by Tad Williams
Vorzheva pulled away from Josua as they passed through the gate and into the crush of Thrithings-folk. She reached her father in a few steps and slapped him stingingly across the face.
“You killed my mother,” she shouted, “but someday I will kill you!” Before he could grab her, she sprang back to Josua’s side. Naidel whisked out of the prince’s sheath and swayed menacingly, a flickering tongue of light beneath the dim sky. Fikolmij stared at Josua, eyes bulging, face crimson with rage. With a visible effort, the March-thane subdued his anger and contemptuously turned his back.
“Go, ride for your lives,” he growled. “I do not break my word over a woman’s feeble blows.”
Hotvig followed as they hustled toward the paddock where the horses were waiting. “The thane was right about one thing, Josua, Vorzheva,” he called. “You must indeed ride for your lives You have an hour’s start and your horses are rested, so all is not lost. Some of the others will help me slow them down.”
Deornoth stared. “You’ll…? But Fikolmij wants us caught.”
Hotvig shook his head roughly. “Not all favor the March-thane. Where do you go?”
Josua thought for a moment. “Please do not let our enemies hear of this, Hotvig.” He lowered his voice a little. “We go north of where the rivers meet, to a place called the Stone of Farewell.”
The Thrithings-man looked at him strangely. “I have heard something of it,” he said. “Go swiftly, then. It is possible we will see each other again.” Hotvig turned and gave Vorzheva a long look, then bowed his head briefly. “Make these people know that not all Thrithings-folk are like your father.” Hotvig turned and walked away.
“No more time to talk!” Josua cried. “To horse!”
The outermost grazing lands of the wagon-camp were disappearing behind them. Despite the injured and inexperienced riders, the long strides of Vinyafod and his fellows ate up the ground. The grass Hew away beneath their hooves.
“This is becoming sickeningly familiar,” Josua shouted across to Deornoth and Isorn.
“What?”
“Running! Pursued by superior forces!” Josua waved his arm. “I am tired of showing my backside, whether to my brother or the Storm King’s minions!”
Deornoth looked up at the clotted sky, then over his shoulder. Only a few lone cows dotted the rearward horizon: there was no sign of pursuing riders. “We must find a place to make our stronghold, Prince Josua!” he called.
“That’s right!” Isorn shouted. “People will come flocking to your banner then, you’ll see!”
“And how will they find us?” Josua called back with a mocking smile. “These people, how will they find us?”
“They will, somehow.” Isorn shouted, “—everybody else does!” He whooped with laughter. The prince and Deornoth joined in. Vorzheva and the others stared at them as if they were mad.
“Ride on!” Josua cried. “I am married and an outlaw!”
The sun made no clear appearance all day. When the dim light at last began to wane and the pall of approaching evening spread across the stormy sky, the prince’s party chose a spot and made camp.
They had ridden due north from the wagon-city until they reached the Ymstrecca in early afternoon, crossing the river at a muddy ford whose banks were pockmarked with hoofprints. Josua had decided that traveling eastward would be safer on the far side of the Ymstrecca, where they would be within an hour’s swift ride to the forest. If Fengbald continued to pursue them, they would at least have a chance to spur toward the dark trees and perhaps evade the superior force in Aldheorte’s tangled depths-Despite this caution, there had been no sign of the High King’s horsemen all afternoon. The night’s watches also passed uneventfully. After breaking their fast at sunrise on dried meat and bread, they were mounted and on their way. They kept their pace swift, but fear of pursuit was lessening by the hour: if Hotvig and others had done something to slow Fengbald, they seemed to have made a good job of it. The only real misfortune was the suffering of those who were unaccustomed to riding on horseback. The cold, gray morning was full of regretful noises as they rode on into the east.
On the second day’s journey across the green but comfortless land, the travelers began to see large roofed wagons and blowsy cottages of mud and sticks dotted along the Ymstrecca’s banks. In two or three places a few huts had even grown together in a tiny settlement, like slow-moving beasts seeking each other’s company upon the dark plain. The chill grass-lands were thick with mist and the travelers could not see far or clearly, but the inhabitants of these huddling-spots did not seem to be Thrithings-folk.
