Dark is the Moon

by Ian Irvine

  That was what war meant to him and he was inconsolable. She hugged him, shedding a tear of her own.

  The weathered doors of Gothryme stood open. They were made of planks thick as Karan’s fists, reinforced with iron bands inside and outside, and studded with iron bolts. One door was dented and splintered.

  Karan introduced Llian, who was polite but unusually reserved, and Shand, who knew Rachis of course. They went inside, into a round hall some thirty paces across with a curved stair of stone running up the far wall. The flagstones were scattered here and there with threadbare rag rugs. On either end of the hall was a fireplace large enough to roast an ox, but neither fire was lit and the hall was icy.

  Karan stood there in silence. “What happened to the carpets and tapestries?”

  “Stolen by the soldiers,” said Rachis dismally. “Also the candlesticks, the silver, most of your mother’s jewelry, and everything else they could carry away. We haven’t enough wood to heat the hall. Come into the kitchen.”

  She followed Rachis out into the northern wing. The kitchen, larders and pantries had not been damaged though there was little in them. One wall was taken up by a huge iron stove of eccentric design, her father’s work. A few pots simmered on top. The opposite wall had a pair of fireplaces with roasting spits, and cauldrons hanging from a bar over a meager fire. The stove was warm though, and they all stood round it while Mavid made tea.

  They drank it standing up, so anxious was Karan to reckon up the damage. It was considerable. Rachis went through the list while they walked around. “The damage to the northern wing is fairly superficial, but most of the southern will have to be rebuilt.”

  They passed out into the gardens, which were also in sad shape. Llian gazed around him. “I hadn’t realized you were so rich!”

  Karan’s estate, which had come down to her from her mother’s side, comprised the upper part of the valley and the ridges on either side. Most was steep, with scrubby woodland and poor, stony soils good only for sheep and goats. Only a small strip near the river was arable.

  In addition she held title to the Forest of Gothryme, an ancient upland wood that extended along the eastern side of the Great Mountains, as well as various waterfalls, streams and a small lake. This forest was almost virgin: magnificent and old, with good hunting and fishing, but inaccessible except by a precarious stair up the granite cliffs, in consequence of which it added almost nothing to her living.

  She was also heir to the folly of Carcharon, which was higher still, beyond the forest and up the dangerous path that led eventually to Shazmak. Carcharon had been built five hundred years ago by her mad ancestor Basunez, at a place which had some kind of cosmic significance to him, if to no other. But Carcharon was utterly worthless and had been abandoned after his death.

  “Rich, ha!” snorted Karan. “It feeds us, but there’s not much left over to sell, or to buy what we can’t grow or make. Gothryme was in debt before I left. Even in the good times, before the drought began, our wealth was counted in silver, not gold.” As she walked around, and the toll of the damage mounted, her heart sank further and further. It could never be made good.

  “Is that all?” she asked as she and Rachis finished going through the stock books. “What is the state of our accounts?”

  Rachis hesitated. To be the bearer of such bad tidings, to confess his failure, was like cutting out his heart. “Grim,” he said, hauling out a huge ledger and turning the pages one by one from the very beginning, a good thirty years ago.

  Karan watched the years go by with agonizing slowness. Finally he grunted, smoothed down the last page and pointed to the balance with one finger.

  “That’s all?” she said in a whisper. “One hundred and five silver tars? That won’t last a month if we have to buy food.” The estate, even if spring was bountiful, would earn no more until mid-summer.

  “The war!” Rachis said heavily. “What with fines, taxes, confiscations and the bribes I had to pay to stop the soldiers from looting everything, you are lucky to have anything left at all. Had not your friend Maigraith come at the head of an army we would be living in tents. And since his return, Yggur has taxed us into the ground. See, I have itemized every expense. And I have to say that we are better off than most.” He listed a dozen families who had nothing left but the land they camped on.

  Karan closed the ledger with a snap. “When do his tax collectors come back?”

