Legends II (Shadows, Gods, and Demons)

by Robert Silverberg (Ed. )

  Dunk groped at his face, pulled the cloth away. Above him torchlight played against a high ceiling. Ravens were walking on the rafters overhead, peering down with small black eyes andquork ing at him.I am not blind, at least. He was in a maester’s tower. The walls were lined with racks of herbs and potions in earthen jars and vessels of green glass. A long trestle table nearby was covered with parchments, books, and queer bronze instruments, all spattered with droppings from the ravens in the rafters. He could hear them muttering at one another.

  He tried to sit. It proved a bad mistake. His head swam, and his left leg screamed in agony when he put the slightest weight upon it. His ankle was wrapped in linen, he saw, and there were linen strips around his chest and shoulders, too.

  “Be still.” A face appeared above him, young and pinched, with dark brown eyes on either side of a hooked nose. Dunk knew that face. The man who owned it was all in gray, with a chain collar hanging loose about his neck, a maester’s chain of many metals. Dunk grabbed him by the wrist. “Where? . . .”

  “Coldmoat,” said the maester. “You were too badly injured to return to Standfast, so Lady Rohanne commanded us to bring you here. Drink this.” He raised a cup of . . . something . . . to Dunk’s lips. The potion had a bitter taste, like vinegar, but at least it washed away the taste of blood.

  Dunk made himself drink it all. Afterward he flexed the fingers of his sword hand, and then the other.At least my hands still work, and my arms. “What . . . what did I hurt?”

  “What not?” The maester snorted. “A broken ankle, a sprained knee, a broken collarbone, bruising . . . your upper torso is largely green and yellow and your right arm is a purply black. I thought your skull was cracked as well, but it appears not. There is that gash in your face, ser. You will have a scar, I fear. Oh, and you had drowned by the time we pulled you from the water.”

  “Drowned?” said Dunk.

  “I never suspected that one man could swallow so much water, not even a man as large as you, ser. Count yourself fortunate that I am ironborn. The priests of the Drowned God know how to drown a man and bring him back, and I have made a study of their beliefs and customs.”

  I drowned.Dunk tried to sit again, but the strength was not in him.I drowned in water that did not even come up to my neck. He laughed, then groaned in pain. “Ser Lucas?”

  “Dead. Did you doubt it?”

  No.Dunk doubted many things, but not that. He remembered how the strength had gone out of the Longinch’s limbs, all at once. “Egg,” he got out. “I want Egg.”

  “Hunger is a good sign,” the maester said, “but it is sleep you need just now, not food.”

  Dunk shook his head, and regretted it at once. “Egg is my squire . . .”

  “Is he? A brave lad, and stronger than he looks. He was the one to pull you from the stream. He helped us get that armor off you, too, and rode with you in the wayn when we brought you here. He would not sleep himself, but sat by your side with your sword across his lap, in case someone tried to do you harm. He even suspectedme , and insisted that I taste anything I meant to feed you. A queer child, but devoted.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Ser Eustace asked the boy to attend him at the wedding feast. There was no one else on his side. It would have been discourteous for him to refuse.”

  “Wedding feast?” Dunk did not understand.

  “You would not know, of course. Coldmoat and Standfast were reconciled after your battle. Lady Rohanne begged leave of old Ser Eustace to cross his land and visit Addam’s grave, and he granted her that right. She knelt before the blackberries and began to weep, and he was so moved that he went to comfort her. They spent the whole night talking of young Addam and my lady’s noble father. Lord Wyman and Ser Eustace were fast friends, until the Blackfyre Rebellion. His lordship and my lady were wed this morning, by our good Septon Sefton. Eustace Osgrey is the lord of Coldmoat, and his chequy lion flies beside the Webber spider on every tower and wall.”

  Dunk’s world was spinning slowly all around him.That potion. He’s put me back to sleep. He closed his eyes, and let all the pain drain out of him. He could hear the ravensquork ing and screaming at each other, and the sound of his own breath, and something else as well . . . a softer sound, steady, heavy, somehow soothing. “What’s that?” he murmured sleepily. “That sound? . . .”

