by Nancy Kress
When asked where a horse might be obtained, Polly Stark had said that she had once heard there was a castle far downriver, to the west, called Reyndak; maybe one could be purchased there. She didn’t ask where Kirila was going, and had never shown the slightest curiosity about her Quest. Kirila planned to pay for the horse with a jewel pried from the hilt of her dagger; another, a small marquise ruby, was already wrapped in a borrowed handkerchief in the oak chest in her bed chamber. Tomorrow she would leave it on her pillow where Polly Stark would be sure to find it.
Now with the tip of her dagger she laboriously cut a lopsided fleur-de-lys into the top crust of the apple tart, her tongue stuck out at the corner of her mouth.
“There! Now it’s done. I hope he likes it. Once he told me that he was particularly fond of apple tart—that and Eggs Anna, but those wouldn’t stay hot while I carried them all the way to the woods. I don’t know why he won’t stay here in the village. He just sits out there, waiting for me, and I know he hates sleeping outdoors without a fire. Mosquitoes.”
Polly Stark bit off the end of her thread. “Enchanted folk take odd notions sometimes.”
“But he won’t even tell me why, and that’s not like him, Mistress Stark. He just stares past me—not at me, past me—with deep eyes, and asks again when I’ll be able to travel. The last thing I expected Chessie’s spell to affect was his conversation!”
“It’s best to humour them, my dear. Here, you try this on, and I’ll clean up while the tart’s baking.”
Kirila glanced at the apple parings, spilled flour, and smeared butter, and nodded gratefully. She’d had even less experience cleaning than cooking.
The gray wool gown fit, more or less, although it looked decidedly odd with a leather belt, dagger, riding boots, and a water-stained yellow silk scarf that had been in Kirila’s pocket. Would the scarf look better around her waist or tied diagonally across her breast? How about at her neck? She jumped up and down in front of the tiny face-high wall mirror—on Kirila it was neck high, giving an excellent view if she had needed to comb a beard—trying to see a reflection of her waist. By time she went back to the kitchen, the scarf in her pocket, the small warm room was again orderly and shining.
“You might be interested in this, my dear,” Polly Stark said. She was reading from a large book balanced on her lap.
“What is it?”
“It’s the Chronicles, of the Lielthien.”
“The Lielthien?”
“The Old Ones, the first Teachers. This is their Chronicles from the ancient Time of Light onwards. The whole story is here, told in truth. The real Truth.”
An expression perched on Kirila’s face that had never been there before, a narrowing of her eyes coupled with a quick downward flick of the left corner of her mouth. The leather binding on the Chronicles was the same color as that on Ap’s Book of Order. For a moment the expression lifted and ruffled a little, while her eyes grew rounder and a kind of longing rose to the surface, the same longing that flits through the wings of a migrating robin at the first signs of winter. Then the narrowed expression settled in firmly, folding its wings.
“No, I don’t think so. I should clean my boots for tomorrow. Do you have any saddle soap, please?”
Polly Stark, her unlined face as calm as ever, brought the saddle soap and then settled down to read. The cottage grew redolent with the smells of rubbed leather and baking tart. Late-afternoon light washed through the open casement and wet the floor with pale gold. Kirila hummed tunelessly, briskly rubbing, and hardly noticed when the other woman put away her book and left to fetch the cow for milking, noiselessly closing the door behind her.
She was just starting on the much-scuffed toe of the right boot, shaking her head over the bat-teeth punctures, when there was a rush of wings at the window and the boot dropped forgotten to the floor.
Filling the casement was a falcon, a white jer-falcon tiercel, but bigger than even any female Kirila had seen. He was the white of moonlight, faintly silver in the hollows, with black markings on a breast whose feathers looked as soft as a duckling’s and as sculpted as timeless marble. Black eyes threw of glints of gold when he moved his great head, and around his legs were the chewed remains of soft leather jesses of unborn calf. He sat completely still, watching Kirila with fathomless black eyes, the sunset behind him smearing the sky with August blood.
