The House of the Stag

by Kage Baker

  “Greet you, green men,” he said. “We come see for Green Witch Lady, got big present for him. You say us where he is?”

  One or two of the disciples giggled, if nervously. The Saint looked into the man’s eyes, read his language there, and in his own tongue replied, “I am the Mother of my people. Am I the one you seek?”

  The man’s eyes widened. He dropped to his knees, as did the other. “Oh, Goddess, forgive my presumption. I meant no disrespect.”

  “I am not a goddess,” said the Saint, smiling at him.

  “You look like one,” he said fervently. “You really do. You have the most beautiful breasts I’ve ever seen in my life!” He stopped, appalled at what he’d just said. “I mean—I meant to say—great lady, I am Trenk Brickmold and I have been sent from the Trades Guild of Karkateen with a token of our goodwill and earnest desire to establish a bond of friendship. Behold.”

  Nothing happened. He nudged his companion, who held the chest. The companion blurted, “Lady, I’ll give you anything, I’ll sell everything I own and give you a house and—and be your servant for life, if you’ll only lie down with me once!” He began to weep.

  “Idiot!” Mr. Brickmold turned and boxed his ear. He tried to grab the chest away to open it, but the companion pulled it back and opened it himself.

  “There,” he said, sobbing. “It’s nothing as lovely as you are. Oh, Lady, have pity on me.”

  It was a bottle of cut crystal, nested in green silk, and full of some golden fluid.

  “Oil of pressed flowers, imported from the islands, so concentrated the perfume lasts a week on the skin,” explained Mr. Brickmold. “You could buy a town house with what this cost. And the crystal’s from Salesh, Cutgarnet’s studio. Finest made. Hai! Hinge, for gods’ sake, get a grip on yourself, you’re making us look fools!”

  “What are they saying?” Seni asked.

  “They have brought us a present,” the Saint replied.

  “That’s nice,” said Seni doubtfully.

  “I thank you for your gift,” said the Saint to the red men. She took the chest from Mr. Hinge, who stared into her eyes. She looked into them, seeing straightforward and desperate lust and an honest soul. She drew back a little at the novelty. “Please come and sit in the shade and have a cup of water.”

  “Thank you, Lady.” Mr. Brickmold grabbed Mr. Hinge’s arm. “My friend here will stay with the boat.”

  Mr. Brickmold was seated in the apple bower and presented with a cup of water, and a cup was sent out to Mr. Hinge. Mr. Brickmold drained his cup in one long swallow and, effortfully keeping his eyes raised above the Saint’s breasts, said, “Thank you. The Trade Guilds of Karkateen hope you enjoy your gift and assure you we wish to continue as trading partners for the foreseeable future. Your medicines have saved uncounted lives in the fever season.”

  “That pleases me,” said the Saint, smiling.

  He caught his breath at her smile and leaned forward involuntarily; then pulled back, coughed, and stammered on, “We are happy to please you, Lady. Now, first matter: I speak again on behalf of the Trade Guild of Karkateen when I implore your aid against the Dark Lord.”

  “Who is the Dark Lord?”

  “Oh, you must have heard of him! The Master of the Mountain? Keeps a fortress up on Black Mountain, with his demon army? Comes down and preys on the trade caravans. Fights with two swords. He’s a sorcerer too, the most powerful one there is. Disguises himself as one of us and comes down bold as brass to ravish our women, once or twice a week, they say.

  “We thought, with your people being the next thing to demons and all, and you having mystic powers as well, there might be something you can do about him for us.”

  “I don’t know what I can do, but I will look into the matter,” said the Saint. “In the meantime I should stay away from the places he inhabits.”

  “Bless you, Lady,” said Mr. Brickmold. “He’s ruining our insurance firms, driving the rates up something terrible.

  “Now. Second matter. I speak on behalf of Brickmold Physic, which is to say my family firm. We have been compounding cures for all ills for seven generations now, with the best intentions you may be sure, but until you graciously sent us your miracle herbs, we hadn’t really found any that actually worked. Now what we were thinking was, we’d like to take your likeness and put it on our bottles, so as to make it plain that ours is the real, authentic Yendri Potion.”

