"Aye, no wonder they've got themselves red hair," said Ils thickly, shading her eyes. "Mine's like to catch flame any minute!"
"You should go further south yet," said Kermorvan with a grim smile, "for there the brilliance of the sun turns the soil hard and brown and parched, and yellows the grass even as it grows. And beyond that there are terrible scorched deserts of stone and sand, a barrier no man may pass, it is said. Sure it is that many have died trying to reach the far south, Brasayhal the Lesser."
"Strange!" smiled Elof. "Could they not simply sail there?"
Kermorvan shook his head. "At sea they call that region Niarad's Oven. The wind will drive ships there, only to vanish and leave them hanging becalmed, while their water runs out and their crews die terribly of thirst. None care now to risk that!"
Elof shuddered. "I cannot blame them. But who is this Niarad they name so often?"
"Do you not know?" exclaimed Kermorvan. "But of course, you would not. Well…"He paused, and looked back at the waves washing far below. "He is a power, a great power by sea. You might perhaps call him a cousin of your friend the Raven." Ils shook her head decisively. "We hold otherwise, that they are of very different kinds and orders, those two! For one thing, Niarad is said to be much more ancient than Raven, being more akin to the wilder powers like Tapiau. For another, Raven is a wanderer, but Niarad's realm is the sea alone; it is said he is the sea, for he dwells always within it and seldom takes anymore bodily form, having little favor for any life beyond its bounds."
"Yet it is told that he appeared in man's form at the founding of our great cities!" said Kermorvan sharply. "And he is revered among us by many statues in that shape, and no other." Ils shrugged. "Perhaps he did. Who can be sure, with the powers? Their nature is not yours or ours, their purposes seldom clear. Happy those who can avoid getting entangled in them."
"But that does not seem to be my fate," said Elof. And through the remainder of the climb he thought long and hard about that voice, and the name only he had heard.
But when at last they came to the summit he forgot it in an instant. At first concern drove it from his mind. Kermorvan had been looking around anxiously with a look of dawning recognition on his face, and abruptly he ran forward, his long hunter's stride carrying him up the hill well ahead of the others. And when he reached the crest, and looked out into the distance beyond, they saw him clench his fists and raise them to the skies, and shout something in a terrible voice. Startled and alarmed, they struggled and panted up the steep grassy slope to join him. He turned to face them as Elof crested the rise. "Damn that seabeast and all its kind to death and the Ice eternal! We're still north of the hills!" He turned, and stopped dead. "And look—by the Gates of Kerys, look—"
But Elof hardly heard him, for from here he could see beyond these grassy hills, and immediately he was lost in wonder at the lands that were spread out before him.
The Northlands had their richness also, and he had seen much of them in his roamings. But the north, even at its green best, still looked wild. The land beyond the hills was something he had never before seen, a country shaped in its wholeness by man. It was a land of little rivers, each a sparkling silver thread running through its own broad plain between long low hillsides. The plains were a patchwork of fields, green and brown and yellow, the hill slopes strung with terraced gardens and vineyards, or little clumps of well-tended woodland. Here and there in the nearer valleys he could almost make out groups of buildings that might be large estates or very small villages, never anything much larger. It looked intensely inhabited, that land; he felt it ought somehow to be quivering with the activity of the thousands of careful hands it must have taken to make and keep it that way. It was a vision of mastery, of prosperity, of a people who had turned all that lives and grows to serve them. Even the grass he stood among on this uncared-for hill seemed more regular, more even than it would be in the north. Nowhere did he see a trace of raw nature untamed, till he at last tore his eyes away from the amazing vista, to look down the steep slopes below into the deep dale that opened at his feet.
All along this lay a long arm of forest, like a dark mantle; of all he saw, it alone looked stern, wild, unmastered, a tangle of warring growth. It was taller than any woodlands of the cold northern realms, though it had no greater majesty. But as the dale neared the southern coast it diminished and grew shallower, and there at the last, within sight of the sea, the dark wall of the trees dwindled also, and stretched no further.
"It is fair, this Southland of yours," said Elof softly, and Ils, standing beside him, nodded agreement.
