by Paul Hazel
FIRST YEARW OOD, THEN U N D ERSEA , AND NOW ...
VOLUME THREE OF THE ACCLAIMED FANTASY EPIC
THE FINNBRANCH TRILOGY
WINTC1RKING
PAUL HHZ6L
2 6 9 4 5 3 * IN U S S3/5l)'(IN C A N AD A $ 4 9 5 )
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FINNBRANCH TRILO G Y
_______ BY PAUL HAZEL
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“ One of the best
high fantasies in some time.”
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—Publishers Weekly
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“A dark, strikingly original book.”
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-IVterS. Beagle
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“ In the spirit
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of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.”
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“ The reader is accorded glimpses
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of an enchanted world, a world of
shore and sea, not ours,
and yet echoing in the mind like
something long ago lost and
forever missed."
Ku.ierl Mi Kinley,
author ol the Hie Ilero ,ind the ( rown
“DEAR CALLAGHAN”
He folded the single page over and set it aside.
He had killed before, both with his own hands and by
proxy. He had never pretended, as men often did, that both
cases were not very much the same, but he had been at it
longer and had less reason to lie to himself. The wars in
which he had taken his first heads and left the bubbling necks
empty were no longer remembered; the lands over which he
had fought were no longer lands, but ocean. Yet he had never
failed to understand what it meant or what a powerful thing it
was to take a life or to be less frightened by it.
He did not expect to be understood. He knew that not
even the most rugged men now living could have lived as he
had lived, gone where he had gone, or done what, to the
horror of his soul, he had had to do.
1 must ca ll you again into service, he wrote at last.
H ousem an, fa ilin g , is d ea d a n d I sh all trust no on e else in this
en terp rise. I have no o th er rew ard to o ffe r you except my
affection ; he stopped, then added, everlastingly.
Beneath the tiny printed letters he set a large cursive “W"
Bantam Spectra books also by Paul Hazel
Y EA R W O O D
U N D ER SE A
(Volumes 1 and II of T he Finnbranch)
WINTERKING
Volume III of The Finnhranch
Paul Hazel
BANTAM BOOKS
TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON • SYDNEY • AUCKLAND
This low-priced Bantam Book
has been completely reset in a type fa ce
designed fo r easy reading, and was printed
from new plates. It contains the complete
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NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.
W IN T ER IN G
A Bantam Spectra Book / published by arrangement with
Atlantic Monthly Press
PRINTING HISTORY
Atlantic Monthly Press edition published October 1985
Bantam Spectra edition / December 1987
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1985 by Paul Hazel.
C over art copyright © 1987 by Mel Odom.
Library o f Congress Catalog C ard Number: 85-47786
This book may not be reproduced in whole o r in part, by
m im eograph or any other means, toithout permission.
For information address: Atlantic Monthly Press,
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ISBN 0-553-26945-3
Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada
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P R I N T E D I N T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S O F A M E R I C A
o
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Natalie Greenberg
Ah, it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight,
and night coming and the body cold.
— Herman Melville
in a letter to Nathaniel Nawthorne
I .
The River
1
.
The photographs of that time, printed from glass plate
negatives, reveal a landscape at once more barren and
roomy, a world puzzlingly larger (not merely less cluttered)
than the world bequeathed to 11s. The pastures to either side
of the Housetenuc, the sixty river miles between Devon and
New Awanux, had then only lately begun to close again with
trees. But the trees are small, all second growth; the men do
not as yet seem uncomfortable beside them. Their expressions reflect no amazement at the huge bald earth nor any knowledge of their little place in it. Their reputation for being
perceptive, while not entirely undeserved, did not truly
encompass the land. To them it was Eden though the fires of
workshops and mills made a twilight by midday over the
rutted hills. The lie which their fathers had carried across the
Atlantic persisted with the sons. But the land had never been
Eden, 'not even when a wilderness of gloomy wood had
covered the valley. The last naked men living along the upper
reaches where the river was narrow and stands of sycamore
still crowded out the sun knew all the while it was Hobbamocko,
not Jehovah, who ruled there. The English, however, who
had covered their genitals far longer than they had been a
nation or gone over the sea, never asked them.
So it happened that Jehovah’s white clapboard houses,
like a species of mechanical mushroom, sprang up inexhaustibly.
