by David Drake
The dancer in the bear costume in the center of the square began to rotate slowly as he high-stepped through a figure eight; the crowd gave him room. How long had it been since there were bears on Ornifal? Much longer than the thousand years in Sharina’s past when West Sesile had nourished, certainly.
“Your Highness?” said one of the women who’d been standing behind the burgesses. She stepped forward, offering a pottery mug with a hinged metal lid. “Won’t you have some of our ale? I brewed it myself, this.”
Kane turned with a look of anguished horror and cried, “Deza, you stupid cow! They drink wine in Valles, don’t you know? Now the princess’ll think we’re rubes with no culture!”
“I drink beer, Master Kane,” said Sharina, taking the mug from the stricken woman. It wasn’t her place to interfere with the way couples behaved between themselves, but her tone was significantly cooler than it might’ve been if the chief burgess hadn’t called his wife a cow. “I hope that doesn’t make me an uncultured rube in your eyes?”
Sharina sipped as Kane’s face slipped into a duplicate of what his wife’s had been a moment before. Sharina’d been harsher than she’d intended; but she was tired too, and “cow” wasn’t a word the burgess should’ve used.
“Very good, Mistress Deza,” she said, though in truth the ale wasn’t greatly to her taste. They didn’t grow hops on Haft; Reise’d brewed bitters for his taproom with germander his wife, Lora, raised in her kitchen garden.
Sharina glanced at the sky again; the half-moon was well risen, so she’d spent sufficient time here. She made a tiny gesture to Masmon.
As arranged, the aide took out a notebook with four leaves of thin-sliced elm wood. She tilted it to catch the light of the nearest lantern and said, “Your Highness? I fear that we’ll be late for your meeting with Chancellor Royhas if we don’t start back shortly.”
“Oh, goodness, Your Highness!” said Mistress Deza. “You mean you have work yet to do tonight?”
“I’m afraid I do, yes,” Sharina said. She smiled, but the sudden rush of fatigue turned the expression into something unexpectedly sad. “Since my brother’s with the army, things are … busy for those of us who’re dealing with the civil side of government.”
A third costumed figure had danced far enough into the square for Sharina to get a clear view of it. It was a long-faced, green-skinned giant whose arms would’ve dragged on the cobblestones if the stilt-walking man inside had let them hang. Instead he was moving the clawed hands with rods so that the creature seemed to snatch at revelers. Even presuming an element of caricature in the costume, Sharina wasn’t sure what it was intended to be.
“Master Kane?” she said, gesturing. “Is that dancer a demon?”
“Not exactly, Your Highness,” Kane said, clearly glad to answer a question that didn’t involve ale. “It’s an ogre, though some say ogres are the spawn of women who’ve lain with demons. The hero Sesir slew an ogre and a bear and a sea wolf to save the colony he led from Kanbesa. According to the Epic of the Foundings, that is. Have you read the epic, Your Highness?”
“Parts of it,” Sharina said truthfully. But very small parts, because in her day the Epic of the Foundings was known only from fragments. None of the surviving portions had mentioned Sesir—or the island of Kanbesa, for that matter.
She handed the mug back to Deza; she’d emptied it. She’d been thirsty, and after the initial unfamiliarity the ale had gone down very smoothly.
“We really have to drive back to the palace now,” Sharina said. She smiled at the chief burgess, then swept her gaze left and right to include all the officials and their wives. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you and to convey the kingdom’s appreciation.”
As Sharina turned away to walk back to her coach, flanked by the Blood Eagles, a dancer raised her shield again in a wild sweep. For an instant Sharina thought she glimpsed a pale, languid man in its polished surface.
It must be a distorted reflection, of course.
CASHEL STOOD ON the edge of the mere, listening to the fishermen croon in the near distance as they slid their tiny canoes through the reeds. The unfamiliar bright star was coming up in the southeast; it’d risen earlier each night since the Change. A shepherd like Cashel got to know the heavens very well. When he’d first seen this star it’d been part of the Water Pitcher, the constellation that signaled the start of the rainy season, but after a month it was nearing the tail of the Panther.
