The Dragonbone Chair

by Tad Williams

  Those were the three Rimmersgard kings on the left of the throne. Wasn’t Fingil the one Morgenes spoke of, the leader of the dreadful army? The one who killed the Sithi? So, on the right side of the yellowed bones the rest must be…

  The Heron King Sulis, called Apostate

  Fled Nabban, but in Hayholt he met his fate

  The Hernystir Holly King, old Tethtain

  Came in at the gate, but not out again

  Last, Eahlstan Fisher King, in lore most high

  The dragon he woke, and in Hayholt he died…

  Hah! Simon stared at the Heron King’s sad, pinched face and gloated. My memory is better than most people think—better than that of most mooncalves! Of course, now there was at last a seventh king in the Hayholt—old Prester John. Simon wondered if someone would add King John to the song someday.

  The sixth statue, closest to the throne’s right arm, was Simon’s favorite: the only native Erkynlander who had ever sat on the Hayholt’s great seat. He moved closer to look into the deep-cut eyes of Saint Eahlstan—called Eahlstan Fiskerne because he came from the fisher-people of the Gleniwent, called The Martyr because he too had been slain by the fire-drake Shurakai, the creature destroyed at last by Prester John.

  Unlike the Burned King on the throne’s other side, the Fisher King’s face was not carved in a twist of fear and doubt: rather the sculptor had brought radiant faith into the stony features, had given opaque eyes the illusion of seeing faraway things. The long-dead artisan had made Eahlstan humble and reverent, but had also made him bold. In his secret thoughts, Simon often imagined that his own fisherman father might have looked like this.

  Staring, Simon felt a sudden coldness on his hand. He was touching the Chair’s bone armrest! A scullion touching the throne! He snatched his fingers away—wondering all the while how even the dead substance of such a fiery beast could feel so chill—and stumbled back a step.

  It seemed for a heart-seizing moment that the statues had begun to lean toward him, shadows stretching on the tapestried wall, and he skittered backward. When nothing resembling actual movement followed, he straightened himself with what dignity he could, bowed to Kings and Chair, and backed across the stone floor. Searching with his hand—calmly, calmly, he thought to himself, don’t be a frightened fool—he at last found the door into the standing room, his original destination. With a cautious look back at the reassuringly immobile tableau, he slipped through.

  Behind the standing room’s heavy tapestry, thick red velvet embroidered with festival scenes, a staircase inside the wall mounted to a privy at the top of the throne room’s southern gallery. Chiding himself for his nervousness of moments before, he climbed it. At the top it was a simple enough matter to squeeze out of the privy’s long window-slit and onto the wall that ran beneath. The trick, however, was a little more difficult now than when he had been here last in Septander: the stones were snow-slippery, and there was a determined breeze. Fortunately the wall top was wide; Simon negotiated it carefully.

  Now came the pan that he liked best. The corner of this wall came out within only five or six feet of the broad lee of Green Angel Tower’s fourth-floor turret. Pausing, he could almost hear the bray of trumpets, the clash of knights battling on the decks below him as he prepared to leap through the fierce wind from mast to burning mast…

  Whether his foot slipped a little as he jumped, or his attention was distracted by the imaginary sea-skirmish below, Simon landed badly on the edge of the turret. He caught his knee a tremendous crack on the stone, nearly sliding back and off, which would have dropped him two long fathoms onto the low wall at the tower’s base or into the moat. The sudden realization of his peril spurred his heart into a terrified gallop. Instead he managed to slide down into the space between the turret’s upstanding merlons, crawling forward to slip down onto the floor of long boards.

  A light snow sifted down as he sat, feeling horribly foolish, and hugged his throbbing knee. It hurt like sin, betrayal, and treachery; if he had not been conscious of how childish he must already seem, he would have cried.

  At last he climbed to his feet and limped into the tower. One piece of luck, anyway: no one had heard his painful landing. His disgrace was his alone. He felt in his pocket—the bread and cheese were rather nastily flattened, but still eatable. That, too, was a small solace.

