The Fall of Neskaya

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Coryn! Where are those horses?” Eddard yelled from across the yard.

  Within the dusty closeness of the stables, the few remaining horses stamped and nickered. The groom had just finished cinching the saddle on Eddard’s raw-boned gray mare. Coryn checked girth, breastplate and crupper strap on his own dun-colored Dancer, for they would be scrambling over rough terrain and a slip of the saddle could be fatal.

  “You be careful out there, you young rascal,” the groom said. “I’ve not seen a fire this bad since Durraman’s donkey was foaled.”

  In the yard, Coryn scrambled on to Dancer’s back and caught the lead line for the pack chervines from Padraic. He and Eddard clattered down the strip of road in the brightening day.

  A plume of smoke rose from the forested hills, still many miles off. Coryn sensed the acrid lightning tang, the greasy feel of smoke from half-burned soapbush, ash across his face.

  The world reeled, sky and green-gold hills blurred . . . melted. . . . Acid stung his throat. He swayed in the saddle, retching.

  With a fistful of sandy mane in one hand and the other clenched on the pommel of his saddle, Coryn struggled to keep his seat. Eddard, riding ahead of him, had not noticed. The spasm of dizziness passed, leaving a sour film in Coryn’s mouth.

  Coryn’s hand went to his neck, where his starstone lay insulated in the pouch of thick silk which he’d stitched himself. He felt its inner light as a wave of heat through his fingers.

  He thought miserably that if only he knew how to use starstone and glider, as he’d dreamed, there would be no need to send Petro racing to Tramontana, or be at the mercy of High Kinnally. He, Coryn, could go aloft and drop the precious laran-made fire-fighting chemicals directly on the blaze.

  With that thought, he pressed his lips together, dug his heels into Dancer’s sides, and galloped on.

  Coryn, along with his brother Eddard and three of the smallholders from the rough borderland along the Heights, labored through the day, working their way along the established firebreaks and cutting new ones. Last summer’s fires had been smaller than usual, but the winter had been mild. Dense foliage, much of it flammable soapbush, overflowed every open space and gully.

  By the next morning, it was clear that the men were spread too thin, the land too vast to clear containment breaks of everything that could burn. As yet, there was no word from High Kinnally. Perhaps it was too soon.

  Eddard brought them to the southern hill above the fire to spy out its direction. Timas, the oldest of the smallholders, studied the wind, the dryness of the underbrush, the slope of the hills. He had worked Verdanta’s fire-lines since he was a boy.

  “Tha’,” he pointed up the slope, “and tha’. D’ye see it, m’lord, how the land sits to channel the flame upward, toward the grove?”

  Coryn, munching on a handful of nutbread smeared with sour chervine butter, followed the old man’s gesture. The wind blew fitfully and at an angle. If it held steady, Timas said, the fire would follow the steeper path to a protected valley where resin-trees and firecone pine crowded together. But if it changed direction . . .

  The other way, the shallow, easy slope, bore nothing but grass. A spit of bare rock separated the two paths.

  Coryn’s sight wavered and he sensed the streams of ghostly fire. Images came to him—the wind freshening, shifting. Narrow tongues of fire lapped at the curling grass; it caught, flames racing faster than a galloping horse. Seeds sent tiny embers aloft as they popped, leaping ahead of the main fire. He saw them land on the rocky spit and as quickly go out. The fire left a crust of black behind it as it leaped along the easy slope.

  Coryn’s sight raced ahead with the fire. More embers landed on the rocky divide. Beyond his line of vision, the spit narrowed, the rock weakened by years of alternating summer heat and winter freeze. A spiderweave of minute cracks gave rooting to windweed and other quickly growing grasses which sprouted in the spring rains and died as quickly in the heat. A single spark landed—he felt it catch, the sudden flare of the dried windweed tendrils. In the next heartbeat, the fire burned on both sides of the barrier, lapping toward the resin-trees.

  If the resin-trees go up, we will lose the entire mountain-side. . . .

  Coryn blinked, realizing that a long moment had gone by.