  “The spring equinox,” said Rachis.

  “And the assessment?”

  “Five hundred and forty tars,” he replied mournfully.

  Karan went white. “We need more than that to restock, let alone rebuild. Thank you, Rachis.”

  He nodded and went out, walking very slowly. Karan remained where she was, her head sunk on the ledger.

  Shand found her there an hour later. He rested his hand on her shoulder and Karan looked up with a start. She pulled away, still angry with him.

  “Worse than you thought?”

  “Much worse. We are practically ruined now. We will be, when Yggur’s tax collector comes back in the spring. I will have to go to the graspers. What will their rate of usury be, after all this ruin? They can ask what they like.”

  “Hundreds of percent, I should say. Have you nothing that you can sell?”

  “Precious little. Most things of any value are already gone. Whatever I can spare will fetch almost nothing, since thousands of other families are selling the same stuff, while whatever I need will cost its weight in silver. And I still owe you and Llian, and Malien, for all the costs of a year’s travel.”

  “For my part, that is forgotten,” said Shand. “I can afford it.”

  “We had this conversation once before,” said Karan sharply. Being beholden to him was even worse now. “I pay my debts.” How? she thought. How can I ever repay you or anyone?

  “Well, who knows what spring will bring?” he said cheerfully. Since leaving Tullin he had behaved as if there was nothing between them. “Come, put your long face away until the morrow. They are preparing a celebration for your homecoming. Don’t spoil it. They have had hard times too. The head of the house must smile and set an example, whatever her own feelings.”

  “I know what spring will bring!” said Karan. “My fortunes have turned. But you’re right. Despair in my own home is more palatable than the same thing on the road. No one will work harder to restore Gothryme again.”

  There was a banquet that night, the best that Gothryme could muster, though that was little. The want and the quality were disguised by plentiful wild herbs and garlic and mustard, and there was wine enough, and dancing and singing, and the kind of high spirits that come with the passing of the storm but before the drudgery of cleaning up begins. After that Llian even did a telling. It was far from being one of his best, but it was the best that the people of Gothryme had ever heard, and they even forgave him his morose looks.

  This was where Karan belonged, though it had taken her long enough to realize it. Shand had never seen her so at home with people; so happy to be the center of attention; so authoritative.

  It was well after midnight. The party was over, everyone gone to their beds. Karan wearily climbed the stairs to her own room, which was on the top floor of the keep. It had a damp-stained timber ceiling and a wooden floor with cracks between the boards. The walls were undecorated, the hangings all stolen, but long narrow windows in the curving walls looked east, south and west, so it seemed light and spacious. Her bed, a huge square box, had been freshly made, and there was a vase of fragrant winter violets by the head.

  She’d imagined her bed for a year. Mostly she’d imagined Llian sharing it, but he’d stayed downstairs in one of the guest rooms. She stripped off her clothes, tossed them into the basket, had a quick wash in freezing water and crept between the sheets, into the hollow at the center of the old mattress.

  An hour later, numb with cold and unable to sleep, she got up again. Her mind refused to turn off. Karan emptied out her pack,
putting her traveling gear away. When that was done, her hair brushed, the covers smoothed down, her restless fingers came across the blackened silver chain Llian had given her in Katazza. A reminder of happier times. It was the most precious thing she owned.

  She took the chain off and let it fall into a pool in her palm, repeating the action over and over. Poor tarnished thing. Silver showed here and there. She rubbed it with a dirty shirt, not successfully, so threw on a robe and padded downstairs to the scullery. Hunting out some silver-cleaning fluid, now redundant since all the silver was gone, she scrubbed away at the chain.

  After an hour or so it was almost as good as new, save for tarnish between the braids of silver that she could not get out, even with a brush. Karan held the chain up to the light. It was a beautiful piece of work, a lovely old thing, and as she’d thought, the weave was exactly the same pattern as the Great Tower that she had climbed in Katazza. She supposed Kandor had made it as a reminder of that marvelous structure, though why he’d hidden the chain so carefully was a mystery. There had been thousands of items in Katazza of far greater value.

