by Wayland Drew
“Look, Valerian, I’m just a simple magician. I have something special, something that might help with the dragon. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that it will help with the dragon; it’s just something I have for a little while, something I can use. But after this is all over I’m going away. Maybe to the Western Isles. Maybe even farther.” He waved his hands in a stay-off motion. “So I don’t want to get involved. I don’t care if you’re a woman. I don’t even want to know.”
Valerian laughed abruptly, incredulously. “But you already do know. So what are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing. It’s not my responsibility, it’s yours. You’ve pretended that you’re something you aren’t, and nobody else can put it right. Don’t ask me to do it. I’m just along to deal with the dragon. Maybe.” They were both standing. Valerian stared at him for a long minute, and it seemed to Galen, looking into those odd, wide-spaced green eyes, that he had passed a test that had nothing to do with the fact that she was a woman, or whether he would tell. She was looking at him as if she had just discovered him, and as if he had pleased her. Then she turned, and in the mannish walk that she had perfected over the years, followed the path back toward their camp.
“No man, woman,” said a reedy voice in a fir tree just above Galen’s head.
“And don’t you tell, either.”
“Warn! Warn!” said Gringe, launching himself softly off the branch and gliding through the tunnel path. “Tee-riam!”
“What?”
“Hodge! Warn!”
“Hodge!” A dreadful vision had suddenly flickered with the sunlight on the rippling surface of the pool, and Galen had seen it clearly: There was Hodge, rising stiffly from his night’s sleep, muttering to himself, reaching back into his robe and withdrawing very gently the pouch of ashes that he had brought from Ulrich’s pyre; there he was, beginning to open it, to ensure the safety of its contents; and at the same moment, elevated slightly—Galen could not tell how far distant because the vision was dreamlike—there was Tyrian, a black radiance in the sun, notching a war arrow into his great yew longbow, drawing it with terrifying ease, and bringing it down as he sighted along the shaft, until . . .
“Hodge!” Stumbling and slipping on the mossy rocks, Galen broke into a full run along the path toward the camp. In a few moments he was there; for an instant as he burst into the clearing, he thought that he had no cause for alarm, that the vision in the water had been false. Everything seemed calm. Two or three men squatted at the fire, others were dressing, others just beginning to pull themselves from their sleeping robes, and Valerian stood in the center, near the fire. Old Hodge, one hand raised in greeting, was beginning to move toward him across the clearing. Everything seemed to be in order—except that those in the clearing were frozen in their various postures, and the air was filled with the sudden whinnying of startled horses; except that on a knoll fifty yards behind the camp stood Tyrian, his bow a diagonal slash across his body and his right hand beside his ear; except that Hodge’s arm was not raised in greeting, nor was he looking at Galen. He was looking in astonishment at a glistening arrowhead protruding three inches out of his chest.
“Hodge! No!”
He fell before Galen could reach him. At the same moment the camp broke into frenzied activity, a melee of shouting men and crying horses. Tyrian notched another arrow into his bowstring and, with a jerk of his head, signaled his men to do the same. His voice rang clearly above the tumult. “No nonsense there! All that’s happened is that another fake sorcerer has failed to pass his test.”
“But the old man wasn’t . . .” Greil began, before Valerian’s foot on his instep silenced him.
Gradually the uproar subsided, the horses calmed. Very slowly, as it became obvious that there would be no protest nor resistance from the cowed Urlanders. Tyrian lowered his bow and replaced the second arrow in his quiver. Then he and his men began to move forward, leading their horses the fifty yards toward the corpse.
Hodge was not yet dead. When Galen reached him, he was breathing through a froth of blood. With great difficulty, he raised himself on one elbow, fumbled inside his jacket, and pressed the leather pouch of ashes into Galen’s hands. “Lake . . . of fire . . .” he said. “Don’t . . . for . . . forget. You . . . Hodge . . . just mes . . . messengers!” This last word he uttered with a particular urgency, staring fixedly into Galen’s eyes even as the life left him and his head slumped against Galen’s supporting arm.
“No! Hodge! You can’t die! Not you, too! You can’t!” Desperately, gripping the amulet at his throat, Galen ransacked his repertoire of charms. “Excede mors! Reveni vita!” But it was no use. Hodge had passed beyond the reach of any charm, and the amulet, in a warning that the impossible and unnatural was being asked of it, burned Galen’s hand. He dropped it and gripped the pouch of ashes.
