The Earth Goddess

by Richard Herley

  “Get out of my way.”

  “It’s about your son, Master Crogh. About Master Euden, and the brooch he sold to Master Iorach.”

  “Brooch? Brooch? What are you talking about?”

  “The serpent brooch. Your son sold it to Master Iorach, but he had no right. It was stolen from the ruling clan. If General Teshe finds out, your son could be executed.”

  This was a lie, but a convincing one, and she hoped he might suspect it to be true. If he didn’t, or if he knew nothing about the affair, or if his son had come by the serpent honestly, then she was lost. This conversation would be reported to Ika, to the chamberlain: she would be punished, tortured, put to death. And to begin with, at the very least, here on the lawn, Crogh would strike her down.

  She was waiting for the blow. It did not come. Crogh remained still, and she saw that the first part of her plan had worked. And if the first had worked, so would the second. By threatening to expose Euden – the threat disguised as an attempt to save him from discovery – she would be able to find out whatever Crogh knew about the serpent, its history, and the fate of Altheme.

  Crogh glanced uneasily towards the residence. “It’s Rian, isn’t it? That is your name?”

  “Yes, master.”

  “Since you seem to have something to say about my son, I suppose I ought to listen.” He made a show of reaching inside his tunic. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I appear to have mislaid my purse. I’ll have to go back and fetch it.”

  The purse was hanging round his neck: Rian could clearly see the cord. This was just a ploy, a ploy with a double purpose: to forestall questioning in case they had been observed, and to give him a face-saving way of agreeing to meet her in private. His next words came as no surprise.

  “Go over to the arbour, Rian. I’ll join you there presently.”

  * * *

  There was only one place where it could possibly be: among the confidential parchments in the Vansard’s quarters. Paoul had unearthed everything else. He had found the provenance of the serpent, the original bill of sale, and the inventory of the Lady Altheme’s other jewels. He had found the inventory of the Trundle taken after the siege and the list of missing valuables, among them the serpent and all the pieces Rian had remembered. He had consulted again Kar Houle’s record of his induction and, to his unspeakable relief, and with a prayer of gratitude for the Order’s pedantic insistence on thoroughness and precision, had found every one of the essential details faithfully noted in that flowery, old-fashioned hand: the repeated doubts about Paoul’s parentage, the exact date of his birth, Tagart’s name and physical description and his identity as Paoul’s “putative father”. He had found everything but the vital scroll relating to the Lady Altheme, the deposition that Rian had given to Torin Hewzane’s men. In this she had described the circumstances of her mistress’s departure from the Trundle, naming Tagart as the leader of the group of nomads among whom she had last been seen, giving an account of the missing jewels, and, most important of all, and substantiating any other reports that the Lady Altheme was with child, Rian distinctly remembered mentioning the time at which the pregnancy had begun.

  Paoul was still unable fully to take in the news that Rian had broken to him just before the night meal. Perhaps he never would be able to adjust to it, not completely. If her excited suspicions were proved correct, then he was not what, all his life, he had believed. He was not the son of Mirin and Tagart, leader of the southern tribes. He was instead a member of the ruling clan, son of the Lady Altheme and of Brennis Gehan Fifth, Lord of Valdoe. He was Hothen’s half brother, Ika’s nephew.

  During the meal he had seen them with new eyes, comparing their features with his own. The resemblance, now that he was aware of it, was too great to be coincidental. It was a horrible and unwelcome sensation to feel himself suddenly so close to them, severed from the father of whom he had always been so proud.

  Yseld was rightfully his. But for an accident of birth, he would already have been married to her.

  The meal had demanded enormous self control. Even Yseld, during their customary polite and neutral exchanges, could not have guessed what was going on inside him. He had longed to tell her; but after the meal there had been no safe opportunity to talk, and anyway it was too soon. Before telling her, he had to be sure. He had to visit the library.

  The search had taken longer than he had anticipated. By the time he had finished, it was too late to return to the residence. At midnight his free day began and, as far as the household knew, he would be spending the night at the vansery. He had practised this same deception last week. It was one way of reducing the risk.

