Chapter V
Bound South
The Silver: Summer 72–99
I
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Jame.
“It was my sword.”
“Which I asked you to bring, and I apparently am becoming That-Which-Destroys. Am I to blame, then?”
“Of course not.”
“The thing is, if you start taking responsibility for everything, it never ends. Believe me, I know.”
They were sitting on a bench in the court garden by the fish pond, stalked by haughty peacocks but otherwise left alone. It was the next day. Few in Omiroth had slept the night before, nor probably would until both Adric and the unfortunate Dari had been given to the pyre on the morrow. The new Lord Ardeth went where he was told and did as he was bid, all in a state of shocked disbelief. His mother seldom left his side. It was anyone’s guess, though, how many of her whispered admonitions he actually heard.
“Who will rule at Omiroth?” Torisen asked, as if reading her thoughts.
“The Ardeth have chosen Timmon and you confirmed him last night.”
“I’m only the Highlord. Lady Distan will still be here when I go, after the pyres. You should leave for Bashti as soon as possible, though. There’s still Harn.”
On to the next problem, thought Jame. How like her practical brother. Only time would tell how Timmon faced up to his new, unwelcome responsibilities. In the meantime, Tori would have to confront his own, as would she.
“I still think you were right to come,” she said. “This was a festering situation. It needed to be lanced.”
He looked sharply at her. “At such a cost? Pardon me if I am less free with the life of my oldest friend. No. That was unfair.” He clapped his hands on his knees, frustrated. “You see, I meant to go on to Kestrie and Kraggen to see what I could do about the Edirr and the Coman. Now I wonder if I might cause harm there too.”
“Someone told me once—an Arrin-ken, I think—that a potential Tyr-ridan will be potent across all three aspects of our god until each of us settles into our own. While I often destroy, I have also preserved and created, if not quite as competently, or do I mean ‘completely’? If I had stopped to think too much, though, might I have done nothing at all, for good or ill? I wish you would go on asking questions. The answers could save us all.”
He gave her a wry smile. “You’ve thought about this, haven’t you?”
“Well, I came to it younger than you did. That’s some revenge for the ten-year gap in our ages, twin. And, as you say, you’re still Highlord.”
“Ah. Just the same, Kraggen and Kestrie look like squabbling children compared to Omiroth. I find that I don’t have much patience with the Edirr and the Coman. As soon as I can, I will return to Gothregor. Will I try this experiment again? That remains to be seen.”
II
As it happened, Jame didn’t leave until after the pyres either. To have done so earlier would have seemed disrespectful, and she didn’t want the Ardeth any more upset than they already were. Besides, she wanted to talk to Timmon.
“I wish I were going with you,” he said when they could finally snatch a moment alone together. “If Grandfather hadn’t died, I would have, despite Mother. She says that I have duties here now. She’s probably right. You’ll ask about Lyra there?”
“As soon as I get a chance. I hear that the Knorth have games scheduled in Karkinaroth after the ones in Transweald. If I can, I will go. But see here, Timmon, what do you mean by that girl?”
He laughed ruefully. “Be damned if I know. She’s a pest and sometimes a twerp, but I’ve never met anyone like her—except, perhaps, for you.”
That surprised Jame. “I’m also a twerp and a pest?”
“You have no artifice, as far as I can tell. I wouldn’t call you innocent, exactly, but you don’t play silly games.”
“You have no idea what I’ve seen or done.”
“Someday,” he said with, a touch of his old, charming smile, “you will have to tell me.”
Then the Lady Distan found them and they had to part.
III
The funeral was held at dusk that night in the garden, a large swatch of which had by then been cleared to make way for it. All day, retainers and family visited the court bringing tokens of respect as well as spices and precious oils hoarded for just such an occasion. The two pyres rose side by side, one low, the other increasingly high with stepped sides built of rare, fragrant wood, garnished with all the flowers of the despoiled garden and several peacocks, their tails displayed, their necks wrung.
A gibbous moon rose. Under it gathered Adric’s household and as many of his Kendar as could fit in the surrounding arcade. This would be a strictly traditional ceremony, Jame supposed; Adric had, after all, been a very traditional Kencyr. That he had put up with her at all she still found amazing, but then Tori had never been conventional either and the old lord had supported him faithfully, despite their differences and Adric’s need to manipulate.
