, had been almost total. ‘Our gold! Miners’ gold!’ everyone shouted, rattling their knives on their bowls so loud that my father had to wait a while before he could go on again. ‘Our stuff! Our pretty yellow treasure!’

‘Indeed,’ Odolghes said when his voice could be heard again. Which I thought was a very dignified way of half-agreeing: it was true, the gold had belonged to us Miners once, but my grandfather had spent it all in the wars, paying the Cajutes to fight on our side, and the expense still rankled. ‘So who has the magic stone now, eh? The Cajutes, of course. And it is from them that I propose to rescue it and bring it back to its rightful owners.’

If there had been silence before, now there was a hush as deep as the one you get down a mine shaft on a rest day. Was this a joke, I could sense my kinsfolk thinking? Was this the Loon up to another of his fooleries, wasting everyone’s time? Or was the fellow serious?

My mother was the first to find an answer to this question, but then she had been watching her playfellow-husband for days now, seeing him grow into something different and unpredictable under her troubled eyes. ‘No, Odol, please!’ she begged, breaking into the circle and rushing up to him and putting her arms round his shoulders. Protecting him like she always did. ‘You’re tired, you’re confused, you don’t know what you’re saying! He doesn’t know what he’s saying!’ she repeated loudly for everyone else’s benefit. ‘No one can enter the Cajutes’ stronghold. How can he recover our stone for us?’ This she repeated too, but quietly, in the other direction, towards my father. ‘No one, sweetest, can enter the Cajutes’ stronghold. How can you recover our stone for us? Be sensible, how can you?’

My father had always welcomed this way of hers of cushioning him against the world, acting as his mouthpiece and his interpreter, but this evening he seemed to resent it. He shook her hands off his shoulders almost rudely and addressed himself again directly to the Miners. ‘Think of me what you like, Miner people,’ he said, ‘call me what names you like, but do not call me a braggart. I know I haven’t done much so far to earn your trust, but, by the womb of the Earth Goddess whom you fear so greatly, I swear to you that from today onwards I will not rest until I have returned to you your magic stone.’

I think he added, ‘And much else besides,’ but it was lost in the hooha that followed. Cheers, clapping, footstamping, yells of ‘Good old Cuckoo-pate, at last he’s waking up!’ more clattering of knives and banging of bowls, and above it all, on a thinner, higher note, the sound of my mother’s wailing. ‘No-oooo, Odol, no-ooo!’ like a mother who has lost a child, or fears she is about to lose one. Which she was, of course, although nobody realised this yet, myself least of all.

(Chapter 2 will be posted on Sunday, April 26th 2010)