“Why?”
“Why, because it was none other than Aieve, the mother wren, and the smallest bird of all. Nimue Guinevere, seeing what had happened to her husband, had conceived of a plan of her own and had managed to hide Aieve under the sleeping king’s hat. Aieve flew out of that hat and landed on the left shoulder of the sleeping king, where she peered deep into that great pointy ear and saw where the earwig was hiding. Suddenly she sang out in a piping shriek of a voice, because you could hardly expect a wren to sing deep like a bull, and the words of her challenge will never be forgotten.”
“What did she sing?”
“She sang, ‘Since everybody knows that earwigs are the stupidest of all creatures, and since everybody also knows that riddling is the wisest and wittiest of occupations, then, to prove that I am right and you are wrong, I challenge you to a duel of riddles.’”
“A duel of riddles?”
“The fiercest of duels there ever was.”
“How fierce?”
“A duel without quarter—riddler takes all!”
“The riddling of all riddles?”
“So it was! Now I wager you might know a riddle or two for such an occasion?”
Mo’s eyelids half opened, and she nodded.
“Then,” the copper-haired dwarf laughed loudly, “shall we say that I will play the part of Gorra and you the part of Aieve?”
Mo clapped her hands and began:
“I dance without legs ’round a song without rhyme;
My sigh is the sky and my dress the springtime.”
“You are surely the wind in the tree tops!” The dwarf answered Mo’s riddle before returning to the earwig’s story: “So the riddling continued, hour after hour, and day after day, from the eyes of the peacock to the song of the lyre bird, through the birth of muses, to carpets woven from snow-white angels’ feathers, until at last, Gorra sang aloud his final challenge:
‘I, for one, in glass am set
And I, for two, am found in jet.
For three I’m seen to hide in tin,
For four I’m found a box within,
But if determined you pursue
For five I can’t escape from you.’
“Aieve cried out in frustration, for Gorra had her stumped. She racked and racked her little wren brains, but she could find no answer to Gorra’s riddle. And then Gorra, so overcome with his own vanity and pride, called on all his relatives to join him for the feast of wren flesh. And soon the Wildwoods were filled with the squeaking and rustling of every earwig who heard the invitation, Gorra’s brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts and his cousins three hundred times removed, until the whole forest floor appeared to be on the move. Gorra called out to them to hurry, poking his head out of Ree Nashee’s left ear, wearing such a look of triumph on his earwiggy face, and gazing out at Aieve’s plump little body with a slavering, rat-a-tat gnashing of his side-to-side jaws.
“But now, if you like, you might help Aieve solve the riddle?”
Mo chuckled:
“What jewels every word adorning,
Like the memory of joy in flower and morning,
Are the vowels sounds a, e, i, o, u
And the rhythm and rhyme of my answer true.”
It was the dwarf’s turn to chuckle with delight. “Alas, like every good tale, it must come to an end.”
Mo grinned. “And I think I know how Gorra’s story ends.”
“Oh, you do—do you?”
Mo closed her eyes and laid down her head, if not to sleep, at least to the contentment of daydreams. And in her daydream she chuckled:
“If the conclusion to this duel you seek,
Look no more to a riddle but the snap of a beak.”
“Aha!” laughed Qwenqwo. “Who is spinning this yarn—you or me?”
The trembling ceased in Mo’s body, though not even a great story of the Wildwoods could entirely ease her sense of dread. For, like Balor, a sorcerer had baited his trap. The Mage of Dreams would draw Alan into that trap. He would send some kind of a message—an enchantment. And instead of an earwig hidden in the king’s ear, she, Maureen Grimstone, was the bait set to capture Alan, and her friends.
Isscan
For Alan, the teeming slums outside the city had become so unsettling he found distraction in a memory when, as the canoe was being hidden, he had noticed a curious action on the part of Ainé, the merest touch of her hand on the brow of Valéra’s baby. During that fleeting caress the oraculum in Ainé’s forehead had pulsed, a single intense throb from deep within the matrix.
