The House of the Stag

by Kage Baker

  No Riders came out of hiding to harm us. The whole world was silent, as though it were holding its breath. We could see the Riders’ halls through the trees, but only one or two thin trails of smoke drifted up from their fires. When we came to the ford at the river, the Star turned and told the free people to wait on their side. There they stayed, in the shadows of the trees, watching us.

  We waded across. As we came near the Riders’ halls, it seemed to me they smelled worse than ever they had before. And they were quiet, when at this hour of the morning there should have been the noise of wood being cut to feed their fires, and grain being pounded to make their bread. Only, as we came up to the walls, we heard a sound of wailing, and voices raised in anger.

  The Beloved walked straight for the wall of the slave pen. We went through, the wall parted like mist for us. Meli shook beside me, but this time she didn’t hesitate to go back into that place she remembered. The Child made her brave.

  There were gasps, hushed exclamations and sobs in the slave pen when we came through. All our chained people had been waiting, hardly able to believe Lendreth’s message. Now they surrounded us, trembling, pushing to get a glimpse of her. In that black place she shone like a star. She exhaled the fragrance of rain, and white flowers.

  The Beloved held her up. “She has come to you. She is your sister, your daughter, your mother. Let each one hold her.”

  The people passed her from hand to hand, stroking her cheek, kissing her brow. She did not fret or squirm or cry. I could see the grace around her like a silver veil, and a little of it lingered with each person who touched her, and they were illuminated. I saw gaunt mothers cradling their own thin children. I saw men worn down with age and sorrow, chain-scarred. I saw orphans, and widows, and people too far gone in fever to know whether they were dreaming this moment.

  Where she passed, they sat up whole and well. Their sores closed. Now Lendreth had his miracle! That vile wound in the earth filled with peace, and all the hundreds packed in there were healed.

  They did not ask, “When shall we be free?” or, “What shall we do now?” They had no questions for her. She was answer enough.

  At last we heard the doors being opened above, and the overseers came down the ramp and started shouting orders. I saw them lift their heads and sniff the air. They looked frightened. Their fear made them cruel. They struck out with whips, needlessly, as our people obeyed them and filed up the ramp.

  We walked with them. The overseers did not see us. They were shaking, sweating. We went out, and as we passed the door of the great hall, we heard lamentation. The smell was worse now, breathing out the door as from a sick mouth.

  The sun was just rising as we were led to the fields by the river. The sky was hot, blue, and the air was clear and already warm. No wind moved the yellow wheat that bowed its heads.

  The overseers roared, lashed out, and yet our people moved gentle and without resistance to their tasks, on their long chain lines. The men took sickles and cut the wheat; the woman followed a step behind, gathering it up, carrying baskets back and forth. The children went to and fro like mice, gleaning the grain that had been dropped. We worked beside them, as we had always done. The Beloved himself worked there, with the Child bound to his chest in a sling of white cloth.

  I heard the overseers speaking among themselves, though I didn’t know what they said. Fear was in their voices. One sat down in the shade of a tree and gasped. One waded into the river and stood there up to his neck. One wandered into the middle of a plowed field and began shouting at something only he could see. Others lay down. One vomited black stuff and lay still after that.

  Some people have said that the Saint brought them pestilence. Even as her breath revived us and gave us strength, they say, it spread death among the Riders. I don’t believe it. I think their dirtiness brought them down at last, as it would always have done, and her coming was our preservation against their death throes.

  The overseers died, one after another, and yet we continued in eerie calm and stillness. There was only the sound of the chains clinking, as the people worked; only the noise of the sickles cutting through the stalks.

  Then we heard the hoofbeats, and shrieks: not shrieking in fear but to frighten, the cry of the Riders as they hunted us. I looked and saw them coming around the great hall, urging on their mounts with cruel spurs. They were lords among the Riders, sick and drunk and mad, and they galloped toward us laughing and waving their knives.

