Rhapsody

by Elizabeth Haydon

  Achmed nodded.

  Rhapsody whistled. “It’s becoming increasingly apparent to me why these people didn’t get along.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  She pointed to the crest. “Well, displaying the symbol of his dominion in the old land in prominent view of his marital bed does not seem to indicate that Gwylliam had much respect for Anwyn’s heritage. Or much interest in putting her in a good mood.”

  “She’s got her own crest above the fireplace in the room next door. A dragon at the edge of the world.”

  “And either way, if they were to share a bed, one would be winning, and the other would have to look at the evidence of it. So they probably didn’t. I can’t imagine, if I was a jealous half-dragon, not entirely comfortable in a human form in the first place, wanting to lie, night after night, beneath Gwylliam’s sweating body as he pumped away, all the while being forced to stare at his family crest, knowing I was not a part of it.”

  Achmed smiled as he looked down at the floor, shaking his head, before he turned away from the fireplace.

  “I’m very glad to know the experiences of your past have not soured your attitude toward sex, Rhapsody.”

  On the opposite wall, facing the fireplace, was an equally ornate headboard, carved from the same blue-black marble as in the Great Hall, veins of white and silver running through it like tiny rivers. A matching footboard lay on the floor atop a shallow pile of ancient mulch and a wide stain that had probably once been the bedclothes.

  “Did the bed itself just decay here, do you think?” Rhapsody asked.

  Achmed chuckled. “Well, according to you it would be unlikely that they set it afire in a fit of passionate humping, so I would guess that, yes, it rotted here. Why?”

  She began to hum, trying to get a fix on the strange feeling she was picking up from the bed area. After a moment she gave him a direct look.

  “Can you feel anything strange here?”

  He concentrated for a moment, then shook his head. “No. What is it you feel?”

  Rhapsody looked down again. “I think it’s blood.”

  A dark expression crossed Achmed’s face, but his voice did not change. “I don’t sense anything.”

  “Do you want me to try?” she asked. Achmed nodded. “Then we have to agree now that if I seem unable to break the trance, or if I become agitated, you’ll intervene and make it stop.”

  “I can carry you out. I’m not sure if that will bring you around, however.”

  Rhapsody’s face hardened. “Drag me; you know how I hate to be carried.”

  “All right.”

  She closed her eyes again, concentrating on the discerning pitch, the same tone she had used to check the ring in the Cymrian museum. An image formed in her mind, the body of a man lying on the bed, his head and neck askew. As the vision cleared, she could see another man, gray-bearded, wearing linen robes painted with gold, sitting on the bed next to the corpse, his face buried in his hands.

  Her skin grew clammy as she began to absorb the emotions of the scene—desolation, betrayal, guilt, anger, agony. One by one they washed over her, weaving a mantle of pain around her, until she could barely breathe for the sadness of it. Her heart thudded hollowly in her chest.

  “We have to get out of this place,” she said. “I don’t know what happened here, or if we ever will know, but it’s no surprise that the mountain itself reeks of devastation. Violent, passionate sex on the floor of the Great Hall, death in the bed of the king, the king himself rotting in the library—what kind of monsters were these people? It’s not the Firbolg who make the place feel ravaged, it’s whatever the Cymrians did.”

  Achmed laughed. “I could have told you that. Before we go, however, there’s one more thing you might want to see.”

  Anwyn’s chamber was as huge and empty as Gwylliam’s, except that the headboard of her bed had been wrought in gold and affixed to the wall. The footboard was missing, probably a casualty of looting after the Cymrians fled Canrif.

  At one time the mantel around her fireplace had been gilt to match the bed, but now all that remained were a few flakes of gold leaf. Rhapsody stared up at the stone relief of the dragon sitting at the world’s rim, the look in its eyes forbidding.

  The loss of home crept up on her unexpectedly, and caught her off-guard. What am I doing here? she thought miserably, the ache of missing her family and her old life consuming her. If I could have known that leaving Serendair would have meant ending up in this place of endless nightmares, might I have just surrendered to Michael?