Slowly, not breathing, Kirila held out her left arm, the fist clenched. With a leap, not bothering to flutter his wings, the jer-falcon sprang to her fist, gripped it hard enough for his talons to draw blood, and turned his head to look at her. In his eyes shifted shadows of the world seen from the clouds, a plaything wheeling slowly below, diminished to a momentary curiosity. The jer-falcon whispered hoarsely, “Ay l’endith melan kel,” and in a rush of white wings was gone.
With a desperate cry Kirila ran to the window. The jer-falcon was already far above, climbing in circles until he was lost over the setting sun. She stayed at the window, craning her neck upward, heedless of the blood trickling from her hand onto the gray wool skirt. She was still there, motionless, when Polly Stark came in from the milking, and the kitchen was filled with the acrid smell of burned apples.
Nine
“It’s not reasonable,” Chessie said belligerently. “It doesn’t make any sense.” He sat squarely on a patch of violets in front of the thicket that was his temporary den, his long jaws snapping smartly closed at the end of each sentence. He had lost weight.
“Well, it was more than just a jer-falcon,” Kirila replied, a little sulkily. She didn’t notice the violets. Since she had seen the black-and-white tiercel, all colors seemed a little faded.
“So, he was enchanted. Big deal. It’s not so rare; lots of individuals are enchanted. I’m enchanted, for that matter, and you promised to go with me to get it undone!”
“I will, I will,” she said soothingly. “But, Chessie, remember that I’m on a Quest, too, for the Heart of the World, and what if instead of at the Tents of Omnium it’s really here?” The Labrador started to open his mouth and she added quickly, “I know, I know, I thought it might be at the Quirkian Hold, too. But then all I had heard was some abstract theories. Here I’ve seen something with my own eyes, and not only seen it—felt it. If you had been there—”
“I’m glad I wasn’t!”
“It was more than just an enchantment in jer-falcon shape,” she went on musingly, as if to herself. “People under a spell are more helpless than otherwise—” Chessie flicked his tail indignantly, but she ignored him, going on in the same pensive voice, “—and this tiercel wasn’t helpless at all, was a sort of source of secret power, like...like...oh, I don’t know exactly how to explain it.”
“When people can’t clarify their ideas, the fault generally lies in muddy ideas,” Chessie said acidly. “You can’t just go around collecting stray bits of vague ideas like some old ladies collect mismatched china. Besides, I thought you said he was wearing jesses. That sounds helpless to me.”
Kirila looked at him crossly, squatting back on her heels on the forest floor. “Well, he was, but as if he didn’t even know they were there. Chessie, what’s so terrible about staying here a little while if there’s even a chance of finding out something important? That’s what my Quest is for.”
“I’m not sure you know what your Quest is for!”
She considered this honestly, chewing on her hair, and finally admitted, “No, not as sharply as you know yours. But I’m trying to find out, looking around, and so looking here is eminently reasonable. And while we’re talking about reasonable, why won’t you move into Rhuor and stay in Polly Stark’s cottage with me? You could hear about the Lielthien, too, and help me judge what I learn. I asked Mistress Stark, and she is willing to have you, if you want to come.”
The belligerency oozed out of the Labrador, drop by drop. His head hung down even as he shook it from side to side. “No.”
“But why not? Can’t you even give me a reason?”
“I’ll come and see you every day,” Kirila said softly. He didn’t answer, and when she turned at the bend in the forest path and looked back, he hadn’t moved.
●●●
“When the world was young,” Polly Stark began in her uninflected voice, “the first Men were helpless. They had no tools, or shelters, or fire, or even clothes, and they all lived in caves and ate grass. Many died. There were wild animals about and they preyed on Men, especially on children. The whole race was about to end. The leader at that time was a man called Rutheniel.”
She glanced at Kirila, who nodded encouragingly and murmured, “Rutheniel, Rutheniel, begins with R.”