  Since that first night, he and Yseld had been together eleven times. Her room was much too dangerous to use again. There was nowhere safe inside the residence, and guards were kept posted at the entrance and at the gate of the inner enclosure. But, by using a circuitous route, it was possible to reach the downstairs day-room and from there, climbing through the window, they could escape into the garden unseen. And so, almost every night, for the two or three hours before dawn, they had met in the pavilion.

  Tonight they had met here again. After leaving the library, retrieving a length of rope he had left hidden in the vansery grounds, Paoul had skirted the palisade of the inner enclosure until he had reached the darkest and quietest spot. There, not far from the shrubbery, he had climbed over and made his way to the pavilion. He had waited for several hours before hearing her footfall on the path, and then, on their improvised bed of cushions, she had joined him.

  Their passion was so intense that until now she had put all thought of the future in abeyance. She had refused even to let him speak of it, but tonight he insisted.

  In the hours he had spent waiting for her, Paoul had decided, against his natural inclinations, not to disclose any of what Rian had told him or what he had so far found out. Without the final evidence there could be no effective claim; to raise and then dash her hopes would be more than he could bear.

  So he merely said that this was to be their last secret meeting. He could not yet tell her why, but it involved finding a certain parchment. If he found it, there would for ever be an end to these furtive assignations. They could be together openly, as man and wife; they could have it all. But they had to be patient. They could not afford to jeopardize the future. Their happiness was at stake.

  “But you are a priest,” she said. “A priest can never marry.”

  He did not tell her why she was wrong. He could not tell her that membership of the ruling clan took precedence over all else, even the sacerdotal vows. It was the one, the single, the sole escape from the Order. And further: if his claim were upheld, he would inherit Yseld automatically as part of the Valdoe domain. Her dowry had purchased her the position, not of wife to Hothen, but of consort to the future Brennis Gehan Sixth, whoever that turned out to be.

  Although she tried to question him, he refused to be drawn. “You once said you trusted me,” he told her. “You will have to trust me still.”

  With that he kissed her and made himself break away. It was nearly dawn. They had to get dressed.

  He helped her to find her things, fastened his tunic and leggings and drew on his boots. While she finished tying back her hair, he picked up the cushions and replaced them on the bench seat that ran along the inner wall.

  Together they went to the step. The east was already faintly grey; a robin which had been singing in the darkness was now joined by a wren. Over the hill, in the distance, came the first calls of a carrion crow.

  “When will I next see you?”

  “Soon,” he said. “Very soon.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  “I cannot live without you, Paoul. Do you know what I am saying?”

  “Yes. I have thought about that too.”

  “If you don’t find this parchment, how much longer do you think we’ll have?”

  “Yseld, it is time to go.”

  They
descended to the path. In the deep night under the cherry trees, they kissed again before parting. He watched her vanish into the dark, moving towards the lawn.

  Within minutes he was back at the vansery. No one saw him come through the gate or enter the main building at the rear.

  His excuse, his reason for being here, was that he wished to spend the morning of his free day in private study in the library, starting before the residence was awake. Rather than disturb the servants and the guards, he had told the chamberlain that he would sleep in the vansery, as before, in one of the small chambers reserved for visiting priests. These chambers lined a short corridor near the common-room. The one in which Paoul was meant to have slept was at the end, next to Enco’s.

  Before leaving to meet Yseld, he had disturbed the bedding on the narrow, hard-based cot. There was a negligible chance that his absence would be discovered: once he had retired for the night, a priest’s privacy was strictly respected, for the hours of darkness were an important time for meditation. Disturbing the bedding had been a needless precaution, but one that would give him the basis of an explanation if the unexpected had happened. He had also pulled three short lengths of stalk from the rush matting and left them bent in such a way that, if the door were opened widely, to its normal extent, they would be moved and their relationship with each other destroyed.

  They were still in place. The room had not been entered. Paoul silently shut the door and went over to the cot.

