by Andre Norton
Sulerna was also aware that her skin had lost its tan because she had been kept so strictly indoors. In her now, there burst a longing for the dawn, for the right to run barefooted through dew-pearled grass and drink in the fresh air outside. Even if the Wind were gone and the land dead or dying beyond the boundaries of thedun, the girl felt dragged by the many potions that shared cooking-space on the hearth and by the herb-scented wood smoke of Mistress Larlarn’s twig fire. This chamber served as both kitchen and sickroom these days, and all its odors were strong.
The girl did not reach for the hairbrush; instead, feeling with a new intensity the unfreshness of one who has slept too long in shift and petticoat, she bypassed the heavy clogs set by the door. But—her hand had risen to the door bar, which was not in its proper place. Startled, she eased the door open, and it yielded to her without a creak. No one roused to challenge her going. Before her lay a patch of mud where the water bucket had slopped over. Impressed there was a single footprint with one toe enlarged. She recognized the shape of a bandage—one she had fastened herself to ease a bruise for Jacklyn. Why had he ventured so? Unease gripped her now.
The household had carefully set out the protection patterns they knew, so she need have no fear of anything crouched in wait nearby. All such wards were attuned to the kin of the dun, and no alarm would be raised by her passing unless early warnings had already sounded an alert.
The gravel of the path was sharp to the girl’s bare feet; still, the feeling of freedom though now touched with rising concern, which had enveloped her since she had slipped through the half-open door kept her moving, until she chose to tread instead on the plants framing the way. Their mingled fragrances, and the sharper scents of their crashed leaves, banished for her the last of the close house smells.
Sulerna reached the end of the garden and turnedthere quickly to avoid the gate that led to the now-blighted outer world, for to pass that boundary would trigger the wards.
The men of Firthdun had been plowing yesterday, for every palm-sized piece of land must be used to raise food—as long as their enemy did not stamp them out of life itself. Ground doves, already awake nearly an hour before sunrise, had found a hole in the hedge large enough to let them in and were fluttering fast over the freshly turned earth. It was Jacklyn’s duty—his and Marita’s—to keep the birds from pecking up the precious seed.
Sulerna grinned and flapped her skirt, whose edge was already damp with dew. Knowing Jacklyn well, she could guess that perhaps he had been out on some business of his own the night before. From his birthing, her older sister’s first son had had something in him which the night called. It might be the shadow of a talent, Mistress Larlarn had suggested at last, although not even the healer could guess the reason for the boy’s need to ever be seeking moonlight. The kin had never been able to teach him to control his strange urge, but they had made him aware—when the Wind still came—that he must keep within the boundaries they set.
Until now—Sulerna looked out over the recently plowed field. For the present, the thieving fowl had not worked their way far from the hole they had found. However, leading away beyond them, pressed clearly into the newly broken soil, were footprints. The girl was startled. Her nephew well knew the ways of the dun, and to cut across a just-sown acre was the mischief of a much younger and less-well-taught child.
Frowning, she scrambled over the gate, climbing its bars instead of trying to open it. The cloud that hung ever over Firthdun darkened in her mind, if not before her eyes. She hurried to follow the boldly marked trail. Uneasiness stirred again in her and fed the beginning of fear.
Jacklyn had crossed only a corner of the field, and his tracks vanished into a barrier of thornbushes through whose forbidding tangle she knew better than to try and push herself.
“Jackie,” Sulerna called. “Jackie, where are you?”
Seeing that bramble barrier, the girl felt increasing fear. Soon the gangs of slaves would come, herded to the nearly sterile fields that had been the pride of once-prosperous neighbors. She remembered the child’s tale of hiding in just this hedge to listen to any who passed. Having obtained one exciting piece of news to offer his elders, and make himself the center of attention thereby, Jacklyn, his aunt could well believe, was trying the same trick again.
