by Tad Williams
Who was it? was his brief, flickering thought.
“Up the hill, the hill!” Binabik shouted hoarsely from somewhere to Simon’s right. He saw the flag of Qantaqa’s tail as the wolf leaped up an incline into heavier trees, a thick clot of pines that stood like uncaring sentinels as the shouting chaos slashed past them. Simon yanked hard on his right-hand rein, having no idea if the horse would pay him any heed at all; a moment later they canted to the side and bolted up the slope behind the bounding wolf. The other three companions rushed past him, pulling up their steaming horses within the sparse shelter of a crown of staff-straight trunks.
Sludig still wore no helmet, and the thin one was surely Grimmric, but the other man, bulky and helmeted, had gone a short way up the slope; before Simon could turn to see who it was he heard a hoarse shout of triumph. The riders were upon them.
After a frozen moment he nocked his arrow and lifted the bow, but the whooping attackers were moving in and out among the trees so quickly that his shot flew harmlessly over the head of the nearest man and disappeared. Simon let fly a second arrow, and thought he saw it strike the leg of one of the armored riders. Somebody shouted in pain. Sludig, with an answering howl, spurred his white horse forward, pulling his helm down over his head. Two of the attackers peeled off from the pack and angled toward him. Simon saw him duck the sword swipe of the first and, turning, crash his axe-blade into the man’s ribs as he swept past, bright blood rilling from the gash in the man’s armor. As he turned from the first man the second nearly caught him; Sludig had time only to deflect the man’s swing with his other axe, but still took a clanging blow to the helmet. Simon saw the Rimmersman wobble and almost fall as the attacker wheeled around.
Before they came together again Simon heard an ear-piercing screech and pivoted to see another horse and rider stagger toward him, a troll-less Qantaqa teeth-clinging to the man’s unarmored leg, scrabbling with her claws at the shrilling horse’s side. Simon pulled his sword from the scabbard, but as the rider struck helplessly at the wolf his reeling steed plunged into Simon’s own mount. Simon’s blade spiraled away, then he, too, was briefly without weight or tether. A long instant later the air was thumped from him as though by a giant’s fist. He skidded to a face-down halt a short way from where his horse struggled with the other in a panicked, whinnying knot. Through a biting mask of snow, Simon saw Qantaqa pull herself out from beneath the two horses and sprint away. The man, caught shrieking beneath, could not escape.
Climbing painfully to his feet, spitting icy grit, Simon snatched at his bow and quiver lying nearby. He heard the sounds of combat move away up the hill and turned to follow on foot.
Somebody laughed.
Not twenty paces below him, seated astride a motionless gray horse, was the man in the black armor who wore the head of a ravening hound. A stark, pyramidal shape was blazoned in white on his black jerkin.
“There you are, boy,” Dog-face said, deep voice tolling inside his helmet. “I have been looking for you.”
Simon turned and dug up the snowy hill, stumbling, sinking into the knee-high drifts. The man in black laughed happily and followed.
Picking himself up yet again, tasting his own blood from his torn nose and lip, Simon stopped at last, backed against a leaning spruce. He grabbed at an arrow and let the quiver drop, then nocked it and pulled back the bowstring. The man in black stopped, still half a dozen ells below, tilting his helmeted head to one side as if imitating the hound he resembled.
“Now kill me, boy, if you can,” he mocked. “Shoot!” He spurred his horse up the hill toward where Simon stood shivering.
There was a hiss and a sharp, fleshy slap. Suddenly the gray horse was rearing up, up, mane-flinging head thrown back, an arrow shuddering in its breast. The dog-faced rider was thrown down hard into the snow; he lay as if boneless, even as his twitching horse fell to its knees and rolled heavily onto him. Simon stared with fascination. A moment later he was staring with even more surprise at the bow he still held in his outstretched arm. The arrow had not left the string.
“H-Haestan…?” he said, turning to look up the slope. Three figures stood there, in a gap between the trees.
They were none of them Haestan. They were none of them men. They had bright, feline eyes, and their mouths were set in hard lines.
