The Eye of Night
Page 4
“I believe you,” I said. “I don't know how you know these things, but they ring true. And I, too, have dreamed of the Raven's Egg; it means something to me. Let me go with you into the North. I may be able to help you.”
“You will, I'm sure.” Hwyn smiled. “Now that you've stopped suspecting me, I think I couldn't ask for a better companion.”
“If it makes any difference,” I said, “I mistrusted Trenara for a while as well. When I noticed your scars I began to suspect her of mistreating you. But I trusted Dannoth, and would have sung his praises all the way back to Annelon if I hadn't happened to wake in the night and see his secrets unmasked. Was there a person I didn't misjudge?”
“Why do you trust me now?” Hwyn asked, only half smiling.
“I saw you risk the Eye of Night, and your life, to save Trenara. I heard you ask mercy for your enemy. What room is left for doubting you?”
“Then you really will rush off with us into the darkness? We may never return alive,” she said.
“Where else should I go?” I said. “I'm finished with the Order. My family is dead. My patrimony is long gone. Any friends I ever had lost patience with me either when I joined the Order or when I left it. What door did I leave open for myself but death? You at least have offered me life—with chaos. And I'm determined not to part company until I've guessed your name— which must be a name of power, because you've told me nearly everything else.”
She gestured me to silence with one finger poised over my lips, almost but not quite touching. “Hush. I've certainly told you too much; I've been trusting you in spite of myself. Yes, come with me, by all means—please come. Who knows but the gods may have sent you to Kelgarran Hall for just that purpose?”
I laughed dryly. “If they care which way I go, or whether I live or die, they have an odd way of showing it. They told me nothing at the Mirror of St. Fiern, you know. Or didn't you hear that part of my story?”
“I did,” Hwyn said. “You were too drunk on Trenara's presence to notice how my ears almost stood up like a cat's when you spoke of the Mirror. I hung on every word.
“You see, I used to live in St. Fiern's Town. Don't think you were the only pilgrim ever to walk away disappointed. We townspeople have seen them all: the ones who slink away downcast, the ones who tell transparent lies about wonders they claim to have seen. We approach the Mirror more cautiously, less hopefully than you pilgrims do; in fact, the townspeople rarely seek its wisdom. It's not only the disappointments. We've seen those changed souls who rise laughing or weeping from the lakeside, the ones whose stories make the Lake-Shrine famous. And they frighten us.
“After all, merchants don't want to give up their wealth at a vision's command. Think what it took to make you give away your goods: was theirs, too, a vision of death that made wealth seem contemptible? And a warrior who casts his sword into the waters to live peaceably—how will he earn his bread? For us, the Mirror is as full of dread as of wonder. But after some years I, too, summoned the courage to approach the pool.
“I am half blind,” said Hwyn, “and I feared I might see nothing. So when I bent over the pool and no clear vision appeared, I lost patience and cast myself in.
“Under the murky water there was no light, but a thousand voices. I stayed listening until I nearly drowned. Some pilgrim pulled me out by the hair, senseless and all but dead. I had such dreams.” She shook her head and looked at me searchingly with her right eye, the left one as always impenetrable. “People pumped water out of my lungs and demanded what I had seen, but I couldn't find the words to tell them. Ever since then I've had what they call the ‘second sight,’ the dreams that have turned my path to the North—though what I saw, with my eyes, was no more than the blank blackness under the water. No more than you saw.”
I drew in a slow breath, as though I had discovered breathing for the first time. “You are the Mirror of St. Fiern to me,” I said. “You have turned my darkness into vision. I will follow you to the world's end.”
“To the world's beginning,” Hwyn corrected me, as the ghostly craft carried us into the unknown.
3
WHITE CATS AND GOLDEN CHAINS
The ghost-pilot sailed us northward for a day and a night as we lived off the dried meat and biscuits in the packs and wondered where we would reach land. There were fishing-nets in the boat, and I trailed them over the side experimentally, without much hope: fishing needs stillness, and we never stopped. On the morning of the second day, I could see the roofs of a city before us to the northeast, set afire by the rising sun.
