The Black Beast

by Nancy Springer

  “Is Frain all right?” he demanded.

  “He travels through Acheron.” The strange black lotus of Acheron drifted through my dreams and his, the stooping trees whispered over us both, the moss brushed my face. The terms of that land were not the terms of Vale. Tirell’s question seemed meaningless there. Frain was no longer unhappy, any more than a floating leaf is unhappy.

  “But is he any better?” Tirell insisted.

  “He is himself, as he has always been.”

  “Contrary old man,” Tirell muttered, and stalked off. But he came back the next day and sat beside me for hours.

  “Frain has come to the lake,” I told him on toward evening.

  “What!” he exclaimed. “What does he find there?”

  “Your beast, lying by the verge. Only it is no longer black, but white. The reflection is black.”

  The beast inclined its head at Frain’s approach. He walked over to greet it, stroking the curve of its neck, then knelt by it and looked into the water of the lake. He gasped and nearly toppled in, almost as if some bodiless thing had caught at him. But he held onto the beast for support, turned his face away and hid it against a white, silken flank, quivering. I saw nothing in the lake, not even myself; what could he have seen? I said nothing to Tirell, having no answer.

  “There is his mother,” I said after a while. She must have been there the whole time. She sat on a grassy bank beneath a willow tree, clad in moss green, quiet as the lake.

  “What! Fabron’s wife?” Tirell could not remember her name.

  “Mela, yes.” I paused, caught up by the Sight. “What is the matter with the swan? It has gone black, and the wing trails crookedly through a pale shadow in the water.”

  “What about Mela?” Tirell asked impatiently.

  “He is walking over to her now.” She was a regal, red-haired presence, not the Mela he had known, and he did not recognize the goddess as the wan queen, tangled in bitterness, whom he had tried to save. Nor, in any mortal sense, did she know him—I think. It was Acheron, after all. But she addressed him with a mother’s tender mockery, for she was at one with the All-Mother now.

  “I have come to speak with Shamarra,” Frain told her.

  “Fool,” she chided. “You poor fool. What ever gave you the notion that you could woo a goddess? Only princes of the line of Melior possess that dangerous privilege.”

  “I thought I was such a prince when I began. And now—”

  “You are trapped like a fly in a casement. Poor fool, can you not see that you would have loved her anyway? You are what you are.”

  Frain shrugged, standing restively before her. “Where is Shamarra?” he asked in a tone just short of demand.

  “Well, let me tell you.” She gestured amiably, forgiving his impatience in her eagerness to talk to someone, for very few folk came there. “Sit, child, and let me tell you the tale. Shamarra was very angry at your so-called brother Prince Tirell. Yes, very angry indeed.”

  “I can well believe it,” Frain muttered, seating himself resignedly on the gray-green slope.

  “So she sent the trees to destroy him while he was exposed in battle,” Mela went on in a kind of awed delight. “An act of interference far exceeding her authority. She had already pressed her limits by leaving her lake unattended and following a mere man with such unbecoming devotion—and getting herself humiliated after all—”

  “I don’t care about that,” Frain burst out. “Where is she?”

  “I am telling you,” Mela reproved. “She sent her minions toward Melior, and the All-Mother herself had to trouble herself to stop them. Adalis was mightily in wrath.” Mela shivered. “Shamarra should never have come back here at all. She had forfeited her position by leaving.”

  Frain did not say a word. He got up stiffly, licking his dry lips, waiting.

  “So Adalis laid a punishment on Shamarra. She stripped her of her personhood and gave her to the wind.”

  “What? She is dead?” Frain whispered in shock. Mela shook her head ruefully at his innocence.

  “No, not dead! Immortals do not die so easily. She wanders with the wind. She is a bird.”

  “What is happening?” Tirell demanded.

  “Shamarra is gone.”

  Dusk was coming on. Frain turned without a sound and walked to the verge of the darkening lake, where he stood staring at the black and crippled swan.

  “Not that one,” Mela called to him, “Nothing so favored. Shamarra is not to fly with the flocks of Ascalonia. She is a night bird.”