The two women were seated at the wooden kitchen table; between them the bindings of the Chronicles of the Lielthien gleamed dully in the candlelight. Kirila had been disappointed to discover that it was written in an ancient language she had never heard of, so Polly Stark was reciting the history for her. Night flowed in the open window, making small secret sounds.
“Then Rutheniel took a mate, but she died before she bore him children. After that a large bear came.”
As the story went on, Kirila shifted restlessly. The Chronicles were bland compared to the sagas and epics chanted by troubadours in the Great Hall at Castle Kiril. Or perhaps it was just Polly Stark’s version that was bland, plodding on in an even voice that seldom changed pitch. There seemed to have been a number of battles between various men and various beasts, and a tortuously convoluted geneology of people with names that sounded alike, most of whom begat one son and then died young, and finally a giving of fire, tools, and copious sonorous advice to men by the powerful Lielthien, a race of immortal white jer-falcons. For a while everything went well, and then men tried to enslave the jer-falcons for hunting and breeding. The falcons retaliated by driving men over a range of mountains and tossing them back on their own resources, but, out of some essential goodness, they let men keep the fire and tools, and also kept in touch through this one village of Rhuor. There was also a set of prophecies in vague symbolism, and a set of miraculous cures, mostly of things like chicken pox.
Kirila grew sleepy and propped up her chin in her hands. The whole venture was beginning to seem fanciful, and when she looked at the open window, trying to recapture the feel of the tiercel perching there silently, all that her tired mind would conjure up was, first, a large white bird, and then the picture of Chessie with his purple paws drooping over his nose.
“Thank you, Mistress Stark. That was...informative.” The little woman was watching her quietly, and she fumbled for something to add. “Could you tell me...uh, could you tell me what this means: ‘Ay l’endith melan kel?’”
Polly Stark’s pale face grew paler, until it was the gray of dingy snow. She whispered, “Where did you hear that?”
“The jer-falcon said it to me.”
“It means...it means, ‘Wait until the Waiting.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The Waiting. It’s a ceremony we hold at the darkest day of the year, and again at Midsummer’s Eve.”
Kirila was too tired to tell her hostess that she had again changed her mind about staying in Rhuor, to explain that she had been mistaken in her expectations about the Chronicles and would not be here for the darkest day of the year. Easier to tell her in the morning. She smiled wearily, said good-night, and stumbled off to her bedchamber, leaving Polly Stark sitting in the dim light of the gutted candle, staring at nothing with an unaccustomed tinge of wonder in her calm eyes.
●●●
Amber-colored honey in a brass bowl glinted in the sunlight on the breakfast table. There were fresh eggs, and scalding tea in a polished copper pot. The tea, which had already been poured, undulated gently in the cups in waves of bronze and lighted gold. Kirila watched with pleasure all this twinkling and shining; it was a good morning to restart a Quest. Everything in Polly Stark’s tiny kitchen glowed around its dun-and-gray mistress.
“I wanted to tell you,” Kirila began, her mouth full of bread and honey, “that I really appreciate...just a minute.” She chewed on the generous wad—the honey was sticking to the roof of her mouth—and, before she had finished it, Polly Stark spoke.
“Would you mind, dear, helping me with the morning chores before you go? Hinkle is salting fish at the river today, and I wanted to finish the chores before the rain.”
Kirila blinked, a drop of honey meandering down her chin.
“If you would just feed the hens, dear, and I’ll turn out the cow shed.”
“But how did you know I was—”
“The hen meal is behind that door, there. I think you better not try to help with the cows; you might get muck in your hand.” She glanced quietly at the clawed welts on Kirila’s left fist.
“But how did—”
“It’s very kind of you, dear,” she said, smiling as she rose. “Don’t worry about clearing away the breakfast things.”
“How—“
But Polly Stark was gone.