“It's a walled city—see there?” I pointed into the brightness.
Hwyn shook her head. “I can't see that far.”
“Sorry!”
“No need to be squeamish about it,” she said. “It's a fact of my life. It will be good to have someone to be eyes for me, now and then. Is it a big city?”
“Not as big as Kelgarran, I think. It's still a long way from here, so it's hard to tell. I think it must be Sebrin. I'll know when I see the shape of the harbor.”
“You've been there?”
“No,” I said. “But I can recall seeing a map of these parts. The Pengar River feeds Lake Garran at Sebrin; the harbor is in an inlet below the falls. We won't be able to go farther north by boat from here, but we may sell the boat and buy provisions for an overland journey. That is, if we can find some buyer willing to overlook the lack of a rudder.”
But the ghost had other ideas. With the town in sight, the boat becalmed itself in the shallows under another clump of willows as perversely as it had unfurled its own sail. As I fiddled with the sheets to see whether I could take control of the craft myself, the boat abruptly vanished under us, leaving us to fish out all our worldly possessions: the packs, the tin cups, the fishing-nets, and the water-skins. These, at least, showed no sign of dissolving into air: Conor had left us with something after all. “Well,” I said, “we won't be selling any boat.”
“We can get a few days' labor in town,” Hwyn said. “We'll re-provision ourselves, then find out the lay of the land for the next stage of the journey.”
“What sort of day-labor will we find?” I said. “I've been relying on the Key of the Tarvon Order to bring me to shelter—in monasteries, temples, and pious households. But I can't bring two women into a house of celibate brothers.”
Hwyn laughed. “With a few stolen clothes, I could pose as a boy—but Trenara, never.”
“And to tell you the truth, I'm not sure I could pass as a priest anymore,” I said, “or that I could stomach it. My tonsure's grown out, my beard's grown back, my habit's in ruins, and to restore it all would seem a sort of hypocrisy.”
“But honesty has its cost,” said Hwyn. “What kind of work can you do?”
“That's the terrible question,” I said. “There's a Tarvon house in Sebrin, so I'll never find work as a scribe. I kept my father's account ledgers, but no merchant could be mad enough to entrust that task to a stranger. I've done almost everything there is to do on a ship or a shipyard—except cooking, the only thing likely to be of use here. Even building boats will be different here than at the seashore. I've never farmed, never hunted, never herded, never been in service. What about you? What work have you done?”
“None of the things you've done and most of the ones you haven't. Can you sing?” Hwyn said.
“Sing? Of course. Any priest can sing. What earthly use is that?”
“The Feast of the Bright Goddess isn't far away,” she said. “If we can scrape by till then hauling loads or scrubbing pots, we might get a hatful of silver singing in the streets.”
“Are you a minstrel, then?”
“Among other things,” she said. “It's not a steady living by itself, but when the great feasts roll around, there's no pleasanter way to earn your bread. Not just in coin, either: before Trenara came with me, I tricked my way into strongholds as a player, not a servant—though to tell the truth, the rich treat the two much the same.”
“Sometimes,” Hwyn said. “More often on the holiday itself than before it. But if we can find work on one of the farms outside the walls, at least we will not be penniless when we reach the wall. They'll let you in sooner if they think you have money to spend; two coins to jingle against each other are sometimes enough.”
Neither of us had so much as a farthing, so we set about looking for day-labor. The first few farmhouses were discouraging: in one fly-infested kitchen, the franklin's wife told us they had no shortage of hands; in a neater, more prosperous-looking farmhouse, they said that idiots were all right with proper supervision, but they'd sooner throw fresh cream to the hogs than hire a lazy priest. Outside a third farmhouse, the landowner gave Trenara such a leer that Hwyn, without any pretense of civility, grabbed us both by the arm and hurried us back to the road.
