Tales of Ethshar

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “What is it?” someone whispered.

  “It’s an oracle,” Kirna said. “A sorcerer’s oracle.”

  “Do we need a sorcerer to work it, then?”

  “No,” Kirna said, staring at the glass dish and gently brushing her fingers down one side of the block. “My mother taught me how.”

  She stopped and looked up.

  “And it’s very old, and very delicate, and very precious, and we don’t know how many more questions it can answer, if it can still answer any at all, so don’t get your hopes up! We’ve been saving it for more than a hundred years!”

  “Keeping it for yourselves, you mean!”

  “And why not?” Alasha demanded, coming to her sister’s defense. “It was our family’s legacy, not the village’s! We’ve brought it out now, when it’s needed, haven’t we?”

  Nobody argued with that.

  “Go on, Kirna,” Wulran said quietly. “Ask it.”

  “Ask it what, exactly?” she replied.

  “Ask it who will save us from the dragon,” Pergren said. “None of us know how to kill it; ask it who can rid us of it.”

  Kirna looked around and saw several people nod. “All right,” she said. She turned to the oracle, placed her hands firmly on either side of the block, and stared intently down into the glass dish.

  Wuller was close enough to look over her left shoulder, while Illuré looked over her right, and Alasha and Wulran faced them on the other side of the oracle. All five watched the gleaming disk, while the rest of the crowd stood back, clearly more than a little nervous before this strange device. Wuller’s mother Mereth, in particular, was pressed back against the wall of the room, busily fiddling with the fancywork on her blouse to work off her nervousness.

  “Pau’ron,” Kirna said. “Yz’raksis nyuyz’r, lai brinan allasis!”

  The glass dish suddenly began to glow with a pale, eerie light. Wuller heard someone gasp.

  “It’s ready,” Kirna said, looking up.

  “Ask it,” Wulran told her.

  Kirna looked about, shifted her knees to a more comfortable position, then stared into the dish again.

  “We are beset by a dragon,” she said loudly. “Who can rid us of it?”

  Wuller held his breath and stared as faint bluish shapes appeared in the dish, shifting shapes like clouds on a windy day, or the smoke from a blown-out candle. Some of them seemed to form runes, but these broke apart before he could read them.

  “I can’t make it out,” Kirna shouted. “Show us more clearly!”

  The shapes suddenly coalesced into a single image, a pale oval set with two eyes and a mouth. Details emerged, until a face looked up out of the dish at them, the face of a young woman, not much older than Wuller himself, a delicate face surrounded by billows of soft brown hair. Her eyes were a rich green, as green as the moss that grew on the mountainside.

  Wuller thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful.

  Then the image vanished, the glow vanished, and the glass dish shattered into a dozen jagged fragments.

  Kirna let out a long wail of grief at the oracle’s destruction, while Illuré called, “Find me paper! I must draw the face before we forget it!”

  4.

  Wuller stared at the portrait. Illuré had come very close, he thought, but she had not quite captured the true beauty of the face he had seen in the glass.

  “Who is she?” Pergren asked. “It’s no one in the village, certainly, nor anyone I ever saw before.”

  “Whoever she is, how can she possibly kill a hundred-foot dragon?” Pergren’s brother Gennar demanded.

  “Maybe she’s a magician,” Pergren suggested.

  “There must be more powerful magicians in the World than her, though,” Gennar objected. “If it just takes magic, why didn’t the oracle say so? Why not show us some famous powerful wizard?”

  “Maybe she won’t kill it,” Alasha said. “Kirna asked who could rid us of the dragon, not who could slay it.”

  Gennar snorted. “You think she’ll talk it into going away?”

  “Maybe,” Alasha said. “Or maybe there’s another way.”

  Pergren and Gennar turned to stare at her. Wuller was still looking at the picture.

  Illuré certainly had a talent for drawing, he thought; the charcoal really looked like shadows and soft hair.

  “What do you mean?” Pergren asked Alasha.