  “—but it will be worse if the fire heads due south,” Eddard was saying. “We must not risk the trees.”

  The old man shook his head, eyes cast down before his lord’s heir. “Ye canna’ trust the grass,” he said stubbornly.

  “Timas is right,” Coryn said, a bit surprised at how steady his voice sounded. “The fire—it will start with the grass but it won’t stay there. Up there past the outcrop . . .” Quickly, he described what he had seen. The other men fell silent, listening to him.

  “Aye, that’s the way of it,” the old man said, nodding.

  “I’ve seen sparks leap ten feet or more. Rock, river, fire-break. But you, young lord, how did you know?”

  “I—I saw it. It happened just like you said.”

  “Nay, lad, I said only how the fire could go. One way or t’other, at the beck of the wind.”

  Coryn lifted his chin and faced his older brother. “It will go that way. I saw it.”

  “You believe you did, chiyu.” Eddard raked back his dark-red hair, leaving it just as unruly as before. “But if we choose wrongly and leave the resin-trees unprotected—”

  “Lord Eddard!” One of the men, who had gone down halfway toward the fire, shouted and pointed. “The wind!”

  “Zandru’s curse!” Eddard spat. The wind had shifted, whipping the flames into miniature firestorms, burning even hotter and faster than before.

  Toward the grassy slope.

  “Let it have the grass!” Eddard shouted, swinging up on his horse. “Downslope, where Coryn saw it leap the rock! With luck we’ll be in time!”

  Coryn could not remember being so numb with exhaustion, so drained in every muscle and nerve fiber, as when he and Old Timas stumbled into the makeshift camp on the third night of the fire. They had worked without stopping all that night and the next day, cutting new, wider firebreaks, clearing away grass and underbrush.

  They saved the resin-trees, only to lose the next two hillsides and part of a nut-tree grove. Coryn saw the fear in the eyes of the smallholders who depended on what their children could gather in the forests to feed their families during the lean seasons. The next few winters would be hard, until the nut trees which had not been too badly burnt could bear again.

  Lord Leynier was a generous man. In times of need, the castle would slaughter some of its livestock, the older and weaker animals, to distribute the meat and lessen the demand for feed grain.

  Now, toward the end of the third day, a young boy on a pony brought orders from Lord Leynier that the men who’d gone out in the first groups were to rest. A handful of replacements had come from the small estates to the south and east. But they could look for no help from High Kinnally. Lord Lanil Storn had refused both men and Petro’s passage to Tramontana.

  At the news, a cry of dismay rose from the smallholders. Ash-streaked faces turned paler.

  “Vai dom,” said one man, “how can they not send help against—against fire?”

  Eddard’s jaw set tight, and for a moment Coryn saw his father’s eyes flash in his brother’s face. “I know not if he means to let us waste our strength against the fire and then strike when we are weak, or if he is fool enough to think the fire will stay on our lands only.”

  Coryn thought of the old proverb, Fire knows no law but its own. Then he remembered that Kieran, the Keeper at Tramontana, was a distant Aillard cousin. The obligations of blood ran strong in the Hellers. “Perhaps,” he said in one of those quicksilver leaps of thought which came all too often now, “he fears that the Tower may give us other things besides fire-fighting chemicals.”

  “You mean weapons?” Eddard looked grim. “If only they would! That is, if there is anything left of us once this fire is do
ne.”

  Eddard turned toward the waiting horses, but Coryn remained for a moment with Timas. The old man’s eyes watered as if smoke still blew across them.

  “It’s a rough business,” Coryn blurted out, aware of his own awkwardness. Without knowing why, he wanted to say something, to ease the other man’s unvoiced distress.

  “Aye, lad, that it is.” Timas’s voice was gravelly from smoke, but Coryn felt the emotional resonances beneath the words. “But fightin’ fires isna’ like warfare. Then it’s the lords that get all the glory and it’s us poor folk that pay for it.”

