The Gold Falcon

by Katharine Kerr

  “I’m beginning to wonder if it’s hopeless.” Cal shook his head in frustration. “We can beat the Horsekin back and back, but in the end there’s a lot more of them than there are of us. It’s like trying to drain the sea with a bucket.”

  “Well, my dear banadar, we do have an available refuge,” Meranaldar said. “The Southern Isles. The High Council has repeatedly invited his royal highness to take up residence among them, and of course that invitation extends to the prince’s retinue.”

  “It would have to extend to every person in the Westlands,” Dar said, “before I’d leave my people.”

  Meranaldar ducked his head and murmured an apology.

  “Besides, go live in a stinking jungle?” With a jut of his jaw Cal interrupted. “I’d rather die defending the Westlands.”

  “I’d rather we all stayed alive in the Westlands,” Dallandra said. “And I intend to find ways for us to do just that. Come on, Cal, we do have allies. The Deverry lords know that if we fall, the Horsekin will be camping on their border.”

  “That’s true, and it means we can count on a good many reinforcements.” Cal sounded suddenly cheerful. “They breed like rats, the Roundears.”

  “Here!” Maelaber rose to his knees. “You’re talking about my mother’s folk, you know.”

  “Be calm, lad!” Calonderiel was grinning at him. “If I’d thought ill of her, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Mael opened his mouth to snarl, but Dallandra got in first. “Oh, do hold your tongue, Cal!” she said. “It’s a wretched hot night, and squabbling will only make it feel worse.”

  “True enough.” Cal turned to his sulky son. “Consider the circumstances. I meant ‘breeding like rats’ as a compliment.”

  Mael forced out a cold smile.

  “Well, think!” Cal went on. “What’s always been our curse, out here on the grass? Our numbers, that’s what. Our women don’t bear enough children. Not that I’m blaming them, but—”

  “Oh, of course you are!” Dalla broke in. “I suppose it never occurred to you that you men might have something to do with the problem.”

  “What?” Calonderiel snapped. “Of course it has! You’re so cursed touchy tonight—”

  “Stop it!” Daralanteriel asserted his royal prerogative. “Stop it right now, both of you! It’s the heat, and the wretched insects, and the ill news, everything all together, but fighting among ourselves isn’t going to ease our troubles.”

  “No, it’s not,” Cal said. “Sorry.”

  “Quite so.” Dallandra nodded the prince’s way. “I apologize.”

  Daralanteriel smiled, but grimly. “Go on, dweomermaster,” he said. “You were going to tell us?”

  “About the children, yes. It’s no one’s fault. It’s because of our long lives, Cal. No creature that lives a long time bears hordes of offspring, especially not those who hunt for meat, as we do. If they did, every tasty kind of animal would be wiped out. The dweomer calls this principle the balance of life against lives.”

  “Does it?” Cal paused, then shrugged. “You’d know better than I about that.”

  “Well, yes, I do.” Dalla forced out a smile to soften the words. “You’ve heard the Deverry folktales, that we’re immortal. It must look that way to them, but if we were, a woman would have a child once in a thousand years, if that.”

  “I’m cursed glad we’re not immortal, then,” Cal said, “and for other reasons as well. Ye gods, who would show the least bit of courage if cowards could live forever?”

  “I’d not thought of it that way before,” Meranaldar remarked. “To risk a death in battle if you were throwing away an immortal life? Why would you?”

  “You’d be a fool to do it. It’s one thing, when you get to be my age, and realize how little lies ahead, to go raging into battle. If you die, you die and only lose that little.” Cal shrugged in dismissal. “As for our lack of children, and notice, please, Dalla, that I said our, I suppose when we all lived in those fine cities Meranaldar keeps talking about that it was a blessing of sorts, but out here it’s a curse. The Roundears—er, the Deverry folk, I mean—have so many children they can’t even feed all of them, and the Horsekin are much the same. So Deverry spreads from the east, and the Horsekin spread from the west, and here we are, squeezed and strangled in the middle.”

  “Or we would be,” Daralanteriel said, “if it weren’t for the alliances we have with Deverry men.”

