Jalmar Raiz said, “Will you go then?”
“It is for the best,” I said. “I do not want to raise false hopes. May I speak to my grandmother?”
“She has asked for you.”
Guenna lay in the depths of a curtained bed, yet her hand upon the covers was still firm, her face still beautiful. I felt sure that she looked nothing like the poor invalid in the house of the Moon Sisters. We talked in low voices, though there was no one to overhear us.
At last I said, “I must leave Erinhall, Grandmother, I will go home into Mel’Nir and ask King Gol for an extension of the truce. For peace.”
“We might have returned, you and I, Yorath,” she said.
“No, Grandmother,” I said. “I have not been trained to rule. I am not a prince. Forgive me.”
“I give you a blessing,” she said. “Go well, Yorath.”
I felt a dull anger and helplessness that I had hardly felt in my life before. I was tormented by Guenna’s lonely life and I could not, no, I would not help her. As I walked down the stairs, the wraiths were coming out again; I heard the children shout and play on the lawn. I looked from the tall window over the stairs and saw them. The tall brown-haired boy ran ahead of his sisters in their absurd Lienish gowns: Kelen, Hedris, Aravel and, ah . . . there, stumbling over the grass, running, smiling, the youngest, Elvédegran.
When we rode off soon afterward, Jalmer Raiz came to my stirrup.
“Let Hagnild send to me a moon or so before you come into the Chameln land to visit the Daindru,” he said. “You will be awaited at Radroch Keep upon the plain.”
I bade him farewell, and we rode off across the park and turned into the forest at its eastern edge. Ibrim gave a low cry, and we saw that the park had gone. There was only a mass of tall weeds and thorns to be seen and, far off, the corner of a ruined wall. Following our map still, for it showed all of Lien, we crossed the Ringist again. We travelled through the province of Hodd, and it was a melancholy journey. Under a summer sky the roses were dying, and the folk were mourning for the Markgrafin Zaramund. We went on quite unremarked until we came to the river Bal and forded it at a place called Lesfurth. So we came into Balbank, in our own country, and the land was at peace.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I
“Come then,” said Hagnild.
We tied up our horses outside the second postern gate, which was open and unguarded. It was midsummer, and the royal parkland was wonderfully green. The Palace Fortress was no longer the frowning, dark place that I remembered: it had been painted, plastered, refurbished and planted with banks of flowering trees. Banners hung from its parapets; ladies upon palfreys and children on their ponies rode out into the meadows. Now Hagnild led me swiftly up a little winding stair into a small tower room with one round window. It had been unused for many years except by Hagnild himself; the servants were afraid of the room. There was a table with his books, and on the window embrasure above the couch a bowl of fresh flowers, placed there by the Princess Merse herself, for Hagnild, her true servant, and for Elvédegran, who died there.
I had been told the story of my birth by Hagnild several times since I returned to Nightwood. Each time he gave the sad tale some different color: sometimes it was more dramatic, sometimes more matter-of-fact. When we came at last to this quiet room, there was little more to be said.
“You may think,” said Hagnild, “that the people of the palace were very simple and superstitious not to question the fact that Caco, the waiting-woman, was ‘carried off by the demon,’ and indeed they were. But there was no search for her because Prince Gol believed he had killed or injured her in his god-rage, that she had been whisked out of his sight.”
I asked a few questions, and then we fell silent. I was still amazed to see how old Hagnild had become; age had fallen on him like a cloud of dust. Of all the magicians I had encountered, he looked most like a magician: tall, thin, white-haired, fine-featured. He sighed now and took another look at the Dannermere where swans were sailing.
“Remember this,” he said. “Your mother died in childbirth. That was the great battle that she lost, that I lost, for I was her healer. Gol was a clumsy and arrogant young husband, no match for a young girl from Lien, gently bred, but he was no monster. If she had lived, she would certainly have made a better life, even here, even with the old king upon the throne.”
I might have added that I was the monster, that Ghanor would not have let me live . . . and with good reason. The threads were tangled; I let the matter rest.