  “But,” Coryn said, repeating words he’d head his father utter, “would you not suffer even more under an unjust ruler? Not every lord takes care of his people as my father does. Storn would let your children starve while he sits in his castle and feasts, or so I’ve heard. Isn’t that worth fighting for?”

  Sighing, Timas shook his head. “How little you know of it, lad.”

  “Eat as much as you can and then sleep,” Eddard said as they reined their plodding horses into the makeshift headquarters. The camp lay on flat, rock-strewn ground, set on a hillside that had burned a dozen seasons before, so that only brush and saplings grew. A spring yielded water for cooking and bathing burns.

  The women and younger children of the castle had set up picket lines, an outdoor kitchen, and a few tents. Tessa and the next youngest sister, Margarida, moved briskly between the tents, carrying bandages and salves for burns, basins of washing water, and poultices for pulled muscles. In the absence of Lady Leynier, for their mother had died at Kristlin’s birth, Tessa assumed the duties of supervising the household staff and dispensing herbal remedies to everyone on the estate. In her plain dress and kerchief, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow, she issued a stream of orders for the care of the injured. Margarida followed in her wake, a wide-eyed shadow.

  Men who had come in earlier, their faces and garments grimed with ashes, hunkered over cups of meat-laced porridge or sprawled exhausted on blankets.

  Coryn slipped to the ground and gratefully handed over Dancer’s reins to one of the castle people. The smell of the food sent a wave of nausea through his belly. He followed Eddard to the rough table where Lord Leynier sat, poring over maps with his coridom. At his left side, a stranger stood, watching silently. The hood of his dark gray cloak masked his features.

  “We have arrested the fire along these lines,” Padraic said, tracing them on the map. “But we cannot guard this entire front, even if we could get there in time. If we push on, if we try to save this part of the forest, then we risk losing even more in other places.”

  Tired men are careless, Coryn repeated to himself what his father had said so many times. And fire is unforgiving.

  “If we permit the fire to burn itself out,” his father said unhappily, “who knows how much more it may consume? There will be even greater hunger and cold in the winters to come.”

  Coryn felt a rush of pride for his father and how he cared for the lands and people under his stewardship.

  “The Tower folk will arrive in time to save your forest,” the stranger said.

  “Father,” Eddard broke in, frowning. “We received word that Petro could not get through to Tramontana. I understood that we could expect no help from that quarter, or from the six-fathered ombredin at High Kinnally.”

  “It is our good fortune that Dom Rumail arrived early,” Leynier said with a deference that surprised Coryn. “And that he has the skill to contact the Tower through his starstone.”

  “I could do no less.” The stranger lifted the hood of his cloak back from his face, revealing a face so long and seamed, it might have been made from leather. Coryn thought him the homeliest man he had ever seen, yet the deeply shadowed gray eyes burned with an inner fire.

  “It is in my brother’s interest to protect the lands of his future daughter-in-law,” Dom Rumail said.

  Laranzu! Coryn caught the glitter of a starstone at the man’s throat. He had never met a laran-gifted sorcerer before and now stared, entranced.

  “Come on, young pup,” Eddard threw one arm around Coryn’s shoulders. “We’ll starve, standing here. Let’s eat!”

  Coryn lowered himself to the folded blanket in between two sleeping men, his brother Petro and one of the stable hands, and accepted a cup of stew topped with dried fruit from Kristlin, who was still wearing those castoff boy’s breeches.

  With the first tentative bite, Coryn felt ravenously hungry. He wolfed down the whole portion. Someone else brought him another plate and also a tankard of watered ale. He dimly felt his head drop forward, someone take the dish and cup from his hands, and then he felt nothing at all.

  Shouting woke him, and for a dizzying moment he wondered if the last three days had not been yet another dream. He struggled upright, blinking in the cloudless daybreak. Another man, not Petro, snored at his side, but the rest of the camp was already roused.

  “They’re here!” Margarida, Coryn’s middle sister, raced through the camp, shouting. “Tramontana has come!”

  Coryn threw his head back, searching where she pointed. Across the clear, empty sky, four—no, six—gliders moved swift and silent as hawks. Silhouetted against the eye-searing blue, the figures appeared swollen by the sacks of fire-fighting chemicals they carried.

