The Shadow Isle

by Katharine Kerr

  When Sidro walked off, Sharak followed her obediently, some three steps behind. It was going to take him a while to understand that he truly was a free man still. Later she’d make it plain to him that she no longer served Alshandra, Sidro decided. At the moment he appeared too dazed from all that had happened to him to understand subtleties.

  They found Dallandra, who immediately agreed to look over Sharak’s injuries.

  “Come over to this fire here,” Dalla said to the boy. “So I can see better.”

  He stared bewildered until Sidro translated, then smiled. He turned to Sidro and bent one knee as a sign of his lower status. “Thank you, Holy One,” he said softly. “It’s so good of you to help such as me.”

  “You’re very welcome,” Sidro said. “I’ll wait here in case the healer needs to tell you something.”

  He knelt before her, then leaned forward and kissed the toe of her boot. With a bob of his head, he rose and followed Dallandra to the fire.

  Sidro felt her eyes fill with tears, just a few and briefly. The boy’s obvious respect had touched her, a respect she’d not received in a long while. With Laz so much on her mind, she found herself remembering how he’d seduced her away from her sacred vows. She’d come to believe that he’d been right to do so, come to see that Alshandra was no true goddess at all, but his utter contempt for a devotion she’d cherished more than life itself hurt her still. What had he said? Something like, “I thought you’d throw that asinine vow off like a cloak.”

  Had it been so asinine, to hope for something so grand, so much larger than herself, so much more wonderful than the handful of names and half-understood rituals offered by the old gods? That night she felt her loss of faith as keenly, as painfully, as she’d felt the loss of her first child. Either of them might have given her life a meaning that it had lacked, her, a mere slave-born half-citizen.

  I have the dweomer now, she reminded herself. She might have another child as well, of course. She hoped for such every day, now that she had a man who wanted a child. She remembered telling Laz that their son had died of fever. He’d looked at her with such blank eyes, hesitated so long, and then finally said, “I’m so sorry.” That was all. “I’m so sorry.” For her, perhaps. For himself, he was relieved. He didn’t even bother to deny it.

  Why would I want him back? The thought hung in her mind like a sudden moonrise, casting strange shadows rather than clear light.

  On the morning that Aethel’s caravan left Lin Serr, Berwynna and Dougie went down the long flights of stairs to the parkland below the main entrance to the city. While the sun climbed higher in the sky, a crowd of men and pack animals milled around, seemingly aimlessly at first. The mules brayed, the men swore, and Aethel trotted back and forth, sorting them out into a decent order. Mic took the chance to remind Berwynna that Cerr Cawnen lay a long journey away—about a month, depending upon the weather.

  “Now, once we get there,” Mic said, “I’ll look over this job of theirs. If I like it, I’ll stay, but you should go back to Lin Serr with the last trading run. I’ll arrange things with Aethel. Your grandfather will make sure that you and Dougie get safely back to Haen Marn.”

  “If you say so, Uncle Mic,” Berwynna said. “By then, I’ll doubtless be ever so glad to see Mam again, especially if we find my da. Everything’s been so splendid so far. Even ordinary things are marvels to me after being shut up on that wretched little island.”

  One of those mundane marvels was the caravan itself. Berwynna had never seen so many mules gathered in one place, to say naught of the sixteen muleteers, tall men, all of them, and on the beefy side. Among them, Dougie seemed neither tall nor short, but his red hair did mark him as someone different. Most of the Cerr Cawnen men had yellow hair and pale blue or gray eyes, far different from the men of Alban that she’d seen, and names that to her sounded either strange or oddly plain, such as Whaw, Hound, Fraed, and Richt, Aethel’s journeyman and his second-in-command.

  “Why would anyone name their son Hound?” Berwynna asked Mic.

  “Most likely it’s an old name in their family.” Mic dropped his voice and glanced around to make sure they couldn’t be overheard. “A long time ago all of the Cerr Cawnen ancestors were slaves, Wynni. They escaped from their Deverry masters and headed west. It was the masters who gave them names like Hound and Ash. Now, remember, bringing up the subject of slave-ancestors is very discourteous, so don’t.”

  “Oh, don’t let it worry you. I can see that.”

