The King shouted, “Kill the monster!” But the words still hung in the air when the child urinated on the King from above. He erupted in flame, and there was no doubt now who ruled in the palace. The grey shadow had come in from the walls.
She looked at Amasa, and smiled. “Because you were the holiest,” she said, “I brought you here.”
Amasa tried to flee the city. He did not know the way. He passed a palmer who knelt at a fountain that flowed from virgin stone, and asked, “How can I leave Hierusalem?”
“No one leaves,” the palmer said in surprise. As Amasa went on, he saw the palmer bend to continue scrubbing at a baby’s hands. Amasa tried to steer by the patterns of the stars, but no matter which direction he ran, the roads all bent toward one road, and that road led to a single gate. And in the gate the child waited for him. Only she was no longer a child. Her slate-grey body was heavy-breasted now, and she smiled at Amasa and took him in her arms, refused to be denied. “I am Dalmanutha,” she whispered, “and you are following my road. I am Acrasia, and I will teach you joy.”
She took him to a bower on the palace grounds, and taught him the agony of bliss. Every time she mated with him, she conceived, and in hours a child was born. He watched each one come to adulthood in hours, watched them go out into the city and affix themselves each to a human, some man, some woman, or some child. “Where one forest is gone,” Dalmanutha whispered to him, “another will rise to take its place.”
In vain he looked for butterflies.
“Gone, all gone, Amasa,” Acrasia said. “They were all the wisdom that you learned from my ancestors, but they were not enough, for you hadn’t the heart to kill a dragon that was as beautiful as man.” And she was beautiful, and every day and every night she came to him and conceived again and again, telling him of the day not long from now when she would unlock the seals of the gates of Hierusalem and send her bright angels out into the forest of man to dwell in the trees and mate with them again.
More than once he tried to kill himself. But she only laughed at him as he lay with bloodless gashes in his neck, with lungs collapsed, with poison foul-tasting in his mouth. “You can’t die, my Saint Amasa,” she said. “Father of Angels, you can’t die. For you broke a wise, a cruel, a kind and gentle butterfly.”
THE EVER-AFTER
eluki bes shahar
Ruana Rulane was a hero. Practically speaking, in terms of semantics and sex, she should have been a heroine, but heroines are rather more associated with the staunch maintenance of husbands, children, and the gentler arts of domestic order.
But Ruana Rulane was a hero—which is to say, vastly inconvenient except in time of war. And this was peacetime.
This was not to say she wasn’t a well-tried and acceptable hero, as self-willed anarchic moralists go. She had slain giants, faced down bandits, meddled where she wasn’t wanted for the sheer joy of it, gotten brief glory and a little legend and would have had more if she’d stopped in any of the places willing to take in a hero and a sword.
But she didn’t. Like most heroes, she was on a quest. Like some heroes, she was pretty sure she’d thrown over her every happiness in favor of having her own way. She’d listened too hard one day to an inner voice that told her she was special, and after a solid young lifetime of backing and forthing, missed opportunities and bad choices, she’d followed her convictions to the point where she was sitting in a worn saddle on an indifferent horse on a muddy road, hearing the carved bone rings in her hair go rattle-click and watching someone else’s destiny make a royal nuisance of itself in front of her.
Destiny blocked the road, spilled into the rut-wet, half-plowed spring fields, and squandered itself joyously on the land around. Destiny was two dozen of the Grey Duke’s soldiers and a jagranatha more glorious than anything found outside a festival procession in the war-duke’s capital. The only trouble with the jagranatha was that it was not in the city. It was in the country, and so it was in a ditch. And the fourteen milk-white oxen with gilded horns and golden nose-rings who drew it went with such commendable gravity and unstoppable deliberation that the jagranatha was now wedged eternally into the sloppy space between the fields and the road.
