by Tad Williams
It could have been a more bitter homecoming: the weather was mild, and much of the snow that had once blanketed this part of the grasslands had again melted away. Still, the wind raced through the shallow gulleys and bent the few small trees as it flattened the long grass, and the campfires jigged and capered: the magical winter had abated somewhat, but it was still nearly Decander on the open plains of the Thrithings.
The prince announced that the great company would rest there three nights while he and his advisers decided what route would best serve them. His subjects, if they could be called by such a name, seized eagerly at the days of rest. Even the short journey from Sesuad’ra had been difficult for the wounded and infirm, who were many, and for those with young children. Some passed rumors that Josua had reconsidered, that he would rebuild New Gadrinsett here on the site of its predecessor. Although the more serious-minded tried to point out the foolishness of leaving a protected high place for an unprotected low one, and the fact that whatever else he might be, Prince Josua was no fool, enough of the homeless army found the idea a hopeful one that the rumors proved impossible to quell.
“We can’t stay here long, Josua,” Isgrimnur said. “Every day we remain will add another score of folk that won’t follow us when we go.”
Josua was scrutinizing a tattered, sun-faded map. The ragged prize had once belonged to the late Helfgrim, New Gadrinsett’s onetime Lord Mayor, who had become, along with his martyred daughters, a sort of patron saint of the squatters. “We will not stay long,” the prince said. “But if we bring these folk to the grasslands, away from the river, we must be sure of finding water. The weather is changing in ways none of us can foretell. It is quite possible we will suddenly be without rain.”
Isgrimnur made a noise of frustration and looked to Freosel for support, but the young Falshireman, still un-reconciled to Nabban as a destination, only stared back defiantly. They could have followed the Ymstrecca all the way west to Erkynland, his expression said clearly. “Josua,” the duke began, “finding water will not trouble us. The animals can get theirs from dew if need be, and we can fill a mountain of water bags from the rivers before we leave them—there are dozens of new streams just sprung up from snowmelt, for that matter. Food is more likely to be a problem.”
“And that is not solved either,” Josua pointed out. “But I don’t see that our choice of routes will help us much with that. We can pick our track to bring us near the lakes—I just don’t know how much I trust Helfgrim’s map ....”
“I had never ... never realized how hard it is to feed this many people.” Strangyeard had been reading quietly from one of the translations Binabik had made of Ookequk’s scrolls. “How do armies manage?”
“They either drain their king’s purse dry, like sand from a sackhole,” Geloë said grimly, “or they simply eat everything around them as they pass through, like marching ants.” She stood up from where she had squatted by the archivist. “There are many things growing here that we can use to feed people, Josua—many herbs and flowers and even grasses that will make sustaining meals, although some who have only lived in cities might find them strange.”
“‘Strange becomes homely when people are hungry,’ ” Isgrimnur quoted. “Don’t remember who said it, but it’s true, sure enough. Listen to Geloë: we’ll make do. What we need is haste. The longer we stay in any place, the sooner we do what she said, eat the place up like ants. We’ll do better if we keep moving.”
“We have not halted just so I can think about things, Isgrimnur,” the prince said a little coldly. “It is too much to expect an entire city, which is what we are, to get up and walk to Nabban in one march. The first week was a hard one. Let us give them a little time to grow used to it.”
The Duke of Elvritshalla tugged at his beard. “I didn’t mean ... I know, Josua. But from now on, we need to move quickly, as I said. Let those who are slow catch up when we do finally stop. They won’t be the fighters, anyway.”
Josua pursed his lips. “Are they any the less God’s children because they cannot wield a sword for us?”
Isgrimnur shook his head. The prince was in one of those moods. “That’s not what I mean, Josua, and you know it. I’m just saying that this is an army, not a religious procession with the lector walking at the back. We can start whatever we have to do without waiting for every last soul who pulls up lame, or every horse that throws a shoe.”
Josua turned to Camaris, who sat quietly by the small fire, staring intently at the smoke rising up to the hole in the tent roof. “What do you think, Sir Camaris? You have been on more marches than any of us, except perhaps for Isgrimnur. Is he right?”