One man sat in the back of each canoe, poling it forward; his partner stood in the front with a long spear. Instead of a single point, the spears had outward-curving springs of bamboo with bone teeth on the inner sides. When fish rose to stare at the lantern hanging from the canoe’s extended bow, the spearman struck and caught the flopping victim like a gar’s jaws.
Cashel wasn’t a fisherman, and the fishermen he knew in Barca’s Hamlet went out onto the Inner Sea with hooks and long lines. He could appreciate skill even in people doing something unfamiliar, however, and these fellows fishing the reed-choked mere south of Valles obviously knew what they were doing.
Besides, he liked the way they sang while they worked. Cashel couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but it’d always pleased him to hear his friend Garric playing his shepherd’s pipe the times they watched the sheep together.
“There!” said Tenoctris firmly, straightening from the squat in which she’d been marking the dirt with a silver stylus. They were as close to the bank as they could get and still find the ground firm enough to take her impressions. Tenoctris took a bamboo wand from her bag, then added apologetically, “This may be a complete waste of time, Cashel. I shouldn’t have taken you away from Sharina.”
Cashel shrugged and smiled. “I don’t mind,” he said. “And anyway, you don’t waste time that I’ve seen, Tenoctris.”
He cleared his throat and glanced away, a little embarrassed. What he was about to say might sound like bragging, which Cashel didn’t like.
“I’d sooner be here in case, you know, something happens,” he said. “I figure you’re better off with me if something does than if you were with somebody else.”
Tenoctris smiled warmly. He didn’t know how old she was—really old, surely—but she hopped around chirping like a sparrow most of the time. Wizardry wore her down, but wizardry wore down everybody who used it.
It wore down even Cashel, though he wasn’t a wizard the way most people meant. He just did things when he had to.
Tenoctris was the only wizard Cashel’d met who seemed to him to know what she was doing. And by now, Cashel’d met more wizards than he’d have dreamed in the years he was growing up.
“So,” said one of the old men who’d been watching Cashel and Tenoctris, the strangers who’d come from Valles in a gig. There were eight of them; a hand and three fingers by Cashel’s calculation. “You folk be wizards, then?”
“She’s a wizard,” said Cashel, smiling and nodding toward Tenoctris. She was taking books out of her case, both rolls and those cut in pages and bound, codices she called them. “I’m a shepherd most times, but I’m helping her now. She’s my friend. She’s everybody’s friend, everybody who wants the good people to win.”
There wasn’t enough light to read by. No matter how smart you were—and there weren’t many smarter than Tenoctris—you couldn’t see the letters without a lamp. She liked to have the words of her spells before her even though she was going to call them out from memory. It was a habit, the way Cashel always flexed his shoulders three times before he picked up a really heavy weight.
“We don’t hold much with wizards here in Watertown,” the local man who’d been speaking said; the others nodded soberly. “Not saying anything against your friend, mind.”
Cashel looked at the group again, wondering for a moment if they were all men. He decided they were, though they were so old and bent down that it didn’t matter.
“From what I’ve seen of most wizards,” he said agreeably, “you’re right to feel that way. I�
��ve watched sheep as had more common sense than most wizards. Tenoctris is good, though.”
He paused and added, still calmly, “I’m glad you weren’t speaking against her. I wouldn’t like that.”
Cashel supposed these folk were the elders of the village too far down the bank to see even if it’d been daylight. The younger men were in the canoes, the women were back in the huts cooking the meal that the fishermen would eat on their return. The old men had nothing better to do than be busybodies, which—
Cashel grinned broadly.
—they were doing just fine.
Tenoctris had finished her preparations; she came to join them. Cashel was wondering if he ought to send the locals away, but Tenoctris pointed to the marble pool behind them. To the man who’d been speaking she said, “Can you tell me if there’s writing on that fountain, my good man?”