This was a grave misfortune for the Grey Duke and whatever possession of his needed to travel with such pomp. But it did not seem to contain, as a situation, the seeds of any wrong whatsoever that needed to be righted, and Ruana did not intend to let her horse stand and acquire whatever Crownking-forgotten ailments an overheated nag left standing in cold mud could catch. So she turned her beast aside for a politic detour over the half-plowed fields, and with inevitability was hailed back by the soldiers to help pull the sacred cart out of the ditch.
One more horse and one more body wasn’t going to make any difference. Ruana knew it. The soldiers knew it. But they were all of them, including the oxen, snabbled by destiny, sorcery, or the perversity of human nature, and so the soldiers called to her, and she came, and the jibes started out “boy” and went on “woman” and then somebody knew her story.
Ruana Rulane, the Twiceborn. Genuine hero, certified oddity, ripe with triumph and tragedy and perils surmounted. They were disappointed that she didn’t look more like a glittering ale-house legend, though the Grey Duke’s men of all people should have known better. They began jostling one another as men do, badgering their disappointment into contempt, angry and somehow cheated that they couldn’t claim the pleasant conquests and certifications of grace that she could and didn’t. And then it came, as it had to. The sword, the tale, and the challenge, and Ruana stood in the cold mud to hear it.
Half a year, a year ago (tales varied), it came to the Grey Duke’s attention that there was something new in his domain, and he wanted it. This much was fact. The lightning, firedrakes, visions, and intimations godly and demonic varied from man to man. Ruana did her best, in kindness, to believe all of them. In the end the Duke, well and truly impressed by something, had sent one of the wide carts that conveyed idols through his city into the dispirited mud of the northwest to claim his prize.
They’d found it. They were bringing it back. And possibly by autumn the Grey Duke’s soldiers escorting the jagranatha would have covered the one-week-on-horseback’s distance to the city.
It was a sword, they said, that killed anyone who touched it except a true hero. And then they laughed and let the matter lie for a moment, and one of them cuffed the drover back to his place at the head of the first yoke of oxen.
The oxen heaved, the jagranatha tipped, and there was a forerunnering sound of sliding. Then Ruana saw the sword. It was the dreaming, lit-seawater green of meteoric glass, shimmering wicked, wide-bladed and translucent.
Love me, it said, and Ruana’s spirit lived in her eyes to answer.
Then there was a winking flame of rubies caught cloudy candyfire in the blade, and Ruana looked away, heartsick. A mock blade. A ritual blade. Nobody jewelled a sword-blade he meant to use.
But there was more noisy fuss as the Grey Duke’s magic sword slid into the mud and lay glinting on its jellied surface, and gradually Ruana, standing flatfoot and perilous with the mud sliding intimate into her boots, realized none of the Grey Duke’s swordsmen dared touch it. Priests had loaded it with chants and wooden tongs, priests who were now fat and warm and fuddled with wine at the best inn to be reached in a day’s journey.
Just before the moment when twenty cold and irritated soldiers doing a job both dangerous and ridiculous decided to prove to a traveller with a legend that she could be miserable too, Ruana walked out from among them and picked up the sword that killed with a touch.
She knew priests and didn’t like them. Most of them lied.
It was a two-handed sword—had to be, with that size—but the black-bone hilt was grooved to make it possible to lift one-handed. There was a ruby round as an egg and clear as water in the pommel, and the weapon rallied sweetly, with lightsome balance.
She did not die.
“Happen it be I’ll take thi
s toy off to yon grey fat chanters for you, and spare you each the trouble of being where the other is.” Her voice was husky, having been forced to loudness on a number of battlefields.
They wouldn’t come near her. They didn’t stop her. She could have taken the sword anywhere she chose. But Ruana knew the name of the inn the priests would be at and had every intention of going only there. She saw no point in stealing useless enchanted swords and less point in being hunted out of the Grey Duke’s holdings before time.
She would be, eventually. It was inevitable. Heroes don’t compromise and dukes don’t reason. He’d send people to chase her off or summon her and offer her gold to do something she didn’t want. And then…Well, there were always more lands to the south.
But that was for later. The mud dried on her boots as her horse jogged down the road.