  “I mean, that in some of the old stories, there are tales of sacrifices to dragons, where when a beautiful virgin willingly gave herself to the monster the beast was overcome by her purity, and either died or fled after devouring her.”

  Pergren glanced at the picture. “You think that’s what she’s to do, then? Sacrifice herself to the dragon?”

  Gennar snorted. “That’s silly,” he said.

  “No, it’s magic,” Alasha retorted.

  “Why don’t you sacrifice yourself, then, if you think it’ll work?” Gennar demanded.

  “I said a virgin,” Alasha pointed out.

  “She said beautiful, too,” Pergren said, grinning. Alasha tossed a pebble at him.

  “We have a couple of virgins here,” Gennar said. “At least, I think we do.”

  “Virgins or not,” Pergren said, “the oracle said that she would rid us of the dragon.” He pointed to the picture Wuller held.

  “No,” said Alasha, “it said she could rid us of the dragon, not would.”

  That sobered all of them.

  “So how do we find her?” Pergren asked. “Do we just sit here and wait for her to walk into the village, while that monster eats a sheep a day?”

  “I’ll go look for her,” Wuller said.

  The other three turned to him, startled.

  “You?” Gennar asked.

  “Why not?” Wuller replied. “I’m small enough to slip away without the dragon noticing me, and I’m not doing anything important around here anyway.”

  “How do you expect to find her, though?” Pergren asked. “It’s a big world out there.”

  Wuller shrugged. “I don’t know, for sure,” he admitted, “but if we had that oracle here, then surely there will be ways to find her in the cities of the south.”

  Gennar squinted at him. “Are you sure you aren’t just planning to slip away and forget all about us, once you’re safely away?”

  Wuller didn’t bother to answer that; he just swung for Gennar’s nose.

  Gennar ducked aside, and Wuller’s fist grazed his cheek harmlessly.

  “All right, all right!” Gennar said, raising his hands, “I apologize!”

  Wuller glared at him for a moment, then turned back to the portrait.

  “I think Wuller’s right,” Pergren said. “Somebody has to go find her, and I’ve heard enough tales about the wizards of Ethshar to think that he’s right, finding a magician is the way to do it.”

  “Why him, though?” Gennar demanded.

  “Because he volunteered first,” Pergren said. “Besides, he’s right, he is small and sneaky. Remember when he stole your laces, and hid in that bush, and you walked right past him, looking for him, half a dozen times?”

  Gennar conceded the point with a wave of his hand.

  “It’s not up to us, though,” he said. “It’s up to the elders. You think old Wulran’s going to let his only son go off by himself?”

  Alasha whispered, looking at Wuller, “He just might.”

  5.

  In fact, Wulran was not enthusiastic about the idea when it was brought up at the meeting that night, and started to object.

  His wife leaned over and whispered in his ear, cutting him off short.

  He stopped, startled, and listened to her; then he looked at Wuller’s face and read the solid determination there.

  He shut his mouth and sat, silent and unhappy, as the others thrashed the matter out, and the next morning he embraced Wuller, then watched as the boy vanished among the trees.

  It was really much easier than Wuller had expected; the
dragon never gave any sign of noticing his departure at all. He just walked away, not even hiding—though he did stay under the trees, hidden from the sky.

  At first, he simply walked, marking a tree-branch with his knife every few yards and heading southwest—south, because that was where all the cities were, and west to get down out of the mountains. He didn’t worry about a particular destination, or what he was going to do for food, water, or shelter. He knew that the supplies he carried with him would only last for two or three days, and that it would probably take much longer than that to find a magician, but he just couldn’t bring himself to think about that in his excitement over actually leaving the village and the dragon behind.

  He took the charcoal sketch out of his pack, unrolled it, and studied it as he ambled onward beneath the pines.

  Whoever the girl was, she was certainly beautiful, he thought. He wondered how long it would take him to find her.

