A Time of Omens

by Katharine Kerr

  With all the prisoners and suchlike, it took the warband two full days to ride home. With Otho and a squad of dwarven axmen standing around her, Carra was waiting at the gates of Cadmar’s dun when they walked their horses up the hill. At first, in the dust and confusion, she found it impossible to tell one man from another, and her heart began pounding in dread, but Dar broke free of the pack at last and ran to her.

  “Thank every god in the sky!” She flung herself into his arms. While she sniveled into his filthy shirt, he stroked her hair.

  “Here, here, my love! I’m home safe again, just like I promised you.”

  Otho snorted profoundly.

  “Egotistical young dolt,” he remarked in a conversational tone of voice. “Wasn’t you we were worried about.”

  “What?” Dar let her go and turned to confront the dwarf. “What are you saying, old man?”

  “I’m saying what I said, you stupid elven fop. Someone tried to kill your wife while you were running around the countryside playing warrior.”

  Dar went dead-still.

  “Well, but they didn’t,” Carra said. “I mean, that sounds stupid, but Otho and his men have kept me safe, really they have.”

  “And for that they’ll have my undying thanks.”

  She had never heard Dar speak like that, so low, so still, each word careful and distinct, and now he was trembling in rage.

  “Where’s the man who tried to harm her?”

  “Don’t know, Your Highness.” Otho’s manner changed abruptly. “He did it by stealth, and we couldn’t catch him.”

  “When we do, I’ll kill him with my own hands.” He threw one arm around Carra’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Name your reward.”

  Otho thought for a good long minute, then sighed.

  “None needed, Your Highness. We were glad to serve your lady. But someday, mayhap, we’ll remember this, and call in a favor done.”

  All around them men were dismounting in a welter of confusion. Pages and stableboys came running to take horses and unload gear, warriors strode by, heading for the great hall and ale. Dar’s archers gathered round like a dun wall to shut their little group off from the potentially dangerous commotion.

  “Is Jill with you?” Carra said.

  “The Wise One?” Dar said. “She’s not. She left us before we reached the city. There’s Rhodry, though. Look, right behind him, see that horse Yraen’s leading? We captured him from the raiders. He belonged to their leader.”

  Carra looked, then caught her breath in a little gasp. Never had she seen such an enormous animal, fully eighteen hands high and broad, too, with a deep chest and huge arch of neck. A blood bay with white mane and tail, he walked solemnly, gravely, planting each big foot down as if he knew that everyone watched him. Rhodry turned his own horse over to a page, then worked his way free of the mob to join them.

  “Otho,” Rhodry said. “I’ve a bone to pick with you.”

  “You remembered, did you?” Otho looked sour. “Well, I owe you your hire, I suppose, though with all the trouble you got me into, that ambush at the ford and all, I don’t see why I should pay you one blasted coin.”

  “Because if you’d ridden north without me and Yraen, you’d have been dead long before you reached the cursed ford.”

  “That has a certain logic to it, truly. Well, I’ve got the coin back at my inn.”

  “Good. Make sure you fetch it, then.”

  And Carra was honestly shocked that a man like Rhodry, whom she was starting to consider as fine and noble as any man in the kingdom, would worry about a handful of coin.

  That night in the great hall the gwerbret held a feast for their victory, and his lady made sure that it also served to solemnize Carra’s wedding in the human way. Before the bard sang his praise-song for the raid and the true drinking began, the gwerbret himself made a fine flowery speech and toasted the young couple with a goblet of mead. The bard performed a solemn declamation, cobbled together from other occasions, perhaps, but elegant all the same. Their arms twined round each other, Carra and Dar took turns drinking mead from a real glass goblet, traded all the way north from Bardek through Aberwyn. Although custom demanded that they smash the thing, it was far too valuable, and besides, as Carra pointed out to her new husband, she certainly wasn’t a virgin anymore anyway. With a laugh Dar agreed and handed the goblet back unharmed to the hovering seneschal.