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Achmed said, reading her mind. His hand was on the door between the two chambers.

  Rhapsody’s mouth dropped open in surprise. “What? How do you know what I’m thinking?”

  “You get the same pathetic look on your face every time, that’s how. Perhaps one of the things your walk through the fire made you was transparent, although I seem to recall you’ve been that way all along. Come over here and have a look at this.”

  Rhapsody followed him to the door and looked through the opening. Instead of being a connecting portal, it led into another room, unlike anything she had ever seen.

  The floor was tiled with small squares of polished blue marble, sanded roughly. Against the inner wall of the mountain was an enormous hexagonal vessel, much like the pool of a fountain but carved from marble as well. There were pipes that ran vertically up the wall, rusty and corroded, tapering down to a strange spout that was suspended over the pool.

  On the other side of the room, against the same wall, was a odd throne, carved from marble and attached to the same strange pipes. Its cushion had apparently been torn off or lost long before, leaving a substantial hole in the base of the chair, which was hollow. A thin tunnel no larger than a fox’s den opened down below the base, bending out of sight.

  The back of the throne was high and straight, and formed from the same gleaming metal that composed the ventilation system. A metal chain hung from the top of it.

  “How strange,” Rhapsody murmured. “Why on Earth would they need these things in their chambers? And why in a room by themselves?”

  “What do you think they are?” Achmed asked, hiding a smile.

  “I’m not sure. This looks like some kind of fountain, and this is a throne. Doesn’t look particularly comfortable.”

  He laughed. “Do me one last favor, and use your discerning note on the throne, just to get an idea of what it was really used for.”

  “All right.” Rhapsody closed her eyes and sought the right pitch, letting the image form her mind. A moment later, she turned red as the sunset.

  “Gods,” she said, her eyes full of embarrassment, “it’s a privy. There are some very strong vibrational signatures associated with it. I never thought they’d build one indoors. How mortifying; I thought it was a throne.”

  “Don’t be ashamed; from what we’ve learned so far, I’d say it would make a very appropriate throne for these people,” Achmed said. “And I assume you’ve figured out that your fountain is a bathtub.”

  Rhapsody shrugged. “I’ve always bathed in a metal tub in front of a fire, in a stream or the public baths. I’ve never seen a bathtub that big, and with six sides.”

  “Well, Gwylliam was nothing if not redundant. Whenever he decided he liked something, whether it was that asinine saying about coming in peace, or six-sided construction, he used it at every possible opportunity, in case you hadn’t noticed. The more I learn about these people, the less I’m impressed.”

  Rhapsody pulled the chain, and dry crumbs of rust fell into the base of the privy. “This used to have water in it?”

  “Yes, and it will again when we figure out how to make the water system work. But for now that’s a secondary project. The cisterns are full, so we can drink; the rest will have to wait until we subdue the first two phases and deal with Roland in the spring.”

  Rhapsody looked at Achmed carefully. He had the same quiet excitement in his eyes that w
as now always there when he spoke of his plans for the future. It was a tangible sense of purpose, of a higher aspiration. He was on the way to finding the answers to his questions, and to making a home.

  How she envied him.

  48

  After that, it was a matter of steady progress and time. The Bolg from the Teeth had arrived the next day, the members of almost seven hundred clans, over four thousand hunter-warriors and children, some trembling in fear, others with excitement. With them had come many others, not selected by the clans as designated warriors, but intensely curious, wanting to be part of the new warlord’s regime.

  Achmed had turned to Rhapsody as the throng arrived, swelling the vast courtyards of the inner city.

  “Laborers. Look on them well; these are the men and women with whose help we will rebuild Ylorc. In a way, their accomplishment will be even more historic than the Cymrians’ was in the original building of it.” Rhapsody gazed down in amazement at the sea of eager faces murmuring in the dark cavern.

  “Careful, Achmed,” she warned, “you’re starting to sound a little like Gwylliam.”

