by Tad Williams
After his earlier words, this felt like a blow to my chest. Did Hakatri truly think I was only concerned for my own safety? “But it is you I fear for, Master, not myself. You and your brother.”
“Ah.” For a little while he was silent again. The trees of the lower mountain paraded past us as we descended, most covered with a green pelt of moss after Renewal’s early rains. The stone banks that jutted out from the slope were as dark as peat. It was a striking landscape, wilder than the lands around Asu’a, but that only added to my feeling of unease. After years of reassuring routine, though so much sameness had sometimes frustrated me, I could no longer guess what might happen next.
“The Hikeda’ya tell of Hamakho’s death as a betrayal,” my master said abruptly, as though the tale now forced its way out of him. “They say that Rinno, the leader of his hunters, was a son of Clan Kaura, which was more closely connected with the Sa’onserei clans than most of Hamakho’s partisans. They say that in the Garden’s final hours, Rinno and the others tried to force Hamakho to board the last ship, but the Great Protector refused until he could be certain all of his people had been found and brought onboard. At last they tried to carry him away by force, but Hamakho defended himself so fiercely that he killed three of his own dragonslayers before being struck down by their arrows. Even after this, Hamakho was still so revered that his kinsman carried his body to the clan’s tomb before they fled the dying Garden.”
I said nothing. My master’s face was full of disgust, though whether over the deed itself or the version of the tale he had just related I could not tell.
“The Hamakha Clan held a tribunal on the Great Ship Singing Fire as they fled the Garden,” he continued after a short pause. “As Hamakho’s acknowledged favorite, Utuk’ku made that tribunal one of her first moments of forceful rule over her clansfolk. Under her direction, Rinno and the other surviving dragonslayers were judged guilty of Hamakho’s murder. I do not know what happened to them—some say they were cast over the side of Singing Fire into the Ocean Indefinite and Eternal. None of them reached these lands. But when they were being judged, Hamakho’s killers told a different story, though Utuk’ku and her nobles did their best afterward to suppress it.
“You see, even then, not all the Hamakha—the Hikeda’ya-to-be—were comfortable with Utuk’ku’s seizure of power. These quiet renegades whispered that Rinno had spoken with great regret of how Hamakho had gone mad in the end, that when they tried to get him to board the waiting ship, he struck and killed the messenger who had been sent to him, and when the rest of his dragonslayers came—many of them his own kinsmen, who had braved and suffered much at his side defending the city of Tzo and our people—he attacked them as well, killing more of them. At last, terrified by his strength and growing madness—Hamakho was the mightiest of all the Garden’s warriors—they loosed their arrows and cut him down before he could take more lives.”
“But which is true?” I asked.
“We will never know for certain. Like Hamakho, Rinno é-Kaura and the others never reached this land, so they had no chance to tell their stories to more sympathetic ears than those of Utuk’ku and her followers.” He shook his head. “I had not meant to tell you this story. It is particularly sad for our family, because Rinno was a cousin of my grandmother Senditu, and she never forgave the Hamakha for executing him without any of his clansfolk present.”
“I am sorry, Master.”
“No fault of yours, good Pamon.” He looked at me for a searching moment. “Are you still fearing Serpent’s Vale?”
“I confess I am, Master.”
“If it brings you any peace to hear it, we will not go there soon. We have much to do before we enter that waste again. For one thing, we must prepare this witchwood trunk for our use, and since we do not have proper woodcrafting tools, that will not be a swift undertaking.”
“So we do not go first to the swamp?”
“No. We will camp somewhere close enough that we need not travel far when our spear is finished, but we do not want Hidohebhi taking us unaware either, so a little distance is called for. Also, I still have much planning to do with my brother before the day comes. We will choose a spot at a safe distance from Serpent’s Vale.”
This relieved the worst of my fears, though I knew it was to be only a respite. The day would come sooner than I would like when we would have to ride into the vale again to face the beast. But the knowledge that it would not be this particular day was enough to lighten my thoughts.