The Sitha who had shot the arrow nocked another and lowered it until its delicately quivering head came to a halt pointed at Simon’s eyes.
“T’si im t’si, Sudhoda’ya’,” he said, his small, newly-formed smile as cold as marble. “Blood…as you say…for blood.”
37
Jiriki’s Hunt
Simon stared helplessly at the black arrowhead, at the trio of thin faces. His jaw trembled.
“Ske’i! Ske’i!” a voice cried, “Stop!”
Two of the Sithi turned to look up the hill to their right, but the one coolly holding the bent bow never wavered.
“Ske’i, ras-Zida’ya!” the small figure shouted, and then, leaping forward, fell into a snow-churning roll to stop at last in a flurry of gleaming powder a few paces from Simon,
Binabik got slowly to his knees, coated in snow as though he had been floured by a hurrying baker.
“W-What?” Simon forced his numb lip to shape words, but the troll signaled him to silence with an urgent flutter of his squat fingers.
“Shhhh. Slowly be putting down the bow you are holding—slowly!” As the boy followed this direction, Binabik spouted another rush of words in the unfamiliar language, waving his hands imploringly at the unblinking Sithi.
“What…where are the others…” Simon whispered, but Binabik silenced him again, this time with a small but violent headshake.
“No time is there, no time…for your life we are fighting.” The troll raised his own hands in the air, and Simon, having dropped the bow, did the same, turning his palms outward. “You have not, I am hoping, lost the White Arrow?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Daughter of the Mountains, I must hope not. Slowly drop your quiver. There.” He sputtered out a little bit more of what Simon took to be Sithi-tongue, then kicked at the quiver so that the arrows scattered across the broken snow like dark jackstraws…all but one. Only its triangular tip, pearl-blue like a liquid drop of sky, stood out against the surrounding whiteness.
“Oh, praise to the High Places,” Binabik sighed. “Staj’a Ame ine!” he called to the Sithi, who watched like cats whose avian quarry has chosen to turn and sing instead of fly away. “The White Arrow! You cannot be in ignorance of this! Im sheyis tsi-keo’su d’a Yana o Lingit!”
“This is…rare,” the Sitha with the bow said, lowering it slightly. His accent was odd, but his command of the Western Speech very good. He blinked. “To be taught the Rules of Song by a troll.” His cold smile returned briefly. “You may spare us your exhortations…and your crude translations. Pick up your arrow and bring it here to me.” He hissed a few words to the other two as Binabik bent to the quiver. They looked back once more at Simon and the troll, then dashed up the hill with startling speed, seeming to barely dimple the snow as they went, so quick and light were their steps. The one remaining behind kept his arrow trained in Simon’s general direction as Binabik went trudging forward.
“Hand it toward me,” the Sitha directed. “Feathers first, troll. Now, step back toward your companion.”
He eased up on the bow to examine the slender white object, allowing the arrow to slide forward until the string was almost slack and he could hold the nocked arrow and bowstave in one hand. Simon was aware for the first time of the shallow rasp of his own rapid breathing. He lowered his shaking hands a bit as Binabik crunched to halt nearby.
“It was given to this young man for a service he was rendering,” Binabik said defiantly. The Sitha looked up at him and cocked a slanting eyebrow.
He seemed, at Simon’s first glance, much like the first one of his kindred Simon had seen—the same high-boned cheeks and strange, birdlike movemen
ts. He was dressed in pants and jacket of shimmery white cloth, dotted at shoulders, sleeves and waist with slender dark green scales. His hair, almost black, but also with a strange greenish tinge, he wore in two complicated braids, one falling before each ear. Boots, belt, and quiver were of soft milk-hued leather. Simon realized that it was only the Sitha’s position upslope, and silhouetted against the drab sky, that allowed him to be clearly seen: if the Fair One were to stand against the snow, in a copse of trees, he would be as invisible as the wind.
“Isi-isi’ye!” the Sitha muttered feelingly, and turned to hold the arrow to the shrouded sun. Lowering it, he stared wonderingly at Simon for a moment, then narrowed his eyes.
