Yorath the Wolf

by Wilder, Cherry;

  “I think my name is Yorath, Brother,” I said. “I have been wounded and I have lost my memory. Did Master Rosmer send you? He promised that I should come to a healer.”

  “I am a healer,” he said. “Come into the Hermitage.”

  He led the way unsmiling, and the two soldiers and the brothers came after us. We trudged from the jetty to the edge of the moat, a long way over the frosty ground, then crossed a drawbridge and came into the outer court of Swangard.

  In contrast to the chilly approach from the river, this place was warm and busy. There was a forge and a stable and living quarters around the thick walls. The brothers went about in their brown robes, bowing the knee to the high-ranking Brother Harbinger. I saw a few poor folk waiting to be fed at a kitchen and even a man selling hot chestnuts.

  We came to another wall, a high white wall, and one of our soldiers lifted a heavy bar that locked a tall gate. Inside the wall was a neglected garden straggling around the base of the inner tower. Other guards, still in the blue uniform with the emblem of the silver swan, lifted the bar on the outer door of the tower. We went in and began to climb a broad staircase. I had to rest on the first landing my leg was troubling me so much, and the Brother Harbinger looked back impatiently. At the top of the stair was a guardroom and another barred door.

  The rooms at the top of the tower were reassuring, for they were well-furnished and spacious. A small fire burned in a pleasant room with blue hangings, and beyond this bower was a bedchamber. The two brothers who had come in with the Brother Harbinger busied themselves with hot water and instruments. I was undressed and washed and my wounded leg was attended to. It was a long and painful process. I cried out at times, and one of the assistants soothed me and fed me mulled wine. At last I was put into a clean, soft bed-gown and given a bowl of broth.

  When he had washed his hands again, the healer came and spoke to me.

  “I am Jurgal,” he said, “Brother Harbinger or First Teacher of this foundation. I must tell you, sir, that we have saved that leg just in time. Judging by the scars and bruises on your body, you have taken enough wounds to kill any normal man, even a giant warrior of Mel’Nir.”

  “Is that what I am?” I asked. “A giant warrior?”

  “A soldier, certainly. And you remember the name Yorath?”

  “I believe that is my name.”

  “Where were you before you came here?”

  “I was on an island. The caravel Goldbarsch took me off and brought me here. I knew I was coming to meet a Master Rosmer, whom I understand is vizier of the Markgraf of Lien. Before that I remember nothing except a little of my childhood.”

  “You learn quickly enough,” said Jurgal, “and you reason pretty well.”

  “Good Brother Jurgal,” I said, “you have dressed my wounds . . . for which I thank you heartily. You are a healer and a man of holy life. If you know who I am, why I have been brought to this place, or anything of my past history I beg you to tell me in the name of Inokoi, the Lord of Light. Try to understand my dreadful uncertainty . . .”

  I watched him very keenly. I saw by the light in his eyes that he did know something and by the way he dropped his gaze from mine that he would not tell me. I tried to search the faces of the two assistant brothers, but they were gazing raptly at Jurgal, their Brother Harbinger.

  “You must try to sleep now, Lord Yorath,” said Jurgal. “Master Rosmer will visit you soon.”

  I was left alone. I heard a noise of bolts and bars as the guards let out the brothers and then made the doors fast again. I wondered why the healer had called me Lord Yorath . . . was it a slip that showed my true rank? I remained awake for a long time simply trying to remember; I did this very often from this time forward. I tried to remember by an act of will and by daydreaming, stringing idle thoughts together. I heard light footsteps come and go beyond the door of my bower; there were other chambers in the top of the white tower.

  It seemed to me that I was in an unusually comfortable prison. I thought of the captain’s story of a Markgrafin of Lien, two hundred years ago, who had been pent up in Swangard. Even as I thought of this tale, a woman, not far away, began to wail and scream and weep. Was this a madhouse? How did I know that there were such places? I chased after a single image, a grating where madmen stuck out their hands, thin filthy hands. Fools Tower? Fools Keep? And at last I had it: Fools Fortress, not the true name of the place. I lay back afraid; I was completely delivered over to the mercy of my fellow men, and I began to doubt this mercy. The wailing woman who shared my tower was quiet at last, and I was able to sleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  My peace had gone. I spent days and nights in a torment of anxiety and restlessness. I wracked my brains, listened like a madman indeed to all that went on around me. When my leg was mending, I limped about staring greedily from every window that I could reach at the world outside. The Brother Harbinger, who came to dress my wounds again, asked me many questions to determine the limits of the strange cloud that lay over my mind. To fill up the empty spaces left in my mind and to comfort me in my distress, he decided, naturally enough, to convert me to his religion.