  The Warlord turned to her after a moment’s consideration. “No, actually, he and I are diametric opposites. We both are in the role of the swordsmith whetting a tool against a grindstone. The difference is that he saw his goal as using the tool in the honing of the stone into smoothness, while I seek to use the stone to make the tool sharper.”

  “Your imagery is lost on me, I’m sorry.”

  His eyes grew brighter in excitement. “To Gwylliam, the building of Canrif, the bending of the hostile mountain to his whim and control, was his objective. The workers were only there to provide the labor achieve his vision. They were the tool that honed his stone into smoothness.

  “My goal is not the building up of the mountain, but rather the building up of the Bolg. They are like the tool, rough, needing to be sharpened. In the rebuilding of the mountain, which is their grindstone, they will learn to work as one people, will gain the destructive skills of war and the constructive skills of renovation. The mountain doesn’t matter to me except as the means by which the Bolg will be united and advanced. What I seek is a sharper weapon, not a smoother stone.”

  A look of frank admiration had crept into her eyes, pushing aside the skepticism from a moment before. “An interesting analogy. The clever part is that, regardless of the intention, the stone gets shaped and the weapon gets sharpened either way, simultaneously.”

  “Yes.”

  Rhapsody looked back at the sea of Bolg swirling below her. They seemed somehow more fortunate than they had a moment before. “They’re lucky to have you,” she said. “Perhaps history granted Gwylliam’s title of Visionary to the wrong Lord of the Mountain.”

  Achmed chuckled. “That remains to be seen. Come on; we need to wade into the fray.”

  The children and their mothers were immediately committed to Rhapsody’s care. The warriors, meanwhile, were brought to the old guard barracks. Within a matter of a few months they were to be trained and turned into a ferocious fighting force under Grunthor’s command.

  The giant Sergeant Major had clearly missed his duties at the head of a regiment, and he threw himself into his new leadership role with relish. Rhapsody was occasionally awakened by the sound of trainees being marched past her chamber, singing cadences that would be awful if they weren’t so funny.

  Bugger you up, and bugger you down

  Spread your legs akimbo,

  Your time on your own is over and done,

  You’re mine forever, now, Jimbo.

  Your nightmare is just about to begin,

  And worlds of pain await you,

  Pray to the gods with all your might

  That the ol’ drillmaster don’t hate you.

  So stick a cocklebur up your arse,

  To get it good and ready.

  It will be the sergeant’s favorite home

  If you hear him call you Betty.

  Or Jo’s favorite:

  Stay in line, soldier-boy, keep with the bunch,

  If you lag behind, you will be the Sergeant’s lunch;

  We count one-two, we count three-four,

  We count it up to five;

  You can’t count any higher, you’re the dumbest things alive.

  Grunthor’s ringing bass, answered by the raspy croaking of the new Firbolg army, added a surreal quality to the already nightmarish existence that Rhapsody was living in Ylorc.

  At her request Achmed had closed off the corridors around the Great Hall, and its surrounding chambers where Gwylliam had held court.

  Rhapsody and Jo were assigned rooms across from each other on one of these protected halls, several doors down from the new king’s chambers, which were guarded day and night by the most intelligent and trustworthy of Grunthor’s recruits. Grunthor kept quarters there as well, but had chosen to bunk in with the army in the barracks. Achmed seemed pleased at the speed at which the transition was progressing.

  He had renamed the fortress complex the Cauldron, largely owing to the heat produced by the forges once they were primed and running. A thousand Bolg were put to work there, mining the coal and feeding the mighty furnace, bringing it up to a heat level sufficient to forge weapons.

  They had agreed that the development and manufacture of weapons was the crucial initial step, because it gave the Bolg the protection they would need, the tools to train the army with, and a source of income once trade agreements could be reached. Achmed had great skill in weapons design, having invented the cwellan himself. He had adapted the other weapons in his and Grunthor’s personal arsenals to complement their respective strengths while compensating for their weaker points.

