Master of the Cauldron loti-6

by David Drake

  Rincale made a circular motion with his hand, gesturing to seaward. Well, it would've been seaward under normal conditions; and the moment it indicated a wasteland of stars.

  "-the waters east of Ornifal, the seas, I mean?"

  He paused to make sure these fine ladies understood so complicated a concept as "seas". Sharina, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice, said, "Yes, we understand."

  "Well, the People said," the sailing master explained, "the ones who weren't killed, I mean, that they live on a floating island that sometimes swings close to Ornifal and sometimes swings away. Now, that's nonsense. There's no island in the channel between Bight and Kepulacecil, there isn't and there wasn't then. East of the channel there's reefs that I wouldn't want to thread a fishing dory through, let alone an island. Wherever they come from, it wasn't from an island!"

  "Perhaps," said Tenoctris carefully, "they didn't mean the island was floating in the sea."

  "What?" Rincale said with a frown. "What else is there to float in, milady?"

  Tenoctris pursed her lips, considering what to say. Sharina gestured toward the great worm swimming ahead of them.

  "Oh…," she said with a lopsided grin. "I think we could all imagine other places if we put our minds to it, Master Rincale."

  "Ah," said the sailing master. "Ah. I hadn't thought of that."

  The worm, undulating like the sea in a gentle breeze, swam onward through the stars.

  ***

  "The Heroes, the men our friends are trying to emulate…," Mab said as she and Cashel sat at a table on the lowest of many terraces stepped up from the surface of a crystalline lake. Her hair was now a rich chestnut color, and she was nearly as tall as Cashel. "Were the great warriors who led the citizens of Ronn when the Made Men threatened the city in past ages. The last of them, Valeri, went down to the cavern where the Heroes sleep a hundred and fifty years ago."

  The walls of Ronn slanted back on all sides like steeply sloped mountains, shading the lake's surface even though the sky above was still bright. Cashel saw brightly-colored fish, the largest of them as long as he was tall, swimming lazily through the pure water. Occasionally one rose to gulp air, sending ripples across the shimmering surface.

  "Valeri was a general?" Cashel said. Generals like Lord Waldron decided where to move troops to and how to line them up-and how to feed them, besides, all sorts of things that Cashel couldn't even imagine doing. But Garric did them too. It was wonderful the things Garric could do even though he'd been raised in Barca's Hamlet the same as Cashel.

  "Valeri was a Hero," Mab said, correcting him gently. "So far as generalship went, that was the Queen's affair. There was no subtlety in the King and the minions of his creation, only numbers and savagery. Valeriled. The citizens of Ronn had weapons and the courage to fight; but without a leader, they would have huddled within the walls of the city, more fearful of making a mistake in their ignorance of war than they were of dying."

  The water of the lake below had darkened to the point that the fish were no longer colors, merely darknesses beneath the shimmer of the reflected sky. Lights appeared in the lake or…

  Could they beunder the lake? Balls of blue and red and yellow moved slowly from the edges inward in curving lines. Each was an even distance behind the one that preceded it. Occasionally a great fish swam above a light and hid it for a moment the way a trailing cloud may block the sun.

  "Young people with lanterns dance beneath the lake in the evenings," Mab said, pausing in her discussion of great issues to explain the thing that had Cashel's attention. "There's quite a lot of competition to get on the teams. The floor of the lake is diamond; the dancers are below it."

  "Ah," said Cashel, leaning forward to take in the patterns which the lights wove. He couldn't see the dancers themselves, but the colored lanterns had a stately grace.

  As he watched he realized that the movements of the fish weren't random either. Somebody who fights with a quarterstaff learns to see the rhythms of things that at first glance just seem to be happening. You learn that if you're going to win, anyhow. "Ah!"

  He turned to Mab and smiled, feeling apologetic for not paying attention to what she'd been telling him. He'd listened but he couldn't pretend he'd cared much about it.

  "Mistress," he said now. "It doesn't seem from what you tell me that Ronn has much needed heroes or armies either one in the past long while. Now that you do again, maybe they'll come along. Don't you think?"

