Rhapsody

by Elizabeth Haydon

  “You are a very sick girl.”

  “Be that as it may, their first vintage will be available in the autumn, along with some credible weapons of a design I guarantee you have never seen before. In addition, if you are unwise enough to doubt what I’ve said about the king’s resolve, your aggression will prove costly to you and your soldiers, mark my words.”

  “Get out.”

  Rhapsody turned her back on him and went to the door as he called for the chamberlain. She took her cloak from the man and turned to face the Regent again.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Your Highness; I’m sorry what I had to say wasn’t better received. If you wish to meet with me again I will be happy to do so, despite this conversation.”

  “Have no fear of that,” the Lord Roland replied, his eyes glinting with anger. “You are a very beautiful woman, madam, but you haven’t the sense the All-God gave a grasshopper. Please do not trouble me again. I will be instructing my counselors to turn you away if you should ever return to my domain.”

  Rhapsody smiled as she put on her cloak. “As you wish, m’lord. I hope you realize that this means when you want to meet with me you shall have to travel to the edge of my realm yourself now. Happy New Year.” She nodded pleasantly at the chamberlain and left the hall, escorted by the guards outside the door. The High Lord Regent watched her go, then turned to the chamberlain himself.

  “Get my counselors in here immediately.”

  “Yes, m’lord.”

  Lord Stephen Navarne listened as patiently as he could while the Lord Regent berated the other dukes. He had not been there that morning, had no hand in the matter of the ambassador about whom his cousin was bellowing, because he was attending to the return of those of Tristan’s soldiers who had helped put down Navarne’s most recent uprising. He had answered the Lord Regent’s angry summons anyway; now he was especially glad he had come.

  After the tirade was over, and the other dukes had been dismissed, Stephen hung back, seeking a private word with his cousin.

  “There is something I’m not certain you’re aware of, Tristan,” he said pleasantly, trying to mask the concern he felt knotting his stomach. “The woman you are snarling about, and her Bolg companions, are the ones who rescued the House of Remembrance some time back.”

  The Lord Roland stared at him blankly. “Oh?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. And, in fact, they are seen as local heroes of somewhat mammoth proportion in Navarne, as they also managed to return a sizable number of the missing children I had mentioned to you at our last session. They apparently took on the forces of a demon or something like it in doing so.”

  Tristan Steward said nothing for a moment and walked back to the window of his library as he had that morning. He poured himself a glass of port.

  “Interesting,” he said.

  When Rhapsody returned to the Cauldron, Grunthor swept her into an enthusiastic embrace.

  “Oi was worried,” he said, looking into her face with relief.

  Rhapsody smiled. She knew he meant it.

  “I’m fine,” she said, giving the enormous shoulder a pat, and turning to Jo.

  “How’d it go?” asked Achmed, watching the girl run to her and hug her. His eyes met Rhapsody’s and a smile passed between them. This was a first.

  Rhapsody put an arm around Jo and followed her Bolg friends into the dreary hall, where a crude breakfast had been laid for her.

  “Well, I have two observations.”

  “Yes?” Achmed crossed his arms and leaned against the wall as Grunthor held her chair for her.

  “Well, are you sure you aren’t the one who’s prescient, Achmed? Everything went almost exactly as you said it would, word for word.”

  Achmed smirked. “That’s not prescience, it’s predictability.”

  “And two, given the reaction they had to me, you might as well have gone yourself; it couldn’t have been any worse. Now I understand why you’re so cranky all the time.”

  51

  Deep within the old Cymrian lands, past the wide heath beyond the canyon and sheltered by a high inner ring of rock formations, was Kraldurge, the Realm of Ghosts. It was the only place the Bolg, without exception, did not go, a desolate, forbidding place from the look of its exterior structures.

  What heinous tragedy had occurred here was unclear in the legends, but it had been devastating enough to scar the psyche of the Firbolg who lived in the mountains permanently. They spoke in reluctant whispers of fields of bones and wandering demons that consumed any creature unfortunate enough to cross their paths, of blood that seeped up from the ground and winds that ignited anyone caught on the plain.

  Rhapsody had come upon the guardian hills quite by accident while scouting for battle orphans, and now she and Achmed made their way arduously back through the edge of the inner Teeth, trying to find the place again.

  They had been searching for a time before Achmed’s impatience got the better of him. He closed his eyes and concentrated on the hidden pass he had located in the rockwall. He loosed the lore he had gained in the Root and let his sight speed along the path, a narrow, overgrown hall in the mountain that had clearly seen no traffic in centuries.

  At its terminus the pass opened into an uncovered meadow, thick and overgrown in high weeds from years of isolation. A hill-like mound rose in the center of the meadow; otherwise there was nothing remarkable in the hidden canyon-dell.

  “Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t see a single demon, and there are no gushing geysers of blood.”

  Rhapsody sighed. “Good. I had more than enough of that at the House of Remembrance, thank you. But I’d still like to see this place; there must have been something there to inspire such hideous fear, even if it has been gone for centuries. Besides, I brought all these seeds; it would be a shame to have to cart them back to the Cauldron.”

  “Very well.”