“If you steer clear of everyone that leers at Trenara, the only work you'll find will be in a house of holy sisters,” I said, “and maybe not there, either.”
“If that were all that bothered me, I'd resign myself,” Hwyn said. “But that man—that man had a smell of blood about him. Truesight is a chancy thing, so it may mean much or little, but that man looked at her as prey, and I will not lead her across his threshold.”
I nodded, out of my depth, and we walked on, the stone walls of Sebrin growing larger before us.
Just outside the walls stood a slate-roofed three-story house of sturdy fieldstone, strangely out of keeping with its surroundings: a townsman's house out of town. There were no sprawling grainfields about it, but a neat kitchen-garden, a small chicken shed, a cow-byre, and an ample stable. On the gray stone wall hung a painted sign of a plump, contented white cat. So far it looked promising enough, but I had to ask myself why such a prosperous-looking inn was outside the town wall when the best-heeled customers would want to be in the center, close to the market or the count's hall.
The answer was immediately apparent when I stepped in the door. A languid girl in a green Iskarrian robe and several ropes of pearls stretched across a divan, her yellow hair disordered. At the sight of me, she started up indignantly: “What, already? It's early for trade.”
A black-haired woman in purple Magyan silks, a gaudy belt about her hips, grinned wolfishly as the innkeeper brought her a breakfast of beer and cheese. “A holy brother goes about his devotions early, Aude, don't you know?” Taking a swallow of beer, she stared at me over the rim of her tankard. “You'll have to wait till after breakfast, Tarvon.” Even in the dim light, I could see the emeralds dangling from her ears in the Iskarrian fashion, the bright chips of crystal glued to each fingernail in the manner of the Western Islanders.
“It's the innkeeper we're looking for,” said Hwyn, emerging from behind me. “With the festival at hand, a few extra hands at sweeping and scrubbing won't come amiss, will they?”
“Hwyn,” I said, grabbing her shoulder as forcefully as she had seized my elbow at our last stop. Was it possible she didn't know what all this exotic finery meant? Even if she could not see, could she not guess what lay behind the second woman's taunt?
The innkeeper, undismayed, looked us over like merchandise. “Penny apiece plus table-leavings for today, noon to midnight. We'll talk about tomorrow when I see how you work.”
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, “but I need to talk this over with my—” I stumbled on what to call Hwyn and Trenara: sisters would not be believed, and anything else would sound, in that place, too much like a smirking euphemism for something else.
“We'll let you know,” Hwyn told the innkeeper sweetly, then went outside without any further arm-twisting, Trenara following silently.
“Look, Hwyn,” I said when the thick oaken door closed solidly behind me, “I may not have truesight, but I haven't been away from the ports long enough to have forgotten what sort of trade those ladies must be expecting.”
“I know,” said Hwyn calmly.
“I'm not trying to be monkish about this,” I said, “but if you're worried about Trenara—”
“Trenara's in no danger here,” Hwyn said, “and this time I'm not speaking from truesight, but from plain experience. Those ladies are courtesans, not slaves of some bawd. Did you notice how the innkeeper waited on them? How he didn't speak till they'd spoken? They may be prostitutes, but they sell themselves for gold and rent rooms with silver, and they'll quit their costly quarters sooner than let a stranger be sold in this inn to undercut their trade. No whoremaster will cross this threshold while they lodge here, and if Trenara were capable of going into the trade on her own, they'd prevent it. They'll protect her better than I can.”
“Oh,” was all I could say, after opening and shutting my mouth a couple of times like a fish.
To my surprise, Hwyn didn't laugh at me. She reached out tentatively, almost fearfully, with one spidery hand, placing it on my arm only when she could see that I wasn't retreating from her. “This really isn't your world, is it?” she said. “Not even in your seafaring days.”
“It's all one world,” I said. “I have to learn to live in it. I haven't given enough thought to how I shall earn my keep without my father's trading ships, without the Order.”