  "Ronn has had perfect peace for a hundred and fifty years," Mab said. "Ever since Valeri led her citizens to drive the Made Men back into the Great Ravine in the northern mountains. The people of Ronn didn't see the need of soldiers, and it seems the Queen must not have seen a need either. People believe what they want to believe; even people who've proved themselves in the past to be wise and very powerful. You can be born brave or at least learn to act brave quickly enough; but nobody's born skillful with weapons. Those arts take longer to learn than the Sons have, or than Ronn has before she needs a leader."

  Her smile took on a tinge of sadness; Cashel knew what she meant. Herron and his friends were puppies. Nice puppies, puppies that might grow up to be really good dogs. Trained right they'd be the kind of officials Garric wanted around him, bright active fellows with the good of the kingdom at heart.

  They wouldn't be soldiers, though, any of them except maybe Stasslin. And Cashel didn't much like Stasslin as a person.

  "The Sons would be willing to lead the people of Ronn," Mab said. "In their hearts, they really believe that's what they're going to do when the rest of the citizens realize their danger. And if that happened, they'd be killed at once and everyone who followed them would be killed. They don't have the skills."

  Cashel nodded. The Sons were young in a fashion that children brought up in the borough were never young. By the time you've survived three winters in a peasant village, you know things that the youth of Ronn had never been forced to learn.

  "Ma'am…?" Cashel said, his eyes on the dancers and the fish. The terraces were well filled with spectators, some foreign but mostly citizens of Ronn. From the talk he heard at nearby tables, the locals judged tiny variations from previous dances while Cashel himself was merely seeing the grace of the thing itself.

  "Yes, Master Cashel," Mab said, her voice prodding politely so that he'd say what he was working himself up to.

  He turned and faced her. He'd ever so much be fighting somebody, anybody, than having this conversation; but here he was, and there wasn't any choice about it.

  "Mistress," Cashel said, "if you're thinking I can lead your army, you're wrong-I can't. I wouldn't be any more use than the Sons were. I'm not afraid-and I'm not afraid tofight. But a man with a quarterstaff isn't much good against real soldiers, and I'd been no use at all with a sword."

  "No, I wasn't thinking of that," Mab said with a dismissive wave of her left hand. Cashel wasn't sure whether his eyes were tricking him or if the fingernails really did make five rosy streaks in the air as they passed. "You're a stranger, Master Cashel. No matter what your skills were, the people of Ronn wouldn't follow you; and even you couldn't fight the Made Men alone."

  Her expression changed to one that Cashel couldn't quite describe, serious and, well, affectionate at the same time. Mab touched the back of his hand and added, "Your pardon. Youwould fight the Made Men alone. But not even you could win."

  "I guess I said that already," Cashel said. He was feeling even more uncomfortable than he'd been when he brought the subject up. "Look, mistress-what do you see as the way out of this? Because you do see something, you're not the sort to just wallow in how bad everything is, are you?"

  Mab laughed, clapping her hands in delight at the joke. People at neighboring tables, toying with the remains of their meals or carafes of wine, glanced over in mild surprise.

  "Oh, my, no I'm not that, Master Cashel!" Mab said. "My hope, my plan if you want to put it that way-"

  She smiled in wry self-mockery. />
  "-is that the Heroes will awaken in their cavern and lead the people of Ronn against the King and his minions, hismonsters. That the citizens of Ronn will destroy the enemies of the city and of all men finally instead of scotching them as so often in the past."

  Cashel didn't say anything for a moment, just sat and thought about what she'd said. His staff leaned against the parapet beside him. He didn't pick it up, but he reached back with his right hand and ran his fingertips over the hickory.

  "So you figure the Heroes have been sleeping, then?" he said. "Ah, how long would that have been for, ma'am? Because you said Valeri had gone down there…"

  "Yes, Valeri whom Dasborn brought up as his son and trained," Mab said. "Valeri with blood soaking through the bandage where a sword had found the joint between the halves of his cuirass. And before Dasborn, the twins Minon and Menon, blond and handsome as the very gods till the day they went to cavern to sleep; Minon in his brother's arms, and Menon staggering despite his strength because of the shaft of the broken spear protruding from his thigh."

