by Tad Williams
Here and there among the great herd were circles of wagons, each circle surrounded with fences of hastily-driven posts. The wagons themselves were all wooden, with large, high wheels, but otherwise were quite different from each other. Some were tall as two or three men, wheeled cottages with wooden roofs and shuttered windows. Others were little more than a wagon-bed topped with a cloth-covered shelter, the fabric rippling and snapping in the stiff breeze. Children played in many of the enclosures or darted in and out among the milling, amiable cattle. Horses grazed in some of the padlocks—and not just dray horses and wagon-pullers. Many were slender-limbed and wild-maned, with something light and strong as forged steel to be seen in their step even from a distance.
“Ah, God, if only we had a few beasts like those,” Deornoth said wistfully. “But we have nothing to trade. I am mightily tired of walking.”
Josua looked at him with a trace of sour humor. “We will be lucky if we walk away from here with our lives, Deornoth. and you are hoping for a brace of battle steeds? I would rather I had your optimism than their horses.”
As the prisoners and their captors continued south, the sprawl of separate wagon-camps began to come together, clumped like mushrooms after an autumn rain. Other groups of mounted men rode in and out among the settlements, Josua’s escorts exchanged shouted remarks with some of them. Soon the wagons stood so near each other that it began to seem that the prisoners traversed a city without roads.
At last they reached a large stockade, its fence posts hung with ornaments of bright metal and polished wood that clattered in the wind. Most of the riders sheared off, but Hotvig the leader and six or seven others ushered the prince’s party through a swinging gate. There were several compounds within the stockade, one of them containing a score of fine horses, another a half-dozen fat and glossy heifers. In an enclosure by himself stood a huge stallion, his shaggy mane twined with red and gold ribbons. The great horse nosed the ground as they passed and did not lookup—he was a monarch more used to being stared at than staring. The men escorting Josua’s party touched their hands to their eyes reverently as they passed.
“It is their clan beast,” Geloë said to no one in particular.
At the far end of the encampment stood a great wagon with wide, heavy-spoked wheels and a banner bearing a golden horse billowing from the roof-peak Before it were two figures, a large man and a young girl. The girl was knotting the man’s long beard into two thick braids that hung down onto his chest. Despite his age—he looked to have passed some sixty summers on the grasslands—his black hair was only faintly striped with silver and his wide frame was still knotted with muscle. He held a bowl upon his lap in his huge beringed and braceleted hands.
The riders stopped and dismounted. Hotvig strode forward to stand before him.
“We have captured several trespassers who walked the Feluwelt without your leave, March-thane: six men, two women, and a child.”
The March-thane stared the prisoners up and down. His face split in a wide, crooked-toothed grin. “Prince Josua Lackhand,” he said, without the least trace of surprise in his voice. “Now that your stone house is fallen, have you come to live beneath the sky like men do?” He took along swallow from his bowl, draining it dry, then handed it to the girl and waved her away.
“Fikolmij,” Josua said, bleakly amused. “So you are March-thane now.”
“When the Choosing came, of all the chieftains there was only Blehmunt who would stand against me. I broke his head like an egg.” Fikolmij laughed, patting at his new-braided beard, then stopped, lowering his eyebrows like a nettled bull. “Where is my daughter?”
“If that young one was yours, you just sent her away,” Josua said. Fikolmij clenched a fist in anger, then laughed again. “Stupid tricks, Josua. You know who I mean. Where is she?”
“I will tell you the truth,” Josua said. “I do not know where Vorzheva is.
“The March-thane looked him over speculatively. “So,” he said at last. “You are not so high in the world today, stone-dweller. You are a trespasser in the Free Thrithings now, as well as a daughter-stealer. Perhaps you will seem better to me with your other hand cut off, too. I will think on it.” He lifted his hairy paw and gestured carelessly to Hotvig. “Put them in one of the bull runs until I decide which ones to cut up and which to keep.”
“Merciful Aedon preserve us,” Father Strangyeard murmured. The March-thane chuckled, flicking a wind-blown curl of hair from his eye “And give these city-rats a blanket or two and some food, Hotvig. Otherwise, the night air may kill them and rob my sport.”