After searching for a few hours at the bottom of the mountain, we found a wide, grassy dale that suited our needs. The Hernsmen told us it was named “Sithmead” because the river that flowed through it originated in the heights at Skyglass Lake, home to Vinadarta’s Zida’ya folk since before the mortals arrived. If Cormach and his Hernsmen saw anything curious in it now becoming the camp of actual fairies (as they thought of my master and his people) they did not tell us. In fact, unless they were working directly with Lord Hakatri or Lord Ineluki, all of the mortals except the prince and his closest companions largely avoided us, setting their camp a goodly distance away from where my master laid his own fire.
I did not mind. The presence of all those mortals was strange and often disconcerting to me. Few of them spoke the Zida’ya tongue, so they talked among themselves in their own speech, which I thought sounded like the barking of dogs, full of harsh sounds and—I must reluctantly say—truly unpleasant scraping noises made at the back of the throat. Neither would most of the prince’s followers look directly at my master or his brother when they spoke to them. Cormach explained that many of them feared the fairy-glamour, as they called it, convinced that gazing too long into the eyes of one of the Sithi (as they called even me!) would put them under some kind of spell. It was not worth disputing this ridiculous idea, but the mortals’ mistrust of us added to the strain we all felt as we prepared to face a deadly foe. Of the mortals, only Prince Cormach seemed utterly unafraid, and as the days passed in Sithmead I began to believe that if the Hernsmen lost him before he became king it would be disastrous, not only for Cormach’s own folk but for my master’s folk as well, making it much more difficult for the Zida’ya to maintain a healthy peace with the mortals. But the prince would not let himself be treated differently than his men. He shouldered the same burdens and assayed the same wearying, painful tasks of preparing the great witchwood trunk for use.
“Could we not use kei-vishaa on the end of the spear?” Cormach asked my master as they planned the work. “I have heard that in the old days the poisonous dust brought down some of the most terrible worms. Is that what you have in the jar Xaniko the Exile gave you?”
Kei-vishaa is made from the pollen of the witchwood tree’s luminous white flowers and is well known among healers. It is rare, which is likely a good thing; in small amounts it can bring pain-ease, along with strange dreams. But too much of it, breathed or swallowed, could easily kill a mortal or one of the Zida’ya.
My master shook his head. “Xaniko’s jar is something else, as you will learn. No, I fear that even if we could go to all the cities of my folk and gather enough of the precious dust, it still would work too slowly. A beast as large as Hidohebhi might take an hour or more to fall under its spell, and in that time it could still destroy many lives. Worse still, the madness kei-vishaa can cause might goad it to even greater rage. Better to try to kill the monster with a single stroke to the heart. At least we will know quickly whether we have succeeded or failed.”
By the end of the first day in the valley we had finished setting up our camp beside the stream—a sort of guild-yard, with our only roof the naked sky. A few of the prince’s Hernsmen became sentries, watching the valley from its outer hills so that the worm might not come upon us unawares. The Blackworm was always on our minds, and we all knew that the mortals and Zida’ya killed in our first encounter with it still lay in the marshy valley only a short distance away in Ser
pent’s Vale, unsung and unburied.
Those of Cormach’s men not standing sentry helped to roll and move the great tree trunk so that Hakatri and Ineluki might trim the stubby remaining limbs from the trunk and smooth its surface so that it would pierce instead of catch. They did this work with the only suitable tools we had, the brothers’ swords Indreju and Kimeku and a witchwood hand-ax from my master’s saddlebag.
My task was to sharpen whichever of those implements was not currently being used. I had much experience with Zida’ya whetstones but was surprised and pleased when the Hernsmen brought me a sort of mushroom that grew on birch trees; dried, it finished the edge of even one of those fabled Zida’ya blades as well as could be asked for. In truth, the woodcraft of the mortals proved to be very useful, as they knew the trees and plants that grew in Sithmead and the surrounding hills far better than we did.
