The Fall of Neskaya

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  With a nod, the youngster clattered back down the stairs.

  Coryn let the door close behind him to see One-eyed Rafe standing in the shadows behind the door. As the old mercenary stepped forward, the light fell across his face. He looked as if he’d aged a century, all his iron strength gone to rust. His clothes were dark with travel filth.

  Kieran’s colorless eyes rested on Coryn’s, reflecting only kindness there. “News has finally come from Verdanta.”

  Coryn searched Rafe’s face, the deep seams lining the mouth, the rheumy eye. With the discipline of his years of Tower training, he waited for the words he knew would come.

  “An epidemic of lungrot swept all the area around Verdanta,” Kieran said. “Your father—and your sister—and many others—”

  “Merciful Avarra!” Aran whispered.

  The hawk . . . the hawk fell from the sky.

  “Even a man in his full strength can be felled by lungrot,” Kieran said, his voice shaded with bone-deep weariness. “Many died before the thing had run its course. No household was spared, from the poorest farmstead to the castle itself. Half the smallholder families are gone. And of those who survived, many have such scarring on their lungs as will shorten their lives.”

  Coryn lowered himself to the nearest bench. Not only Kristlin and his father, but men and boys who had labored beside him on the fire-lines and feasted together at Midsummer, gone! He felt Aran’s light touch on his shoulder, the pressure of fingertip on muscle, a pulse of strength, I am here . . .

  Lungrot . . . Unlike natural diseases, this horror was laran-made. Tramontana had never done so, and Coryn had heard Kieran speak out against weapons which respected no boundaries and killed so many innocents. Bronwyn, who had seen her home razed under firebombings from laran-powered aircars, had raged, “We should make warfare even more dreadful, then, so dreadful that no lord dares to strike at another for fear of what might be unleashed on his own lands!”

  “I am so sorry,” Aran murmured. “Your father—”

  In those few words, Coryn caught the echoes of pain long past, of losses set to rest but not forgotten. Never forgotten. Aran’s father and grandfather had died in a rockslide when he was seven or eight, old enough to remember them but young enough to need the guidance of a loving parent. His mother, bereft and embittered, had turned inward on her own grief, leaving Aran and his brothers to find their own way through the tempestuous, lonely years that followed. All this he had whispered to Coryn as they sat up, sleepless and a bit drunk, on Midsummer Festival Night of their second year.

  “It was Kristlin who died, a day afterward,” Coryn said in a hollow voice.

  Nodding, Rafe covered his face with one raw-scraped hand to hide his tears.

  Coryn had not seen Kristlin for two years. It had been Midsummer Festival the last time he’d been home. He had thought there would always be another Midsummer, and then a wedding . . .

  “And Petro? Tessa? Margarida? Ruella, my old nurse? The coridom? Old Timas?”

  Rafe pressed his lips together, silently gathering his composure. “Petro and the other damiselas, they live, although how well they do, I canna say. Ruella—Timas—I don’t know these names, but few of the old people made it. The fevers hit them hardest, them and the wee ones. I—I was riding the border with High Kinnally and was late returning,” he added, as if in explanation or perhaps a plea for absolution.

  Coryn found himself getting to his feet, Aran’s hand falling away. “I will prepare to return home for the funerals.”

  Kieran said, “There can be no funerals for those who die of lungrot. The bodies must be burned and the ashes laced with salt to prevent further contagion.”

  “I don’t care.” Coryn’s vision blurred. “This is my family—I must go home.”

  Rafe lifted his head. “Your brother Eddard, he that’s Lord Leynier now, he bade me tell you that he and his one son still live. He says—he says—” he inflected the word to mean commands, “—not to come, not when there’s still danger from the lungrot.”

  “Not come—just as if they were strangers and their lives meant nothing to me?” Coryn heard his own voice rise in pitch, his ragged breathing. “What am I supposed to do, pretend nothing has happened? Gods, man, does my brother think I’m so unfeeling or that Tower work has stripped me of all courage?”

  We almost lost you to threshold sickness, Kieran said, mind to mind. I will not risk you again to some accursed plague.