As Josua and the others were led away at spearpoint, Fikolmij turned and shouted for the girl to bring him more wine.
14
A Crown of Fire
It was a dream, Simon knew even as he dreamed it. It started in an ordinary enough fashion: he was lying in the Hayholt’s great loft, hidden in tickling hay. watching the familiar figures of Shem Horsegroom and castle smith Ruben the Bear talking quietly below. Ruben, his broad arms glimmering with sweat, was hammering clankingly away at a scarlet-hot horseshoe.
Suddenly the dream took on a strange cast. Ruben’s and Shem’s voices changed, until they sounded nothing like their real selves. Simon could now hear the conversation perfectly well, but the smith’s hammer was silent as it struck the gleaming iron.
“…But I have done all you asked for,” Shem abruptly said in a queer, rasping tone. “I brought King Elias to you.”
“You presume too much,” Ruben replied. His voice was like nothing Simon had ever heard, cold and remote as the wind in a high mountainpass. “You know nothing of what we want…of what He wants.” There was more wrong with the blacksmith than just his voice: a feeling of wrongness emanated from him, a black and bottomless lake hidden beneath a crust of thin ice. How could Ruben seem so evil, even in a dream—kind, slow-talking Ruben?
Shem’s lined face smiled cheerfully, but his words sounded strained. “I do not care. I will do anything He wishes. I ask little in return.”
“You ask a great deal more than any other mortal would,” Reuben replied. “Not only do you dare to call on the Red Hand, you have the temerity to demand favors.” He was chill and uncaring as graveyard dirt. “You do not even know what you ask. You are a child, priest, and you grasp at gleaming things because they seem pretty. You may cut yourself on something jagged and find that you bleed to death.”
“I don’t care.” Shem spoke with a lunatic firmness. “I don’t care. Teach me the Words of Changing. The Dark One owes me…he is obligated…”
Ruben threw back his head in wild laughter. A crown of flames seemed to blaze about his head. “Obligated?” he gasped- The sound of his amusement was terrifying. “Our master? To you?” He laughed again, and suddenly the blacksmith’s skin began blistering. Little gouts of smoke jetted into the air as Ruben’s flesh burned away, peeling back to reveal a shifting kernel of flame beneath, pulsating with reddish light like a coal fanned by wind. “You will live to see His final triumph. That is more reward than most mortals can expect!”
“Please!” Even as Ruben flared, Shem had begun to shrink, becoming small and gray as a charred parchment. His tiny arm waved, crumbling. “Please, undying one, please.” His voice was oddly light, fraught with a kind of slyness. “I will ask nothing further—I will not speak of the Dark One again. Forgive a mortal fool. Teach me the Word!”
Where Ruben had stood, a living flame glowed. “Very well, priest. There is, perhaps, little risk in giving you this dangerous but final toy. The Lord of All will be taking this world back soon enough—there is nothing you can do that He cannot make undone. Very well. I will teach you the Word, but the pain will be great. No Change is without some cost.” Laughter bubbled again in the unearthly voice. “You will scream…”
“I don’t care!” Shem said, his ashy form swirling away now into darkness, as did the shadowed smithy and then the hayloft itself. “I don’t care! I must know…!” Finally, even the glowing thing that had been
Ruben became only a bright point in the blackness…a star…
Simon awakened, breathless as a drowning man, his heart thudding in his chest. There was a single star overhead, peeping through the hole in the top of their sleeping shelter like a blue-white eye. He gasped.
Binabik lifted his head from Qantaqa’s shaggy neck. The troll was half-asleep, but struggling toward full wakefulness. “What is wrong, Simon?” he asked. “Were you having a dream that frightened?”
Simon shook his head. The tide of fear was ebbing a little, but he was sure it had been more than just a night fantasy. It had seemed that an actual conversation was taking place nearby, a conversation that his sleeping mind had woven neatly into the stuff of his dream—a mundane happening that he had experienced many times. What was strange and frightening was that there were no other speakers anywhere about: Sludig was snoring, Binabik obviously new-wakened.
