Last King of Osten Ard 02 - Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  The captain of the Nearulagh gatehouse had arrived only a short while before, a grizzled older soldier with a well-trimmed beard who was clearly abashed to have missed so much. “You heard Lord Tiamak,” he told two of his men. “Get that horse before someone steals it.”

  Tiamak was holding Ordwine’s right hand, which was clenched in a bloody fist. He was trying to open the dead man’s fingers but not succeeding. “I need help,” he said, but when one of the soldiers would have moved in, he shook his head. “Thelía, I would rather you do it. Gently. He will not be stiff yet, but he was holding tight and still is.”

  Ignoring the blood, Lady Thelía helped her husband work the dead man’s hand open, revealing a crumpled object almost entirely soaked in red. Tiamak lifted it out and set it carefully on the table. “A parchment,” he said. “No, something cruder.” He carefully began to tease open the wadded mass. “There is writing on it,” he said. “But see, a great hole is torn in the middle.”

  Simon pushed in closer. “Why would he do that?”

  “I do not think he did, Majesty. I think he carried this message in his breast, beneath his armor, and the arrow went through it. It was so important to him that he pulled the arrow free from his own body to save it.”

  “Brave man!” Simon said, fighting back tears for fear he would not be able to stop. “He will have a hero’s funeral. But what is it? Tell me, man, what does it say?”

  “A moment, Majesty,” Tiamak said. “It is very torn and stained, and I do not want to harm it any more—see, already much of the writing is destroyed. Save all those small pieces,” he told his wife. “We may find a word here and there.”

  “Tell me what it says!”

  Almost everybody flinched at the anger in Simon’s voice, but Tiamak would not be hurried. “First I need a clean white cloth,” he said. “And a knife. I seem to have left mine in my chambers.”

  It was all Simon could do to stay silent while soldiers hurried to find a suitable piece of cloth—it was not the sort of thing ordinarily found in the Nearulagh gatehouse. At last one came back with a white arming shirt. “It is new—my wife just sewed it for me,” he said dejectedly as Tiamak took it.

  “Give it over, man,” Simon growled. “We will get you another.”

  Tiamak laid the shirt out on one of the few unbloodied parts of the table, then spread the rumpled message upon it. He then folded the shirt over it and pressed down as the soldier who had donated the garment looked on sadly.

  Now that some of the blood had been soaked away, Simon could see the letters more plainly. It was no polished parchment meant for courtly missives, but a piece of stretched skin with crudely irregular edges. Simon had seen such things before, and he also recognized the small, bold runes, although he had never seen them so hurried and slapdash. “I know that hand,” he said. “It is Binabik’s, praise God, so perhaps he still lives. But what does he write?”

  Tiamak squinted. “‘Set on by Thrithings men on forest’s edge,’ is the first part, but then we reach the bits that were torn by the arrow. Thelía, can you make out the next?”

  His wife leaned close. “‘The prince,’ I think it says just before the hole. And after that is ‘Eolair,’ I believe. Is this from the troll? His writing is very odd—I have seen nothing like it before.” She pursed her lips, studying it. “On the other side it says, ‘taken by clansmen, perhaps for . . .’” She shook her head. “I cannot make it out.”

  Simon now felt his heart thawing, if only a little. “Ransom,” he said. “I know Binabik’s hand. That is ‘ransom.’ Does he mean Eolair and the prince have been captured, not killed? All praise to Almighty God if that is true!”

  “Yes,” Lady Thelía said, “I believe you are right, Your Majesty. ‘Ransom.’ Below the hole, I can read, ‘and my family follow him. We will not . . .’ That is all I can read.”

  “Are you certain it is Binabik’s writing?” Tiamak asked, then laughed, a short bark with no mirth. “I am a fool. Of course it is—who else in that company would be traveling with his family?”