  Achmed pulled his cwellan out and slipped between the rockwalls. Rhapsody never ceased to be amazed at the speed and silence with which he wielded the bulky weapon. She followed closely behind him, her bow out with an arrow on the string.

  As they crept through the pass their footfalls sounded up the canyon walls, echoing at an enormous amplification, so that anything that might have been waiting for them would have had ample warning. Despite the noise they made, on entering the hidden meadow they found nothing different from what Achmed had described.

  The canyon that hid the field was so tall that the wind rarely reached down into it; it howled around the top of the surrounding crags, creating a mournful wail. Achmed and Rhapsody smiled at each other. Even the bravest Bolg could mistake the noise for demonic shrieking. Despite the natural explanation for the sound, Rhapsody could sense an innate sadness to the place, a feeling of overwhelming grief and anger.

  She bent and touched the earth but could discern nothing unusual; perhaps this was a forgotten burial ground from the earliest conflicts of the Cymrian War. There was no mention of it in the manuscripts they had found within Gwylliam’s, but there probably wouldn’t have been, anyway.

  Achmed began to scout the perimeter of the internal canyon. The field was small enough to be seen in its entirely from the top of the mound, and it seemed completely enclosed, with the only egress being the pass through which they had come.

  He gave Rhapsody a nod, by which she knew he meant for her to go about her business while he surveyed the terrain. When she reached the gentle summit of the central hill Rhapsody took from her pack a burlap sack full of seeds and her hand tools, as well as her flute. A harp would have served her purposes better, but she had left hers at the House of Remembrance in the crotch of the oak tree, playing its song of healing, protecting it from the corruption that had almost killed it.

  She cast a glance over at Achmed, reassuring herself that she could still see him, then set about digging in the earth, taking a sample to determine the type of soil that lay beneath the grass. To her surprise the newly thawed ground, warm in th
e light of almost-spring, was loamlike and fertile beneath a thin layer of rocks, rich with nutrients. She had guessed the shelter from the wind and elements would have left it more barren. She was glad to be wrong.

  Rhapsody touched a small patch of highgrass and called forth the fire she could feel in her soul. Instantly the brown weeds burst into flame at the base, burning out quickly under her hand.

  She pulled the now-dead scrub out by the roots and dug into the earth, turning it to the depths the seeds would need for best planting. They were hear’sease, a flower she had loved in the old land that had been brought by the Cymrians to this one, its blossoms often given as a sign of condolence and planted on graves or battlefields in memory of loss. It had seemed the obvious choice. The plantings would grow to cover the mound by midsummer, and come back each spring until the whole of the canyon bloomed with it in a year or two.

  The wind moaned again high above her as she opened the burlap sack and drew forth a handful of seeds. She sang along in tune with the wind as she planted them, a song of atonement and comfort, seeking to bring consolation to the wounded land.

  When the earth was back in place she took the highgrass and covered the area to hold in the moisture from the rain and protect it from the wind. Then she moved a few feet away and repeated the process up and down the sides of the hill.

  She had planted most of the mound when the trowel slipped from her hand and disappeared into the earth. Rhapsody was astonished; the hole she had dug was no deeper than her hand, and certainly could not have held the tool. Perhaps she had hit another hole or pit of some kind.

  She called to Achmed and began moving more of the dirt away. By the time he had crested the hill she had located a small crack, about as wide as a string, with a larger hole in the middle big enough to have held the tool, but not deep enough to have swallowed it.

  “Look at this,” she said to Achmed as he put his weapon down. “It ate my trowel.”

  “It’s been undisturbed for centuries; perhaps it’s hungry.”

  Rhapsody peered down into the crack. “It looks hollow down here, but I can’t see the bottom.”

  “Let me look.” Achmed moved above the crack and stared down into the tiny hole. She was right; there was a depth past the surface of the soil. He closed his eyes again and made use of his path lore once more.

  His mind raced through the hole and down through the crack in the earth. It was enormously deep and regular, almost cylindrical past the layer of rocks, becoming a tube of sorts in the ground.

  A hundred or more feet down the tube widened out and emptied into a vast underground cavern, the firmament of which they were standing above. The dome of the firmament was several hundred feet above the bottom of the cavern, and the grotto was filled with water.

  “It’s an underground lake of sorts,” Achmed said, standing erect again. “Shall we go exploring?”

  “Yes, of course,” Rhapsody answered excitedly. “Just let me finish up here; I’m almost done. Why don’t you get out our noonmeal while I put these last few seeds in the ground?”

  Achmed nodded and opened his pack, noticing that the song of consolation she was singing had changed in tone to far more cheerful than it had been before.

  When she finished she picked up her flute and sat down on top of the hill in a shaft of sunlight. She began to play the song she had sung; it blended with the wind and softened a little the discordant wail bellowing down from the peaks above. It had all the sorrow of a maypole dance; she was having a hard time containing her excitement at the thought of the upcoming adventure. He shook his head and smiled to himself as he began to eat.

  After a brief search of the meadow they located the passage down. It was cleverly hidden in the darkest part of the canyon, in an alcove that always seemed touched by shadow. Achmed had not seen it when he was canvassing the place.