  “If anything happens to your brothers, you will be the next Lord of Verdanta,” Aran pleaded. “You must stay here, where you are safe.

  “When this thing has run its course, someone must be left to stand against High Kinnally,” Rafe added, iron ringing in his voice.

  “Kinnally . . .” Liane’s family! “Has the plague reached Storn?”

  “Who knows?” Rafe looked as if he wanted to spit, but dared not, here in a Keeper’s private chambers. “We sent no word to them nor they to us. For all we know, they set it on us! Or so Lord Eddard says.”

  “There has been nothing from Neskaya,” Kieran commented mildly, meaning no news along the relays or any hint of who might be responsible.

  Coryn thought again of returning home, but he had nothing to offer the desperate survivors, not even money to purchase food against next winter’s hunger. He could not just sit here idly at Tramontana. Yet there was nothing he could do to bring back Lord Beltran or Kristlin or to change the course of the plague.

  An idea struck him, something he could do, even so far away. Not for this crisis, but for others still to come.

  “With your permission,” he said, nodding to Kieran and then turning back to Rafe, “I will send a messenger-bird home with this good man and say to my brother that he has but to release it in the event of a forest fire, and I will send chemicals which I have myself made.”

  “That is a good offer,” Kieran said. “Now, young Aran, take this man down to the kitchen for some hot food and make sure his beast is well stabled. They both deserve rest.”

  Coryn lingered in the Keeper’s chambers after the others had gone. His thoughts jumbled one on top of the other, things he wished he had said or had left unsaid. Now that the news was sure, pain pierced his body like a fire-tipped arrow, only to recede into numbness.

  “It is a grave loss,” Kieran said. “And such things can take a long time to mourn, even when we anticipate their coming. I think we do not so much forget as we reach a new balance.” Something in his tone told Coryn that he spoke from his own experience. “You need not join us in the circle for a time.”

  “I—I would like to work. I think it would help take my mind off—all the things I keep thinking.”

  “Sometimes it does happen that way. When you are ready, you must first have Gareth monitor you to make sure you are fit for the work. Grief can cloud our judgment of many things, not the least our own clarity.”

  That made sense, even in Coryn’s dazed state. He went back to his chamber, where he lay curled on top of the covers for what seemed like hours, until Liane slipped in. She lay down behind him, curving her body around his, her arms around him, and held him until silent tears came and went and he finally slept.

  10

  “So the old man and the girl are both dead.” Deslucido stood with his brother on the balcony outside his private quarters as the great Bloody Sun lowered on the horizon. Autumn was fast turning into winter, and ice edged the wind even in Ambervale’s sheltered valleys. He had been idle for too long, playing the benevolent king, and the inactivity rankled.

  Rumail drew his cloak around him and made no reply. It was too bad, Damian reflected, that his brother had been caught before he completed the laran device which was to have protected the girl. Damian hadn’t planned on releasing the lungrot so soon, but Old Lord Leynier would have seized upon Rumail’s expulsion from Neskaya as yet another excuse to delay. Damian had to act decisively. Nor was it Rumail’s fault that the lungrot, purchased at great expense and with many bribes
of secrecy from an unregulated Tower near Temora, had gotten out of control. But the end result was the same—Verdanta in shambles, ripe for the taking.

  Originally, the plan had been a sound one. With the father and brothers dead from the lungrot or else so weakened as to be incapable of fielding an effective defense, the Ambervale forces would have swept through Verdanta like a heated knife through butter. The girl’s age or wishes would have mattered nothing. There would have been an end to temporizing, to placating the brat and her doting sire. Backed by the legitimacy of marriage, Verdanta would have been theirs now, not in another four or five years, as that unreasonable Lord Leynier kept insisting.

  As a boy, Damian had once ridden his father’s favorite mount, a huge yellow unruly brute of a stallion, just to see how far and how fast he could go. The horse raced through fields shimmering with new-sprouted wheat and barley, hooves throwing up great clods of earth. Even now, Damian remembered the wind singing in his ears and the coarse mane whipping across his face. Up into the hills they ran, as if possessed.

