by Tad Williams
The Earl of Utanyeat stood silently for a moment, and the blankness of his expression slowly hardened into something that to Maegwin looked unsettlingly like jubilation.
“No greater penalty?” the Earl said, savoring each word as though it felt good on his tongue. “No greater tithe?” He spat a wad of citril juice on the ground before the king’s chair. Several of Lluth’s men-at-arms actually cried out in horror; the harper who had been quietly playing in the corner dropped his instrument with a discordant crash.
“Dog!” Gwythinn leaped up, his stool clattering away. In a flashing moment his sword was out and at Guthwulf’s throat. The earl only stared, his chin tipped ever so slightly back.
“Gwythinn!” Lluth barked, “Sheathe, damn you, sheathe!”
Guthwulf’s lip curled. “Let him. Go ahead, pup, kill the High King’s Hand unarmed!” There was a clanking by the door as some of his men, their astonishment thawing, started to move forward. Guthwulf’s hand shot up. “No! Even if this whelp should slit my weasand from ear to ear, no one shall strike back! You walk out and ride to Erkynland. King Elias will be…most interested.” His men, confused, stood in place like armored scarecrows.
“Let him go, Gwythinn,” Lluth said, cold anger in his voice. The prince, face flushed, glared at the Erkynlander for a long moment, then dropped his blade back to his side. Guthwulf passed a finger over the tiny cut on throat and gazed coolly at his own blood. Maegwin realized she had been holding her breath; at the sight of the crimson smear on the Earl’s fingertip, she let it whistle out again.
“You will live to tell Elias yourself, Utanyeat.” Only a slight tremor disturbed the evenness of the king’s tone. “I hope you will tell him as well the mortal insult you have paid to the House of Hern, an insult that would have gained your death had you not been Elias’ emissary and King’s Hand. Go.”
Guthwulf turned and walked to where his men stood, wild-eyed. When he reached them he pivoted on one heel, facing Lluth across the expanse of the great hall.
“Remember that you could think of no greater tithe you could pay,” he said, “if someday you hear fire in the beams of the Taig, and your children crying.” He strode heavily through the door.
Maegwin, her hands shaking, bent and picked up a piece of the shattered harp, and wound its curling string around her hand. She raised her head to look at her father and brother; what she saw there made her turn back again to the shard of wood in her palm, and the string pulled tight against her white skin.
Breathing a soft Wrannaman curse, Tiamak stared disconsolately at the empty cage of reeds. It was his third trap, and there had not been a crab yet. The fishhead that had baited it was, of course, gone without trace. Glaring down into the muddy water, he had a sudden nervous premonition that the crabs were somehow a step ahead of him—were perhaps even now waiting for him to drop the cage down lardered with another pop-eyed head. He could picture a whole tribe of them scuttling over with expressions of glee to poke the bait out through the bars with a stick or some other such tool recently granted to crab-kind by some beneficent crustacean deity.
Did the crabs worship him as a soft-shelled providing angel, he wondered, or did they look up at him with the cynical indifference of a gang of ne’er-do-wells taking the measure of a drunkard before relieving him of his purse?
He felt sure it was the latter. He rebaited the carefully woven cage and, with a soft sigh, let it splash down into the water, uncoiling its rope behind as it sank.
The sun was just slipping below the horizon, washing the long sky above the marsh in shades of orange and persimmon-red. As Tiamak poled his flatboat through the Wran’s waterways—distinguishable in places from the land only by the lesser height of the vegetation—he had a sinking feeling that today’s ill luck was only the beginning of a long rising tide. He had broken his best bowl that morning, the one that he had spent two days writing Roahog the Potter’s ancestor-list to pay for; in the afternoon he had shattered a pen nib and spattered a great gobbet of berry-juice ink across his manuscript, ruining an almost completed page. And now, unless the crabs had decided to hold some kind of festival in the cramped confines of his last trap, there was going to be precious little to eat tonight. He was growing so very tired of root soup and rice biscuits.