  “Stand fast,” said the Star. “Be patient. They are dying men.” They came on. The children cried and tried to run in their shackles, and fell. In her sling, the little Saint twisted and struggled. She began to wail.

  As her cry rose, there was a sharp sound, the crack and ring of metal. Chains were breaking, falling off. I saw the shackles dropping from ankles and wrists, springing away. People stood free, but did not move because they could not believe they were free. The Riders came on, swinging their weapons, stabbing at us with spears, and some of us they wounded.

  I heard Lendreth shout, “You are slain if you disobey, and now you are slain if you obey! Defend yourselves!” He caught up a sickle and swung at the nearest Rider who careered close to him. The blade caught the beast in the throat. Blood shot out and drenched Lendreth’s white robe, as the beast fell. The Rider thrashed under the animal. Then one man caught up the chain he had worn, and with it he began to beat the Rider.

  I have seen horrors in my time, but never thought I would see my own people do such things as they did then. The killing spread like fire from that one spot in the field. I heard the harsh cries of my people, as they stabbed and battered the Riders to death. And the Star held up his hands, weeping; and the little Saint screamed and screamed.

  One by one, as the Riders died, it stopped. The people looked at their bloody hands; they dropped the bloody sickles, the chains all foul with blood and brains and hair. They looked around as though they were waking from a dream. Lendreth raised his hands and shouted, “We have won! We are free!”

  “Not free,” said my Beloved, sorrowful.

  On this day, in this field, your childhood ended

  and your innocence went down in a spray of blood.

  You gloried in your rage. You caught their pestilence,

  more deadly than any fever; for you will live to justify this thing

  and pride yourselves on what you did,

  forgetting what you were before. You will become your enemies.

  And so the future is set.

  Oh, little Child, what labors, what troubles wait for you.

  He did not speak to Lendreth, but walked across the field to where a child had been trampled and lay moaning in pain. He knelt by the boy and leaned down, setting the Child beside him. She touched the boy with her hand.

  The boy was healed at once; but as my Beloved knelt by him, a dying Rider leaned up with a sickle, and struck at him and cut his foot to the bone. We ran to our Star, Luma and Meli and I, and saw the Rider stone dead, still gripping the sickle. We pushed him away and the blood welled from the Beloved’s wound.

  Luma tore her robe, she staunched the bleeding, and Meli and I begged him to let the Child heal his injury. He only shook his head.

  Bind it up; but it will never heal.

  So I will walk to freedom with blood upon my feet,

  over the bodies of the dead; so doom fulfills at last.

  We carried him from the field, back across the river, and the free people met him lamenting for his hurt. We stayed with him, we cleaned the wound and bound it up; Lendreth took the disciples to the outlying houses and fields, to find any of our people who might be hiding. They returned, pale and shaking at the things they’d seen, leading the last few who had been freed.

  Lendreth was eager to atone for his lapse. He saw to it that bandages and salves were brought down from the mountain caves, and jars of water from the spring, for the river water was too fouled to drink. My Beloved lay quiet, holding the little Saint as though
for comfort. She slept.

  So we lay in the valley that night, without fear. For the first time I looked up and saw the stars from that place where our people had used to dance, so long ago. But the great trees were all dead, the dancing green a harrowed field. We were not the people we had been then. My Beloved had kept us alive, we had endured the chain and the lash in the innocence of our hearts; but he had lost us, even in the hour of his triumph.

  Sometime in the night, the roofs of the houses across the river caught fire. We watched them burn.

  When morning came, Lendreth knelt before my Beloved where he lay with us, and with downcast eyes asked what we were to do now. “We will leave this place,” said the Star.

  “Where are we to go?” asked Lendreth.

  “We will follow the river,” said the Star. “It will take us to the land beyond the mountains.”

  “Bright One, that is impossible,” said Lendreth, raising his eyes. “I have been that way. I traveled as far as the mountain’s wall and saw the river sink underground there. I tried to climb the wall, and failed. I searched for weeks and found no passes through, anywhere.”