  Later, after the bardsong and the assigning of praise, after the mead and the feasting, the gwerbret called for music, and there was dancing, the circle dances of the border, half-elven, half-human, stepped out to harp and drum. For the ritual of the thing, Carra danced one with Dar, then sat down again beside the gwerbret’s wife, who caught her hand and squeezed it.

  “You have my thanks, my lady,” Carra said. “For honoring me this way.”

  “Well, you’re most welcome, and truly, I thought we’d best take our merriment while we can.” Labanna’s dark eyes turned haunted. “The omens are poor, and the news worse.”

  Carra nodded, moving instinctively a little closer to her. Out in the center of the great hall, the music pounded on, and the dancers moved gravely, circling round and round. In her grim mood it seemed that they were weaving an immense and ancient spell rather than celebrating an event as common as a wedding. Yet, even over the music, when Carra turned toward the window she heard or thought she heard the harsh cry of a hawk, as if some huge bird drifted overhead on the rising night wind.

  Author’s Note

  Many readers and reviewers have assumed that the Deverry books take place in some sort of alternate Britain or that the people of Deverry came originally from Britain. In fact, they emigrated from northern Gaul, as a couple of obscure clues in the text tell the compulsively careful reader who also knows an awful lot about. Celtic history. Since only a few people fall into that rather strange category, myself being one of them, allow me to explain further. For one thing, the great heroes often mentioned, Vercingetorix and Vindex, are real, historical Gauls. For another, those “vergobretes” who became in Deverry “gwerbrets” are mentioned in Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars as magistrates among the Gauls, though, he says, the Britons have no such kind of leader, relying instead upon “kings.” The Gaulish king, it seems, was more what we’d term a “warleader,” the “cadvridoc” of Deverry, than the ruler of an organized state. Even in Britain, however, the Celts elected their kings more often than they accepted them by inheritance, a pan-Celtic political tradition that lies behind the instability of the Deverry kingship.

  The language of Deverry also derives from that of Gaul, but Gaulish was not, as far as scholars can tell, very much different from the Old British that evolved into the language we know today as Cymraeg or Welsh. Thus the Deverrian language looks and sounds much like Welsh, but anyone who knows this modern language will see immediately that it differs in a great many respects. Now, not a lot of Gaulish survives. The Gauls had never been big on writing things down, and when the “cursed Rhwmanes” conquered the place and imposed Latin as the official language, the native speech and oral literature died out. Fortunately a good many personal and place names survive among the remnants—the very thing a fantasy author needs!

  As for the Deverrian forms of these names, remember that not only do all languages change over time, but each family of languages changes according to its own rules. In our own family, Indo-European, which includes among others the Germanic, Persian, Hindi, and Slavic groups as well as the Celtic languages, these changes have been studied and codified by linguists. For instance, any “g” sound caught between two vowels tends to first soften, then drop away; “-nt” or “-nd” at the end of a syllable changes to a simple “n,” the old Indo-European sound “wh” or digamma either hardens or disappears, and so on and so forth.

  What I’ve done, then, is taken old Gaulish names and subjected them to these rules of change to produce the Deverrian names you find in the books. Consider the ancient word isarnos, iron, which has become
in Deverrian yraen. Although the spelling seems similar to our word, we actually pronounce iron eye-urn, in defiance of the order of its consonants, a pronunciation similar to the Welsh haearn. Both are different from the Deverrian ee-rain, the nickname of one of my characters in this volume. As well, I’ve cribbed a few of my favorite names from Welsh history, for instance Rhodry (spelled Rhodri in Welsh orthography). That some of the others have ended up sounding like actual Welsh names goes to show just how much alike Old British and Gaulish were. Most Deverrian names, though, such as Gwersyn, the remnant of Vercingetorix itself, were never found in Welsh, or at least not as far as I know.

