by Tad Williams
The thought make her feel faint and weak; the odoriferous grease did not help. She leaned against the wall of the bell-ringer’s closet and was grateful for its narrow confines. Between the stacks of rope, the bell hooks and grease pots and brick walls standing close at either shoulder, she could not topple over even if she tried.
She had not meant to spy, of course—not really. She had heard the voices as she was examining the woefully dirty stairs at Green Angel Tower’s third floor. She had stepped quietly out of the spiraling passageway into a curtained alcove so as not to seem to be listening to the king’s business, for she had recognized Elias’ voice almost immediately. The king had climbed past, speaking as though to the grinning monk Hengfisk who accompanied him everywhere, but his words had seemed like babbling nonsense to Rachel. “Whispers from Nakkiga,” he had said, and “songs of the upper air.” He had spoken of “listening for the cry of the witnesses,” and “the day of the hilltop bargain coming soon,” and of things even less understandable.
The pop-eyed monk followed at the king’s bootheels, as he always did these days. The mad words of Elias washed over him, but the monk only nodded ceaselessly as he scrambled along behind—the king’s grinning shadow.
Fascinated and excited in a way she had not felt for some time, Rachel had found herself following through the shadows a few ells behind the pair as they climbed what seemed a thousand steps up the tower’s long stairway. The king’s litany of incomprehensibles had continued until at last he and the monk disappeared into the bell chamber. Feeling her age and the throbbing of her infirm back, she had remained on the floor below. Leaning against the oddly-tiled stone walls, fighting for breath, she had wondered again at her own boldness. An open workroom lay before her. A great pulley had been spread in pieces on top of a sawdust-mantled block; a sledge lay on the floor nearby, as though its owner had disappeared in midswing. There was only the main room and a curtained alcove beside the stairwell: thus, when the monk suddenly came pattering back down the steps, there had truly been no choice but to bolt for the alcove.
At the far end of the niche she had discovered a wooden ladder leading up into darkness. Knowing she was caught between the king above and whoever his cupbearer might bring from below, she had seen no other choice but to climb upward in search of a more secure hiding place: anyone walking too close to the alcove might brush the curtain aside and reveal her, delivering Rachel up to humiliation or worse.
Worse. The thought of the heads rotting like black fruit atop Nearulagh gate spurred her old bones up the ladder, which turned out to lead straight to the bell-ringer’s closet.
So it had not really been her fault, had it? She had not truly meant to spy—she had been virtually forced to listen to Elias’ confusing conversation with the Earl of Utanyeat. Surely good Saint Rhiap would understand, she told herself, and would intercede on Rachel’s behalf when it came time to read from the Great Scroll in Heaven’s anteroom.
She peered out through the door-crack again. The king had moved to another window—this one facing north, into the churning black heart of the approaching storm—but otherwise seemed no nearer to leaving. Rachel was beginning to feel panicky. People used to say that Elias spent many sleepless nights at work with Pryrates in Hjeldin’s Tower. Was it the king’s particular madness to walk around in towers until the break of dawn? It was only afternoon now. Rachel felt another bout of dizziness. Was she to be trapped in here forever?
Her eyes, wildly darting, lit upon something carved on the inside of the bolted door and widened in surprise.
Somebody had scratched the name Miriamele into the wood. The letters were cut deeply, as though whoever had done it had been trapped like Rachel, fidgeting away the time. But who would be here in the first place that might do such a thing?
For a moment she thought of Simon, remembering how the boy would climb like an ape and get into trouble that others could not even find. He had loved Green Angel Tower—wasn’t it just a bit before King John died that Simon had knocked over Barnabas the sexton downstairs? Rachel smiled faintly. The boy had been a very devil.
Thinking of Simon, she abruptly remembered what the chandler’s boy Jeremias had said. The smile dissolved from her face. Pryrates. Pryrates had killed her boy. When she thought of the alchemist, Rachel felt a hatred that burned and bubbled like quicklime, a hatred quite unlike anything she had ever felt in her life.