“Little treasure there? Let’s have a look at it!” The shadows of Tyrian and his men fell across Galen and the corpse; their horses snorted. Galen lowered the old retainer to the ground and stood up, clutching the pouch to his chest. His face was wet with tears and he was trembling violently. He was so frightened and so furious that he choked when he tried to speak. “You’ll get no . . . nothing from me! You’re not a wa—warrior; you’re a killer! You ki—kill old men and wo—women!”
Tyrian’s hand dropped on the hilt of his great sword, and Galen was close enough to read the engraving on its hilt: Cave! Tendrun sum! I am Tendrun. Beware! “Yes,” Tyrian said, his mouth unmoving, “and impertinent boys if need be, for I do what is necessary to keep the peace in Urland. The bag!”
Galen retreated, but only half a pace, for the point of a dagger had pierced the skin at the base of his skull and he felt a trickle of blood on his neck.
“Make no mistake,” Tyrian warned. “Jerbul will kill you where you stand. He would like nothing better.”
Guttural laughter sounded behind Galen, and he was enveloped by the stench of rotting teeth and rotting meat, palpable as fur.
“For the last time,” Tyrian said. “The bag.”
Eyes shut tight, Galen yielded, held the bag out, felt it taken.
“What’s this—ashes? Bits of . . . bone?” Tyrian laughed harshly. “If that’s what the old fellow was going to use on Vermithrax I have made a mistake. Why, that’s what he’d be. Here you are, lad. Take the keepsake if you must.”
“No kill him?”
“No, Jerbul. Not now. Back off, now! What is your name?” There was a moment’s pause, and then the tip of the polished yew bow probed under Galen’s chin and lifted his head. “I’m speaking to you, boy.”
“Galen.”
“Well, Galen, since you seem bound for Urland with these citizens, let me tell you what they already know very well. In Urland, King Casiodorus’s word is law, and I am the executor of that law. I do what I must to keep the peace, and to keep Vermithrax at peace.” He indicated the corpse of Hodge. “Sometimes I am wrong. I thought I was killing a sorcerer, a man dangerous to Urland, but I have killed an old fool. But I act, and I am alive. It is those who would have opposed me and opposed my duty who are dead. Now listen well, young Galen.” Again the tip of the bow hovered at the boy’s throat inches from the amulet, and Galen felt, through his pain, and anger, an increased heat from the stone. It seemed to be responding to the red dragon emblem on Tyrian’s chest. “When you enter Urland, you enter a land that has made its accommodations with its fate. We are realists. Occasionally we have troublemakers from outside who disrupt our arrangements, arguing from principle. Usually they are young, like yourself, and usually they do not . . . stay long. See that you are not one of them and you will be welcome enough; trouble the peace and you shall have me and my men to reckon with. Do you understand? Do you?” The bowtip probed upward.
“Yes.”
“Good. I trust in that case that we shall not meet again.” Still watching Galen, Tyrian mounted his horse, a magnificent black stallion gleaming with sweat. His men also mounted, and he ges
tured the way forward with his bow, saying nothing more. Jerbul was the last to mount and leave, and he looked back with distinct regret, not sheathing his dagger until he was well down the road.
Clustered around the body of Hodge, the Urlanders watched them go. “I’m sorry, lad,” Greil said, laying a hand on Galen’s shoulder. “The old man didn’t have to die. It was just a stupid wilful action. It’s the way Tyrian is. Such things happen all the time.”
“Brutish,” Malkin said.
“I hate him!” Valerian said with such vehemence that a strand of spittle fell across her chin. She wiped it off with a sleeve. “I hate him and his rotten little army, and the rotten king that pays him!”
“Shh, careful, lad,” Malkin said softly, glancing fearfully around at the others. “Word might get back.”
“I don’t care! You all know that what I say is true. Casiodorus is no fit king to keep on traditions that make no more sense, and to let the land sicken and die. You know that, and you hate him too, as much as I, and silly Elspeth too! Do you think her name goes on those lots? Ha! Not bloody likely! I hate them all!” She spat and would have gone on had she not at that moment caught sight of Galen watching her. He was massaging his bloodied neck where Jerbul’s knife point had pricked him, and the look she caught from the corner of his eye as he turned away said, No, her name does not go on the lots, nor yours either! She flushed and then, to cover her embarrassment, said gruffly, “Well, let’s go to work. Thanks to Tyrian and his louts, we have a burial to do before we move on.”
