The Summer Palace

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “If we aren’t delayed, yes. Trading weight for weight, though—that was not right. Dried meat weighs much less than the equivalent in fresh meat.”

  “I know,” Sword admitted. “Those two birds would probably not have gotten me through the winter, but an equal weight of jerky should.”

  “Some of those people may be very hungry before we can buy our supplies from the markets in Winterhome.”

  “I hope not,” Sword said sincerely. “And they ate well tonight.”

  “Hm.”

  Whistler made no further protest, and there was no more conversation that night.

  When Sword awoke the next morning the tent was bitterly cold, the fire long dead, and he thought at first that he had overslept, as the light seeping in through the cracks seemed brighter than it ought to be. He wrapped his carpet around himself as he got to his feet and peered out the flap.

  He had not overslept; the sun was barely peeping over the eastern horizon beneath the edge of a broad expanse of cloud. The light was bright, though, because the world outside the tent was covered in gleaming, freshly fallen snow that reflected every glimmer of the dawn’s light and washed everything in a cold white glare. It was not deep; perhaps an inch had accumulated as he slept.

  Sword stood in the tent’s mouth for a moment, staring out at the snow. He turned when he heard movement behind him, and found Fist standing there.

  “Good thing we started when we did,” Fist remarked as he looked over Sword’s shoulder at the snow.

  Whistler was awake, as well; he said, “First snow came early this year. I hope that’s not a sign of what’s to come.”

  “Better get started,” Fist said. “The little ones won’t be moving very fast in this.”

  Half an hour later the entire clan had been roused and the tents folded; loads were being packed, and a few of the women had already set out to the west.

  The bag of jerky was far less cumbersome than the two birds, and this time Sword was able to keep up with the young men in the lead. He took advantage of this to ask a few questions that had not seemed entirely appropriate after last night’s trading. They were far less urgent now that he had a supply of jerky, but he preferred as great a margin of safety as he could manage.

  “If I wanted to bring down another ara or two . . . ,” he began, talking quietly to Whistler.

  The hunter turned and stared at him. “What?”

  “If I wanted to catch another ara, how would I best go about it?”

  Whistler stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Wait until spring,” he said.

  “But . . . no, I meant now.”

  “You can’t,” Whistler told him. “Not unless you manage to get in front of one of the northern flocks and pick one off as it goes past. They’re all running south now.”

  Sword blinked, then looked up at the low-hanging clouds. “The snow?”

  “Yes, the snow. Any flock that hadn’t already started south would have begun running this morning, as soon as they saw the snow. Ara don’t stay where there’s snow; what would they eat? And what would they drink when the streams are frozen?”

  “I didn’t know,” Sword said.

  Whistler did not bother to respond.

  They walked on in silence for a moment, then Whistler said, “I don’t think you should have done that, last night.”

  Sword did not pretend ignorance; he knew what the hunter was referring to. “I meant no harm,” he said. “I didn’t force anyone to trade.”

  “Most of them have no sense,” Whistler replied.

  “It’s just a few days to Winterhome.”

  “If we’re lucky.” He gestured at the endless white landscape that surrounded them. “If that had been a blizzard, rather than a dusting, you might have deaths on your soul.”

  Sword had to stop and think about what the word “blizzard” might mean up here. It snowed in Barokan, of course, at least in the Vales, but the Wizard Lord’s magic kept the weather from getting out of control. Sword had heard of blizzards, but he had never seen a real one—people had sometimes called snowstorms “blizzards” back in Mad Oak, but everyone knew the real thing, as found in the Uplands, was far worse. That was one reason the Uplanders didn’t stay on the plateau through the winter.

  “But isn’t it too early for a blizzard?” he asked.

  Whistler shook his head. “This isn’t the Lowlands,” he said. “It’s rare, but storms can come early up here. My grandfather told me stories about one bad one that the clan got caught in when my father was a baby. Half a dozen of us died, frozen to death or lost in the snow.”

  Sword shuddered. “Oh,” he said.

  In some ways, spending the winter in the Summer Palace had seemed almost like a game until now; this reminded him that it was a deadly serious one. Winter could kill. Even in Mad Oak there were stories of old people or young children dying of the cold, though not in Sword’s lifetime, and there was Blackhand, the old woodcutter, who had lost two fingers to frostbite when Sword was about eight—though that had been the result of a long series of stupidities. Sword had been too young to hear all the details, but he knew that Blackhand’s wife had thrown him out after an argument, and Blackhand had then gotten thoroughly drunk and wandered off into the woods with some mad notion of making a carving of some sort as an apology, only to get lost overnight after not properly appeasing the ler of the groves.

  Sword had seen the ugly stumps of those lost fingers. He had never seen a real blizzard, never seen an Upland winter, but he had seen Blackhand’s ruined hand, and that was all he needed to know that cold weather was not something to be taken lightly.

  “I’m sorry,” he said—but he did not offer to return any of the jerky. He might need it to get through the winter. Just staying alive in cold weather took more food than an active man needed in the summer.

  Silently, they marched on through the snow.

