Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Take back her dog to her,” the priestess whispered.

  “I’m going to. But would you come back to life for a whining mongrel, Lady?”

  Raes, Aeronu! Is he not the sorceress’ child? Has she not risked her life to give him birth? What laboring mother would exchange her childbed for Frostflower’s sufferings?

  Never since the child began crying tonight had he stopped. Despite her successes with him during four days, suddenly it seemed to Inmara that she could not comfort him because she was not his mother, because the little, sorcered infant was screaming for the sorceress. Inmara closed her eyes again, and the tears spilled down her cheeks. “Take him,” she whispered. “Take him now. His crying will cover your sounds. Walk softly, and anyone who hears will think you are me, walking with the child.”

  “Until I get to the door and they start wondering why you’re taking him outside on a cloudy night.”

  True. Though comfortable in the hall, it would be chill outside, and might storm again before Thorn reached…wherever Frostflower was. Inmara stood. “I will get his blankets.”

  “What about my guts?”

  The priestess stared at her in contempt. “You are not worthy to carry this child.”

  Thorn shrugged again. “Lady, please, just tell me how to keep him quiet.”

  How distasteful that this swordswoman must be the means of restoring the child to Frostflower! For a moment, now she held him in her arms, Inmara considered not giving him up, after all. But he was more nearly Frostflower’s than hers; the justice of Aeronu and Great Jehandru, it seemed, did not always favor their own priests and priestesses. Inmara changed the infant’s breech-cloth for the last time, wrapped him in his soft blanket from the cradle and in a tightly-woven, oiled outer blanket to keep off the rain if it fell. Then she made her final decision.

  “At the dais-end of the long hall,” she whispered, “is the beginning of an ancient tunnel. You will descend and pass through a round chamber. Walk reverently: it is our place of ablutive purification. On the other side of the chamber the tunnel branches. One branch leads up into the garden, from which you could not escape. The other passage leads beneath the length of the Farm, and will bring you up in Beldrise Forest, beyond the outer wall to the east, an hour’s walk from the river Glant. You will see the garden passage at once. The safe passage begins far to the right. The entrance is narrow—you may not see it at first in the mosaic design—and you will know you are in the right passage when you see bare places where tiles have fallen and roots pushed through.”

  “But you know it’s clear all the way to the outside, Lady?”

  “I walked it twice, when I came here as Maldron’s bride. Several of the children have walked it often, and the warriors keep a few shrines in it and sometimes, I think, use it to leave the Farm for a short while.”

  Thorn grunted. “So I might run into someone down there.”

  “You would prefer to leave by the open wheelpath and the guarded gate? Warrior, if I did not mean to return this child safely to the sorceress, I would not give him to you.”

  The warrior nodded, sheathed her dagger, and touched fist to lips in a salute more respectful than Inmara would have expected from her. Then she held out her arms.

  “You will need a candle,” said the priestess. “They are in the chest beneath my bed.” She could more easily have gotten the candle herself, but she clung to the excuse for holding the babe a few moments longer.

  Thorn found a candle, thrust it knifelike through her belt, and came for the child. He had almost stopped crying, but started again at the transfer. “Go quickly,” whispered Inmara. “Do not light your candle until you reach the dais.”

  The warrior seemed about to speak, but did not. Inmara hoped she had wanted to say something grateful, for which her rough tongue could not find words. “Thorn,” the priestess added, “do not let her be captured again with him.”

  “I won’t let his Reverence take any one of us alive.” Thorn glanced downwards. “Come on, you damn dog.”

  The warrior left, pushing the curtain aside with her elbow. Inmara sat on the bed. Dowl came, looked up at her face, whined, sat, and put one front paw on her lap. The priestess fondled his shaggy ears for a moment, then patted him once and lifted his paw from her lap. He stood, shook himself, and padded out, pushing past the curtain in his turn and following the swordswoman.

  Inmara lay on her bed, clenched her fists, and sobbed into her pillow. She must think of what to say to Maldron. But first she must offer up prayers of the safety of her little Terndasen…no, he was Frostflower’s Starwind. Ah, Aeronu and Jehandru, have I acted well? And I must rest—must try, despite my aches, to sleep for a while. To sleep and forget.