  There seemed to be no end to the horse’s strength. Each fallen log, each ditch, each rockpile or stream seemed only to add to the animal’s frenzy. Foam splattered the front of Damian’s shirt. They burst through a copse along the crest of a hill and stood poised for a moment over a long, boulder-strewn slope. Damian tightened his grip on the reins. His legs trembled with exhilaration. The hill was too steep for safety, the rocky footing too uncertain.

  But the stallion ducked its massive head and seized the bit. It leaped from the ridge and plunged downhill as if all the demons of Zandru’s nine hells were lashing at its tail. The horse seemed to suspend itself in the air for a sickening moment, so steep was the hillside. Then it landed with a bone-cracking jolt. Damian was almost unseated. The pommel of the saddle dug into his stomach as he lurched forward over the sweating, arched neck. The horse slid, scrambled, heaved itself onward. Metal shoes sparked against rock.

  All Damian could do was hang on. The reins were useless, for nothing could have slowed that mad, careening downhill course. He had not even time enough to pray. With his fingers laced in the horse’s mane and blood hammering through his skull, the hot raw power of the beast flowed into his own body.

  An eerie peace had settled on him, one he remembered and thirsted for to this very day. His body had shifted in perfect balance with the horse’s. Without thought, he adjusted to each landing, each stumble, each soaring leap. He no longer thought of falling, of dying, or even of reaching the bottom—only of the wild joy of the moment. Never before and rarely since had he felt so intensely alive, every fiber of his being throbbing with exhilaration.

  That was the trick of it, in war and in love as well as riding a maddened horse, to meet each obstacle as it came. To be rooted in the present moment, not the unchangeable past or the uncertain future. If his plans for a bloodless conquest of Verdanta went awry, then he would find some other way. Verdanta was the key to the surrounding stretch of Hellers and the gateway to Acosta, Acosta which he must have safe before the accursed Hasturs settled their death grip on all the lands around it.

  But war took planning, the careful assessment of strengths and liabilities. Rumail, now, represented both.

  As if on cue, several figures entered the room adjacent to the balcony on which he and Rumail now stood.

  “Ah, here are my son and my senior general,” Damian said, keeping his voice light. “Let us see what inspiration they can bring to our present situation.”

  They drew up chairs around the table of polished golden-pine fitted with racks of rolled maps and shelves of account books. A servant set down goblets of watered wine and as silently disappeared.

  “What’s the assessment of Verdanta?” Damian asked the chief of his generals, a man once so fair as to arouse speculation he was Dry Towner by birth. Years and weather and uncounted battles had grizzled his hair and seamed his face like bleached leather. His men called him The Yellow Wolf. Damian, pleased with the idea of a wolf at his service, did nothing to stop them.

  “Confusion continues,” The Yellow Wolf answered. “The contagion has burned itself out, yet there is little order restored. My scouts were able to ride within sight of the castle without challenge. They saw crops rotting in the fields, trees bending under unpicked fruit, cattle untended in their pens. Hunger will surely follow the loss of the harvest. This Eddard Leynier might become a competent ruler in time, for he appears to be well liked and to have training in organizing fire-lines if nothing else. Only someone with a true genius for leadership—” a flicker of those pale eyes in Damian’s direction, “—as well as Aldones’ own luck could bring the people together under these conditions.”

  “If we marched on Verdanta, we could still take it with minimal losses.” Belisar said. “We must strike first before they can mount a defense.”

  Damian looked on his son and heir with pride. The boy might be impulsive, but he had a good mind when he chose to use it. The years had brought some measure of insight even as they pared away his boyhood softness. The lungrot plague might not have gone the way they’d planned, but with a little of that luck The Yellow Wolf swore by, even better opportunities might come their way. Belisar, with his quick mind and hard-edged masculine beauty, would have been wasted on that insipid little country girl. Now he was free to make a far more advantageous match elsewhere.

  “It’s not the taking of Verdanta itself which poses risks, Your Highness,” the Yellow Wolf explained without a hint of condescension. He pointed to the unfurled map. “It’s the possibility that their neighbors, the Storns of High Kinnally, might seize this opening for themselves.”