  “That?” The maester listened. “That’s just rain.”

  He did not see her till the day they took their leave.

  “This is folly, ser,” Septon Sefton complained, as Dunk limped heavily across the yard, swinging his splinted foot and leaning on a crutch. “Maester Cerrick says you are not half healed as yet, and this rain . . . you’re like to catch a chill, if you do not drown again. At least wait for the rain to stop.”

  “That may be years.” Dunk was grateful to the fat septon, who had visited him near every day . . . to pray for him, ostensibly, though more time seemed to be taken up with tales and gossip. He would miss his loose and lively tongue and cheerful company, but that changed nothing. “I need to go.”

  The rain was lashing down around them, a thousand cold gray whips upon his back. His cloak was already sodden. It was the white wool cloak Ser Eustace had given him, with the green-and-gold-checkered border. The old knight had pressed it on him once again, as a parting gift. “For your courage and leal service, ser,” he said. The brooch that pinned the cloak at his shoulder was a gift as well; an ivory spider brooch with silver legs. Clusters of crushed garnets made spots upon its back.

  “I hope this is not some mad quest to hunt down Bennis,” Septon Sefton said. “You are so bruised and battered that I would fear for you, if that one found you in such a state.”

  Bennis,Dunk thought bitterly,bloody Bennis . While Dunk had been making his stand at the stream, Bennis had tied up Sam Stoops and his wife, ransacked Standfast from top to bottom, and made off with every item of value he could find, from candles, clothes, and weaponry to Osgrey’s old silver cup and a small cache of coin the old man had hidden in his solar behind a mildewed tapestry. One day Dunk hoped to meet Ser Bennis of the Brown Shield again, and when he did . . . “Bennis will keep.”

  “Where will you go?” The septon was panting heavily. Even with Dunk on a crutch, he was too fat to match his pace.

  “Fair Isle. Harrenhal. The Trident. There are hedges everywhere.” He shrugged. “I’ve always wanted to see the Wall.”

  “The Wall?” The septon jerked to a stop. “I despair of you, Ser Duncan!” he shouted, standing in the mud with outspread hands as the rain came down around him. “Pray, ser, pray for the Crone to light your way!” Dunk kept walking.

  She was waiting for him inside the stables, standing by the yellow bales of hay in a gown as green as summer. “Ser Duncan,” she said when he came pushing through the door. Her red braid hung down in front, the end of it brushing against her thighs. “It is good to see you on your feet.”

  You never saw me on my back,he thought. “M’lady. What brings you to the stables. It’s a wet day for a ride.”

  “I might say the same to you.”

  “Egg told you?”I owe him another clout in the ear.

  “Be glad he did, or I would have sent men after you to drag you back. It was cruel of you to try and steal away without so much as a farewell.”

  She had never come to see him while he was in Maester Cerrick’s care, not once. “That green becomes you well, m’lady,” he said. “It brings out the color of your eyes.” He shifted his weight awkwardly on the crutch. “I’m here for my horse.”

  “You do not need to go. There is a place for you here, when you’re recovered. Captain of my guards. And Egg can join my other squires. No one need ever know who he is.”

  “Thank you, m’lady, but no.” Thunder was in a stall a dozen places down. Dunk hobbled toward him.

  “Please reconsider, ser. These are perilous times, even for dragons and their friends. Stay until you’ve healed.” She walked along beside him. “It w
ould please Lord Eustace, too. He is very fond of you.”

  “Very fond,” Dunk agreed. “If his daughter weren’t dead, he’d want me to marry her. Then you could be my lady mother. I never had a mother, much less alady mother.”

  For half a heartbeat Lady Rohanne looked as though she was going to slap him again.Maybe she’ll just kick my crutch away.

  “You are angry with me, ser,” she said instead. “You must let me make amends.”

  “Well,” he said, “you could help me saddle Thunder.”

  “I had something else in mind.” She reached out her hand for his, a freckled hand, her fingers strong and slender.I’ll bet she’s freckled all over. “How well do you know horses?”

  “I ride one.”

  “An old destrier bred for battle, slow-footed and ill-tempered. Not a horse to ride from place to place.”