“Hotvig spoke aright,” Josua mused as they passed by one such settlement. A handful of dim figures bobbed in the gray ribbon of the Ymstrecca that wound beside the huts—settlers casting their fish nets “I think they are Erkynlanders. See, that cottage has a holy Tree painted on its side! But why are they here? Our folk have never lived in this land.”
“Upheaval, crops ruined,” Strangyeard said. “Goodness, how people must be suffering in Erchester! Terrible!”
“They are more likely God-fearing folk who know Elias deals with devils,” Gutrun said. She clasped Leleth tighter against her considerable bosom, as though to protect the child from the High King’s communicants.
“Should we not tell them who you are, sire?” Deornoth asked. “There is safety in numbers, and we have been few for very long. Besides, if they are Erkynlanders, you are their rightful prince.”
Josua gazed at the distant camp, then shook his head. “They may have come out here to escape all princes, rightful or otherwise. Also, if we are followed, why put innocents in danger by giving them knowledge of our names and destination? No, as you said, when we have a stronghold we will make ourselves known. They can then come to us if they wish, and not because we have swept down on them with swords and horses.”
Deornoth kept his expression carefully neutral, but inside he was disappointed. They were in dire need of allies. Why did Josua insist on being so damnably careful and correct? Some things about his prince, it was obvious, would never change.
As the riders continued across the brooding steppe, the weather grew steadily worse, as though they were abroad at the turning of winter instead of the earliest days of Anitul-month in what should be high summer. Flurries of snow came riding on the back of the north wind, and the impossibly broad sky had gone a perpetual gray, dreary as fireplace ash.
Even as the landscape on either side grew more dismal and uninviting, the travelers began to encounter larger settlements along the Ymstrecca’s banks, settlements that seemed not to have grown so much as accumulated. As the river carried brambles and sticks and silt before sloughing them off at convenient sandbars, so the very substance of these settlements, both people and materials, seemed to have arrived in this strange and only slightly hospitable place by chance, lodging as in some narrow spot while the force that had carried them so far swept on without them.
Josua’s people rode silently past these tiny, ramshackle hamlets, embryonic towns almost as forbidding as the land itself, each made up of perhaps a dozen crude shelters. Few living things could be seen outside the flimsy walls, but wisps of smoke from their cooking fires twined on the wind.
A second, third, and fourth night beneath the cloud-hidden stars took the prince’s exiles to the edge of the Stefflod river-valley. The evening of the fifth day brought more snow and bitter cold, but the darkness also gleamed with lights torches and campfires, hundreds of fires that filled the neck of the valley like a bowl of gems. The travelers had found the largest settlement yet, a near-city of flimsy shelters nestled in the trough of the shallow valley where the Ymstrecca and the Stefflod came together. After a long journey across the empty plain, it was a heartening sight.
“Still we go like thieves. Prince Josua,” Deornoth whispered crossly. “You are the son of Prester John, my lord. Why must we skulk into this crofter’s clutter acting—and looking—like footpads?”
Josua smiled He
had not changed his travel-stained Thrithings clothes, although one of the things he had bartered for had been extra garments. “You are no longer begging my pardon for your forwardness as once as you once did, Deornoth. No, do not apologize. We have been through too much together for me to disapprove. You are right, we are not coming down into this place as a prince and his court—we make a sorry court, in any case. We shall instead find out what we can and not put our women and young Leleth and the rest in any unnecessary danger.” He turned to Isorn, who was the third and to this point quietest member of the trio. “If anything, we will want to allay suspicion that we are anything but ordinary travelers You, Isorn, look especially well-fed: your size alone might make some of these poor folk afraid.” He chuckled and poked the brawny young Rimmersman in the side. Isorn, taken unawares by the prince’s sudden lightheartedness, stumbled and almost fell.
“I cannot make myself small, Josua,” he grunted. “Be thankful I am not as big as my father, or your poor folk might run screaming into the night at the sight of me.”
