The Black Beast

by Nancy Springer

  “Where are the prince and Mylitta?” I shouted at him. “Come, tell me, the King is riding!”

  He only stared at me. Probably he didn’t know. “If I were you I’d hide!” I snapped at him, and I kicked my horse toward the grove, hoping … But the King was there before me. He must have had a spy, or perhaps it was that damned visionary cleverness of his. I saw the torches flaring ahead and heard Abas shouting. Even at a distance I could not mistake that grating voice.

  I eased toward the commotion, mindful of the torchlight on my white horse, not to speak of my white linen shirt! But as I drew near I found that all eyes faced the King and his quarry. Tirell and Mylitta stood side by side, with Boda holding them both. They must have been taken riding, for another man held the black horse by the reins. The King stood shouting and shaking his fist at Tirell. Abas was tall, and in the glare of the torches his shadow seemed huge.

  “Thus you obey my commands!” he roared. “Out at night, over the wall, to rut with a peasant!”

  “I would have been back by day,” Tirell replied. His voice was calm, but his face was white and taut with fear. And contempt. Hide the contempt, I urged him inwardly.

  “Out at night … even in the darkest night …” Abas was trembling with wrath and a sort of frantic loathing. “At the mid of night to run from me, to scorn my command …”

  “No, Majesty, he has told me he must go to Tiela!” Mylitta said in her gentle, musical voice. The King stopped his ranting with a choke to stare at her. She stood straight and graceful, meeting his crazed blue eyes with her wide eyes of brown. It was then that she sealed her fate, I believe, though she did not know it. No one dared to gaze at the King so equably.

  I cannot understand how I failed to foresee her mortal danger. Abas’s wrath seemed to have stunned my reason. He was hoarse, panting, scarcely coherent, but he kept shouting, and Tirell listened as I did, numbly. “A dirt-caked peasant…” the King gasped. “Would you scorn a princess for a peasant? Out in the night … You are to have no more thought of her. I will see to it. No more joy in the black night. Night… no hope …” The cadence of mad rage went on with no change for warning. “Thus will I secure you!” Abas shrieked, and whipped out his long ceremonial sword. I set heels to the white mare at the first flash, but far too late. I saw Mylitta fall while I was yet in midleap. She died without a cry, even as Tirell tore loose from his guards and lunged.

  The Boda were all startled and in confusion, some of them trying to restrain Tirell and most of them scrambling away from my charge. They didn’t like to risk hurting me, I suppose, without orders, but I didn’t care if they tried to kill me. I was desperate to get to Tirell before he came up against Abas and that sword. I shoved through the melee, leaned from my mount, and got an arm around my brother’s chest from behind. My eyes met the King’s glittering eyes scarcely an arm’s length away; he was jerking his sword from Mylitta’s body, and his glare froze me in place. My frightened horse tore us away from the guards. Torches were falling and horses were breaking loose in terror and I think Abas shouted again. I held tight to Tirell and to the white mare’s neck, and she galloped off into the lightless woods.

  Tirell was struggling against me, cursing between sobbing breaths. “Shut up and hold still!” I gasped. My arm felt as if it would pull off with his weight. The King and his Boda were after us. I could hear their hoofbeats. Then the mare shied. A dark shape loomed ahead of us, a blot, a moving vortex of darkness in that darkest of all nights, shifting and rearing and lifting widespread black wings. It blared a challenge I could not heed. I moaned and shut my eyes as we ran wildly past it. From behind I could hear the cries of the Boda and a long, hoarse scream of complete terror. That was Abas; I was sure of it. And I sensed that he had somehow met the black beast before.

  A bit farther on my arm gave way and Tirell fell to the dirt with a thump. I wrestled my panicky horse to a halt. Tirell sat like a stone where I had dropped him.

  “Come on!” I begged, tugging at him. “We’ll both be killed!”

  “Fine,” he muttered.

  “Come on, Tirell!” I was almost weeping, as panicky as the horse, and I tried to lift him. He threw off my grip.

  “Calm down,” he said tonelessly. “They’re gone. Listen.”