  Since some of the mules would be carrying empty panniers home—Aethel had traded bulky woolens for fine metalwork, including a good many pieces of jewelry—Berwynna, Kov, and Mic would ride to Cerr Cawnen. Dougie, however, would walk alongside Berwynna’s mule. Since Richt had given him a pair of stout boots and some brigga as well, he made no complaint when he led the mule that would be Berwynna’s over to her.

  “You look so different in those brigga,” Berwynna said, grinning. “Now we’re dressed alike, and no one’s going to ask me why you’re wrapped in a blanket.”

  “Huh, and them with their gall!” But he was smiling at her. “The plaid will do well enough for a cloak if it rains.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind walking?”

  “You’re not much of a rider, lass. I can keep an eye on this mule this way. They’re crafty, mules, a fair bit smarter than horses, and he won’t be obeying someone who doesn’t know how to handle him.”

  The mule snorted as if agreeing. When it tried to toss its head, Dougie’s broad hand on its halter kept it still.

  Mic wandered away to speak with Kov, who was nervously considering his own mule nearby. They were a contrasting pair, Mic stout and clean-shaven, with hair as black as soot, and Kov lean, a handsome man for one of the Mountain Folk, with his chiseled features and neatly trimmed brown beard. They were, however, also arguing about something—what a surprise! Berwynna thought. The Mountain Folk side of her clan had some traits that she could have done without, though she certainly had benefited from their generosity to inhabitants of Haen Marn.

  Among other things, Vron had given Berwynna a pair of saddlebags for the journey. Before she mounted up, she opened them as surreptitiously as she could to make sure that the precious dweomer book was safe, tucked into its oiled wrappings. Dougie, however, noticed it immediately.

  “What’s that?” Dougie said. “Not that blasted book I dug up, is it?”

  “Um, well, it is.” Berwynna began lacing the bag back up before Mic noticed as well. “When I was going down to the pier, back home, you know? I saw it just lying on a bench, so I took it. I know I shouldn’t have. Please don’t berate me!”

  “Well, it’s here now, sure enough.” Dougie rubbed his chin with one hand while he considered the problem. “We’ll take it when we go back for the winter. There’s naught we can do about it now.”

  Thinking that she could return the book relieved some of Berwynna’s guilty feelings about having taken it in the first place. Whenever she thought about it, she was surprised all over again that she’d found it left out in the open. It was so unlike Mara to be careless with the few things she owned.

  At last the caravan got itself assembled in the correct riding order, and all the farewells had been said. With a whoop and a yell, Aethel led his men and mules out of the massive stone gates of Lin Serr.

  For the first few days, they followed a well-worn road through the hills east of the mountain city. It wound through forests, mostly pine mixed with aspens and maples, though now and then they did pass a farm worked by men of the Mountain Folk. Judging from the sun’s position at its setting, Berwynna realized that despite the road’s many turnings, they were heading northwest rather than straight west.

  “This road does go away from Deverry, bain’t?” she asked Richt.

  “It does,” he said. “The farther from them we do stay the better. There be bandits along the border. That be why we carry staves.” He glanced at Dougie. “I hope you be good with that sword of
yours, lad.”

  By then Dougie had learned enough of the Mountain dialect to answer on his own. “There be some who did tell me I am,” Dougie said. “We should be hoping you get not the chance to judge for yourself.”

  Richt laughed and nodded his agreement. They were sitting together that evening on one side of a small campfire. On the other, Mic and Aethel were discussing opals while Kov merely listened. Richt picked up a thin stick of firewood and drew a rough map in the dirt between him and Berwynna.

  “This curve here,” Richt pointed to a half circle, “be the mountains. Down below here this line be the border twixt Dwarveholt and Deverry. Another reason to travel the northern route be the river.” He drew a vertical line westward of the half circle. “It’s so cursed broad that never would we get across on our own, but some folk who live there did build a bridge. For a toll, they do let us cross. Then we head south again, but not too far south, not on your life, nowhere near the Slavers’ Country.”

  “This land north,” Dougie said, “be it hilly or flat?”