She noted three women standing at the foot of the larger pyre. Judging by their fine clothing and masks, two of them were elderly Highborn, one supporting the other who silently wept. The third woman was younger and more plainly dressed, a Kendar with broad shoulders, strong arms, and a nervous air. At least, her hands kept opening and closing. A black robed priest stood by them.
“Who are they?” Jame asked her brother.
“Adric’s oldest women-kin and his last attendant. That must be a position of particular honor.”
The biers emerged from the house, surrounded by torches, and were carried down the steps by the old lord’s remaining immediate family. Timmon walked foremost among these, looking as pale as his grandfather. Lady Distan followed in dignified silence, no longer a bud but now in her crimson robes a full-blown, regal rose.
This is a queen, her proud stance seemed to assert. Make way for her.
The bearers raised each bier to the top of its mound. Dari was covered with a plain cloak, to signify his dutiful if reluctant humility. Adric’s shroud was richer, cream velvet beaded with pearls, scattered with luminous moonstones. Wealth would go to the fire with him, to his house’s honor as much as to his own.
The priest gave the three women each a cup. They drank. Then they mounted the pyre, the Kendar helping her older companions. All three lay down on its steps beside the peacocks and folded hands across their chests.
Jame realized that there would be no blood spots on cloth here, no surrogate sacrifices. This was the real thing.
“I didn’t know that Adric was a blood-binder,” she said, feeling breathless.
“Neither did I,” Torisen replied through tight lips.
The priest took a flaring torch and offered it to him. “Lord, honor your patron,” he said. “Light the fire.”
Torisen looked at those still figures. “No,” he said.
The crowd murmured. This was an insult.
The priest leaned closer. “Take it,” he said. “They are already dead.”
Timmon seized the torch from the priest’s hand, but then he hesitated, looking ghastly.
“Go on,” mouthed his mother.
“Not the boy,” said Torisen, glancing at him.
Jame grabbed the priest. “If they are all dead as you say, prove it. Say the pyric rune.”
He glared at her, then took a deep breath. The rune scorched its way out of his throat, making those who heard it flinch back as if from searing heat. It struck the bodies on the pyre so that they too seemed perforce to inhale.
Ahhh, hahhh . . .
Chests rose, chests fell, exhaling smoke. More seeped out from under robes, from under masks. Tongues of flame licked outward, blackening cloth, blacking faces. Deep within the pyres, oil-soaked kindling caught. Torisen watched as the man who would feign have been his father crumbled into charred ruins.
Jame was about to look away when her breath caught and she grabbed Torisen’s arm.
“What?”
The principal pyre folded inward, as it was designed to do, dropping its occupant into its incandescent heart. Flames leaped upward. Sparks flew against the moon. Onlookers sighed.
The priest choked on a seared, constricted throat. He was trying not to laugh. “Highlord, you have proved yourself false to your oldest friend. Who will trust you now?”
“Oh, shut up,” said Jame.
IV
Later, she told herself that it was only heat that had made the young Kendar’s fingers clutch each other so desperately. She couldn’t still have been alive in that inferno . . . could she?
Then, it had all collapsed.
What came to mind was Bear on his pyre in the White Hills, how his brother Sheth had seen him move in the fire and had pulled him out. Life had been a torment for Bear for a long time after that, in so many ways. Here, once the pyre had fallen, surely there had been no more hope, no more fear.
But the memory haunted her.
Could Tori put an end to such practices? How would traditional Kencyr respond if he tried to do so?
“Who will trust you now?” the priest had asked.
V
The next day, early, Torisen left for Gothregor and Jame for the Central Lands. Grimly went with her. Events at Omiroth had so badly shaken him that he too only wanted to go home. Jame also had Damson’s ten-command, and was glad of it. Apparently, this was what Torisen had had in mind when he had ordered her to bring an escort—Kendar she knew to accompany her into a strange new land.
He had been thinking about more than that, as it turned out. Before they parted, he had turned to her and said, “One more thing: in Bashti you should be able to make judgments based on what you see and hear, without waiting weeks for my approval by post rider. I authorize you to act for me.”
The memory of that still stunned her. How far they both had come in matters of trust, and what a weight to place on her shoulders.