Sulerna stood very still, listening with all her might. There were always sounds aplenty when the gobbes drove their captives to some nearly always unprofitable labor. She heard nothing, but didn’t dare call out again. Only one chance was left her: to somehow trip the nearest-set ward and so arouse the dun. However, her work had always been in the house garden and the dun itself. She knew, as did all the kin, the whereabouts of the major wards, but she knew, too, that the men who had to risk their lives in the fields had others known only to themselves.
As the girl stared ahead at the thorn-studded brushwall before her, she tried to imagine just where such a ward could have been set. Plainly, from what Jacklyn had said, he had had no fear of those alarms when he had eavesdropped on the work gang. Too, he had had a reasonable excuse for hedge diving: he had been harvesting berries and, though the season was early, the dun could use every possible foodstuff.
Slowly Sulerna began to ease along the hedge, sure she was heading in the right direction. Then she saw the half print of a foot pointing reassuringly ahead. However, such marks were moving further and further from the dun itself, and that she liked less and less.
She was thus almost prepared for the sudden shriek of pain and terror that arose from nearly in front of her. She caught at the brush, paying no heed to the thorns, and staggered back as a section wider than her own body came free from its roots—recently hacked so and then set once more into place.
The girl plunged forward as a second cry became a piteous whimper. Scratched and torn by what remained of the barrier, she stumbled out where the old trader road made a loop. Jacklyn was there, lying very still, and Sulerna was sure she saw a splotch of blood staining his coarse smock. Forgetting all else, she made for the boy.
Then out of nowhere came those arms. The flat of a hand slapped the girl’s face on one side so that her head whirled. She tried to struggle, but she might as well have already been bound, helpless and unable to defend herself, as hands tore savagely at her few garments.
Now she could see the face of her attacker. Beastly, misshapen, gobbe-fashioned as she expected, it was not. She tried to scream, “Yurgy!” as he gave her a second vicious blow across her mouth and knelt over her downed body.
12
DULL GRAY SKY HUNG OVER YURGY. THE BOY LAY dazed, staring up into the bowl that held a sun always pale these days. But the tower—where—how—?
Then his whole body jerked in sympathy with a sound, a desolate gasping cry such as fitted the bleak world about him. Awkwardly, as if his muscles had forgotten how to obey his will, he levered himself up.
No! This was part of a nightmare born of one of the pictures in that book!
Only, the terrible image did not fade, as was usual with any dark dream upon one’s awakening. The youth could see the girl, hear the faint, bubbling moan that rose on the trickle of blood washing from between her swollen lips. Against his will, his eyes moved, but with pitiless slowness, as if what they allowed him to see must be seared into his memory forever. Her white body, bloody, bruised—this was his doing—his!
Still, in a sheltered corner of his awareness, Yurgyfaintly knew he did not bear the rotten heart and mind that would lead to such a deed as this. He was Yurgy—and, in that moment, all the entanglement of illusion and domination was swept away. There was no Wind, but also no Irasmus or pictures; there were only he and—she—
On hands and knees, for he did not have the strength to stand upright, the boy crawled to the girl’s side. Her eyes were open, seemingly fastened on something no one else could see high above them. Her head did not turn at his coming.
“Sulerna?” Her name was a whisper, when he wanted to shout to awaken her—and himself—
and to let him know that this could not be the truth for either of them.
His foster sister only moaned and continued to stare at nothing. Her body was so slender, those now clawed and bruised breasts so small—hardly more than a girl child would show before her first moon time. And below those—
Yurgy raised his head as high as one of the forest wolves and, like them, howled, but for shame—a shame that could never now be riven from any mind.
Thus, just as Sulerna had not been aware of his attack, so Yurgy in his turn knew naught of the one moving in behind him, until a painful yank on his sweat-matted hair brought his head further back.
A face hovered above his, one so twisted with rage that the boy’s wits seemed too dim to set name to it. Then came the downward flash of a sickle. Yurgy did not try to offer any defense—there was no other answer but this for what he had done—and he was hardly aware of the bite of the blade through his throator the gush of hot blood that followed. Though he heard, dimly, through the mad cursing of his executioner, something else . . . a ghost of a breath . . . yet, still, somewhere—
The Wind.
