Everran's Bane

by Kelso, Sylvia

  Beryx averted his face. The presence chamber is a winter room, small, intimate, with walls of folding rosewood panels and a thick crimson Quarred carpet to echo the rosewood roof. The fire was out, the panels folded back to admit dusty air and hot, glazed slaty summer blues and yellowed greens. But as Inyx spoke the room seemed to heat, to darken, to fill with men dying in anguish under the lurid glow of the dragon’s breath.

  Inyx shifted in his chair. “Not your fault.” He sounded quite truculent. “We didn’t ask for it, we’ve just got to deal with it as best we can. Same as any war.” He grunted to his feet. “It’s away to Saeverran now. Stand-easy for a bit.”

  At those first words something had moved in Beryx’s face. Now it vanished and he looked up sharply. “Are you all right?”

  Inyx stared. Then he produced one of his rare, acid grins. “I don’t rush out with an iron basket round m’ middle,” he said rudely, “looking for a glorious death.”

  Beryx’s face cleared in a laugh. “Go and find a bath, you old ly’ffanx. You stink.”

  * * * * *

  Quarred was prompt with a sonorous official complaint. Beryx’s reply, considerably pithier, said that help sent when asked would have prevented any damage. We had barely dispatched it when the skies over Saphar turned a sullen brown with smoke.

  Hawge had left the Raskelf in something of a tantrum: baulked of its woolly feast, it had been harassed by a swarm of hard-riding, fast-shooting archers who did not wait to be smashed with a tail, scattered too quickly to be properly incinerated, and persistently fled in the wrong direction when chased. I have since pieced together the true story of that blend of desperate stands, foolhardy attacks, lightning retreats, and miraculous rallies by which Inyx, using raw troops over mountain country, not only held but rebuffed a dragon. He did less than justice to his part in it.

  Hawge did not feed in Saeverran. It flew dead north for Kelflase and spewed fire all the way on the Slief beneath, then crossed the Kelf to dine on a big Gesarre vineyard’s laborers. But it crossed Saeverran in a hot spell, during the summer’s first westerly gale.

  Sending Zarrar to the fires, I told him this would be his journeyman’s work: from my very self I hid that I could not bear to go from Saphar, the king—and the queen.

  Zarrar came back very quiet, though composed, and is only now making the songs. “Something like that,” he said, “takes time.”

  The songs are terrible but magnificent: images of fire that rings the horizon like an endless incandescent worm, whose lakes lie amid flaming red-gold beaches with the stars of dying trees in their depths, fire that fills the zenith sky with scarlet to make midnight clear as noon, that comes down on the wind in squadron after squadron of reaching, racing, scarlet and vermilion flame, that roars louder than floodwater and at a mile distance sucks the breath from a man’s lungs, that throws forward its skirmishers in swarm upon swarm of sparks that jump firebreaks and run across saturated roofs and reduce days of frantic labor to five minutes’ jeering flare.

  Against that spectacle he places the folk, the farmers, soldiers, refugees, beggars, hethel-lords, ditch-diggers, town governors. They rise in silhouette, blackened, singed, and desperate, often beaten, never conceding defeat, growing taller and taller until they dwarf the flames. The battle line that held the Saeverran road six hours with the cruel sun beating down undimmed from a whitened sky and the fire charging on a wind that never flagged along a front stretching from Kelflase valley nearly to Saeverran town. The breaking of that line when the wind veered, and whirlwinds bore live coals far over their heads so the fire, rekindling, overjumped the rear defenses and bore down on Saeverran itself. The townswomen who formed bucket-chains from the wells to soak not only roofs but the surrounding land, before the exhausted fighters could outstrip the fire on the uplands, arriving to find the entire population of Astil marched up to reinforce them, the governor at its head. The three-day battle for Saeverran, islanded in a wave of flame, desiccated by the heat, lit by wind-borne sparks in fifty places at once, defended to the last wall, lost when the town-hall roof crumbles on both governors’ heads.

