The Writers' Circle

This is the first chapter of the same novel that I lodged the prologue to earlier (and in the title of which I missed a critical hyphen, but never mind).


1. The Beach

Lana was staring fixedly from her sentinel post on the highest of the seaward dunes down into the turbulent greens of the bay that on her right was grasped between Sitaali's urban arms - staring because this was where she last remembered seeing him, but also because the sea was the only direction she could face and not be blinded by the whipping straps of her long red hair - the hair that he had so adored, and which streamed unfettered in his honour now across the billowing pillow of one of the pretty silk blouses he'd bought for her two summers before at the fair.

They used to walk here towards the easternmost tip of their domain and stop to dream of the wilderness that lay beyond the sea.  Sometimes they had talked mad, crazy things with each other, as if they would live through the thousand years of rain that would wash the dust of the war away - that they would be among the first of the new wave of explorers to reclaim a piece of the sweet new world for themselves.

Alone now, Lana only came here before heading off for work.  Dorian, in who's mind she had found the other half of herself, and who's love had carried her through the tragic death of her mother, was gone, and her heart was cold like the ocean that had taken him away; the ocean which drew its huge and fathomless breath with a hollow roar at her feet, and then threw itself again on the shivering drum of the endless sands.

Through the bubbling confusion of its demise she heard a cry and turned; lashing herself at once across the face with her salt-wetted locks and seeing a shabby knot of clothes walking towards her.

The wind blustered form flapped violently this way and that, revealing the face of an elderly woman at it's slightly more stable core.  Beyond her, and as far from her again as the woman was from Lana, there stood a very tall hooded monk with his back to them both.  A bare wooden fighting pole gleamed where it was slung across his back in the light of the rising sun.

Lana struggled to hold her hair out of her eyes so that she could better interpret what was going on.  She saw the woman was coming towards her - offering her something by pushing it out in front of her and shouting against the wind.

'...take it.'

Lana's mouth dropped open with shock.  She could hardly believe what she was seeing.  This was a scene that belonged in the past - nearly a hundred years in the past.  The Hogans, a creed that had risen freshly as a fusion of their remaining faiths, might have inspired and lead the survivors of the filthy war to build the five new cities of the citisphere, but once their usefulness had been negated by the passing of the initial emergency they had quickly been ridiculed and then faded into oblivion as a result of some of their rather more far-fetched ideas about human destiny and fate.

Yet, here they were - a Hogan priestess, or at least a woman who looked the part, accompanied by a man who looked every bit the traditional warrior monk.

'You must be freezing, child - take it,' the woman repeated, proffering a shawl, embroidered with a dazzlingly beautiful peacock feather pattern.

Lana looked but didn't accept the gift even though it was meant to be very ill-mannered to reject the charity of a Hogan, since they spent their lives begging for the things that they then gave to those whom they considered to be needy.

'Child?'  Lana laughed a little nervously at the old fashioned form of address. Was the priestess a ghost?  It was hard to tell with the salty wind drying her eyes and blurring her vision.  'I'm 23 and hardly a child, but thanks, and that's very kind of you, but all the same, no thanks - I like the wind.  It drives the heat out of my mind and makes me feel calm - and there are others who have more need - those who sleep on the street at night.  I have a nice warm bed and a home to go back to when I'm finished here.'

It was a lie, of course, a pointless lie.  Though she had a house and a comfortable bed, she was going directly to work, but it mattered not.  The delicate shawl, though it might have shielded her from the icy blast of the wind just a little, would not have been suitable for her suggested cause, but in that moment she hadn't been able to think of anything better to say.  Most of her mind was still full of the ghost of her love and her secret desire to be brave enough to walk into the waves and join him, just like it was most mornings.

Distracted though she might have been, Lana knew that she was staring at the alien appearance of the woman; thinking how she appeared to be so very much like the photograph of a gypsy that she remembered from her school days, even though all such racial differences had long ago been obliterated by the war and the eugenics they had been obliged to use to serve the purpose of ensuring their continued survival on a planet riddled with the various radioactive and viral dusts that their predecessors had so unwisely unleashed.  

Given her trade as a professional eugenic engineer, Lana was keenly aware that features like the ones she was looking at right now only appeared now and then as shadows of their former selves in those born as a result of back street engineering - mistakes that just happened to resemble something that they weren't even remotely related to, never mind descended from.  The woman had features that could be described as ancient Eastern European, or even Asian in nature, but she also had greying fair hair and deep blue-green eyes that were more typical of the original northern Europeans that once lived in this area.  It was a striking, if rather disturbing fusion of disparate cultures.

The woman smiled.

'You think I'm strange to look at?  I'll tell you, girl, you'll see many more strange things than me in your future.'

Lana stared out to sea again for a moment.

'I'm. sorry,' she said, embarrassed.  'I didn't mean to stare at you like that, but. and what a strange thing to say - how would anyone know their own future, never mind anyone else's?'

She couldn't imagine that even the slightly deranged thinking of the Hogans included such cheap trickery as fortune telling.

'In my case?  By knowing the past extremely well.'