“It doesn't have to be here,” Hwyn said. “I didn't choose this place as some sort of cruel test. It's a long fall from priest in a monastery to drudge in a brothel, and if you can't bear it—”
That touched off some small flare of pride in me. “I can bear it,” I said. “What do you think? Are his terms fair?”
“It's not what I might have hoped,” Hwyn said, “but it may be the best we can get, for now. They won't be quite desperate till the festival's on, and you can see by our reception in the farmsteads that we don't cut a promising figure: I'm too small, Trenara's too fine, and you're at once too clerical and not clerical enough, if you follow my line of thought.”
“Yes,” I said, “I think you're right. Too priestly for farm work and not enough to look trustworthy.”
“We'll have to explain about Trenara,” Hwyn said, “and talk one of the courtesans into guarding her. If there's no problem with that, I think we should take the penny and hope for better another day. What do you say?”
My heart sat low in my stomach, but I had already spoken, and would not take it back. And so in the heat of the afternoon, we were scrubbing last night's beer-stains off the sticky public-room floor while Trenara watched dreamily, as though this were a feat of skill and daring scarcely glimpsed in the world. Blond Aude and black-haired Grana had vanished upstairs to their scented and cushioned rooms, so at least there was none to taunt me as I wrung out the sodden sleeves of my cassock on the gummy floor and tried for the hundredth time to roll them out of the way. I could not help noticing that little Hwyn had covered twice the length of floor I had covered, and that the sleeves of her colorless shift stayed rolled up. There's an art to everything, I thought. It's bound to get better with practice.
By nightfall, we'd helped the more regular drudges sweep out the perfumed boudoirs of the inn's eight courtesans, wash linens stiff and musky with old pleasures, air out little-used rooms in the attic for the festival travelers, dust the great bedsteads, spread fresh coverlets, fill pallets with fresh straw for common-room sleepers, shovel the muck from the stable and spread it in the kitchen-garden, and fill the kitchen's huge cauldrons with water from a well that seemed too far away. The first time I saw Hwyn laboring under a yoke of buckets that looked like they must be heavier than herself, I hurried to her aid, cursing the innkeeper under my breath for sending her on such an errand. I was ashamed to find that I could walk no faster under them than she, and spilled more trying to prove myself stronger. Either she was made of stronger stuff than I had recognized, or years of copying old scriptures had made me too soft for the world. In
furious whispers I cursed the Order and myself for making me unfit for the life I must lead.
After a few trips with the yoke, I was ready to drop, and the first customers had scarcely begun pounding mugs on the table for refills of the inn's watery excuse for beer. The innkeeper, Morvath, manned the tap himself, no doubt from the misguided impression that his drudges were dying to steal the sickly yellow fluid he sold as beer. His daughter and another maid wore themselves out running to and fro with full mugs and empty mugs, but there was still enough fetching and carrying left to exhaust me and Hwyn. I toted so many trenchers of chicken stew that I stopped being hungry long before I found the chance to take any of the promised table-leavings. Trenara fared better: Grana, not wanting another dark-haired beauty on display, had paid the scullery maid to keep her out of sight and content, which she did by feeding her tidbits and filling her lap with a cat as sleek and spoiled as the one painted on the inn's sign. Whenever my work brought me through the scullery, I could see the two of them, Trenara and the cat, tranquil amid the commotion of the inn's nightly work.
Once I stole a moment there to lean on the wall and catch my breath, but the sight of Hwyn lugging another heavy bucket of water shamed me back to work, feet throbbing, back aching, head pounding. I had worked this hard before—there were no idle hands on my father's trading ships—but that had been when the wind and weather demanded it, when every ounce of strength was needed to keep the ocean beneath us instead of above us. To throw this sort of killing effort into sating the greed of old tradesmen for overpriced stew, execrable beer, and expensively perfumed womanhood seemed disproportionate, ludicrous, insane. And at every turn I was chided: I folded the sheets wrong, left muddy footprints on the floor I'd washed, splashed too much water, spilled the precious beer, didn't come fast enough when someone shouted.