  After that come the leaderless survivors, striking north-east after the fire as it branches out over the Slief, the farms their owners lit without hesitation when they were in a counter-fire’s path, the scores of little unsung stands on knoll or bare flat where it seemed the enemy might be stemmed. The Gebrians up from their arid plains, the hethel-lords ridden from Meldene with estate folk at their backs, the Saphar volunteers and homeless Stirianns, the Kelflase garrison who dammed the river and toiled like madmen to channel, pump, carry water south on their backs. The wind change that wheels the fire north to menace Astarien: and the last battle-front, spread across that upland valley behind a half-mile glacis of burnt, stamped, flattened earth. Women, children, grandmas, scribes and cripples and cooks, Gerrar at their head, swathed in wet cloaks, buckets and wet bags and green branches in their hands.

  Zarrar has almost finished that song: how the rest of the force made north through the night when the wind dropped to slow the fire, extending the defense till it ran from Kelflase to Deve Astar, with the Kelf borne in bucket-chains to their backs. How the fire came down the valley in one last tremendous charge so hot the tarsal trees did not burn but exploded in fountain upon fountain of red and white-hot sparks above the molten grass, while the heat vaporized the very air, and the defense hid in their cloaks as children raced each other to the falling sparks until sheer unbearable heat drove them back. So the last sparks to cross were beaten out by five brave souls who ran in to them and died there, asphyxiated by heat and smoke.

  How the fire, baffled, choked to a halt: and the instant the heat eased the fighters surged in upon it with bucket and bag and branch, beating till they collapsed, till their boot soles burnt away, while the bucket chains stretched forward through the night like cables drawn to breaking point—and held. How, by unanimous election, it was Gerrar who sent the mirror signal next morning: Fire out on Saeverran Slief.

  * * * * *

  Once the fire crossed the road, manacles could not have kept Beryx home. Inyx did. He stumped in while Kyvan was prophesying doom, I was arguing, Sellithar weeping, and Beryx firing commands hither and yon and deaf to us all. He swung on Inyx, beginning, “Inyx, you—” and Inyx stopped him dead.

  “I won’t and neither will you. There’ll be no time for nursemaiding there.”

  “Had to say it,” he growled to me afterwards. “If he never speaks to me again.”

  Which seemed likely. Beryx had gone white as paper and then rounded on us, hissing, “Out! All of you! Out!” This last direct to Inyx, with a look to slaughter snakes.

  We fell back on Inyx’s quarters, the first time he invited me there. He had the gatehouse tower, with his own private lookout forever tramping up and down the stairs, which Inyx did not seem to mind. The rooms, kept scoured by a six-foot cavalry widow, were full of bizarre mementoes: a twisted iron joist from a corsair galley-ram, a seven-foot Quarred shepherd’s crook with its steel spike and crozier, lopped in half. A dented company kettle, a two-handed Hazyk sword, a blood-stained battle order. A Hethox throwing spear thinner than your thumb, with a shovel-nose iron head that could halve a man, a set of worn-out horseshoes behind a red leather bridle with silver bosses and superb ivory Holym forehead plate. An entire mirror-signal unit, the charred remnants of a Lyngthiran fire-cross, and letters in everything from wine to tar, all surmounted by a huge battle-painting where square-topped horses reared or kicked upside-down amid thousands of small stiff soldiers and a perfect hedgehog of spears.

  “M’father’s,” Inyx said with pride. “Old man commissioned it for him after they kicked the corsairs out of Estar.” By which I assumed “old man” meant Beryx’s grandfather. “A long-serving family,” I remarked.

  “Um,” said Inyx, and looked into his cup.

  Beryx withdrew up Asterne to live with the mirror-signalers, sending down decrees with the feverishly awaited news bu
lletins and forbidding anyone to go up. When the fire was out, Sellithar asked me to play at her private thanks to Ilien. As we set out, I saw Inyx going slowly toward his tower, and said on impulse, “Lady... ask the general too?”

  She shot me a look. Then she called him, and put the invitation with the exact warmth that was not pity in her harpsong voice.

  We were all returning to the palace for a council of war—“our war,” as Sellithar said, dimpling wickedly—when Beryx met us in the path.

  He was strained and hollow-eyed and must have slept the week in that rag of crimson cloak, but he was walking fast, forgetting to hide his right arm, with an absorbed, impatient frown. “At last!” he burst out as he saw us. “Where the Four have you been?” Grabbing my arm, he put his right shoulder in Inyx’s back, fielded Sellithar between us, and pushed us all toward the Treasury. “Come in here.”

