Master of the Cauldron loti-6

by David Drake

  "What do you mean about it not mattering whether the prisoners were men or women?" Sharina said. She didn't let her voice rise, but she knew her tone had lost the pleasant warmth with which she'd begun the conversation. "Your majesty, gentlemen, this is really very important. There's a serious danger to the kingdom. And thus to your lives, you see."

  Lord Lichter cleared his throat, turning toward one of the frescoes set in the center of decorative frames. This particular one was a male centaur carrying a woman over his shoulder as he galloped away. The woman, bare-breasted with the remainder of her garments streaming behind her, reached out desperately toward the viewer.

  "Well, you see…," he said. "It's not the sort of thing that got talked about, of course, but many people knew. In a palace, well, things get around. Theplace Stronghand was wounded, you see…"

  Valence drank deeply. When the chaplain's voice trailed off, the king looked directly at Sharina.

  "Whatever else my father might be doing after the Battle of the Tides," he said in a harsh, challenging voice, "he wasn't fathering children. Because that spearblade didn't leave him anything to father them with. Do you understand?"

  Lord Geddes shook his head sadly. His eyes were on the game board, but his mind was in a distant place. "You can't really blame the old fellow for being angry most of the time, can you?" he said.

  "By the Shepherd!" said Lires. "You sure can't."

  CHAPTER 10

  Ilna finished warping the table loom she'd borrowed from Malaha and Mostera, the sisters who squatted across from her staring. They were the chief weavers at the manor-the Abode of Ramelus, according to Ramelus himself and his henchmen, though Ilna'd heard others call it only 'the big house'.

  The sisters were short, dumpy women past middle age, dressed in hooded black robes. There was little to choose between them in appearance, but Malaha seemed excited by the chance to see what the outsider was going to do, while Mostera glared with the fury of a priestess watching her altar defiled.

  Ilna smiled faintly. Though she wasn't going to defile anything, what she planned to make fabric do today was at the edge of what she considered proper. She'd promised to bring a feeling of joy in those who viewed the result and so she would, but…

  The manor house was a sprawling thing that tried to look like more than it was. Originally it must've been a rectangle of one story and perhaps a loft. Ramelus had built it to two stories and a false front to the north with pillars all the way up; wings had since spread to either side. Ilna couldn't imagine who Ramelus expected to impress, but perhaps it was just for himself. He seemed like a man who thought about himself most of the time, if not all of it.

  The courtyard on the behind the house was formed by lines of stables and work shops rather than colonnades like the front. Women in a line under a pole-framed tile roof were preparing food for the evening meal, while across from them other women washed clothing in large vats carved from limestone. The blacksmith was repairing tools in his forge at the back of the court, near the bread ovens. Thecling of his hammer and the wheeze of the bellows worked by two of his assistants were regular interruptions to the chirps of playing children.

  The gray yarn Ilna was using for the warp was of goat hair. The individual strands were longer and finer than the sheep's wool she'd more often worked with, but-like human hairs-they weren't as tightly coiled. The difference in texture was part of the pattern. Everything was part of the pattern, the height of the sun, the haze of dust in the air, even the noisy flutter of sparrows squabbling for grain fallen in the courtyard.

  Ilna checked her weft yarn, touching each loaded bobbin instead of merely looking at them. The feel told her things that eyes, even her eyes, couldn't see. She smiled as her fingertips read the future.

  She didn't fit in with other human beings. Either they saw too little truth, or their world held truths that were merely fancies to Ilna os-Kenset. But threads and fabrics spoke to her, and they never ever lied.

  The weft threads already on the bobbins were wool of various weights and colors: bleached white, indigo blue, and three different shades of gray. The grays were each the natural color of a particular sheep, the darkest nearly black.

  A final hank of weft thread was drying in the sun. Ilna had simmered more of the gray goat hair in raspberry pulp, the waste left in the bag after the kitchen staff made jelly. The yarn was now a soft pink that seemed to cling to the eyes even after one looked away.

