Everran's Bane

by Kelso, Sylvia

  “Sellithar.”

  The mule’s ears flickered and relaxed. The queen fell forward to that quiet, all-sufficient voice.

  “What is it, clythx?”

  It means, Heart. And he said it with such tenderness.

  The sobs died away. The queen rested in his arms as in sanctuary: but the note in that pure voice was defeat.

  “I was going away. To Stiriand.”

  Beryx did not stiffen. And only I could see his face.

  “But clythx... why?”

  “Because,” another stifled sob, “I asked Ilien... and the ship sank. Before the bridge.”

  I would have cried, Will you augur from such child’s omens as that? Beryx knew better. Kindly, gravely, he persisted, “But clythx—why Stiriand?”

  I made to shift the mule. He gave his head a violent shake. Within his arms, that pure voice spoke with a rending despair.

  “To find the dragon,” it said.

  I think I froze. Certainly, I could not believe my ears. Beryx sounded carefully casual.

  “Surely, clythx, a king and three hundred guardsmen can deal with that?”

  “But the curse is my fault,” said the hidden voice. “It has been my fault these last five years.”

  The eygnors caroled on, heart-whole, oblivious. The mule hove a bored sigh. Very slowly Beryx freed a hand, cupped her chin, and lifted her face to his.

  “Clythx?” The quiet had changed. Now it chilled my spine. “Who has made you think a queen must breed like a carrier’s mare?”

  She merely shook her head.

  I saw his shoulders straighten. When he spoke, his voice had changed again. Steady. Deliberate. Accepting more than the role of comforter.

  “Clythx... remember the lore. If it was that which—brought the curse—a dragon is summoned by the king.”

  I must have jerked the lead-rope, for the mule flung its head up and his voice changed in a flash.

  “Now Harran shall stable your nag and you can take off those abominable clothes and we’ll all forget this,” I felt his eye on me, “and go where we ought to be: home in bed.”

  He turned her about in his arm, and they walked away, her head against his shoulder, his arm tight about her waist. Left with the mule and the moonlight, I tried to feel thankful, and could find only an ache that overrode the too explicable dread. For we both needed comfort, and she had taken it: but the comfort she had taken was not mine.

  Chapter II

  We marched from Saphar with the Helkent pinnacles black on a tiger’s eye streak of cloud. Torches lit the marketplace tangle of skittish horses, clumsy riders and swearing, laughing grooms, and all Saphar had come to see us off. Hooded market-women jostled lords untimely out of bed, urchins dived among wives anxiously watching their men cling to reins and manes, or counselors disordered by reversing rumps. Sellithar had not come, but a bright yellow square of window marked the queen’s tower, high in the gloomy sky. There were no cheers, no thrown flowers: just a great many quick, quiet embraces, some bleats from the Regent, and a few heartfelt cries of “Luck!”

  After things settled, I found myself riding close behind the banner, the trumpeter, the general, and the king. Inyx, top-heavy in mail on a shaggy mountain pony, resembled a bandit off on a raid. Beryx, resplendent with crimson cloak, damascened corselet, and plumed helmet, sat his big brown blood-horse like the pattern of a cavalryman. As the bumping, grumbling, jeering tangle unwound behind us, hide armor bundled on horses’ rumps and sarissas waving all ways to imperil neighbors’ heads, he glanced round and grinned. “Thank the Four,” he remarked, “they’ll be earthborne before we charge.”

  It was my first true acquaintance with flesh and blood warriors. They may be gallant and lordly in combat, but beforehand they grumble, quarrel, get drunk, lose their gear, their money, their horses and themselves, make lewd jests, sing lewder songs, and need more shepherding than all Quarred’s flocks. Nor do they relish civilian company.

  At first the horses kept them humble, but the second night Beryx and Inyx took me along with trumpeter, banner, and armor-bearers when, as usual, they joined the circle at the nearest fire. Beryx too had noted some surly looks. The moment we settled, he called across, “Harran, will you give us a song?”