The hens scrambled eagerly for the grain she threw them, pecking each other accusingly and claiming especially fat kernels by sitting on them. When the sack was empty, Kirila stood in the yard, tipping her head back, bending backward a little at the waist where her dagger hung. The sky was a cloudless blue. She sniffed the wind and caught no smell of rain. Shrugging her shoulders, she was starting for the cowshed to say goodbye when something far overhead caught her eye, and she watched, squinting into the sun.
Seven white jer-falcons, flying in a tight circle, spiraled lower and lower. The sunlight was absorbed into their wings and seemed to break into fire at the tips, fourteen fire-edged wings that beat in precision and stopped at the same heartbeat to glide motionlessly down the blue sky. The wings grew, swelled like music, until they blotted out the sun and the falcons’ eyes became fourteen black suns in a white-feathered sky. Kirila cried out, not knowing she did so, and squeezed her eyes shut as the circle dropped around her. Instantly she opened them again, but the jer-falcons were winging upward, high in the east, toward the sun.
Polly Stark stood beside her, laughing delightedly, and the little woman glowed with color so unaccustomed it was shocking: pink cheeks, flashing eyes, red lips and a gown whose gray prismed into green and violet and cranberry, as a rain puddle will color the gray stone when touched with oil. Kirila gaped at her, dazed, unable to speak. When she again found her voice and connected it with her fuddled mind, she gasped, “What is it—the Waiting? What happens?”
Polly Stark shook her head. Already the color was bleaching out of her; in a minute she would again be uniformly gray. “When they take one of us.”
“Take? You mean, like a falcon takes a woodcock? Kill?”
“Oh, no, dear, of course not! They never kill!”
“Then what?”
She shook her head again, and suddenly Kirila was reminded of Chessie, unable to say why he wouldn’t enter Rhuor. All Polly Stark would add, in a hushed voice, was, “Two years ago, on Midsummer’s Eve—then it was my brother.”
Kirila gazed into the sun, shading her eyes with her hand. There was no sign of the jer-falcons, but she stayed rooted to the spot, searching, for a long time after Polly Stark had quietly gone back to the cowshed. The hens pecked at her boots. She ignored them, her eyes hungry and bewildered. After a while she went to find Polly Stark, to see what could be done to help with the rest of the day’s farmwork. In the west, clouds were blowing up blackly, smelling of rain.
Ten
A ragged line of six silent men swung scythes in the glinting air, cutting the hay. Behind them, the women raked it with wooden rakes into long strips. A few children played between the strips, well away from the scythes, quiet games in which they sat in one place, fiddled with hay straws, and talked in low voices. There
was no Blind Man’s Buff, no Old Wat nor hide-and-go-seek nor Red Dragon-Blue Dragon. The children of Rhuor possessed carved wooden toys, carts and dolls and plows, and these could be passed from child to child through whole families, sometimes even generations, without being much scratched, beheaded, or left out at night in the rain.
Kirila worked with the other women. She was actually not very good at haymaking, as she had proved over the last weeks to be not very good at most of the other farmwork. Her cheeses tasted of whey; her spinning was a maze of knots and airy little wisps that sprouted from the gray thread like tendrils; a cow she had milked would stamp uneasily in the misdirected puddles of milk on the cowshed floor. Helping in the vegetable garden, she had pulled up all the young carrots in the mistaken notion that their leafy tops were exotic weeds. But she was strong and she tried hard, in a preoccupied sort of way. No one ever pointed out her deficiencies; they were all of them, all the quiet gray yeomen of Rhuor, as unfailingly kind and unemotionally generous to her as they were to each other.
Except for her height, the jewelled dagger at her waist, and her divided skirt, she looked much like the rest of them as she raked hay. Her red hair was pulled into a bun, so as to be out of the way. Her gown was the same gray as the other women’s, and, like theirs, it was covered with perspiration and bits of hayseed, sticks, and odd twisted fragments. And, like the others, every few seconds she stopped raking and glanced upward. Even the littlest children did this, interrupting their solemn play to stare up with their round childish eyes into the hot, blue, empty sky.