  Rumail, who had spoken little that evening, stirred. “There is scant love lost between those two families. As you remember, when I visited Verdanta to assess the daughters for laran, High Kinnally had refused their aid in a forest fire, even denying them passage through to Tramontana. Their quarrel, like so many of these petty mountain feuds, goes back farther than living men can remember, with each new generation renewing the animosity. I have not heard of any mending of that breach, or of any desire for peace on either part.” He looked disgusted. “Given access to it, they’d be pelting one another with clingfire and worse at the slightest excuse.”

  “Meanwhile, men die and their families starve for a cause no one remembers,” Damian said. “It will be so much better for everyone once they are joined under a single King. No more incessant vendettas, no more needless famines.”

  “Shall we then stand back and let High Kinnally fall upon Verdanta, so that they spend themselves upon each other and fall the more readily to our greater strength?” Belisar put in, eager to return to the subject.

  Damian shook away the recurrent vision of a glorious united Darkover and leaned back in his chair. “An interesting idea. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

  “Sire?”

  “Every plan, no matter how apt or well-planned, has its own pitfalls,” Damian said. “Since you have so readily proposed this one, you may now point out for us all the things that could go amiss. As an exercise, if you will.”

  “Well—” Belisar swallowed hard. “We could end up with two enemies instead of one. High Kinnally and Verdanta might settle their differences and join together against us as a common opponent.”

  Damian nodded. Belisar might be a bit overly dramatic, but he could think on his feet. In fact, he seemed to do so better than when he’d prepared what to say.

  “And—” the boy went on, “—and Verdanta could fall too fast. Then High Kinnally would have all their own resources and Verdanta’s. We’d face a united enemy, one already primed for battle. Fighting on their own territory. Oh, I said that before.”

  “Our forces could also be spread too thin,” Damian pointed out, “over strange country—mountainous country—which both of them know intimately and are better trained and equipped for fighting in than our forces are. We’d have long supply lines and disadvantage of terrain.”

&n
bsp; “Yet in every crisis there is opportunity,” The Yellow Wolf said. “We had not planned on having to take High Kinnally, at least not at this time. It’s too remote to govern well.” Too far from Acosta, he meant. “We’d face the same problems in holding Verdanta, that we cannot afford to weaken our own armies by leaving an occupying force great enough to put down incessant uprisings. We could hold family hostages against the current lord’s fealty or perhaps we could leave one of the lords—Leynier or Storn—in place to govern both lands.”

  “Oh,” Damian permitted himself a dark laugh, “they’d love that.”

  “They’d direct their anger at each other, not rebellion against us,” the general returned.

  Damian bent over the table, studying the map as he thought aloud. “Verdanta we must have, one way or the other. We cannot hold it without making sure of High Kinnally. Whether by alliance or conquest, then, we must deal with the Storns as well.” He looked up. “I want three plans drawn up: one, we deal first with High Kinnally and then go on to Verdanta; two, we strike Verdanta first and hope for an easy victory, whether Kinnally backs down or we must wrestle them into submission also; and three, we follow my son’s suggestion and let the two of them have at each other, so that we face only the weakened victor. I especially want to see fallback plans, should each of these schemes go wrong.”

  When the meeting broke up, both Belisar and Rumail remained behind.

  Damian sighed and drained his goblet in a single draught. The faintly acid taste of the watered wine lingered on his tongue, leaving him hungry for stronger stuff. Belisar was still at the map, tracing the borders of Verdanta with a thoughtful expression.

  “They will fall to us, both of them,” Damian said. “The only question is the details. You are not fretting over the loss of your promised bride?”

  “No, why should I?” Belisar shrugged. “I never knew her except as an indifferently rendered portrait. She looked much like any other girl-child still playing with her dolls. I have always known I must marry for the good of Ambervale, but I had hoped for a more suitable wife. If Verdanta can be ours without my having to bed a spoiled brat, I am just as happy. I have heard that one of the Storn daughters is of marriageable age—”