by Tad Williams
The crowd stopped shouting. Somewhere overhead a crane threw out its clattering call, then silence swept back over the field.
“Now, ’ the Thrithings-man exulted, breaking his long silence, “Utvart kills you.”
Josua suddenly ceased resisting and flung himself forward into his enemy’s grasp, snapping his head to one side. The curved blade slid along the outside of his neck, slicing the flesh deeply, but in that fractional instant of freedom the prince drove a knee into Utvart’s groin.
As Utvart grunted in painful surprise, Josua hooked a foot around the Thrithings-man’s calf and pushed against him. Utvart could not find his balance and tumbled backward. Josua fell with him, the Thrithings-man’s blade flailing past his shoulder. When Utvart struck the ground with a hiss of released breath, Naidel snaked free. A moment later its point slid beneath the Thrithings-man’s chin and was hammered upward a hand’s-width or more, through the jaw and into the braincase.
Josua rolled himself free of Utvart’s spastic clutch and struggled to his feet, dripping scarlet. He stood for a moment, legs shaking, arms dangling limp and helpless, and stared at the body on the ground before him.
“Tall man,” he gasped, “it is…you…who talks too much.”
A moment later his eyes rolled up beneath his lids and he fell heavily across the Thrithings-man’s chest. They lay together, their blood commingling, and across the entire grasslands it seemed that nothing spoke or moved for a long time. Then the shouting began.
PART THREE
Storm’s Heart
18
The Lost Garden
After a long sojourn in soundless velvet emptiness, Simon returned at last to the dim borderlands between sleep and waking. He came to awareness in darkness, on the edge of dream, and realized that once again a voice was speaking within his thoughts, as on the nightmarish flight out of Skodi’s abbey. Some door had been opened inside him now it seemed that anything might enter.
But this uninvited guest was not the taunting flame-thing, the Storm King’s minion. The new voice was as different from that ghastly other as the quick from the dead. The new voice did not mock or threaten—in fact, it did not even seem to be speaking to Simon at all.
It was a womanly voice, musical yet strong, shining in Simon’s lightless dream like a beacon. Though its words were sorrowful, it brought him a strange sense of comfort. Even though Simon knew that he slept, and was sure that it would only be the work of an instant to wake into the real world, the voice captivated him so that he did not wish to awaken just yet. Remembering the wise, beautiful face he had seen in Jiriki’s mirror, he was content to hover on the edge of wakefulness and listen, for this was the same voice, the same person. Somehow, when that door into Simon had been opened, it was the mirror-woman who had come through. Simon was infinitely thankful for that. He remembered a little of what the Red Hand had promised him, and even in the shelter of sleep he felt frost upon his heart.
“Beloved Hakatri, my beautiful son,” the woman’s voice said, “how I miss you. I know you are beyond hearing or beyond replying, but I cannot help speaking as though you were before me. Too many times have the People danced the year’s end since you went into the West. Hearts grow cold, and the world grows colder still.”
Simon realized that even though the voice sang through his dream, these words were not meant for his ears. He felt like a beggar child spying on a rich and powerful family through a crack in a wall. But just as the wealthy family might have sorrows a beggar could not understand—miseries unrelated to hunger or cold or physical pain—so the voice in Simon’s dream, for all its majesty, seemed weighted with quiet anguish.
“In some ways, it seems only the turning of a handful of moon-faces since the Two Families left Venyha Do’sae, the land of our birth across the Great Sea. Ah, Hakatri, if only you could have seen our boats as they swept across the fierce waves! Of silverwood they were crafted, with sails of bright cloth, brave and beautiful as flying fish. As a child I rode in the bow as the waves parted, and I was surrounded by a cloud of scintillant, sparkling seafoam! Then, when our boats touched the soil of this land, we cried. We had escaped the shadow of Unbeing and won our way to freedom.
But instead, Hakatri, we found that we had not truly escaped shadow at all, but only replaced one sort with another—and this shadow was growing inside us. Of course, it was long before we realized it. The new shadow grew slowly, first in our hearts, then in our eyes and hands, but now the evil it caused has become greater than anyone could have suspected. It is stretching across all this land that we loved, the land to which we hastened long ago as to the arms of a lover—or as a son to the arms of his mother.