“It’s nothing,” Simon said, struggling to speak evenly. He crawled to the front of their lean-to, mindful of the bruises from the evening’s stave-practice, and pushed his head out to look around. The first star he had seen had a great deal of company—a spatter of tiny white lights across the night sky. The clouds had been driven away by the brisk wind, the night was clear and cold, and the unrelieved monotony of the White Waste stretched away on every side. There was not another living thing to be seen anywhere beneath the ivory moon.
So it had only been a dream, a dream of how old Shem Horsegroom might speak with Pryrates’ croaking tongue, and how Ruben the Bear might speak with the sepulchral tones of nothing on God’s living earth…
“Simon?” Binabik asked sleepily. “Are you…?”
He was frightened, but if he was to be a man he could not run to cry on someone’s shoulder every time he had a bad dream. “It’s nothing.” He crawled shivering back to his cloak. “I’m well.”
But it seemed so real. The branches of their flimsy shelter creaked, wind-handled. So real. Like they were talking in my head…
Taking the silver sparrow’s fragmentary message to heart, they rode from first light to last every day, trying to outpace the coming storm. Simon’s mock-combats with Sludig now took place by firelight, so that he had scarcely a moment to spend alone from the moment he rose until he tumbled into exhausted sleep at the end of each day. The days of riding passed in a procession of sameness: the endless, humped fields of white, the dark tangles of stunted trees, the numbing insistence of the wind. Simon was grateful for his thickening beard: without it, he often thought, the relentless wind might rub away his face, down to the very bones.
It seemed that the wind had already worn away the face of the land, leaving behind little that was remarkable or distinct. Had it not been for the widening line of forest on the horizon, he could have supposed that every morning found them back at the same cold, bleak starting place. Thinking morosely about his own warm bed in the Hayholt, he decided that even if the Storm King himself were to move into the castle, his minions numerous as snowflakes, Simon could still live happily in the servant’s quarters. He wanted a home desperately. He was close to the point where he would take a mattress in Hell if the Devil would lend him a pillow.
As days wore by, the storm continued to grow behind them, a black pillar rising ominously in the northwestern sky. Great cloudy arms clutched at the firmament like the branches of a heaven-spanning tree. Lightning flickered between them.
“It’s not moving very fast,” Simon said one day as they ate a sparse noontime meal. There was more nervousness in his voice than he would have liked.
Binabik nodded. “It grows, but its spreading is slow. That is something for being thankful about.” He wore an unusually dispirited expression. “The slower it is moving, the longer we are not beneath it—for I am thinking that when it comes, it will bring a darkness with it that will not be passing away, as with storms of the ordinary type.”
“What do you mean?” Now the tremor was plain to hear.
“It is not a storm with just snow and rain,” Binabik said carefully. “My thought is that it is exactly meant to bring fear where it goes. It rises from Stormspike. It has the look of something full of unnaturalness.” He raised his palms apologetically. “It is spreading, but as you said, not with great swiftness.”
“I do not know about such things,” Sludig said, “but I must admit I’m happy we will be off the Waste soon. I wouldn’t want to get caught in the open in any storm, and that one looks truly nasty.” He turned toward the south and squinted. “Two days until we reach Aldheorte,” he said. “That will be some protection.”
Binabik sighed. “I hope you are right, but I am fearing that there will be no protection against this storm—or that the protection must be some-thing other than forest trees or roofs.”
“Do you mean the swords?” Simon asked quietly.
The little man shrugged. “Perhaps. If we are finding all three, perhaps winter can be kept at spear-length—or even pushed back. But first we must go to where Geloë tells us. Otherwise, it is only worrying about things we cannot be changing; that is foolishness.” He mustered a smile. “ ‘When your teeth are gone,’ we Qanuc say, ‘learn to like mush.’ ”
The next morning, their seventh on the Waste, came laden with foul weather. Although the storm in the north was still only an inky blotch defacing the far horizon, steely gray clouds had gathered overhead, their edges stripped into sooty tatters by the rising wind. By noon, when the sun had vanished from view entirely behind the dismal pall, the snow began to fly.