  She touched the yarn she'd dyed. It was dry already: though bright, the sun wasn't particularly hot, but the air sucked all moisture out of the thread. Ilna took the hank from the cleft stick on which she'd hung it and began to wind it onto a bobbin.

  "You're a fool if you use that for your pattern, woman," Mostera growled. There was worry as well as challenge in her tone.

  "Now, maybe the foreign lady has a trick we don't know of, darling," Malaha said, pursing her lips into a fishlike expression that apparently was meant to be a smile. "Is that so, Mistress Ilna?"

  Ilna sniffed. "Whatever I may know about dyes and yarns that you don't," she said, "doesn't matter. The pattern I've chosen is probably beyond your ability to plan, but I suspect either of you could weave it yourselves if you watch me carefully the first time."

  "Such a fine lady," Mostera sneered. "I don't think! A vagabond come traipsing up to the big house without so much as a spare tunic."

  "Watch and learn, mistress," said Ilna mildly as she twisted the shed and ran her shuttle through the warp for the first time.

  Davus stood in the center of a group of house servants, each wearing a headband of wool dyed with indigo. He was juggling fist-sized stones, more of them than Ilna could've counted easily even had they been lined up on the ground before her. He had at least three separate sequences in the air at the same time. She couldn't predict the patterns Davus was weaving, but she couldsee them clearly.

  The indigo headbands were rank insignia as well as a uniform to set the indoor personnel off from the field hands. The highest servants present, the steward and chief cook, had bright blue bands of first-quality dye. Ordinary servants had duller bands from the second quality of the plant, while the scullery maids and potboys wore bands the color of gray mud with only the slightest hint of blue.

  Ilna brought her shuttle across the loom, moving as swiftly and gracefully as Davus was spinning his stones skyward. She'd noticed that he not only kept within sight, he always had at least one eye on her-though his audience probably thought he was wholly focused on his juggling.

  Ilna doubted that Davus watched what the stones were doing at all-or needed to, any more than she needed to look at the yarn as she fed it through the warp. She smiled, feeling the future as it wove onward.

  "I suppose that's where your Lord Ramelus sits when he addresses you?" Ilna said, nodding toward the ornate chair in a three-walled kiosk behind the house proper. The shelter had blue-glazed tiles on the outside and a tree-of-life pattern enclosing the throne. The roof was of ordinary terra cotta rooftiles, their faded orange color a painful contrast with the walls.

  The kiosk's workmanship wasn't very good to begin with, nor had it been kept up well. Where tiles had fallen off, Ilna saw they'd been laid over a core of wattle and daub.

  "Oh, yes," Malaha said cheerfully. "Every day at midday. Everybody gathers here in the courtyard and he dispenses justice. Well, the herdsmen and the men working in the New Fields in the north, they don't come in except on every Ninth Day, but everybody else does."

  What he calls justice, Ilna thought; and thought also that Ramelus' version of justice wasn't something she'd care to count on.

  "He likes to have people whipped," Mostera said. "Sometimes he whips them himself. If he doesn't like the cloth you weave, mistress, he'll have you whipped."

  "I expect that he'll like my pattern," Ilna said with a faint smile. She glanced toward Chalcus, singing to the women doing laundry and to many of the children besides. And I don't think Ramelus or any man will whip me while I liv
e and while Chalcus lives.

  The breeze shifted from east to west, bringing a snatch of his song, "…in its worst despair, still ponder o'er the past…" Chalcus was accompanying himself on an odd little instrument that he must've borrowed here, a lyre of sorts made by stringing gut across the humped shell of a tortoise.

  Ilna's hands slid across the loom, beating the fabric at the short intervals required by the speed at which it was growing. "Oh, she's wonderful, Mostera!" Malaha murmured. "Mistress, you're a wonderful weaver."