Rachel shook her head, dizzied. It was horrifying to think about Pryrates. What Jeremias told her about the hairless priest gave her ideas, black thoughts she had not known she was capable of thinking.
Frightened by the power of her feelings, she forced her attention back to the wall carving.
Squinting at the careful letters, Rachel decided that, whatever other mischief Simon had gotten into, this carving was not his doing. It was far too neat. Even with Morgenes’ instruction, Simon’s writing had wandered across a page like a drunken beetle. These letters were made by someone educated. But who would carve the princess’ name in such an out of the way place? Barnabas the sexton used this closet, no doubt, but the idea of that sour, juiceless, leathery old lizard carving Miriamele’s name laboriously into the door beggared even Rachel’s imagination, and Rachel could imagine men committing virtually any evil or stupidity if freed from the proper influence of women. Even so, sexton Barnabas as a pining lover was too much to conceive.
Her thoughts were wandering, Rachel chided herself angrily. Was she indeed so old and fearful that she must distract herself at a time when she had many important things to think about? A plan had been forming in her mind since the night she and the other chambermaids had rescued Jeremias, but a part of her wanted to forget about it, wanted things to just be the way they once were.
Nothing will ever be the same, you old fool. Face up to it.
It was harder and harder to hide from such decisions these days. Confronted with the runaway chandler’s lad, Rachel and her charges had eventually realized that there was no solution but to help him escape, so they had smuggled him out of the Hayholt one day’s end, Jeremias disguised as a chambermaid returning home to Erchester. As she watched the ill-used boy go limping to safety, Rachel had been seized by a revelation: the evil haunting her home could be ignored no longer. And, she now thought grimly, where the Mistress of Chambermaids saw that which was foul, she must make it clean.
Rachel heard the scuffling of heavy boots across the white stone floor of the bell-chamber and risked a peek through the narrow opening. The king’s green-cloaked form was just disappearing through the doorway. She listened as his steps descended and grew fainter, then waited a long while after they had passed from her hearing altogether before she clambered back down the ladder. She stepped out from behind the curtain into the airiness of the stairwell, then patted at her forehead and cheeks, which were damp with perspiration despite the cold stone. Stepping carefully and quietly, she began to descend.
The king’s conversation had told her much that she needed to know. Now, she must only wait and think. Surely planning such a thing could not be half as complicated as commanding a spring cleaning? And, in a way, that was what she planned, was it not?
Her old bones aching, but her face stretched in an odd smile that would have set her chambermaids to shuddering, Rachel walked slowly down Green Angel Tower’s endless stairway.
Binabik’s eyes would not meet Sludig’s across the cookfire. Instead, the troll swept his sad pile of knuckle-bones back into their bag. He had cast them several times that morning. The results seemed to give him little pleasure.
Sighing, the troll pocketed the sack, then turned and poked in the ashes of the fire with a stick, digging out their breakfast, a cache of nuts that he had located and dug from the frozen ground. It was a bitterly cold day, and their saddlebags were empty of food: Binabik was not above stealing from squirrels.
“Do not speak,” the troll said abruptly. After an hour of silence, Sludig had just opened his mouth. “Please, Sludig, for a mom
ent be saying nothing. Just the flask of kangkang from your pocket I am asking for.”
The Rimmersman sadly handed over the flask. Binabik took a long swallow, then wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his mouth. The sleeve made another pass across the troll’s eyes.
“A promise I made,” he said quietly. “I was asking for two night’s fires and you gave them. Now I must be fulfilling the oath that of all I would be most happily breaking. We must take the sword to the Stone of Farewell. ”
Sludig began to speak, but instead accepted the flask back from Binabik and took a deep draught.
Qantaqa returned from a hunting foray to discover the troll and the Rimmersman wordlessly bundling their few belongings onto the packhorses. The wolf watched them for a moment, then uttered a low moan of distress and danced away. She curled up at the edge of the clearing and peered solemnly at Binabik and Sludig over the fence of her brushy tail.