  “So Binabik and his kin are alive—and perhaps Morgan is alive too.” Simon could not remember having feelings so mixed in all his memory, full of dread and yet suddenly hopeful when he had been certain only moments before that no hope remained. “And Count Eolair, too—God and his sacred son keep them all safe! They are in the hands of grasslander barbarians. Still, that is better news than I first feared. I will tell Duke Osric that we need not give up yet.” He had a sudden, intensely painful thought that brought despair rushing back in. “But, oh!—merciful Aedon, now I will have to write to the queen and tell her this terrible news.”

  13

  Life in the Treetops

  Between the occasional offerings from the secretive creatures in the trees—ReeRee’s family, as Morgan supposed—and what he was able to find with the little animal’s help, he managed to keep starvation at arm’s length. Still, an hour did not pass when he didn’t think of real food, of great slabs of beef or venison, red and dripping, or a cheese tart, the crust as breakable as the ice of an early frost.

  You miss things so much when you can’t have them . . .

  He thought about wine, too, and brandy. In the first days in the woods his thirst for such things had been so strong that sometimes he feared it would drive him mad. But after hacking angrily at tree trunks with his sword, then having to sharpen the blade again, he had done his best to stop thinking about such impossible things, but it did not keep them from haunting him.

  In dreams now he often found himself a child again, his father alive, his mother still with nothing but time for her young son. He ran again through the endless halls of the Hayholt, where everything was giant-high. He crawled on the floors across carpet or cold stone, which had always been closer to his child’s life than the walls or ceiling, the provinces of looming adults. Sometimes he found himself to be something other than his own younger self, a kind of animal perhaps, scuttling along the forest earth, clambering over huge roots or mountainous fallen trees. And when he dreamed he was an animal, he was always hunted. Something out there was searching for him, and despite all his hurrying and scurrying he could never outrun it.

  Morgan was in the middle of such a dream when he woke bolt upright in the near-complete darkness of his tree-canopied crevice to discover that little ReeRee was gone.

  For a confused moment he felt himself to be both the dream-Morgan, a creature pursued, and the child Morgan, lost and missing his parents. Then both phantoms receded and he remembered where he was and what had happened. As he scrambled out of the crevice a sound made him stop.

  Whimpering. It came from upslope and to his right, where the trees leaned close to the granite outcropping that had more or less become his home.

  As he made his way cautiously around the base of the great stone, as uneven ground and tangles of underbrush made a puzzle of shadows by the tree-shuttered starlight, he heard the noise again. He made his way to the base of the tall beech tree that grew beside the stone and saw what he felt reasonably sure was ReeRee’s small, huddled form on a branch and close against the trunk, three or four times his own height off the ground.

  The small creature turned to look down at him and her eyes were two pale yellow disks glowing in the starlight. He opened his mouth to scold her for getting into a place where she could not get down, then it occurred to him that maybe she had tried to join the rest of her kind, but weakness or her slow-healing injury had prevented it.

  She wants her people, he thought, like I want mine—although he knew it was ridiculous to think of animals as “people.” He was about to call her when he heard a rattling in the trees behind him. For a sliver of an instant he thought it might be ReeRee’s fellow creatures come to take her back, but the noise was too loud: something large was shoving its way through thick shrubbery and slender tree limbs, and it was coming closer.

 
Morgan looked up at ReeRee’s perch in sudden panic but saw that even if he jumped his highest, the lowest limbs were beyond his reach. Even as he cast around for another route of escape he heard himself uttering panicky curses, as though it was someone else speaking. He’d left his sword back in his sleeping place.

  The large thing in the trees moved again. A single thin sapling snapped and fell forward into a puddle of starlight—it was now a dozen paces away at most. Was it a wolf? A bear? Or something worse, something he had not ever heard of except in the servants’ ghost stories . . . ?

  “Climb something, idiot!” he told himself out loud.

  Whatever was skulking in the trees heard him. For a moment it was completely silent, then the sound of crackling branches became loud and steady.