As he silently approached the last float, a latticework ball of reeds, he offered an unspoken prayer to He Who Always Steps on Sand that even now the little bottom-walkers were pushing and shoving their way into the cage below. Because of his unusual education, which included a year living on Perdruin—unheard of for a Wrannaman—Tiamak did not really believe in He Who Steps on Sand anymore, but he still held a fondness for him, such as might be felt for a senile grandfather who often tumbled down from the house, but once brought nuts and carved toys. Besides, it never hurt to pray, even if one did not believe in the object of prayer. It helped to compose the mind, and, at the very least, it impressed others.
The trap came up slowly, and for a moment Tiamak’s heart sped a little in his thin brown chest, as if seeking to drown out the expectant noises of his stomach. But the sensation of resistance was shortlived, probably some clinging root which had held and then slipped away, and the cage suddenly popped up and bobbed on the water’s cloudy surface. Something was moving inside; he lifted the cage up, interposing it between himself and the sunset-glaring sky, squinting. Two tiny, stalked eyes goggled back at him, eyes that wobbled atop a crab that would disappear in his palm if he folded his fingers over it.
Tiamak snorted. He could imagine what had happened here: the older, rowdier crab-brothers goading the littlest into assaying the trap; the youngling, caught inside, weeping while his crude brothers laughed and waved their claws. Then the giant shadow of Tiamak, the cage suddenly tugged upward, the crab-brothers staring abashedly at each other, wondering how they would explain Baby’s absence to Mother.
Still, Tiamak thought, considering the hollowish feeling in his middle, if this was all he had to show for today…it was small, but it would go nicely in the soup. He squinted into the cage again, then upended it, shaking the prisoner out onto his palm. Why delude himself? This was a run-on-the-sandbar day, and that was that.
The crablet made a plopping noise as he dropped it back into the water. He did not even bother to resink the trap.
As he climbed the long ladder from his moored boat to the little house perched in the banyan tree, Tiamak vowed to be content with soup and a biscuit. Gluttony was an obstacle, he reminded himself, an impediment between the soul and the realms of truth. As he reeled the ladder up onto the porch he thought of She Who Birthed Mankind, who had not even had a nice bowl of root soup, but had subsisted entirely on rocks and dirt and swamp water until they combined in her stomach and she whelped a litter of clay men, the first humans.
There, that made root soup a real bargain, didn’t it? Besides, he had much work to do anyway—repair or rewrite the blotched manuscript page, for one thing. Among his tribesmen he was thought of as merely strange, but somewhere out in the world there would be people who would read his revision of Sovran Remedys of the Wranna Healers and realize that there were minds of true learning in the marshes. But ay! a crab would have gone down smartly—that and a jug of fem beer.
As Tiamak washed his hands in the water bowl he had put out before leaving, crouching because there was no room to sit between his obsessively scraped and polished writing board and his water jug, he heard a scratching sound on the roof. He listened carefully as he wiped his hands dry on his waistcloth. It came again: a dry rustle, like his broken pen being rubbed across the thatching.
It took him only a moment to slide out the window and climb hand over hand onto the sloping roof. Grasping one of the banyan’s long, curving limbs he made his way up to where a little bark-roofed box sat atop the roof peak, an infant house carried on its mother’s back. He ducked his head into the box’s open end.
It was there, right enough: a gray sparrow, pecking briskly at the seeds that were scattered ac
ross the floor. Tiamak reached in a gentle hand to enfold it; then, as carefully as he could, he climbed down the roof and slid in through the window.
He put the sparrow in the crab cage he kept hanging from the roofbeam for just such occasions, and quickly made a fire. When the flames began to lick up from the stone hearth, he removed the bird from the cage, his eyes smarting as the smoke began to coil toward the hole in the ceiling.
The sparrow had lost a feather or two from its tail, and held one wing out a bit from its side as though it had come through some scrapes on its way down from Erkynland. He knew it had come from Erkynland because it was the only sparrow he had ever raised. His other birds were marsh doves, but Morgenes insisted on sparrows for some reason—funny old man, he was.