They dug a grave for Hodge on the slope of the grassy knoll above the camp, and wrapped him well in his old sheepskin robe. One eye they could not close; it remained fixed in death, staring, it seemed to Galen, directly at him wherever he moved and causing Hodge’s last words to keep running through his mind: Remember, the lake of fire . . . Valerian drew a corner of the robe across his face, and the Urlanders lowered the body of the old man into the earth and covered it. Gringe watched silently from a dead elm on the hillside and he remained unmoving there after the little procession had taken to the road. Xenophobius the muleteer left last, casting dark glances at Galen’s back, and muttering about strangers and ill luck. Long after the rumps of the mules had vanished, Gringe rose from his tree and, circling once over the new grave, glided toward the dark mountains which were the great barrier between Urland and the rest of the world.
Valerian and Galen had been walking some distance ahead of the others.
“Well,” Valerian was saying as the raven caught up and passed over them, “looks as if you don’t have anyone now.”
Galen nodded. “I have a mother and father. At least, I think so. I haven’t seen them for years. The fact is that I guess I was a nuisance to them and they sort of . . . well, sold me to Ulrich when I was just a kid. I don’t remember them too well. They went away somewhere.”
“Sold you! What did you do?”
Galen flushed and shrugged. “I don’t know. It was a long time ago. They just wanted to get rid of me, you know. They always wanted to travel.” He shrugged again, anxious to get this conversation away from himself. “How about you? Any folks?”
“Just a father. My mother died soon after I was born.”
“Too bad. What’s your father do?”
“He’s a blacksmith. And a silversmith too. The best. See?” She opened her shirt at the throat to reveal the cunning band that Galen had glimpsed in the forest pool. Looking at it closely now, he gasped at its beauty. It was elaborately fashioned of several twisted cords of silver, each made of interwoven smaller strands, and fastened at the ends by small, silver reptilian heads, which strained toward each other at Valerian’s throat but which remained separated by the width of a finger. “It’s called a torque. My father says that neckpieces like this were worn by the warriors of the Old People, who were here long, long before even the Romans, and that sometimes they would go into battle wearing nothing else.” She paused, and smiled. “My father solved the mystery of how to fasten them around the neck. He wouldn’t let me watch while he placed this on me. He said that it will bring me luck. He said that if nothing else it would make stronger my disguise, because no woman was ever allowed to wear a torque. But he made this for me, too.” She held out her right hand. Circling the little finger was an exquisite silver ring, a tiny, perfect copy of the torque. So fine were the strands of silver, and so intricately were they interwoven, that Galen could hardly trace their convolutions. He could not imagine how the blunt fingers of a blacksmith could have fashioned something so delicate. “And he made one exactly the same for my best friend, Melissa.” Valerian laughed and shook her head. “You know, I think when he did that he had pretended for so long that he actually thought of me as a boy. He actually believed that I might marry Melissa, and he saw the rings as a kind of . . . a kind of betrothal.”
“Does she wear her ring, too?”
“Always. Even after . . . well, never mind.”
They walked for a while in silence. Gringe glided ahead through the forest, flitting from tree to tree like errant snow from the looming mountains ahead.
“Is that where your name comes from, too?”
“From the Old People?” She laughed. “No, Valerian is a wine. A Roman wine.”
“What’s wine?”
Again she laughed. “A drink. Like mead, only it’s made from grapes.”
Galen shrugged. He had never drunk mead, and he didn’t have the slightest idea what grapes were.
“Well, anyway,” Valerian went on, “the Romans loved wine, and they brought a lot of it here and stored it. I guess it gets better the older it is. They stored a lot of it in big jugs in caves where it was cool and dark. Some of them must have left in a hurry when the Saxons came, because the day I was born my father and some other men were in the hills, looking for lost sheep, and they came to the old Roman fortress behind Swanscombe. The oldest man with them could remember his grandfather telling how he had fought a battle there with Romans and Britons. Anyway, they went even farther—they could hear the sheep in the hills—and they came to a cave where the Romans had stored wine. Father said there were one hundred big jugs, and he said the wine was delicious. It had just gotten better and better all those years. They took some back to the village then and more later, and before two years had passed they had drunk it all at feasts. But when he came back the first time, after discovering the wine, I had been born, and he and my mother drank my health in old, old Roman wine. He said it was the happiest day of his life.”