He sensed that it had been important. But what had it meant?
His ruminations were interrupted by Milish, who whispered last minute advice as they neared the gates. “Be wary at all times. Isscan holds many perils. The Death Legion have already erected one of their accursed arenas within the city walls. We have no desire to become the entertainment.”
Before setting out, Milish had encouraged Alan to wear a broad-brimmed yokel’s hat, which Layheas had woven out of reeds. “Even if your face isn’t known, the oraculum is a beacon. You must keep your brow well shaded.”
No amount of disguise would conceal the stature of the Shee so it had been decided that they could not accompany them into the city. The Kyra was unhappy about this, and furious debate had taken place during the hours of darkness until they had arrived at an uncomfortable compromise. Layheas had a means of calling for help, if help was needed. Now, walking in the shadow of the walls, Alan was astonished by their grandeur. Masoned from huge blocks of granite, they towered a hundred feet high on their aprons, and another twenty feet where hexagonal towers buttressed their angles. The ramparts sloped in from their base to about two-thirds of their ascent, after which the summits sloped out again, in a gigantic collar that would make attack by scaling virtually impossible. Isscan appeared to be so large and sprawling, it would have required a vast army to defend, or encircle, it. It made no sense that he saw no evidence of soldiers. But he took Milish’s caution to heart and kept his guard.
In the distance, unapproachable by road from this northern direction, he glimpsed the forest of masts and cranes that marked the docks. If the need proved desperate, this was where they had agreed to meet: the old harbor under the city walls. The Temple Ship had to be somewhere within that forest. And that meant Kate was nearby.
Kate! Even to think about Kate—the thought of holding her in his arms again—was so exciting he could hardly bear to wait another moment. He found himself rubbing at his brow, as if to force his thoughts to concentrate on the reality of the moment and the dangers that surrounded their every step.
The North Gate had been removed from its great iron hinges allowing a ramshackle collection of stalls and booths to curl through the massive portal, with its sculpted coat of arms and leafy decoration. Alan made out two sheaves of corn crossed and a fish leaping over the balances that once symbolized its free-trading status. Again, it appeared that no guards or sentinels controlled this northern entrance.
Once inside, the lanes were carpeted by a thick settling of dung, wetted to a foul sticky mud by snow. The poor trod barefoot in this filth, which was churned to spray by the traffic of carts pulled by short, stout ponies, their passage spattering the legs of the people around them. Other riders, on grander horses, wore greatcoats of velvet, embroidered with stitching of gold and silver in clever geometrical patterns. The farmers had their horses and flat-bottomed carts loaded with provisions to sell in the markets. Here at least it was a bustle he felt more comfortable with.
Barefoot children went running by and shrieking. More wealthy townsfolk, men and women, jostled with one another, warmly wrapped in long coats, or dresses, that fell down to their laced leather boots. In some of the side alleys the houses overhung the pavements, like Tudor shambles. Between the alleyways he saw gambling houses and what his mother would have called “houses of ill-repute.” At every corner he found a multitude of beggars, their hair whitened by snow and their dish
eveled clothes caked in the foul-smelling muck.
In Isscan, as Milish now informed him, every day was a market day, so that in spite of the snow and the cold there was a bustle of activity, with music, entertainers, hawkers and peddlers. Open stalls were selling vegetables, a variety of fish and bloody joints of meat. In one cobbled area, where heat blasted their eyes from an open hearth, an entire hog carcass was being turned on a spit. Throughout the teeming market, the scent of burning wood mingled with the smell of the roast meat, with glowing braziers reflected in the red cheeks of the men and women who tended them. Some of the braziers had griddles over them, where they cooked flat pancakes of corn. Others served soup in chunky bowls, so hot they had to be held in straw mats. Alan was hungry, and the savory smells made his mouth water.