  “Flat, mostly, and forested. Not many do live there, though the land, it does look rich enough. Now, the far north, it be a strange place, a barren place, much rock and little soil. The gods did take a shovel and scrape it bare, I think me, some long while ago. Here and there along the streams, there be grass and suchlike, but not much land a man could farm. I heard tell that there be ghosts up there.” Richt leaned forward and quirked a conspiratorial eyebrow. “And another thing. Once we do reach the flat lands, ride not off on your own, fair lady. There be dragons there.”

  “I do know that,” Berwynna said. “One of them be my father. The silver wyrm.”

  Richt stared openmouthed, then glanced at Kov, who’d turned to listen to Richt’s tale.

  “He is,” Kov said in his perfect Deverrian, “though the tale is far more complicated than you might think.”

  Richt looked back and forth between them. Berwynna smiled brightly and waited. Finally Richt muttered an excuse, got up, and left. It took all her self-control to keep from laughing at his retreating back.

  The silver wyrm was, at that moment, lairing far to the west of the caravan. When he left Cengarn, Rori flew straight north to the spot where he’d earlier seen the Horsekin army. By then they’d moved on, but they left tracks and litter behind them, a trail that angled eastward. Rori eventually found them setting up an elaborate camp. He stayed high enough overhead to prevent them seeing more than a birdlike shape, white against the sun, if indeed they noticed him at all.

  The spot they’d chosen, a low rise of hill that overlooked a shallow valley to the south of it, made a good choice for a fortress, but it lay too far north to offer any sort of threat to the Westlands. Since the Horsekin had marked out the site of its future walls by clearing away the grass and shrubby ground cover, Rori could estimate its size—too small to garrison any sizable number of troops. As a staging ground, however, to store provisions and provide support for an army on the march, it would do quite well.

  The question then became: where was that army and when would it march? When he woke that morning, he decided that he’d best go take a look at the heart of Horsekin territory, just to see if troops were gathering or if more of the savage Horsekin from the far north were moving south to join their brethren. He could fly there and back in but a few days, a journey that would take men on horseback months.

  Rori got up from the rocky ledge where he’d been sleeping and stretched. The wound on his side itched, as it continually did. He desperately want to scratch it, but fear of making it worse stopped him. It had nearly poisoned him to death, back when it was black and crusted, oozing a continual slime of blood and pus. If only I had hands, he thought, as he did every time the wound forced itself into his consciousness. Perhaps then he could find some relief, carry with him that willow bark Dallandra had used to soothe the itching for a little while, brew it up himself. All he had now were paws, four huge clawed paws, too clumsy for delicate acts like lighting a fire or peeling bark from a tree.

  By turning his head at the right angle he could see the pink stripe on his belly. Before Dallandra had pointed out that he was making it worse, he’d licked it in a futile attempt to keep it clean—licked it like a dog, he reminded himself, not a man. Now he could do nothing to it or for it. He’d come to hate it more than he’d ever hated an enemy. Perhaps it was an enemy, a constant reminder of his lack of hands, of his lack of the ability to do all those little human things he’d always taken for granted.

  With a growl he launched himself into the air. When he flew, hands became irrelevant. It was the one thing he could do to ease his soul as well as the wound.

  During the day, when the caravan was making its slow way west, Envoy Kov had taken to riding at the head of the line with Aethel. This position spared him the sight of Berwynna and Dougie laughing together or talking in the intimate way that only young lovers have. More to the point, it allowed him to question Aethel thoroughly about the countryside through which they were riding. Kov was always mindful of his commission from Garin and the envoys’ guild, to learn everything he could about the mysterious, exotic west.

  After an eightnight of riding, they left the mountains for a stand of low hills, curving away to the north of them just as Richt’s rough map had shown. The rocklands, however, still lay some distance away, or so Aethel told Kov. Directly ahead lay rolling country, grasslands, mostly, crisscrossed by the watershed streams for the Dwrvawr, as he unimaginatively named the central river: the Big Water.

  “Now, mark this well,” Aethel said. “The rivers hereabout, they be dangerous. Some kind of monster does live in the water. Shallow streams be safe, mind, but any that run over four feet deep or so— go not down to the banks, even.”

  “Monster?” Kov said. “What kind of monster?”