My life had been set in order; I felt sometimes as if Yorath the Wolf had never existed. I had spoken four times with King Gol and believed we had reached some kind of understanding. Certainly the King’s Peace would be reestablished. In the chronicles there was the true tale of Knaar of Val’Nur’s treachery, and we had held it over his head. He had been sent a letter in my own hand and knew that I lived. As it was, General Yorath would remain dead, and in Krail he would be remembered with other heroes.
My companions had gone. Arn had returned to the Swordmaker’s Yard and Forbian had gone with him; I trusted both of them to keep silent. Even Ibrim had left my service at last; he had ridden off over the High Plateau to the Danasken communities in the southeast to take himself a wife. All three of my friends were richer than they had been: the Lady of Erinhall had given them each a bag of gold. “And not fairy gold, at that,” as Forbian had said, biting a coin to test it.
Hagnild opened the inner door of the tower room, and we wandered out onto a broad landing. We could look down into a courtyard where certain ladies of the court were taking the air. Destiny had struck again, and in a way that pleased me, for it had nothing at all to do with doom or darkness. King Gol, on a progress through the Eastmark, had been taken with a widowed lady of great beauty who was visiting her kin. She was a suitable match; and since she would bear no children, the right of Prince Rieth, Fadola’s son, would not be challenged. Soon the king would be married to the Lady Nimoné, widow of Valko of Val’Nur. There she sat in the courtyard with Merse and Fadola and their attendants.
Princess Gleya, that unmarked child that I remembered from the scrying stones, was far away. She had not lacked for suitors at the Hanran estates near Cayl, but Merse, her mother, had sent her even further from the war that engulfed Mel’Nir. At eighteen she was married to Prince Borss Paldo of Eildon; she had crossed the seas to the magic kingdom in the west.
I looked down again from an arrow slit of the Palace Fortress, and below me in the summer meadow, I saw a young boy upon a black pony. He was about seven years old, tall and well-grown, with red-gold hair: Rieth, the Prince of Mel’Nir, the pride and joy of the whole court. Hagnild reported that he was healthy, straight, and of normal intelligence, giving the lie to any forboding that might have arisen on this score. Baudril Sholt and the Princess Fadola had a fine son.
Now Hagnild came to my side, and we both looked down at the little prince handling his pony skilfully and laughing into his father’s face. I glimpsed another life, one that had never been possible for me.
“Ah, Goddess,” said Hagnild, “the poor Duarings. They deserve a respite from the tyranny of the blood. And their greatest treasure has been denied to them.”
He laughed softly and blinked and patted my arm. “I kept it for myself,” he said. “Come, Yorath.”
So we went down the winding stair again from the tower room and returned to Nightwood. The house in the wood had not changed; Finn and Erda were still hale and hearty at the smithy, aided by certain of their children. A widowed daughter came to keep house for Hagnild.
There was another member of this household, quite unexpected. When we first came—Arn, Forbian, Ibrim and myself—returned from our adventures in Lien, something worried at our ankles and bounced about before the hearth.
“A dog?” I said. “A hound puppy, Hagnild?”
“Look again!” he smiled.
I caught up the soft white bundle, and it whined and panted; its eyes were gr
een-gold.
“Goddess!” said Arn. “A white wolf cub!”
“Your brother Till shot the mother wolf,” said Hagnild, “and brought me this fellow because of his white coat. I call him Zengor.”
It was a royal name of Mel’Nir, a King of the Farfarers who had come through the mountains.
“Can a wolf be trained?” I asked, setting the cub down again.
“Try your hand, Master,” said Ibrim. “I have heard of great cats trained to hunt in the Burnt Lands.”
I trained Zengor; Hagnild had asked me to delay my journey a little, to stay with him. All the rest of the summer I wandered Nightwood with the white wolf cub, and he proved himself as strong and clever as any hound. He grew amazingly, a mighty silver wolf, with no vices and a hundred endearing tricks. I put a broad green collar on him in the winter so that a hunter would not take him for a maurauder. In the spring, Hagnild and I sailed to Nesbath with Zengor and came to the old home of the Raiz family with some secrecy lest Rosmer should be watching.