  Striding over the stone flags nearly at his old pace, he said, “It’s still near Gesarre.” No need to ask, What? “But it won’t stay there. It won’t stay anywhere until it lairs. And if the lore’s right, it will only lair when it has something to protect.” We all stared like simpletons. “So we’ll give it something. From this.”

  When no one spoke, he wheeled on Inyx in something less like defiance than abject plea. “For the Four’s sake, this time I must be right!”

  Inyx cleared his throat. A faint, awkward grin came. Then he said solemnly, “Ah.”

  Beryx’s face lit up: reconciliation had been made.

  He turned to me, balanced now. I said, “It’s the lore. If we can try it, why not?”

  Sellithar took a pace back, saying, “You’ll be busy...” with that quiet dignity as new as the severe, refined lines of her cheek and throat, and Beryx swung quickly to her. “No, wait, Starflower. Help us to decide.”

  She flushed delicately, eyes brightened with pleasure if not hope, glanced along the scintillant racks. Then she said, “If I were you—I should send it Maerdrigg’s maerian.”

  “Why not?” she went on. “It’s beautiful enough. And you offered it to the champions.” She paused. “And,” she said candidly, “I never liked it very much.”

  Beryx stared a moment. Then he said abruptly, “No. Nor did I.”

  The maerian went north with some loose finghends, a packhorse load of gold, and Morran, Inyx’s promising youngster, charged with delivery of the bait.

  “All to plan, lord,” he said, at stiff attention in the audience hall: a tall hazel-eyed bronzed boy hardly in his twenties, but already bearing the soldier’s stamp. “We arrived three days after it fed.” Nowadays, in Everran, such talk hardly caused a flinch. “Laid out the treasure, found a lookout. The dragon took off toward Feock, and the sun must have caught the gold. It made a big circle. Then it made a lot of little ones. Then it landed. When we left, it was sitting on the gold like,” his cheek muscles twitched, “like a broody hen.”

  “Let us hope,” Beryx said blandly, “that your simile is apt.”

  Three days later Hawge flew off with the treasure and Gjarr’s axe in its mouth. For a week anxious mirror-signals followed it down the Helkent clean through Meldene: then Aslash on the Ven Elond road reported, “Entered the Kerymgjer Caves. Not seen since.”

  “Now,” said Beryx with grim pleasure, “we’ll shut the trap.” He sent for local people, cave maps, engineers, wall builders, well-makers, and a score of other specialists, remarking, “If I can bury or wall it in there I’ll willingly lose a score of Maerdrigg’s maerians.”

  But even dragons cannot eat gold. Hawge emerged before our plans matured, and it was hungry. And the first edible thing it saw was a train of Holym traders, coming up the road with cattle to sell.

  I found Beryx sitting alone at dusk in his presence room. Without asking why he had sent for me, I sat down and began to play.

  At last he sighed and opened his eyes. Then he rubbed his fingers up between his brows, the gesture of a tired man at the end of his wits.

  “Harran,” he said, “I want you to do something for me.”

  “Willingly, lord,” I said.

  “You won’t be. The Kerymgjer caves—you know them? In the spurs just north of Bryve Elond.” His teeth clenched. “Why, with all Everran to hide in, did it have to settle there? The engineers doubt we can bring the roof down. The mouth’s too wide to wall. And you know the road. You know what will happen if our trade has to come past that.”

  “I know.”

  He looked up at me: no longer royal, even masterful. Just a weary man bearing a load of leadership with a line of disastrous decisions at his back.

  “So the only thing left,” he said, “is to parley. Make a,” his teeth gritted, “treaty with it. So much gold—so many cattle—or whatever it wants to make it stay at home.”

  “You want me to draft the offer, lord?” I asked.

  “No. I want you to carry it,” he said.

  Disbelief, shock, horror, indignation, I felt them all. Why me? I wanted to explode. Not me! I wanted to squeak. Some icy-nerved young warrior like Morran, some wily old hand like Inyx, take it yourself if you must, anything but give it to me! If I had been beyond fear at Coed Wrock, it did not last: I still woke sweating with that forge voice in my ears, that facetted eye reading my innermost thoughts. Then I thought how he had already fed her first lover to the dragon, and found myself shouting in silent mutiny, You shan’t give it us both!