  [ 9 ]

  The stop to dig vegetables took longer in the snow; so did clearing a campsite and raising the tents. By the time the campfires were lit, several of the children were either whining with hunger or sound asleep.

  Sword’s tent-mates did not seem inclined to speak to him that evening.

  On the third day of the journey they began to see other clans in the distance, moving westward toward the cliffs. Sword was walking a little apart from the other young men, so it took him a while to realize that they were discussing which banners they could see. He also failed to notice immediately when the Clan of the Golden Spear unfurled their own banner on the breeze.

  He turned his steps closer to the others, and waited for a pause in the conversation before asking, “Why are we flying the banner now, when we didn’t yesterday?”

  Whistler looked at him, then turned away without replying. Fist, though, looked at him pityingly and said, “Why would we bother with it yesterday, when no one else could see it? We all know who we are; it’s the other clans who need to see the banner.”

  Sword started to say something about showing the banner so ler would know them, then caught himself. No one up here paid any attention to the ler.

  It wasn’t that the land had no ler; Sword had been in places that had been stripped of their spirit, dead places, and knew the lifeless, empty feel of them. When he had first ascended the cliffs he had thought the Uplands were dead, but that had been by contrast with the vitality of Barokan; now he had stayed long enough to accustom himself to the feel of the high plains, he could recognize the difference. He knew that even though he could not sense any of the ler directly, this was a living land, one with its own soul, its own ler. He couldn’t feel that life, but all the same, now that he had spent time here, it no longer felt dead; it was as if the ler slept.

  But the Uplanders didn’t acknowledge that in any way. They made no demands of the ler, and the ler made no demands of them. There was no contact at all.

  That was a mystery to Sword. In Barokan the ler did not sleep, and could not be ignored. They made their pres
ence felt everywhere. In the towns, the locals would have made their accommodations with the spirits of the place, and in the wilderness between the towns, the wild ler were a constant threat, picking at travelers at every opportunity.

  On the roads the Wizard Lord had ordered built, the old ler had been uprooted and scrambled, and the new ler that formed spontaneously had been tamed, but even there they weren’t completely ignored. If the roads were not used, if the people using them did not assert that they belonged there, the ler would turn hostile; thanking ler for a safe passage, asking for their cooperation, was a habit so firmly established that it was automatic.

  Up here on the plateau, though, there was no communication of any sort between human and ler. No one felt the presence of any spirits. Even the ara hunters did not bother to apologize to their prey; they treated the great birds as if they were soulless, less alive than the sword on Sword’s hip, even though a glance into any of those avian eyes made it very clear that the ara had strong, fierce, inhuman souls.

  How such an unnatural state of affairs had ever come about Sword did not know, and none of the Uplanders he had asked during his sojourn had admitted knowing, either, though there were theories. Perhaps the ara themselves were responsible; their feathers blocked magic, blocked ler, so completely that perhaps the hunters couldn’t appease their spirits, and had generalized from that. Certainly, the Uplanders considered dealing with ler to be something Lowlanders did, not something that concerned them. Any Uplander who found his tools uncooperative, or his sleep troubled by dreams, would simply wear a few more ara feathers until the problem went away.

  There were old stories, as well, folktales about how people had dealt with ler long ago, only to be betrayed or cheated. The stories always ended with the chastened humans swearing to rely only on themselves in the future, and not listen to ler.

  Sword had always taken it for granted that the Uplanders knew their own land better than he did, but there were times such disrespect troubled him.

  It did explain why Uplanders stayed in Winterhome in the winter, and were never seen elsewhere in Barokan; they probably couldn’t deal with the omnipresence of ler. In Winterhome the Host People had made them welcome, and had made the ler accept them, but elsewhere they would have found it very unwise to ignore the spirits.

  The clan made camp that night within sight of three other Uplander camps, and the Patriarch sent envoys to each of them to ensure there would be no unpleasantness as they neared the defile leading down off the plateau, no arguments about who would go first. Fist was sent to the Clan of the Five Stars, amid some laughter and nudging.

  “He has a girl there,” Whistler explained to Sword. “Or at any rate, he’d like her to be his girl.”

  “So the Patriarch chose him for that? So he could see his beloved?”

  “Probably,” Whistler acknowledged grudgingly. “I don’t care to say why the Patriarch does anything; I won’t pretend to his wisdom. And Fist isn’t the only one who likes a Five Stars girl.”

  Sword nodded. “You said you do your courting in the winter?”

  “Of course,” Whistler replied, startled. “Our own women . . .” He bit off his sentence unfinished, as if realizing he had been about to say something disloyal.

  “You want a greater choice,” Sword said.

  Whistler didn’t reply; he turned away.

  By the end of the fourth day they were traveling in close company with other groups, to the point that Sword could not tell which of half a dozen clans an unfamiliar face belonged to. There was some confusion as guards kept the marchers from trampling various gardens, but in general the migration was peaceful.

  There was one unpleasant incident when a slave, now the property of the Three Hawks clan, was recognized by his family in the Crescent Moon clan as a young fool who had run away the previous spring. Since he had run away on his own, and not been exiled, his mother argued that the Hawks had had no right to enslave him; the Hawk patriarch retorted that if they believed every exile who claimed to be an innocent, not only would there be no slaves to deal with the offal, but the Uplands would be overrun with unpunished thieves and bullies.