  How appropriate. She still ruled death, then. I wondered if Frain knew that he wooed Vieyra.

  He looked at his hands. “Where? Lore Tutosel?” he asked softly.

  “Adalis knows.”

  Frain sat by the lake as dusk deepened into night. He refused the food Mela offered him, and she left him there alone. I knew he could not feel anything quite so unreasonably as he formerly might have, not in that place of shifting shadows, of dreams and reflections. Still, I felt a nudge of fear. Mela also must have felt some small tug of anxiety, because sometime in the starless nadir of night she came out to him, walking easily without a lamp.

  “Do not go into that lake unless you are fully prepared to die,” she warned. “A strange fate lies on the mortal who enters it and lives.”

  She could not see his face, and neither could I, but I felt the lurch of his heart. “And what is that fate?” he asked evenly.

  “Well, he would have to be a special one.…” She hesitated. “He would have to be very pure to survive. But supposing one come whose own darkness did not drag him down, he would become immortal, yet enslaved.”

  “To what?” Frain no longer hid his agitation.

  “To whatever passions ruled him at the time. A more cruel fate than you might be able to imagine.”

  But he comprehended all too well. “Then there is to be no end of this?” he whispered.

  She did not hear or understand, but perhaps she understood his mood. She sat by his side and spoke to him in motherly tones. “Frain, you seem to be a nice young man. I just want you to know that if you go in that lake there is no hope and no turning back. So think well.”

  “Go away,” Frain said. “I wish I were dead.”

  She shrugged and returned to her pavilion. Frain sat by the lakeside through the night, his feet nearly in the water. Immortals do not weaken and die, but they can be killed.… I sat with him in terror, though my body lay on the couch at Melior. But he did not move until owl light turned to dawn and into early sunrise. Then he glanced at the brightening mountain peaks behind him. And he rose and stood entranced, his back to the lake.

  “I should have known,” I sighed.

  The heights had called him from his earliest days. And what now could hold him back from them? He stripped his horse of its gear and turned the animal loose to crop the lakeside grass. He nodded at the white beast, shouldered a pack of provisions, and started away westward.

  “Wherever are you going?” Mela called to him from her doorflap. Nothing lay that way except vast ranges of mountain peaks, scaling ever higher.

  “To seek death,” he called back, smiling sourly.

  “Death?” She frowned, perplexed. “There is death everywhere, and nowhere more than here.”

  “Ah, but I am very particular. Her name is Shamarra.” So he knew. The immortal in search of his doom. “And I Will find her if I have to go as far as Ogygia to do it. If I have to beard Adalis herself.” He walked on as he talked.

  “Swans and serpents! But youngster, why?” Mela cried in exasperation. “She no longer has any very winsome face.”

  Frain paused long enough to turn and cast her a glance of astonished scorn. “Because of what I am,” he said finally. “Good-bye, Lady.”

  “Frain, listen to me.” She took a few steps after him. “You can no more reach Ogygia than yonder crippled swan. Even if you could find it, what makes you think Adalis would speak to you? The penalties are severe for impertine
nce. And what makes you think Ogygia lies west?”

  “A vision.” My vision of long ago, forsooth! He had listened well. He smiled at his mother—she had come close enough for a smile. “Good-bye, old woman,” he told her almost gaily, and turned to the path.

  “He’s on his way,” I whispered to the King who sat by my bedside. Tirell heard and asked me, “Where?” But I never answered. I was with Frain.

  It took him days to climb those awful cliffs. All those days I lay uneating, unresting, unwaking, suspended in the magic and terror of his journey. Sheer rocks and tiny, clinging plants, spiraling winds and ever more limpid sky.… It was all sky at the end. He found the dim trail at last, made the top of the last divide, and looked beyond. I could see his smile, nothing more—a marvelous, ardent, lovestruck smile. Something utterly beautiful lay there. He took breath, gazing like a stag that scents the wind, with quivering attention. Then he stepped out of sight.