  Soldiers have their own bards: they have poets as well. Some of this doggerel had been running in my head, mixed with the rhythms of our going, the broken clop and crunch of hooves, the jingle of scabbard and bridle, the gusts of talk, the heavy flap-flap of the long green banner on its haft. I patterned the rhythms and married in the rhymes, adding a few of my own. What emerged was a marching song, scurrilous as always, deriding everything from the dragon, “that flame-throwing lizard,” to the king’s helmet plume, “tall enough to tickle the dragon’s—”

  I had begun in dour silence. I progressed in stunned quiet that broke in a roar of delight. A little unsure how Beryx would take it, I glanced across, and he shook his fist at me, laughing with the rest. Then a huge Gebrian’s friendly pat almost snapped my collarbone, his neighbor soused me with a battered tin bucket of wine, and next day I had to ride with the first squadron, who all wanted to sing, but could not quite recollect the chorus of my song.

  * * * * *

  All those days are merry, when I look back. We were on the road, an enlargement in itself: riding in the effervescent spring weather, and it was fine. Meeting a new challenge, and in my case, finding a new fellowship. And crossing the uplands of Saphar Resh, Everran’s heart, with its trim whitewashed villages, its endless rolling green vines, its cultivated trees at every well and roadside, its cheerful, prosperous people to feed and stable and wish us on our way.

  Beryx too was merry. He had become a soldier, no more than first among equals, and he had the soldier’s gift of living now, shutting out before and behind. Often he made me think of the boy who shipped with the whalers those fifteen years ago—until the mirror signal came.

  We were nearing the rust-red, deep-cloven uplands of Raskelf, where the Kelf river springs and Quarred summers its flocks. Against the Helkents’ embery flanks the signal made a white stutter of light in the early dawn, bringing the column to an instant spontaneous halt. Inyx leapt from his pony, whipped round his little polished cavalry shield, and flashed an acknowledgement. Around me men leant forward: many of the phalanx veterans could read mirror signals too.

  “Findtar...” someone muttered at my shoulder, “. . . burnt. Oof! Garrison... east. Evacuation... what in the Four is—?”

  “Dislocated,” rapped another voice. “Sarras—” “He runs Gesarre—” “... fallen back on Kelflase. Fire reported—to his... south!”

  “Four!—” “Shut up!—” “Scouts lost... delayed... last report—”

  “Smoke in the... Perfumed Vale. Finish. Luck.”

  In the deep dull hush, someone else muttered, “Thanks.”

  Beryx had been sitting utterly still, a carven cavalryman on a carven horse. Now he turned his head. He and Inyx exchanged a half-dozen staccato sentences and he wheeled his horse. The merriment was gone. His face was as honed and planed as a sword bared for the thrust.

  “Forced march.” His voice matched his face. “Squadrons close up. At the trot.” And swinging his mount from the paven roadway, he jumped the ditch and headed in a bee-line for the north-east.

  “Ain’t the pace—worries me,” panted a tall Stiriann, as we towed our grunting horses over yet another limestone scarp. “Beryx always—gets along. It’s these four-footed bladder-bags—we gotta tow behind. Here, harper. Give’s its head. Now belt it, Asc!”

  My horse came up with a bound, my Gebrian acquaintance lumbered after it, and we slid slantwise down a scree fit to capsize goats. In the ravine bottom, the banner-bearer was girth-deep in stones and foam. On the further brink Inyx’s pony reappeared, black with sweat but tossing its head in a clear question, What’s keeping you? As Beryx put his horse to the climb, I could not help asking, “Surely the road would have been quicker?” which brought a snort f
rom Asc.

  “General’s playing scout. We’ll be headed for the Perfumed Vale quick as morvallin fly.”

  We ate noonday bread and cheese on the march, watered in mid-afternoon at a river Asc called the Velketh, and bivouacked on the northern side of a valley paved with the world’s hardest stones, amid the glorious confusion of our first picket lines. I was almost too weary to walk. Beryx was everywhere: adjusting hobbles, hammering halter stakes, checking head-ropes, hooves, and backs, all with a crisp urgency worlds from his former merriment. The men did not seem to mind. They leapt to obey his orders. They even leapt with alacrity when the trumpet sounded before Valinhynga brought up the dawn.

  That day was easier, since instead of running athwart the Raskelf we angled down the Pirvel valley’s wooded river-flats, often moving at the trot. “Four send we find this lizard,” growled Asc, rubbing his backside as we walked at noon, “before my rump wears out.” The horses, hard-ridden by inexperienced men, were white with salt and beginning to flag, yet Beryx still pressed the pace. Errith the Stiriann, also unconcerned, predicted, “Drop these clumpers soon.”