  I stood for a moment, panting. It was true that the wood was quiet.

  “But the beast is somewhere about,” I said shakily.

  “So much the better.” He got up. “I’m going back to Mylitta.”

  “She’s dead,” I whispered.

  “I know it.” His voice was dispassionate, and in the darkness of the wood I could not gauge his mood. I stood feeling very small in the night.

  “Remember her as she was, brother,” I pleaded. “She has been—trampled, since.”

  “Luoni take our father!” he cursed in a cracking voice, and he strode off. I caught the white mare and went after him, but I had not gone far when I met him mounted on the black, riding hard toward the west. Except for the gleam of his torque he was only a racing shadow beneath the trees; I almost thought it was the black beast. “What now?” I called to him.

  He did not answer, so I sighed and sent the white laboring after him. We galloped out of the sacred grove and up the Hill of Vision, up to where the White Rock of Eala stood gleaming like bleached bones in the starlight. Tirell rode headlong under it. I went around.

  “Are you going to Grandfather?” I shouted.

  He did not answer. He urged his horse recklessly down the Hill, and I followed more slowly. I was not afraid of losing him any longer, for the Wall blocked his path. Presently I saw a speck of light. Daymon Cein was awake in his hut, it seemed. I rode up to find Tirell standing and studying the Wall. Grandfather came out in an old white nightgown, carrying a rushlight in his hand.

  “So, lads,” he said quietly, “the trouble has come.”

  Tirell turned slowly and stared at him, a fey, perilous stare, almost threatening. “Had you seen that she would be killed?”

  “No, lad, I am sorry.” Grandfather’s voice was full of pity. “I saw your love and rejoiced in it, but the King’s thoughts and actions are hidden even from himself. Only lately his fell deed has awakened me from my sleep.”

  Tirell stared at him a while longer, then shifted his cyan gaze to me. “Go back,” he said flatly.

  “To our gentle father?” I chided. “He would kill me sooner than greet me. Thank you, but no. I am going with you.”

  “I want no company where I go,” Tirell said. His face was set in a white mask with his eyes burning through it like cold blue flame. I had known his anger many times, anger that passed like storm clouds before a high wind. But I had never seen such a locked and tortured rage in him. I shivered, facing him. It was as if my brother had become a stranger to me, or perhaps someone whom I knew all too well.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To Acheron. To my death, if death pleases to take me. I am done with Vale.”

  I felt my hair prickle. “The Wall will not let you pass,” I said, a little too quickly.

  “Ah, but it will.” Tirell turned back to Daymon. “Will it not, Grandfather?”

  “It might,” Grandfather replied, almost serenely. “But it has been prophesied that when this wall is breached the doom of Melior will be at hand.”

  “Better yet,” Tirell snapped. “Do it.”

  “Wait a bit. Even in Acheron you will need some provisions.” Daymon went into his hut, and I hurried after him.

  “Grandfather,” I whispered, “what is going on? Are you both mad?”

  “Perhaps,” the old man acceded. “But where is he to go? Back toward Melior? He will be taken before he tops the Hill. At least the Boda will not follow him into Acheron.”

  “But Tirell is not fleeing for life!” I cried. “Did you not hear him welcome death?”

  “His rage speaks. But life is not so easily thwarted. Wait and see if he does not live yet a while. May peace come to you, lad. Both of you
.” He handed me a packet of cheese and bread and strode back outside with me tagging after. “Hold the horses,” he added.

  I got them by the reins and stood stupidly, waiting—for what, I didn’t know. Grandfather wandered over to a spot by his yew tree and slowly extended his arms. He spoke no word that I could hear, but power flowed through him until he seemed as big as the night. His arms quivered, and the stones of the Wall quivered along with him, then rumbled and fell from their places with a noise fit to waken the dragons in the deep. Grandfather lowered his arms by degrees, looking once again stiff and old. Tirell walked over and methodically began to clear a path through the rubble.