  “True. They’re on our side—for now.”

  “And they’ll remain so,” Dalla went on, “because they hate the Horsekin.”

  “Maybe so, maybe not.” Cal thought for a moment. “I’d rather have my own kin at my side when things come to the arrows flying.”

  Maelaber, who had been silent through all of this, suddenly laughed, though it was more of a bark than a merry sound. “It’s too bad,” Mael said, “that we can’t trade a few hundred years of life for more children.”

  “That’s what we’re doing, isn’t it?” All at once Dallandra saw something that should have been obvious long before, or so she felt. “Every time one of us has a child by a human man or gets a child on a human woman.”

  Cal swore, under his breath but at length. Everyone turned toward the prince, who shrugged, hands open and palms up.

  “I suppose so,” Dar said. “But I courted Carra for herself alone, and not for her—” He hesitated for a moment. “Childbearing.”

  The men all laughed, but Dallandra kept silent, struck by another thought. Rhodry’s wyrd is Eldidd’s wyrd. The prophecy, over a hundred years old, suddenly revealed a fresh meaning. It might well be Eldidd’s wyrd—and the Westlands’—to give birth to a mixed race that would save a dying people.

  “Well, Cal,” Dar went on. “We’ll find out soon enough just how steady our alliances are.”

  “And let’s not forget that I have allies of my own.” Dallandra rose, glancing around her. “I’d better warn Grallezar as soon as I wake in the morning. And Niffa, up in Cerr Cawnen. And speaking of waking, I think I’ll go get some sleep.”

  Calonderiel scrambled to his feet. “I’ll escort you back. We should have moved your tent in closer. I don’t like the idea of you being alone out on the edge of things.”

  “It’s hardly necessary,” Dallandra said. “We’ll all be leaving tomorrow, and I doubt very much that there are Horsekin assassins lurking out in the grass.”

  “So do I,” Cal said. “But what about Horsekin sorcerers?”

  Dallandra was about to repeat Ebañy’s unpleasant news about the way the Horsekin treated sorcerers when it occurred to her that there was more than one faction of Horsekin. Some might have refused to give up their magic at the dictates of a priest.

  “You have a point,” she said, “but I’ll be safe for one night. I’d feel a warning if one of their shape-changers was nearby.”

  “Good.” Calonderiel glanced at the sky. “They’re usually birds, aren’t they?”

  “All the ones I’ve ever seen took bird form, yes. So if you see an unusually large bird of some sort hovering around, tell me.”

  After thinking about mazrakir, as the Horsekin called their shape-changers, Dallandra was glad enough of Calonderiel’s company as they walked through the dark, silent camp. A night wind picked up at last to cool the air and drive the worst of the insects away. Out beyond her tent the grass rippled and sighed at its touch, a green sea under starlight, stretching to the western horizon. And beyond the horizon, invisible at this distance, lay the foothills and high mountains of the far west, where once the People had lived in towns and farms, a settled folk, renowned for their learning and their literature.

  “Having Meranaldar here has taught me a lot of things,” Dallandra said, “but the biggest one is just how much we’ve lost.”

  “That’s true,” Cal said. “It would gripe my soul to lose the little bit we’ve got left. My curse upon them all, Horsekin and their false goddess both!”

  “Well, the false goddess is long gone, at
least. And she was the one who lied to them, you know, and set this whole ugly thing in motion. They aren’t truly to blame for that.”

  Calonderiel snorted profoundly. “The Horsekin breed gods the way horseshit breeds flies,” he said. “By the Dark Sun herself, if I could concoct another plague to wipe those hairy bastards off the face of the earth, I would.”

  “Don’t ever say that! You can’t know how evil a thought it is. Here, you met Zatcheka and her menfolk. The Horsekin aren’t all savages.”

  “Oh, of course, of course. But it’s the savages that are causing the trouble.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately. But if Zatcheka’s tribe could leave their old ways behind and become Gel da’Thae, the rest of them can as well.”

  “And the moon might well turn purple, too.”

  “Oh, don’t be so stubborn! There’s nothing in their essential natures that keeps the Horsekin from changing their ways. They’re not animals, like wolves or bears, driven to be what they are from within with no hope of learning better.”

