by David Drake
Neither had Garric, though some really severe winter storms had been almost as deafeningly bad. The signallers were skilled beyond question, but they and their instruments were intended to blare commands through the chaos of battle. It was remarkable what they could do when grouped together and filled with a spirit of rivalry.
But as Sharina’d said, the islanders filling the plaza seemed to love it. That went for both country folk and the residents of Mona itself. City-dwellers on First Atara tended to sew bright-colored ribbons on their dress garments, but there wasn’t as much distinction between urban and rural as there would’ve been on Ornifal or even Haft.
Sharina wore court robes of silk brocade with embroidery and a cloth-of-gold appliqué to make them even stiffer and heavier. Garric’s molded and silvered breastplate wasn’t comfortable, but at least it wouldn’t prevent him from swinging a sword. The court robes were far more restrictive.
Normally Liane would be seated slightly back of his left side, formally his aide because she wasn’t legally his consort. They’d planned the wedding over a year before—but events had prevented the ceremony, and further events had pushed it back again. The royal wedding would be an important symbol that the Kingdom of the Isles was truly united for the first time in a thousand years…
But before he claimed the symbol, Garric had to create the reality. He grinned. Kingship was much more complicated that it’d seemed when he read Rigal’s epic Cariad. The hero Car had fought many enemies, both human and supernatural, in founding his kingdom, but he’d never had to settle a wrangle between the Duke of Blaise and the Earl of Sandrakkan as to the order of precedence of their regiments when the royal army was in full array.
“I could handle that for you, lad,” said image of King Carus, shaking his head in rueful memory. “Nobody argued with me about anything to do with the battle line because they knew I’d take their head off if they did. Unfortunately I dealt with tax commissioners pretty much the same way, and I can’t tell you how much trouble that caused.”
Today Liane was in charge of the royal involvement in the funeral and apotheosis rites. She had an instinctive feel for protocol and precedence, what should or shouldn’t be done in a formal setting. That was a better use of her talents than sitting beside Garric and calming him by her presence; but he half wished now that he’d left the arrangements to one of Lord Tadai’s stewards.
The shrieking of horns and trumpets halted. Choruses of boys and girls came forward from behind the bleachers. The youngest singers were only six or so, and the choir masters and assistants trying to keep the lines in order looked more harassed than the children did. It was almost time to light the pyre.
Lord Protas was to Garric’s right; Lord Martous was whispering to him. The boy looked stiff and uncomfortable, but that’s how he’d looked ever since Garric met him on the Shepherd. Garric realized with a touch of sadness that a 12-year-old boy whose father had just died was an obvious subject for sympathy, but he—Prince Garric of Haft—had none to spare.
Protas seemed biddable. He could take over the government of First Atara with the ‘advice’ of a commissioner from Valles, leaving one fewer problem for Prince Garric to concern himself with.
“There’s nothing wrong with sympathy,” said King Carus, standing on the balcony of a tower that might never have existed. “And don’t pretend that you lack it. The trouble comes from letting sympathy keep you from doing what has to be done. Anger does less harm than false kindness; and I’ve got plenty of experience of how much harm anger does.”
Martous handed Protas a glass bowl in a filigreed framework; it held a pine torch lying on a bed of sand which’d been soaked with oil. Sluggish flames wobbled from the sand as well as the pine.
“Go, your highness!” the chamberlain snapped. “Don’t delay the ceremonies!”
Garric put his right hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeezed it, smiling at him. He didn’t speak. Protas nodded appreciatively, then got up and started across the broad cleared space toward the pyre. His back was straight and his stride firm except for one little stumble.
“No sympathy!” repeated King Carus with a gust of laughter.
Tenoctris sat cross-legged on the ground beside the bleachers where she’d asked to be. A lifetime of studies with no servants and little money had made her adept at making do with what was available. There was almost always a floor, but chairs and stools were harder to come by; she’d gotten into the habit of drawing her words and symbols of art on the surface she sat on.