  He could not reach the branches where ReeRee crouched or find a climbable tree before whatever it was caught him. Given little choice, he turned and began to scale the stone outcropping itself.

  It was a terrible choice: he knew even as he grabbed for his first handhold; the mass of stone jutted from the hillside at such an angle that it was like climbing the prow of a large ship. Even though he managed to haul himself up off the ground, and found a place to lodge his bare feet, each successive movement up the rock tilted him farther and farther backward, until it became harder to hold on each time.

  The rattle in the trees ended in a crash of brush as a large shape burst out of the vegetation into the clearing in front of the stone. The unwanted visitor was a bear, dark gray in the dim light and at least twice Morgan’s size. When it saw him clambering up the rock it stopped and reared onto its hind legs, throwing its front legs wide. He saw wisps of gray at the end of both forefeet—claws as long as paring knives.

  As the bear lumbered toward him, Morgan turned back to the outcrop, heart thundering and hands slippery with sweat. A piece of stone broke loose under his hand and in a desperate scramble he almost fell down and into the creature’s open jaws. He was able, however, to cling with one hand until his feet found purchase. Still, he was hanging upside down like a spider on a ceiling.

  The bear waddled to the base of the stone and reared again, snapping at him, its massive head so near that he could smell the strange, sweet stink of its breath. He could not find anything above him to grasp, and knew he did not have the strength to hang for long where he was. He saw only one chance and took it, crouching with his weight against the footholds while continuing to hold on with one hand. His knees and legs were trembling so badly that for a moment, nightmarishly, he could already feel himself failing, his leap falling short even before he began it. He put all he had into a single uncoiling of his legs, leaping away from the stone with his arms outstretched and his back toward the ground.

  He caught the lowest branch of the beech tree and slipped a little, then held on. Beneath him the bear snarled and swung huge but impotent paws. Gasping, Morgan dragged himself onto the branch and clung with both arms and both legs, quivering all over, then slid along it until he reached the trunk and could make his way up, branch by branch. ReeRee was waiting for him, making soft fear-noises. Below, the bear paced back and forth, grumbling and growling. It even climbed a little way up the trunk—Morgan’s heart again thundered—but failed and slid down again. Even after that, the beast would not leave and continued to waddle back and forth around the base of the stone. ReeRee fell silent and for a long while Morgan could hear no sound except for the bear’s snuffling breath.

  He finally dropped into a sort of half-sleep on the branch next to ReeRee. He did not tumble out, though dreams of doing just that kept waking him, his fingers gripping the branch beneath him so hard that they ached. He did not truly sleep, nor did he want to. At last, after weary hours, the cold, damp dawn arrived, and he started awake out of another doze to discover that the bear had gone.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was clear he had to move on. Before it gave up, the bear had pulled most of Morgan’s belongings from the crevice in the rock and scattered them across the slope. And though there was nothing for the monster to eat and no damage done except for scratches and bite marks on his leather purse and boots, he felt sure it would come back. He decided he would be safer sleeping in the trees from now on, no matter how uncomfortable that was.

  Morgan made a bed from his folded cloak for ReeRee, and set it in the depths of the crevice as he gathered up his belongings, but he found himself lingering over his sword and shirt of chain mail. Neither had been much use to him thus far, although he had used his blade on more than one occasion to chop through underbrush. But as he held it in his hands and remembered his foolish childhood dreams of using it in battle instead of as a makeshift scythe, he could not bear to leave it behind. The blade had been his father’s, given to John Josua when he had been made a knight and passed to Morgan at his father’s death. His father had never drawn it in anger—unlike King Simon, John Josua had never shown any inclination for the warrior life—but it was still a treasured possession.

  What son leaves his father’s sword in the forest? And what prince, especially, would ever do such a thing? What if, next time he had to fight a bear, not hide from it? His knife, useful as it had been elsewhere, would be worth nothing in such a moment.