  Some, I devoutly hope not all of this, had shown. Beryx leant his brow in a palm and looked at the floor.

  “It was not an order,” he said at last, more tiredly. “It was a... request.”

  I strove to speak, and failed. I played something and it betrayed me, an angry, resentful chord.

  “No,” he said without looking up. “I know it’s no job for you. Only I thought, you’ve spoken to it. And you made the song. It would have been a good... But Inyx can—no. I can’t spare him. I’ll go myself.”

  At that my tongue moved. “Beryx,” it said, “don’t be an idiot.” He jumped. “I’ll go.”

  He did not thank me for hazarding my life, offer me gold, jewels, half his dominions, or any other futile recompense. He merely smiled that rueful, disarming smile that could have melted Hawge, and said, “Well, you have used my name. At last.”

  * * * * *

  “This time,” I told my servant, “I will take the great robe.” As he lifted it from the chest there was a knock. The outer door opened, and a hooded figure said in a voice like harpsong, “I have a message for the hearthbard. From the queen.”

  I had just wit to say, “That seam has opened. Will you mend it?” Then she was in my arms, eyes midnight black against a white wool cloak lined with swan’s-down that looked muddy against her face.

  “I can’t bear it,” she said, stifling sobs against me. “I can’t—not you as well.”

  Ungallant as it may seem, I felt less bliss than embarrassment. What if she was missed? If someone came? “Love,” I said rather stupidly, “I’m not going to fight with it. Only talk.”

  “No different...” Then she reared her head up. “How dare he?” she demanded. “Why doesn’t he send a soldier? The general? Why must it be you?”

  Humanity being more perverse than dragons, I found myself saying, “I’ve spoken to it before. And I have an excuse: the song. What use would soldiers be in a word-fight? He can’t go himself.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know.” Staring, I quoted her own words. “Without him, what would Everran do?”

  “I don’t care,” she said flatly, “about Everran. Let it fry. We can go to Tirs. My father will secede.”

  “Love... Sellithar,” I stammered. “I couldn’t... I—it was you who talked about breaking trusts!”

  “Before this!”

  I looked around. Over her head I said, “I have given him very little. He has given me everything. Even you.”

  Slowly her face quieted, though not in conviction. Then she put a hand inside her cloak. “I thought you would
say that. So I brought this. They’d laugh at it in Saphar, but in Tirs we know better.” She held out her hand. “It’s a talisman. We call them Lossian’s Eyes.”

  I nearly dropped the thing on the spot. It was a flat, silver, single spiral gripping two stones, not beryl or finghend but some even paler green crystal, cut with high-shouldered faceting that made them twinkle like Hawge’s own stare.

  “No, take it,” she thrust it urgently back at me. “It will keep you safe: even... there.”

  She fastened the clasp. I drew her near for a parting embrace. But she put her arms around me and whispered, “Don’t go away from me. Not yet.”

  So I quitted Saphar unwillingly, but with joy in my heart: and also guilt.

  * * * * *

  In summer Ven Elond is usually crowded, but my four-man escort and I were almost alone as we climbed the gentle hills of Saphar Resh, while the Helkent drew ever closer to right and left, and the tall red crag of Lynghyrne, Fang of the Morning, rose ahead to mark the pass itself. Before Aslash, the country alters to the meager highlands where Tirianns learn to hunt, long stony slopes of rosewood and gastath and numberless sandstone scarps. The governor of Aslash received me with honor. I ordered my horse reshod, and retired to my harp.

  Next morning was swelter hot, a true midsummer day, with a zenith hard and pale as turquoise, the hills dancing in a liquid haze of heat, dust curling from Aslash’s unpaven square, and the sweat already thick under my shirt. The escort had found a local guide. The dragon watch reported Hawge had fed on a mob of mountain donkeys yesterday. Everything was auspicious. As I climbed on my horse in the shade of the thin-leaved, thick-twigged syvels, the governor, a taciturn retired soldier, glanced west across the baking white square and remarked, “Luck.”