  On his third visit, he brought from under his fine embroidered tabard a small book bound in grey leather in the style of Lien.

  “You think, Yorath, that you are still able to read?” he asked.

  He gave one of his rare smiles, glancing at the four young callants who had accompanied him.

  “I think so,” I replied.

  “Read to me from this book!”

  Upon the cover of the book there was a sun symbol and the words The First Book of Matten. Inside there was a longer title that said: “The First Book of the Wanderings of Matten Seyl of Hodd, nobleman of Lien, and his Blessed Meetings with Inokoi, The Lord of Light.” I read this out and then came to the famous opening passage of the Meetings; the callants all mouthed the words as I read. They knew this first book off by heart.

  “I walked through a marsh and could not find a dry foothold. I fell into the morass. Wherever I looked there was ooze and mud. Tall reeds shut out the light. I saw a Lame Man in the marsh who held out his hand to me and set me upon a firm path.

  “He said, ‘Matten, you see that this marsh is wet and foul. Its green places breed pestilence. Yet see where the sun dries the marsh and sends light to drive away the mists and the darkness. Follow me into the light.’

  “I followed the Limping Man along a firm dry path and we came out of the marsh. In the light of the risen sun I saw that this man was not of flesh and blood. He was of the spirit. I trembled and cried out: ‘Who are you, Lord?’

  “And he replied, ‘I am Inokoi, the Lord of Light. Look now on this ugly marsh which we have left behind us.’

  “I turned and looked at the marsh and saw that it was the world in which I lived. I saw that there were those who could never come out of the marsh, for it was their nature to breed and to brood in darkness and foulness. I saw many of my brother men who could seek the light and find out the spirit. I knew that the spirit was the better part of a man, his true nature. Therefore I cast aside all the foulness of the world. Just as the mud upon my hands and feet dried up and fell away in the sunlight so the evil that clung to my spirit fell away in the light of the living truth declared to me by the Lame God.”

  The Brother Harbinger and the callants all looked at me expectantly as I came to the end of the first passage of the Book of Matten.

  “What do you feel, dear brother?” whispered one of the callants.

  “I am a little afraid,” I said. “I do not like to think of the world as a foul and ugly place. I know I am thrown upon the mercy of the world and the people in the world because I am wounded and have suffered some kind of brain-shaking.”

  This answer disappointed the callants. Jurgal, the Brother Harbinger, said to me:

  “You are not ‘in the world.’ You are here with us.”

  “Brother Jurgal,” I said, “I believe I am in a prison.”

  �
��Your wounds are being healed,” he said calmly. “Keep this holy book, and it will heal your spirit. We will speak further.”

  So I read The First Book of Matten: the young nobleman’s short and simple account of his six meetings with the spirit-being who called himself Inokoi. I read of Matten’s worldly life, which he had cast aside, and wondered if I had done the things that he had done, namely, “consorted with women of little worth” or “drunk wine day long and night long and eaten rich food in a beastly manner” or “given out gold for luxurious trappings, toys and unhealthy amusements.”

  I wished that I knew when Matten had lived, how his story fitted in with the history of Lien and of Mel’Nir. I wished for a history book, a book of battles and kings and queens and their legends, set out with quaint pictures drawn about the letters and in the margins, a book . . . yes, I remembered . . . a huge book with its wooden covers bound in brown fur . . .

  I tried to discuss The Book of Matten and the teachings of Inokoi with Jurgal, the Brother Harbinger. We touched upon the need for holiness of life and upon the need to heal the world, to “drain the marsh.” We spoke of The Second Book of Matten, also called Hiams the Healer. It tells of Matten’s friend and spirit-brother Hiams, founder of the Brotherhood. He too had been granted, at the end of his life, a vision of the Lame God. He beheld the six orders of creation, which Inokoi showed with the aid of an ear of wheat: kings and noblemen, priests and scholars, soldiers and merchants, farmers and handworkers, women, beasts.