That first day, they passed between Kraggen on the west bank and Kestrie on the east.
“Greetings,” said Essiar, Lord Edirr—or was it his twin brother Essien?—tumbling down a bank to the road on the back of a bright chestnut mare, his hunting party behind him. The horses below jumped. Death’s-head hissed through his fangs. Jame clouted him on the ear.
“Quiet,” she said. Then, to the newcomer, “You don’t mean to poach again, do you?”
Essien—or was it Essiar?—grinned. “What if we do? Daring Edirr, stodgy Coman. The game goes to the most skillful, whichever bank it is on. Why else maintain a bridge between us, eh?”
There was, indeed, a bridge. The Silver had many such crossings between keeps, although they had to be rigorously maintained and often rebuilt, given the writhing of the River Snake down whose length the Silver ran.
“Won’t the Coman be watching their end?”
“Oh, they did at first and may be doing so now, but with so many of their troops stationed in Mirkmir they have few to spare. We Edirr, likewise, are short-handed.”
“Cousin Holly at Shadow Rock says much the same. It strikes me that the smallest keeps suffer the most from the current situation.”
“And you don’t?”
Jame considered that. “Torisen hasn’t complained about it, but it did occur to me that our barracks at Gothregor rang a little hollow. Then too, we all miss Harn. By the way, your raids are making my brother nervous.”
His smile broadened. “So?”
“He needs your support, and you need his. Think about it.”
Essiar thought, and grinned again. “Essien sends his greetings. You and Torisen are also twins, yes?”
This was far from general knowledge. Some like Adiraina might have guessed it, but there was still that ten years’ difference between their ages.
“Why would you say so?” she asked.
“An instinct. Don’t you also finish each other’s thoughts?”
That, at least, was true.
“Ride wary,” Jame said to him.
“Ha!” he said, and spurred away.
VI
That night they camped ten miles south of the keeps, where the Riverland ended.
From here, the Northern Host had taken nineteen days to reach the Cataracts when Torisen had led it down to face the Waster Horde. However, that had been largely a forced march at seventy miles or more a day with dwar sleep at night. The Kendar on foot had done better than the horses.
“The fastest way would be to travel by post,” Torisen had said, with a sidelong glance at Harn’s letter. “There are stations roughly every twenty-five miles. Eleven or twelve days from here to Bashti . . . ”
But those stations were set up mostly for messengers, with a limited number of remounts each. Even a party as small as Jame’s would have over-taxed if not crippled that vital service. Besides, she didn’t want to arrive alone.
“Harn has survived this long,” she had said. “He can wait a few days longer.”
So here she was, looking south down the slide of the Silver, with her command making camp behind her. Had she been right about Harn? How would she feel if she arrived too late, whatever that meant?
Damson spoke at her shoulder:
“One of our horses may be pulling up lame. Already. Permission to swap it out for a pack pony?”
“Yes, of course. The next station may have an available replacement. Let’s hope there aren’t more drop-outs.”
“Forty-five miles a day from now on. You hope to keep that up?”
“Weather and terrain permitting. We can but try.”
The next day they came to the first station, which did have a mount to spare although it cut their tiny herd by a third and Jame got some sour looks.
Rue’s Stubben tried an experimental limp of his own, but gave it up when strenuously urged.
Death’s-head snorted with disgust at a pace that must have seemed painfully slow to him. He showed no sign of leading them off into the folds in the land, however, assuming they even existed here. At least, Jame had never seen any signs of them. As the day’s heat settled on the rathorn, he seemed to go to sleep on his feet while still shambling forward. The rest of the company loped after him. That night and each thereafter, he shook himself awake and disappeared to hunt, with Jorin and Grimly trotting hopefully on his heels. All three were carnivores if not, on the rathorn’s part, omnivores.
On the fourth day from Omiroth, they passed the way that turned off to the Grindark keep at Wyrden, but had no reason to visit it. This was where Torisen had nearly gotten his throat cut, Jame remembered. It was also where they had found the lost mail pouch with news in it of the Southern Host’s disastrous encounter with the Horde in the Wastes. Here Torisen’s mad dash to the Cataracts had really begun.
Beyond that, the Oseen Hills opened out on the eastern bank and rolled on for three more days, parched and singing under the late summer sun. The wells at post stations supplied water. Dried rations came out of packs.