  Climbing stairs on his aching knee was an effort, but it was no good getting into Green Angel Tower, tallest building in Erkynland—probably in all of Osten Ard—and then not getting up any higher than the Hayholt’s main walls.

  The tower staircase was low and narrow, the steps made of a clean, smooth white stone unlike any other in the castle, slippery to the touch but sure beneath one’s feet. The castle folk said that this tower was the only part of the original Sithi stronghold that remained unchanged. Doctor Morgenes had once told Simon that this was untrue. Whether that meant that the tower had indeed been changed, or simply that other unsullied remnants of old Asu’a still remained, the doctor—in his maddening style—would not say.

  Having climbed for several minutes, Simon could see from the windows that he was already higher than Hjeldin’s Tower. The somewhat sinister domed column where the Mad King had long ago met his death gazed up at Green Angel across the expanse of the throne room roof, as a jealous dwarf might stare at his prince when no one was looking.

  The stone facing on the inside of the stairwell was different here: a soft fawn color, traced across with minute, puzzling designs in sky blue. Turning his attention away from Hjeldin’s Tower, he stopped for a moment where the light of a high window shone on the wall, but when he tried to follow the course of one of the delicate blue scrolls it made his head dizzy and he gave up.

  At last, when it seemed he had been climbing” painfully for hours, the staircase opened out onto the shiny white floor of the bell tower, this, too, constructed from the unusual stair-stone. Although the tower stretched up another near-hundred cubits, tapering to the Angel herself perched on the cloudy horizon, the staircase ended here where the great bronze bells hung row by row from the vaulted rafters like solemn green fruit. The bell chamber itself was open on all sides to the cold air, so that when Green Angel’s chimes sang from its high-arched windows the whole countryside might hear.

  Simon stood with his back against one of the six pillars of dark, smooth, rock-solid wood that spanned floor to ceiling. As he chewed his crust of bread he looked out across the western vista, where the Kynslagh’s waters rolled eternally against the Hayholt’s massive sea wall. Although the day was dark, and snowflakes danced crazily before him, Simon was startled by the clarity with which the world below rose to his eyes. Many small boats rode the Kynslagh’s swells, lake men in black cloaks bent stolidly over their oars. Beyond, he thought he could dimly make out the place where the river Gleniwent issued out of the lake at the start of its long journey to the ocean, a winding course of half a hundred miles, past dock-towns and farms. Out of Gleniwent, in the arms of the sea herself, Warinsten island watched the river mouth; beyond Warinsten to the west lay nothing but uncountable, uncharged leagues of ocean.

  He tested his sore knee and decided for the moment against sitting down, which would necessitate rising again. He pulled his hat down over his ears, which were reddening and stinging in the wind, and started in on a piece of crumbling cheese. To his right, but far past the limits of his vision, were the meadows and jutting hills of Ach Samrath, the outermost marches of the kingdom of Hernystir, and the site of the terrible battle Morgenes had described. On his left hand, across the broad Kynslagh, rolled the Thrithings—grasslands seemingly without end. Eventually, of course, they did end; beyond lay Nabban, Firranos Bay and its islands, and the marshy Wran country…all places Simon had never seen and most likely never would.

  Growing bored at last with the unchanging Kynslagh and imaginings of the unseeable South, he limped to the other side of the bell chamber. Seen from the center of the room, where no details of the land below we
re visible, the swirling, featureless cloud-darkness was a gray hole into nowhere, and the tower was momentarily a ghostship adrift on a foggy, empty sea. Wind howled and sang around the open window frames; the bells hummed faintly, as if the storm had driven small, frightened spirits into their bronze skins.

  Simon reached the low sill and leaned out to look at the mad jumble of the Hayholt’s roofs below him. At first the wind tugged as though it wished to catch him up and toss him, like a kitten sporting with a dead leaf. He tightened his grip on the wet stone, and soon the wind eased. He smiled: from this vantage point the Hayholt’s magnificent hodgepodge of roofs—each a different height and style, each with its forest of chimney pots, rooftrees, and domes—looked like a yard full of odd, square animals. They sprawled half-atop one another, struggling for space like hogs at their feed.