  “So? Who’s to teach them? I don’t want them to do their learning over a pile of our corpses.”

  “Do you think I do?”

  “No.” Cal suddenly smiled. “The prince was right, you know. Our tempers have been rubbed raw by the news. Let me apologize again for snapping at you.”

  “And I’ll apologize to you, too.”

  For a few moments they said nothing, lingering side by side in the soothing wind. Above them the River of Stars, where the elven gods sailed at their leisure in jew eled ships, flowed and glittered from horizon to horizon.

  “Ah, well,” Cal said at last. “I suppose I’d better be getting back.”

  She could hear his longing for her under the studied indifference of his voice. For a moment she was tempted to let him stay the night, just because she felt so lonely under the high arc of the stars, but that reason would have been profoundly unfair to him, or so it seemed to her.

  “Yes,” Dalla said, “you should. We’ll all have to be up at dawn tomorrow.”

  “True enough.” He raised one hand in a gesture somewhere between a wave farewell and a slap at the air. “Good night.”

  As Dallandra watched him stride away, she felt tempted to call him back. You’re just lonely, she told herself. Don’t be a fool! With a shake of her head, she went into her tent. Hot, stuffy air met her like an unwelcome embrace. She grabbed her blankets and took them outside to sleep in the grass.

  Yet for a while she lay awake, watching the River of Stars and thinking of the Horsekin, moving inexorably east like another river. At least she could take comfort in knowing that help was on its way—not only military help, but that of the dweomer. She could depend upon Grallezar among the Gel da’Thae and Niffa in the Rhiddaer to guard their respective homelands. Beyond them, even, two of the greatest dweomermasters the world had ever known had been reborn, and now they were old enough to begin their training. They’ll learn fast, Dallandra thought. With them, it will be more like remembering.

  Or so, at least, she could hope.

  With all the taxes received and stored, life in Cadryc’s dun settled into a quiet routine, or it would have been quiet if Tieryn Cadryc hadn’t been so jumpy. He snarled and snapped at everyone, servant and noble-born alike, then apologized, even to the servants. In between bouts of temper he paced around the ward, led the warband out for long aimless rides, or sat brooding in his chair in the great hall. The men picked up their lord’s mood. Fights broke out over next to nothing beyond Gerran’s ability to prevent them, though he broke them up fast enough. He’d get in between the fighters and start swinging the flat of his sword while he cursed them impartially.

  The weather added its own measure of unease. The days were unusually hot, and every summer shower left the air so humid that it might as well have still been raining. In the damp afternoons insects swarmed around men and horses both. Cadryc took to drinking earlier in the day.

  “It’s the insult to his honor, I suppose,” Branna said. “Uncle Cadryc, I mean. Somewhat’s aching his heart.”

  “The insult does vex him,” Galla said. “But he still has hope, you see, that the gwerbret will give in eventually. It’s up to that gerthddyn now, he told me.”

  “Salamander? How could he possibly change the gwerbret’s mind?”

  “I don’t know, dear, but Salamander said somewhat about finding a Horsekin fortress. If he does, it’ll make a difference. Cadryc’s not told me more than that. But hope can vex a man, too, just from the waiting to see if he’s going to get what he’s hoping for.”

  The two women were sewing up in their hall, their refuge against the general ill temper downstairs. They’d finished the first panel of Branna’s bed hangings a few days earlier, and now the second lay stretched in the frame between them. With a bit of charcoal Branna had drawn bands of spirals separating rows of wolves, who faced each other in pairs, each one’s tail laced with that of the wolf behind. All around the edge ran interlaced knots, mitered at the corners. The wolves would end up a rusty red, while the colors of the spirals and the knots would depend on what dyestuffs they could find.

  “It’s too bad the men don’t have somewhat like this to keep them busy,” Branna said. “I think I’d go mad if it weren’t for our sewing.”

  “I’ve had that thought myself, dear, especially when we’d first moved out here, away from you and all my friends. The men do have their Carnoic and wooden wisdom games, but these days the gambling only seems to cause more trouble.”