  “My likeness?”

  “Yes, Lady. By way of an endorsement, see?” Mr. Brickmold opened a pouch at his belt and drew out a small tablet and a stylus. “So if I could just make a picture of you here and now, we’d consider it a done deal, eh? And of course we’d pay you a percentage on each bottle sold.”

  “Sold?” The Saint knit her brows. “Do you sell the fever cure?”

  “Why, Lady, it sells like water in the desert,” said Mr. Brickmold jovially.

  “But I meant for the medicines to be given to your people, asking nothing in return.”

  Mr. Brickmold shrank somewhat at her expression. “Well—that is to say—your Mr. Lenderett, he always wants trade in steel and glass and what have you—and then it costs us to make the bottles, you know, and we have to pay our workers—so, yes, we make it available to the public for a modest fee.”

  She looked into his eyes. He gulped, as the secrets of his soul appeared, blazoned large in his sight and hers too. The Saint was so diverted by them she nearly lost the edge of her wrath, but hawklike seized the essential statement and sprang away with it. “So Lendreth is selling you the herbs?”

  “More like trading for them, Lady, but, well, yes.”

  “If I sent you seeds and roots at no cost, and some of my disciples to show you how to grow your own herbs, would you give the medicines freely to your people?”

  Mr. Brickmold was dazzled. “Lady, you are generous as well as exquisite—only—well, we still have to stay in business, you see? The staff won’t work for no wages.”

  The Saint knew this was true, having looked into his soul. She thought quickly. “I will have the fever cure given away free, for lives depend on it, and life is not a commodity to be bought and sold. But herbs have other uses. Inessential ones. Flavorings in food and drink. Scents. Soaps.”

  “Soaps as in, what you wash your face and hair with?” said Mr. Brickmold, attentive.

  “Yes.”

  “What you wash your face and hair with? Personally?”

  “Yes.”

  “Haiiiii,” exclaimed Mr. Brickmold, but quietly. A faraway look had come into his eyes. “Your personal beauty-care product. And your likeness on the bottle. Oh, yes. Oh, we won’t be able to make it fast enough.”

  “And this you may sell to your people, since it is only a vanity. In return for which I require you to make the fever cure available freely to all.”

  “We’ll give it away on street corners,” said Mr. Brickmold with tears standing in his eyes. “I swear by all the gods.”

  “Then we have an agreement.”

  The Saint consented to sit for her portrait. When the red men had gone back across the lake, she went to her bower and wrote a stiff epistle to Lendreth.

  A month later he presented himself at the island, to explain.

  “What will you explain, Lendreth?” asked the Saint, and he had to look away from the light in her eyes.

  “That I have lived among these people, and I understand them,” he said. “They are mercenary. What is offered at no price, they view with suspicion. A thing must cost money to have value, in their world. If I had not demanded goods in trade, they would have thrown away your gifts as worthless.”

  “And why did you never speak of this before, even if it were true?”

  “I thought to make it plain to you in a gradual way. In any case, what I did, I did for our people.”

  “That they might have vanities? Pleasant things they had easily lived without, before you brought them? That your Mowers might buy themselves swords and magnify their of
fense? My dragonfly pitcher and cups are pretty, but what did they cost some mother whose children were sick?”

  “And what should we do, then?” said Lendreth, raising his voice. “Give away all we have, and all we know, to help strangers?”

  “Yes! Though they are not strangers now. For better or for worse, we are neighbors. Look at me, Lendreth, and dare to tell me the Beloved would not have said the same.”

  Lendreth would not meet her eyes, but said with some heat, “The Beloved was only a man. I saw his imperfections. You never really knew him, or you’d know.”

  “I knew him better than you did.”

  “Child!” Seni was shouting from the boat landing. “Child, come quickly! Here are wounded men!”

  They were not wounded, as it turned out. They were paralyzed.