  There were some scratchings on the clasp, still filled with dirt and tarnish. She worked over them with a brush, then cleaned out the grooves with a needle. It was engraved writing, she realized. The letters were revealed one by one. F I A C H R A. Not a name that meant anything to her. She searched for other markings and eventually found a beautifully engraved sigil or glyph, the maker’s hallmark. It was rather worn, clearly older than the name. She must ask Llian about them sometime. If Llian ever spoke to her again.

  They had reached Gothryme just in time, for in the night the wind came up, howling from the south, a blizzard that dropped a knee-deep cover of snow by morning, and a lot more during the day, though the calendar only said autumn. The season had turned a month earlier than last year.

  It snowed for two days, then the sun melted it all away again. No one was fooled—it was warning of a cruel winter on the way, and famine in Bannador. If winter came in earnest in the next few weeks they would very probably starve, for most of their grain and stock had been stolen or sent to the relief of the lowlands a long time ago. That generosity began to seem foolish now. Supply wagons could move down there during the winter, but up here they would be snowed in for months, travel only possible on foot. They could freeze too, with much of the manor uninhabitable and their stocks of firewood destroyed.

  They also worried about the Ghâshâd, though none had come through the valley in months. Karan learned that Yggur had a garrison only a day’s march away, at Tuldis. She did not find that comforting.

  The following days were spent in the hardest of physical toil. Everyone set to, gathering fuel and scavenging for what food they could find, though that was practically nothing after the war. The only other source was the high forest, normally untouched because it was so inaccessible that it was not worth the trouble. Up there were mushrooms and nuts, animals large and small, and fish in the lake. But foraging so far away and carrying it down the cliff was an impossibly time-consuming task. Time they did not have—the next snowfall would cover everything on the ground for a hundred days.

  Llian, however, felt much better in Gothryme. Perhaps it was the nature of the place, for Gothryme was not grand, either in size or proportion or ornament, but it had the comfortable feeling that comes with great age and continued use. Its walls were mostly unplastered stone, decorated with a few rustic woolen tapestries and hangings, most threadbare and repaired many times. They were the ones that had not been worth stealing. Its floors were bare stone too, slabs of slate or shiny schist with a scatter of rag rugs.

  Perhaps the exhausting toil had something to do with it, for Llian slaved, as did everyone, from the hour before the dawn until late in the evening, long after the early dark. And his were the dirtiest, most menial tasks, for he was good for nothing else. He could not do anything more skilled than mixing lime and sand to make mortar. So he worked, lumping stone, timber and slate, filling buckets with mortar, carrying water or cleaning out barrels.

  And perhaps it was the lack of time to think, to brood and bend over his books until the middle of the night, for there was never time for that, and even if there had been, candles were precious and he was far too tired to concentrate. No one in Gothryme cared to talk about the affairs of the world, and perhaps by tacit agreement neither would Karan or Shand. In any case Karan had no interest in outside affairs, unless they affected Gothryme itself. She steadfastly refused to discuss such things.

  Or perhaps it was the ambience of Gothryme—some characteristic of land or house that made it a poor place for receiving outside influences. Whatever the reason, neither Karan nor Llian had any bad dreams for some time.

  Llian was so much better now that Karan began to doubt what had taken place in Tullin, to feel more and more sure that Shand had been wrong. But she did not raise the issue with Llian, nor he with her. In their desperate struggle to get ready for winter Karan put that fear to the back of her mind. And though their bodies cried out for the comfort of each other he never came to her bed again, nor she to his. The barrier between them was too high to overcome.

  “We’re not going to manage it,” said Karan to Shand, halfway through stacking a wagonload of wood. Her anger had thawed somewhat, since he’d been working so hard for her. “There just aren’t enough of us.”

