Summer King, Winter Fool

by Lisa Goldstein

  “Do you think that was wise?” Taja asked quietly.

  “They might not kill us if they fear us,” Val said.

  “Well, perhaps. But perhaps they’ll kill us sooner.”

  They reached the city two days later. The twisted streets were deserted; their horses’ hooves sounded loud against the cobblestones.

  A man rode out from one of the alleyways. He wore a golden helmet and breastplate; Taja noticed that Val started at the sight of him. A soldier, she thought, or a man of the watch. “Hold!” he said.

  “We bring two prisoners to the temple,” Rugath said. “Witches from Etrara.”

  “Etrara?” the soldier said doubtfully. He looked at Taja and Val, both weighted down with layers of Shai clothing. “I’ll have to come with you.”

  Rugath seemed about to argue. Then he shrugged. “As you wish, my lord,” he said.

  Rugath said nothing more as they rode to the temple. Several young men dressed in blue stood at the foot of the steps; they clashed their swords together as the Shai soldier approached them.

  As Taja saw them she realized she knew the details of their lives as surely as if they had told her. These were the acolytes of Sbona; the next god-king would be chosen from among their ranks. They felt excited at the prospect, eager for the honor and the chance to live in luxury for half a year. But at the same time she sensed their uneasiness, their feeling that no honor was worth death six months later.

  The acolytes and soldier spoke together for a few minutes, and then the soldier said something to the outlaws that Taja did not catch. The Shai dismounted, and after a moment she and Val did the same. A few of the acolytes came forward to take their horses. Taja gave hers up reluctantly; it would be difficult to escape without it.

  They climbed the steps to the temple. Two of the acolytes had come with them, and these spoke to others just inside the door. Now Taja could see that a great hallway ran down the length of the temple, lit only by iron lamps on twisted chains.

  One of the acolytes said something to Rugath. “Never!” Rugath said. Taja had never heard him speak so loudly; his voice echoed off the marble walls of the temple. “By Scathiel’s big toe I swear—”

  “If you do not give up your weapons you will not be allowed into the temple,” the acolyte said. “Only the god-king’s servants can carry weapons in a holy place.” He and the others stood before the outlaws, their hands on the hilts of their swords.

  Rugath shrugged, apparently resigned. He took a sword from a scabbard at his side and a knife from his boot, and the other outlaws followed his lead. Taja watched, surprised and a little alarmed, as the pile of weapons in the hallway grew. Val’s sword was thrown down; the outlaw who had taken it when they were captured had evidently kept it. She had had no idea that they were so well armed.

  When they had finished, the acolytes motioned them down the corridor. Identical rooms opened off on either side of them. The rooms on the right were brightly lit, and draped with the gold and green banners of Callabrion. People bustled in and out, coming out to speak with the acolytes and even with Rugath and the other outlaws.

  Taja caught only a quick glimpse of the rooms on the left. They were dusty, the pale light coming through windows obscured by dirt. Hangings and tapestries in blue and silver, Scathiel’s colors, covered the walls; gray spiderwebs dimmed their luster.

  An acolyte motioned them forward into a room on the right. They had come to the throne room, Taja saw; a great chair fashioned of gold and emeralds stood before them. She turned and saw an identical room across the hall, and a tarnished throne of silver and sapphires, before her way was blocked by the crowd.

  A handsome young man sat on the golden throne. Taja was surprised at the expression of slack indolence on his face; he looked as if he might be drugged. Priests in white stood ranged on a platform behind him. She looked for the old woman, the goddess-queen, but could not see her anywhere.

  Soldier and acolyte and outlaw bowed their heads toward the king, and after a moment Taja and Val did the same. He gave no indication that he saw any of them.

  “Are these the prisoners?” one of the priests asked, indicating Taja and Val. Suddenly Taja understood that this man was the true ruler of Shai, that the god-king and the goddess-queen had no power, no tasks except those they were assigned at the festivals. The priests here were nothing like the astronomer-priests in Etrara, whose sole task was to study the motion of the sun and stars.