“Where did you find this, Sudhoda’ya?” he asked harshly. “How did one such as you come by such a thing?”
“It was given to me!” Simon said, color coming back into his cheeks and strength to his voice. He knew what he knew. “I saved one of your people. He shot it at a tree, then ran away.”
The Sitha again looked him over carefully, and seemed about to say something more. Instead, he turned his attention up the hillside. A bird whistled a long, complex call, or so Simon thought at first, until he saw the small movements of the white-clad Sitha’s lips. He waited, still as a statue, until there came an answering trill.
“Go now, before me,” he said, swinging around to gesture with his bow at the troll and boy. They walked with difficulty up the steep slope, their captor moving lightly behind them, slowly turning the White Arrow over and over in his slender fingers.
Within the space of a few hundred heartbeats they reached the rounded top of the knoll and started down the other side. There, four Sithi crouched around a tree-rimmed, snow-blanketed gully, the two Simon had already seen, recognizable only by the bluish tint to their braided hair, and another pair whose tresses were smoky gray—although, like the others, their golden faces were unwrinkled. At the gully’s bottom, beneath the menacing quadrangle of Sithi arrows, sat Haestan, Grimmric, and Sludig. They were each one bloodied, and wore the hopelessly defiant expressions of cornered animals.
“Bones of Saint Ealhstan!” Haestan swore when he saw the new arrivals. “Ah, God, boy, ‘was hopin’ y’got away.” He shook his head. “Still, better than bein’ a dead’un, I suppose.”
“Do you see, troll?” Sludig said bitterly, his bearded face smeared with red. “Do you see what we have called on ourselves? Demons! We should never have mocked…that dark one.”
The Sitha who held the Arrow, seemingly the leader, said a few words in his language to the others and gestured for Simon’s companions to climb from the pit.
“Demons they are not,” Binabik said as he and Simon braced their legs to help the others scramble up, a difficult task on the shifting snow. “They are Sithi, and they will do us no harm. It is, after all is said, their own White Arrow that is compelling them.”
The Sithi’s leader gave the troll a sour look but said nothing. Grimmric came gasping up onto level ground. “Sith…Sithi?” he said, struggling for breath. A cut just below his scalp had painted his forehead with a solid swath of crimson. “Now we’ve gone walkin’ into old, old stories, an’ that’s sure. Sithi-folk! May Usires th’ Aedon protect us all.” He made the sign of the Tree and wearily turned to help the staggering Sludig.
“What happened?” Simon asked. ‘How did you…what happened to…?”
“The ones who pursued us are dead,” Sludig said, sagging back against a tree trunk. His byrnie was slashed in several places, and his helmet, which dangled from his hand, was scraped and dented like an old pot. “We did for some ourselves. The rest,” he napped a limp hand at the Sithi guards, “fell with bodies full of arrows.”
“They’d shot us too, sure, if the troll hadna spoken in their tongue,” Haestan said. He smiled faintly at Binabik. “We didna think bad of ye when y’ran, Prayin’ for ye, we were.”
“I went for finding Simon. He is my charge,” Binabik said simply.
“But…” Simon looked around, hoping against hope, but saw no other prisoner. “Then…then that was Ethelbearn who fell. Before we reached the first hill.”
Haestan nodded slowly. ” Twas.”
“Damn their souls!” Grimmric swore. “Th’were Rimmersmen, those murd’rin’ bastards!”
“Skali’s,” Sludig said, eyes hard. The Sithi began making gestures for them to get up. “Two of them wore the Kaldskryke raven,” he continued, rising. “Oh, how I am praying to catch him with nothing between us but our axes.”
“You are waiting with a host of many others,” Binabik said.
“Wait!” Simon said, feeling terribly hollow: this was not right. He turned to the leader of the Sithi company. “You have been looking at my arrow. You know my story is true. You cannot take us anywhere, or do anything, until we see what has happened to our companion.”