  The sky was almost dark, now, but lights floated through the air above the tables. They were faint and the color of old parchment, but Cashel could see his companion as clearly as he could've in a full moon.

  "They're sleeping, mistress?" Cashel said quietly. "With wounds like those?"

  "Minon and Menon were sister's sons to great Hrandis," Mab said as though she hadn't heard the question. And perhaps she hadn't: she was looking down toward the diamond lake, but Cashel had the feeling her eyes were seeing much deeper than that, back in time as well as far into the core of the world.

  "Hrandis was shorter than you," she continued, "but his shoulders were even broader. He swung an axe in either hand. When he led the citizens for the last time, he left a swath of the bodies of Made Men the width of both arms and his axe helves all the way from the walls of Ronn to where he fell at the mouth of the Great Ravine."

  "Fell?" said Cashel. "Then Hrandis is…?"

  "Minon and Menon escorted their uncle to the cavern," Mab said, "holding his arms over their shoulders and walking on flowers and the rich garments the grateful citizens threw before their feet. Hrandis and his axes sleep there still; waiting for the city's greatest need, the legend says. Waiting as Virdin waits, the Queen's first champion and Ronn's first Hero. Virdin whom the blades of the Made Men never touched, Virdin who went down to a well-earned rest in the cavern with his white beard spreading like a mountain cataract. Waiting for the city's need."

  Cashel didn't speak. His fingers had been rubbing the familiar smoothness of the wood. Now he took the quarterstaff in both hands for comfort as he thought.

  Mab gave a brittle laugh. "I think Ronn is in need now, don't you, Master Cashel?"

  Before he could answer, she rose to her feet as supple as an otter. "Come," Mab said in a cheerful tone. "The sun's down, so I can show you the way the Heroes guard the walls of the city yet today."

  She took Cashel by the hand and guided him toward one of the platforms that effortlessly lifted Ronn's citizens through the city-mountain's many levels.

  ***

  They'd found several coarse sacks in hanging from the outer wall of the shed. Ilna had handled them; they told her of nothing worse than hot sun and the leaden exhaustion of the laborers who'd chopped the leaves from which the fibers were rotted before being woven. Now Chalcus carried the bread and cheese from Nergura's cupboard in one, leaving Davus' hands free to juggle three stones: two of them of a size to behead a pigeon if thrown accurately, the third big enough to dish in a man's skull.

  Three homunculi, carrying the vine on which their siblings grew, trotted toward the east as soon as they were out of the maze. Ilna didn't see any advantage of the terrain in that direction instead of another, but the creatures seemed in no doubt. They went over a rise bristling with clumps of silk grass and vanished from her life, except for the snatch of angry grumbling a vagrant breeze brought her a moment later.

  Davus looked at Nergura, who'd stayed at the mouth of the maze as the three of them followed the homunculi out. He said, "You may think that you can catch them again if you hurry, wizard. If you do, I will come back for you."

  "Let's go," said Chalcus quietly. "I'd like to get some distance on before we bed down for the night."

  They started forward, walking abreast this time. Ilna was between the two men.

  "Do you think you're better than me?" the wizard shouted. "Is that what you think?"

  Ilna turned. "I know I'm not better than you," she said. "But I'd be worse yet if I said that what you were doing was no business of mine because you weren't doing it to me personally."

  She and her companions started toward the Citadel again. The lowering sun turned the crystal into an orange-red blaze.

  "From this valley they say you are leaving…," sang Chalcus in his lilting tenor. "Do not hasten to bid me adieu…"

  Davus laughed and began to juggle his stones in an intricate pattern, and before long the maze and the wizard were out of sight behind them.

  CHAPTER 7

  "There's no call for concern," said Chalcus in the same light tone with which he'd been singingI'm goin' away to Shengy, "but I believe something's following us with such care that I've caught no more than a whisker here and there."