"Fair, aye, a noble stem! But how fares the flower?" Kermorvan's clear voice trembled. He took Elof by the shoulders, and twisted him round to look toward the southern coast. "See there! Look upon Kerbryhaine-in-Bryhaine, Kerbryhaine the City, the Fair!" His voice fell, almost to a whisper in the wind. "And look well, for you may never see more. We are come too late."
And Elof looked, in deep wonder and delight, upon the mightiest work of man that he had ever seen. At this far distance, brilliant in the hazy light, it might have been some minute toy or trinket he had shaped on his smallest anvil, carved out in his finest vise, some delicate brooch of polished gray-green rings, inlaid with fine flecks of ivory and topped at its rising heart with bronze and gold, tipped with silver at the water's edge. But now the silver seemed tarnished, and there was a darkness in the air, a somber reek that hung over the lands around like the smoke of many great fires.
"Battle is joined!" whispered Kermorvan, almost voiceless with anguish. "And I not with them!"
"Bear up!" said Ils sympathetically. "We'll get there soon enough…"
"Soon enough?" cried Kermorvan, in a frenzy. "If that boat had lasted we would have been there in only a day or two more! Now we have a week's march or worse!"
"Surely not!" exclaimed Ils. "It cannot be much above twelve leagues' distant, this great burg of yours, and over such fat easy country, for the most part! Cannot such hard doers as we are traverse that in three days?"
"Of course!" said Elof. "The coast curves out, we would have had to sail a long way round. But by land we need not follow it, we can go straight as the arrow flies. Once through that forest, what else—"
"We cannot go through that forest!" said Kermorvan in black anger, and sat down heavily in the grass. "We dare not!"
Elof stared down at his friend. "What's this? Dare not? The man who cut down half an Ekwesh war crew single-handed? Who took on a whole pack of snow-trolls, and tried to elbow a hunting whale aside?"
"Aye, and was ready to face down a dragon!" chimed in Ils. "Frightened of a few moldy trees, even to save his own city?"
Kermorvan's mouth twisted in disgust. "I am not afraid, as you mean it! Save of failure! Would you leap down a precipice to save going around it? Those are no ordinary trees. What you see below you there stretches back unbroken to the end of your mountains, Ils, and through the lands there, out to the east."
Ils sucked in her breath. "Part of the Great Forest, then? I had heard it ran still almost to the sea, but I did not know it was here."
"Aye, the Forest, Tapiau'la-an-Aithen, the black heart of the whole land. And we would be doing scant service to any of our homelands, north, south, or underground, if we vanished, never to appear again."
"Vanished?" said Elof.
"Indeed, and without trace. So do all who stray over the fences of that shadowy realm. Do they not keep the tales of the Tree Realm, even, in the north?"
"Some," said Elof. "But surely, here…"
Kermorvan shook his head. "Once it was much larger, spreading some way down all the valleys you saw southward, and those margins of it were less shadowed than the rest. In the days of our strength, when we had suffered too much loss from that forest, my people rose against it as they would against an invader or oppressor, and cleared it back for many a league. But this glen we could never clear, and to this day we shun it, save for a few foolhardy ones. And they never trespass more than once."
"They never return from the first." Ils sniffed disdainfully. "This is a foolishness, my lads. The duergar walk at need in the margins of the Great Forest itself. Oh, it has its perils in plenty, yes. What part of Tapiau's realm would not? But nothing so absolute, so final, that we could not venture it—not even the Children of Tapiau. I can tell you now, I'd sooner risk crossing this little valley than see my homeland fall to the maneaters."
"So you think me fool and coward that I dare not?" said Kermorvan bitterly.
She rested a plump hand on his arm. "I think those who vanished, Kermorvan, were not such men as you. Or you, Elof. If the whales knew your name, perhaps the trees will know it too."
Kermorvan visibly gathered himself together. He sat for a moment, hugging his knees and glaring out at the dark fumes that rose around his home. He shivered, for all the warmth of the sun. "So you both would venture it, for a land that is not your own?"