  “You could not find them,” said the Star. “And I could not find them. But the Child has come, and the world is new. She will make a way for us.”

  Lendreth bowed his head. “Then with respect, let us take the path of the sun, downriver, and not”—he lowered his voice—”Cursed Gard’s way. I went that way too and saw nothing but cliffs of ice, and it is all climbing.”

  “The path of the sun, then,” said the Star. “For we drift downstream.”

  We walked out of the land where we had been born. We sang farewell to the mountains that had been our refuge and our prison wall. We sang farewell to the great tree under which the Beloved had told us stories. We sang farewell to the ruined places that had been ours, where the Riders now lay in all corruption.

  Lendreth had a litter made, and the poor lame Beloved sat in it and held the baby Saint, and we, his lovers, carried him. We put on our white robes and carried him proudly, we decked his litter with flowers.

  Singing, we walked out of that land, and as we went, the spirits of our dead went with us. Some were white birds. Some were floating shadows. I saw them pouring up into the sky from the blackened beams of the Riders’ houses, clouds and clouds of white butterflies, all who had died there in that black pit before the Child had come: their souls were released, and they followed us.

  It was a long journey. We traveled slowly. The country was harsh, treeless, full of stones, and in places the river cut through steep gorges and foamed white and fast, uneasy footing. Sometimes we had to stop for days while Lendreth went out with the disciples to find streams of clean water to drink, so we could fill our carry-gourds. There was little to eat.

  But the Beloved gave us heart. He told us the old stories, fresh and new now that they might be real, about the green warm forests on the other side of the mountains. He sang the old song “Oh, That We Were Stars,” and it was not a sad song anymore but a hopeful one. We dreamed of orchards, and gardens, and sweet meadows.

  He sang to the little Saint too, quietly, as we bore them along. It seemed to me that as he sang, something of him faded, and something of her brightened. He was in pain, for all we tried to ease him; the wound in his foot never did heal. His eyes dimmed, his voice grew faint.

  But the Child sat up, she looked about her, she seemed to understand what she saw and heard. Sometimes I saw them singing together, as he held her before him. She watched his face, she moved her little lips as he did, as though she knew she must learn the Songs. She was a solemn baby.

  We came at last to a high cold edge of land over which the river rushed. It fell far to break in white clouds below, where it shattered into a thousand streams and bled out across a marshy valley. At the other side of the valley the mountains rose steep and high, a sheer wall, no way through.

  “This is what I tried to tell you,” said Lendreth, coming close to speak quietly to the Star. “I went down there. I waded in muck like a heron through two moons, from one side of the valley to the other, and all I found was that the river drains away underneath. We cannot go farther.”

  The Star looked at him, sad. “We can. Have a little faith, Lendreth. The Child is with us, after all.”

  “But she’s only a baby,” said Lendreth.

  My Beloved shook his head. He rose on the crutch we had made for him, and hobbling to the high place, he called for the little Saint. Luma brought her, from where she had been crawling in the sand at the river’s edge. He brushed the sand from her, smiling, and set her in the crook of his arm. He bent down and whispered in her ear.

  Then he raised his head. He sang a note of command. The river was disturbed in its bed, the gray water drew away from its banks and bubbled strangely, and weaving patterns formed in the torrent where it dropped over.

  “You see, Lendreth? I am not strong enough. Yet, watch!” The beloved took the little girl’s hand in his own, holding it up. He looked into her eyes and sang the note, softly. She opened her mouth and sang too, the same note, sustained. Their voices grew louder. He turned with her and looked out at the mountain wall.

  Fools born since, who were not there, say they don’t believe what happened next. They say we must have gone down and found some narrow hidden passage that led out, after long searching. That was not how it was. If you had been there as I was, you would never in your life forget.