Binabik lifted the White Arrow out of the saddle bag and held it up, then pressed its wooden shaft against his cheek; the arrow shone more brightly than the powdery snow lying all around. He tucked the arrow back into the bag. “I will be back for you,” the little man said to no one present. “I will find you.”
He called for Qantaqa. Sludig swung up into his own saddle and they vanished into the forest, the string of pack horses following. The downsifting snow began to fill in their footprints. By the time the muffled sounds of their passage faded, all trace of their presence in the clearing was gone.
Sitting in one place lamenting his fate wasn’t going to do him much good, Simon decided. In any case, the sky was becoming unpleasantly dark for mid-morning and snow was beginning to fall more heavily. He stared ruefully at the looking glass. Whatever Jiriki’s mirror might be, the Sithi prince had spoken truth when he said that it would not bring him magically to Simon’s side. He put it back in his cloak and stood up, rubbing his hands.
It was possible that Binabik and Sludig were still somewhere close by: perhaps, like Simon, they had also been tumbled from their mounts and were in need of help. He had no idea how long he had lain helplessly in the grip of sleep, listening to the Sitha-woman speaking through his dreams—it might have been hours or days. His companions could still be close by, or they might have given up on him. They could be leagues away.
Pondering the bleak possibilities, he began walking in what he hoped was an expanding spiral, something he dimly remembered Binabik suggesting as a good thing to do when people were lost. It was difficult to know if this spiral-walking was exactly the right thing to do, however, since he was not sure precisely who was lost. Also, he had not paid particularly close attention when the little man had explained how one calculated this spiral—the troll’s woodcraft lecture had concerned the movement of sun, the coloration of bark and leaves, the direction certain tree roots sprouted as they lay in running water, but at the time Binabik had been explaining these things, Simon had been watching a three-legged lizard slowly limping along the Aldheorte Forest floor. It was a shame Binabik had not tried to make his explanation a little more interesting, Simon thought, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
He tramped on through the thickening snowfall as the sun rose invisibly behind the smother of clouds. The brief afternoon arrived, then almost immediately began preparing to leave. The wind blew and the storm seized Aldheorte in its frosty fingers and squeezed. The cold jabbed at Simon through his cloak, which began to feel as thin as a lady’s summer veil; it had seemed adequate while he was still in the company of friends, but when he thought about it, he could not remember the last time he had felt truly warm.
As the day of unrewarded snow-trudging dragged on, his stomach began to ache as well. He had last eaten in Skodi’s house—the memory of the meal and its aftermath dislodged one of the few remaining shivers that the cold wind had not yet discovered. Who could say how much time had passed since then?
Holy Aedon, he prayed, give me food. The thought became a sort of verse that echoed over and over in his head in time with the crunching of snow beneath his boots.
Unfortunately, this was a problem that would not go away by thinking of something else. Neither had it gotten as bad as it could get: Simon knew he could not get any more lost than he was at that moment, but he could become a great deal more hungry.
In his time with Binabik and the soldiers he had gotten used to others doing the hunting and gathering; when he had helped, it was usually at someone else’s direction. Suddenly he was as alone as he had been during those first awful days in Aldheorte after he had fled the Hayholt. He had been dreadfully hungry then, and had survived until the troll found him, but that had not been winter weather. He had also been able to pilfer from isolated freeholdings. Now he wandered in a frozen and unpeopled wilderness that made his earlier sojourn in the forest seem an afternoon outing.
The storm winds rose in pitch. The very air seemed to grow suddenly colder, sending Simon into a fresh spasm of trembling. As the forest began to darken ever so slightly, sending the first warning that even this weak daylight could not last forever, Simon found himself fighting back a rising surge of horror. All day long he had tried to ignore the faint scrabbling of its claws: at times he had felt as though he walked along the edge of an abyss, a pit which had no bottom, no limit.