Our new land has become as shadowed as the old one, Hakatri, and that is our fault. But now your brother, who was ruined by that shadow, has himself become an even more terrible darkness. He casts a pall over all he once loved.
Oh, by the Garden that is Vanished, it is hard to lose your sons!” Something else was now competing for his attention, but Simon could only lie helplessly, unwilling or unable to awaken It seemed that somewhere outside of this dream-that-was-not-a-dream, his name was being called. Did he have friends or family who searched for him? It did not matter. He could not break away from the woman. Her terrible sadness twisted within him like a sharpened stick or a bit of broken pot; it would be cruel to leave her alone with her sorrow. At last the voices that faintly called for him vanished.
The woman’s presence remained. It seemed that she wept. Simon did not know her, and could not guess to whom she spoke, but he wept with her.
Guthwulf was feeling confused and irritated. As he sat polishing his shield he tried to listen to the report of his castellain, who had just ridden down from Guthwulf’s hold in Utanyeat. He was not having much luck with either chore.
The earl spat citril juice into the floor rushes. “Say it again, man, you are making no sense at all.”
The castellain, a round-bellied, ferret-eyed fellow, firmly repressed a sigh of weariness—Guthwulf was not the kind of master before whom one displayed imperfect patience—and started in again on his explanation
“It is simply this, Lord. Your holdings in Utanyeat are nearly empty. Wulfholt is deserted but for a few servants. Almost all the peasants have left. There will be no one to bring in the oats or barley, and harvest can wait little more than a fortnight.”
“My serfs have left?” Guthwulf stared distractedly at the boar and silverspears that sparkled on his black shield, the spearheads picked out in mother-of-pearl. He had loved that coat of arms, once, loved it as he would a child. “How do they dare leave? Who but me has fed the ugly louts all these years? Well, hire others for harvest, but do not let those who fled come back again. Not ever.”
Now the castellain did make the smallest noise of despair. “My lord, Earl Guthwulf, I fear you have not been listening to me. There are not enough free folk left in Utanyeat to hire. The barons, your liege men, have their own problems and few workers to spare. Fields everywhere in eastern and northern Erkynland are going to seed unharvested. Skali of Kaldskryke’s army across the river in Hernystir has cut a swath through all the border towns near Utanyeat, and will probably cross the river soon, having exhausted Lluth’s country.”
“Lluth is dead, I am told,” Guthwulf said slowly. He himself had been in King Lluth’s house, the Taig. His blood had flowed hot in his veins as he insulted the sheep-herder king in the midst of Lluth’s own court. That had been a few scant months ago. Why did he feel so terrible now, so unmanned? “Why are all these villains running away from their rightful homes?”
The castellain looked at him queerly, as though Guthwulf had suddenly asked which direction was up. “Why? Because of the wars and looting on their border, the chaos of the Frostmarch. And the White Foxes, of course.”
“The White Foxes?”
“Surely you know of the White Foxes, Lord.” The castellain was almost openly skeptical. “Surely, since they came to the aid of the army
you commanded at Naglimund.”
Guthwulf looked up, pawing reflectively at his upper lip. “The Norns, you mean?”
“Yes, Lord. White Foxes is the name the common people give them, because of their corpse-pale skin and foxy eyes.” He suppressed a shudder. “White Foxes.”
“But what of them, man?” the earl demanded. When there was no immediate answer, his voice began to rise. “What do they have to do with my harvest, Aedon shake your soul?”
“Why, they are coming south, Earl Guthwulf,” the castellain said, surprised. “They are leaving their nest in Naglimund’s ruins. People who must sleep in the open have seen them walking the hills by darkness, like ghosts. They travel at night, a few at a time, and always moving southward—heading for the Hayholt.” He looked around nervously, as if only now realizing what he had said. “Coming here.”