“Ah, how I miss Isgrimnur,” Josua said. “May the Aedon indeed look after your father, that good man, and bring him back to us safely.”
“My mother misses him very much and fears for him,” Isorn said quietly, “but she does not say so.” His good-natured face was solemn.
Josua looked at him keenly. “Yes, your family is not one for breast-beating.”
“All the same,” Deornoth suddenly said, “the duke can certainly make a ruckus when he is displeased! I remember when he first found out that Skali was coming to King John’s funeral. He threw a chair through Bishop Domitis’ screen and broke it to bits!”
“Ouch! Damn me!” Laughing, Deornoth tripped on a hummock in the darkness. Tonight’s misted moon was stinting with her light. “Hold the torch closer, Isorn. Why are we walking and leading our horses, in any case?”
“Because if you break a leg, you can ride,” the prince said dryly. “If your new mount Vildalix breaks his, will you carry him?”
Deornoth granted the point grudgingly.
Talking quietly of Isorn’s father and his legendary temper—the expression of which was almost always followed, as soon as the duke calmed down, by horrified apologies—they made their way down the grassy slope and toward the lights of the nearest fires. The rest of their party had built camp at the valley’s edge; the fire Duchess Gutrun tended was a shrinking beacon on the high ground behind them.
A gang of shivering, starveling dogs barked and scattered as the three-some approached the settlement. A few shadowy figures looked up from their fires or stood cross-armed in the door-flaps of shabby huts, watching the strangers pass, but if there was any sense that Josua and his comrades did not belong, no one challenged them. From the snippets of speech they picked up as they passed, it was clear that these settlers were indeed mostly Erkynlanders, speaking both the old country speech and Westerling. Here and there a Hernystiri burr could be heard as well
A woman stood in the open space between two houses, talking to her neighbor about the rabbit her son had brought home and how they had steamed it with sour grass for Hlafmansa. It was odd, Deornoth thought, to hear people speaking of such mundane things here in the mist of the empty grassland, as if there might be a church hidden behind a rock where they would go for the morning prayer, or an ostler’s shop under a leaf where they could buy beer to drink with their rabbit stew.
The woman, of middle years, red-faced and raw-boned, turned at their approach and surveyed them with a look of mixed apprehension and interest. Deornoth and Isorn stepped to one side to pass around her, but Josua halted.
“We wish you a pleasant evening, goodwife,” the prince said, inclining his head in a sort of bow. “Do you know where we could get a bit of food? We are travelers and have good money to pay. Has someone got something to sell?”
The woman looked him over carefully, then turned an eye on his companions. “There are no taverns and no inns here,” she said grimly. “Everyone keeps what they have.”
Josua nodded slowly, as if sifting particles of purest golden wisdom from her discourse. “And what is the name of this place?” he asked. “It is not on any map.”
“Shouldn’t think so,” she snorted, “wasn’t here two summers ago. It doesn’t have a name, not truly, but some call it Gadrinsett.”
“Gadrinsett,” Josua repeated. “Gathering-place.”
“Not that anyone’s gathering anything.” She made a face. “Just can’t go any farther.”
“And why is that?” Josua asked.
The woman ignored this last question, looking the prince up and down once more in a calculating manner. “Here,” she said at last, “if you want food and you’ll pay for it, I might be able to do something for you. Show me your money first.”
Josua showed her a handful of cintis and quinis-pieces that he had brought in his purse out of Naglimund. The woman shook her head.
“Can’t take the bronze. Some folk farther along the river might trade for the silver, so I’ll take a chance on one o’ them. D’you have aught else to trade? Leather straps from broken saddle? Buckles? Extra clothes?” She looked at Josua’s outfit and smirked. “No, I doubt you’ve got extra clothes. Come on then, I’ll give you some soup and you can tell me any news.” She waved to her friend—who had remained at a safe distance, watching the whole exchange open-mouthed—then led them back through the cluster of huts.