  CHAPTER 8

  How the Hell did you hold a baby with one arm? And how in Azkor’s name did you shut the brat up? Gods, thought Thorn, you’d think it would squall its damn throat raw. Every bloody farmer in the hall must be awake by now, and getting impatient for Inmara to shut him up. Any moment the old nurse or somebody else would be coming out to help.

  At least Thorn had made it to the dais. “Shut up or maybe I’ll bite your damn nose off,” she muttered. Amazingly, the grub left off squalling and began to whimper. “All right. Now hold still, Smardon gut you,” the warrior added, hoping the trick would work again. It did not. The grub kept on squirming. Apparently Smardon didn’t scare it so much as mother.

  Now Thorn could hear four paws padding up behind her. So the mutt had finally decided to come along, eh? Squeezing her right arm tighter around the brat’s middle, trying to ignore the wiggling arms and legs, half wondering if she was still holding it right-side-up, she managed to free her left hand, pull the candle from her belt, and light it at the constant-wick.

  She had never been all the way to a farmer’s dais before and might never be again. She had serious doubts about following Inmara’s advice—at every step down the hall she had been ready to turn around and head for the front door and the open fields—but even if the priestess was setting a trap, it had almost been worth it just to get a glimpse at these mosaics. There was the Sheaf of the Wheat God, the Dripping Comb of the Bee Goddess, the Blossom Wreath of the Apple God, all glistering with the patina of years, cleanliness, and new gilding. Gods! thought the swordswoman, I’d like to see this by daylight.

  “Well, come on, dog. Time to get the Hellbog out of here.” Ducking behind the dais-wall, she came to an archway of ancient wood. Her left hand trembled slightly as she moved the candle up and around to view the work more closely. The mosaics had been beautiful, but this was awesome. Even in the candlelight, she could see the darkness of age in the wood grain. The gilding had been renewed not long ago, so that the carvings themselves shone as if they were new, against the background of wood cut lifetimes ago. The carving…you never found carving like this in anything less than two lifetimes old. Even the small wooden cloak-toggle carved in a similar style, which Thorn had seen on her one trip to Five Roads Crossing, had been priced at two hundred goldens, more than Slicer’s sheen-amber. And here was an entire doorway of such carvings—strong, clean lines forming ancient, mysterious, sometimes unrecognizable versions of the holy symbols—and the farmers were on everyday terms with it as part of their dwelling! If she had not had a baby in one arm and a candle in the other, Thorn would have liked to trace her fingertip through one or two of the ancient symbols; but she knew she would not quite have dared touch the wood.

  Warriors’ God! It was not worth losing her guts for. Pushing aside the linen doorcurtain with one elbow, she went through into the tunnel. The tunnel walls were completely covered with mosaics. Fortunately, after seeing the carved wood, she was no longer so much tempted to stop and gawk. Besides, if the grub started wailing again before she got out of the farmers’ hearing, they would think it pretty damn suspicious that the priestess was taking him down into the tunnel.

  By the time she got to the circular room, she judged she was pretty well out of their earshot. The
grub was being unbelievably good, and the dog was padding along without so much as its usual silly whine, so Thorn allowed herself a glance around. This time she was more curious than impressed. The drain in the floor and the assorted basins and fancy brushes waiting around amused her, and that was all. More than one farmer had told her that a ritual ablution was the only purification a warrior needed to be fit for the touch of a priest, but none of them had ever gotten her down to the ablution-room. Now she finally had a look at one, she decided a person could get just as clean in a good river, or even in a barracks bath-house.

  She moved through the round chamber, listening for sounds of pursuit and wondering what the Hellbog she could do down here if the priestess were betraying her. This was a good place for a trap. She found where Inmara had told her to go: a narrow opening partially camouflaged between two long vertical stripes of tile symbolizing justice and mercy. She almost turned up the other passage instead, with ideas of hiding in the garden until the chase went by. But… Warriors’ God! she had been around the garden wall, and she knew the garden would be a dead end. At least there was a chance of the other tunnel’s coming up outside the Farm.