  Shorter only than the two towers, the dome of the castle chapel dominated the Inner Bailey, colorful windows draped in sleet. The keep’s other buildings, the residences, dining hall, throne room and chancelry, were each one of them stacked and squeezed with additions, mute evidence of the castle’s diverse tenantry. The two outer baileys and the massive curtain wall, descending concentrically down the hill, were similarly cluttered. The Hayholt itself had never expanded past the outwall; the people crowding in built upward, or divided what they already had into smaller and smaller portions.

  Beyond the keep the town of Erchester stretched out in street after careless street of low houses, wrapped in a mantle of white drifts; only the cathedral reared up from their midst, itself dwarfed by the Hayholt and by Simon in his sky-tower. Here and there a feather of smoke drifted upward to shred in the wind.

  Past the city walls Simon could make out the dim, snowsmoothed outlines of the lich-yard—the old pagan cemetery, a place of ill repute. The downs beyond it ran almost to the forest’s edge; above their humble congregation the tall hill called Thisterborg stood as dramatically as the cathedral in low-roofed Erchester. Simon could not see them, but he knew that Thisterborg was crowned with a ring of wind-polished rock pillars that the villagers called the Anger Stones.

  And beyond Erchester, past the lich-yard and downs and stonecapped Thisterborg, lay the Forest. Aldheorte was its name—Oldheart—and it stretched outward like the sea, vast, dark, and unknowable. Men lived on its fringes, even maintained a few roads along its outer edges, but very few ventured inward beyond its skirts. It was a great, shadowy country in the middle of Osten Ard; it sent no embassies, and received few visitors. Placed against its eminence even the huge Circoille, the Combwood of Hernystir in the west, was a mere copse. There was only one Forest.

  The sea to the West, the Forest to the East; the North and its iron men, and the land of shattered empires in the South…staring out across the face of Osten Ard, Simon forgot his knee for a while. Indeed, for a time Simon himself was king of all the known world.

  When the shrouded winter sun had passed the top of the sky, he moved at last to leave. Straightening his leg forced out a gasp of pain: the knee had stiffened in the long hour he had stood at the sill. It was obvious that he would not be able to take his strenuous secret route down from the bell tower. He would have to chance his luck against Barnabas and Father Dreosan.

  The long stairway was a misery, but the view from the tower window had pushed away his other regrets; he did not feel nearly as sorry for himself as he otherwise might have. The desire to see more of the world glowed within him like a low-banked fire, warming him to his fingertips. He would ask Morgenes to tell him more of Nabban and the Southern Islands, and of the Six Kings.

  At the fourth level, where he had made his original entry, he heard a sound: someone moving quickly down the stairwell below him. For a moment he stood still, wondering if he had been discovered—it was not strictly forbidden to be in the tower, but he had no good reason for his presence; the sexton would presume guilt. It was strange, though—the footfalls were receding. Certainly Barnabas or anyone else would not hesitate to come up and get him, to lead him down by the much-handled scruff of his neck. Simon continued down the winding stairs; cautiously at first; then, despite his throbbing knee, faster and faster as his curiosity got the better of him.

  The staircase ended at last in the huge entry hall of the tower. The hall was dimly lit, its walls cloaked in shadows and faded tapestries of subjects probably religious but long since obscured. He paused at the last step, still concealed in the darkness of the stairwell. There was no sound of footsteps—or of anything else. He walked as silently as possible across the flagged floor, every accidental bootscrape hissing up toward the oak-ribbed ceiling. The hall’s main door was closed; the only illumination streamed in from windows above the lintel.

  How could whoever had been on the stairs have opened and closed the giant door without his knowing? He had easily heard the light footfalls, and had himself been worrying about the squeak that the large hinges would make. He turned to again scan the portalhall.

  There. From beneath the fringed trim of the stained silver tapestry hung by the stairs, two small, rounded shapes protruded—shoes. As he looked carefully now, he could see how folds of the old hanging bellied out where someone hid behind it.

  Balancing on one foot like a heron, he quietly pulled off first one boot, then the other. Who could it be? Perhaps fat Jeremias had followed him here to play a trick? Well, if so, Simon would soon show him.