There were four on the Stratford flats. In New Awanux itself
there were twenty. Old Qkanuck, son of Ansantawae, the
wind of memory blowing across his mind, sat laughing merrily in the corner of the longhouse and struck his hams. Alone, he had burned seven of Jehovah’s houses, had walked up to
them boldly across the green commons, bearing a torch in
3
4
WINTERKING
each hand. The ghosts of those burnings still flamed in his
eyes. The warriors saw it and were cheered.
“The land did not want them,” old Okanuck said. “If it
had, those houses would have grown back, like the madarch,
drawing their substance from the bones of the buried wood.
So our longhouses grew then, year after year in the same
place, nested in the damp, in the oak-shade, taking their
strength from the ground.”
A smile sank in his toothless mouth. Like the earth he
had darkness inside of him. And foxcubs and black birds, he
maintained, shaking with laughter. And a thousand oak trees,
windstorms and the seeds of spiders. �
�Only see that I am
planted deep,” he howled gleefully, "and I will grow a world
again. A better world.” Old Okanuck winked. “No Awanux.”
They gave him his pipe.
When the silence had lasted for many heartbeats, a boy
with thunderous brows reached across to touch the old one’s
shoulder. The faces of the men turned on him disapprovingly.
But Okanuck, setting the pipe aside, gave him an encouraging nod.
“The Awanux are many,” the boy said angrily.
Okanuck did not take the boy any less seriously but
grinned. “We are more,” he said kindly. With a sweep of his
outsi/.ed hands he motioned the boy to sit nearer and to share
the pipe. Okanuck watched as the boy parted his lips and
sucked in great quantities of maggoty smoke. But, though the
smoke filled the boy’s chest, inside there was emptiness. The
smoke was drawn in and lost.
“O nce,” the boy said, uncomforted. “Perhaps it was
different then. But now it is they who increase.”
Okanuck leaned forward. “They are only a frost,” he said
slyly, “a frost on Cupheag, on Metichanwon, a chilly smear
on Ohomowauke. . . .” His brows were lifted. Despite his age
his hair was black as oak-shade. “Who, knowing the frost,” he
asked, “fears it?”
Outside the longhouse the valley was sealed by cloud.
Okanuck felt no resentment. He laughed.
“The earth is under it,” Okanuck said. “Deep down.
Undying.” Gingerly, with the clawed edge of his toes, he dug
for lice, scratching in the mat of dense feathers on the
underside of his black and cobalt wings.
The River
5
“Crows?”
“Surely not,” was the immediate answer. “Dark, nameless
birds. The type doesn’t matter. But water birds of some sort,
I should think— though, of course, the shapes are drawn from
the earth, not the river.” He smiled. “. . . Pulled aloft from
the fields and then transformed, one pattern to the next, until
they soar.” Turning in his desk chair, the speaker pointed.
“The white birds, on the other hand, emerge directly from
the sky ”
He paused, appearing to search for a phrase which, in
fact, he knew quite precisely. “As though,” he began again,
“some quality in the white horizon. . . in the whiteness
itself. . . exactly matches the whiteness of the birds.” He let
that sink in. “See, near the top— to the left of the center
line— how the birds begin all at once, sky and birds in one
tessellation— simultaneously. You do see it?”
The younger man nodded but continued to examine the
woodcut of white and black birds silently.
Pleased with his explanation, the speaker went on smiling. He was perhaps a decade older than the younger man, just a shade past thirty and already balding. The woodcut
hung on the south wall of the study. It had taken him the
better part of six months to save for the print. Now as his
gaze traveled appreciatively over the repeated images of
birds, his sense of uneasiness in the younger man grew a bit
sharper. Yet for another moment he chose to ignore it. He
tipped a little farther back in his chair.
His name was George Harwood. He was an assistant
professor of Awanux. He had a blonde wife and a five-year-
old daughter, neither of whom he could quite afford. He lived
with both in three cramped rooms in the basement of West
Bridge Hall, where individual scholars before him had lived
since the time of its founding. His duties, for which he was
paid only slightly more than the wage of an instructor,
included tutoring a dozen or so of the more promising young
men. And this young man, with his long, odd, unboyish face,
was accounted to be the most promising.