His hunger must have shown because a boy with a running nose ran beside him, pestering him to buy the carcasses of small birds, roasted on sticks. In response to Milish’s gesture of refusal, he cursed them, screeching obscenities in their wake. Alan was glad to escape the congested streets of the marketplace to trudge at last along cobbled inner-city streets, over walkways lined with timeworn paving stones.
Begrimed buildings of two, three and even four stories hung over them, masoned in gray-blue granite, some built around stout oak frames. The mason’s love of ornament appeared on jambs and lintels, reminding him of the intricate wood carving on the Temple Ship. Then, as they emerged from the side streets to the heart of the city, he was awestruck.
Confronting them was a great boulevard with a tree-flanked highway enclosing a central island of magnificent architecture. The boulevard had been densely planted with decorative trees, now irregularly hacked down to fuel fires in the shanties. Toward the rivers, two great battlemented horns embraced the plaza, which was completed by a three-sided buttress on the harbor walls. Great bronze cannons extended out over the masts of the ships. From this elevated platform, high above the moored ships and gantries, the eye was drawn to the confluence of the two rivers below, which dictated the shape of the plaza, and from which the city had derived its strategic importance.
Isscan, as Milish explained, was the province’s largest inland fishing port, being situated at the meeting of the two great rivers, the Ezel, or East River, and the Snowmelt, or Tshis-Cole, as it was known locally. From here, the confluent Snowmelt River continued southward to enter the mountainous pass of Kloshe Lamah. “There it meanders,” she whispered, as if she were in fear of being overheard, “through the Forest of the Undying in the Vale of Tazan, dividing around the holy isle of Ossierel, to meet again in a new majesty, running southeast until it meets the Eastern Ocean at Carfon, the last sanctuary of freedom among the great cities of Monisle, and where we are bound.”
Alan considered what she had whispered, confused by notions of undying forests and a holy isle, as he gazed for a moment around the plaza, with its stepped platform, where a multitude gathered about its steps. “My God!”
From a distance of fifty or sixty yards, he recognized the obscene carnival of a public execution. And not of a single prisoner, but of a series of a dozen or more men and women, their hands manacled behind their backs and their ankles shackled and linked from one person to the next by a long black chain. Some of them looked hardly older than children.
“Mask your aversion,” hissed Milish. “Yet witness how grief follows in the wake of the Death Legion, as flies follow the reek of corruption.”
With nausea rising from the pit of his stomach, Alan made out the distant figure of a tall, white-robed man, who appeared to be presiding over the executions. He looked like some venerable priest, with flowing white hair and beard. Lofting a glittering chalice before the exultant mob, he brought the chalice to his lips and drank its contents. The mob cheered. Alan had an awful presentiment of what filled the chalice.
Milish led them away from the grand boulevard, though her gait was stiffer than before. “Damn the Tyrant!” she muttered. “Damn him and his minions to the pits of hell!”
Quickening their steps, they entered a street that was more functional, paved with granite, cobbled for commercial traffic and lined with three-story buildings of unadorned stone. Midway along this street she stopped by an entrance with windows guarded by spiked embrasures and its door head decorated with hieroglyphs. It appeared to house some of the civic offices. The gap-toothed man who answered Milish’s knock eyed them with suspicion, but Milish was persuasive enough to get them over the threshold. The doorkeeper told them to wait in a corridor. He brought his mistress, a squat civil servant, who eyed them with a contemptuous stare.
She led them to a wide and high-ceilinged chamber where other men and women, busy at desks or tables, did not trouble even to glance in their direction. Strangers were not welcomed by these townspeople. Nevertheless business was business, and now Alan witnessed how business was done.
The woman took a seat in a padded mahogany chair, leaning her fleshy arms on a desk of similar wood while listening to Milish’s prevarications.