On the 81st they reached the Ever-Quick as it rushed down from the Ebonbane and the Anarchies between the Oseen and Ordor, northernmost of the Central Lands.
“A third of the way to Bashti,” said Grimly, coming up beside Death’s-head although maintaining a respectful distance from him. The Wolver rose and shook off the road’s dust. Fur flew. In the heat, he was shedding. “Halfway to my home, the Grimly Holt.”
“How are your paws?”
“Sore.”
“You could ride one of the ponies.”
“Better you should ask your cat.”
Jorin had plumped down to chew noisily on spread, tufted toes. He sneezed, stood up, and jumped onto Death’s-head’s back behind the saddle. The rathorn jerked awake and bolted. The saddle’s high cantle kept Jame from shooting off over his tail. Jorin dug in his claws and wailed. Sometime later, they juddered to a stop, whereupon Death’s-head put his hooves together and bucked them both off.
“That could have gone better,” said Jame, picking herself up, ruefully regarding a rip in the knee of her pants. Nothing was broken, however, and Jorin, catlike, had landed on his feet.
Damson pulled up beside them on a sweating horse. “This is no time,” she said, “to show off.”
“Somewhere in the luggage is my armor, also a crupper. Find it, will you?”
While Damson did this, Jame had words with a truculent Death’s-head. “You don’t like having your rump attacked. I understand that. This should help, though.”
The Kendar brought back barding in the form of a heavily quilted cape that fit over the rathorn’s otherwise unprotected hind-quarters.
Jame secured it to the saddle, then wrestled up Death’s-head’s tail, which he was inclined to clench between his haunches. “Quit it,” she said, slapping him on the flank and buckling the crupper’s strap when he flinched. “What?”
This, to Rue, who had also flinched. “Nothing.”
“Now, let’s try this again. Jorin, up.”
The ounce looked dubious. However, obedient, he crouched and sprang. The rathorn shied under his weight but steadied, still glaring.
“Better,” said Jame. “I do prefer it when my children don’t quarrel.”
Their bolt had brought them up to a bridge. For some reason, at this point the River Road shifted from the east to the west bank, although Jame could see that a minor road continued on the way they had been going. A scout went ahead to make sure the span was sound—always a risk over the Silver. This was the cadet Wort, Jame noted. She had been aware of the girl on the ride south but hadn’t known quite what to say to her. Wort had declared her loyalty to Jame by growing long hair and elaborately braiding it, in contrast to the usual randon short cut. During his invasion of Tagmeth, Gerridon had made her hack it off. That might seem trivial, but it wasn’t.
The way having been proven safe, they crossed over and camped on the western bank, lest something untoward happen in the night.
For the next two days they rode around the White Hills. While the company had talked and sung before, here they were quiet in the shadow of that ominous land. No one would ever forget how Ganth Gray Lord had descended on the Kings’ Host of assembled Kencyr mercenaries. It was said that Ganth’s hands were still red with the blood of his slaughtered womenfolk and that his madness had infected those who rode after him. That the Bashtiri Shadow Guild had slain them, there was no doubt, but who had paid for the contract? Ganth blamed the Seven Kings. His own people stood in the way of his vengeance. He struck them down until through sheer numbers rather than force of arms they overwhelmed him. Exile had followed, and thirty years of darkness for the Kencyrath. Before that, the hills had earned a new name, white as they then were with the ashes of the Kencyr dead.
They still had a bleached quality and were often overhung with dust, or mist, or the ghost of smoke. Birds had skimmed the Oseen Hills, crying. None flew here unless so high that they were mere silent dots against a stricken sky.
“Torisen cut across those,” Jame said to Wort, peering into the twilight beyond their campfire. “He was in a hurry, of course, but oh so rash.”
“What did he find there, lady?”
“It seems that the hills have gone soft. When two parts of Rathillien are somehow alike, they may overlap. Tori wandered out of the Central Lands altogether and into the Haunted Lands. Haunts followed him back.”
“Like the ones that came through Tagmeth’s gates last Winter’s Eve?”
“Yes, very like. They are the returned dead, you know. Nothing where I grew up was entirely dead or alive except for us, and sometimes we weren’t sure. It was all very unpleasant.”
“I saw them then,” said Wort with a shudder. “Can they look anything like that?”