Indeed, Harwood had long since been aware of a twinge
of jealousy whenever he considered Will Wykeham. Harwood
himself had once been thought of as something of a prodigy, a
man to be watched. This was not boasting. When he was
barely nineteen he had produced a thousand-page study of
6
W1NTERKING
the myths of the Flying Dutchman, a study of such scope and
interest that, he had been assured, with a very little tightening
it might well have found a berth at the college press. But
there had been interruptions. He had been burdened with
other matters and the work had dragged on without completion.
Wykeham, of course, had yet to accomplish anything of
equal breadth or learning, a paper on Chaucer, a few brief
articles on Milton, jewel-like, it was said, nearly perfect but
on a small scale. The younger man had a talent for appearing
to inhabit the author’s world, an instinct for the nuances of
language now fallen out of use, an instinct which permitted
him to suggest a number of rather clever interpretations,
wonderfully clear once he mentioned them but previously
escaping the attention of more seasoned scholars. The senior
faculty noticed him. On one occasion hearing Wykeham
deliver a paper on Paradise L ost the Dean himself had
whispered discreetly to Harwood, “One might well suppose
the boy had lived in the Garden and had spoken personally
with the Snake.” Harwood’s mouth had twitched up at the
corners. The Dean, who was a kindly man and inclined to
like undergraduates indiscriminately, promptly forgot the remark. It was envy that caused Harwood to remember it nearly half a year until at Greenchurch, on the edge of panic,
the words came back to him.
Beyond the window the river was blurred with cloud.
Having turned away from the woodcut, Harwood found
the younger man looking at him intently. For an instant
Harwood had the curious feeling he was staring directly into
the blank March weather. The eyes, while not large, conveyed
an almost overwhelming bleakness, as though through their
slight openings Harwood glimpsed the cold mist and the hills
beyond them, fading north in the rain. But it was the long
square face that had most shaken him. The strong features,
gathered close to the center, left an expanse of unexpected
whiteness. It was a face with room in it. Whatever trouble
had momentarily set its mark there, the face itself, with a
surprising sense of quiet, remained essentially free of concern. Harwood found himself suddenly ill at ease.
“You said they reminded you of crows,” he said unevenly.
“I’m sorry. Not really.” Wykeham’s voice came from
miles off. “I was just thinking of crows.” For a time the
younger man looked past him, staring through the window at
The River
7
a clump of elms set off at the edge of the broad college lawn.
"I saw one this morning. A great scrufly-looking fellow. Too
big for a shore crow. It was waiting for me by the post office
gate when I went for the mail.”
“Waiting?”
Wykeham’s frown vanished. “I think so,” he said. His
eyes turned abruptly toward Harwood. “You might say a
&nbs
p; prophet of doom.” Wykeham reached across his chest and
into the inner pocket of his jacket and drew forth an envelope. He dropped it on the desk in front of Harwood.
“You may read it,” Wykeham said. “But the short of it is,
I shall be leaving New Awanux by Saturday.”
With one pink hand Harwood reached halfway to the
letter. Both men shared a love of light holiday literature.
Harwood lifted an eyebrow, “Oughtn’t you have said,” he
bantered, “ I must be gone before morning’?”
Wykeham managed to smile and sigh all at once. “Really,
George, this is serious. You might at least have a look.”
The envelope was addressed: William Wykeham, Esq.,
College Station, New Awanux-on-Housetenuc. The address,
set down in yellowish-brown ink, was large and florid, with
much embellishment and too many capitals. Harwood glanced
at it dubiously before pulling out four sheets of white paper.
He laid the letter on the desk in front of him and began to
read.
“My Dear Mr. Wykeham, Undoubtedly the lawyers have
informed you of the untimely demise of Michael Morag.
Clearly your guardian was a just man and died peacefully (as
his service deserved), leaving your affairs in good order and
myself, as I believe those same lawyers must dutifully have
written you, to manage and discharge them in his place. I
regret I had not the pleasure of meeting him. Indeed he must
have been a most pleasant man as is well evidenced by the
comforts of the parsonage wherein for so many years he
resided, where I (by terms and covenants of the Will and by
my appointment lately to this parish) consider myself now
fortunate to have established my own household.
“I am told that yourself you never met the Reverend Mr.
Morag, although it cannot be more, at least not greatly more
(if it is not too discourteous to remind you), than sixty miles
from New Awanux to your properties here in Devon, and th e
trains run w ith some frequency! But then, of course, you have
8
WINTERKING
been traveling and had only come to these shores, as it were,
and at that for the first time, when you matriculated and have