  So although the sword had so far been more of a hindrance than a help, he sheathed it and strapped it around his waist. The armor, though, was a less compelling burden. It did not keep him warm at night, and in the summer days’ heat it weighed on him. It might save him from a bear’s claws or a wolf’s jaws, but only for a moment. He hung the armor from the branch of a tree—a flag that declared, “Prince Morgan was here,” to anyone who might be looking for him, although he was becoming more and more certain that if anyone had been, they had given up by now.

  As he picked up the various other scattered articles and stuffed them back in his purse—his muddied Book of Aedon, his coil of rope—he found the spike-covered climbing irons that Little Snenneq had given him. They were certainly heavy, and there seemed very little chance he would be walking or climbing anything icy, unless he was lost in the forest until winter—an ugly possibility he still did not want to consider—and he was about to toss them away, but an idea suddenly came. It seemed so mad that he actually laughed out loud, but the more he examined the irons the more interesting the idea became.

  He put them on, though it took him several tries before he could remember the correct way Qina and Snenneq had shown him. When he had laced them firmly over his boots, he walked in an awkward fashion back to the tree where he and ReeRee had spent the night.

  He could now dig the spikes that protruded from the toe of his boot into the bark, but found the trunk was still too slippery; he only managed to climb a few feet before his own weight pulled him back. He pulled the toe-spikes out and slid clumsily back down, disappointed. But then a memory of the steeplejacks at the Hayholt and their elaborate harnesses came to him.

  Morgan went for his coil of rope and found a suitable stone that he could knot at one end. Returning to the tree, he swung the rope and let the stone end spin around the trunk. Then he pulled the ends even and grasped them tight. He could now dig his toes into the bark and pull back on the rope around the trunk, supporting his upper half at the same time.

  After a few failed attempts, including a painful landing on his fundament that he was glad no one he knew had witnessed, he was able to climb even the smooth trunk of the beech to a point where he could grab the bottommost branch. He let himself down—going backward was even harder than going up, but faster—and then did it again. The third time he managed to scramble up to the nearest branch so quickly that when he reached it, he let out a whoop of joy that echoed through the trees. ReeRee came wide-eyed out of the crevice, still favoring her injured foreleg, perhaps wondering why he was bellowing and capering on a branch that she could reach with so little effort.

  “I live in the trees!” Morgan shouted and
for the moment didn’t care that he was proclaiming it to no one but himself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The days that followed were some of the strangest and yet happiest Morgan had spent in a long time. ReeRee grew stronger and more interested in climbing on her own, and would leave him for long stretches to search for delicacies only she could locate. But now he could climb up after her, and often they spent hours together in the branches. Morgan found he could also use the cord to tie himself to the trunk at night and sleep without fear of falling. He was still hungry, still lost, still miserably without human company, but if he could climb high enough into the slenderer branches by sundown he no longer had to worry about whatever was out hunting on the ground.

  ReeRee seemed to enjoy the new arrangement too, chittering at him to come see something she had found, or curling up on him when she was tired. He could not go everywhere she could, and sometimes, when she leaped from one tree to the next where the branches were too slight to hold his weight, Morgan had to descend one tree and climb the next. They moved slowly. He had largely given up on finding his way out of the forest, so he did not care. The order of the moment was simply to find food and stay alive.

  It quickly became clear that ReeRee’s troop had stayed close to her and her odd, clumsy companion. The Chikri seemed less shy of him now that he was often in the trees as well, and though they still kept their distance, he could observe them closely. ReeRee’s first excited reunion with the troop was a particularly joyful thing to see. They all frisked and rubbed against each other, even rubbing noses, and one of them was so reluctant to let ReeRee go again that Morgan felt certain it was her mother. His own mother had been that way once, anxious whenever he was out of her sight, especially in the first months after his father’s death. He could not help feeling sorry for the fear he must have caused in the small animals when they saw their offspring carried away by giant Morgan, presumably to be eaten.