The Black Beast

by Nancy Springer

  “How did you come here?” Tirell asked her curtly.

  “Through the watery ways.” Shamarra glanced up at him archly.

  I managed to speak; I wanted her to look at me as well. “Lady, are you queen of this place also?”

  “One of me is.” She spoke kindly, as if she thought me a nice, polite child. “Come here, Frain, and drink my water. You’ll find it nourishes you.” She rose from her seat on mossy stones and beckoned us toward the basin.

  “Drink that?” I heard Tirell protest. “It’s full of—” But I didn’t care what Tirell said. I stumbled down and drank deeply. The water satisfied me as if it were food. I was not surprised, for I was coming to expect all manner of marvels. Tirell drank, grudgingly, then led the horses over. The black beast drank and lay down quietly by the cliff. I flopped down in like wise, without a thought, utterly weary. Tirell sat and faced Shamarra.

  “You have lured me here,” he said to her in a low voice. Listening hazily from a place somewhere between sleep and waking, I found it hard to gauge the anger in his voice. Anger seemed fixed and ever present in him those days anyway. It did not matter, I thought drowsily. He had saved me. Tirell my brother the prince was faultless even in anger.…

  “No, I have only met you here,” Shamarra answered courteously. “You came of your own device, and very prettily, I must say. Moreover, it is your destiny as a Sacred King, a very heir of Aftalun, to roam in dark and tangled ways. You carry that destiny with you wherever you go.”

  “The shield? But it was you who chose it and gave it to me. What is this game you are playing with me, lady? Why come to meet me here, as you will have it?”

  “A whim to see you again,” Shamarra said, sounding amused.

  “A whim?” Tirell laughed, sounding not amused at all. “A powerful whim, that takes you under the roots of a mountain along with the swimming dead.… That way can be neither short nor easy, whatever you say.”

  “It is not a hard journey,” she said lightly, “to anyone with my powers.”

  “Powers? But I know nothing of them. To me you are only what you appear to be, a lass and a liar. Why are you here?”

  I jerked out of my drowse at his discourtesy. That he should have called her a liar! But the lady answered him coolly enough. “I wish to ride with you awhile.”

  “Ride with me!” Tirell laughed again, the harsh laugh I did not like. “Why? And on what?”

  “I can ride the beast, if I must,” the lady remarked quietly. “But I would rather sit behind you, on your horse.”

  “You lie again. No one can ride the beast,” Tirell said flatly. “And there’s no room on my horse for you.”

  “Tirell!” I struggled to my elbows, full of protest at his rudeness. But even the lady ignored me.

  “You do not own the beast,” she told Tirell. “It serves you freely.”

  “Very true. And we do not want your company, or any other.”

  “She will ride with me, then!” I shouted, on my feet at last. “And I ride with you whether you wish it or not!”

  Tirell did not bother to rise and face me. “The youngster fancies you better than I do,” he told Shamarra. I could not bear his insolence to her.

  “She is a lady, and therefore a goddess, and she has done you all good and no harm!” I cried. “How can you so churlishly refuse her?”

  “Goddess, lady, wench, or maid, she is but an ash pit to me,” Tirell said. “You rut with her, if you like.” His face was masklike, unreadable, as foreign to me as a face in a nightmare.

  “By Adalis, if you were anyone except my brother,” I whispered, “I would kill you for that.” I was raging, but as feeble as a child, an infant. My hands felt at the air for support. The night blackened around me.

  “Frain, lie down before you fall down.” It was Shamarra’s calm voice. “That healing you did this morning has sapped your strength; you will be weak for a few days yet. Lie down and think no more of anger. We will stay here through tomorrow at least, for the beast also must rest.”

  “I will say how long we stay,” Tirell snapped.

  “Try to find the way without me,” she challenged him.

  “The beast will take us out.”

  “Even the beast cannot find a way if the trees will not let you pass. And the trees are mine to command. The beast only solved the riddle they set.”

  “Then you admit you lured me here!” Tirell roared. “To your creeping pool of spook lights—” He sounded like Abas.