The old man slowly turned his gaze away from the flickering fire. “I think that what Duke Isgrimnur says is just, yes. We owe it to the people as a whole to do what we have set out to do, and even more than that, we owe it to our good Lord, who has heard our promises. And we would be presumptuous to try to do God’s work by holding the hand of every foot-weary traveler.” He paused for a moment. “However, we also wish—nay, need—the people to join us. People do not join a hurrying, furtive band, they join a triumphant army.” He looked around the tent, his eyes calm and clear. “We should go as swiftly as we can while still maintaining our company in good order. We should send riders out, not just to search what lies before us, but to be our heralds as well, to call to the people: ‘The prince is coming!’ ” For a moment it seemed he might say more, but his expression grew distant and he fell silent.
Josua smiled. “You should have been an escritor, Sir Camaris. You are as subtle as my old teachers, the Usirean brothers. I have only one disagreement with you.” He pivoted slightly to include the others in the tent. “We are going to Nabban. Our criers will shout: ‘Camaris has come back! Sir Camaris has returned to lead his people!’ ” He laughed. “‘And Josua is with him.’”
Camaris frowned slightly, as if what the prince said made him uneasy.
Isgrimnur nodded. “Camaris is right. Haste with dignity.”
“But dignity does not allow us to plunder inhabited lands,” Josua said. “That is not the way to gain the people’s hearts.”
Isgrimnur shrugged; again, he thought the prince was cutting the point too fine. “Our people are hungry, Josua. They have been cast out, some of them living in the wildlands for almost two years. When we reach Nabban, how will you tell them not to take the food they see growing from the ground, the sheep they see grazing the hills?”
The prince squinted wearily at the map. “I have no more answers. We will all do our best, and may God bless us.”
“May God have mercy on us,” Camaris corrected him in a hollow voice. The old man was again staring at the rising smoke.
Night had fallen. Three shapes sat in a copse of trees overlooking the valley. The music of the river rose up to them, muted and fragile. They had no fire, but a blue-white stone that lay between them glowed faintly, only a little brighter than the moon. Its azure light painted their pale, long-boned faces as they spoke quietly in the hissing tongue of Stormspike.
“Tonight?” asked the one named Born-Beneath-Tzaaihta’s -Stone.
Vein-of-Silverfire made a finger-gesture of negation. She laid her hand on the blue stone for a long moment and sat in unmoving silence. At last, she let out a long-held breath. “Tomorrow, when Mezhumeyru hides in the clouds. Tonight, in this new place, the mortals will be watchful. Tomorrow night.” She looked meaningfully at Born-Beneath-Tzaaihta’s-Stone. He was the youngest, and had never before left the deep caverns below Nakkiga. She could tell by the tautness in his long, slender fingers, the gleam in his purple eyes, that he would bear watching. But he was brave, of that there was no doubt. Anyone who had survived the endless apprenticeship in the Cavern of Rending would fear nothing except the displeasure of their silver-masked mistress. Overeagerness, though, could be as harmful as cowardice.
“Look at them,” said Called-by-the-Voices. She was staring raptly at the few human figures visible in the encampm
ent below. “They are like rockworms, always wriggling, always squirming.”
“If your life were but a few seasons,” Vein-of-Silverfire replied, “perhaps you, too, would feel that you could never pause.” She stared down at the twinkling constellation of fires. “You are right, though—they are like rockworms.” The line of her mouth hardened minutely. “They have dug and eaten and laid waste. Now we will help put an end to them.”
“By this one thing?” Called-by-the-Voices asked. Vein-of-Silverfire looked at her, face cold and hard as ivory. “Do you question?”
There was a moment of tight-stretched silence before Called-by-the-Voices bared her teeth. “I seek only to do as She wishes. I want only to do what will serve Her best.”
Born-Beneath-Tzaaihta’s-Stone made a musical sound of pleasure. The moon reflected tombstone-white in his eyes. “She wishes a death ... a special death,” he said. “That is our gift to Her.”