  He made himself lie down. He needed sleep, but sleep was impossible. Already he could hear the first sounds of the vansery coming awake, and he had yet to devise a means of getting access to the confidential archive. He knew where it was kept, in the inner chamber of Phede Keldis’s office. He would need no more than a quarter of an hour to pick out the appropriate scroll, read it, and return it to its compartment. The problem was to find a time when the office would be unattended during daylight.

  In the next room he heard Enco rise. A moment later Enco’s door opened and closed as he left to perform his ablutions. What were his plans for the day? How would he react if told how his friend had spent the night? Would that shake his confidence, his smugness and self-esteem?

  The treatment of Hothen had so far yielded no results. Already Enco had confided that he was beginning to doubt it ever would. He had said that Hothen’s defects were congenital, the result of inbreeding. If nothing could be done for him, Enco would soon be going back to Hohe.

  Paoul shut his eyes. How weary he was, how sick of it all, of the priesthood and its values! To think that he had once dreamt of nothing more wonderful than a career at the citadel!

  The dawn gong sounded and the solution came, and with it a surge of new energy and excitement. Paoul got to his feet, straightened his clothes, and hurriedly made the bed. Phede Keldis almost always conducted the dawn litany himself; his assistant would also be there, leaving the office empty just long enough for Paoul to enter the inner chamber and consult the archive. Then he could join the service at its end, standing near the door at the rear of the hall, and no one would ever have to know.

  8

  Paoul had found it. He had found the scroll. He had seen Rian’s deposition, among a sheaf of private documents relating to the ruling clan, and in it the essential framework for the successful prosecution of his claim. He had had to delay before leaving the vansery, but now, overjoyed, he was hurrying back to the residence.

  The dealer Iorach was now the key. He was an honest man, Rian had said; his testimony would prompt General Teshe to interrogate Euden, Crogh’s son, and then Crogh himself. There might well be some difficulty here, although Crogh could not deny his son’s possession of the serpent and would be hard put to explain how he had acquired it unless he admitted the truth: that the serpent, together with the other pieces he had subsequently sold to Iorach – for which Iorach would also have bills of sale – had indeed come from Bocher’s village. There was no evidence that Crogh had come by the jewels illegally; he could easily have bought them, just as he had told Rian, and just as, in Kar Houle’s report, he claimed to have bought Paoul. It was not a crime to benefit from the ignorance of the farmers. Far from it: the only crimes recognized by Hohe were crimes against the empire. And even if, as seemed likely, Crogh had accepted both Paoul and the jewels as a bribe, there was no possibility that Bocher, presuming he was still alive, would ever condemn himself by admitting it. All Crogh had to do was stick to his story, the one he had given Kar Houle, and he would be safe. In protecting himself he would substantiate the link between Paoul and the jewels; between Paoul and the Lady Altheme.

  The evidence was essentially flimsy. After all this time, how could it be otherwise? In different circumstances, Paoul knew his claim would not get far. Minds like his own would soon rip it to shreds. But, with Hothen as he was, and his coming of age only five months away, the claim stood an excellent chance. Paoul fulfilled all the requirements of Lord Heite, and more. Not only was he the son of Brennis Fifth, but he was the legitimate son, the first-born. The claim would receive support from all quarters of the High Council: the Order, ever anxious to extend its influence, could not wish for a more pliant Lord Brennis than one of its own. Knowing the way the High Council worked, there was little doubt in Paoul’s mind what the ruling would be.

  He could still not believe there was every chance he would have Yseld for life, with the freedom to be with her just as he chose. He could not believe that he, Paoul, might soon be the Lord of Valdoe, the man who held sway over the whole domain and whose influence could, in time, be brought to bear on the citadel. What slow and subtle changes there would be! Secretly, subversively, he would work for reform. He would seek to free the slaves, to reduce the taxes, to diminish and divert the power of the Prime.