There I felt a stirring of hope, a longing for my new life. I set out walking along the Nesbath road on the first day of the Willowmoon. I had my heavy cloak, my ash staff and a blanket roll; Zengor walked by my side. The weather was clear and cool, with a few shoots of green showing at the edges of the road. We walked for four days and came through a place between two high cliffs where the road widened out and then became very narrow. To right and left rose high ridges clothed in loose pine, and on the edges of the road there were flattened places where new trees had been planted, row on row. I have never known a quieter place than the Adderneck Pass. I stood still and heard nothing but the wind in the tops of the trees, higher up on the western ridge. I shut my eyes and could not help but think of the ring of metal, the screams of men and horses, the arrows that flew out of the dark, the fires that were lit.
Zengor whined suddenly, and I opened my eyes. It was a place that lay heavily on the spirit of any passerby. Zengor growled softly, and I told him to be quiet. I saw that we were not alone. Twenty paces away there was a young man in a russet tunic; he came forward with a smooth, almost jaunty step that I remembered.
“Yorath Duaring!” said the Eilif lord, with an inclination of his head.
“Lord . . .”
“Will you walk all the way to Chameln Achamar?”
“I do not think the Chameln have horses large enough to carry me,” I said, smiling.
“Go well,” he said.
I remembered how I had been too proud to question this fairy lord. But now I was not too proud.
“Good sir,” I said, “can you bring word to my lady, Gundril Chawn, the Owlwife? I long for her return.”
“How long since we met, Yorath Duaring?” he asked.
“Eight years, nine . . .”
“Has it seemed long to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very long. I am growing older.”
“You have far to go.”
I saw that he would give me no better answer.
“Farewell, Lord,” I said.
I turned and walked on through the Adderneck, through the narrows, where so many brave men had died, and out again between two high bluffs on to the plain. Ahead lay a broad new road to the town of Folgry and the hills beyond, the central highlands; to the east I could see the Dannermere. All about me lay the plains, a boundless expanse of grassland, silvered in places as the wind swept over it and bent the grasses. I set out to the northeast across the plain, for I thought I could see Radroch Tower where Jalmar Raiz had said I would be awaited. I let Zengor run ahead and enjoy the freedom of the plain. It was like no other place that I had seen; there were larks overhead hovering and singing, and Zengor flushed out a hare that bounded away. It was the year 335 of the Farfaring, and I had left the land of Mel’Nir.
II
I walked on and came closer to the tower, which was old and grey and built in another fashion from the towers and keeps of Lien and Mel’Nir. I came past an empty sheepfold on the plain, stopped at a half-grown pine tree and called Zengor. I rested in the shade of the tree; the tower showed no signs of life, there were no banners hung out. I sat down on the ground and watched the plain. A party of riders approached from the east, along one of the wide roads of beaten earth that crisscrossed the plain.
As I watched, dreaming, three riders broke away from the group and began to cross the plain. They rode at breakneck speed in a wild tearing fashion, bent low over their horses’ necks. The size of the plain was deceptive, and the distances hard to judge, but I saw that these were small horses, the leading horse white, the others grey, and that they were indeed riding straight for me, where I stood. I leashed Zengor and stood up. On and on they came, these Chameln riders, and the two greys swung out to either side.
The rider on the white horse came on, slackening speed at last, and cried out, “Yorath!”
She was a small woman, fine-boned, though she rode like a demon. Her clothes were richly embroidered, with splendid boots and long, fine leather trousers. Her horse was a white mare, not much larger than Prince Rieth’s black pony, but tough and spirited. I saw that her companions were kedran, on grey horses just as small . . . the Chameln grey. I walked slowly towards horse and rider and had hardly to lift my head to her as she sat in the saddle. Her face was strange and fine, a northern face with high cheekbones, a radiant, pale skin, a pointed chin: her eyes were green as emerald. I saw Aidris, the Witch-Queen of the Chameln.
“Dan Aidris!” I said, bowing my head.
We stared at each other, two creatures so unalike that we might not have been of the same race of mortal beings. Yet around her neck she wore the swan of Lien, as I did.