  Their voices faded away from my hearing after a while. I lay on the ground, unnoticed, with a spinning head, and if I had not been too proud, I think I would have wept. Tirell’s locked eyes struck me to the core. Though I had said he was mad, I believe I had not really comprehended his madness until then. His stony despair would not quickly pass.

  “So the beast has left Abas to come to you!” Shamarra mused. “Have you thought, Prince, how ardently he must search for you both? He needs you and hates you, as he needs and hates the beast—but his eye flinches away from Acheron.”

  An odd thing happened as I lay choking on tears. The black beast got up from its place, came over, and lay by my side.

  I felt somewhat better when I awoke in the morning, and I decided to set things to rights in any way I could. But Tirell sat in sullen indifference beside the black beast, and Shamarra sat in graceful relaxation beside her oval pool, and I could get no talk from either of them. I fed on water—a peculiar pool, that, with no outlet to be seen; it must have been another eye of the flood beneath. Then I groomed the horses, cleaned my sword, and rubbed my shield and my hacked helm. Finally, in a kind of desperate boredom, I began to groom the black beast.

  I brushed at its sleek neck and picked the brambles from its mane. My loathing of the creature had entirely disappeared. I don’t think I could hate the thing I had healed, or perhaps I could not heal a thing I hated. Now I regarded it as a fellow, a curious sort of horse or perhaps a very queer bird. If it had stepped on me, or tossed its head and hurt me, I don’t think I would have found any malice in the act.

  I was combing the forelock with my fingers when Tirell spoke. “Do you think you could heal that wing?”

  This was a fairer speech from Tirell than grunts and glares. I gave thought to my answer.

  “I know nothing at all about healing, brother,” I said finally, “except what little I learned yesterday. I would never have guessed it was in me. What made you think I was a healer, Tirell?”

  “Anyone with eyes can see it in you!” Tirell replied, a bit crossly. “There is healing in your every movement and glance. Since you were born, you have been healing me.”

  “Then that is why you turn from me now!” I said quietly, with sudden insight. “Because you wish to bleed yet a while.”

  He stiffened and gave no reply. I continued silently with the beast. I ran my hands softly over its sturdy flanks; all the wounds were dry and mending well. I touched the big lump of crooked bone in the wing, held my hand on it tenderly, but no power nudged within me; I only felt tired.

  “You and Mother and Grandfather all have gifts of vision,” I said after a while. “And also our fa——And also the King, and he seems to have power over people as well.… But I had never felt power of any kind in me until yesterday, and maybe that was a fluke. Where is there healing in our family?”

  Tirell said nothing, but Shamarra’s lovely, liquid voice sounded unexpectedly; I felt blessed just to hear her. “It is true that a gift of healing seems to run in families,” she said. “Smiths and metalworkers especially tend to have an aptness for healing that makes them highly honored among common folk and royalty alike.”

  Tirell glared fiercely at her, but she continued unabashed. “However, many folk feel that this propensity is due more to their familiarity with metal than to their parentage. Metal, you know, is a marvelous and magical substance, brother to fire in value and peril. Those who know metal deeply know much that is hidden from the rest.”

  “I k
now nothing at all about metal,” I sighed.

  “Indeed, knowledge is the key,” Shamarra remarked silkily. “Your grandfather the seer Daymon Cein knows many things deeply, and consider: Is not his knowledge power and healing in itself? All of those who sleep under the Stone of Eala carry hidden in them the seeds of healing, for they know the stone that is dragon’s tooth and Eala’s bone, and metal is the marrow of the bone of earth.”

  “I am not one who has slept under the stone.”

  “Grandfather is,” said Tirell sharply, “and our mother carries the seed to us. Haven’t you heard her trying to tell you?”

  “I don’t know—” I hedged.

  “That is right,” Shamarra broke in smoothly. “And until you do know, you will not be able to heal that wing. Knowledge is the key. Truth, if you will.”

  I stared at her—stupidly, I am afraid. “What truth?”

  She looked me full in the face for the first time that day and smiled a smile that did not comfort me. “The truth about yourself,” she said.