  He led the way, while Rhapsody concentrated on not slipping on the lichenous path, overgrown with slime. She shuddered; the dank air reminded her of being on the Root, and it was all she could do to keep going as the tunnel turned and she could no longer see the light of the meadow.

  “How deep do you think it is?”

  “Three, four hundred feet, taller at the center. Maybe a thousand at the highest point.”

  They followed the path down for a long time. Just as Rhapsody’s stomach had had all it could take, they came out into a huge grotto, a cavern that stretched out into seemingly endless darkness.

  It was lighted from above by a series of tiny holes in the firmament like the one that had swallowed her tool, and the light was strong enough to have produced plant life all along the shores of the massive lake that filled the base of the cavern. The scent here was less dank and more fetid, like stagnant water from a swamp, even though there was a current in the lake.

  Down at the water’s edge was a copper structure, rectangular in shape and sealed with wax, its sides ornately engraved with intertwining patterns. Buried just beneath the surface of the sand before it lay the remains of a series of metal rollers, once held in place by an iron trackway. Time and water had fused this system into a mass of rust.

  The front wall of the copper structure was hinged on the bottom. After careful examination they determined it was a storage place for a rowboat that had once been moored nearby. The rusty iron mooring still stood in the sand, fragile and encrusted with algae.

  Achmed pried the copper structure open and found the rowboat and a metal oar still inside, resting on a bed of rice. Rhapsody had initially thought the rice grains were vermin larvae and leapt away as they spilled out onto her feet. Achmed had taken great pleasure in her embarrassment and laughed for several minutes while he pulled the rowboat out of its drydock to examine it.

  It was made from wood covered with thin hammered sheets of copper, which had turned green but had managed to preserve the boat’s integrity over time. The vessel was free from holes, though the wood showed signs of dry rot, and he knocked on it several times to check the soundness of the floorboards. He must have deemed it seaworthy, because he turned it over again and shoved it into the lake.

  “Can you swim?”

  “Yes,” Rhapsody answered. She glanced across the lake. In the distance she could see something, a structure of some sort, on the far shore. “Can you?”

  “Somewhat. Enough, I suppose; it doesn’t appear very deep.” Rhapsody eyed him doubtfully. She would guess it to be at least seventy feet in the middle. “Are you game?”

  “Of course,” she retorted indignantly. “I’m the one who can swim. Let’s go.”

  She climbed into the boat, and Achmed followed her after locating the other oar. It, like its twin, was made of a metal neither of them recognized, and was surprisingly light and free of rust or tarnish.

  They rowed across the lake, taking turns at the oars. While Achmed rowed, Rhapsody looked all around her in amazement.

  The dome above her was higher than she could see in the light that flooded down from it, much like looking up into a cloudy sky. The lake was clear and pure a few yards from shore, so that they could almost see the bottom, even in the middle. They were able to discern the movement of fish, and a wind was noticeable on the water, though nowhere near as strong as it would have been above ground.

  Stalactites and stalagmites protruded from the ceiling and the floor of the cavern on the outskirts of the lake, glistening in crystal iridescence. Now and then one of the toothlike structures would catch a stray sunbeam and flash it over the surrounding walls and water, leaving gleaming patches of light that glittered for a moment, then were gone.

  A waterfall was visible when they were almost over to the far shore, tumbling from a rock ledge that jutted near the top of the cavern where the grotto wall met the dome. It was roaring, swollen with the spring rains, and Rhapsody was enchanted with the music that it made as it fell into the lake and echoed in the cavern all around them.

  “This place is beautiful,” she said to Achmed. He raised an eyebrow, but sai
d nothing.

  Finally, as they approached the shore, the structure they had seen from across the lake came into view. It was a small cottage, centuries old, standing not far from the shore of what appeared to be an island. An equal expanse of water was visible behind the island, setting it almost exactly in the center of the lake. The house was dark, and stained by dusky patterns where ivy or something like it had once grown. It seemed structurally sound, but it was impossible to be sure from the boat.

  Rhapsody wriggled with impatience as Achmed maneuvered the boat into its ancient dock; it was all she could do to keep from leaping from the craft and wading to shore. He had probably not had much experience piloting boats before, she realized in amusement. This was the first time she had seen him not the master of the task he was undertaking, and she was enjoying it. Apparently he was not.

  “Make yourself useful—tie off the rope,” he instructed through his teeth. Rhapsody hid her smile and complied. She climbed out of the boat after him and followed him up the shore.

  52

  At the top of the shoreline where the sand met dry grass they could see the whole of the island. In addition to the small cottage they found what once had been flower beds, now long dead, and a marble gazebo set a considerable way back from the house. The marble structure was solidly encrusted with centuries of grime, like the house, but also bore the ancient marks of fire damage, black stains that spread irregularly across one side of the gazebo.

  From the moment they set foot on the island they could both feel it, a mournful, pulsing anger inherent in the place. It did not scream of evil, but rather of rage, and sorrow beyond measure. Rhapsody shuddered and moved closer to Achmed, but he seemed oblivious of the feeling. He had seen birthplaces of hatred before.