Garric glanced at the old wizard. She was muttering an incantation over a figure drawn on ground packed hard by the feet of generations of buyers, sellers, and spectators. The bundle of yarrow stalks lay by her left knee and a vellum scroll was partly unrolled to her right, but she didn’t appear to be using either one.
The four Blood Eagles detailed to guard Tenoctris formed an armored U-shape on all sides of her but in front. They kept their eyes on the crowd and possible threats rather than looking at what Tenoctris was doing, but her wizardry didn’t seem to worry them the way it would most laymen. Lord Attaper had learned to pick the wizard’s guards from those who knew something about the art: men who’d had a nanny who worked spells or whose father’s cousin was a cunning man back in their home village, that sort of thing.
Cashel stood behind Sharina’s throne, as placid as a resting ox and as impressively big at a quick glance. When Garric’s eye caught him, he smiled softly. He was unique among folk dressed in splashy finery: his tunics were plain except for a curling pattern in subtle browns that Ilna had woven into the hems.
Spectators who’d seen Cashel brought their eyes back to him, though. That was partly because of the simple elegance of the man and his costume, but also because of that woven pattern. No fabric that Ilna wove was only a piece of cloth.
Protas had covered most of the distance between his throne and the base of the pyre. Liane signalled the commanders of the ad hoc military bands; they in turn snapped commands to their units and raised the tools they used for directing. The fleet’s music master had a slim silver baton, but his army counterpart used the long straight sword he carried as a cavalry officer. The musicians lifted horns and trumpets to their lips.
Light trembled over the instruments of brass and silver and even gold. Tenoctris glanced up; Garric followed her eyes. The sound of the second meteor, for now only a rasping undertone, reached his ears as he saw the fluctuating light and looked quickly away. “May the Shepherd guard me!” a man called in a high-pitched voice.
The signallers blew together. For a moment, the shriek of their instruments filled the air, but the thunder of the oncoming meteor overwhelmed even that raucous blast. People throughout the crowd were shouting though their voices went unheard, and the ancient king in Garric’s mind said, “Sister swallow me if it isn’t coming straight at us!”
Protas didn’t stop or look up. Lifting the torch from the bowl in which it rested, he touched it to the faggots. Yellow flames spread too swiftly for green wood: the bundled brush had been soaked with oil. Protas backed a step and paused, then hurled the burning bowl onto the pyre also. It shattered on the steps, igniting the red muslin.
The meteor exploded unthinkably high in the heavens. For a moment there was only the flash; then the sound reached the crowd, throwing everyone to the ground. Garric felt himself lifted, then slammed down hard. The crudely built throne cracked under his weight, and the casque bashed his forehead.
He stood up. His ears rang and he felt each heartbeat throb in his skull. There was a stunned silence over the plaza, relieved by the sounds of prayers and sobbing. The fire was beginning to bite on the funeral pyre. A crackling indicated that the olive oil and beeswax had ignited the wood.
Garric looked at the topaz crown in his left hand. His grip had twisted the soft gold circlet, but the big stone was more vividly alive than a diamond. The things moving in the brightness were no longer shadows but streaks of flame spinning sunwise around the whit
e-hot heart of the stone.
Garric was spinning: not his body but his mind. He felt the suction and tried to throw down the topaz, but he couldn’t open his grip. Voices cried wordlessly like a winter storm.
“Hold me!” Garric tried to say, but he couldn’t make his lips move nor even form the words in his mind. The circles of light boring through his eyes wrenched his consciousness out of the waking world. He hovered for a moment above the plaza, watching his garments flatten on the ground where he’d been standing. His helmet bounced once and came to rest on its rim, the gilded wings shivering.
The plaza and the pyre were gone. Garric stood on a gray road, naked and alone, and fog swaddled his brain.
Ilna put her right arm over Merota’s shoulders as what the girl called a meteor snarled like a landslide toward them through the bare sky. If it hit the plaza—and it certainly appeared that it was going to—there was nothing anyone could do that’d make a difference.
If Ilna’d been alone, she’d have taken lengths of yarn out of her left sleeve and begun knotting a pattern. She smiled wryly. Her powers were considerable but they didn’t rise to ripping large rocks out of the sky, so that wouldn’t have helped either. The work made her feel more content, though.