“Yes.” Vein-of-Silverfire picked up the stone and placed it inside her raven-black shirt, next to her cool skin. “That is the gift of the Talons. And tomorrow night, we will give it to Her.”
They fell silent, and did not speak again through the long night.
“You are still thinking too much of yourself, Seoman.” Aditu leaned forward and pushed the polished stones into a crescent that spanned the shore of the Gray Coast. The shent-stones winked dully in the light of one of Aditu’s crystalline globes, which sat on a tripod of carved wood. A little more light, this from the afternoon sun, leaked in through the flap of Simon’s tent.
“What does that mean? I don’t understand.”
Aditu looked from the board to Simon, her eyes suggesting a deep-hidden amusement. “You are too much in yourself, that is what I mean. You are not thinking about what your partner is thinking. Shent is a game played by two.”
“It’s hard enough to try to remember the rules without having to think as well,” Simon complained. “Besides, how am I supposed to know what you’re thinking about while we’re playing? I never know what you’re thinking about!”
Aditu seemed poised to make one of her sly remarks, but instead she paused and laid her hand flat over her stones. “You are upset, Seoman. I have seen it in your play—you play well enough now that your moods carry over to the House of Shent.”
She had not asked what was bothering him. Simon guessed that even if a companion showed up with a leg missing, Aditu or any other Sitha might wait while several seasons passed without asking what had happened. This evidence of what he thought of as her Sithi-ness irritated him, but he was also flattered that she thought he was becoming good at shent—although she probably only meant “good for a mortal,” and since he was the only mortal he’d ever heard of who played, that was a rather lackluster compliment.
“I’m not upset.” He glared down at the shent board. “Maybe I am,” he said at last. “But it’s nothing you could tell me anything about.”
Aditu said nothing, but leaned back on her elbows and stretched her long neck in her oddly-jointed way, then shook her head. Pale hair fell loose from the pin that held it and gathered around her shoulders like fog, one thin braid coiling in front of her ear.
“I don’t understand women,” he said suddenly, then set his mouth in a scowl as though Aditu might contradict him. Evidently she agreed that he didn’t, for she still said nothing. “I just don’t understand them.”
“What do you mean, Seoman? Surely you understand some things. I often say I do not understand mortals, but I know what they look like and how long they live, and I can speak a few of their languages.”
Simon looked at her in irritation. Was she playing with him again? “I suppose it’s not all women,” he said grudgingly. “I don’t understand Miriamele. The princess.”
“The thin one with the yellow hair?”
She was playing with him. “If you like. But I can see it’s stupid to talk to you about it.”
Aditu leaned forward and touched his arm. “I am sorry, Seoman. I have made you angry. Tell me what is bothering you, if you would like. Perhaps even if I know little about mortals, speaking will make you feel happier.”
He shrugged, embarrassed that he had brought it up. “I don’t know. She’s kind to me sometimes. Then, other times, she acts as if she hardly knows me. Sometimes she looks at me like I frighten her. Me!” He laughed bitterly. “I saved her life! Why should she be frightened of me?”
“If you saved her life, that is one possible reason.” Aditu was serious. “Ask my brother. Having your life saved by someone is a very great responsibility.”
“But Jiriki doesn’t act like he hates me!”
“My brother is of an old and reserved race—although among the Zida‘ya, he and I are thought to be quite youthfully impulsive and dangerously unpredictable.” She gifted him with a catlike smile; there might as well have been a mouse tail-tip protruding from the corner of her pretty mouth. “And no, he does not hate you—Jiriki thinks very highly of you, Seoman Snowlock. He would never have brought you to Jao e-Tinukai’i otherwise, which confirmed in the minds of many of our folk that he is not entirely trustworthy. But your Miriamele is a mortal girl, and very young. There are fish in the river outside that have lived longer than she has. Do not be surprised that she finds owing someone her life to be a difficult burden.”
Simon stared at her. He had expected more teasing, but Aditu was talking sensibly about Miriamele—and she was telling him things about the Sithi he had never heard her say. He was torn between two fascinating subjects.
“That’s not all. At least, I don’t think it is. I ... I don’t know how to be with her,” he said finally. “With Princess Miriamele. I mean, I think about her all the time. But who am I to think about a princess?”