As my masters and some of the men trimmed the trunk, other Hernsmen selected and felled sturdy oaks to make buckets for hauling water from the stream, and also used that strong wood to build huge racks on which the trunk would be lifted off the ground for hardening by hammer and fire. When I saw some of them working on the rope harness that had carried the witchwood trunk down from the grove, I thought at first they were making nets for fishing, although the spaces seemed much too wide to catch and hold any fish smaller than the largest pike or catfish. When I asked about this, Prince Cormach was amused. “We are making a stronger harness for the witchwood spear,” he explained. “Your master said we must be able to lift it quickly when the time comes.”
I nodded as if I understood, but I could not form a picture in my mind of what Hakatri planned. All our lives were at risk if the plan did not work, but I had spent most of my life trusting his wisdom, so I put my questions aside and went back to sharpening my master’s sword.
When one end of the tree had been carefully trimmed and sharpened to a point, we were ready to finish the huge spear. The surface of the witchwood trunk had been scraped until it was very smooth, and the fire we had built had burnt down to coals, so the Hernsmen used their rope harness to lift the trunk up onto the heavy oak racks with its pointed end above the flames. Then several of the mortals took up wooden hammers and began to pound on it. At the same time, the embers beneath the sharpened tip were fanned back into life so that the witchwood could be hardened. As the Hernsmen pounded away, my master sang a quiet song he called the “Dalala,” which he said came from my ancestors and helped to soothe the wood as it was being shaped. I could not understand the words, but I thought I recognized some of the sounds, though I could not say whether that was because of the times Lady Ona had tried to speak to me in our people’s tongue or because of things I had heard from the other Tinukeda’ya in Asu’a. In any case, just hearing Hakatri sing those words made my skin prickle.
The coals were only allowed to smolder under the spear tip for a short while, the men turning the long wooden post the whole time, then the coals were raked away. The hammering continued through the day, Cormach’s men pounding the witchwood until it was almost as hard as the finished strength of my master’s sword.
“We have done very well with what we have,” Ineluki said as the men completed their tasks.
“Yes,” Hakatri said. “We have all done well. We will have a celebration tonight.”
And we did. Three full casks of mead from Hernsland and a large jug of wine from Snowdrift were opened and emptied. Many, including my master, raised their voices to the skies in laughter and more old songs. For that moment, anyway, there was something like true accord between my master’s folk and Cormach’s men.
Surely, I thought then and still believe, this world has never seen anything quite like that night at Sithmead when the great witchwood spear was finished—a night when mortals and Zida’ya drank and ate and sang together, perhaps for the first time ever, and possibly also the last.
With our tree-sized spear now finished, the Hernsmen rolled it onto the huge rope sling so it could be carried to the battleground. I say battleground, but the place we had picked was only a pond just across the Silver Way from Sithmead, a short distance into Serpent’s Vale. My master had chosen it because the muddy water was deep enough to hide the whole length of the spear, and because the end of the pond opposite where the dragon lurked was an insloping, angled wall of granite. Using other stones as tools—this was no work for a precious witchwood sword—we chipped away for hours at that slab of granite until we had made a notch just below the waterline which was big enough to hold the butt-end of the shaped witchwood trunk.
“It is possible the tree might shatter,” my master said, “but it will not slip. It is held fast against the stone like a lord-errant clutching a lance.”
Heavy ropes had been tied to the edges of the spear’s harness. With the stonework finished, the cookfires lit, and the sentries sent out to keep watch, my master gathered us all around him and explained the plan that he and Xaniko the Exile had worked out.
“We must lead the worm onto the spear,” he said. “Even a hundred of us would not be strong enough to thrust it between the scales of his breast, but if we brace its back end against the stone, as a hunter digs the butt of his boar-spear into the earth, we can hope that the beast’s own strength and haste will do the work for us.”
