Free Beguilers by Kate Thompson Page A

dark, but although I was physically tired I was far from sleep. I lay and listened to the last birds settling themselves in for the night and tried to ignore the depth of the silence that lay behind their rustlings. I was comfortable where I lay, and the shawl was surprisingly warm, but I feared the vast, empty silence of the mountain above. I longed for the comforting sound of the nightangel’s song, but I knew there was no chance of hearing it up there in the druze. So I tried to remember it instead, and at last I began to drift towards sleep.

CHAPTER TEN
    T HE SOUND, WHEN IT came again, cut through me like an ice-cold dagger. All the warmth that I had preserved inside my shawl seemed to depart in that instant. This time there was no mistaking that it was real and that it came from somewhere out there in the night and not from inside my mind. The sound was anguished, agonized, ripping through the night like desperate claws, grasping at my soul.
    I stayed dead still, clutching at the edge of the yellow shawl the way a baby grips her mother’s collar, grasping for comfort. My heart was hammering wildly in my chest, urging me to run; to put the source of such fear as far behind me as possible.
    But I couldn’t run. Some sense of pride, or of purpose, or both, was holding me firm against my fear. And there was another thing as well; less clear to me but no less powerful. The beguiler’s cry sent shock and terror lancing through my heart, but those weren’t the only feelings it evoked. As though it were barbed, the sound had planted hooks in me and my desire was divided between advancing and retreating.
    For a while longer I was held in a stalemate, paralysed by indecision. Then, almost before I knew it, I found myself getting to my feet.
    The beguiler was silent now, but its whereabouts was clear to me as I made my way through the druze. I walked uphill and to my left, angling away from the porters’ trail and towards the unsealed peak of the Great Mother. There was still no light, but there were varying shades of darkness as I moved through the night. The druze bushes crouched like malevolent beasts and seemed to bar every route I tried to take. I had to back-track constantly and make winding detours, but the long-gone sound of the beguiler had etched its point of origin clearly on to my mind, and I never lost my sense of direction. I was in a black maze in the black night, and so intent upon finding my way through it that I lost all sense of why I was there or what I would do if and when I found my way out.
    My journey ended abruptly. One minute I was fighting my way through the druze and the next I was clear of it, standing on the edge of a wide clearing and looking up at a sandstone cliff which reared up above me until it vanished into the darkness.
    Through a gap in the clouds I glimpsed a half moon, lying on her back as though she had fallen. Her dim light shone upon the cliff face and suddenly I knew where I was. The whole face of the crag was pocked by holes and laced with hand-carved paths. I had arrived at the lepers’ caves.
    There were no longer any lepers there, I knew. There hadn’t been for several generations. As I looked up at the cliff I remembered hearing that the strange formation had been made by water forcing its way through the stone, and although the melting snows had now found another route to bring them down the mountainside, there were times during the year when the caves were practically uninhabitable because of the damp. I had learnt that because it was a story regularly told to the children in the village; how the lepers had come down from their caves looking for shelter one year and the elders had been thrown into a quandary about them. It would go against the principles of the village to refuse hospitality, yet it would endanger the population to have the lepers living among the people. In the end they had brought the outcasts to the buzz-bat cave, a huge cavern which lies about a mile