The woman’s name was Ielda, and although she mentioned several times that her man might return at any moment, Deornoth guessed that this was mostly to forestall any thoughts of robbery that three strangers might have; he saw no sign of any living husband around her camp, which centered around an outdoor fire and small, rickety cottage. She did have several children, their genders somewhat blurred by dirt and evening darkness. These came out to watch the prince and his friends with the same wide-eyed attention they might have given to a snake swallowing a frog.
After receiving a quinis-piece, which immediately vanished into her dress, Ielda poured them each a bowl of thin soup, then procured from somewhere ajar of beer that she said her man had brought with him from Falshire where they had previously lived. Seeing that jar hardened in Deornoth’s mind the notion that her husband was dead: what man could live in this Godforsaken hole, yet leave beer so long undrunk?
Josua thanked her gravely. The three of them passed the jar around several times before thinking to ask Ielda if she would like some herself. She accepted with a gracious nod and took several healthy swallows. Her children discussed this among themselves in a strange pidgin language consisting mostly of grunts, a few recognizable words, and repeated cuffings to the head and shoulders.
The pleasures of company and conversation soon began to work on Ielda. Reserved at first, before long she was holding forth quite knowledgeably on everything there was to know about Gadrinsett and her fellow squatters. Untutored, she nevertheless had a sly wit, and although the travelers were chiefly interested in finding the way to their destination—Geloë’s instructions had not been very precise—they found themselves enjoying Ielda’s imitations other various neighbors.
Like many of Gadrinsett’s other inhabitants, Ielda and her family had fled Falshire when Fengbald and the Erkynguard had burned down the city’s wool district—a punishment for the resistance of the wool merchants’ guild to one of Elias’ less popular proclamations. Ielda also explained that Gadrinsett was even larger than Josua’s folk had first guessed; it continued for a way down the valley, she said, but the hills loomed high enough that the camp fires at the far end were blocked from view.
The reason it was the stopping place for so many, Ielda said, was that the land beyond the spot where the Stefflod and Ymstrecca joined was ill-omened and dangerous.
“Full of fairy-rings it is,” she said earnestly, “and there are mounds where spirits dance at night. That’s why those folk that live in the Thrithings leave us in peace—they wouldn’t live here anyway.” Her voice drop
ped and her eyes grew large. “One great hill there is where witches meet, full of terrible warlock-stones—worse even than Thisterborg by Erchester, if you’ve heard tell of that evil place. Not far from it is a city where devils once lived, an unholy, unnatural city. Terrible magicks is what that land across the river’s full of—some women here have had children stolen away. One had a changeling left in return, pointed ears and all!”
“That warlock-hill sounds a fearsome place indeed,” Josua said, an expression of great seriousness on his long face. When the woman looked down at her lap, where she was mixing flour and water in a bowl, he caught Deornoth’s gaze and winked. “Where is it?”
Ielda pointed into the darkness. “Straight that way, up the Stefflod. You’re wise to avoid it.” She stopped, frowning. “And where are you going, sirs?”
Deornoth chimed in before Josua could speak. “Actually, we are traveling knights who hope to lend our swords to a grand task. We have heard that Prince Josua, the younger son of High King John the Presbyter, has come here into the eastern lands, where he plots the overthrow of his wicked brother, King Elias.” Trying not to smile, Deornoth ignored Josua’s irritated gestures. “We have come to join that noble cause.”
Ielda, who had stopped kneading the dough for a moment to stare, made a snorting noise and resumed her labor. “Prince Josua? Here on the grasslands? That’s a clever joke. Not that I wouldn’t like to see something done. Things just haven’t been right since old Prester John died, bless him.” She made a stern face, but her eyes suddenly gleamed wetly. “It’s been hard for us all, so hard…”
She stood abruptly and laid out the flattened balls of dough on a clean heated stone at the edge of the fire; they began to quietly sizzle. “I’m just going to see my friend,” Ielda said, “and find out if she has a bit more beer we can borrow. I won’t tell her what you said about the prince, because she’d just laugh. Watch those cakes close now while I go—they’re for the children to eat in the morning.” She got up and walked out of the circle of firelight, dabbing at her eyes with a dirty shawl.