  He never doubted that he would find her eventually; after all, he had the portrait, and magic was said to be capable of almost anything. If one ancient sorcerous device could provide her image, surely modern wizardry, or some other sort of magic, would be able to locate her!

  An hour or so from home he stopped for a rest, sitting down on the thick carpet of pine needles between two big roots and leaning back against the trunk of the tree he had just marked.

  He had worked up an appetite already, but he resisted the temptation to eat anything. He hadn’t brought that much food, and would need to conserve it.

  Of course, he would get some of his food from the countryside, or at least that was what he had planned. Perhaps he could find something right here where he sat.

  Glancing around he saw a small patch of mushrooms, and he leaned over for a closer look—he knew most of the local varieties, and some of them were quite tasty, even raw.

  This variety he recognized immediately, and he shuddered and didn’t touch them. They might be tasty, but nobody had ever lived long enough to say after eating them. Illuré had told him that this particular sort, with the thin white stem and the little cup at the bottom, held the most powerful poison known to humanity.

  He decided he wasn’t quite so hungry after all, and instead he took a drink from his water flask; surely, finding drinking water would be easy enough! If he kept on heading downhill, sooner or later he would find a stream.

  Far more important than food or water, he thought, was deciding where to go. He had talked about going all the way to Ethshar, but that was hundreds of miles away; no one from the village had ever been to Ethshar. Surely he wouldn’t really need to go that far!

  He looked about, considering.

  His home, he knew, was in the region of Srigmor, which had once been claimed by the Baronies of Sardiron. The claim had been abandoned long ago; the North Mines weren’t worth the trouble of working, when the mines of Tazmor and Aldagmor were so much richer and more accessible, and Srigmor had nothing else that a baron would consider worth the trouble of surviving a winter there.

  Sardiron was still there to the south, though.

  To the west lay unnamed, uninhabited forests; he did not want to go there. True, beyond them lay the seacoast, and there might be people there, but it would be a long, hard, dangerous journey, and he knew nothing about what he might find there.

  To the southwest the forests were said to end after about three days’ travel, opening out onto the plain of Aala. If Srigmor were part of any nation now, it was part of Aala.

  He had never heard of any magicians living in Aala, though. He tended to associate magicians with cities and castles, not with farms and villages, and Aala had no cities or castles.

  The Baronies of Sardiron it would be, then.

  His grandfather had visited Sardiron once, had made the long trip to the Council City itself, Sardiron of the Waters. If his grandfather could do it, so could he.

  He stood up, brushed off pine needles, and marched onward, now heading almost directly south.

  6.

  Streams were harder to find than he had thought, and not all were as clean as he liked; after the first day he made it a point to fill his flask at every opportunity, and to drink enough at each clear stream to leave himself feeling uncomfortably bloated.

  His food ran out at breakfast the third day, and he discovered edible mushrooms weren’t as common as he had expected—though the poisonous ones seemed plentiful enough—and that rabbits and squirrels and chipmunks were harder to catch than he had realized. Skinning and cooking them was also far more work than he had expected it to be; the hunters and cooks at home had made it look so easy!

  He almost broke his belt knife when it slipped while he was holding a dead squirrel on a large rock as he tried to gut it; he felt the shock in his wrist as the blade slipped and then snagged hard on a seam in the rock, and he held his breath, afraid that he had snapped off the tip.

  He hadn’t, but from then on he was more careful. The knife was an absolutely essential item now. He wished he had had the sense to borrow another, so as to have a spare.

  He had made good time the first two days, but after that much of his effort went to hunting, cooking, eating, and finding someplace safe to sleep. He dropped from seven or eight leagues a day to about four.

  He had expected to find villages, where he could ask for food and shelter. He didn’t. He knew that there were villages within three or four leagues of his own, and assumed there were more scattered all through Srigmor, but somehow he never managed to come across any. He saw distant smoke several times, but never managed to find its source.