  In the end an agreement was grudgingly reached, so that there would be no violence where so many clans were gathered; the Moons bought their youth back for a hundredweight of bones and feathers, and a promise to let the Hawks’ unbetrothed young men, of whom they had a surplus, visit the Moon women’s quarters in the guesthouse in Winterhome—properly chaperoned, of course.

  Sword watched this with interest, and noticed that even while the negotiations were going on, everyone involved kept moving toward the cliffs. Clouds were gathering in the east, the temperature, chilly to begin with, was dropping, and more snow seemed likely; no one wanted to wait for it to arrive. That earlier inch or so had largely vanished in the sun and the dry air, and what had not evaporated had been trampled into mud by the passing nomads, but everyone knew that once the snows began in earnest the plateau was not a safe place to be.

  That night the camps were so close together that they merged into one sprawling city of tents. It occurred to Sword that this was probably the only time all year that the clans lived in such proximity; the guesthouses in Winterhome were more widely spaced. He was not surprised, therefore, to see many animated conversations as members of the various clans swapped news and gossip, or boasted to one another of their accomplishments over the course of the year. Some children seemed to be playing happily with the children of other clans, while others hung back, shy or even frightened by these strangers. Older children, and young men and women, were clearly taking an interest in members of the opposite sex, regardless of clan.

  There were flurries that night, but not enough snow to matter, and in the morning the Clan of the Golden Spear marched on—as did the other clans around it.

  By the eighth day the clans no longer pretended to remain distinct; they were all one great migration that would sort itself back out at the foot of the cliff.

  Sword found Fist and asked him, “Is it always like this? Every year?”

  “No,” Fist replied. “We don’t usually bunch up this much—the snow rushed some clans. But there’s always a gathering.”

  On the ninth day some of the Uplanders claimed they could see the smoke rising up from Winterhome; Sword’s eyes were not sharp enough, or not trained enough, to make out anything of the sort.

  And finally, on the eleventh day, they came within sight of the Summer Palace, and Sword said his farewells.

  No one paid much attention; they were more concerned with the long climb they would be making down the cliffs. Despite his new clothing and his spear, Sword had never really been a part of the Clan of the Golden Spear, and his curiosity value had worn off. The closest thing he had to a friend among the Uplanders was Whistler, and that young man had made plain that he didn’t approve of Sword’s bartering for jerky during their westward migration.

  No one called after Sword or waved as he turned aside to march toward the palace, instead of into the defile at the trailhead.

  The plain seemed colder away from the crowds of Uplanders, whether because there was no shared body heat, or because there were no neighbors blocking the easterly wind, or because it was actually colder, Sword could not say. He could not be entirely certain he wasn’t simply imagining it. He shivered and pulled his vest and coat more tightly around him, glad that he was wearing the winter coat he had made.

  When he reached the palace gate he found it locked, the lanterns gone from the hooks—that was no surprise. He could not hear the burble of the fountains just inside; they had presumably been shut down.

  There was no sign of any guards. Sword had wondered whether Artil might have left a few of his soldiers up here to ensure that the Uplanders did not loot the place in his absence, but apparently he had not bothered, or if he had, the guards must already have left.

  Or, perhaps, they were inside the walls somewhere, out of the cold.

  Sword paused
at the gate and looked back at the line of Uplanders, stretching eastward to the horizon. He wondered how Winterhome could accommodate them all. He had seen the immense guesthouses that lined the roads around the town, but he had never really given much thought to just how many people squeezed into those structures. Thousands, obviously—perhaps tens of thousands. How did the Host People feed them all?

  Well, the system had operated for centuries, so obviously the Host People had ways. Presumably there were storehouses somewhere to supply them.

  Some of the Uplanders were staring back at him, he noticed, pointing out the man at the palace to their comrades.

  That wouldn’t do. He hadn’t tried to keep his plans secret from the Clan of the Golden Spear, since that hadn’t seemed practical, but they all knew that their patriarch favored Sword’s scheme and would not want it spoiled. Other clans, though, knew nothing of it. Sword did not want someone from one of those other clans casually mentioning to the Wizard Lord that some strange man had been seen breaking into the Summer Palace.

  Sword turned east, and marched back out onto the open plain. He was not going anywhere in particular; he just did not want to be seen entering the palace. He could not rejoin the Clan of the Golden Spear, which had already gone down the canyon and was on its way down to Winterhome, and did not see any reasonable way to join another clan at this point. Instead he wandered aimlessly through the remainder of the afternoon, and at dusk he settled down at a random spot, within sight of the westernmost of the great birdskin cisterns.

  A few hundred yards away to the south the vast encampment of the migrating Uplanders sprawled across the landscape, tents black against the darkening sky, a myriad campfires gleaming orange in the gathering gloom. Sword wondered whether anyone was cooking over those fires, or whether they were all dining on jerky alone, and making fires for light and warmth only. Had the vegetables run out yet?

  He considered building a fire of his own, but then decided it would draw too much attention. Instead he simply sat and waited, dozing lightly.