Love me, said the sword, seductive in her hand as she rode, and made her dream of triumph. Of finding the mythic Starharp and playing it to wake the sleeping Crownking. Of doing deeds to draw the singers from their patrons’ praises to make a song of her and her alone.
Lost, glittered the sword. Lost, forsaken, betrayed…The sky grew dark. Ruana frowned, and spurred her horse, and remembered.
Once, a long time ago in the far north country, there was an eclipse, and in its shadow a woman was brought to bed of her firstborn in the same hour its father died. She lost husband and daughter in that hour, and then her name, because to baffle the vengeance of the cheated child-ghost it was decreed by the elders of that small village that Ruana should become a man. The bone ornaments were quickly brought, and the drums and herbs, and when the dance was over there was no grief spent on husband and girlchild, for Rulane Twiceborn had none.
And when Rulane had been schooled to an honorable man’s estate, skilled with sword and bow and sling, Ruana left. Sword and horse and ivory dice were all the patrimony and dowry of Ruana Rulane.
Hero, hero, hero, sang the drumsong of the horse’s hooves. The sword she carried for another was light and glowing in her hands. Never a moment to weep for the daughter died borning, no tears to give for her lover, her husband, dead under the ice. They had taken everything from her—her name, her family, her past, her future.
Lost. Lost, forsaken, betrayed…The sword danced in her hand, instinct with violence.
With such a sword as this she could return to the place where she had been born, and with its blade of liquid light school priest-elders to sorrow. She could make the stars weep for the day that had birthed such a glorious abomination—not man, not woman, not mother nor yet the child of any mother. Twiceborn. Ruana Rulane, the Twiceborn.
The ghosts of future glory gathered around her. They would pay; oh, how they would pay.
Ruana checked the horse and gazed down at the sharp-wild sword with dreaming eyes. Shadowkiss, she named it, and touched the heart’s-blood crystal of the gems in the blade.
But why would I want to go back north? Her mouth stretched wry with puzzlement. Her past was a story, and a pretty story for a singer’s tongue, but it was over and done. If she could even find the village where she had been born it would be nothing like she remembered. And though she might kill the villagers every one, she could not make them sorry that they had protected themselves from evil times.
The lure of her past drew back. Sword, what are you?
Lover.
Ruana picked up the reins again and urged the horse onward.
The river bridge was out, and her horse didn’t like the water. She couldn’t blame the beast, with the river running spring-flood high, but the ferryman who should have been there was nowhere to be seen. He might be off drinking Duke’s gold, or dead, or as little fond of a river in spate as Ruana’s horse was. At any rate, he wasn’t there.
She swung west, following the riverbank. The sword lay across her thighs, hot and living. A spare league south was the inn full of priests whose charge she had carried off. Soon enough (she would do it, in their place) a rider would come from the soldiers to dress her abduction of the sword in fantastic language. She made no doubt he’d find a way across the river. Trouble always did, and then it would be the priests who decided how much more trouble to make.
Still, likely they wouldn’t make a decision before tomorrow dawn. She could ride all night if she had to, providing she could ford the river by the end of the day.
And give the sword back. Her hand tightened on the rough bone of the hilt. If she could.
Shadowkiss.
The edge of the river became sheer-cut mud cliffs and brambles, narrow enough to jump on a better horse. Ruana followed the river road as it swung inland, and the dripping trees opened to fields again.
Burned fields.
Here there had been no spring plowing. Last year’s weed and stubble were seared to black, gone liquid with the rain, and her horse shied at the stink.
Then she came to the freehold.
She had seen a number like it here in the south. A fine big house with barns and stables, and lesser houses for carle and carline in a ring just inside the ditches that could hold palisades in time of war.
No more. The cottages were smoke and ash. The barn door hung half off its hinges, displaying emptiness, and the stable was charcoal bones. If the palisades had ever been erected, there was no sign of them now.
