He hesitated, then added more gently: “I cannot begin to understand why you are the elected one. Always he has called his handmaid from among the highest-born women of the Chosen. Perhaps he has a special knowledge of you, beyond the knowledge of ordinary men. It is not for us to question, only to obey.”

He turned and began to walk away, holding his torch to one side so that I, too, could walk by its light. And so I followed him, up over the mountain ridge beyond our camp, away from Siranjaro, the mine, my home, my family, and Lesharo.

One thing more this strange man said to me: “Don’t look back, Elsha of the Quelled.”

4

Fire on My Mind

FOR THREE DAYS I travelled with Amasai, steward of the Firelord. We travelled on foot, though he had a mule waiting just outside Siranjaro, laden with brightly coloured travelling bags. For the first time in my life I saw beyond Siranjaro: saw the vast world of our mountains, range upon cloud-topped range, rocky and desolate and beautiful. Often, far up in the misty heights, we saw snow, almost white against the sooty sky. We passed beneath huge stone cliffs, sheer to the clouds; crept along razor-edged tracks where, a step away, the world vanished into mist; and crawled like ants along ridges swept with icy winds, where eagles soared. Once we saw, far below on a windswept plain, a pack of wolves tracking a solitary deer; and once on a high and rocky place we startled a small herd of ibex, and they leapt away before us on the sheer rocks as if they were winged. I did not know what the creatures were then; the man told me.

Though we travelled through desolate places, all our paths were marked on either side by rounded stones, many of them carved with words I could not read. At times the stones were so many, they made a low wall on either side and we were sheltered from the bitter winds. I asked the man what the carved words were. “They are travelling prayers,” he told me. “The paths through these mountains are dangerous, handmaid, and the carved stones are our protection. Every time our shadow falls across a prayer, it is as if we speak it, and God listens and watches over us.”

“But who placed the stones, lord?”

“Hundreds of travellers, over hundreds of years,” he said.

Sometimes, when the wind dropped and our path was smooth, we looked out across vast wilderness places, ashen grey and hoary with mist. The hugeness of the icy wastes appalled me, yet at the same time I found them strangely comforting. They gave me space to think, and their cold was a cleansing thing. I could not have borne then the turmoil of the town we went to later. I needed this peace, barren and desolate though it was. And there was joy in being all day outside on the mountains.