  I asked when Matten had lived and what had become of him. The Brother Harbinger smiled again.

  “Matten is not dead,” he said. “He has gone on his last pilgrimage.”

  “You mean he has died and become a spirit?” I asked.

  “No,” said Brother Jurgal. “He set out on a pilgrimage from First Hermitage at Larkdel on the river Bal at dawn on the first morning of the Birchmoon in the year two thousand and three of the Annals of Eildon, as time is reckoned here in Lien. He gave a large life-stone to Brother Hiams, our first Harbinger, and set out to wander the lands of Hylor. He believed that the Lame God would go by his side and watch over him. The light in his life-stone, preserved in the sanctuary at Larkdel, has never gone out. He was then thirty years of age so we call the year of his departure the thirtieth Year of Matten. In Hylor there are too many ways of reckoning the years; Matten was born in Hodd exactly two hundred and twenty-five years ago come the fifteenth day of the next Hazelmoon.”

  Brother Jurgal rose up and looked about at my bower, where we were sitting, and gazed a moment from a window with white-painted iron bars beyond the mullioned panes. He confided to me another great mystery of the followers of Inokoi, which touched upon the very tower we were in. It was called Ishbéla’s Tower, for the markgrafin who had been imprisoned here at Swangard. She was a lady of Hodd, the mother of Matten. When she was widowed of the Lord of Hodd, Matten’s noble father, she had so seethed with lust that she had caused the markgraf of that time to marry her and then to shut her up. So it was that the struggles of Inokoi against the foul influence of the Marsh-Hag, his greatest enemy, whom he always defeated, were mirrored here in the history of Matten, the pure and penitent youth casting aside the toils of his evil mother.

  Without quite knowing why, I felt uncomfortable with Brother Jurgal’s religion. Yet the image of Matten wandering the world pleased me.

  I could look through a grating in the door of my bower onto a corridor. I saw two old women who carried food and linen to the madwoman; Brother Jurgal would not tell me the name of the woman who shared my tower; he twisted his lips in disgust when talking of any woman. I saw another woman, a lady-in-waiting in a Lienish gown. She was fine-looking, a proud, plump beauty. I wished that she might come to wait upon me; I longed, in fact, to consort with her. It was a thing that it would be very pleasant to relearn with such a teacher. With or without my memory, I knew that the holy life of the brothers was not for me.

  Rosmer came in seven days. He stood before me, a neat, balding gentleman with an odd half-squinting look. He was plainly dressed in a scholar’s gown of black velvet and a white fluted Lienish collar. He looked not so different in his dress from Jurgal, the Brother Harbinger. Yet he was clearly a man of the world, a man from Balufir, the noisy, colorful, luxurious city that the brothers talked of in whispers.

  “Do you know me?” he asked.

  “Yes, Master Rosmer,” I said, “but I think that when I last saw you . . .”

  “Yes”—he sighed—“I had my hair and a blue robe. Vanity . . . pure vanity. I hear from the Brother Harbinger that you are making good progress.”

  “Master Rosmer,” I burst out miserably, “I am in prison!”

  “It is a hospital,” he said mildly. “You are not healed. Tell me, what do you know of yourself?”

  “What do you know of Lord Yorath?” I demanded angrily. “I am under an evil spell! Is this your doing?”

  “Believe me, I saved your life . . .”

  “For what? To be pent up in this prison like the poor Markgrafin Ishbéla? I will die here. I will fall into a melancholy fit . . . you will be to blame.”

  “Do not give way to such doleful dumps,” said Rosmer. “I am not to blame for your misfortunes.”

  “Who then?” Will you say it is the work of the Marsh-Hag or my evil mother?”

  Rosmer laughed aloud, then primmed up his mouth.

  “The Lord of Light is not the best medicine for a man with no memory,” he said.

  He snapped his fingers, and the guards brought in baskets of good things.

  “See what I have brought you,” he said. “Books, fruit, wine . . .”