She wasn’t an utter fool. A magic sword and a duke’s displeasure were trouble enough. If she wanted more she could come back here later to find what had blighted the crops and burned the buildings. Later. Half of being a live hero was the timing. She clucked to her horse and turned its head to ride away.
But they came out of the house to her and stood starveling-gaunt in ragged gowns and tunics, survivors of a freehold that saw outsiders maybe twice in a year, and not even that now that the horses were dead.
There was no use asking them why they didn’t leave, no more than asking them why they didn’t fight. Either choice was suicide. The land and their labor on it were all they had.
They looked at Ruana with hungry eyes, and even her patched and worn leathers were finery to them. Hero, they said to the bone rings braided in her hair, and stretched their eyes to the luminous glass-green of her jewelled sword. Save us.
“Ah, damn the lot of you!” the hero snarled, brandishing the borrowed sword in a glittering arc. It hummed, sweet as pack-ice in deep winter, and her horse side-stepped, unimpressed. The old question rose unbidden in her mind, and there was still only one answer.
If not her, then who? If not now, when?
“Happen some one of you will know where it bides,” she said resignedly. “Happen you’ll show me where to go.”
She’d known what it was when she saw the fields. They didn’t like the warmth of a southern summer; left alone this one might sleep till autumn. But the crofters wouldn’t go out to the fields while they thought it was there, and if they did, it would be roused by the scent and sound of prey and attack.
She bullied them into giving her what she needed, coaxing them with promises of victory and brave tales of heroism. With a few hours of daylight left, she loaded the casks and the torches and the firepot onto her horse and went off with the least terrified of the survivors to show her the way.
The worm had laired upland. Her horse stopped at the edge of the gummy, cast-seared earth, and would go no farther. She swore, and tied the shivering animal to a tree, blindfolding it to make it stand. The glass sword she sheathed reluctantly in the earth and drew her own familiar blade of browned iron. It would not do to injure what she was still hoping to return.
But it hurt to let it go. They were meant to be together. Together their word would shape the world.
“What do you want me to do?” The boy’s voice jarred her back to herself.
In truth, she’d counted herself lucky he’d come with her this far. It was an act of bravery, and there’d be no particular virtue in being a hero if bravery was easily come by. Now she took a closer look at him and saw, if not the noble lineaments of si
nger’s tales, at least the mark of more and better food in childhood.
“Land-holder’s bairn be, hinny?” she asked kindly.
The northland dialect was unfamiliar to him, but he understood enough. “My father was freeholder here. The dragon killed him. Now I’m freeholder. I want to help you kill the dragon.”
Ruana saw the stubbornness under the dirt, and the bleak knowledge that to hold the crofters to him now he must add “Dragonslayer” to his name, like it or not.
“Well then,” she said, accepting. “If you’re after killing worm, my callant, take up one of those casks and come along.”
“…worm-lair has two ways in. Other one’ll be hidden, and likely we could spend a planter’s year looking for it. But worm’s a fashious hellicat, and if we block up one entrance, he’ll be bound to come and see why.”
She was far from being as confident as she sounded, but she had killed worms before, even with unskilled help. Fire blinded them, and at the very least the thing would lair somewhere else.
Dickon stuck the torches into the ground. Ruana lit them all from the firepot, then stove in the top of the first oil-cask.
“Mind you get ready to run.”
“I’m not afraid!” But his hands were shaking as he took the open cask and headed up the side of the worm-hill.
“Hurry, damn you!” The words came out more sharply than she’d intended. They’d made enough noise to wake it; if the worm came out on top of Dickon, he wouldn’t have to worry about holding his father’s lands.
His feet left dusty footprints on the tarry surface of the hill. The oil slopped all around the hole in the earth as he poured it in. He threw the cask after it.
“There’s something down there—I saw it!” Dickon gasped, sliding down the hill again with hasty grace.
The earth shook, and a blind white shaft of flesh burst up out of the hole. Too soon! Ruana snatched up the nearest torch and shied it past Dickon’s head, praying it would stay lit, would ignite the oil, that a thousand different luck-chances would fall her way.
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