  Dazed as I was by the events of the night, it did not occur to me that we had put Grandfather in péril. Just as it had never occurred to me to wonder why he lived so much alone, at the Wall.…

  I joined Tirell, lifting stones until we had cleared a narrow path for the horses. By the time we were finished the sky had turned from black to gray. I could see the shapes of the mountains looking down on us. Grandfather had long since disappeared—into his hut, I supposed. We led the horses through to the far side of the ruined Wall. But before I could mount, Tirell took my arm with no gentle hand.

  “Now,” he said, facing me to the south, “make your way between the river and the mountains until you come to Vaire. There is plenty of cover, and it is not too far. Fabron will give you aid, if only secretly. I am sure of it.” His voice was hard. I shook off his hand.

  “I go with you,” I told him.

  “No good will come to you with me, princeling. I am a shadowed thing. Choose your path more wisely.” Tirell’s eyes looked like blue jewels, hard and fixed in their sockets.

  “If you go to Acheron, I go there too,” I said.

  He shrugged coldly and mounted his black. He set off silently and I followed without a word. In a moment we rode into the shadows of strange, twisted trees. But before we had gone far, hoofbeats sounded behind us. I whirled to face the pursuit, but Tirell scarcely moved his head. “What is it?” he asked indifferently.

  “It’s the black beast,” I told him.

  Chapter Four

  We rode all day without speaking another word. Tirell led, looking like the raven of war in his black cape and on his black steed. I followed on the white mare, and the black beast paced close behind me, restlessly tossing its head. Arrows of fear shot through me all that day; I believed that at any moment I was likely to feel that knifelike horn in my back. But I was too proud even to turn and look at the baleful thing, since Tirell was in such a harsh and desperate mood.

  We made our way up the foothills of Lore Acheron, between ancient, gnarled trees that stooped over us like old, old women puttering at a loom. The ground and tree trunks were covered with shaggy gray moss, and the silence was profound, like the silence after a snowfall. I did not hear even a bird or a rabbit—only the hot breath of that black-horned monster behind me. As the day wore on I forgot my fear in tiredness, for I had not slept the night before. The day was gray—all days might be gray in those woods—and I nodded as I rode. By the time the gray turned to black, even Tirell was willing to sleep. We stumbled off our horses, stupid with fatigue, and sank down into the soft, deep moss. I was sound asleep within minutes.

  In the dead of night I dreamed that the trees were moving. They crooked their branches and beckoned one another, and their long leaves clustered like greenish hair around their knobby heads. They gathered around Tirell and me, peering.

  “Such bold duckies to come to Acheron!” said one in a high, creaky old woman’s voice.

  “Bold or fools,” said another, sounding puzzled. “Have men forgotten in Vale what Acheron is?”

  “They know well enough, though they will not say it,” the first replied. “Such bold ducks! Shall we take them now, when they will mind it least?”

  “No!” said a voice deeper than the rest. “Bide a bit and see what the lady says. I sense a mistake here. The littler one is full of life.”

  “And there is the beast, too,” another added. “That is odd.”

  “Yes, it should be skulking about Melior. How Abas hates the night, and how he hates the beast!” The trees joined in high, creaking laughter, like the tinkling of twigs in a breeze. “Hates it and fears it, poor thing! But is this not Abas’s son?”

  “The black-haired one, yes. It is he that the beast follows. He is a scion of Aftalun.”

  “But what of the other, the russet-haired one? They both wear torques.”

  “Speak no more of that,” said the deeper voice. “He is not suitable to our purposes or the beast’s. Torque or no torque, we shall not touch him unless the lady gives us leave. Look, even now he stirs. Hush!”

  I was straining to sit, to wake and look more fully around me. But the gray moss softly brushed my face, and I remember no more until morning. When I awoke the sun was high, but Tirell was still asleep. The beast lay quietly curled in the moss beside him, with its horned head resting on its hard shining hooves.

  I stared at the beast for a while, and it stared back without sign or motion. Its eyes were of a flat, threatening gray, like storm clouds, and a bloodshot white rim showed all around. They did not blink even when I moved to Tirell’s side. Warily ignoring the beast, I shook my brother.