She pointed.
Jame blinked the firelight out of her eyes. A tall figure stood motionless between the initial swelling of the dark hills. Wisps of luminous mist wreathed its unseen feet and swirled up its pale robes. It appeared to be watching the camp through what might have been a smiling waxen mask. Then, between one blink and the next, it was gone.
Jame shivered. “I don’t know what that was,” she said, “but I don’t like it. Damson?”
“Here.” The ten-commander materialized out of the night so suddenly that she must have been standing nearby, also watching.
“From now on, set extra guards.”
Damson grunted in assent and stumped off to do so.
Again, Jame wondered where she had seen that face before. A similar tremor had run along her nerves at Kithorn with the Noyat shaman. Where else?
Wort nervously cleared her throat with the air of one determined to change the topic. “What are you making, lady?”
Jame held up the tangled work, noting that in doing so her hands shook. Trinity, that specter in the hills really had rattled her. With improvised needles, she had been attempting to knit something using long, white strands pulled from Death’s-head’s curry brush and woolen threads teased from a spare blanket. The result was not unlike an untidy bird’s nest, made worse by the stitches she had just dropped.
“It may not amount to anything,” she said. “I thought, though, that I would try to make you a hat. I’m sorry about your braids.”
“Oh!” Wort involuntarily touched the dandelion ruff of her cropped hair. “Something with rathorn in it? That would be . . . wonderful!”
On the 84th they left the hills, glad enough to see them fall behind. By now, the country of Mirkmir was on their side of the river and ancient Hathir opposite them, the respective temporary homes of Coman and Ardeth forces.
Of course, Jame had travelled this way before, going to and coming from Kothifir. Then, however, her attention had been fixed on the immediate route. Now she noticed more. The Silver remained largely empty, no surprise given its treacherous nature. There were more bridges than she remembered, though, and more relics of those that had been abandoned. These latter often corresponded to the ruins of cities set back from the River Road, often no more than a few easily overlooked stones in a field. The capital of Mirkmir was an exception, although even it seemed to have turned its back on the Silver. At least, the company passed the moldering remains of extensive wharfs only a few of which still welcomed small, scared-looking boats, some with chunks bitten out of their gunwales, others sunken and moldering in their slips with breached hulls.
That night Jame dreamed that the Master spoke to her out of the dark.
“Poor little girl,” he said, and she could hear the smug smile in his laughing voice. “Do you really think yourself a match for me? Your brother and cousin are even more pitiful. I have bargained with Perimal Darkling itself and gained my wish. Who are you, to contest that?”
No one, she wanted to say. I was a fool ever to think that I could.
And with that she woke, shivering. His voice had taunted her before, since she had last heard it wail off into the desolation of his soul-image. She had freed the souls which her mother, the Dream-weaver, his sister, had reaped for him. What would he do now? How could she counter him?
I’m not ready, she thought. Will I ever be?
There was no more sleep that night.
A day later, on the 88th, they came to the edge of the great forest known as the Weald.
“Nearly home,” Jame said to the Wolver Grimly. “Are you excited?”
He grinned. At the same time, though, he looked nervous. “It will be good to see my pack again, of course, but will they be glad to see me?”
“Why not?”
“Before I went north to the Riverland, I was in the Deep Weald with Yce for over a year. We Holt dwellers tend to look down on the Weald wolvers as primitive. Yes, that makes us snobs. Poetic ones at that, and again yes, I still think of myself as a poet. Where do I belong now?”
“Will you go back to her?”
“I don’t know,” he said, helplessly. “If I value my soul, I shouldn’t, but I just don’t know.”
The Weald enclosed them with maple and birch and green, green shadows, so welcome after days in the hot glare of the hills. This easternmost corner of the vast forest was known as the Holt, a refuge for Grimly’s folk. All day the company was aware that they were being followed although the watchers broke no branch nor snapped any twig. Fur brushed leaf, however, and wary eyes gleaned in the shadows. A murmur of speculation seemed to surround the riders:
Who are these people? Why is our prince with them? What prince?
“Hoy!” Grimly shouted at the trees. “This is me and these are my friends. Make us welcome, damn you!”
Near dusk, they came to the wolvers’ lair, the shell of a keep in the heart of the Holt, to find a company of Jaran already ensconced as guests.