  There was even a vase of roses, yellow, white and red. They were the loveliest flowers I had ever seen; they filled the room with their perfume.

  “These are from the Markgrafin Zaramund’s own winter-garden,” said Rosmer. “You can see Alldene, the royal manor, from the window of your bedchamber.”

  “I am a soldier, a man of Mel’Nir,” I said. “What have I to do with the rulers of Lien?”

  “You are our guest,” said Rosmer. “What will make you more comfortable? Will you have music? A walk on the roof? It is too cold to go down into the garden.”

  “Who is that other poor prisoner, the woman who weeps and cries out in the night?” I asked.

  “Alas, it is the Lady Aravel,” he replied softly, “the Markgraf Kelen’s only surviving sister. Queen Aravel, the widow of Esher Am Zor, a former King of the Chameln lands, and mother of the present King Sharn. There is a double sovereignty in those lands, the Daindru, and Sharn rules with his cousin Queen Aidris . . .”

  “The Witch-Queen!” I said. “I have been told by Brother Jurgal that there is a witch-queen in the Chameln lands.”

  “I am sure she dabbles in magic,” said Rosmer dryly.

  “Master Rosmer,” I said, “I have no company here. I see a lady who passes by to serve that unfortunate Queen Aravel . . .”

  “I think I know the lady that you mean.”

  Rosmer did his best to cheer me. In the evening of a long winter’s day, a key turned in my door and a new gust of perfume filled my bower.

  “Great Goddess!” said a sweet, bold voice. “I knew it at the first . . . you are a conjuring!”

  She was a sight to make a Hermitage of brown brothers roll in the snow. A woman no older than myself, tall and full-breasted, with a low-cut Lienish gown, golden-brown hair caught up in a jewelled net, and a lovely, plump, smiling face.

  “I have the advantage of you, Lord Yorath,” she said. “I have seen you before, but I am sure you will not remember. I am called Zelline of Grays.”

  She carried a ribboned lute.

  “Master Rosmer thought you might like to hear some music,” she said.

  “Lady Zelline,” I said, “you are the most welcome sight that I remember!”

  She sank down before my fire and played on the lute very skilfully. I asked her, first of all, where she had seen me.

>   “I know that you have lost your memory,” she said, “but my first sight of you, Lord Yorath, will bring you little help. It was a fleeting glimpse we had of each other. It was—how the time flies—eight years ago in the citadel of Krail, the city in the west of Mel’Nir. You strode down a passageway after a little scrap of a page dressed all in yellow. You were on your way to dine with the lord of the citadel, Valko of Val’Nur. I was a waiting woman in attendance on the Markgrafin Zaramund, my cousin. I was with another girl, and we saw you pass by and could not believe that anyone could be so tall and strong!”

  She fluttered her eyelashes, and I was almost overcome, not only by her divine presence but by this mysterious flood of information. She played more music, and I questioned her further.

  “You really have lost your memory,” she said. “I thought you might be foxing to deceive Rosmer. Poor boy, I can give you little help. You had newly arrived at the citadel, and yes, you were the friend of the younger son of Val’Nur, a dark boy named Knaar. You had both been in some bloodthirsty scrape up country, and you had just ridden in at the head of a free company of soldiers. Rosmer was in our party, of course, as well as Kelen, the Markgraf Kelen, and poor Zaramund and that wicked girl, Merilla Am Zor; after all our trouble to find her a husband, she ran away. She rode off one day when we returned to Lien, took her younger brother, Prince Carel, and a musician, and went into the Chameln land to her brother King Sharn. I expect he has married her to some savage chieftain.”

  I shook my head sadly.

  “I wish I could remember all these people . . .”

  “It was a happy time,” said Zelline wistfully, “because Zaramund still hoped to bear a child, the heir to the land of Lien. Indeed she became pregnant for the last time when we returned from the Westmark of Mel’Nir. She lost the child at the new year. All hope was gone. Since then she has lived in fear . . .”

  “The markgrafin? What is she afraid of?”

  “That she will be put aside by Kelen, her husband, so that he can marry a new wife. He must have an heir. Zaramund’s life is ruined: she has lived like a queen, she is a famous beauty, she had Kelen’s love, for many years . . . but now . . .”