  I never told Tirell. I spoke no word to any living person concerning any of this. For at the moment Frain traversed that tall divide, I, too, passed a barrier. The dead go through many changes; they fly in form of moth or hawk; they swim the flood beneath. But it is a voice from the nameless beyond that speaks to you now.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Book of Isle series

  Chapter One

  I am Dair. I am spirit, speaking to you mind to mind, for I know no other way to speak the languages of men. As a man I was a mute because I was born a wolf and stayed so until I was grown—until the day I found Frain.

  I had dreamed of him ever since I had seen him on Ylim’s loom. It is hard to explain how much he meant to me, this bond brother I had never met. There was something in me that could not forget him. Perhaps it was the wolfwit, which forms attachments for life. Or perhaps it was my father’s ardent Laueroc blood. His forebears, the Sun Kings, had been blood brothers and legendary friends, and then there had been his own bond with the god in the grove—or perhaps it was something of the elf in him that would not let me lose sight of the Swan Lord who was coming. Whatever moved me, hardly a day went by that I did not think of the russet-haired youth as I had seen him, afloat on the lonely sea, his destiny somehow mixed in with mine. I wondered and longed for him all that year. I grew restless and took to roaming the downs even as far as the Westwood.

  “Wanderlust,” Trevyn grumbled. “Dair, you young furbrained fool, would you please be careful? I worry about you when you are out alone.” There was still much hard feeling against wolves in Isle. It had been only a few years since the war when evil sorcery had turned them to a horror, and even Trevyn’s good magic could not erase that memory.

  No one can come near me, I bragged. I go like a shadow on the wind. I was well grown, strong and swift as mountain water.

  “Indeed.” Trevyn sat back studying me, and for some reason he sighed. He had a human child now, an infant, his legal heir, but always he greeted me with warmth and joy. Truly, I had not meant to go so far from him. But fate had its finger on me. My second snowy winter came and my unrest deepened as the snow.

  Sometime after the solstice of that winter I left. The dream of the bond brother was on me, I felt the focus of his coming in the east, and I ran that way to meet him.

  I journeyed far faster than any horse. I needed only a coney caught in the snow or a mouse or two and then I was off, padding, night and day, slipping like a slate blue shadow across Isle. For some weeks I went straight as an arrow, straight as arrowflight in silence, until I came to the eastern shore. There on the shingle beach I sat, trying to whiff the smell of destiny in the wind that came across the salt water. Finally I lay down, curling my warm tail over my nose. I lay there for three days.

  I was stubbornly waiting. I would not move to hunt for food even though deer ran by within a hundred feet. Snow fell and covered me. Then the clouds drew away and a cold, cold night came. Every star showed, and all the stardark between, and all the warmth of earth seemed to have vanished into that void. There was a looming feeling in the night or in me. I got up and stretched myself for a moment and looked out over the dim ocean, feeling myself tiny in the sight of those twin eyes, sea and sky. There was a steady lapping sound out on the far water that I could not identify. Even my nose told me nothing. All night I sat and watched the dark water and saw nothing. I remembered such dark water from an old woman’s loom.

  In the morning some instinct sent me northward a little way, and there he lay, naked, the salt spray turning to white rime ice on him.

  Frain. The Swan Lord. I did not yet know him by those names, but I knew how important he was to me, and for a horrible moment I thought he was dead. He was lying on the hard, seawashed sand below the high tide ledge, his red hair snarled like wrack, his face far too pale—as pale as sand and snow. But he still breathed, I saw. I lay down right on top of him, trying to warm him with my thick fur, and at that touch a pang of yearning made me howl aloud and the change came on me all in a moment.

  It was not of my doing or deciding. These things are often awkward—I might have been of more use to him as a wolf. But it came on me willy-nilly, amid a welter of emotions, compassion—it is the most human of emotions—and longing—I wanted his smile, I had come all this way to meet him, to be his friend, his human friend, it seemed.… Cold is what I remember first. The day was as bitterly cold as the night had been. Cold air and cold snow and sand—my fur was gone. I was practically hairless. How humans were to be pitied, to be always so naked beneath their clothes, so cold! I pitied myself heartily. My limbs shot out, long, and my heart pounded within great broad ribs. My muzzle disappeared. My vision blurred for a moment, then righted itself, and hands waved foolishly in front of my face. I was terrified, startled beyond telling. I sprang up to run off. But my limbs would no longer serve me wolf fashion, and I fell over on my side, thrashing. One foot struck Frain, and he groaned.