The woman laughed as she spoke, but it was a sad, ironic laugh.  Hogan or not, the poor creature was clearly just a muddled old fool, and her monk was probably some poorly looking ancient old man who had grown old in her service, though he did seem to stand so very tall and straight; so broad shouldered for the age that she imagined him to be.  

Lana did the only polite thing she could think of doing, short of telling the woman to go away.

'I must be going now,' she said and turned without thinking in the wrong direction - away from the sandy path back through the dunes towards Sitaali's promenade.  It was just the direction opposite the one that was blocked by this little old woman, and where she could be certain she wouldn't accidentally run into her guardian monk.

He probably wouldn't hurt her even if she did - he was only there to protect his priestesses, though no one had ever made it clear if this included punishing those who would dare to insult them by rejecting their charity.

'It's Quarthonian silk.  Why, when you're so cold, Lana, would you turn down a gift that would keep you warm?'  It was just a whisper, a quiet exclamation of surprise perhaps, but the wind and the waves had just lulled, and the woman's worn old whisper seemed to travel for miles.  One of her words in particular threw invisible hooks into Lana's consciousness so that she was unable ignore it.  Unless it was a trick of the wind, or of her own grief-sickened  mind, the woman had just said her name.

Lana glanced back at her and asked a little uncertainly.  

'What did you say?'

The woman closed the gap that Lana had been so quick to open up between them.  The loom of her figure obliterated Lana's view of the distance so that she failed to notice that in the same moment the hood of the monk, had turned sharply and unerringly in their direction.  Also in that moment, Lana felt the sand give way underfoot and wobbled violently before regaining her balance.  By the time she looked up the woman was nearly on top of her, offering a hand to catch hold of her - a sudden unexpected closeness.

They both straightened with a rush of apologies to one another and inched backwards a little so that a more comfortable range was recovered between them as strangers, and the woman searched  herself for an answer to Lana's question as if she was listening to her own thoughts before speaking them. 

'It's. so cold out here. I mean - you've come here every day now for the last month, and probably for a lot longer than that, for all I know, but we've only been here for a month, so I wouldn't know, for sure.'

Lana struggled again with her hair while she tried to remember what it was that had made her stop and re-engage the woman's attention that way, but another coincidence registered and got in the way of her contemplation.

'Oh, you're from the fair?'

It would explain a lot - like their temporary presence and their antiquated act as Hogans.

'Fair?' the woman snorted, and threw her head back to laugh.  'We're troubadours,' she said, 'Musicians, singers and dancers - performers of the Arts - we're artists, my love, not common fair folk.'

Lana was unable to imagine her being directly involved in all the colourful and fantastical acrobatic dancing, music and singing that the people of Sitaali were so familiar with at this time of the year along the sea front promenade.

They, the fair, a troop of troubadours, whatever they wanted to call themselves, always came towards the end of the summer when the nights started drawing close and the fire of their torches whirling high in the air above their heads could be seen to the best effect.  Their passage marked the change of seasons, from summer, through autumn, to winter.  The troubadours had become such an inevitable part of Sitaali life that their presence was firmly woven into the city's cultural consciousness, and would have been most noticeable by an absence.  

At least, Lana barely noticed them any more, but to say that or anything that implied it out loud would have been unnecessarily rude.  She shook off her melancholy with some effort, given the environment she was in, and tried again to be friendlier.  The woman, who's tattered robes where no better than rags, was trying to give her an expensive shawl, and had been concerned enough about the under-dressed waif that she had found wandering the beach like a lost soul that she had crossed the invisible personal boundary to try to catch her as she stumbled.  

'I'm sorry - I didn't mean to be so rude to you.  At least, let me give you something for the shawl?'

It was the wrong thing to say.  Before she had even finished saying it Lana had known by the cloud of badly disguised offence in the woman's eyes that she had completely misjudged the situation, and bit her lip.

'It's not for sale, child,' the woman said quietly and wrapped it tightly around her arms as she started sidling away from her.  Lana felt terrible.

'I'm sorry!' she whimpered.

It didn't make any difference.  The woman was now walking away from her along the crest of the dune with increasing speed.

Lana shook her head and closed her eyes a moment, then started down the face of the dune  - back towards the promenade along the shore, and just out of reach of the fearsome waves at the foot of the dunes.

Save the fact that they were both pausing to glance uncertainly at one another in their parallel but slowly diverging paths they might never have spoken again, but Lana looked one last time before the line of the crest of the dune veered sharply away from the beach, and just as the woman also stopped to look back down at Lana.  

They stared at one another for several interminable seconds.

Lana, who felt guilty, wanted to say something, but knew it would probably only make everything much worse.  Instead she mouthed her apology one last time and turned to head off to work.  

Words reached her then, making her stop and wait to hear them without turning back.

'He would be so sad, child, if he could see you now - all thin and white - the life washed out of you - coming here all the time to re-live your pain.  You should ask yourself this one question - would he, whom you so adored, have wasted his life away like this if it had been you that died that day?'

Lana swallowed hard and moved off swiftly, refusing to respond now that her brows were knotted high in the middle of her forehead and tears were starting to burn her salt dried eyes with painful intensity.

What right did she, a total stranger, have to interfere with the grief that filled her private world?  

None.  

But the other thing that bubbled around her mind and would not leave her alone was the question: how did she know?