Aditu laughed, a sparkling sound like falling water. “You are Seoman the Bold. You saw the Yásira. You met First Grandmother. What other young mortal can say that?”
He felt himself blushing. “But that’s not the point. She’s a princess, Aditu—the High King’s daughter!”
“The daughter of your enemy? Is that why you are troubled?” She seemed honestly puzzled.
“No.” He shook his head. “No, no, no.” He looked around wildly, trying to think of a way to make her see. “You are the daughter of the king and queen of the Zida’ya, aren’t you?”
“That is more or less how it would be said in your speech. I am of the Year-Dancing House, yes.”
“Well, what if someone who was from, I don’t know, an unimportant family—a bad house or something like that—wanted to marry you?”
“A ... bad house?” Aditu looked at him carefully. “Do you ask whether I would consider another of my folk to be beneath me? We have long been too few for that, Seoman. And why must you marry her? Do your people never make love without being married?”
Simon was speechless for a moment. Make love to the king’s daughter without a thought of marrying her? “I am a knight,” he said stiffly. “I have to be honorable.”
“Loving someone is not honorable?” She shook her head, mocking smile now returned. “And you say you do not understand me, Seoman!”
Simon rested his elbows on his knees and covered his face with his hands. “You mean that your people don’t care who marries who? I don’t believe it.”
“That is what tore asunder the Zida‘ya and Hikeda’ya,” she said. When he looked up, her gold-flecked gaze had become hard. “We have learned from that terrible lesson.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the death of Drukhi, the son of Utuk‘ku and her husband Ekimeniso Blackstaff, that drove the families apart. Drukhi loved and married Nenais’u, the Nightingale’s daughter.” She raised her hand and made a gesture like a book being closed. “She was killed by mortals in the years before Tumet’ai was swallowed by the ice. It was an accident. She was dancing in the forest when a mortal huntsman was drawn to the glimmer of her bright dress. Thinking he saw a bird’s plumage, he loosed an arrow. When her husband
Drukhi found her, he went mad.” Aditu bent her head, as though it had happened only a short while before.
After she had gone some moments without speaking, Simon asked: “But how did that drive the families apart? And what does that have to do with marrying whoever you want?”
“It is a very long story, Seoman—perhaps the longest that our people tell, excepting only the flight from the Garden and our coming across the black seas to this land.” She pushed at one of the shent-stones with her finger. “At that time, Utuk‘ku and her husband ruled all the Gardenbom—they were the keepers of the Year-Dancing groves. When their son fell in love with Nenais’u, daughter of Jenjiyana and her mate Initri, Utuk‘ku furiously opposed it. Nenais’u’s parents were of our Zida’ya clan—although it had a different name in those long-ago days. They were also of the belief that the mortals, who had come to this land after the Gardenborn had arrived, should be permitted to live as they would, as long as they did not make war on our people.”
She made another, more intricate arrangement of the stones on the board before her. “Utuk‘ku and her clan felt that the mortals should be pushed back across the ocean, and that those who would not leave should be killed, as some mortal farmers crush the insects they find on their crops. But since the two great clans and the other smaller clans allied with one or the other were so evenly divided, even Utuk’ku’s position as Mistress of Year-Dancing House did not permit her to force her will on the rest. You see, Seoman, we have never had ‘kings’ and ‘queens’ as you mortals have.
“In any case, Utuk‘ku and her husband were fiercely angry that their son had married a woman of what they considered to be the traitorous, mortal-loving clan that opposed them. When Nenais’u was slain, Drukhi went mad and swore that he would kill every mortal he could find. The men of Nenais’u’s clan restrained him, although they were, in their own way, as bitterly angry and horrified as he. When the Yásira was called, the Gardenborn could come to no decision, but enough feared what might happen if Drukhi was free that they decided he must be confined—something that had never happened this side of the Ocean.” He sighed. “It was too much for him, too much for his madness, to be held prisoner by his own people while those he deemed his wife’s murderers went free. Drukhi made himself die.”