  I had hurt him. I wanted to howl again.

  Instead I quieted myself, gathered my wits a moment. Then I struggled up enough to balance on one front paw—hand. I used the other to tug and shake at him. His only reaction was to swallow. I tugged harder, then managed to sit on my haunches and get both hands free. I grasped him under the shoulders, pushed with my feet and sprawled over backwards, pulling him a little farther from the sea. I wanted to get him out of reach of the tide, though it meant dragging him into the snow. But I was barely able to wriggle out from under him. A few more such efforts and I was exhausted.

  I was very weak. I had not eaten in too long a time for a human, it seemed. And I was cold, shivering, a horrible, strange sensation to me. I felt terribly afraid. I would freeze, we would both freeze, unless I found us help—

  I tried to rise on my long hind legs, to walk man fashion. I fell. Again I tried, and again I fell, and again and again. I gave in and tried to go on four legs, but all my speed and grace and strength had left me; I could go no better than a snail. The nearest dwelling might be miles.… Despair washed over me like an incoming tide, and I bowed my head to the ground. This bond brother I had found, I was failing him in every way. I could not carry him to shelter, and I had no longer even any fur to warm him. I had thought that once we were together all things would come to rights, but we were naked, helpless, no better than mewling babes. I whimpered like the babe in its basket back at Laueroc. Then I whined dismally. Finally I raised my head and gave forth with a longdrawn, loud and woebegone howl.

  And from the distance an answering shout came.

  Trevyn. I should have known he would be anxious, that he would be searching for me, babe or no babe—I should have known. Dear Trevyn. I rose to my knees so that he could see me. He came thundering toward me over the wealds at the head of a half dozen men, looking angry and frightened both at once. When he saw me the look changed to one of astonishment. He brought his horse right up to me, pulling it to a plunging halt.

  “Dair?” he cried out. “Dair!”

  Thrown off balance, I fell over again. Hot liquid had s
tarted down my face at the sight of him. Tears. I would have known what it was if I had thought, but I was appalled by the feeling and by the spasms that had hold of me, the sobs. Trevyn knelt beside me and put his arms around me, folded me into the shelter of his cloak and of his embrace, trying to comfort me.

  “Dair,” he whispered, “Dair, my son,” and he rocked me gently in his arms. “It will be better soon, truly it will.”

  How did he know what I was feeling, the fear, the pain? But of course he would. He was wise. With some small surprise I saw that he was weeping too. Somehow his tears strengthened me. I straightened, looking for the youth I had found by the sea. The men had already brought him up beside us.

  “It is he,” Trevyn breathed. “The one—”

  We saw in Ylim’s web. I know.

  Trevyn reached over and felt at him, checking his breathing and pulse.

  “He’s more than half dead,” one of the men said.

  “Cover him warmly and get him in all haste to Nemeton. There are doctors there.” Trevyn fastened his cloak around me and stood up, helping me up as well, supporting me.

  “You are as tall as I,” he marveled.

  It was true. We were two youths. He was twenty, and I looked about the same—we might have been brothers or comrades. But I might as well have been a child just then.

  It hurts, I whimpered, meaning my legs and everything in general. The sounds that left my mouth were mere noises, but Trevyn understood in much the same way that he had always understood.

  “I know,” he said. “Or I can imagine.… Perhaps I cannot. Try to rest as we ride.”

  He got me onto his horse, carrying me sideways in the saddle before him. We cantered southward along the shore toward the port city of Nemeton with the men taking turns carrying Frain. I settled into a time of numb endurance measured out in the rhythm of the horses’ hooves. A memory floated up from deep mind. Trevyn had carried me like this before, but I had been very young then, still in my first fur.