  Shand grunted as he heaved another length up to the top of the stack. “Talk uses energy,” he said. “Don’t waste it.”

  “Well, without a miracle we’ll all starve.”

  The mood was gloomy that night—the whole household infected by the realization that they had enough food for barely two months, even if they ate the precious seed and the few remaining breeding animals that they would need for the spring.

  That night Karan called the household together. While they assembled she went down to the cellar and rummaged among barrels that had not been tapped since her father was alive. Surprisingly, the cellar had not been discovered by the looters. She came back with a small cask on her shoulder, which she put in the middle of the table. It was thickly coated with dust, as was her coat and her hair.

  “I called you together tonight,” she said, “to put our position before you.” As she spoke Karan dusted off the cask with a rag. She tapped it expertly and drew off a jug of golden liquid. Pouring a measure into mugs the size of eggcups, she handed them round. They touched their mugs.

  Llian sipped his liquor. It was a kind of fortified wine, luscious, sweet and strong.

  “Things are very bad,” she said. “So bad that we may well starve if we stay here, and even if food is to be had I’ve no money to buy it. So whoever wishes to go and has a place to go to, leave with my blessing.”

  Beside the barrel sat a small chest. She lifted the lid. The hundred or so small coins that remained did not even cover the worn red velvet on the bottom. “Here is all the money I have. Whoever would go, take two tars from the chest for your traveling expenses. I am deeply ashamed but I can offer you no more. If we survive the winter the tax collector will ruin us in the spring. Come up, whoever of you would go to a better place, and take what is your due.”

  She stood back, expressionless, doing nothing to influence them. They must do what was best for themselves. They filed up one by one, young men and women, weatherbeaten laborers and hunters, ancients who should have been in their rocking-chairs for a decade. Even the cook’s boy, Benie, came forward.

  Llian sat watching Karan. Despite his own feelings, he could not help pitying her. It seemed that she was going to lose everyone and everything. Then to Llian’s amazement, Rachis came up too, slipped his hand in the chest and all the coins chimed. Had Llian a handful of grints to his name he would have flung them in, in spite of their woes. But he had nothing left.

  Yes, he did! The silver knob that he had unscrewed from Kandor’s bedpost in Katazza, against the time when his wallet must be empty, still lay at the bottom of his bag. It must be the weight of
a hundred tars, at least. He ran out.

  Karan watched him go, dismayed. Every single person came up, touched their glass to hers and went to the chest. The coins tinkled like bells heard from far away. Llian reappeared with his hands in his pockets and followed the procession.

  Just as he put his hand in Llian looked up and caught Karan’s eye. She had gone white, absolutely stricken. Despite their troubles, she had not thought that Llian would abandon her too.

  The whole room held its collective breath, then Shand lifted the chest and shook it, making the coins cry out in a great voice. He laughed, a rich cheerful roar. Karan looked offended.

  “Your people deserve you, and you them,” he said, tilting the chest so that they could all see inside. The bottom was heaped with coin, copper and silver. In one corner was a big familiar silver knob, here and there a flash of precious gold, and mischievous Benie’s shiny copper grint sat proudly on top of the pile. No fortune, but enough to get them through the winter, if there was food to be had. Karan burst into tears, ran down and embraced them every one. While her back was turned Shand slipped his own contribution into the chest.

  36

  * * *

  A LIGHT IN

  CARCHARON

  Karan woke well before dawn to a persistent banging, as if one of the shutters had come loose. Better fix it before it smashed itself to firewood in the wind. Rousing slowly from too little sleep she realized that there was no wind! It was the front door. Someone had been pounding on it for ages. Who could it be at this hour? Every muscle ached from the previous day’s toil, but it was time she was up and doing. She ran down the stone stair, wrapping her robe around her. Perhaps the war had started again. Perhaps it was Yggur’s tax collectors come early.

  At the door she found another small miracle. The threshold was crowded with laughing people. It was Malien and eleven of her Aachim.