  I asked nothing more. I had had talk enough. I kept silence till dark.

  The next day, with his face still hard and flat as a slab of Eala’s rock, Tirell mounted the black and rode away. I sprang onto the white. Shamarra watched us both with a look as blank as Tirell’s.

  “Come on,” I said, offering to help her up behind me. But she shook her head.

  “I’ll walk.” Her delicate, pale face reminded me of a sculpture in ice.

  “You are too proud!” I urged her earnestly. “Come, share my mount, though I may be unworthy of the honor.” But she scarcely looked at me, and I knew that she had shut off the sound of my voice from her ears. I was on fire with love and anger and pity all at once. I loved her ardently, as I had loved her from the first—even though, I suppose, I scarcely knew her.

  I urged my horse after Tirell, since there was nothing else I could do. He was another whom I loved and who would not accept my help. He rode with heart locked on pain like a dungeon gate. The black beast led him. I followed, and Shamarra walked barefoot, straight and proud, in the rear, a shimmering vision within the gloomy, tangling forest.

  We all walked more than rode that day anyway. The beast took us under dark arbors of interlacing boughs, through twisting passages between boulders and bulging roots, around standing boles wider than a chariot and over fallen branches half waist high. The weird trees of Acheron seemed to have gone as wild and extravagant as Tirell. We picked and fought our way slowly along. By nightfall we had found no clearing. We slept uncomfortably in niches between rocks and roots, and hunger began to gnaw at us. We had seen, or at least I had seen, no living creatures besides ourselves all day. Not even birds seemed to live in the giant snare we moved through.

  We came out of it, praise be, the next morning, before noon. I blinked in strong springtime light, staring as if I had never seen Vale before, although the scene was commonplace enough. To our left the river Chardri curved away toward Vaire. To our right the tall, dark peaks of Acheron marched away toward the southern sky. Meadowland sloped between. Knobby trees still fringed the mountains, but compared to the snarl we had just left they seemed almost friendly, stooping to peer at us. “Hello, old women!” I cried delightedly.

  “Hush,” Tirell growled. “There may be foes about.” The black beast lifted its head, questing.

  “Not the Boda, or at least not those you left,” stated Shamarra. “Who do you think shut the forest against them?” So perhaps it had not been Grandfather.

  The beast snorted and leaped from a stand into a gallop. Rabbits were feeding near the river. Almost before the little creatures could move the beast ran them down, stuck one with its horn and flung it overhead with fierce abandon. It speared yet another before they could scatter to their holes. I sat watching, sickened; but why? I had often seen game taken. A few more coneys lay stunned by black hooves. Tirell rode over and slit their throats. “Supper,” he said morosely.

  I got down to help him, still shuddering. There had been more to this scene than the gathering of food. Blood of the victims trickled over the beast’s forehead between its white-rimmed eyes. I wiped it off. Odd, but the monstrous creature was a comrade and an ally. I knew that even then. It rubbed its nose against me, and even in my horror I could not refuse the caress.

  We built a fire on the spot, cooked and ate, and left in midafternoon, carrying the surplus meat with us. Once again I invited Shamarra to ride behind me on my mount.

  “I will walk,” she said as before.

  “I must ride after my brother,” I told her angrily. “That is my first duty. But you cause me dishonor, lady, by your stubbornness. It is unseemly for me to ride away and leave you afoot.”

  She glanced at me haughtily. “There is no one to see.”

  “There are always eyes to see,” I retorted, though I could not have said what eyes. The lady raised her curving brows at me.

  “By Vieyra,” she remarked, “you are not entirely a fool. So since there is even that much truth in you, I will ride with you—for the time.”

  The black beast watched curiously as she took her place. Then we cantered down the slope after Tirell.

  Chapter Seven

  We traveled thus for several days, with Tirell on the black in the lead, the lady and myself following on the white, and the black beast roaming as it pleased, but seldom far away. Tirell kept to the foothills of Acheron, skirting the borderlands of Vaire. Though the meadowland through which we rode looked lush and fertile, we did not see a dwelling or a human soul. Honeycomb fungi sprang up everywhere in the springtime dampness. We gathered them to eat with our cold meat.