  “If I need to get from place to place, it’s him or these.” Dunk pointed at his feet.

  “You have large feet,” she observed. “Large hands as well. I think you must be large all over. Too large for most palfreys. They’d look like ponies with you perched upon their backs. Still, a swifter mount would serve you well. A big courser, with some Dornish sand steed for endurance.” She pointed to the stall across from Thunder’s. “A horse like her.”

  She was a blood bay with a bright eye and a long fiery mane. Lady Rohanne took a carrot from her sleeves and stroked her head as she took it. “The carrot, not the fingers,” she told the horse, before she turned again to Dunk. “I call her Flame, but you may name her as you please. Call her Amends, if you like.”

  For a moment he was speechless. He leaned on the crutch and looked at the blood bay with new eyes. She was magnificent. A better mount than any the old man had ever owned. You had only to look at those long, clean limbs to see how swift she’d be.

  “I bred her for beauty, and for speed.”

  He turned back to Thunder. “I cannot take her.”

  “Why not?”

  “She is too good a horse for me. Just look at her.”

  A flush crept up Rohanne’s face. She clutched her braid, twisting it between her fingers. “I had to marry, you know that. My father’s will . . . oh, don’t be such a fool.”

  “What else should I be? I’m thick as a castle wall and bastard born as well.”

  “Take the horse. I refuse to let you go without something to remember me by.”

  “I will remember you, m’lady. Have no fear of that.”

  “Take her!”

  Dunk grabbed her braid and pulled her face to his. It was awkward with the crutch and the difference in their heights. He almost fell before he got his lips on hers. He kissed her hard. One of her hands went around his neck, and one around his back. He learned more about kissing in a moment than he had ever known from watching. But when they finally broke apart, he drew his dagger. “I know what I want to remember you by, m’lady.”

  Egg was waiting for him at the gatehouse, mounted on a handsome new sorrel palfrey and holding Maester’s lead. When Dunk trotted up to them on Thunder, the boy looked surprised. “She said she wanted to give you a new horse, ser.”

  “Even highborn ladies don’t get all they want,” Dunk said, as they rode out across the drawbridge. “It wasn’t a horse I wanted.” The moat was so high it was threatening to overflow its banks. “I took something else to remember her by instead. A lock of that red hair.” He reached under his cloak, brought out the braid, and smiled.

  In the iron cage at the crossroads, the corpses still embraced. They looked lonely, forlorn. Even the flies had abandoned them, and the crows as well. Only some scraps of skin and hair remained upon the dead men’s bones.

  Dunk halted, frowning. His ankle was hurting from the ride, but it made no matter. Pain was as much a part of knighthood as were swords and shields. “Which way is south?” he asked Egg. It was hard to know, when the world was all rain and mud and the sky was gray as a granite wall.

  “That’s south, ser.” Egg pointed. “That’s north.”

  “Summerhall is south. Your father.”

  “The Wall is north.”

  Dunk looked at him. “That’s a long way to ride.”

  “I have a new horse, ser.”

  “So you do.” Dunk had to smile. “And why would you want to see the Wall?”

  “Well,” said Egg. “I hear it’s tall.”

  THE TALES OF

  ALVINMAKER

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  THE TALES OF ALVIN MAKER:

  BOOKONE: SEVENTHSON(1987)

  BOOKTWO: REDPROPHET(1988)

  BOOKTHREE: PRENTICEALVIN(1989)

  BOOKFOUR: ALVINJOURNEYMAN(1996)

  BOOKFIVE: HEARTFIRE(1998)

  BOOKSIX: THECRYSTALCITY(2003)

  In theTales of Alvin Maker series, an alternate-history view of an America that never was, Orson Scott Card postulated what the world might have been like if the Revolutionary War had never happened, and if folk magic actually worked.

  America is divided into several provinces, with the Spanish and French still having a strong presence in the New World. The emerging scientific revolution in Europe has led many people with “talent,” that is, magical ability, to emigrate to North America, bringing their prevailing magic with them. The books chronicle the life of Alvin, the seventh son of a seventh son—a fact that marks him right away as a person of great power. It is Alvin’s ultimate destiny to become a Maker, an adept being of a kind that has not existed for a thousand years. However, there exists an Unmaker for every Maker—a being of great supernatural evil who is Alvin’s adversary, and strives to use Alvin’s brother Calvin against him.