  She slipped between the vertical stripes. Only three strides in, she noticed a bare patch in the wall where some of the tile had fallen. Large flagstones replaced tile on the floor. The passage was clean, floor and all; but the wall mosaic had not been repaired.

  In the days when farmers could be killed during raids, every hall was supposed to have had one or two escape tunnels. Thorn wondered if Maldron’s tunnel had been tiled from the beginning, or if the mosaics had been added after priests’ bodies became sacred (and warriors’ bodies did not).

  The tunnel was getting rougher now. More and more patches of mosaic had fallen. Once or twice she saw broken tile that had never been swept from the floor. Every so often there was a root poking down through the ceiling. Inmara had told the truth about that, at least. A nice, safe mock-wilderness for the farmer brats to pretend they were brave and in some kind of danger. Well, maybe they were at that; one of these tunnels was supposed to have caved in once, somewhere near the middle.

  In places the flagstones ended for anywhere from two to thirty strides. If the decorations were put in between the time the priests stopped needing the tunnel and the time they more or less stopped using it at all, maybe the floor had never been finished. More likely some of the stones had been pulled up and carted off for use elsewhere, or covered by dirt washing down from breaks in the wall and secondary entrances. Thorn could spot a secondary entrance, or what might have been an entrance, somewhere around most of the major disappearances of floor stones. Originally, the various ways into and out of the tunnel would have been carefully hidden, so that attacking warriors would not get in and stop the priestly family’s escape. Now, many of the entrances were either clogged entirely by the dirtfalls and debris of years, or completely open and letting in nightglow and fresh air. They had to keep some of the secondary entrances open, if the warriors had shrines down here; you could be damn sure Maldron did not let his cattle use the priests’ entrance in the hall.

  At one of the openings, a sudden draft blew out Thorn’s candle. The grub, who seemed finally to be asleep, took it in stride; but Dowl yelped and whimpered. “Shut up, dog,” said Thorn. “You aren’t burned.”

  The swordswoman climbed up the narrow steps, cut long ago in the earth and matted now with grass and moss. Feeling at once free and exposed, she took a careful look around. The moon was a white smudge behind the clouds, and the night was too dark to make out how far she had gotten from the unlighted hall. She thought she could glimpse a dark barrier to the east. That might be the outer wall, if it wasn’t a stretch of fruit trees.

  Maldron had taken over his neighboring farmers’ land to the south and enlarged his walls in that direction. Maybe he had taken over some of Beldrise Forest and enlarged his wall to the east as well, making the end of the ancient tunnel useless. Well, Thorn would go on trusting Inmara for now.

  She descended again, sitting on the middle steps to fish out her firebox and relight her candle. The dog huddled around her, whining and getting its floppy head in her way. She had just room on the stairs to push him down and try to hold him with one foot. Then, remembering how Frost had left the mutt with the baby, she put it on the step beside her and said, “Earn your damn food, dog. Watch the brat.”

  Dowl moved into position on the steps below the grub and sat still. When Thorn got her candle relit, she saw the dog was taking her command in earnest, hunching close as a protective barrier in case the brat tried to roll off the step, and looking up at the warrior expectantly. “Good mutt,” said Thorn. She put away her fire-making equipment one-handed, managed to gather the little bugger up again, and went down the rest of the steps.

  Seven or eight score paces farther along, she came to one of the warriors’ shrines the priestess had mentioned. An alcove about six paces deep and maybe eight across had been hollowed out along the right-hand side of the tunnel. It seemed to date at least from the time the mosaics were first put in. It was tiled like the rest of the tunnel wall; but, where along the rest of the wall patches had been left broken, in the alcove they had been mended. Even by candlelight, you could tell where the tiles in mended places did not quite match those of the original design. Thorn guessed that fallen tiles from other parts of the tunnel had been brought here for the repair work. In a couple of spots, a whole symbol seemed to have been knocked out on purpose and a new one put in, as if the shrine had first been made for some other god or goddess than the one who now occupied it.