The pool must be spring-fed, because a trickle of water dribbled from a pipe through the curb, then down the side. The flow used to feed into an open channel, also marble, and then down into the mere. Years had eaten the trough away, so only the little difference lime from the stone made in the vegetation showed it’d ever been there.
The pool curb had the crumbly decay—black below but a leprous white above—that marble got in wet ground, but it still seemed solid. There was a raised part on the back like it was meant to hold a plaque or carved words, but Cashel doubted you’d be able to tell if anything was written there even in sunlight.
“Mistress, I can’t write,” said the old man nervously. He backed a step; Cashel’s size hadn’t scared him, but Tenoctris did—either because she was a wizard or just from the way she spoke that showed she was a lady. “Nobody in Water-town can write, mistress!”
“I think this was built as a monument to a battle, you see,” Tenoctris said. “According to Stayton’s Library, twin brothers named Pard and Pardil fought over the succession to the Kingdom of Ornifal. They and everyone in their armies were killed. A fountain sprang from the rock to wash the stain of blood from the land, and their uncle built a curb and stele—”
She gestured toward the vertical slab at the back of the curb.
David Drake
“—around it.”
She stepped through the group and knelt to peer closely at the pool. Cashel moved with her, not because there was a threat—certainly not from these men—but just on general principle. Sometimes things happened very fast. Although Cashel was quick, he still didn’t plan to give trouble a head start.
“So this is the spring, mistress?” Cashel said, squinting to see if that helped him make out any carving on the decayed slab. It didn’t.
“There are problems with the story, I’m afraid,” Tenoctris said, giving him one of her quick, cheerful smiles. The local men were listening intently; two of them even leaned close to see what they could make from the white-blistered stone. “Pard and Pardil mean Horse and Mare in the language of the day, and the island wasn’t called Ornifal until the hero Val arrived from Tegma a thousand years later and founded the city of Valles.”
She looked at the pool again, pursing her lips, and added, “But still, this could be the battle monument Stayton describes.”
An old man who’d been silent till then said, “Mistress, there was swords and a helmet carved on the stone, my gramps told me. And he said more squiggles too. That coulda been writing, couldna it?”
“Your gramps, your gramps!” sneered the original speaker. “Dotty he were, Rebben, and you’re dotty too if you think this fine lady’s going to take the least note of what you say or your gramps ever said!”
“Dotty am I, Hareth?” said Rebben, his voice rising immediately into something as shrill and harsh as a hawk’s scream. “Well, he did say it! And I reckon he said it true, as he always said true. And anyhow, who are you to talk who falls asleep with his face in his porridge most nights if his daughter don’t grab him quick, hey?”
“Fellows, don’t bump Lady Tenoctris, if you please,” Cashel said, moving forward to crowd the old men away without having to touch them. He rotated his quarterstaff, bringing it across at an angle in front of him to make the same point as his words. “If you’re going to argue, it’d be good if you went off a ways to do it.”
The men scattered like songbirds when a falcon strikes. Hareth and Rebben jumped to the same place, collided, and fell in a tangle with high-pitched cries.
Cashel grimaced and put himself between Tenoctris and the men thrashing nearby. He’d been clumsy and almost caused what he’d been trying to prevent: one of the old fellows bumping Tenoctris into the pool.
That hadn’t happened though. Tenoctris walked past with a pert expression, avoiding the men on the ground with the same careless unconcern as she did the muddy patch from the overflow pipe.
“I’m sure this is the place,” the old wizard said cheerfully to Cashel, who followed her back to the circle she’d scribed beside the bank. “All I could tell from the spell I worked back in the palace is that the site would become important. I hope I can learn more now that I’m here.”
She settled herself cross-legged, facing the figure. She’d written things both inside and outside the circle, but Cashel could no more read the words than Hareth and his friends could’ve.