  During the course of his adventures, Alvin explores the world around him and encounters such problems as slavery and the continued enmity between the settlers and the Native Americans who control the western half of the continent. The series appears to be heading toward an ultimate confrontation between Alvin and the Unmaker, with the fate of the entire continent, perhaps even the world, hinging on the outcome.

  THEYAZOO QUEEN

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  Alvin watched as Captain Howard welcomed aboard another group of passengers, a prosperous family with five children and three slaves.

  “It’s the Nile River of America,” said the captain. “But Cleopatra herself never sailed in such splendor as you folks is going to experience on theYazoo Queen .”

  Splendor for the family, thought Alvin. Not likely to be much splendor for the slaves—though, being house servants, they’d fare better than the two dozen runaways chained together in the blazing sun at dockside all afternoon.

  Alvin had been keeping an eye on them since he and Arthur Stuart got here to the Carthage City riverport at eleven. Arthur Stuart was all for exploring, and Alvin let him go. The city that billed itself as the Phoenicia of the West had plenty of sights for a boy Arthur’s age, even a half-black boy. Since it was on the north shore of the Hio, there’d be suspicious eyes on him for a runaway. But there was plenty of free blacks in Carthage City, and Arthur Stuart was no fool. He’d keep an eye out.

  There was plenty of slaves in Carthage, too. That was the law, that a black slave from the South remained a slave even in a free state. And the greatest shame of all was those chained-up runaways who got themselves all the way across the Hio to freedom, only to be picked up by Finders and dragged back in chains to the whips and other horrors of bondage. Angry owners who’d make an example of them. No wonder there was so many who killed theirselves, or tried to.

  Alvin saw wounds on more than a few in this chained-up group of twenty-five, though many of the wounds could have been made by the slave’s own hand. Finders weren’t much for injuring the property they were getting paid to bring on home. No, those wounds on wrists and bellies were likely a vote for freedom before life itself.

  What Alvin was watching for was to know whether the runaways were going to be loaded on this boat or another. Most often runaways were ferried across the river a
nd made to walk home over land—there was too many stories of slaves jumping overboard and sinking to the bottom with their chains on to make Finders keen on river transportation.

  But now and then Alvin had caught a whiff of talking from the slaves—not much, since it could get them a bit of lash, and not loud enough for him to make out the words, but the music of the language didn’t sound like English, not northern English, not southern English, not slave English. It wasn’t likely to be any African language. With the British waging full-out war on the slave trade, there weren’t many new slaves making it across the Atlantic these days.

  So it might be Spanish they were talking, or French. Either way, they’d most likely be bound for Nueva Barcelona, or New Orleans, as the French still called it.

  Which raised some questions in Alvin’s mind. Mostly this one: How could a bunch of Barcelona runaways get themselves to the state of Hio? That would have been a long trek on foot, especially if they didn’t speak English. Alvin’s wife, Peggy, grew up in an Abolitionist home, with her papa, Horace Guester, smuggling runaways across river. Alvin knew something about how good the Underground Railway was. It had fingers reaching all the way down into the new duchies of Mizzippy and Alabam, but Alvin never heard of any Spanish- or French-speaking slaves taking that long dark road to freedom.

  “I’m hungry again,” said Arthur Stuart.

  Alvin turned to see the boy—no, the young man, he was getting so tall and his voice so low—standing behind him, hands in his pockets, looking at theYazoo Queen .

  “I’m a-thinking,” said Alvin, “as how instead of just looking at this boat, we ought to get on it and ride a spell.”

  “How far?” asked Arthur Stuart.

  “You asking cause you’re hoping it’s a long way or a short one?”

  “This one goes clear to Barcy.”

  “It does if the fog on the Mizzippy lets it,” said Alvin.

  Arthur Stuart made a goofy face at him. “Oh, that’s right, cause around you that fog’s just bound to close right in.”