“Welcome, cousin,” said the queen. “Welcome to the Chameln lands!”
We exchanged a few words, talked of simple things: the countryside, the weather, the queen’s white horse, who was called Shieran, daughter of Tamir, a famed white stallion. I told her of Zengor, my companion. I felt an immediate love and liking for this Cousin Aidris and believed that she had the same feeling for me.
I went with the queen to Radroch Tower, a nobleman’s hunting lodge, and the next day we set out for Achamar. I was given a brown charger to ride, one of the new breed called Lowlanders, from the horse farms about Radroch, horses bred from the captured chargers of Mel’Nir. We did not go through the hills of the center, but took a wide sweep across the plain to the east and came in sight of Chernak, where Sharn Am Zor was building his new summer palace in the style of Lien. The king came out to meet us with his fair consort, Danu Lorn, and his court, a large and brilliant company. So I spent one day with the Daindru, the rulers of the Chameln lands. I saw that Sharn Am Zor was indeed handsome as a god; we were the same age almost to the day, but he seemed to me much younger. He was clean-shaven, and I felt myself a great bearded bear by comparison.
The Daindru were not troubled by problems of succession. Aidris and her fierce-looking consort, Danu Bajan, a chieftain of the Nureshen, had a son and two daughters; Sharn and his lady had a daughter and a son. All these royal children, together with the children of other noble families, were spending the spring and the summer at a manor called Zerrah. Jalmar Raiz, as tutor to the Heir of the Firn, Prince Sasko, was at Zerrah too, and Pinga with him, so that I did not meet my old companion.
I came on to Achamar with the queen and her escort and found it a marvellous city, not so dear to me as Krail, but old and strong and full of wonders. Nevertheless, I spoke at last to Aidris and excused myself from further attendance at court. I asked for a guide into the north and a safe conduct through the land, if that was needed. In the last week of the Willowmoon I left Achamar for the northern tribal lands, and my guides were Ivan Batro, Bajan’s nephew, of the Nureshen, and his servant, Amuth.
We left the city early in the morning, and the queen came down to the courtyard by the northern gate of the palace to bid me farewell.
“I know where you are going,” she said, ruffling Zengor’s mane. “I heard it once
in Athron and did not understand.”
“You were in Athron more than ten years ago, Cousin,” I said. “Who could have told you?”
“The Carach tree.” She smiled. “I asked the way to a certain place whose name I will not speak. The Carach tree replied: ‘No one knows where it lies, but the Wolf and the Wild Swan.’”
Then she stepped up onto the mounting block and placed around my neck a large glittering green stone edged with runes worked upon gold, a jewel of the Firn.
“It is your safe conduct,” she said, “and it is a scrying stone. We will see each other. If you come into the northwest mountains, called the Roof of the World, find out a tribe called the Children of the White Wolf. Commend me to their Chieftain Ark and their Spirit Maid, the Blessed Ilda.”
“I will remember!”
So we moved on through the streets, chill and misty at this hour, and came out through the northern gate of Achamar: two men of the Firn on their grey horses, one man of Mel’Nir on a brown charger, and Zengor, the white wolf, running ahead. We passed along broad highroads through the cornfields and came to the plains again. We rode on and on across the seas of grass, camping at wells and sheepfolds, and came at last to the first lodges of the Nureshen.
We were greeted by Batro, father of my guide, and his mother Ambré, sister of Bajan. I had a fine guest lodge all to myself and was an object of some curiosity. I went out among the pleasant lakes and groves of trees that were before my door and tried a bathhouse on the lake shore. The lands of the Nureshen and the other tribes, east and west, are fine and rich with teeming fish in the lakes and rivers, berries and fruit, plots of rye and herds of deer. Yet I could not linger; my journey had only half begun.
I had a map from Aidris Am Firn, and I asked for another. At night in my lodge I heard the sound of a drum, and presently there were voices at my door: a shaman had come with a map. He was a tall man for these parts and past middle age, with his glossy black hair threaded with grey and worked into a plait that hung past his knees. It was a mark of holiness. He offered me no name, but we sat down together and he unrolled his marvellous map.
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