  “Truly. They need somewhat soothing, like.”

  “Huh! No doubt they’d scorn anything quiet and peaceful.” Galla turned thoughtful. “But you know, you’ve given me an idea. I’ll suggest it to your uncle tonight.”

  At breakfast on the morrow, after everyone had eaten, Cadryc stood up and yelled for silence. Once he had it, he smiled broadly all round.

  “What about this, lads?” Cadryc said. “We’ll have a tournament to pass the time. I’ll send a messenger to Lord Pedrys, to see if he cares to bring some of his best men to join in. Wooden blades and wicker shields, lads, and the winner gets a silver penny from the high king’s bounty. Gerran and Mirryn will judge the combats, though I’m hoping they’ll put on an exhibition, like, when the rest of the fights are over.”

  The men cheered him. Galla, sitting across from Branna at table, winked at her. All through the great hall, the talk picked up as the wagering got under way. Even though no one knew yet which fighters would face off with whom, apparently everyone already had their favorites.

  “That was a splendid idea of yours, my dear,” Cadryc said with a nod Galla’s way. “Where’s my scribe got to? I want to get Pedrys’ invitation on its way.”

  “I’ll fetch him, Uncle.” Branna rose and curtsied. “I overheard him say that he’d be gathering feathers for pens.”

  “My thanks, child.” Cadryc turned to Galla. “Do you think we should invite that blasted young cub of a gwerbret?”

  “We should,” Galla said. “And why not, since most likely he won’t come.”

  Branna left them discussing the matter and hurried away, leaving by the back door of the hall. Out in the sun the day had already turned hot. As she made her way through the various sheds clustering in the ward, she could hear the geese honking and hissing. She found them at last in the kitchen garden, where they were snatching up snails and insects, pausing only to squabble among themselves. On the far side of the garden the goosegirl stood talking with Neb, who had already gathered two good handfuls of long feathers.

  She was a pretty thing, dark-haired Palla, wearing only a single gray dress, torn at the neckline. She was alternately giggling and simpering as Neb told her some long involved tale. Branna walked a little closer, but before she could hear what they were saying, the geese saw her and gave the alarm. One old gander charged her, his head low, his clipped wings flapping. Branna stepped to one side and gave him a kick that sent him tumbling.

  “You’d better t
end your charges, lass,” Branna snapped. “They’re getting a bit above themselves.”

  Palla blushed scarlet. She mumbled something conciliatory, but the look in her eyes flashed pure anger. Branna glanced Neb’s way, then walked off, heading toward the broch. In a few moments Neb caught up with her.

  “Now who’s jealous?” Neb said with a smug smile.

  “Huh,” Branna said. “I suppose you think I care about that flea-bitten lass. Talk with her all you want.”

  “I was just telling her the sort of feathers I need for my pens.” Neb held them up. “It’s the ones with a good stout shaft. The thin ones don’t hold up well when you cut all the feathering off them.” He grinned again. “You looked jealous to me.”

  “And what if I was?”

  “Well, what indeed?”

  “Oh, this is silly! Of course I was jealous. A bit. Just a little bit, mind. Well, actually, I wanted to slap her dirty face, and I was surprised I felt that way. I suppose you think it was stupid of me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then my thanks.”

  “Most welcome, and don’t trouble your heart about the lass.” Neb hesitated for a long moment, then glanced away. “There’s somewhat I’ve been wanting to ask you, and now’s as good a time as any. Do you think you could ever stoop to marrying a common-born man? Just as a matter of general principle, like.”

  Branna wanted to blurt “I would if it was you.” Instead, she reminded herself that she was supposed to show her good breeding, which most definitely did not include being forward with possible suitors.

  “Oh, I’ve naught against the idea on principle,” she said. “After all, it’s not like I’ve got land in my dowry.”

  “That makes a difference, doesn’t it?” Neb suddenly grinned, then wiped the grin away in what was most likely his own attempt at good manners.

  “Quite a difference,” Branna said. “My kin couldn’t have any objections based on a demesne passing out of noble hands.”

  “Might they have other objections, do you think? Just as a matter of interest.”