  “Aye, my lord,” Rugath said.

  Two priests stepped down from the platform to study them. One pushed back the hood of Val’s cloak, and Taja remembered her earlier fear. What would the Shai do if they discovered Val’s identity? How would they treat the true king of Etrara?

  “This is the first time in memory that the Tathlag have entered the god-king’s temple,” the ruling priest said. “Tell us why we should let you go free.”

  A few of the outlaws looked at each other, a complex glance that Taja did not completely understand. She wondered if it meant that some of the outlaws doubted their chief, that Rugath’s hold on the clan was uncertain. The thought cheered her a little; she and Val might be able to take advantage of a division in the Tathlag clan.

  “We bring you these captives to demonstrate our loyalty to Shai, and to the god-king,” Rugath said. “If we were nothing but thieves and clanless men, as you and others have claimed, we would have kept these witches for ourselves.”

  “Witches?” the priest asked. A few of the men near Taja and Val stepped back uneasily.

  “Aye, my lord,” Rugath said. “So they told us. I thought they might be sacrificed in place of the king, so that—”

  “Quiet,” the priest said. “The Tathlag clan stands very low on the ladder—certainly not high enough to tell the god-king what to do. We will take these prisoners, and then decide what to do with them. And we will take you as well.”

  Acolytes moved forward to seize Taja and Val. Others took Rugath and Cor and the men surrounding them. “But—” Rugath said. “But my lord—”

  “Quiet.”

  At that moment Taja saw that her insight had been correct, that men in the clan doubted Rugath’s ability to lead, and for very good reason. Rugath had enough charm and bluster and cunning to guide a small tribe of outlaws, but he was no match for the subtleties of the god-king’s court. He had fully expected to walk into the temple and receive his pardon.

  “Don’t—” Cor said, holding his hand out to Taja and Val. The acolytes forced it down roughly.

  “Don’t?” the priest asked.

  “Don’t kill them. It’ll mean your death to kill a witch, and ours too. We brought them to you—the witch’s curse will light on us all.”

  A few of the acolytes looked uneasy. “Ah,” the priest said. “But are they witches? We have only your word for that.”

  “They told us so,” Cor said. “They said they’ve been to Wizard’s Hill.”

  One of the acolytes turned pale, exactly as Cor had. But the priest laughed. “Wizard’s Hill!” he said. “How did a man and woman from Etrara manage to reach Wizard’s Hill?”

  Rugath spoke a few words. In the space of a blink all the outlaws, even the women, had taken out swords, drawing them from cloaks and boots and hidden pockets of clothing. They had given up only a fraction of their weapons in the hall, Taja saw.

  Rugath held his sword toward the acolytes, keeping them at bay, and at the same time motioned the outlaws into the hall. They moved warily, used to fighting. The servants of the god-king stood uncertainly for a moment and then came after them, drawing their weapons.

  In the confusion Taja ran for Scathiel’s throne room across the hall. One of the outlaws followed her and broke a window with the hilt of his sword. Cold wind whistled through the room, blowing up dust and cobwebs. People ran for the window.

  Rugath and a few others hurried after them into the throne room. Blood flowed down one of his arms, and he was breathing heavily. Taja saw him engage one of the acolytes,
and then the press of people crowding her against the window was too great and she had to turn.

  The man in front of her clambered through the window to safety. She held out her bound hands and jerked the rope against the broken glass. The rope frayed but did not break. Someone fell against her and swore angrily. She tried again; this time she managed to cut the rope and climb to the window. As she turned to drop to the ground she saw Rugath fall to the acolyte’s sword.

  The man who had pushed her followed her out the window. A woman came after him, holding her heavy skirts as she fell to the ground. Then, to Taja’s vast relief, she saw Val leap from the window and run toward her.

  “Rugath’s dead,” he said. “Come—we’ve got to hurry.”

  A few of the outlaws moved toward them. “Let them go,” Cor said.

  “Let them …” said one of the outlaws.