  To consider some history, the people of Bel, that is, those tribes who chose the god Belinos to be their special patron deity from all the wide and rather randomly organized Celtic pantheon of gods, lived in a vaguely defined area of Gaul known as Devetia Riga. While the precise location has been lost, we may surmise that it was somewhere on the Atlantic coast, and more north than south. The Devetii, as they would have been known to the Romans, first came in contact with the classical Mediterranean cultures around 200 B.C. or so when Greek traders came their way, bringing wine, the art of writing, and other such luxuries. Civilization had little effect on them, however, until they were conquered by Julius Caesar just as so many other Gaulish tribes were. Although the great hero Vercingetorix made a gallant last stand at Alesia, in the end Roman organization and Roman stubbornness wore him down the way they wore down the heroes of so many other peoples of the ancient world.

  With a great deal of grumbling, the people of Bel accepted to some extent the Roman yoke. They learned some Latin, adopted a few Roman customs, and studied the Hellenistic system of herbal medicine. They also sent a few of their druids to Rome as ambassadors, where, as so many other Gaulish ambassadors did, they met Cicero before his untimely end and purchased, upon the ex-consul’s recommendation, learned books to bring back to the tribe. Yet unlike so many other Gauls, the people of Bel always remembered their days of freedom.

  When in A.D. 69 Julius Vindex, a Gaul who had risen high in the Roman government, led his rebellion against the corrupt emperor Nero, the men of Devetia were among the first to support him. When his rebellion failed, they would have followed him to the Otherlands by honorable suicide, as well, if it weren’t for the counsel of that rather mysterious figure, Cadwallon the Druid. It was Cadwallon who, along with the cadvridoc, Bran, led the Devetians on the Great Migration by means that could only have been magical. (The readers of this volume, in fact, are now in a position to know exactly how this journey was accomplished.) In the end, this migration took them to the shores of the continent that would be home to the new kingdom, Devetia Riga reborn, though over the years its name wore down to Deverry.

  Glossary

  ABER (Deverrian) A river mouth, an estuary.

  ALAR (Elvish) A group of elves, who may or may not be bloodkin, who choose to travel together for some indefinite period of time.

  ALARDAN (Elv.) The meeting of several alarli, usually the occasion for a drunken party.

  ANGWIDD (Dev.) Unexplored, unknown.

  ARCHON (translation of the Bardekian atzenarlen) The elected head of a city-state (Bardekian at).

  ASTRAL The plane of existence directly “above” or “within” the etheric (q.v.). In other systems of magic, often referred to as the Akashic Record or the Treasure House of Images.

  AURA The field of electromagnetic energy that permeates and emanates from every living being.

  AVER (Dev.) A river.

  BARA (Elv.) An enclitic that indicates that the preceding adjective in an Elvish agglutinated word is the name of the element following the enclitic, as can + bara + melim = Rough River, (rough + name marker + river.)

  BEL (Dev.) The chief god of the Deverry pantheon.

  BEL (Elv.) An enclitic, similar in function to bara, except that it indicates that a preceding verb is the name of the following element in the agglutinated term, as in Darabeldal, Flowing Lake.

  BLUE LIGHT Another name for the etheric plane (q.v.).

  BODY OF LIGHT AN ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT-FORM (q.v.) constructed by a dweomermaster to allow him or her to travel through the inner planes of existence.

  BRIGGA (Dev.) Loose wool trousers worn by men and boys.

  BROCH (Dev.) A squat tower in which people live. Originally, in the Homeland, these towers had one big fireplace in the center of the ground floor and a number of booths or tiny roomlets up the sides, but by the time of our narrative, this ancient style has given way to regular floor with hearths and chimneys on either side of the structure.

  CADVRIDOC (Dev.) A warleader. Not a general in the modern sense, the cadvridoc is supposed to take the advice and counsel of the noble-born lords under him, but his is the right of final decision.

  CAPTAIN (trans, of the Dev. pendaely) The second in command, after the lord himself, of a noble’s warband. An interesting point is that the word taely (the root or unmutated form of -daely) can mean either a warband or a family depending on context.

  CONABER (Elv.) A musical instrument similar to the panpipe but of even more limited range.

  CWM (Dev.) A valley.

  DAL (Elv.) A lake.

  DUN (Dev.) A fort.