  By the third night he was very tired indeed of sleeping on dead leaves or pine needles, wrapped in his one thin blanket. Even in the mild weather of late spring, the nights could be chilly—so chilly that only utter exhaustion let him sleep.

  Late on the afternoon of the fourth day, though, his luck finally changed. He saw a break in the forest cover ahead and turned toward it, since such openings were often made by fallen trees that rotted out and became home to various edible creatures.

  This opening, however, was not made by just one fallen tree. Rather, an entire line had been cleared away, and the surface below was completely free of debris. It was a long ribbon of hard-packed dirt edged by grass, with two shallow ruts running parallel for its entire length, and Wuller realized with a start that he was looking at a highway.

  His spirits soared; checking his bearings from the sun, he set out southward on the road, certain that he would find other people to talk to within minutes. In his eager confidence, he did not worry about finding supper.

  The minutes passed, and added up into hours, as the sun vanished below the trees to his right, while he encountered no one at all.

  At last, long after dark, he gave up. He found himself a clear spot by the roadside where he unpacked his blanket and curled up in it, still hungry.

  Despite his hunger, he slept.

  7.

  He was awakened by laughter. He sat up, startled and groggy, and looked about.

  An ox-drawn wagon was passing him by. A man and a woman sat on its front bench, leaning against each other as the woman giggled.

  “I like that, Okko!” she said. “Know any more?”

  “Sure,” the man replied. “Ever hear the one about the witch, the wainwright, and the Tazmorite? It seems that the three of them were on a raft floating down the river when the raft started to sink…”

  Wuller shook his head to get the bits of grass and leaves out of his hair, stood up, and called out, “Hai! Over here!”

  The man stopped his story and turned to see who had called, but did not stop his pair of oxen. The woman bent quickly down behind the bench, as if looking for something.

  “Wait a minute!” Wuller called.

  The man snorted. “Not likely!” he said. The wagon trundled on, heading north.

  With a quick glance at his unpacked belongings and another down the highway to the south, Wuller ran after the wagon, easily catching up t
o it.

  The driver still refused to stop, and the woman had sat up again, holding a cocked crossbow across her lap.

  “Look,” Wuller said as he walked alongside, “I’m lost and hungry and I need help. My village is being held hostage by a dragon, and I…”

  “Don’t tell me your troubles, boy,” the driver said. “I’ve got my own problems.”

  “But couldn’t you help me? I need to find a magician, so I can find this girl…” He realized he had left the sketch with his pack, back where he had slept. “If you could give me a ride to Sardiron…”

  The driver snorted again. “Sardiron! Boy, take a look which way we’re going! We’re heading for Srigmor to trade with the natives, we aren’t going back to Sardiron. And I’m no magician, and I don’t know anything about any magicians. We can’t help you, boy; sorry.”

  “But I just came down from Srigmor, and I don’t know my way…”

  The driver turned and stared at Wuller for a moment. The oxen plodded on.

  “You just came from Srigmor?” he asked.

  “Yes, I did, and…”

  “There’s a dragon there? Where? Which village?”

  A sudden rush of hope made Wuller’s feet light as he paced alongside. “It doesn’t really have a name—it’s not on the highway…”

  “Oh!” the man said, clearly relieved. “One of the back country villages, up in the hills?”

  “I guess so,” Wuller admitted.

  “Then it won’t bother me,” the driver said. “Sorry, it’s not my problem. You go on south and find your magician.” He turned his eyes back to the road, and said to the woman, “As I was saying, the raft starts to sink, and they’re too far from shore to swim. So the witch goes into a trance and works a spell to keep it afloat, and the wainwright gets out his tools and starts trying to patch the leaks and caulk it all up, but the Tazmorite just sits there…”

  Wuller stopped, and watched in dismay as the wagon rolled on northward.

  He had not expected a reaction like that.

  On the rare occasions when an outsider happened into his native village, he or she was invariably made to feel welcome, given the best food, drink, and shelter that the village could offer. He had expected to receive the same treatment in the outside world.