After he had set a pot of water on the flames, Tiamak did what he could for the awkward silver wing, then put down more seeds and a hollow curl of bark full of water. He was tempted to wait until he had eaten to read the message, to hold off the pleasure of faraway news as long as possible, but on a day like this one had been, such patience was too much to expect of himself. He mashed some rice flour up in the mortar, added some pepper and water, then spread the mixture out and rolled it into a cake which he set on the fire stone to bake.
The slip of parchment that had been wrapped around the sparrow’s leg was ragged at the edges, and the printed characters were smeared, as though the bird had gotten more than a little wet, but he was used to such things and soon sorted it out. The notation signifying the date when it had been written surprised him: the gray sparrow had taken nearly a month to reach the Wran. The message surprised him even more, but it was not the kind of surprise he had been hoping for.
It was with a feeling of cold weight in his stomach superceding any hunger that he went to the window, looking out past the tangled banyan branches to the fast-blooming stars. He stared into the northern sky, and for a moment could almost believe he felt a cold wind knifing in, driving a wedge of chill through the warm air of the Wran. He was a long time at the window before he noticed the smell of his supper burning.
Count Eolair sat back in the deep-cushioned chair and looked up at the high ceiling. It was covered in religious paintings, painstaking renditions of Usires healing the washerwoman, Sutrin martyred in the arena of the Imperator Crexis, and other such subjects. The colors seemed to be fading somewhat, and many of the pictures were obscured by dust, as though draped in a fine veil. Still, it was an impressive sight, for all that this was one of the smaller antechambers of the Sancellan Aedonitis.
A millionweight of sandstone, marble, and gold, Eolair thought, and all for a monument to something no one has ever seen.
Unbidden, a wave of homesickness washed over him, as had often happened in this last week. What he would not give to be back in his humble hall in Nad Mullach, surrounded by nieces and nephews and the small monuments of his own people and gods, or at the Taig in Hernysadharc, where a bit of his secret heart always lingered, instead of surrounded here by the land-devouring stone of Nabban! But the scent of war was on the wind, and he could not lock himself away when his king had asked his help. Still, he was weary of traveling. The grass of Hernystir would feel fine beneath his horse’s hooves again.
“Count Eolair! Forgive me, please, for keeping you waiting.” Father Dinivan, the lector’s young secretary, stood in the far doorway wiping his hands on his black robe. “Today has been a full one already, and we have not reached the forenoon. Still,” he laughed, “that is a terribly poor excuse. Please, come into my chambers!”
Eolair followed him out of the antechamber, his boots silent on the old, thick carpets.
“There,” said Dinivan, grinning and warming his hands before the fire, “is that better? It is a scandal, but we cannot keep the Lord’s greatest house warm. The ceilings are too high. And it has been such a cold spring!”
The count smiled. “Truth to tell, I had not much noticed it. In Hernystir we sleep with our windows open, except in direst winter. We are a people who live out-of-doors.”
Dinivan wagged his eyebrows. “And we Nabbanai are soft southerners, eh?”
“I did not say that!” Eolair laughed. “One thing you southerners are, you are masters of clever speech.”
Dinivan sat down in a hard-backed chair. “Ah, but his Sacredness the lector—who is an Erkynlandish man originally, as you well know—the lector can talk circles around any of us. He is a wise and subtle man.”
“That I know. And it is about him I would speak. Father.”
“Call me Dinivan, please. Ah, it is ever the fate of a great man’s secretary—to be sought out for one’s proximity rather than one’s personality.” He made a mock-downcast face.
Eolair again found himself liking this priest very much. “Such indeed is your doom, Dinivan. Now hear, please. I suppose you know why my master has sent me here?”
“I would have to be a clod indeed not to know. These are times that set tongues wagging like the tails of excited dogs. Your master reaches out to Leobardis, that they can make some sort of common cause.”
“Indeed.” Eolair stepped away from the fire to draw up a chair near Dinivan’s. “We are delicately balanced: my Lluth, your Lector Ranessin, Elias the High King, Duke Leobardis…”
“And Prince Josua, if he lives,” Dinivan said, and his face was worried. “Yes, a delicate balance. And you know that the lector can do nothing to upset that balance.”