  He set up four large pieces of oilskin on stands in the chamber behind the Great Hall where the planning took place, labeled weapons, clans (not aligned), infrastructure, and social.

  “We’ve already had some of the Heath clans and the clans on the outer rim of the Hidden Realm come to us, asking to join forces,” he reported, marking their names off the clans list with an inked quill.

  “Oi expect no problems in convincin’ those others to enlist, once my troops ’ave a chance to talk with ’em, sir,” Grunthor added. Rhapsody shuddered; the army was growing every day, both in size and enthusiasm.

  Achmed nodded. “That should give us about seventy percent of the population united. Once we’ve put Spring Cleaning behind us, we’ll deal with the rest of them, the clans deep in the Hidden Realm, and the Hill-Eye.”

  “When can I get to the vineyards?” Rhapsody asked, looking at the notations under infrastructure. “The sooner I can see them myself, the better plan I can devise for their cultivation.”

  “Grunthor should have that area cleaned out—er, consolidated—before you leave on your diplomatic mission to Bethany.”

  Grunthor’s brow darkened. “Oi still don’t like the idea o’ you goin’ there, miss, especially alone.”

  Rhapsody smiled at the Sergeant. “I know, Grunthor, and I appreciate your concern, but we need to try to put a stop to the Spring Cleaning massacres by talking first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way men do it,” she replied. “Do we want the Firbolg thought of as men, or monsters?”

  “Actually,” interjected the Warlord, “we want them seen as both.”

  A deep, annoyed sigh and a thudding sound issued forth from across the room. Jo had exempted herself from the discussions of the cultural structure of the future kingdom, announcing that the subject was boring and she would prefer to practice throwing knives.

  Grunthor had set up a little hay target for her on the other side of the chamber. Often heated discussions were punctuated by the thud of Jo’s missiles piercing their target. Achmed was particularly good at timing his remarks to coincide with the decisive sound.

  Achmed smiled, then returned to the weapons chart. “The Bolg will need to be outfitted with crossbows, to maximize their range, as well as the swor
ds they’re learning to forge now. For purposes of trade we’ll look to producing curved blades, and these.”

  He pulled forth one of the many sheaves of parchment on the table beside him and held it out for the others to see. On it was a drawing of a three-bladed throwing knife, made of steel and bound with leather at the grip. The blades curved like arms bent at the elbow, following in the same direction like a gearwheel.

  “These throwing knives will be usable both in the open air and in the tunnels,” Achmed explained. “They’re sharp enough to be deadly in hand-to-hand situations. In flight they turn about the center of gravity, ensuring that they will cut or pierce at almost any attitude of impact.”

  “And will they be forged by the same method you were showing me earlier?” Rhapsody asked, still unsettled by the tour of the forges from the morning. Achmed had patiently explained the massive equipment, the vast presses that Gwylliam was still building when Canrif was overrun, but she had been too overwhelmed to follow the discussion.

  “No; that’s later, Stage Three. After we have one united land from the Teeth to the outer border of the Hidden Realm. Understand, Rhapsody, this is a lifetime’s work. The Cymrians had master swordsmiths whose work with weapons was as impressive as the great harpers and instrument makers you sometimes speak of, each weapon so finely and carefully made as to be considered a work of art. It will take several generations for the Firbolg to get to that level. The equipment and the new forging process will help achieve it.”

  “Sounds like you’re planning to live a long time,” she said, smiling slightly.

  Achmed didn’t smile in return. “Forever,” he said simply. “So how is the medical training going?”

  “It would go better if I had some facilities. Did you plan those out yet?”

  He located another set of scrolls and passed them to Rhapsody, showing her the elaborate schematic he had drawn. In addition to precise notes detailing his plans, scripted in his neat, spidery handwriting, Achmed had done a credible rendering of the internal workings of the mountain, showing the forges, the ventilation system, and the internal structure of the new city that would be rebuilt from Canrif. One small area was labeled medical supplies.