In a situation like this, Simon realized, it would be very easy to go mad—not to spring suddenly into arm-waving lunacy, like a beggerman ranting on Tavern Row, but rather to slip over into quiet madness. He would make some unrecognized misstep and topple slowly, helplessly into the abyss whose nearness seemed at that moment so unarguably clear. He would fall and fall until he did not even remember that he was falling anymore. His real life, his memories, the friends and the home he had once had, all would dwindle until they were nothing but ancient, dusty objects inside a head like a boarded-up cottage.
Was that what dying was like, he suddenly wondered? Did a part of you stay in your body, as in Skodi’s ghastly song? Did you lie in the earth and feel your thoughts dwindling away bit by bit, like a sandbar broken down and carried off by a flowing stream? And now that he thought of it, would that be so terrible after all—to lie in the damp and dark and just slowly cease to be? Might it not be better than the frantic concerns of the living, the useless struggle against impossible odds, the panicky and pointless flight from death’s ultimate victory?
To give in. To just stop fighting ...
It had a pacific sound to it, like a sad but pretty song. It seemed a gentle promise, a kiss before sleeping ...
Simon was falling forward. Shocked into alertness, he threw out a hand and steadied himself against the trunk of a skeletal birch. His heart was beating very swiftly.
He saw with astonishment that snow had gathered thickly on his shoulders and boots, as though he had stood in this place for a long time—but it had seemed like the merest instant! He shook his head and slapped at his cheeks with gloved fingers until the stinging brought life surging back through his body. He growled at himself. To almost fall asleep standing up! To freeze on your feet! What kind of a mooncalf was he?!
No. He growled again and shook his head. Binabik and Sludig had said he was almost a man: he would not prove them wrong so easily. It was cold and he was hungry, that was all. He would not cry and give up like a lowly apprentice scullion locked out of the kitchen. Simon had seen and done many things. He had survived worse than this.
But what should he do?
He couldn’t solve the lack of food immediately, he knew, but that wasn’t so bad. One thing Binabik had said that Simon remembered very well was that a person could go a long time without food, but could not survive a single night in the cold without shelter. For this reason, the troll always said, fire was very, very important.
But Simon had no fire, nor could he make one.
As he considered this grim fact, he kept walking. Despite the fast-increasing darkness he hoped to find a better camping place before he stopped. The snow was falling faster now, a
nd at the moment he was slogging along the bottom of a long, shallow canyon. He wanted to find higher ground, someplace where he would not have to dig his way out if he survived the night. Thinking about this, Simon felt a painful smile form on his cracked lips. With the dreadful luck he had been having, the high place he chose would probably be struck by lightning.
He laughed hoarsely and was momentarily heartened by the sound of his own mirth, but the wind snatched it away before he could savor it.
The spot he chose was a stand of hemlocks clustered atop a low hill like white-caped sentries. He would have preferred the shelter of several large stones—or better still, a cave—but his luck was not so generous. He ignored the gurglings of his empty stomach as he briefly surveyed the little copse, then set to work pressing snow into hard lumps. These he piled between the trees on the windward side, pressing and smoothing them together until he had a serviceable wall that reached to a little above his knees.
As the last light started to bleed from the sky, Simon began pulling branches from the surrounding hemlocks. He pilled them near the base of his snow-bulwark until he had made a bed of springy needles nearly as high as the wall. Not yet content, he continued his way around the clearing, using his Qanuc knife to cut branches by the handful until a pile of equal size lay beside the first. He stopped for a moment, breathing heavily, and felt the chill air suck the warmth away from his exposed face as abruptly as if he had been fitted with a mask of sleet.
Suddenly aware of the enormity of trying to stay warm during the wintery night to come—and of the fact that if he decided wrong, he might not wake up the following morning—he was spurred to a feverish renewal of his efforts. He shored up the snow wall, making it a little taller and much thicker, then built a lower wall supported by tree trunks on the other side of the first pile of branches. He raced around the copse cutting more branches—his gloves were now so resinous that he could not separate the fingers, and could only remove his hand from his knife by stepping on the blade first—until the height of both piles equaled that of his windward wall. By now it was almost too dark to see: even the great trees were rapidly blurring into murky smudges against the near-luminous snow.