She wasn’t alone. She was responsible for Merota, and though the girl was putting a brave face on it she was understandably terrified. Ilna wasn’t going to fill her last moments of life with the knowledge she’d just abandoned a frightened child.
She, Merota, and Chalcus had been seated on a middle row of the bleachers, down at the right end. The rows beneath them—three; she’d counted them off on her fingers as she stepped up—were the seats of the island nobility who were going to march up to the pyre and throw on incense. The rows above—two more—were nobles as well, but seated higher because they were less important and didn’t have any duties during the funeral except to be part of the spectacle. They were rich farmers for the most part, judging by their talk and gaudy tastelessness.
Those folk were the problem now. They were trying to get to the ground, and in their panic they probably wouldn’t have cared if that meant trampling a small woman and the ten-year-old girl in her charge.
They cared when Chalcus jumped onto his seat and faced them, though, sword and dagger drawn. One fellow tried to push through anyway; Chalcus’ left hand moved too quickly to see. The panicked local clapped his hands to his face and sprang back, three long gold chains dancing as he fell on the bleachers. Blood from his slit nostril flickered in the air.
Ilna’s smile grew minusculy wider: Chalcus understood duty also. If she was about to die, and it certainly seemed that she was, she was fortunate to do it at the side of a man in the best sense of the word.
The sling-stone—the meteor, since Merota was educated and doubtless knew the right word—exploded high in the sky. Ilna’s face was bent down but she felt the flash on the backs of her hands. She braced herself because she remembered what’d happened when the earlier meteor hit the sea, but the shockwave this time was beyond anything she’d imagined.
Clutching Merota with one hand, Ilna turned an unintended cartwheel. The bleachers, raw wood beneath a drape of red muslin like the steps up the pyre—had flexed down and then sprung back again. She tried to grab Chalcus—for the contact rather than because it’d help in any material way—but he was spinning off in a different direction.
Ilna, Merota, and several handfuls of other spectators crashed down onto the bleachers together; boards broke. The whole structure collapsed in a tangle of splinters and torn cloth.
Ilna jumped to her feet. The back of her right wrist was skinned, but she wasn’t really injured.
“Merota, are you hurt?” she said. The girl wrapped her arms around Ilna’s torso and sobbed into the bosom of her tunic.
People were shouting and crying, but only a few of them had real injuries. A splinter as long as sword blade had run through a middle-aged woman’s right calf. She stared at it in shocked amazement; Chalcus, glancing first to see that Ilna and Merota were all right, knelt at the victim’s side. He sheathed the sword he hadn’t lost in the tumult, then used the dagger to cut a length off his sash for a bandage or tourniquet.
Ilna looked around plaza. The troops who’d been formed by battalions in a semicircle around the bleachers had fallen like ten-pins, their armor and weapons clattering. Now they were picking themselves up and dressing their ranks. Some soldiers were gray-faced with fear, but instead of running they trusted their safety to discipline and their fellows just as they’d been trained to do.
Ilna supposed that sort of training was useful—for people who couldn’t simply overcome their fears by will power. She was afraid of many things: afraid of failure; afraid of making a fool of herself; afraid of her own anger. She wasn’t in the least afraid of death.
The locals weren’t as fast to get to their feet as the soldiers were, and when they did they often stumbled away from the plaza. Ilna didn’t blame them: the air had a metallic taste, unpleasant and rough on the back of her throat.
Her ears rang from the blast, but she could hear sounds again. A local screamed and pointed toward the pyre. Other islanders turned to follow the line of his arm, then screamed in turn. Their drift became a panicked stampede.
Ilna looked at the pyre also. The lowest level was burning, though the green brushwood made smoky flames. They crackled like sea ice breaking on the coast in an inshore gale.
The bier at the top of the third stage was disarranged. The corpse got to its feet, dragging away the cloth-of-gold drapery. It swayed, wax-pale except where it was rouged, and took a step by pivoting its whole leg at the hip. Its mouth moved, but any words it spoke were lost in screams and the sound of the fire. The corpse took another step to the muslin-covered staircase, then a third.