After the castellain left, Guthwulf sat a long time drinking from a stoup of wine. He picked up his helm to polish it, staring at the ivory tusks that lifted from the crest, then put it back down, untouched. His heart was not in the task, even though the king expected him to lead the Erkynguard into the field a few days hence and his armor had not been thoroughly looked-to since the siege of Naglimund. Things had not gone right at all since the siege. The castle seemed ghost-ridden, and that damnable gray sword and its two blade-brothers haunted his dreams until he almost feared to go to bed, to fall asleep…
He set the wine down and stared at the flickering candle, then felt his melancholy spirits lift a little. At least he had not been imagining things. The countless odd night-sounds, the untethered shadows in the halls and commons, Elias’ vanishing midnight visitors, all these and more had begun to make the Earl of Utanyeat doubt his own good mind. When the king had forced him to touch that cursed sword, Guthwulf had become sure that, whether by sorcery or no, some crack in his thoughts had let madness in to destroy him. But it was no whim, no fancy—the castellain had confirmed it. The Norns were coming to the Hayholt. The White Foxes were coming.
Guthwulf pulled his knife from his sheath and sent it whickering end over end into the door. It stuck, quivering in the heavy oak. He shuffled across the chamber and pulled it loose, then threw again, fetching it out with a swift jerk of his hand. The wind shrilled in the trees outside. Guthwulf bared his teeth. The knife thumped into the wood once more.
Simon lay suspended in a sleep that was not sleep, and the voice in his head spoke on.
“…You see, Hakatri, my quietest son, perhaps that was where our troubles began. I spoke a moment ago of the Two Families, as though we twain were the only survivors of Venyha Do’sae, but it was the boats of the Tinukeda’ya that brought us across the Great Sea. Neither we Zida’ya nor our brethren the Hikeda’ya would have lived to reach this land had it not been for Ruyan the Navigator and his people—but to our shame, we treated the Ocean Children as badly here as we had in the garden-lands beyond the sea. When most of Ruyan’s folk at last departed, going forth into this new land on their own, that, I think, was when the shadow first began to grow. Oh, Hakatri, we were mad to bring those old injustices to this new place, wrongs that should have died with our home in the Uttermost East…”
The clown mask bobbed before Tiamak’s eyes, gleaming with firelight, covered with strange plumes and horns. For a moment he felt confused. How had the Wind Festival come so soon? Surely the annual celebration of He Who Bends the Trees was months away? But here was one of the wind-clowns bowing and dancing before him—and what other explanation could there be for the way Tiamak’s head ached but an excessive intake of fern beer, a sure sign that Festival Days were here?
The wind-clown made a soft clicking noise as it tugged at something in Tiamak’s hand. What could the clown be doing? Then he remembered. It wanted his coin, of course: everyone was expected to carry beads or pieces of money for He Who Bends the Trees. The clowns gathered these glittering tributes in clay jars to shake at the sky, making a rattling, roaring noise that was the chief music of the Festival—a noise that brought the good will of the Tree-Bender, so that he would keep harmful winds and floods at bay.
Tiamak knew he should let the clown have his coin—wasn’t that what he had brought it for?—but still, there was something about the insinuating way the wind-clown pawed at him that made Tiamak uncomfortable. The clown’s mask winked and leered; Tiamak, fighting a growing sense of unease, clutched the metal more tightly. What was wrong…?
As his vision suddenly cleared, his eyes widened in horror. The bobbing clown mask became the chitinous face of a ghant, hanging only a scant cubit above his boat, suspended by a vine from a branch that overhung the river. The ghant was prodding gently with its insectile claw, patiently trying to poke Tiamak’s knife loose from his sleep-sweaty grasp.
The little man shouted with disgust and threw himself back toward the stern of his flatboat. The ghant rasped and clicked its mouth-feelers, waving a plated foreleg as though trying to reassure him that it had all been a mistake. A moment later Tiamak swept up his steering pole, swinging it broadside so that he caught the ghant before it could scurry back up the vine. There was a loud clack and the ghant flew out across the river, legs curled like a singed spider. It made only a small splash as it disappeared into the green water.
Tiamak shuddered in repugnance as he waited for it to bob back to the surface. A chorus of dry clacking came from above his head and he looked up quickly to see half a dozen more ghants, each the size of a large monkey, staring down at him from the safety of the upper branches. Their expressionless black eyes glittered. Tiamak had little doubt that if they guessed he could not stand, they would be upon him in a moment; still, it seemed strange for ghants to attack any full-grown human, even an injured one. Strange or not, he could only hope they didn’t realize how weak he really was, or what sort of injuries the bloody bandage on his leg signified.