  It was a shrine to the Warriors’ God now. The new patches were the Crossed Swords, the Bloody Spear, and the Flaming Shroud. The statue was tiny, dwarfed by its own niche at the back of the alcove; but even before Thorn approached for a closer look, she knew Whose image it would be.

  It was ancient. That explained why Maldron’s women used a statue too small for the niche—its venerability made up for its size. It was dark wood, carved in the same style as the door to the tunnel, and probably rubbed with blood to finish it off. The nose and the tip of the spear had been broken off and replaced with wax.

  A brazier stood in front of the niche, a basket of kindling and wood chips waited to the right, and a basket of bread to the left.

  Damn! thought the swordswoman. Warriors’ God, I know I promised You a sacrifice at the first statue I found of You, but I meant after this whole mess was done with and Frostflower had the brat safe.

  But she could not remember making that qualification in so many words. She had just promised the first statue of the Warriors’ God she found. Damn it to Hellbog, why couldn’t the baskets have been empty? Well, He could not expect her to stop in the middle of her escape, could He? But why had the damn shrine been put here in the first place, if not so that priestly families could stop and burn a sacrifice on their way out? If they could risk it, with a raid going on above them, what excuse did Thorn have for cheating on her word? Besides, she had already wasted a few moments here, a few moments there, gawking at the doorway, staring around at the ablution chamber and the bloody mosaics, climbing all the way up to take a look at the bloody clouds… Hellstink, if she had been walking straight ahead keeping her addled wits on escaping, she would not even have known Whose statue this was.

  No, that was not just, either. Inmara had told her that the warriors kept shrines down here, and Who else would warriors have in their shrines? She should have known this would happen when she decided to trust the priestess. Well, if Inmara was cheating her, she had already wasted too much time; and if the priestess was playing her true, she had the time to waste. Besides, if she wanted to keep the Warriors’ God on her side the rest of the way, she had damn well better not cheat on her promise to Him now.

  There was a thick marble sacrifice-ledge jutting out about waist-high on each side of the curving wall of the shrine, but Thorn decided the grub would be safer on the floor. She put it down on the left-han
d side and told Dowl to watch it again. Satisfied the mutt was at his post, she returned to the statue and made a fire in the brazing-pan, lighting it with her candle.

  The bread was in sacrifice-sized loaves almost as big as a fist. It was maybe half a hen’s-hatching old; but the basket was almost empty. That meant warriors came down here pretty often to sacrifice. She dug Stabber’s point a little way into the pad of her left fourth finger, squeezed nine drops of blood onto the bread, and put it on the brazier at once. She should have stood with her fist to her lips in a salute until the bread was unrecognizable; instead, she stood only for the length of two hundred heartbeats, not counting the times she broke the salute to poke up the fire and add another few pieces of kindling. When most of the bread’s surface was pretty well singed, when the dog was yapping and the brat fussing—probably at the sacred stench of burning bread and blood—Thorn guessed the God would understand if she left early.

  She turned and saw the mongrel was no longer lying beside the grub, but standing over it, looking toward the opening of the alcove. Well, you could hardly blame him for turning his nose toward the fresher air.

  As soon as Thorn picked up the brat, Dowl loped out into the tunnel and stood there, looking down it, yipping and wagging his silly tail. “Shut up, grub,” Thorn muttered. She shoved her cut finger into its mouth, giving it a chance to suck blood. It fell quiet and she stood listening.

  Someone was coming.

  There was no sense trying to run. The footsteps were too close—a lopsided thumping. If it had not been for the dog and the brat, she would have heard it sooner. Maybe she had, and assumed without thinking that it was the dog banging its fool tail again, out of rhythm.

  The first of Inmara’s bitches appeared at the alcove entrance. Clopmule? I just put iron into Clopmule six days ago! Why the Hell would the priestess send Clopmule—why would the limping cow outdistance all the others? Thorn could not even hear any more footsteps behind.