“Help…” it cried in a piping voice. It stumbled to its knees. “Me…”
The flames were rising higher. The fire had taken hold slowly, but before long the brush would dry and turn the structure into a dancing, orange-red incandescence.
“I’m coming, your highness,” called a plump man whose tunic and trousers were decorated with silver gares. It was Martous, the chamberlain; the man who’d sent the boy prince to ignite the pyre. He tried to go forward but stopped, paralyzed by fear and indecision.
Ilna weighed the situation coldly, as she did all things. She patted Merota’s shoulder reassuringly, then gave the girl a little push in the direction of Chalcus. “Go to Chalcus, milady,” she said. “Quickly now!”
The corpse got up again. It tried to walk and fell immediately, rolling down the stairs to the broader second stage. Flames were already licking up the wood on the adjacent side.
Ilna gathered her tunics above her knees and ran toward the pyre. Cashel was watching over Sharina whose court dress hobbled her as effectively as leg-irons would. Chalcus was saving a woman who’d bleed to death without his help. That was slight recompense for the many lives he’d let out with his sword and less merciful means, but it was something—and besides, somebody had to watch Merota.
Garric was… Ilna didn’t know where Garric was. All she could see as she ran was his unique winged helmet lying on the ground near his broken throne, and beside it a tunic reeved through his ornate cuirass.
Where is Garric? But the question could wait for now. Ilna reached the side staircase and started up.
The steps were uneven, forcing Ilna to look down at her feet instead of keeping her eyes on the man she was rescuing. The corpse. She supposed she shouldn’t complain. Only a desire for symmetry had caused the islanders to put steps on all four sides to begin with. The flight up the front had been sufficient for the procession placing the bier.
Ilna’d never seen the point of funerals in the first place. All that remained when a person died was meat, and human flesh was as useless as fallen leaves in autumn. For sanitary purposes it had to be disposed of—in a hole, in a fire, or simply by throwing it into the sea.
She gla
nced up as she reached the top of the first tier: the late King Cervoran had gotten to his feet again and was wallowing down the middle flight of steps. “Help…,” he squeaked.
Ilna continued toward him. Apparently she’d been wrong about funerals. That wasn’t her first mistake, but each one made her angry with herself.
She began breathing through her mouth. The wind shifted slightly and wreathed her in smoke; she felt the hair on the back of her neck shrivel.
“Me…,” the corpse said.
Close up King Cervoran still looked like a corpse of several days, but he was quite obviously alive. The coins that’d covered his eyes were gone. The whites and irises both had a yellowish hue, but the pupils were feverish and bright; they focused on Ilna.
Cervoran’s lips were violet under the smear of the undertaker’s rouge; the tongue between them was black. He repeated, “Help… me…”
Peasants aren’t squeamish. Ilna took Cervoran’s left wrist in her hand and wrapped his arm over her shoulders. It was like handling warm wax which smelled of decay. She wondered if the arm would pull out at the shoulder; it didn’t, at least not just now.
Heat hammered her as the fire roared to full life. A ball of flame flared at Ilna’s side and vanished, an outrider of the main blaze. Before she started down, she pulled Cervoran along the tier to put the bulk of the pyramid between them and the fire. She could feel the back of her tunics searing and shrinking. The cloth would be brown and brittle after this, no use even for wiping rags.
Of course that assumed there was an after…
Cervoran didn’t fight her, but he was barely able to keep his feet under him. She dragged him along. “Yes…,” he said. His voice wasn’t loud, but it pierced like a bradawl.
They reached the staircase down the north side, opposite where the boy’d lighted the fire which was now waving like a banner over the bier. Ilna was beginning to feel Cervoran’s weight in her knees.
Because this was a formal event she wore sandals, which she wouldn’t normally do in weather so warm. She caught her left heel stepping down and had to throw her right leg out to keep from pitching onto her face with the former corpse on top of her. Cervoran twisted, trying to help but unable to move his legs quickly enough. It was like carrying a desperately sick man.