  The valley widened, a long vista of a green and silver-gray north, with Kelflase somewhere in its folds, but our mirror signals brought no response. Then the slopes of Saeverran Slief began to rise on our left, pale blonde upland grasses that the Stirianns named with nostalgia as they bumped: but that too was devoid of life. In mid-afternoon we struck the Saeverran road. As we swung onto its deeply rutted wagon tracks, Beryx reined up.

  “General!” he called. “Do you smell smoke?”

  A hundred yards in front, Inyx wheeled his horse. I heard his wide-nostrilled Snff! And as the weary column slowed, a northern air drew it over us: a vile, choking waft of charred thatch, smoldering timber, carrion, and half-burnt flesh.

  Inyx looked at the king. “Ah,” he said.

  Beryx glanced round. Behind the helmet nasal his brows almost met. “Volunteers?” he said. “Scout?”

  The first squadron’s surge carried along my horse. Beryx said swiftly, “Asc, you’ve a good eye, Errith, Iphas, Thrim—Harran?”

  “When my horse volunteers, lord,” I said, “I can hardly retreat.”

  Asc and Errith laughed. Beryx gave me one glance cut razor-edged down between mirth and irritation and said, “Go on.”

  Berating my idiocy, I walked my horse forward with the rest. We could all see the smoke now. It was rising from just over the ridge, a thin, languid coil of black upon seraphic horizon sky.

  The soldiers fanned out. Asc growled, “Come behind me, harper. Cover you with this bladder-bag,” and brought his sarissa to the port. Errith rose in his stirrups. Over Asc’s massive shoulder I saw a winged black cloud whirl up, heard a raucous, indignant yark, and then Thrim’s growl in his throat. “Morvallin. The black sods.”

  It was an ordinary upland farm: a stone-gabled house, byres and barns forming three sides of a square whose fourth side opened to the road. Something had struck the house—

  No. “Struck,” is not the word. From central door to gable, the wall was gone. The king-beam had snapped. The gable itself was a heap of tumbled stone. A fire had been burning inside. Wisps of smoke still rose amid the blackened remnants of wall-timber, furniture, family possessions, and charred stems of fallen thatch.

  “Ah,” said Asc, deep in his throat. He checked his horse, and sat looking round in the eerie, unnatural quiet.

  The white-washed barn door was open, an ox-cart propped in a corner of the yard. Trampled flesh-red soil brought up the gray-green foliage of helliens rustling beyond the house. At the yard’s center was a cattle trough, a hollowed tree-trunk that held a glitter of white. Beyond lay a bundle of discarded sacks. They were red-stained. A white bone was sticking out...

  “Best get off, harper.” Errith gripped my arm without looking round. “Don’t mind us. First time, most throw up.”

  As I straightened, he spoke to Asc. “Feeding cattle. That’s salt.”

  “Ah,” Asc repeated, that subterranean rumble quite expressionless.

  Thrim put in, “Cattle rushed. See t’fence?” It was a post and rail: two posts leant drunkenly, rails hanging from their mortises in splintered stubs. “Went out there.”

  All the heads turned, in that slow, hair-trigger scrutiny, to the slope behind the barn.

  The cattle had run uphill, scattering as they went. The first was a young red heifer. On her back, all four legs straight up, belly torn open from udder to dewlap, intestines strewn around. Asc spat with a disgusted hawk. Next was a calf. Its head had been torn off. Then a cow, ribs stove into the bloated trunk. The next was a bull.

  “Four,” said Errith under his breath. He had no need to finish, we were all thinking it: what sort of claw can rip out ribs and gouge the spine from a full-grown bull as a falcon does with a mouse?

  “Best go back,” Thrim said in that wooden voice. The horses were snorting, beginning to crouch and sidle; soon they would be out of hand.

  “Ah,” said Asc again, eyes on the slope.

  Silently we looked with him at a thirty-foot black swathe of grass burnt off at the roots. Then with a speed that nearly shot my heart through my teeth, he swung off and thrust his reins at Iphas. “Hold that.”

  No one spoke as he came back. He was walking slowly, head bowed, cradling his burden with incongruous tenderness for such a big, burly man. “Back,” he said, walking past without a look at us. “Report.”