  In the camp, the gray-robed stranger stood apart from the others. Lips moved, although no sound came from his mouth. Something in his posture pulled at Coryn, drew him near. The man’s hands cupped something which glowed faintly blue. He stared into it with an intensity that both fascinated and repelled the boy. Aloft, the group of fliers divided, some heading toward the two most desperately pressed firelines.

  “It’s all right, I don’t eat children.” Dom Rumail looked up. A fleeting smile lightened his features. He lifted the hand that held the starstone. “Nor will this harm you. It’s not wizardry, you know.”

  “Y-yes, I know that,” Coryn said, suddenly shy. “I have one, too. All of us except Kristlin, who is too young, were presented with starstones at the Midwinter Festival of our twelfth years.”

  “May I see it?”

  Coryn couldn’t think of a reason to refuse, but he slipped the starstone reluctantly from its silk pouch around his neck and held it out. To his relief, the laranzu made no attempt to touch it, but merely bent over the lightly flickering gem, studying it.

  “Yes, you’ve keyed into it, albeit roughly. Who showed you how to do this?”

  “N-nobody. Father’s been too busy. And Eddard—”

  “Eddard!” Dom Rumail snorted, as if it might as well have been Coryn’s horse. “And the wrapping—did you do that, too?”

  Coryn blushed. His older brothers and sisters wore their starstones bare against the skin, when they wore them at all. Margarida, complaining that her stone gave her a rash, had wrapped it in a scrap of velvet from the late Lady Leynier’s Midwinter gown. Coryn had gone to his sister for advice when, several weeks after his birthday, he’d awakened from nightmares. He dreamed that shadowy figures were impaling his chest on a sword of molten blue steel. When he tried the velvet, it made his nightmares worse. The circles under her eyes showed that it hadn’t helped her either. It had been his idea to try silk, although Margarida had been the one to pilfer the scraps, cut from their grandmother’s wedding gown and destined for a patchwork comforter.

  “Your stitches betray you, boy,” Dom Rumail said in a voice less gruff. “Put it away for now and don’t let anyone touch it. From now on, only you or your Keeper may handle it safely. I must speak with your father.”

  Relieved, Coryn went back to his work. The gliders from Tramontana had dispersed, each to unload bags of fire-retardant chemicals in a different front line of the fire. Already, the smoke had changed in color. Coryn joined some of the other younger people, his brother Petro among them, up a little way on the hill above the camp. From here, he could see the billows of rust color streak the charcoal clouds.

  There would still be more work t
o do, backbreaking and long, slow labor sifting through the ashes, making sure no live embers lingered to spring to life again. But the larger battle had been won.

  2

  When at last the ashes had been combed through and every lingering ember extinguished, when those who had labored so hard against the fire had time to rest and their burns and bruises were tended, Lord Beltran Leynier held a feast of celebration. He included not only his own household but every man and woman on the estate and every smallholder and his family, a gesture of unusual magnanimity.

  That evening, the great hall of the castle glowed with candlelight. Tessa and Margarida had bedecked the hall with wreaths of late summer lilies and garlands of brown and blue, the Leynier colors. Padraic the coridom had arranged every serviceable table in the castle into a long-stemmed T, with Lord Leynier properly at its head and Rumail at his left hand, in the place of honor.

  Coryn sat a few places away, sandwiched between Eddard and his young wife on one side and Margarida on the other. His mouth watered as one succulent dish after another was carried out, the slow-roasted bull calf, the barnfowl stuffed with nuts and apples, the loaves of fresh-baked bread redolent with rosemary and garlic, the last of the winter gourds glazed with honey. He had no idea food could taste so good. In addition to the grueling physical work of the last week, the nausea had receded, leaving him ravenous.

  After the platters of dinner meats had been removed and the honey cakes reduced to crumbs, Lord Leynier called for another round of wine for each guest, even the children. Rising to his feet in the expectant hush, he lifted his own goblet.