Elias kicked the body away from his sister.
“Sulerna—Sulerna!” His first calling of her name sounded too vigorous, too loud, and he feared he might, with the lash of a harsh voice, drive her into further withdrawal.
But the girl’s first reaction was fear as she tried to slide away from her brother across the brittle, broken grass, throwing up an arm in a vain attempt at self-defense. Elias did not try to touch her—perhaps she would shrink in pain from any man, now, no matter what kin he was or what aid he wished to offer.
“Sulerna”—he lowered his voice to near a whisper—“it is Elias; let me help you.”
Fright still lingered on her battered face, and she edged even farther from him. He had to get her back to the dun—what had happened here might be the beginning of the end for all of them. But he dared not attempt to touch her. Instead, he gathered up the rags of what had been her clothing and gently covered her body. That much, it seemed, she would allow him.
“Is—is she—dead?” asked a child’s voice, high and cracking with fear. Elias had forgotten Jacklyn, but now his nephew, a smear of blood along his head, ran across the field to hold to him fiercely, gabbling in terror.
“No,” Elias answered shortly.
“But Yurgy”—the boy had come forward and looked beyond his kin—“he is?”
“There is no more Yurgy to be remembered amongthe kin.” Elias’s rage made an oath of that. “Jacklyn, get you Mistress Larlarn, and Ethera”—he named his own wife—“and Grandsire.”
It was the women who seemed able to tend to Sulerna—and to break through the horror that had frozen the girl—so that she could be laid on pole-stiffened blankets and taken back to the dun.
Elias and the eldest of his line remained, and Rush and Vors joined them. The four men half encircled that other body, and Grandsire dropped a roll of earth-stained blanketing he had been holding.
“Leave him to be found and, if what has happened here is not already known to the Dark Lord, it certainly will be. If that one moves now to wipe out the dun, we are already too late. Yet there is always hope.
“We have kept to ourselves,” the oldfather continued, “yet still he has found a way to pluck one of us out of safety. Let the body of this—thing, which he has so corrupted, be taken and, if the work can be done well out of sight, thrown into the root cellar beneath Mistress Larlarn’s holding. Then cast down upon it any covering that may long endure!”
In the dunhold, the children had been brushed out of the way and, about that improvised stretcher, the women of the household gathered. Sulerna had returned to them now—she repeated their names in a whisper one by one, then sighed, and her eyes had closed. It would seem that warm and comforting darkness had at last claimed her.
“Sulerna?” As one, the women turned. Haraska was sitting up in the cupboard bed. No longer was her face drawn to one side, and she helped herself rise using the arm that had lately failed her.
“Grandmam!” Ethera was the closest and hurried to support her. “You—you are healed!”
The strangeness of it all held them: fear, pain, and deep wounding had stricken Sulerna down, while Grandmam had risen from the near dead.
“No!” Haraska made a negating motion with that long-paralyzed hand as the injured girl’s mother opened the door of the cupboard where, on the top shelf at the far back, were kept certain mixtures known to the women alone.
“No!” the oldmother ordered again. She had reached the edge of the bed now and held its quilt about her as a cape. “Not the black drink!”
The bottle was already in Fatha’s hands. “Sulerna has been”—she paused as if the next word was beyond her ability to utter until she nerved herself to the task— “taken. It is not right that she be forced to bear the fruit of ravishment if means are at hand to rid her body of such a monstrous thing.”
Mistress Larlarn moved beside Haraska, and they clasped hands as might war women shouldering together to face a skirmish.
“There is a reason.” The old woman’s voice had weakened a little from her unwonted exertion. “That sending which left me unable to warn—Did you never wonder whence it came?”
“You foresaw—this?” Sulerna’s mother still held tightly to the bottle as she nodded her head toward her unconscious daughter.