  “Come on, sluggard,” I called, as cheerily as I could. “Wake up!”

  Tirell roused reluctantly and gazed at me with blank eyes. Then memory struck him, and he groaned under the blow. He covered his face with his hands.

  “Come here, brother,” I said softly, holding him. “Weep it out.” But instantly he spurned the embrace and rose to his feet.

  I rose also to face him. “Have you grieved for her?” I asked, as gently as I could.

  “Grieved!” Tirell barked. “I am a prince, not an old woman, that I should sit in a pool of tears!” He turned angrily away.

  “The beast is behind you!” I warned.

  “Good!” he retorted harshly. “Let us ride.”

  “Eat first.” I offered him bread and cheese. But he would not eat, so I chewed on my portion as we rode. The land grew steeper and steeper that day, until the horses scarcely could manage the slope. Gradually rock began to show beneath the moss, the trees grew more sparse, until they ceased altogether and we picked our way between soaring rocky cliffs. After a while it seemed to us that the horses could go no farther. We stopped, though we said no word. But the black beast swept past us and took a twisting path up a slope as steep as a precipice. Tirell followed at once, and I more slowly, clenching my teeth. It gave me no comfort that the black creature of ill omen had become our leader.

  By day’s end we had reached a narrow ledge below crags that seemed to shut out the sky with the sun. The beast trotted along at a speed I did not dare to match. “What does it care! It has wings!” I muttered to no listener, for Tirell seemed oblivious to talk or fear. I was falling behind the pair of them, the black beast and the black-clad prince, when the ledge suddenly became a narrow passageway between great slabs of rock. In the tiny slit of sky far above I could see stars twinkling, though it was not yet night. Anxiously I cantered after the others, then stared past them. Space showed at the end of the corridor: a clearing or a cliff?

  It was a clearing. Even Tirell stopped to stare when we entered. We had found the heart of Acheron.

  Soft gray-green grass spread beneath the horses’ feet. The lawn sloped gently to a still, oval expanse of water beneath a dim dome of sky and shadowed by mountains all around. It was a lake, but not like the little pools I had known; it was large, clear, and fathomless, like a single eye of the ancient deep. A swan floated on it, a white swan, but I blinked; the reflection was black. In the midst of the mirrorlike water, on a sort of island, stood a curious greenery in the shape of a castle all made of living, rustling foliage. We stared for long moments in the failing light before we could be sure of what we saw.

  Slowly we rode along the margin of the lake, staring at that castle like peasa
nts come to court. Presently we found a little bridge of land that connected the island to the shore. So we approached the castle, still staring. It was all made of huge trees and twining vines, gigantic things that must have fed on the very blood of the dragon. Their leaves were of a peculiar silvery green, shimmering like silk, giving off muted flakes of light, even though there was not a breath of breeze in that place. Between the leaves were window slots and parapets and balconies, all as neat as if a builder had planned them. We rode around the living walls to the gap that should have been a gate and entered. We left our horses in the soft, grassy space that served for courtyard and walked into the green great hall.

  The structure of the castle soared above us; thick branches that spiraled into steps offered to take us to the very top of it, if we liked. Steps of turf led up to a vast dais. On the dais stood a sort of pavilion, a tent, in cloth of bright, soft gold. And at the doorway of the tent sat a lady. She rose as we walked up to her, and I felt my heart stop at the sight of her; I could not speak. But she looked only at Tirell.

  She was slender, fair of skin, and with a face so delicately wrought, so eerily beautiful that it seemed to shine with its own whisper of light, like an echo of moonlight. Long hair of palest gold flowed over her back and shoulders. Her gown was silver that did not shine; in lustered like moonlight, like the other soft things in this place. I hope I did not gape, but I felt as if my legs would not hold me. And I shall never forget the sound of her voice as she spoke; it was soft and cool and clean and lovely, fearsome and yielding at the same time. I could have drowned in her voice.

  “I am Shamarra, the lady of this lake,” she said, “and you are Tirell of Melior. What do you seek here?”