“That’s right, you ugly bugs!” he shouted, brandishing his steering pole and knife. His own cry made his head hurt. Wincing, he prayed silently that he didn’t faint from the exertion; if he did, he felt sure he would never wake up. “Come on down and I’ll give you the same lesson I did your friend!”
The ghants chittered at him with offhanded malice, as much as to say that there was no hurry; if they didn’t get him today, some other ghants would soon enough. Crusty, lichen-dotted carapaces scraped against the willow branches as the ghants dragged themselves higher up into the tree. Resisting a fit of shivers, Tiamak calmly but deliberately poled his flatboat toward the center of the watercourse, out from beneath the low-hanging limbs.
The sun, which had been only midway up the morning sky when he noticed it last, had moved shockingly far past the meridian. He must have fallen asleep sitting up, despite the early hour. His fever had taken a great deal out of him. It seemed to have abated, at least for the present, but he was still dreadfully weak, and his injured leg throbbed as if it were aflame.
Tiamak’s sudden laugh was raw and unpleasant. To think that two days ago he had been making grand decisions about where he would go, about which of the mighty folk clamoring for his services would be lucky enough to get him and which would have to wait! He remembered that he had decided to go to Nabban as his tribal elders had requested, and to let Kwanitupul go for now, a decision that had caused him many hours of worrying deliberation. Now his careful choice had been reversed in a freakish instant. He would be lucky if he even made it to Kwanitupul alive: the long Journey to Nabban was simply inconceivable. He had lost blood and was sick with wound-spite. None of the proper herbs to treat such an injury grew in this part of the Wran. Also, just to insure his continuing misery, a nest of ghants had now spotted him and made him out as soon-to-be easy pickings!
His heart raced. A gray cloud of weakness was descending on him. He reached a slender hand down into the rivercourse, then splashed coldwater onto his face. That filthy thing had actually been touching him, sly as a pickpocket, trying to dislodge his knife so its brethren might drop on him unresisted. How coul
d anyone think that ghants were only animals? Some of his tribesmen claimed that they were nothing but the overgrown bugs or crabs they much resembled, but Tiamak had seen the terrible intelligence lurking behind those remorseless jet eyes. The ghants might be products of They Who Breathe Darkness rather than She Who Birthed Mankind—as Older Mogahib so often proclaimed—but that did not make them stupid.
He swiftly surveyed the contents of his boat to make sure nothing had been taken by the ghants before he had awakened. All his meager lot—a few rags of formal clothing, the Summoning Stick from the tribal elders, a few cooking things, his throwing-sling, and his Nisses scroll in its oilskin bag—lay scattered in the bottom of the flatboat. Everything seemed as it should be.
Lying in the hull nearby were the skeletal remains of the fish whose capture had begun these latest troubles. Some time during the last two days of chills and madness he must have eaten most of it, unless birds had picked the bones naked while he slept. Tiamak tried to remember how the fever-time had passed, but all he could summon were visions of poling endlessly down the watercourse while the sky and water bled color like glaze running from a poorly-fired pot. Had he remembered to make a fire and boil the marsh-water before washing out his wound? He seemed to have a vague recollection of crying to lay a spark to some tinder piled in his clay cooking-bowl, but had no idea whether a fire had ever caught there.
Trying to remember made Tiamak’s head swim. It was useless to fret over what had or had not happened, he told himself. He was obviously still sick; his only chance was to make his way to Kwanitupul before the fever returned. With a regretful head shake he dropped the fish carcass overboard—the size of the skeleton confirmed that it had indeed been a splendid fish—then donned his shirt as another bout of shivers ran through him. He slumped back against the stern of the boat, then reached for the hat he had woven from sand-palm fronds during his journey’s first day. He pulled it down low in an effort to keep the harsh midday sun out of his smarting eyes. After dabbing a little more water on his eyelids, he began to push with the pole, laboriously forcing the flatboat along the wide channel while his aching muscles protested with every stroke.