  Bare feet nearly silent on the stones, he crept across the hall until he stood immediately before the suspicious bump. For a moment, reaching a hand out to the edge of the hanging, he remembered the strange thing Brother Cadrach had said about curtains while they had watched the puppet show. He hesitated, then felt ashamed of his own timidity, and swept the tapestry aside.

  Instead of flying open to reveal the spy, the massive hanging tore free of its stays and billowed down like a monstrous, stiffened blanket. Simon had only a momentary glimpse of a small, startled face before the weight of the tapestry knocked him to the ground. As he lay cursing and struggling, badly tangled, a brown-clad figure shot by.

  Simon could hear whoever-it-was struggling with the heavy door as he himself wrestled the dusty, enveloping fabric. At last he pulled free and rolled to his feet, moving across the room in a bound to catch the small figure before it slipped through the partially opened door. He got a firm handhold on a rough jerkin. The spy was captured, half-in and half-out.

  Simon was angry now, mostly from embarrassment. “Who are you?” he snarled. “You spier-on-people!” His captive said nothing, but only struggled harder. Whoever he was, he was not big enough to loosen Simon’s restraining grasp.

  Fighting to pull the resisting figure back through the doorway—no easy task—Simon was startled to recognize the sand-colored broadcloth he was gripping. This must be the young man who had been spying at the door of the chapel! Simon gave a fierce pull and got the youth’s head and shoulder back through the doorframe so he could look at him.

  The prisoner was small, and his features were fine, almost sharp: there was something a shade foxlike in nose and chin, but not unpleasantly so. His hair was as dark as a crow’s wing. For a moment Simon thought he might be a Sitha-man, because of his height—he tried to remember Shem’s stories about not letting go of a Pookah’s foot, and so winning a cauldron of gold—but before he could spend any of his dream-treasure he saw the fear-sweat and reddened cheeks and decided that this was no supernatural creature.

  “What is your name, you?” he demanded. The captured youth tried to pull free again, but was obviously tiring. After a moment he stopped his struggling altogether. “Your name?” Simon prompted, this time in a softer tone.

  “Malachias.” The youth turned away panting.

  “Well, Malachias, why are you following me?” He gave a little shake to the youth’s shoulder, to remind him just who had captured whom.

  The youth turned and stared sullenly. His eyes were quite dark.

  “I wasn’t spying on you!” he said vehemently.<
br />
  As the boy averted his face once more, Simon was struck by a feeling that he had seen something familiar in this Malachias’ face, something he should recognize.

  “Who are you then, sirrah?” Simon asked, and reached out to turn the boy’s chin toward him. “Do you work in the stables—work somewhere here in the Hayholt?”

  Before he could bring the face around to look at it once more, Malachias suddenly put both hands in the middle of Simon’s chest and gave a surprisingly hard push. He lost his grip on the youth’s jerkin and staggered backward, then fell on his seat. Before he could even attempt to rise, Malachias had whisked through the doorway, pulling it shut behind him with a loud, reverberating squeal of bronze hinges.

  Simon was still sitting on the stone floor—sore knee, sore rump, and mortally wounded dignity clamoring for attention—when the sexton Barnabas came in out of the Chancelry hall to investigate the noise. He stopped as if stunned in the doorway, looking from Simon bootless on the floor to the torn and crumpled tapestry in front of the stairwell, then turned his stare back to Simon. Barnabas said not a word, but a vein began to drumbeat high on each temple, and his brow beetled downward until his eyes were the merest slits.

  Simon, routed and massacred, could only sit and shake his head, like a drunkard who had tripped over his own jug and landed upon the Lord Mayor’s cat.

  6

  The Cairn on the Cliffs

  Simon’s punishment for his most recent crime was suspension from his new apprenticeship and confinement to the servants’ quarters.

  For days he strode the boundaries of his prison, from the scullery to the linens room and back again, restless as a hooded kestrel.

  I have done this to myself, he sometimes thought. I’m just as stupid as the Dragon says I am.

  Why do they all make such trouble for me? he fumed at other moments. Anyone would think I was a wild animal that can’t be trusted.