Auchinmurn Isle
The Middle Ages
The sun dipped behind the horizon. The wind howled across the bay. Matt’s clothes were damp against his skin and his body ached from exhaustion. Worse, his stomach was rumbling furiously. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. He dug his fingers into the corner of his coat pockets in the hope of finding something, but there wasn’t even a fuzzy Polo mint.
They were heading silently north-west towards the more rugged, uninhabited part of Auchinmurn. Solon was in the lead, his tunic singed and torn, with Carik following, clutching her wounded hand close to her chest. Matt brought up the rear.
Matt was astonished at how much Auchinmurn had changed over the centuries. He was adapting, slowly, to the overwhelming stink that permeated everything – a heady mix of burning peat, cooking pig fat, human waste and animal manure, all punctuated with the sour smells of sweat. But unlike in the twenty-first century, the island’s forest reached all the way to the shoreline, giving them cover as they climbed to the caves high up in the hillside.
Solon stopped under a cluster of pine trees. ‘Can you climb this, Matt?’
Matt looked up at the dense, overgrown cliff face in front of them, and nodded.
Solon began to clear the way by hacking through the heavy wet brush with his sword as they climbed slowly up the cliff. Mud and water were still flowing through the bracken on this part of the island, so their ascent was a slippery one. Because of her swollen blistered hand, Carik fell backwards twice on to Matt. Her mistrust and wariness of him was still strong; he sensed it every time he set her back on her feet. He did his best to respond neutrally, but it wasn’t easy. She and Solon both smelled sour, like burning wood tinged with rotting meat. It was hard not to wrinkle his nose and convey the wrong impression of his own feelings towards them both.
You hardly smell of scented soap, he reminded himself. The phrase was Jeannie’s, and the memory caught in his throat. He hoped his dad’s lifelong relationship with the old housekeeper was keeping him from harming her.
As they climbed, Matt wondered what was on this part of the island in the present day. He, Em and Zach knew all the coves and caves near Seaport and on Era Mina, but he didn’t think Auchinmurn’s spelunkers were aware of smugglers’ caves on this side of the island.
‘Look out!’ Solon suddenly yelled, flattening himself against the crags as an avalanche of rocks and roots tumbled towards them.
Matt covered his head with his hands as rocks rained down on him, battering and cutting him. Curled against the rock face, he experienced a jolt of homesickness that took his breath away.
Carik reached out her good hand to Matt as the avalanche trickled to a halt.
‘You will see your sister again soon,’ she said.
Kindness at last, Matt thought wryly. She had obviously sensed his longing.
‘I’m fine,’ he said shortly. ‘Keep going.’
They climbed on in silence. Solon was some way ahead now, almost at the ridge line.
‘Why did your father send those knights to attack us?’ Carik asked abruptly.
Matt focused on where he was placing his hands. ‘I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t want us following him, seeing where he took Jeannie.’
The higher they climbed, the thicker the bracken and brambles became. The moon was full now, glittering on the bay below them. Matt’s hands and face were covered in scratches. Above them, Solon had stopped at a thick curtain of bramble and hawthorn bushes, and Matt detected a cave opening behind their swinging branches.
‘May I use your magic glasses again?’ Solon asked.
Matt breathlessly handed the opera glasses over. They huddled together on the ledge as Solon focused on the small island of Era Mina.
‘What are you looking at?’ asked Matt.
Solon returned the glasses to Matt. ‘Brother Renard’s tower on Era Mina. The one we are building to keep him safe from his own fracturing imagination. Look.’
The tower on Era Mina stood full height in Matt’s time, slender and commanding. Right now, it was part-way through the process of being built.
The rocky promontory was swarming with hundreds of black knights in identical armour, cutting stone, mixing mortar, carrying bricks – building the tower at record speed and all moving in the same precise way that Matt, Solon and Carik had witnessed earlier on the beach. Matt wondered again at how his father was doing all of this. Guardians could not animate. What were these creatures? Where had they come from?
Solon took the glasses again. ‘Why does your father not animate the tower itself?’
‘He’s a Guardian,’ said Matt. ‘Not an Animare.’
Solon looked startled. ‘Then how is he doing this?’
‘I have no idea.’
They moved inside the cave and Solon dropped the brush cover, plunging them into darkness. Matt could feel and smell Carik standing next to him. The sense of her mistrust and intense curiosity assailed him.
Who are you? she was saying, as clearly as if she were speaking the words aloud.
Matt wasn’t sure he knew the answer to that either.