"You know what my true concern is," said Elof, and he, too, looked out to sea as once he had, in years that were past. "But if I wait till your city is overwhelmed, it will fail anyway. And other sothrans than you have been my friends. For them, for you, for my quest, yes, I would risk it." Ils chuckled. "That master of yours all but tipped An-sker and me into a crevasse like the others. That's one score to settle, beside all else with the Ice he serves. Aye, I'll risk it."
Kermorvan gave a calm smile, as one whose troubles have been suddenly settled, and he sprang lightly to his feet. "Then I cannot honorably do any less! Come! A river runs before the forest fence, we shall eat and drink there, and spy out our best road through. Come along! What do you stay for?" And he strode purposefully away down the slope.
Ils grinned at Elof, but he found it hard to return her amusement. Fear and courage were things he must come face to face with, soon enough, and he marveled at how little he had understood them. On the Ekwesh ship and often since he had seen Kermorvan do bold deeds, and thought him simply unafraid, as little aware of perils as Elof himself might be of forgeburns in the heat of some great labor. Elof had admired that, but felt it was something inhuman, remote, nothing he could ever hope to imitate. But here, now Kermorvan had shown his fear. He had balked at what was evidently the worst peril he knew, a fear he had learned from childhood, and still he was walking, quite calmly as it appeared, into the shadow of it. How had he achieved that? Perhaps by finding—no, by creating a greater fear than that of the forest, the fear of dishonor. Elof sighed. What greater fear could he find in himself than of confronting his old master, armed with the very fruit and prize of Elof s own worst deed? In turning it against him, the Mastersmith, whatever ill he intended, would be doing no more than justice. What could he fear more than that?
The dark peaks of the trees seemed to thrust up at them from below. The travelers came level with them long before they had reached the valley floor, marveling at their great height, and the thickness of the roof of foliage they spread across the valley. "You could almost walk over that!" exclaimed Ils.
"It would be hardly less safe," said Kermorvan drily. By then, though it was yet early afternoon, the sun was dipping behind the steep valley walls, and an ancient gloom seemed to drape itself like a shadow-veil around the forest. To the bare lower tree trunks it clung, muffling sound, baffling the sight. Only at the margins did the trees glow light green in the sunlight; the bulk of the forest reared behind them like a wall of darkness. But as they stopped to eat under the shade of the outmost trees, rows of leaning alders along the riverside, it appeared quiet and peaceful enough. "And it cannot be very far through, at this point!" said Elof encouragingly, as they finished their scanty meal. He stooped to fill their leather waterbottles from the river as it came tumbling down the slope beside them, clear and shallow, to fall rumbling into its own deep-cut channel between the roots of tall firs like gateposts. Kermorvan, chewing an end of smoked meat, said nothing. "A few miles at most," Elof added. "And beyond that an easy way through the hills, by the look of it. We should be out by nightfall."
"If our way is straight," said Kermorvan, and rose. "Well, we have naught to gain by delay. Are we all prepared? Very well then. But Kerys! If it were not the only way…" And turning, he plunged between the alders into the gloom of the forest as a diver into deep water, and to the others, only a little way behind, he was as swiftly swallowed up.
Hastily they scrambled after him, and found the undergrowth tangling thick about them, sword ferns, wood ferns, five-finger ferns, tall horsetails gaudily ringed red and brown and green, tangled bushes of huckleberry, clumps of iris and many others they did not recognize. Low branches of hazel, maple and mountain lilac swept at their faces. But Kermorvan, only a few steps ahead, was gliding between them with the ease of great woodcraft, and by following him they found the clearer ways. Ils had least trouble of all, being the shortest, but Elof, wiping pollen from streaming eyes, tugged at his sword, yearning to hack his way clear; he remembered, though, the woodcraft he had learned from Kermorvan, and forbore. No need to make his trail any easier to follow, if followers there might be. He became acutely aware that the ground was sloping away beneath them, the walls of the dale turning steeply downward once more, and when he looked back the forest edge was high above his head, the afternoon light shining through it as over a high wall, split into smoky beams among the tree trunks. "There must be deep places in here where the sun never reaches, where no light ever shines!" He spoke softly, and shivered a little. Even the wind among the leaves seemed high overhead, and below here it was strangely still.