  “I know not, exactly. Never have I seen one clearly, like, myself, though I did see some swimming when I were a good distance away. The local folk do warn us in no uncertain terms. Some furry thing, they do say, very fast and sleek, with huge fangs. It’ll pull you under and drown you, then eat you for supper without even the courtesy of spoon and salt.”

  “I’ll be careful, then.” Kov was thinking of Garin, rolling his eyes at the thought of monsters. Beavers, perhaps? Coupled with superstition? Flood waves, brown with mud? Kov could think of a number of explanations, but he reminded himself to keep an open mind. He was here to learn, not to assume he knew.

  The land had flattened out by the time they reached the Dwrvawr. The river lay in a grassy valley, no more than a dip in the land worn away by the placid water. Thick stands of purplish-green reeds grew along the banks, though the water ran fast out in the middle of its channel. A scatter of huge old willow trees grew along its banks. When Kov looked north, he saw what appeared to be fields of some sort of grain, growing tall but still green this time of year. Otherwise grass burgeoned, marred only by a dirt road that led up to the bridge, a ramshackle affair of rough-cut timbers held together with rope and wood pegs on top of wood pilings that slanted at various angles. It reminded Kov more of the skeleton of some long-dead animal than a proper bridge.

  “We’re going to cross on that?” Kov said to Aethel.

  “The only ford be a full day’s ride out of our way, and besides, there be those monsters, so cross it we will.” Aethel gave him a good-natured smile. “Fear not, Envoy! Never has it dumped us into the water yet.”

  There’s always a first time for everything, Kov thought. Aloud he said, “Well and good, then.”

  A few yards from each end of the bridge stood a small narrow building like a crate turned on end, made of wattle and daub and roofed in moldy-looking thatch. A tall man like Dougie would barely be able to stand upright in one of them, Kov figured, and only one of him would fit. He assumed that they existed only to provide shelter for the men who collected the bridge tolls. Sure enough, as the caravan drew closer, a short though stocky fellow stepped out of the booth and raised one arm i
n a signal to halt.

  Aethel called out to his mules and men. In a dusty swirl the caravan halted while Aethel dismounted and strolled over to meet the toll taker. Richt signaled to Kov and his party to join the leader on the ground.

  “We’ll have to lead the stock across a few at a time,” Richt said.

  Clutching his rune-marked staff, Kov dismounted. The tollman wore not proper clothes, but a strange loose tabardlike garment, two long pieces of brown cloth sewn together at the sides up as far as his chest, then precariously fastened at the shoulders with ornamental pins in the shape of fish. Should he wish, he could have opened one pin then shrugged to send the garment to the ground. He had a narrow face that peered out of a thick white beard and a shock of white hair. For a moustache he had only white plumes at each corner of his upper lip.

  Out here in the middle of wild country, coin meant nothing. Aethel opened his saddlebags and brought out a small, thin-beaded knife blade, a packet of steel fishhooks in oiled cloth, and two small glass balls that Kov took for net floats. The tollman fingered each in turn, held the objects up to his nose and sniffed them, then handed back the blade and the net floats. With a sweep of his arm he indicated that the bridge was theirs to cross.

  With the toll paid, the men began to lead the mules across, five at a time—safely, despite Kov’s fears. Kov followed, clutching his staff in one hand and his mule’s halter rope in the other.

  On the far side, two white cows grazed, watched over by a naked boy child carrying a long stick. He watched the caravan cross while he scratched his dirty stomach, but he never called out in greeting or alarm. Some hundreds of yards beyond him and his cows stood a huddle of thatched huts, maybe twenty in all, arranged around a stone pillar. Villagers came hurrying out as the last few mules crossed the bridge, and they all struck Kov as being as strange as the toll taker.

  None of the villagers came close to the Cerr Cawnen men in height, but they were ordinary-sized men and women, taller than Kov’s own Mountain Folk by a fair bit. They looked oddly similar to one another, with their short brown hair, dark eyes, and bushy eyebrows, though their faces showed differences—a sharp nose here, a pronounced lack of chin there, and the like. They all, men and women both, wore the strange tabardlike garment. The little children, however, ran around naked. Inbreeding, Kov thought, I’ll wager it’s common among these isolated villages.