Tenoctris raised the bamboo sliver. Before she started calling out the spell she glanced back at Cashel with a wry smile.
“Of course this may not help either,” she said. “I’m simply not a powerful wizard, as I’ve proved many times in the past.”
“You’ve never failed, Tenoctris,” Cashel said quietly. “You’ve always done enough that we’re still here. You are and the kingdom is, for all the people who fight evil.”
The old wizard’s smile changed to something softer, more positive. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a way to think about it. Thank you, Cashel.”
She bent over the circle and began, “Stokter neoter,” tapping her wand on the written words of power as she spoke them. “Men menippa menoda.”
Cashel looked away. Wizardry didn’t bother him, especially when Tenoctris was doing it, but his job was to look out for her. Watching Tenoctris chant would be as silly as watching sheep crop grass instead of keeping an eye out for danger.
And there was always a chance of danger when there was wizardry. Tenoctris said she could see the strands of power that sprang from certain places and twined among themselves. Those powers grew from temples and altars, especially old ones, but they came from graveyards and especially battlefields like this one. More men than Cashel could imagine had died here in blood and terror.
Concentrated power attracted those who wanted power more than anything else, and they weren’t all human.
The local men had gathered by the side of the pool, standing tightly together and all watching Cashel and Tenoctris. They seemed angry and afraid, though maybe the moonlight exaggerated their expressions. Cashel smiled at them, hoping he seemed friendly, but he couldn’t see that that did any good.
Tenoctris droned on. Sometimes Cashel caught a few syllables … morchella barza … but they didn’t mean anything to him. The language a wizard spoke was directed at things—demiurges, Tenoctris called them, but that was gobbledygook to Cashel—that controlled the powers that the cosmos turned on.
The bright star in the south continued to rise. The water of the memorial pool was mirror smooth; now it drew the star’s reflection into a cold white pathway.
Cashel began to wipe his quarterstaff with the wad of raw wool he carried for the purpose; lanolin in the fibers kept the hickory from cracking and brought out the luster of the polished wood. He’d turned the staff himself from the branch which the farmer who owned the tree had given him as pay for felling it. Cashel’d been little more than a child at the time, but he’d already had a man’s strength.
Now that he was a man, he had the strength of Cashel or-Kenset. He smiled at the thought.
Cashel put the wool away and lifted the staff, his hands spread a little more than the
width of his shoulders. He set the hickory spinning slowly in front of him, loosening his muscles. When he was ready, he speeded up each time he crossed his arms till the heavy staff hummed as it cut the air.
Still keeping an eye out—he was on watch, after all—Cashel raised the whirling staff overhead. He turned his body under it to face what’d been his back, then forward again. He moved in quick jumps, using the weight of the iron-shod hickory to pull him around.
Cashel saw a bluish twinkle in the center of Tenoctris’ figure; wizardlight, brought to life by her chanting the way flint strikes sparks from iron. Cashel felt the hair on the back of his neck rise, also a sign of approaching wizardry.
The old men watched in amazement, but Cashel wasn’t doing this to impress them. He grinned again. He’d impressed much more important people than these old codgers, and some of those people’d been trying to kill him at the time.
Ordinarily a little spell of the sort Tenoctris chanted wouldn’t have made him tingle as much as this. Was something else …?
Where the star had shone on the pool, there was now a man with a shield and drawn sword. The angles were funny; the fellow wasn’t reflected—there wasn’t anything but empty sky to reflect. It was like he was standing straight upright instead of being on his back in the water. His leg moved forward and he was standing on the stone curb.
The water didn’t ripple. A second man was standing on its surface. Both were naked except for the belt supporting their scabbards. Their skin was black in the moonlight.
The first man stepped forward, raising his sword. Rebben noticed him and shouted.
The black man’s sword split Rebben’s skull like a melon. As the other old men blatted in terror, the swordsman jumped into the midst of them hacking left and right.
The second figure was stepping out of the pool.