  "I've thought there's something too," Ilna said, taking the silken lasso from around her waist. "I haven't seen anything I could point to, but the… well, I thought there was."

  She couldn't say, "because of the way the clouds stand overhead," or "because of the way the tree roots crawl across the ground," and expect it to mean anything to people who weren't already disposed to trust her instinct for patterns. Chalcusdid trust her; and so, apparently did Davus. She didn't need to explain the things that shimmered on the surface of her mind.

  They'd entered this valley around mid-afternoon. It was well-watered, but the soil was a sickly yellow-gray and supported only coarse vegetation. Scrub oaks provided a welcome shade and they'd been able to drink their fill from a little creek, but an enemy would find concealment easy. Shortly the sun would go down.

  "It could be a jackal following us hoping for scraps," Davus said conversationally. "There's jackals in these parts."

  He let the two walnut-sized pebbles he'd been juggling along with a larger stone fly off to the side as he bent. He snatched a block of quartz out of the dirt, fist-sized and jagged.

  "There's other things as well," Davus added, grinning at his companions. "Things that the jackals follow, hoping for scraps."

  They saw the crops before they noticed the houses, a double-handful of them on the other side of alternating fields of lentils and grain-oats, Ilna thought, but it might've been barley. The low buildings were made from chunks of pale limestone which'd weathered out of the ground. They were set on one another without mortar. Though the houses were close together, there wasn't a wall around the whole community.

  A man with a girl of ten at his side stepped between two houses and raised his hand. "Welcome, strangers!" he called. "We're just in from the fields. Come join us for dinner."

  More people were appearing in the spaces between the dwellings. None of them were armed. A boy of three or so stared at Ilna, his thumb in his mouth. Suddenly he gave a cry of fear and ran behind a woman breastfeeding an infant. He continued to watch from between her legs.

  "Since the King's law died with the Old King…," Davus said. He fed a thumb-sized lump of chert into his pattern so that he looked like a juggler executing a complex pattern instead of a man ready to bash skulls by throwing stones. "I can't swear that their hospitality is more than a lure. But if something's prowling about us now, I'd as soon have stone walls around me in the dark."

  The three of them continued to saunter forward together. Chalcus raised an eyebrow to Ilna. "Agreed," she said, looping the lasso back around her waist. It would shortly be too dark for her knotted patterns to be of much use, but the noose was no help at all against a whole village-full of
people.

  If they were enemies, which they certainly didn't seem to be.

  "Thank you, good sir," Chalcus called cheerfully. "We're three travellers far from home who thought we were going to spend another night under the stars. Though we've no intention of putting you to trouble-we've slept rough in the past and can do so again."

  "Why do you suppose they have no defenses?" said Davus, speaking quietly but without seeming furtive. "For I can tell you that even in my day, there were things in this part of the land which were less innocent than we are."

  "Some claim there's a part of the world that the Gods bless and cherish," said Chalcus in a similar voice. "Mayhap they're right. Though the chance the likes ofme would ever see such a spot, that I find hard to credit."

  The field had been plowed, not planted in separate holes made with a dibble. A cow lowed, and as they walked toward the houses down three parallel furrows Ilna caught the smell of cattle. There was also another animal odor, one she didn't recognize.

  "I'm Polus," said the man who'd first greeted them. "This is my daughter Malia. Ah, are you traders? We don't get many traders here."

  Polus wore a kilt and separate poncho, both of a vegetable fiber that Ilna hadn't seen before. The material had possibilities, but the workmanship was crude and the embroidered decoration was childishly bad.

  Ilna smiled minusculely. Not the sort of work she herself did as a child, of course.

  "Not traders, just travellers on our way north," said Davus. He caught his small rock and a large one in his left hand. The other large one remained in his right. "If we could sleep in your cow byre tonight, we'd appreciate it."

  They'd walked between two houses and found themselves on the front side of the village; the community, anyway-it wasn't half the size of Barca's Hamlet, which seemed tiny in recollection now that Ilna had experience of the largest cities in the Isles. The houses were built as single rooms on three sides of a square, around a courtyard of tamped earth. All the dwellings faced the same way.