"Indeed there must!" laughed Ils. "And what would you do if you had not got one of the duergar with you, then? Eh? My eyes feel eased as they have not done since I was carried off by you squint-eyed men! In this fine shade I can see patterns on plant and stone that you cannot. I can see the small things as they stir among the leaves. The very fungi on the rotting wood glow with light for me to see by! Now say, have I not the better of you strong swordsmen?"
"You always had!" chuckled Elof. He was suddenly almost achingly glad she was here, with her sardonic good cheer and stonelike steadiness. In a rush of sudden affection he reached out and hugged her. She drove a bunched fist into his diaphragm, not especially hard.
"Hands off, you smelly young human! At least till you've had a bath in something better than seawater!"
He laughed, unoffended. They had been friends since their first day together in Ansker's forge. He had always found it easy to like Ils, to forget she was of a different, alien kind, one that held men in no great esteem, and that she was undoubtedly far older in years than he. Now, though, she had reminded him of that, in a roundabout, half-joking way. He did not mind, but nor, then, did he stop to think she might have been reminding herself.
Kermorvan's harsh whisper broke in on them. "Cease, you two! Are you on a country stroll?" They knew he was right, and fell silent. There were sounds in the forest they should be paying attention to, the hollow music of tumbling water, the rush of swaying branches, the rustle of leaf mold and snap of twigs on the forest floor, the patter and scurry of small things among them, the cries of birds. It was in these, in their sudden change or cessation, that they might find their only warnings of trouble, if trouble there came.
Elof listened then, and as he listened he became more and more aware of the size of the forest. The sounds of it seemed to stretch away into infinity, to drown any faint murmur from the world outside. A difficult patch of bush brought him breathless among a stand of redwood trunks; he leaned for a moment on a wide bole, looked upward and stood rigid with amazement. Up they soared over him, those ragged trunks, to an immense height, as if they were pillars supporting the sky. They were even taller, growing from this steep slope, than they had looked from the hillside. The smallest of them was as large as the largest in the northern forests he knew, and they grew closer together. The thick branches bristled out from the upper trunks to link and mesh into a roof so thick t
hat only a shifting dapple of light fell to the damp floor beneath, and in some places less than that. Elof understood the tangle of growth he saw around him, plant climbing upon plant, all clustering like frantic children around the boles of the high trees, redwoods chiefly, but with firs and cypresses among them almost as tall. It was all a struggle toward the sun, a slow fierce war of jostling growth whose intensity, once perceived, was almost alarming. It was like walking among statues in attitudes of battle, and seeing blood flow. The forest seemed suddenly a less peaceful place, full of jealous, malign vitality, and he scurried on to keep up with the others, feeling he understood Ker-morvan a little better now.
More time passed, another half-hour perhaps, and they were still going downhill. The light overhead seemed dimmer and grayer, the trees if anything even taller and more overpowering. Ils glared into the dimness. "How far down does this dale go? I cannot even see the further slope yet!"
Kermorvan nodded. "We will not be through before nightfall, I fear, Elof-"
But Elof gestured him to silence, and they stood very still. The birds had fallen almost silent. The sound of rushing water was louder now below them, but there was another very similar note above it, a new sound of rushing and pattering and splashing. Kermorvan looked up, and water dripped down upon his face. "Rain!" he said. "Well, we have shelter of a kind down here, no one place better than another. As well to press on." So they donned their cloaks, pulled their hoods out to shield their faces and walked on. The wind rocked the treetops and drove last autumn's skeletal leaves dancing across the forest floor, but the mighty branches above them scarcely stirred. The smell of the mold grew richer, stronger, heavier, almost stupefying. The ceiling of foliage did indeed stop the rain, but only to pass it on as slower, heavier drops, or a haze of spray which worked its way in everywhere. They were soaked in minutes, and deaf to everything save the sharp relentless pattering, a sound which lulled the mind and numbed it. Then it came upon them.
The Anvil of Ice Page 30