  “Aye. Rugath’s dead. I’m the leader now, and I say to let them go. It’ll mean our death if we kill them, or allow them to be killed.”

  The outlaws hesitated. “Come!” Val said again. He began to run, and she followed him.

  They hurried down the strange crooked streets of the city. No one came after them, and she thought that the acolytes must have been stopped by what remained of Rugath’s band. It was strange to think of Rugath dead; he had been so filled with life, so exuberant. She would not have expected a man of the Shai, a people used to obedience and conformity, to do what he had done, to confront the priests in their own temple.

  After a while she and Val slowed. She saw that he had cut his bonds on the window as well, and the sight of them made her think that they should find a knife to finish the job; a clanless man and woman wandering through Shai tied with bonds of rope would surely attract some attention. And they had to get rid of their heavy cloaks as well; they could not afford to be mistaken for outlaws.

  But they saw no one on the streets, and Taja began to think that they might keep the cloaks after all. The bulky fabric covered their darker features and made them less conspicuous.

  “I’m almost sorry he’s dead,” Val said, echoing her thoughts about Rugath. “He seemed more like a man from Etrara than a clan chief. A courtier, or even a king.”

  “Aye,” she said. “He was like a man in a tragedy. He had too much ambition for a man of the Shai—it was almost inevitable that he died.”

  She led the way through the twisted maze of the city, stopping when the streets branched out into two or more directions. Yet every time they stopped she was able to choose a street and continue on.

  After they left the city the rough spire of Wizard’s Hill appeared in her mind for the first time since they had been captured. It called to her, drawing her toward it. She hurried on, anxious to reach their destination.

  A day later Taja saw a more direct way to the hill, and she turned south onto a dirt track that led off the main road. Val followed. They had said little all day; both were hungry and worried about pursuit.

  They passed fields and farmhouses. Dogs barked at them from the safety of their houses, and when she and Val came to the barns and storehouses she saw that they were locked. She had heard of similar things happening in the provinces around Etrara; farmers wanted to protect what little food they had as the crops began to fail. She nearly groaned aloud with hunger. And something else had started to worry her: the Shai had taken Val’s sword. How could he guard her while she spent the night on Wizard’s Hill?

  When night fell they stopped at an open field and spread their cloaks on the ground. There was little warmth in Val’s arms; he held her as she lay on her back, shivering and staring at the thin shell of the moon. The next night would be dark, moonless. Only once did she think of turning back, but she put the thought away from her as something impossible, as if a fish had thought of walking on dry land.

  “Taja?” Val said. “Are you awake?”

  She turned to face him. “Yes.”

  “I thought of something that might help you. I met a poet-mage during the war, Anthiel, and he told me something about the ways of magicians. He used solid words as his keystones, he said—tree and rock, table and door.”

  “Solid words,” Taja said. The advice meant little to her; she had not thought of the night she would have to endure on Wizard’s Hill. All her strength had gone toward getting there. She turned over and drifted off to sleep.

  She saw blackness broken by a thousand stars when she woke; the sky reminded her of a courtier’s jeweled cloak she had seen the night she had ridden to Etrara to find Val. Despite the darkness she knew that morning had come. She roused Val and they set off.

  The weak sun rose some hours later, barely lightening the world around them. As they walked she forgot everything but the hill that loomed before her in her mind. Once Val said something and she started, remembering with surprise that she was not alone. “What?” she said impatiently.

  “There are orange trees here,” he said.

  She could not imagine what he wanted. But he turned off the path and picked a few of the thin-skinned, wizened oranges and gave her one. “Eat it,” he said, peeling one and taking a bite. “Gods, it tastes horrible.”

  As she ate she realized how hungry she was. But a few steps later she stopped, all thoughts of the orange in her hand forgotten. They had topped a rise and she saw, off in the distance, the silhouette of Wizard’s Hill. It looked exactly as she had seen it in her dreams.

  She hurried on, not turning back to see if Val followed. The land around the hill was featureless, with no houses or pasture or cropland to break the flat expanse. After she had gone some distance she realized that the bleakness of the land made the hill look closer than it really was; they would not reach it until nightfall.