  “Playing up hill, I reckon,” Errith commented in that empty, controlled tone, as Asc delicately, tenderly, laid her in the road before the king. She could not have been ten, and she had been pretty, once. The slender sun-browned arms, the wisps of silky blonde child’s hair, and the long fine legs were pretty still.

  “Day... Day and a half.” Asc, too, used that flat, empty speech. “House smashed. Farmer dead in yard. Cattle killed. But only morvallin’ve touched. Didn’t feed.” A thread of deep, savage hatred entered his voice. “Sheer—wantonness.”

  Beryx was looking at the child. I saw his nostril-rims turn white and his jaw muscles bunch and heard that furious, protective cry in the presence room. “That is my land! My charge and trust!” But his voice was empty too.

  “Inyx, fall out the column. Set outposts. You men, come with me. Bury her, Asc.”

  We rode away in that same unnatural quiet which had lapped the farm and, looking at the men around me, I saw that red-hot, protector’s vengefulness in every face.

  * * * * *

  We struck up over the Slief, far north of Saeverran town, riding in a fringe of scouts and presently, into a sunset that was a silent hymn to Fire. On our right, the slopes from the distant Helkents were a tide-race of fiery gloom and bloodily glowing crests, on our left the Slief climbed in sheets of scarlet and deepest crimson to a cloudless, wine-flushed sky. But in the north the light rose vertically up an enormous cloud bank whose buttresses of molten copper and alexandrite thrust out between rose-black canyons, burning without combustion in the vacant air. A little warm wet wind arose: a northerly. I sniffed the stink of foul conflagrations, but also the tickle of rain on dried-out earth.

  Asc grunted. Thrim said, “Just so it wets that sod as well.”

  * * * * *

  Around the fires they regained some spirit, but now there was real malice in the boasts and savagery in the jests, and the dragon was the only butt. Presently rose a cry of, “Harper! Where’s harper? C’mon, harper, give us a song.” Rubbing his calves, Errith added, “Take m’mind off these galls.”

  My own choice was for something gentle, to erase those still-too-present memories. But a harper must know listeners as well as lore, and escape was clearly the last thing in their heads. Moreover, Beryx would not have thanked me for sapping their courage if it were.

  In the end I dredged up a thing I dislike and seldom sing, an ancient vendetta chant of Meldene: a tribesman hunting human blood. It brought a hot, eager roar. As Beryx rose, sounding the unofficial turn-in, Asc rumbled, “Come
’n check cloppers, harper. You’ve done me a power of good.”

  We lurched off amid the manure piles and hidden stakes and horses luckily too tired to play the fool. A stumble and a clipped, “Uh!” announced Inyx on the same errand, and by common consent we paused at the line end, staring into the starless north.

  Asc sniffed. Inyx said, “Ah.”

  Asc said, “Reckon it’s there?” And Inyx growled in his throat.

  “Scouting. Flew a circle round Kelflase and back. It’s there.”

  Asc’s deep voice was musing when he spoke again. “Ever see the Perfumed Vale, harper?”

  “I have heard the songs,” I said.

  “Ah.” More silence. Then, “I don’t have the words. But I reckon songs’d miss the gold, for that.”

  He paused. We moved to turn away. And then all three of us froze in our tracks.

  A sound was drifting out of the north: tenuous, bodiless, the very emanation of night. It began on a high note, a thin, tremulous wail, wavered, rose to an eldritch howl, hung at its climax till my teeth hurt. Dropped, ending as if slashed. Inyx exclaimed, quick and incoherent, under his breath. I felt the hair rise on my scalp.

  It came again, a chorus this time: a quavering, soprano cadenza, a choir’s mourning voice. But from no human throat.

  The fires’ comfortable hubbub was dead. The silence was complete. The very horses must have been holding their breaths.

  Once more that shrill, eerie keening wavered up into the dark: trembled, faded, died to a dissonant finale, and was lost. Then the night pressed down on us until I felt myself suffocating. I let out my breath.

  Asc backed straight into me like a panicky horse. I never thought such a man could so disintegrate. “Not me,” he was moaning, “I didn’t, I never meant, I’m not ready to—” And, as if ungagged, Inyx snarled, “Shut up!”

  “Si’sta,” he went on fiercely; he must have been shaken too. I had never before heard him lapse into dialect. “Si’sta, this is Stiriand. And th’art a Gebrian, tha great stupid lump!”