by Tad Williams
Josua stumbled back, ducking awkwardly beneath another of Utvart’s swinging attacks, then tensed and lunged forward. His thrust ended harmlessly, well short of Utvart’s oiled stomach. The Thrithings-man, silent to this point, laughed harshly and cut again. Josua blocked, then attacked. Utvart’s eyes widened, and for a moment the paddock echoed with the percussive sound of steel on steel. Most of the throng were up and shouting. Slender Naidel and Utvart’s long sword spun in and out through an intricate dance of silver light, ringing their own accompaniment.
The Thrithings-man’s mouth stretched in a grimace of wild glee, but Josua’s face was ashen, his bloodless lips pursed and his gray eyes burning with some last reserve of strength. Two of the Thrithings-man’s powerful swings were clangingly rebuffed, then Josua’s swift lunge drew a bright red line along Utvart’s ribs. Some in the watching crowd shouted and clapped at this evidence that the fight was not yet over, but Utvart narrowed his eyes in anger and surged forward, raining blows like a blacksmith hammering at an anvil. Staggered, Josua could only retreat, trying to keep Naidel up before him, the thin strip of steel his only shield. The prince’s weak attempt at a counter-thrust was carelessly knocked aside, then one of Utvart’s bludgeoning swipes banged off the prince’s guard and struck his head. Josua lurched backward for several loose-jointed steps before slumping to his knees, blood coursing from a spot just above his ear. He lifted Naidel before him as though to ward off more blows, but his eyes were bleary and the sword wavered like a willow limb.
The noise of the throng rose to a howl. Fikolmij was on his feet, beard blowing in the sharp wind, clenched fist in the air like an angry god calling down the thunder of the heavens. Utvart approached Josua slowly, still surprisingly cautious, as though he expected some stone-dweller trick, but the prince was clearly beaten, struggling to rise from his knees, the stump of his right wrist slipping in the mud.
A different kind of noise suddenly arose from the far side of the paddock. The crowd’s attention grudgingly turned toward the source. There was an eddying of bodies near where the prisoners stood, and spears flailing like grass-stems. A woman’s shriek of amazement was followed immediately by a man’s cry of pain. A moment later a pair of bodies broke free from the press. Deornoth held one of the Thrithings guards, his elbow around the man’s throat. The knight’s other hand clasped the guard’s spear just below the head, its sharp point pushed snug against the man’s belly.
“Tell your other riders to stand back, horse-lord, or these men will die.” Deornoth prodded at his captive’s belly. The man grunted but did not cry out. A spot of blood appeared on his dun-colored shirt.
Fikolmij stepped forward, flushed with wrath, his braided beard quivering on his jaws. “Are you mad? Are you madmen? By The Four-Footed, I will crush you all!”
“Then your clansmen will die as well. We do not like to kill in cold blood, but we will not stand by and see our prince murdered after you beat him until he could not fight.”
The crowd murmured unhappily, but Fikolmij, seething with rage, paid no attention. He raised his braceleted arm to call for his warriors, but a voice lanced out.
“No!” It was Josua, climbing totteringly to his feet. “Let them go, Deornoth. ”
The knight stared in amazement. “But, Highness ...”
“Let them go. He paused to find breath. ”I will fight my own battle. If you love me, release them.” Josua rubbed blood from his eyes, blinking.
Deornoth turned to Isorn and Sangfugol, who held spears on three more guards. They returned his astonished stare. “Release them,” he said at last. “The prince bids us release them.”
Isorn and Sangfugol lowered their spears, allowing the Thrithings-men to step away. They promptly did, scrambling out of reach of the spear points before they remembered their original roles as captors and stopped, muttering angrily. Isorn ignored them. Beside him, the harper was trembling like a wounded bird. Geloe, who had not moved through all the furor, shifted her yellow eyes back to Josua.
“Come, Utvart,” the prince said haltingly, his smile a bitter slash of white across a bloody mask. “Forget them. We are not finished.”
Fikolmij, who stood close by, champing with his open mouth as though at a bit, started to say something. He never had the chance.
Utvart leaped forward, battering at Josua’s guard. The moment’s respite had not returned Josua’s strength: he fell backward unsteadily before the Thrithings-man’s attack, fending off the curved blade only by the slimmest of margins. At last a swinging blow slid past, nicking Josua’s chest, then the following attack landed the flat of Utvart’s blade on Josua’s elbow, springing Naidel from his grasp. The prince scuttled after it, but as his fingers closed on the bloody hilt his feet slipped from beneath him and he sprawled on the trampled turf.
Seeing his advantage, Utvart lunged forward. Josua was able to lift his sword and turn the stroke downward, but his awkward position as he rose from the ground allowed Utvart to grapple him in a hugely-muscled arm and begin to pull the prince in toward the cutting edge of the curved sword. Josua brought up his knee and right arm to try to hold his attacker at bay, then managed to raise his other arm, keeping his blade locked against Utvart’s guard, but the stronger Thrithings-man pushed his sword up slowly against the prince’s stiffened wrist, forcing Naidel back as the crescent blade rose toward Josua’s throat. The prince’s lips skinned back in a grimace of ultimate exertion and sinews knotted along his slender arm. For a moment, his supreme effort halted the rising blade. The two men stood grappling chest to chest. Sensing the prince’s flagging strength, Utvart tightened his grip around his smaller foe and smiled, drawing Josua toward him in a movement almost ritually slow. Despite the agonized play of the prince’s muscles, the long edge of the curved blade continued inexorably upward, coming lovingly to rest against the side of Josua’s throat.
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
Stonn’s Heart
18
The Lost Garden
After a long sojourn in soundless velvet emptiness, Simon returned at last to the dim borderlands between slee 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 silver spears 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 whickeri
ng 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.