  DWEOMER (trans, of the Dev. dwunddaevad) In its strict sense, a system of magic aimed at personal enlightenment through harmony with the natural universe in all its planes and manifestations; in the popular sense, magic, sorcery.

  ELCYION LACAR (Dev.) The elves; literally, the “bright spirits,” or “Bright Fey.”

  ENGLYN (Welsh, pi. englynion.) A metrical form, consisting of a three-line stanza, each stanza having seven syllables, though an extra syllable can be added to any given line. All lines have end rhyme as well. In Deverry at the time of which we write, this form was so much the rule that its name would translate merely as “short poem,” hence my use of the corresponding Welsh term to give it some definition.

  ENSORCEL To produce an effect similar to hypnosis by direct manipulation of a person’s aura. (Ordinary hypnosis manipulates the victim’s consciousness only and thus is more easily resisted.)

  ETHERIC The plane of existence directly “above” the physical. With its magnetic substance and currents, it holds physical matter in an invisible matrix and is the true source of what we call “life.”

  ETHERIC DOUBLE The true being of a person, the electromagnetic structure that holds the body together and that is the actual seat of consciousness.

  FOLA (Elv.) An enclitic that shows the noun preceding it in an agglutinated Elvish word is the name of the element following the enclitic, as in Corafolamelim, Owl River.

  GEIS A taboo, usually a prohibition against doing something. Breaking geis results in ritual pollution and the disfavor if not active enmity of the gods. In societies that truly believe in geis, a person who breaks it usually dies fairly quickly, either of morbid depression or some unconsciously self-inflicted “accident,” unless he or she makes ritual amends.

  GERTHDDYN (Dev.) Literally, a “music man,” a wandering minstrel and entertainer of much lower status than a true bard.

  GORCHAN (Welsh, trans, of the Dev. gwerganu.) Literally, a “supreme” or last song, an elegy or death-poem.

  GREAT ONES Spirits, once human but now disincarnate, who exist on an unknowably high plane of existence and who have dedicated themselves to the eventual enlightenment of all sentient beings. They are also known to the Buddhists, as Bodhisattvas.

  GWERBRET (Dev. The name derives from the Gaulish vergobretes.) The highest rank of nobility below the royal family itself. Gwerbrets (Dev. gwerbretion) function as the chief magistrates of their regions, and even kings hesitate to override their decisions because of their many ancient prerogatives.

  HIRAEDD (Dev.) A peculiarly Celtic form of depression, marked by a deep, tormented longing for some unobtainable thing; also and in particular, homesickness to the third power.

  JAVEUN (trans, of the Dev. picecl) Since the weapon in question is o
nly about three feet long, another possible translation would be “war dart.” The reader should riot think of it as a proper spear or as one of those enormous javelins used in the modern Olympic Games.

  LWDD (Dev.) A blood-price; differs from wergild in that the amount of lwdd is negotiable in some circumstances, rather than being irrevocably set by law.

  MALOVER (Dev.) A full, formal court of law with both a priest of Bel and either a gwerbret or a tieryn in attendance.

  MELIM (Elv.) A river.

  MOR (Dev.) A sea, ocean.

  PAN (Elv.) An enclitic, similar to fola, defined earlier, except that it indicates that the preceding noun is plural as well as the name of the following word, as in Corapanmelim, River of the Many Owls. Remember that Elvish always indicates pluralization by adding a semi-independent morpheme, and that this semi-independence is reflected in the various syntax-bearing enclitics.

  PECL (Dev.) Far, distant.

  RHAN (Dev.) A political unit of land; thus, gwerbretrhyn, tierynrhyn, the area under the control of a given gwerbret or tieryn. The size of the various rhans (Dev. rhannau) varies widely, depending on the vagaries of inheritance and the fortunes of war rather than some legal definition.

  SCRYING The art of seeing distant people and places by magic.

  SIGIL An abstract magical figure, usually representing either a particular spirit or a particular kind of energy or power. These figures, which look a lot like geometrical scribbles, are derived by various rules from secret magical diagrams.