  “Why does no one come here?” I asked Shamarra. I attempted every day to converse with her, hoping to improve her opinion of me, though usually she answered with merest courtesy.

  “Men fear Acheron,” she replied briefly this time.

  “But why, lady?” I persisted. “You’ll think me a fool, but I have been to Acheron—part of it—and I have seen much that is fair, and not too much to fear.”

  She was amused, and flattered perhaps, and replied kindly enough. “You are young,” she said, “too young to really believe in death, and the Luoni mean nothing to you.”

  “Is it my youth that has protected me, lady, or your goodness on my behalf? Surely you are the one that I must thank, that I am not a sleeper amidst gray moss. I heard the trees whispering, that first night.”

  Shamarra laughed her laugh that was like rippling water. I think she was perhaps even a trifle impressed! “One of me you may thank,” she said. “Only one.”

  I could not reply to that, but I was delighted at any speech from her, even riddling speech. “And Tirell,” I went on, emboldened. “Is he also one who is too young to fear Acheron?”

  “No,” she answered, slowly and seriously. “Though it is true that he does not fear death, not at this time.”

  “He is very brave,” I agreed.

  “Courage is the least of it,” Shamarra retorted sourly, and she would talk no more that day.

  After perhaps a week of riding I began to notice wisps of smoke on the far horizon of Vaire, and now and then a distant rooftop. I took to skulking around the isolated homesteads at night in search of food, with a bit of spook-fire Shamarra had loaned me for light. Nobody was likely to come near that eerie glow. I carried it in my hand like a bit of fluff; it had no weight, or substance, or even feel to it, and I still don’t know where she got it. The stuff gave me just enough light to steal eggs from the hens’ nests. I would pull garden greens, also, and once I took a loaf of bread out of a kitchen window. Quite a comedown for a prince of Melior, but I had no choice. Even if we could have traded torques for victuals, we did not dare to be seen by daylight.

  We had come far from the true Acheron, nearly into the Lorc Tutosel, what the southern people call the mountains of the night bird. After almost a fortnight of riding, I realized one day that the white mare was going lame. Her gait roughened, and
we were forced to get on more slowly. I had always, since the start of this journey, kept close behind Tirell because of an unspoken fear that he would heedlessly leave me—he seemed so cold and uncaring. I had never dared to stop unless he did. But as the white mare ambled on more and more reluctantly, I made a happy discovery: the black beast would circle back to check on us, and Tirell, perforce, had to wait as well. He would never leave the beast.

  I fervently hoped that Tirell would not comprehend the problem. He always rode with his back to me, seeming to notice nothing, hear nothing, and see nothing except whatever vision of vengeance floated before his mask of a face and his glittering blue eyes. Perhaps he could even remain oblivious to our slowness. But I should have known better. When we camped that evening he glanced once at the white mare, went to her, and felt her legs. He cradled her big head in his arms for a moment and studied her fine dark eyes as if he were speaking to her. Then he rounded on me.

  “She is lame,” he said flatly, “and sore in her back, too. That is what has come of your hauling that wench along.”

  “You would do well to speak better of the lady,” I flared, “and not risk her wrath! Has it occurred to you that she could destroy you? Is she not a goddess and a form of Adalis?” But Tirell laughed harshly, the chilly laugh that made me flinch.

  “She is welcome to my person for destruction!” he laughed. “Nothing else.” He turned and thrust his hard white face at Shamarra. “Nothing else,” he repeated. It was as if he had spit on her.

  Shamarra stood in all her silken beauty, pale golden hair and shimmering gown, moving only with the breeze and her own breath. She was not stony like Tirell, but just as impervious in her own way. If she had winced, if her eyes had widened as if hurt, I would have struck Tirell, and maybe Morrghu knows what might have happened then. But she looked through him, and in a moment he turned away and went back to the white mare, stroking her back and droning to himself. Presently the droning formed into a singsong tune.

  “Hey, nonny nay,

  My white horse is gray!