The Sentinel of the Sun

Prologue - THE LUMINARY

The wetlands north of the capital looked much the same as they had since prehistoric times, the night the Luminary killed the falcon. Thunder punctuated the sucking sound his boots made as he trudged toward the bird hide, a wooden shack squatting in the long grass. Sludgy moonlight revealed nothing but frog-spawning brown swamp in every direction, flickering periodically with far-away lightning, while the night sky rumbled in warning. The door nearly collapsed in his hand, hunks of rotted wood crumbling to his feet like wet newspaper, but he squeezed inside and crouched, propping the muzzle of the rifle against the narrow viewing strip. Back in the calm of his study he had known what to do with absolute clarity, but now as he brushed the cobwebs from the low ceiling and wiped them on his coat, the truth seemed remote and uncertain. “Have faith,” he murmured to himself, and fixed his hard, grey eyes again on the sky, his lined forehead heavy and his steel-streaked hair damp.

Blinding white fingers of lightning burst the storm cloud on the horizon and stabbed the ground. A speck hung illuminated by the flare of angry brightness, a black dot in the distance growing bigger. He lifted his rifle and lowered his eye to look along its length, squinting against the intermittent flashes of light. His fingertip itched on the patient curve of the trigger. The bird was dead ahead, the arches of its wings outstretched against the clouds as it rode the waves of wind. A millisecond late and he would miss his shot. “Squeeze, don’t pull,” he whispered to himself.

“Guide me.” He closed his eyes.

The explosion of the gun ripped through the air, the recoil slamming into his shoulder like a punch. Hundreds of wild fowl erupted from the marsh, squawking and flapping as his eyes raked the sky. Chaos ascended, but one of the shapes was spinning, tumbling over and over in the air, plummeting down toward the earth. The gun clattered onto the dusty floorboards as he staggered to the door and down the few steps to the muddy ground. Blood rushing back to his stiff legs and the soles of his feet full of needles, he jogged as fast as he could toward the patch of open grass where the bird had fallen.

It seemed so small up close, on the ground and near to death, such a fragile little thing, all tiny bones and pale feathers. Its chest movements were slowing as he picked it up to inspect it. He smoothed its soft down as its eyes rolled back in its head and the last of its strength went limp in his hands. He had expected more. He wasn’t sure what, but it was just a dead bird. He stood for a while there on the marshland, the water slowly oozing through the thick fabric of his boots, but nothing happened. He tucked the bird inside his coat and walked stiffly back to retrieve the gun.

Chapter 1 - ALEXIS

Alexis woke to the chill spring air and pulled the blankets up tight over her chin. The familiar sound of her mother making breakfast drew her back to herself, but her dream remained, the sense of falling. She squeezed her eyes closed and wound the sheet tightly around her fists until her heart stopped pounding. Toes reaching for the floor, she shuffled to the edge of the thin mattress, keeping her brown blanket wrapped around her like a toga. Her feet carried her automatically to the bathroom, her hand holding the end of the cover up to stop her from tripping.

“Morning Lexi,” trilled her mother from the kitchen. No matter how grey and poor their lives were, Carys Wilde always saw a positive side to everything, however small. She was unapologetically single in a town where unmarried women, especially mothers, were extremely rare, but she possessed an amazing ability not to notice the sideways glances and whispered mutterings that passed in her direction. It kept the two of them firmly on the extreme fringes of polite society, which suited them both fine.

Alexis’ father had been a rare outside visitor to the Powlen Valley. He was a scientist here to survey the local lichen, or some other banal thing that Carys couldn’t remember the details of, but they’d had a glorious, illicit love affair beneath the trees. Then he’d received the order to return home to the Fjallenskap Mountains and Carys was left standing alone in temple, her secret bulging out the front of her robes. She’d never resented him for leaving, loyalty to your birth tract was the most primary teaching of the Source and not voluntary, but she’d never given up hope that he’d return either. The few men who’d shown an interest since, usually older widowers who wanted someone to wash their socks and make their tea, had been immediately sent packing.

Alexis did not fit in to Penavan any better than her mother did, although in many ways they could not have been more different. If Carys was sunny, Alexis was stormy. She felt like a solitary question mark in a row of full stops. “It’s not our place to question the Source’s plan,” the temple servants would chastise her gently in answer to anything difficult, but instead of nodding quietly and lowering her head, Alexis stuck her chin up and blazed inwardly. It was a lazy answer that filled her with hopelessness so overwhelming that at times it almost burst out as a great exasperated sob.