“Skeí, Sudhodaya!” Ineluki snapped at a pair of weary Hernsmen who were whispering to each other. “Stop chewing your beards and listen, mortals. All our lives may depend on it.”
The scolded Hernsmen fell into shamed silence at Ineluki’s harsh words, but I saw several of their comrades share disgruntled looks.
“With the new, longer ropes on the spear’s cradle,” my master continued, “you men will only have to stand before the great beast for a few moments. See how the ground slopes up on both sides of the water.” He gestured toward the rim of the pond, which had the granite shelf at one end, but was otherwise surrounded only by dirt and stony scree. “The moment I call out, you must pull the ropes at the front of the spear. That way it will rise up from the water with the sharp end higher and the other end socketed against the stone. If luck is with us, the worm’s headlong rush will bring it onto the killing point. When it is impaled, let go of the ropes and run as far and fast as you wish to keep safe from its tail, which will lash and flail mightily, as Xaniko the Exile warned me.”
“But, if I may ask something, Lord Hakatri,” said Prince Cormach, “I see the wisdom of the plan, but how will we convince the worm to come toward us and to move swiftly enough to drive itself onto the spear? If we send men with sticks and torches to beat it out of the wrack as we drive boars out of a thick wood, will it not merely attack them instead?”
The question set the Hernsmen to murmuring again, and I thought that my master would be annoyed with the prince, but a moment later I realized that Cormach and Hakatri had planned this aforetime, because my master answered quickly and without rancor.
“A very apt question, Prince Cormach. No, we will not send beaters into the swamp, especially after dark, which will be the best time to effect our strategy, since the spear will be even harder to see then. Lord Xaniko gave me something to draw out the worm.” He patted the wax-sealed jug which had come from Ravensperch and had sat for so long in my master’s saddlebag. “These worms mark their territories just as bears and wolves do, with scent. Before he fought the deadly Snareworm, Lord Xaniko followed it for some time to learn its ways, and he collected some of the branches and grasses that the Snareworm had marked. That is what is in this jar.”
“How does it smell?” one of the Hernsmen asked.
“Worse than you can imagine,” said my master with a bit of a smile. “But trust me—by the end of this, we will all know the stink of it better than we’d like.”
“Why would the Drochnathair come to the scent of another dragon?” a second man asked.
“To fight a rival, of course,” Hakatri said. “The Blackwor
m cannot know that Xaniko killed the dragon that made this noisome stuff a long time ago. It will smell its own kind and come to defend its lair. At least that is what we hope.”
The talk went on for some time—the Hernsmen, as anyone can understand, had many questions. At last the sentries were changed and the rest of the mortals took their rest while their prince, my master, and Lord Ineluki sat up to finish with their plans.
“It is not enough that Hidohebhi come to investigate this stranger’s reek,” Hakatri told us. “The great worm must be angry. It must be in haste to drive out the intruder. We need it to come running pell-mell into this little valley, and to do so without the ordinary caution even a large and dangerous beast maintains.”
“And that is where your brother and myself come into things,” said Cormach, pale and determined.
Ineluki sighed. “Brother, my oath hangs on me like an awful weight of chains.” He had a fevered look in his eye. “Let me be the one to steady the great spear instead of you. The risk should be mine.”
Hakatri shook his head. “No, brother. You are the more nimble rider, while I have better knowledge of the spear and its harness. You must be the one to lead the creature down on us—you and Prince Cormach.”
They argued, but Hakatri would not budge. Ineluki gave in at last, but he did not look pleased. “Then I will take my own spear,” he said, “so at least I can strike the first blow.”
“As you wish,” my master told him. “But if you fail to lead the beast down into this pool all will be for naught, and many of us may die. Do not let your honor cause you to forget that.”
Ineluki gave him a strange look, half shame, half anger. “Do not treat me like one of the mortals, brother—like someone whose courage you doubt. You and I have fought side by side against giants and other fell creatures. You know my quality.”