  Eight or nine of the Mowers were borne on litters by their grim-faced brethren. They were frozen in postures of attack, though their faces were mobile enough; tears streamed from their eyes and they lamented constantly, as they were rowed to the island one by one.

  “What happened?” The Saint knelt by the first to be brought ashore. He was one of their senior officers.

  “Oh, oh, don’t drop me—don’t drop me! I’m frozen, I’ll break! Child, Mother, help me—please, the ice burns—”

  “There is no ice,” she said, examining him. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Cursed Gard is alive!” he told her, rolling his eyes wildly. “He did this to us!”

  Seni cried out in horror, putting her hands to her face. The Saint, having tugged experimentally at the man’s upthrust arm and found its sinews rigid, leaned down and looked into his eyes. She saw the spell there clearly enough, the illusion that fed into his fear and expectations and held him captive.

  “I’m going to heal you now,” she said, and broke the illusion. He collapsed at once, screaming in pain as his muscles released. “Bring the others across!” she ordered, and the boat put out immediately. “What do you mean, Cursed Gard?”

  “You never knew him,” said the Mower, writhing on his litter. “But I remember him, I was a child, I saw what happened that day when he killed Blessed Ranwyr and the Beloved cursed him! I saw him!”

  “You must have been mistaken,” said the Saint patiently. “Cursed Gard went into the snows and was lost.”

  “I tell you it was he! He told us so, himself!” The man went into spasms, biting his tongue. She placed her hand on his brow and willed him to relax, and he sagged back weeping.

  “Carry him into the bowers for the sick,” she told his bearers, and rose to watch the next man being rowed across.

  Beside her, Lendreth spoke with barely concealed triumph. “If they had had swords with which to defend themselves, they had not come to harm.”

  “They have come to no real harm,” she said, turning to regard him. “And you ought to be ashamed of yourself for gloating like this.”

  “I told you we had enemies,” he insisted. “You did not foresee this, it would seem.”

  When the last of the Mowers had been unensorcelled, when they had been given water and calmatives, the Saint got the following story out of them:

  They had gone far in their patrols, even to the red road that ran near the edge of the northern wood, faithfully seeking any harm that might come near their people. As they watched from the shadows, a big and black-a-vised man came walking along the road. He was dressed in garments such as the Children of the Sun wore, carrying a jar of wine under one arm.

  He did not appear to be armed, and they had let him pass without challenge; but he turned his head and saw them, though they were artfully concealed and would certainly have been invisible to the Children of the Sun. He stared at them a long moment, and then, in their own tongue, addressed them.

  “Why, Earthborn, it has been a long time since I saw the like of you!”

  They had stepped forth then, asking how he had seen them and known them. He had replied that he used to live among them, but long ago. “Tell me,” he said, “how it was the Star made such a hole in the mountain wall? For I never thought he had power to do such things.”

  And that had been when Falway, the senior officer, recognized him and cried out that it was Cursed Gard. At which the man had scowled at them in a terrifying manner. “Cursed indeed, and banished too,” he had said. “And unforgiven still, I see.”

  Whereupon one young Mower had cried out that Blessed Ranwyr’s blood still cried from the earth for revenge. “Fool,” said Cursed Gard, “I never shed his blood, though certainly I killed my brother. Learn the truth before you threaten me.”

  The Mowers had said then that they would do more than threaten. They circled him, meaning to fight him in the way they had learned, kicking and striking with the hands. Some loaded stones into their slings, and others drew out blowpipes with which to shoot darts at him.

  Before they could assail him in any way, however, Cursed Gard had raised his hand and said a Word, and they had frozen where they stood. Nor was this all: from up and down the road demons in black armor came, horrible to see, and they ran at once and threatened the Mowers with spears.

  The demons rudely searched them then, taking from them everything of value.

  When Cursed Gard saw the gold cloak-brooches they had worn, which bore the emblem for the Mowers, he taunted them. “So you are a wealthy people now. So you are a fierce people, with slings and poisoned darts for your enemies. You are not the Earthborn I knew.”