Eolair nodded slowly. “I know.”
“So why have you come to me?” Dinivan asked kindly.
“I am not quite sure. Only this I would tell you: it seems there is some struggle brewing, as often happens, but I myself fear it is deeper. You might think me a madman, but I forebode that an age is ending, and I fear what the coming one may bring.”
The lector’s secretary stared. For a moment his plain face seemed far older, as though he reflected on sorrows long carried.
“I will say only that I share your fears. Count Eolair,” he said at last. “But I cannot speak for the lector, except to say as I did before: he is a wise and subtle man.” He stroked the Tree at his breast. “For your heartsease, though, I can say this: Duke Leobardis has not yet made up his mind where he will lend his support. Although the High King alternately flatters and threatens him, still Leobardis resists.”
“Well, this is good news,” said Eolair, and smiled warily. “When I saw the duke this morning he was very distant, as though he feared to be seen listening to me too closely.”
“He has many things to weigh, as does my own master,” Dinivan replied. “But know this, too—and it is a deep secret. Just this morning I took Baron Devasalles in to see Lector Ranessin. The baron is about to set forth on an embassy that will mean much to both Leobardis and my master, and will have much to do with which way Nabban throws her might in any conflict. I can tell you no more than that, but I hope it is something.”
“It is more than a little,” Eolair said. “I thank you for your trust, Dinivan.”
Somewhere in the Sancellan Aedonitis a bell rang, deep and low.
“The Clavean Bell calls out the noon hour,” Father Dinivan said. “Come, let us find us something to eat and a jug of beer, and talk about more pleasant things.” A smile chased across his features, making him young again. “Did you know I traveled once in Hernystir? Your country is beautiful, Eolair.”
“Although somewhat lacking in stone buildings,” the count replied, patting the wall of Dinivan’s chamber.
“And that is one of its beauties,” the priest laughed, leading him out the door.
The old man’s beard was white, and long enough that he tucked it into his belt when he walked—which, until this morning, he had been doing for several days. His hair was no darker than his beard. Even his hooded jacket and leggings were made from the thick pelt of a white wolf. The creature’s skin had been carefully flayed; the forelegs crossed on his chest, and its jawless head, nailed to a cap of iron, sat upon his own brow. Had it not been for t
he bits of red crystal in the wolf’s empty sockets, and the old man’s fierce blue eyes beneath them, he would have been nothing but another patch of white in the snow-covered forest that lay between Drorshull Lake and the hills.
The moaning of the wind in the treetops increased, and a spatter of snow dropped from the branches of the tall pine tree onto the man crouching below. He shook himself impatiently, like an animal, and a fine mist rose around him, momentarily breaking the weak sunlight into a fog of tiny rainbows. The wind continued its keening song, and the old man in white reached to his side, grasping something that at first appeared to be only another lump of white—a snow-covered stone or tree stump. He held it up, brushing the powdery whiteness from its top and sides, then lifted away the cloth cover Just far enough to peer inside.
He whispered into the opening and waited, then knitted his brows for an instant as if annoyed or troubled. Setting the object down, he stood up and unbuckled the belt of bleached reindeer hide from around his waist. After first pulling the hood back from his lean, weather-hardened face, he stripped off the wolfskin coat. The sleeveless shin he wore beneath was the same color as the jacket, the skin of his sinewy arms not much darker, but starting on his right wrist just above the fur gauntlet the head of a snake was drawn in bright inks, scribed in blue and black and blood-red directly on the skin. The body of the snake curved round and round the old man’s right arm in a spiral, disappearing into the shoulder of his shirt to reappear writhing sinuously about his left arm and terminate in a curlicued tail at the wrist. This fierce splash of color leaped out against the dull winter forest and the man’s white garb and skin; from a short distance it appeared that some flying serpent, halved in midair, was suffering its death agonies two cubits above the frozen earth.