“Why think you I rebelled against such knowledge until my body broke?” questioned Haraska. “Now listen and heed well. We are women here together, and the worst of all men’s vileness has been wreaked uponone who is dear kin. However, I swear, by the Moon of my First Offering”—she spoke very slowly, and her words entered deeply into the minds of all who heard her—“that what Sulerna bears now within her body will not, in the end, be for evil but for good. That much was promised me this very night by a truedream. Thus, tonight, when the moon shines full, we shall take our loved one to the Women’s Place where we spend the night of our first moon gift each month. There we shall place her in the light—”
“But she is no longer virgin,” objected Ethera.
“She will be what the Wind Caller determines she will be. We are near the end, kin-daughter, of our safety here—this thing was done as part of malicious planning. But this I have also come to believe: we shall raise up champions such as rode with the Wind in the ancient days, and for such aid, payment there must always be. Blood has already been shed; it may be that all Firthdun shall cease to be.
“Ethera!” Such was the force of her name being called by the old woman that Elias’s wife was startled. “Ethera, you are also with child.”
“Am—am I so?” The young woman flushed. “I was not yet sure—”
“You may be sure. You shall call the daughter who comes at the proper time Cerlyn. She will live surrounded by fear in her first days, thus training her talent the stronger, but the Wind shall favor her. I was not shown the end, kin-daughter, but we are all part of something being built stone by stone, even as was that accursed tower down Valley—save that the Light, not the Dark, shall be with us in the end.”
Suddenly she collapsed, as if a strength, which hadbeen loaned for a mere moment, had been withdrawn. Mistress Larlarn eased the frail old body down upon the bed once again. Sulerna’s mother continued to hold the bottle, looking from it to her daughter; then, as her gaze moved on to Haraska, some of the stubbornness leached out of her grim face. She must accept that what they had heard was dreamer’s truth and that they would have to face a daunting future.
It was decided among them hastily that, if the men of the dun were to learn of Haraska’s words, it would be by her telling and not theirs. Mistress Larlarn suggested that they say the Black Drink was too strong for Sulerna in her present state and that they must follow the oldmother’s instructions and seek strength from the moon—matters that had been, from the beginning, purely women’s affairs.
No mention had been made of Yurgy when Grandsire
returned with only two of the men. The rest had been sent to make a show of their usual daily tasks, for all of them suspected they were being spied upon. Jacklyn crept away to the darkest stall in the stable and there cried until he could hardly see. The heaviness of his guilt in that hour put an end to all his joyous innocence—and to his boyhood itself.
“So be it.” Yost looked into the hanging panel of fabric, that was again a window showing the events of this day just passed.
“So be it!” Harwice struck his fist against the wall until blood marked the stone he pummeled.
“The dream”—Gifford might not have heard either of them—“that was no sending of mine.”
“I think there will be very little dreaming for a space.” The archmage spoke heavily. “Irasmus believes his plan safely under way; at present, he is perhaps more interested in the connection of the gobbes with the Forest.
“You say you sent no dream, brother.” The misery on the old archivist’s face was as real as any flow of tears. ‘Think: to whom do these Firthdun women now appear to turn? Each to her own, Gifford.”
“But She” protested the loremaster, “She has always kept Herself aloof and has ruled the Forest, never the Valley—though, by Her power, the Wind blew there once.”
As he replied, Yost fixed his gaze on the bloody splotch left by Harwice’s impassioned blow to the stone as the painter spoke his oath. “Irasmus has dared use his strength to force his will upon a woman—obliquely, to be sure, but the ravishment came by his desire.
“Yes, She has ever claimed the Forest and not the Valley; still, She also commands the Wind, and that force blew there at its strongest when She did call. Firthdun was once Her shrine—or have you forgotten what lies so many years behind us? Now, with or without our renegade’s orders, his creatures have taken the life of one of Her chosen—and he himself has moved against a human whom She might well hold in favor. We can only wait and see—Time can be both an enemy and a friend.