  But above all he would work for the golden dream: to extend the control of self beyond the priesthood, to pass this priceless gift to all. “Pagans”, they were called; but who were the real heathens, the criminals who abused the greatest faculty of man? There could be no going back to the forest. It was too late for that. The marvels of Tagart’s age had gone. Man was coming to another age, not of decay, as the Order so cynically had it, but of potential unfulfilled. It never could be fulfilled if he were deprived of the single faculty on which the world’s welfare hinged, the faculty indivisible from that which Paoul loved and worshipped most in Yseld: the human spirit.

  They had talked of all this; it seemed as if they had been talking for ever. Lying together in the pavilion, he had told her all his doubts and dreams, and she had told him hers. She had never been under any illusions about the Order or the Gehans. What he had taken years to realize had for Yseld been the hateful background of her life. Since birth she had been exposed to it; her own marriage was an example of her family’s corruption and greed.

  Very soon now, her unhappiness would be at an end. Paoul would tell her first, and then he would find Rian, the kind and faithful Rian, a woman who deserved none of the treatment that Valdoe had meted out. When she had told Paoul of her discovery she had wept with joy, saying again and again what a miracle it was, again and again how much he reminded her of his mother, her former mistress, the Lady Altheme. She had made no mention of it, but he was sure she had guessed the truth about him and Yseld, and he was equally sure she would never give them away.

  Yes, he would find Rian and take her to the Vansard, and immediately begin his claim.

  The guard at the residence gate was a new man Paoul had never seen before. His unsmiling face was completely at odds with Paoul’s euphoric mood; so too was the greyness of the day.

  Crossing the sheep-cropped lawn, traversing the irregular granite stepping stones to the porch of the side entrance, Paoul noticed a wizened old gardener, a slave, morosely at work near the arbour, picking spent blossoms from the shrubs and tossing them into a wicker bin. To reach the higher blooms he was using a crook, bending down the branches, stripping them, letting them spring back. As one of the stouter branches sprang bac
k a dark cluster of leaves was torn off and fluttered to the ground.

  They touched the lawn and Paoul felt the first painless stab of premonition. Something had changed here. Something was wrong.

  The side door opened and Rian appeared. She did not come out, but remained anxiously in the porch, her hands clasped. She must have been standing by the window, watching for him, awaiting his arrival.

  Then, somehow, Paoul knew that Yseld had been caught returning to her room. He knew. The porch door approaching with unreal slowness, Rian’s face, her anxiety, the cloudy morning, the swish and slap of the tortured foliage, everything confirmed it.

  “Forzan Paoul,” Rian said, moving inside, into the gloomy dankness of the lobby. “I have something terrible to tell you.” The lobby smelled of stale milk. A bucket had been spilled here a week before. There were garments hanging on the rack: the servants’ robes and mantles, the gardeners’ leather aprons. She took hold of his arm, as a mother holds her son’s. “Forzan Paoul, you must promise me you’ll stay calm. You must do nothing sudden, nothing foolish.”

  Still it was unfolding at the same unreal rate, but now he realized that the stab of premonition had gone much deeper and left a widening wound, a wound filling with agony and disbelief.

  “Sometimes, Forzan Paoul, my lady Ika cannot sleep. This morning, very early, she called out to my lord Hothen. She had heard the Lady Yseld. I think she must have stumbled at the foot of the stairs and hurt herself. The light there is bad.”

  His wound was worse, even worse than he had feared; his last hope of life had been crushed by the look in Rian’s eyes.

  “If it hadn’t been for my lady Ika … if you’d heard her questions … Forzan Paoul, she put ideas in his head. She wanted to know where the Lady Yseld had been. She accused her of seeing the kitchen-boy, just because he’s handsome and the Lady Yseld was once kind to him. Hothen called his guards. They dragged the kitchen-boy out of bed and beat him. They beat him with clubs. Then Hace … Hace burned him. He burned him till he screamed. He confessed to everything my lady Ika said, foul things, disgusting things, and then they killed him. And then … then … then Hothen … Forzan Paoul, I am so sorry. I loved her too. Pity him, Forzan Paoul. Pity him. He has killed the Lady Yseld.”