  I tell you the water trembled and rose in its banks, it raised its white neck up from the torrent and hung in the air, like a glass-bodied serpent. The wide water on the plain below drew together, closed like the fan of a bird’s tail and pulled upward. Twisting and glittering in the sun, the water shot out with all its gathered force. It hurtled across the valley in midsky, roaring.

  And the river struck the mountain so the mountain rang to its root. Chattering and gobbling, licking, hog greedy, it ate into the mountain, and stones and mud flew out and flowed down. Inward it bored and tunneled, making our way for us.

  We lifted our hands and shouted, so heartened by this miracle after so many bitter days of traveling through bitter lands. My Beloved stood straight and motionless with the Child on his arm, and she never struggled, never moved to draw her hand from his, but watched steadily as the water thundered out across the void. The mountain was hidden in rainbows.

  When the river had pierced through at last, and in sudden silence the rainbows vanished, only then did the Star sway where he stood. He called for us to come take the Child. Meli caught her as he staggered back, and Luma and I caught him as he fell.

  The river fell too. It rained from the air and once more ran in its bed, hiding the wet rocks below in new mist. But we could see, now, the black cavern opened in the flank of the far mountain wall.

  My Beloved did not move or speak, sick-pale, he did not open his eyes. Weeping we laid him in his litter, and the Child wept too. We set her beside him. He revived enough to put his arm about her. In a faint voice he told us to hurry. Lendreth shouted for us to follow no more than two abreast, and he led us down the steep slope and so along the edge of the marsh, the way he knew.

  Half that day it took us, threading through perilous ways of black mud, but we came at last to the tunnel through the mountain and saw light at its distant end. We hurried through wet and echoing darkness, over rocks, splashing through pools of water, ducking under dripping gnarled roots.

  It was just evening when we stepped out on the wet grass on the other side of the mountains. We looked down into a fair green land of forests, the place of our dreams. A new moon hung low in the sky, and one star.

  Sometimes I dream we are all back there, in the place we came through, and my Beloved is strong and sound, as he was in the old days. He sits under a great tree and he tells us stories, just as he used to, and jokes, and we love one another in the old way under the glowing lamps of the stars. Meli is happy, laughing. In my dream, he lies down with me in the sweet grass and del
ights me again. But now and again my dream ends badly, for I look up and see Lendreth there, shaking his head in disgust at us….

  The truth was nothing like my dream. The Star lay unconscious many hours. In the strong light of that place we saw that he looked worn and old, suddenly. The Child sat beside him, playing in the grass. Now and again she would crawl close and pat his sleeping face, and look questioningly at us.

  When the Beloved woke at last, we tried to get him to take food, broths to bring back strength, such as we used to feed those newly rescued from the slave pits. He supped a little, but had no appetite. Lendreth reproached him, telling him it would be a shame if he couldn’t enjoy our freedom for sickness.

  “I am not ill, Lendreth,” said the Star. “I am used up. My time is past. You have had an imperfect teacher, but she who has come is without imperfection. The time to come is her time.”

  We all wept, then, and begged him not to return to the earth. He smiled and said he would remain awhile yet, for the Child was still too little to lead us.

  When he was strong enough, we put him in the litter and we traveled on, descending the slopes into the green trees. It was hot there. The air was clear and dry, with a glitter like crystal, even under the green shade canopy. Some of our people took off their garments and never put them on again, the air was so pleasant.

  Under the trees we found the river, where it emerged from the mountain’s root. We followed its bank, as we had done before. We found fruit trees, and many strange flowers. The Child ate gladly of the berries we brought her in a rolled leaf, filling her little fists and staining her mouth.

  Months, we traveled. Our people became strong, even the children born in the pit put on flesh and laughed. And then we learned we were not alone in this fair country.

  At a place where the river ran through a rock gorge, we saw a wonder: a high hill of rock, full of strange colors, on the edge of the water. Steps were cut into the rock, rising from the little beach. We were frightened. Even Lendreth turned to the Star with a pale face, thinking we had come to some place where Riders were.