There had been a flood caused by an untimely spring, as Milish explained, disguising her voice under a more earthy accent. This had forced a village of fisher people to abandon their winter quarters to seek sanctuary in Isscan. Among these simple people was her brother by marriage. She begged this good lady, busy as she was with her public duty, to assist them. Was not Isscan’s reputation for shelter famous throughout Monisle! Perhaps this council woman might have heard word of some new arrivals that fitted Milish’s description?
The woman yawned, making it clear that she had no interest in homeless rabble.
Milish produced a purse that jingled with coins, which she now tipped onto the desk. The coinage was gold and of different sizes and geometric patterns, some triangular, square or hexagonal, each denomination decorated with a symbol from nature: corn, flowers, animals, birds and insects.
Alan watched the official closely to see if she showed any signs of undue curiosity. But he saw nothing other than ill-concealed greed in her eyes. “A village of fisher people, you say?”
“They would have registered their boats with the harbormaster—and very recently.” Milish scooped the coins back into her purse and held it firmly to her breast. “The waterfront is such a warren, they could be anywhere. We are wearied in our search for them. We have no place for the night but would be pleased to share what simple refuge they might have found.”
The barter lasted several more minutes, during which the official tested Milish, making sure that there was no more gold to be extracted. Only then, taking the purse and having asked several of her clerks to check their records for the fisher people’s arrival, did she dismiss them with a peremptory nod, barking to the doorkeeper, who was instructed to lead them to an address. Once back in the streets the gap-toothed lackey took Milish’s last triangular gold coin before he would lead them more than a block from his mistress’s offices.
They soon abandoned the grander streets to enter a maze of shambling alleys lined by taverns. In the yards of some of the larger taverns were sunken arenas that looked like fighting pits. From time to time, Alan caught the furtive swivel of Gaptooth’s eyes, as though he were attempting to probe Alan’s face under the low brim of his hat. Unlike the official, Gaptooth appeared decidedly curious about the strangers. Meanwhile the smell on the air told them that their guide was leading them back to the waterfront.
The end of their mission was a wooden building on the wharf-side, sunken at one corner into the foul-smelling mud, where the piles that sustained it had rotted away. Its weatherboarding was splintered and peeling, and many of the deformed planks had sprung their nails at the corners. Here, Gaptooth bowed before them with a mocking flourish before kicking ajar one half of the rickety gate.
The stench of fish assaulted their nostrils as they stepped inside the barn-like building.
Amid the shouts of surprise and welcome, Alan was almost bowled over by the tearful Kate. He lifted her off her feet, twirling her around in a circle and
hugging her so hard she could hardly breathe.
She kissed him fiercely, then murmured into his ear, “Ah, and sure I could kill you! I’ve been bawling my eyes out, thinking you were dead.”
They hugged again, until they simply had to let go to breathe.
“Where’s Mark?”
“Here—somewhere.”
“I want a few words with him.”
“Go easy on him, Alan.”
“Go easy?”
There was no time to discuss it further. Now it was Siam’s turn to lift Alan off the floor in a bear hug, then curl a burly arm around his shoulders and drag him away to greet Kehloke, Turkeya and Loloba, Turkeya’s sister, who were just three among the hundreds of astonished faces that peered at him from the shadows. Alan introduced Milish and Layheas to everybody, then let them all chatter among themselves while he found Kate again. But they were given precious little chance to be alone. Kemtuk limped over the irregular floor to come and clasp his hands, with evident relief.
“My friend!” the shaman exclaimed. He handed over the Spear of Lug, which he had kept safe for Alan’s return. Then he leaned over and whispered in Alan’s ear, “We are in great danger. Isscan has proved to be a trap.”
“I saw enough already to have figured that.”
The lack of guards at the gates, the absence of soldiers on the walls and throughout the streets when an occupied city the size of Isscan should be teeming with them, all made sense only when you realized that it had to be a deliberate strategy. And Gaptooth knew who he was, Alan was certain of it. He put his hand on the shaman’s shoulder, escorting him over to Milish, who was being questioned, in urgent whispers, by Siam.
The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) Page 31