  And a horrible demon had asked Cursed Gard whether he would like all the prisoners’ throats slit. Cursed Gard had laughed scornfully and said it would be punishment enough to leave them there, in their shame.

  “Besides,” he had said, “they may carry my message back to their people. Listen well, fools: I am honored that you kept my name alive, in your curses. I am called the Master of the Mountain now, when I am being cursed.

  “While I thought you still meek and poor, I did not trouble you; but now that I find you so proud and so rich, you may expect to see me again.”

  So saying, he had gone his way and left them, and his demons had vanished. There the Mowers had remained, until their brothers-in-arms had come out to see what had become of them.

  If they had expected sympathy from their Saint, they were to be disappointed. She called them together, when they were recovered, and reproached them in sorrow. She pointed out that this had come of their eagerness to do violence; that Cursed Gard, who had heretofore ignored her people, would now fix his baleful attention on them; that the Star himself had seen fit only to banish Cursed Gard, so there had been no excuse for confronting him when he had, after all, been doing no harm to anyone.

  One of the Mowers was unwise enough to murmur, where she could hear him, that if they had been permitted to carry swords, the affair might have turned out differently.

  “Indeed it would have,” she said, looking him in the eye with white wrath. “You would have all died. If he could freeze you with a Word, what would blades have done but made him angrier than he was?”

  The Saint was to learn, within the month, that Cursed Gard was a man of his word. She was at her writing platform when the messenger came.

  “Mother.” The man knelt and bowed his head. “I have come from the apple orchards in the north, and my name is Deluvwyr. Your weeping children implore you for aid.”

  Sighing, she blessed him, and he rose. “Tell me everything,” she said.

  “Cursed Gard came down and raided us. We were working in the orchard when he came out of the woods and strode between the trees, with an army of demons, hideous to behold. We attacked him with our pruning hooks. He waved his hand and we were blown back like leaves. Our pruning hooks were broken. His demons laughed at us. We could not stop them coming into our village.”

  “Village?”

  “We live in houses in a meadow, Mother, with a fence of palings around. The Trevani Lendreth suggested it, when he visited us, and we have found it more convenient for our work. The anim
als are kept out of the apple storehouse.”

  “And did your fence of palings keep out Cursed Gard?”

  “No, Mother.” Deluvwyr lowered his eyes. “He extended his hand again, and the palings flew apart like straws. He marched into the center and stood by the fire, and asked what cheer we had to welcome a tired traveler. Those of the men who had not been in the orchard took quarterstaves and went to attack Cursed Gard, and the quarterstaves might have been straws too, for all the harm they did him. When our men lay groaning on the earth, Cursed Gard rubbed his hands together and said, ‘My lads, these folk don’t know how to answer politely. Just look about and see what entertainment there is in this fine village.’ “

  “What happened then?” said the Saint.

  “Our trevani came forth to stop him and struck him with her staff. I saw the power flowing off it like water, but Cursed Gard spoke a Word and the staff broke, and the trevani fell down unconscious. Demons ringed us round with their spears.

  “Other demons he sent into the houses, to see what was there. They found the storehouse we had filled to trade with the Children of the Sun and brought out the bags of pearls we had collected, and the lacquer-ware, and the honey, and the jars of cider. They broke the jars open and drank. They took all the cider we had stored and became drunk. Cursed Gard laughed and said, ‘Where are your boys in green cloaks? They must be sick; I know they are not afraid to come out and fight me for your sakes.’

  “We thought he would go then, but worse was to come; for some of his men had found our drums and our flutes and lyres, and they cried, ‘Let’s have music!’ And then he had his demons take the mothers and children and the old people and shut them in the storehouse. The young women he then made to dance, as the demons played. And there were demonesses among his people, and they made the young men to dance also. And then they made them drink of the cider too, and then … there was ravishment.”

  “Were any killed or wounded?” said the Saint. Deluvwyr looked at the ground and in a small voice said that none had been killed or wounded.