“We’ve always gotten along well with the forest-folk,” their commander explained. “Sharp,” she said her name was—a squat Kendar, once a randon, now a scrollswoman. The college at Mount Alban accepted many such people as they aged, although some became singers rather than historians or scholars. “Story and poetry create a mighty bond.”
“Where are you bound?”
“To Mirkmir. There’s a festival there soon to commemorate the breaking of the Elder Empires. Huh. Trust the Mirkmirians to make a celebration of something that only isolated them further. In the old days, they were part of Bashti. They still are, I suppose, but the Weald and the Silver have cut them off from the rest of the Central Lands. Perforce, they make a virtue out of that, and maintain more ties to the forest than anyone else does, for all that that pipsqueak Pugnanos calls his country the Transweald.”
Wolvers moved among them in half-furs, shy but bright-eyed and prick-eared with curiosity, bringing cups of mead and skewers wrapped with strips of roast rabbit. Out in the dusk, others of their number yipped and crooned softly, a chorus tuning to the night.
“How is your approach to the contracts working out?” Jame asked.
“Well enough so far. The Jedrak was right: people here love history. On the other hand, they howl if we present anything that conflicts with what they think they know, and stories vary from country to country. We nearly had a riot in Transweald.”
“I’ve wondered as we rode: why has no one spoken of the Central Lands before this summer? I’ve travelled through them several times by the River Road, hardly knowing what I passed. They could have been blanks on Marc’s stained-glass map, for all I knew.”
Sharp grunted. “You are young, my lady. So are your Kendar. We randon elders, we remember too much. The White Hills were a horror beyond imagining. No one cared to remember, much less to reminisce, and so we turned our backs on the Central Lands, hoping never to return. You’ll find Commander Harn much more knowledgeable than I am. After all, he was deeply involved with the Bashti court before Ganth’s fall, but he may not care to talk about it, even now.”
Jame stirred uneasily. She didn’t like to be ignorant. Neither, like her brother, did she care to interrogate Harn Grip-hard. Graykin had sent her some reports, but he still seemed to be finding his way through a complex situation. Maybe he could answer more questions when they met.
“What will you perform in Mirkmir?” she asked, to change the subject.
“As usual, a mix of song and story. Would you like to hear?”
“Oh, yes,” breathed the nearest wolver, putting down her ewer, to an eager, muted chorus from the others. They pressed close and crouched to listen. Jame’s command also gathered around, Quill foremost. A mighty bond indeed.
“Well, then.” Sharp settled back. Other Kendar sat down behind her, attentive, as if at a rehearsal. “Harrumph. First, some history:
“Long, long ago, Perimal Darkling, ancient of enemies, invaded that series of connected worlds known as the Chain of Creation, of which Rathillien is part. The Three-faced God bound together the Three People—Highborn, Kendar, and Arrin-ken—as the Kencyrath to fight it. Then our god abandoned us. We have fought a long retreat down the Chain ever since.
“When we came to this world over three thousand years ago, at first we concentrated on establishing border keeps. Yes, the shadows had followed us to the very rim of Rathillien and there we stopped them, but not at the cost that we expected. Instead of immediate war, years of mounting guard followed.
“In the meantime, we had to maintain our outposts. Those of us not on frontier duty contracted as mercenaries to the Central Lands, to the Seven Kings, to support our kinsmen where we expected the battle to break. Here, we became the kings’ champions, settling their quarrels by force of arms, Kencyr against Kencyr, for the blood of Empires was too precious—they said—to spill. Years passed. A thousand of them. The waiting . . . it was hard.”
The wolvers made plaintive sounds. The Kendar swayed to them.
Sharp slapped her knee, making everyone start.
“Then came the great weirdingstrom, of which I am sure you have all heard tell.”
A singer behind her leaned forward and took over in a husky whisper. “Picture it: Night in the Central Lands, oh, so many, many years ago. All the dogs begin to howl . . . ”
The surrounding forested swelled with low ululations. In the shadow of leaf and bark, eyes caught the firelight and glowed back. The audience had grown.
“. . . and the wolves too, I suppose. They make so much noise that orders are given to strangle them all.”
The howls died to a one last, plaintive yelp.
“That accomplished, a silence falls, but not for long. The earth begins to growl.”