  The hill grew larger as they walked. Its pointed top seemed to reach to the heavens, to the court of Sbona. One side was jagged, as if something had broken off from it long ago; the other was smooth and looked impossible to climb.

  The pale sun had set by the time they reached the hill. She could no longer see the top; black had merged imperceptibly with black.

  “Look,” Val said.

  Strange shapes of stone and metal crouched at the base of the hill. The ruins looked nothing like the arch of Sleeping Koregath, but she thought they shared some kinship with it; they had been built by the same people, perhaps, or ensorcelled by them. Would the ruins come alive sometime in the night? She shook her head; her task would be difficult enough without such child’s fancies.

  She began to climb. “Wait,” Val said. “This path doesn’t lead all the way up. Look—it’s blocked by that boulder there.”

  She stopped, impatient at the delay. Had they come this far only to be turned back by the hill itself? But Val had gone around an outcropping of rock and called back to her. “Over here,” he said.

  She didn’t wait to hear more, but pushed in front of him and began to climb.

  For a while she could hear Val behind her, but soon she thought of nothing but the hill. She felt that everything she had ever done, her strange lonely childhood by the sea, her work as the librarian of Tobol An, her meeting with Val, all of it had been nothing compared to her ascent of Wizard’s Hill. Her life before this could be summed up in ten lines of verse and spoken by a Prologue in a play; here, on this hill in front of her, her true life would begin.

  She pulled herself up over several large boulders. The path leveled out and she hurried on.

  “Taja!” Val called behind her. “Taja—where are you?”

  She had made it to the top, she saw; there was a small plot of level ground ahead of her, with nothing on it but a white stone shining palely in the darkness. She walked toward the stone and sat, knowing as she did so that countless men and women had done the same before her.

  “Taja—the hill won’t let me join you. I’ll wait for you here, and guard you. May all the gods protect you and defend you. May I see you whole and well tomorrow morning. Good fortune!”

  Val stood near the crest of the hill.
Strange forms had approached him as he climbed, blocking his way to the top: soldiers and trees and great cats, apparitions like the ones he had encountered in the Teeth of Tura.

  Taja had appeared not to see them. Well, he thought, the mountain existed for her and for people like her, wizards, poet-mages.

  There were more shapes here, metal and stone like the ones they had passed at the mountain’s foot. He went closer. These forms were not as ruined as the ones he had seen earlier; perhaps the power of the mountain had preserved them. He could see statues nearly twice his height, smoothed by generations of wind and rain; looking up he saw that what was left of their faces still showed an unearthly beauty and wisdom.

  He would spend the night here, then, guarding her and praying to Callabrion. And if she descended whole in the morning she would be a poet-mage; she would help him take the throne of Etrara. He glanced up once but the dark bulk of the mountain kept its secrets; he could not see Taja anywhere.

  What if she failed? How would he face Pebr if he brought her dead body back to Tobol An? Worse, what if she went mad, if she spent the rest of her life staring sightlessly from the windows of Pebr’s cottage?

  He shivered. He had met sorcerers before, Penriel and Anthiel, but never one who had gone to Wizard’s Hill. What would happen to her? Had she understood what she was doing when she agreed to help him? What had he unleashed in his desire to be king?

  Dead, or mad, or a poet, she thought. Almost as if the thought had conjured up whatever force was at work on the mountain the sky above her began to slide sickeningly, to change places with the earth below. The stars wheeled beneath her. A shape appeared from the plains overhead, a great bird of prey. The bird flew toward her, and as it came closer she saw that it carried a warrior on its back, his sword aimed unerringly toward her heart.

  She drew a deep breath. It had begun, then. She spoke an invocation to the gods and began to construct a spell to turn the apparition aside. Halfway through her second verse she saw how the poem should end, how the two keystones came together in a phrase that strengthened both of them. She spoke the words triumphantly. The bird gave a loud cry and disappeared.