“This is terrible,” Simon shouted, eyes narrowed against the stinging sleet. Despite his heavy leather gloves, his fingers were swiftly growing numb. “We’re blinded! Shouldn’t we stop and make shelter?”
Binabik, a small, snow-covered shadow atop Qantaqa’s back, turned and called back to him: “If we go a little farther, we will reach the crossroads!”
“Crossroads!” Sludig bellowed. “In this wilderness?!”
“Ride nearer,” Binabik cried. “I will be explaining.”
Simon and the Rimmersman brought their mounts closer to the striding wolf. Binabik lifted his hand to his mouth, but still the wind’s roar threatened to carry off his words. “Not far beyond here, I am thinking, this Old Tumet’ai Road
meets the White Way
, that is running along the northern edge of the forest. At the crossroad may be shelter, or at least the trees should be of more thickness there, closer to the woods. Let us go riding on a while longer. If there is nothing in that spot, we will make our camp there despite it.”
“As long as we stop well before dark, troll,” Sludig bellowed. “You are clever, but your cleverness may not be enough to make a decent camp in darkness in this blizzard. Having lived through all the madness I have seen, I do not want to die in the snow like a lost cow!”
Simon said nothing, saving his strength so he could more fully appreciate his misery. Aedon, it was cold! Would there never be an end to snow?
They rode on through the bleak, icy afternoon. Simon’s mare plodded slowly, ankling through the new drifts. Simon leaned his head close to her mane, trying to stay out of the wind. The world seemed as formless and white as the inside of a flour cask, and only slightly more habitable.
The sun was quite invisible, but a dimming of the already scarce light tested that the afternoon was fading fast. Binabik, however, did not seem inclined to stop. As they passed yet one more unprepossessing stand of evergreens, Simon could stand it no longer.
“I’m freezing, Binabik!” he shouted angrily above the wind. “And it’s getting dark! There’s another bunch of trees gone and we’re still riding. Well, it’s almost night! By God’s bloody Tree, I’m not going to go any farther!”
“Simon…” Binabik began, striving to assume a placating tone while yelling at the top of his lungs.
“There’s something in the road!” Sludig cried hoarsely. “Vaer! Some-thing ahead! A troll!”
Binabik squinted. “It is being no such thin
g,” he shouted indignantly. “No Qanuc would be foolish enough to go wandering alone in such weather!”
Simon stared into the swirling gray dimness before them. “I don’t see anything.”
“As neither do I.” Binabik brushed snow from his hood lining. “I saw something,” Sludig growled. “I may be snow-blinded, but I am not mad.”
“An animal, that is most likely,” the troll said. “Or, if we are unlucky, one of the diggers as a scout. Perhaps it is time to make shelter and fire, as you said, Simon. There is a stand of trees that looks to make better sheltering just ahead. There, over the rise.”
The companions chose the most protected spot they could find. Simon and Sludig wove branches among the tree trunks for a windbreak while Binabik, with the help of his yellow fire-powder, set flame to damp wood and began to boil water for broth. The weather was so unremittingly foul and cold that after sharing the thin soup, they all curled up in their cloaks and lay shivering. The wind was too loud for any but shouted conversation. Despite the proximity of his friends, Simon was alone with his cheerless thoughts until sleep came.
Simon woke with Qantaqa’s steaming breath on his face. The wolf whined and nudged him with her great head, rolling him halfway over. He sat up, blinking in the weak rays of morning sun filtering into the copse. Snow drifts had piled against the woven branches, making a wall that kept the wind at bay, so the smoke from Binabik’s campfire rose almost undisturbed.
“Good morning, Simon-friend,” Binabik said. “We have survived through the storm.”
Simon gently pushed Qantaqa’s head out of his side. She made a noise of frustration, then backed away. Her muzzle was red-daubed.
“She has been unsettled all the morning,” Binabik laughed. “I am thinking that the many frozen squirrels and birds and such who have tumbled from the trees have fed her well, however.”
“Where’s Sludig?”