“Grr . . .” said the wolvers, tasting the sound with relish.
“A red mist comes down the Silver. It kindles lights in the air, on the water, and under it, as if whole weed beds have caught fire.”
“Catfish jump out of the river and then head for the hills,” another singer exclaimed. “Then the water boils and leaps up like a fountain. Whoosh!”
“It swallows islands,” chanted a third, “jumping its banks, flooding the shore. Forests lance down from high banks like so many cast spears. Some lands sink. Others rise into new islands, new earth. Imagine!”
“Whole populations disappeared that night,” Sharp added, in the historian’s’ past tense. “Drowned, the survivors thought, but no bodies were ever found. On land, the ground rolled like waves, higher and higher until their crests burst.”
“Cities fall,” said the first singer, on a hushed voice. “They have not been rebuilt to this day.”
Another picked up the story, and another, and another, passing it from mouth to mouth behind Sharp, who seemed to be brooding between past and present.
“Then comes a great silence,” a voice in the chorus cried. “Then comes the weirdingstrom itself.”
“It smokes. It glows. A river of mist rises above the Silver’s ravaged bed.”
“Aroo!” breathed the wolvers.
“Some call it the Serpent’s Breath,” called one of their voices out of the dusk.
Another, excited, answered: “Yes, yes! Others say that this world rests on the back of the great Chaos Serpent. Its offspring run like veins under the earth, under the water, yes, even under the Silver.”
“The Breath woke the River Snake,” said Sharp, with a sudden drop to the matter-of-fact tone of a historian, “nor does it yet sleep. You ask why the Silver devours those who travel on it? Here, some would say, is your answer, and that led to the fall of the Elder Empires, which did not survive its emergence.”
The audience, wolver and Kencyr, breathed again.
“Do you believe that, about the River Snake?” Jame asked as the keep returned to its hum and a light dusting of nervous laughter.
“I have heard it said.” The Kendar accepted another mug of mead. “Do I believe it? Well, let’s say that history is seen though many eyes. Sometimes, I don’t know what I believe. But we scrollsmen can at least fall back on that useful artifice, the Lawful Lie.”
“You as well as the singers? I didn’t realize that. Sorry. I don’t mean to tease you. Actually, I first heard that part of your story from the Caineron Matriarch, Cattila, who told it to me as fact, with the Earth Wife sitting at her elbow. Then, later, I saw the River Snake’s scales on the bed of the Silver, also his mouth under the well at Kithorn when I nearly fell in.”
Sharp stared at her. “Truly? I was told that you had had unusual experiences.”
Jame laughed. “Oh, believe me: this world is stranger than you can imagine.”
The wolvers had resumed singing, their voices lacing in and out of the night air. Those within the keep sang in counterpoint to those who still haunted the shadows without, one inviting the other into the light, the other praising the dark. It was a warm, harmonious song evoking the night, and community, and love.
When they paused, a new voice arose. With growls and snarls and coughs, it traced a different side of life. Here the hunter chased the prey, and killed, and fed.
Red meat, its undertone said. Fat on the bone. Who is to deny me those, and love beside?
The Holt wolvers fell silent. Was this too raw for their poetic taste if not for their nature?
Grimly lowered his muzzle and waited.
The keep’s murmur began again, but he was outside it.
“It made my hair crawl,” said Jame to him, aside. “But it spoke a truth.”
Later that night Jame woke suddenly, aware that someone had moved. She saw Grimly rise and leave the keep. Beyond its shattered walls, a white wolf waited. Grimly went out to her and they padded off together, he a pace to the rear.
The next day the Knorth party emerged from the Holt, diminished by one. Had Grimly been right to go back into the Deep Weald with Yce? Jame didn’t know. More and more, love struck her as a peculiar obsession, but since when had she thought about it at all?
Kindrie and Kirien, Grimly and Yce . . . would she ever have what they did? Did she even want it? Then there was Ganth and the Dreamweaver, also Gerridon with his honeyed promises to her in the dark. Ugh.