Frustration had walked by her side for as long as she could remember. Fast to ignite and slow to extinguish, it was a scab diligently picked into a deep wound. When she sat at the back of her over-crowded classroom, chin cupped in the palm of her hand, she often imagined that she could pull all her feelings into herself, pressurising and pressurising them, until she could explode out through the shattering window and soar away across the valley.

“You’ll be late for school if you’re not careful,” Carys called through the kitchen door, her body silhouetted against the greenish light of the window. “Chop chop.”

Alexis lazily splashed water at her pale face and sighed, raking her fingers through her mess of sun-streaked, brown hair and tugging at the tangles. Her eyes were the same luminous green as sea glass and the one part of herself that she quite liked. “Disconcerting,” she’d heard Mrs Ellis, the bishop’s wife, say about them. Followed by, “there’s a touch of feral about that girl.” If they bothered Mrs Ellis they were fine by Alexis.

Sitting on her unmade bed two minutes later, she tugged her grey woollen leggings on and pulled a hooded, cable jumper over her vest. The wool was black and white spun together and it was her favourite. For the most part the people of the Powlen Valley wore brown, cream and variations on brown and cream. The entire tract’s singular purpose was the cultivation of the densely coated, four-horned sheep which grazed on the grassy hillsides, so the one thing that they weren’t short of was wool. The sheep were large and soft and their fleeces were distinctively tri-coloured, black, white and a rich, earthy brown. After shearing, the children would split the wool into different bins to separate out the colours, the more valuable black and white fleece largely being exported to the capital city, Deliverance. Dye was hard to come by, expensive and frowned upon in Source-fearing Penavan, and as a result the townspeople mostly reflected the brown tinge the town had, as though you were looking at them through an old ale bottle.

Carys had acquired an orphaned black and white lamb a few years ago as a gift from a farmer for helping him with the ewes in labour. They’d named it Bill Henderson, after the farmer, and had a few blissful, argument-free, months while they shared its care, taking it in turns to feed him from a bottle and cuddle him. After Bill Henderson had grown too big to live in the house he’d been set free with the herd, a little metal tag in his ear that bore the word ‘Wilde.’

Most people sold their black and white wool after the annual round-up and shearing, but Carys knew how her daughter hated to wear brown and always kept some fleece back for her. For a month after the shearing Carys would sit by the little stove in the kitchen, spinning the fleece into wool at her wheel and knitting, the silence of the evenings disturbed only by the soft click-clack of her needles.

Alexis inspected herself briefly in the small mirror on her bedside table and scowled, tugging at the side of her hair where it formed in an odd little curl over her temple. She tucked it back behind her ear, trying to flatten it with her palm, and shoved her keys and notebook into the pocket of her jumper. She stretched the sleeves down and poked her thumbs through holes she’d made in the cuffs to keep the birthmarks on her wrists from showing. The marks disturbed the respectable mothers of Penavan even more than her cat-green eyes did, but in this instance they bothered Alexis even more and so she kept them hidden.

She wandered into the kitchen and pushed her feet into black leather boots, bought cheap from the import shop and custom-mended endlessly with bits of old belts that wound round her calves to stop them flapping and tripping her up. The pan of porridge sat on the hob, bubbles slowly bursting on its surface, and Alexis paused to steal a few mouthfuls without sitting down. “Sorry mum, running late,” she mumbled, blowing gently at the steaming spoon in her hand.

“It’s okay Lexi. There’s no jam or sugar today anyway so it’s very dull.”

“No worries.”

“It’s going to be a lean month I think.”

Alexis emptied the spoon into her mouth and immediately began to puff short little breaths over the top of the steaming mound on her tongue, fanning her hand in front of her open mouth to cool it. “What’s new?” she mumbled around the food, before eventually swallowing. Carys gave a half shrug of acknowledgment.

Alexis moved to take her spoon over to the little sink, but her mother took it from her. “Don’t worry about that, get yourself off to school and have a good day. Come straight home though.” She fixed Alexis with her best attempt at a stern look.

Alexis rolled her eyes and grabbed her satchel from the back of the wooden chair. “Thanks mum,” she said, flipping her hood up over her head. “You too. See you later.”

“Bye darling,” Carys called as the rickety door swung shut behind Alexis.