They walked a long time in silence. Galen mused over the story the girl had just told him, and the insight it gave into the life of a family. Never, in all his life, had anyone wanted him just for himself. What he had been had apparently been so annoying to his parents that they had got rid of him as soon as possible, and Ulrich had always wanted to mold him into a sorcerer. “What’s it like?” he asked.
“What? What’s what like?”
“To have someone—your father—who wants to keep you just for what you are?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never known anything else. I thought you were asking what it’s like to pretend for all these years. That’s awful. Terrifying.”
“Terrifying?”
She nodded. “Because if you pretend to be something long enough, you actually become that thing. After a while it’s no longer an act. You’re it! And the fact is that I don’t want to forget I’m a . . . a woman.”
“So, what are you going to do when you get home?”
“I don’t know yet, but I think probably I’ll tell what I am—before the next Lottery—and make some sort of recompense.” They trod several minutes in silence. The great mountains, closer now, loomed over them. “I wonder,” she said, “if guilt and pretending always go together. Do you think they do?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sated, Vermithrax lay inert. The sun gleamed on its length, steaming away the last vestiges of earthy damp and warming the bare and shredded places where torn scale
s had not regenerated. The sun felt wonderful, and Vermithrax released a lazy, fiery exhalation of contentment, which snaked thirty feet among broken stones and briefly ignited nondescript bits of matter. On the hillside at the edge of the Blight, the two parties of spectators—villagers and courtiers—had begun to leave silently. Vermithrax watched with a baleful eye until the last figure had vanished, making sure that no hero, glinting like ice in his armor, was going to come forward and, posturing ridiculously, offer battle. It had happened two or three times, many years before, that the basking and replete Vermithrax had had to rouse itself to deal with that sort of presumption, and had then gone on to vent its wrath on the countryside at large, incinerating villages, crofts, and forests indiscriminately. Now, however, it seemed that there was no longer need for that sort of nonsense; there were no more heroes.
When the ridge was clear of humans, Vermithrax allowed its eyes to close contentedly, and for a little while it dozed. It was quite alone. Nothing approached it save a few witless insects, drawn by the scent of scraps, and a single dragonfly which rested for a time on a nearby rock, contemplating the monster. The sun rose higher, got hotter, and the insect noises in the Blight grew more insistent.
Half a mile above, a gyrfalcon turned in lazy circles, also contemplating the dragon. It had witnessed the entire sacrificial scene—the arrival of the festive procession, the immolation of the horse, and the martyrdom of Melissa, and its rhythmic circlings had not changed. All of this bestial human activity was of little concern to the falcon, certainly of less concern than the cautious emergence of an otter’s snout from its hole in a muddy bank of the Swanscombe River. The falcon circled and waited.
From that height it could see the entire southern end of Urland. Swanscombe village lay directly beneath. Immediately to the north was the Blight, its blackness relieved only by the shimmering pale green shape of the reposing Vermithrax, and farther to the northwest, hazy in the distance, stood the col of Morgenthorme, the fastness of Casiodorus, to which the royal procession was even now returning. Far to the north—the gyrfalcon knew this, for it had reconnoitered the previous day, although it could not now see them—were the northern Urland villages of Turnratchit, Verymere, and Nudd, each tucked into its surrounding hills. To the west, flowing northwestward to the distant sea, was the shallow Varn, the river that marked the western boundary of Urland, and to the east, beyond the dark lake that was part of the broad south-flowing River Ur, lay the mountains over which the falcon had passed the day before, after its release by Galen. On all its horizons, Urland faded gently through green hills and fields into mists so soft that it was impossible for even the falcon to tell where the land ended and the sky began. Ever since leaving Cragganmore the falcon had traveled westward, and it intended to continue in that direction the next day, or the next. For the moment it was concentrating completely on the cautiously emerging otter; yet there was something else, something undefinable, that urged it to stay in Urland, to stay for at least the summer.