The next day, the 90th of summer, they began to pass between the west bank Transweald and the Midlands to the east. From now on, in the heart of the Central Lands, the River Road showed more traffic—merchants coming and going; herds of cattle being driven; wandering entertainers; priests and soldiers including a Brandan troop whose leader saluted Jame as they passed. There were also bold eyed nobles who stared and laughed. Carts moved in nearby fields, following the late summer harvesters of rye, barley, and wheat. Smoke smudges in the distance marked towns, manors, and forts set well back from the ill-fated river. There were more bridges and more ruins, but only a few timid boats.
They passed the borders of Karkinor. A company of Caineron rode parallel to them for a day on the eastern road, watching their progress. Jame noted that none of them smiled. She wondered to what extent events here would reflect those in the Riverland.
On the 93rd, her company crossed a tributary’s bridge into northern Bashti, or so Quill gleefully informed her:
“See? Here we are!”
Not quite.
Had she really paid so little attention to such details the last time she had come this way? Then again, she had been travelling with a broken collarbone, which did tend to distract one.
Two days later they turned westward off the River Road. This, she was informed, was Thyme Street, an ancient way leading back along the River Thyme all the way to High Bashti and beyond. From here, the rich plain with its fields of grain extended back for league on league. A low, rough horizon marked the Snowthorns on Bashti’s western border. These grew in size, almost (it seemed) stealthily over the next few days. The land began to roll. Soon it turned to hilly pastures and orchards, dotted with groves of tall trees. The Oseen and the White Hills had seemed to be molded into swells that only varied according to size. Here the knuckled toe bones of mountains began to burst through the earth and goats clung to them like so many clumps of hairy lichen.
Meanwhile, traffic on the road increased—pedestrians, horse carts bearing families, ox wagons bound for the capital laden with fruits and vegetables or rumbling back empty, herds of swine and complaining cattle.
The number of roadside villages also increased. As they passed, children ran out to offer water for sale in leather cups or roast dormice on sticks. Many of them gathered, themselves like clamorous mice, to see the rathorn pass. In turn, they were delighted to be snarled at. Death’s-head didn’t like civilization.
“Why don’t you show off?” Jame asked him. “Prance a little.”
He did for half a street, half-heartedly, then subsided with a grumble.
The hills grew more precipitous, the mountains ahead higher. They were following the river Thyme now along its north bank, where it cut through the hills on into its valley. Unlike the Silver, it was open to travel. Shallow-draft, broad-beamed barges slid past near the southern bank, going downstream. Others were rowed or dragged westward against the current by teams of oxen along tow paths.
On the 99th, the travelers began to pass plaques set in the surrounding sandstone bluffs, more and more of them. The cliff-face appeared to be practically hollowed out.
“What do you suppose . . .” Rue wondered.
Jame peered upward. “Names, dates, praise. At a guess, those are burial slots.”
Where the bluffs receded, first into rocky canyons, then, grudgingly, into open land, there were more monuments. Some of these were simple tombstones. Others were guarded by elaborate statues: husbands and wives seated side by side, immortalized in stone; mythological beasts; geometric shapes. Others amounted to small marble houses, or not so small, set back from the road. A few mausoleums there could have comfortably housed a deceased family of forty and as many living guests. Perhaps, on occasion, they did. Many were beautifully maintained with guards lounging about their portals.
The largest of these, however, appeared to have been viciously ransacked. Three-stories’ worth of stained-glass windows had been smashed, opening into cavernous space. Doors hung ajar. Statuary lay in fragments across its façade, so many shattered marble limbs, so many truncated feet. Carrion birds squabbled on its threshold. A dog slunk out of a broken portal, something red in its jaws that looked like a severed human tongue. This despoliation must have happened recently.
The bluffs pinched in again, then spread out to ring a broad river valley full of cultivated fields. At the valley’s heart stood High Bashti.
“Big,” remarked Damson, reining in beside Jame.
This was an understatement. The city loomed out of the haze of smoke—cooking, incense, votive lamps—that hung over it. Two walls surrounded it. The outer circled the valley, to the south facing a secondary road that ran beside the river, to the east and north skirting the cliffs that were precursors to the mountains beyond. The inner wall was nearly embedded in the surrounding city, as if the latter had outgrown and was busily consuming it. Within both rose at least ten prominent hills topped with white marble structures. Oh, so much stone piled on top of stone.
“All right,” said Jame. “I’m impressed.”
Her small company rode down to the eastern gate, in the midst of a crowd, and were engulfed by it.