The traipse up the mud road to school never changed. The town was an unimaginative grid of identical brown, prefab box houses. Each had a little garden at the back, packed from one side to the other with vegetables. Alexis and Carys had a pear tree whose branches clutched at the side of the house, its leafy arms criss-crossing the windows and giving the interior its greenish hue. A lot of the houses were falling apart. Window frames rotted under peeling paint and black holes gaped in roofs where tiles should be. It was never mentioned. Carys and Alexis scraped from one week to the next, but somehow they always got by, in part because Carys did not give as much to the temple as others did.

“The temple tower’s still standing at least,” she’d say. “I think the Source would rather see us fed and in a safe house than have himself a few more statues.” It was the sort of comment that made people in Penavan gasp, but Alexis secretly enjoyed that side of her mother’s eccentricity.

As she walked to school the jagged hills around them summoned her like a drumbeat knocking against her spine. Every day they tried to tempt her away from the suffocating primness of the towns and villages that huddled, one after the other, along the valley floor. They called her up toward the peaks where the horizons were wide and the sunlight stretched as far as the eye could see. Often what started as a quick detour ended up with her creeping in after dark, boots caked in mud and clothes snagged and covered in burrs. She never planned to do it, but with each step she took away from the shabby houses of the valley the better she felt, as though she could breathe all the way down to the bottom of her lungs again and step the full length of her stride. Returning to bricks and walls after the silent expanse of the hillsides felt like shrinking herself to climb back into a cage. While she was up there she could forget to be angry, but then when she undressed in the evening she would catch a glimpse of her own forearms and feel the familiar burn ignite again.

Carys maintained that Alexis was born that way, that they were birthmarks, but that was impossible and no one else would offer a better explanation. It looked like lace under her skin, showing through pale and white. Sometimes when she caught them in a certain light the marks appeared to glow. On the inside of each elbow was the faint image of a sun, its rays stretching down to her wrists, and from her wrists, stretching back to greet the suns, were wings, their pointed feathers stretched wide.

* * *

Alexis had started school on her fifth birthday and she would finish it on her eighteenth, a few months from now. She had spent most of her education hiding in mediocrity at the back of the class, but now that her year group was dwindling her cover was being stripped away. Most of the talk in the sparse little classroom revolved around final career decisions. From the age of twelve, education petered down almost exclusively to sheep and religion. Once you could read, write, count and had a reasonable knowledge of the history of the Union, education in any subject not linked to your future in wool or faith was unnecessary.

Only the most devout and talented were given the opportunity to leave their home tracts and see the Ziggurat, the white pyramid at the heart of Deliverance, where the Luminary and the conclave that governed them were housed. Its base was half a mile across and its gently sloping sides were terraced with gardens for the most faithful servants. Every child knew that the Source himself had guided the people to build it after the great wars. The civilised world had been split into tracts, each with a singular mission, so that every person would know their purpose and never again have to experience the mess of conflict and squalor that preceded them. Places too cold or barren or rocky to be of any material use were designated as feral land and abandoned for nature to reclaim. The mission of the Powlen Valley tract was wool. Felted, knitted, woven, it didn’t really matter, it was the children of the Valley’s past, present and future.

It was almost unheard of not to commit yourself to at least a year of service in the temple on turning eighteen, but Alexis felt a rock of sickness in her stomach when she imagined wearing the white robes, stuck in the shuffling silence of the temple dormitory with fifty of her peers. A few hours a day at school was enough. The only future option that sounded bearable was to be a shepherdess and spend her days roaming the hills, watching the flocks and keeping only the wind and rocks for company. Alexis stared out of the classroom window, lost in her own thoughts.

“Be honest with yourself about where your skills lie,” the teacher rattled on. “There’s no point trying for creative roles in garment production if you have yet to show much design aptitude. By the same token, shepherding is not for you if you can’t handle the long hours outdoors on the hillsides in all weather. Prayer is the answer-”

She froze suddenly, eyes wide and hands suspended in the air like a living photograph, as the room began to shiver, the floor vibrating beneath their feet. Alexis’ mouth went dust dry and the panicked ringing in her ears drowned out the start of the high-pitched screeching noise the window made, as a crack spread slowly across its surface. “Under the tables,” the teacher cried, falling to her knees and scrambling into the space beneath her desk.

Alexis was off her chair and under her table in a tangle of skinny limbs just as the pane burst, sprinkling the floor with glass shards. The ground rocked back and forth jerkily, dislodging pictures from walls and books from shelves. She hugged her knees to her chest and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, her heart racing in her throat and her breath pushing urgently through her clenched teeth. Not again, was all she could think. Not again.