The Sitha looked at him appraisingly. “I do not know your story is true, manchild, but we will find out soon enough. Sooner than you might wish. As to the other…” He took a moment to survey Simon’s ragged party. “Very well. We shall allow you to see to your other man.” He spoke to his comrades, and they followed the men down the hill. The quiet company passed the arrow-plumed corpses of two of their attackers, eyes wide and mouths agape. Snow was already sifting back over their still forms, covering the scarlet stains.
They found Ethelbearn a hundred ells from the lake road. The broken shaft of an ashwood arrow stood out from the side of his neck below his beard, and his splayed, twisted posture told that his horse had rolled over him in its death throes.
“He wasna long a-dyin’,” Haestan said, tears standing in his eyes. “Aedon be praised, ‘twas quick.”
They dug a hole for him as best they could, hacking at the hard ground with swords and axes; the Sithi stood by, unconcerned as geese. The companions wrapped Ethelbearn in his thick cloak and lowered him into the shallow grave. When he was covered over, Simon pushed the dead man’s sword into the earth as a marker.
“Take his helmet,” Haestan said to Sludig, and Grimmric nodded.
“He’d not want it t’go unused,” the other Erkynlander agreed.
Sludig hung his own ruined helm on the pommel of Ethelbearn’s sword before taking the one held out to him. “We will avenge you, man,” the Rimmersgarder said. “Blood for blood.”
Silence settled over them. Snow filtered down through the trees as they stood regarding the patch of naked ground. Soon it would all be white again.
“Come,” the Sitha chief said at last. “We have waited for you long enough. There is someone who will want to see this arrow.”
Simon was last to move. I scarcely had time to know you, Ethelbearn, he thought. But you had a good loud laugh. I will remember that.
They turned and headed back into the cold hills.
The spider hung motionless, like a dull brown gem in an intricate necklace. The web was complete, now, the last strands laid delicately in place; it stretched from one side of the ceiling comer to the other, quivering gently in the rising air as though strummed by invisible hands.
For a moment Isgrimnur lost the thread of talk, important talk though it was. His eyes had drifted from the worried faces huddled near the fireplace in the great hall, roving up to the darkened comer, and to the tiny builder at rest.
There’s sense, he told himself. You build something and then you stay there. That’s the way it’s meant to be. Not this running here, running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a year at a time.
He thought of his wife: sharp-eyed, red-cheeked Gutrun. She had not offered him a solitary word of rebuke, but he knew it angered her that he had been gone so long from Elvritshalla, that he had left their oldest son, the pride of her heart, to rule a great duchy…and to fail. Not that Isorn or anyone else in Rimmersgard could have stopped Skali and his followers, not with the High King behind him. Still, it had been young Isorn who had been master while his father was gone, and it was Isorn who would be rem
embered as the one who had seen the Kaldskryke clan, traditional enemies of the Elvritshallamen, strut into the Longhouse as masters.
And I was looking forward to coming home this time, the old duke thought sadly. It would have been nice to tend to my horses and cows, and settle a few local disputes, and watch my children raise their own children. Instead, all the land is being torn up again like leaky thatch. God save me, I had enough of fighting when I was younger…for all my talk.
Fighting was, after all, mostly for young men, whose grip on life was light and careless. And to give the old men something to talk about, to remember when they sat warm in their halls with winter moaning outside.
A damned old dog like me is just about ready to lie down and sleep by the fire.
He plucked at his beard, and watched the spider scramble toward the darkened roof comer, where an unwary fly had made an unexpected stop.
We thought John had forged a peace that would last a thousand years. Instead, it has not survived his death by two summers. You build and you build some more, laying strand over strand like that little fellow up there, only to have a wind come along and blow everything to pieces.
“…and so I have near-crippled two horses to bring these tidings as fast as I could. Lord,” the young man finished as Isgrimnur turned his ear back to the urgent discussion.
“You have done magnificently, Deornoth,” Josua said, “Please rise.”
His face still damp from his ride, the lank-haired soldier stood, wrapping himself more tightly in the thick blanket the prince had given him. He looked much as he had that other time, when, garbed in the costume of the holy monk for the Saint Tunath’s Day festivities, he had brought the prince news of his father’s death.