  Ilna smiled faintly. She didn't need these women to tell her that, but she wouldn't pretend she didn't like to get praise. Her eyes were unfocused, while in her mind she watched what would happen to the fabric in a few weeks or a month.

  "She can weave, I'll grant," Mostera said. She didn't share Malaha's enthusiasm, but neither was the statement grudging; and for that Ilna felt a tinge of respect. She'd praised others for the sake of truth, even when it tore her heart out to do so. A weaker person might've deluded herself that Lady Liane bos-Benliman wasn't a worthy mate for Garric, but Ilna hadn't permitted herself to do that…

  "Lord Ramelus could have you or me or any of us whipped," Mostera said in a distant tone. "He's a great man, and he'd be the first to tell you so. But he couldn't, I think, do anything so great as weaving the cloth on your loom, Mistress Ilna."

  Across the courtyard Chalcus sang, "For mem'ry is the only friend-"

  Ilna said nothing, but she smiled more broadly.

  "-that grief can call its own."

  ***

  Cashel had thought that if he maybe squinted a little, he could imagine that the Sons of the Heroes were really soldiers. It didn't work. Sure, they wore swords and armor as they listened to Mab explain what they were getting into, but they didn't hold themselves right. They weren't poised like people whose job was standing shoulder to shoulder and killing other people. That's what a soldier was, after all, and by now Cashel had met his share of them.

  "The Queen's power is from the air and light," Mab said, standing as the others watched in a half circle around her. The Sons were on crystal benches under a canopy of ferns; Cashel squatted at the right end beside Herron where he could see all his companions out of the corner of his eye. "The King's power is strongest in earth and water, so it was natural that when the Queen drove him out of Ronn, some remnants of his influence would linger in the lowest levels of the city."

  Mab made an angry gesture with her left hand: red sparks danced angrily in the air.

  "Natural," she repeated, "but very unfortunate. Because the Queen was exhausted from the battle-and I have to say, arrogant with her victory-she failed to wipe Ronn clean of contamination when she could've done so with relative ease. She didn't, and by that she failed her duty and failed the city."

  "The Queen's a great wizard and a greatperson," Orly said in glowering discomfort. "She's kept Ronn safe for a thousand years. You shouldn't talk about her that way!"

  "If she hadn't vanished," Herron said, "then we'd still be safe."

  "You weren't safe while the Queen was present, Master Herron," Mab said with a dismissive snort. "Or she wouldn'thave vanished, would she? If you're afraid of straight talking, then how do you expect to face the things you'll meet on the way to the Shrine of the Heroes?"

  Cashel smiled though he knew he shouldn't have. Right now Mab looked like she was a girl no older than the Sons themselves. She had blue eyes and fluffy blond hair, just as cute as you could ask for. Her tongue and her temper hadn't changed from what they'd been earlier, though.

  Herron grimaced and hung his head. "I just meant…," he muttered; but what he'd meant was obvious- "The Queen didn't fail us!" -and obviously false. Herron had sense enough to swallow the remainder of his words.

  "The armies of Made Men are a spectacular threat, but perhaps not the most dangerous one," Mab resumed in a softer tone. "The King's power has been increasingin Ronn ever since he was driven out. The Heroes have defeated his creatures repeatedly, but those defeats don't change the way darkness and night have slowly spread upward from the living rock beneath the city. By now they lurk at the edges of the crystal plazas open to the sun."

  "Mistress?" said Enfero. His head was bandaged from where Cashel'd smacked him with the quarterstaff. "How can we fight that? How can we fight things that I don't even see?"

  Mab twisted her face toward him like a hawk sighting prey; then the cold anger in her eyes melted. "You can't fight a fog, Master Enfero," she said mildly. "The Queen will have to burn that away after she returns. Perhaps she'll have learned to do it properly this time, to sear the very rock clean of the taint of evil. But before the Queen can return, the citizens of Ronn must defeat the army of Made Men massing on the plain outside. And to do that you six, and Master Cashel, and I, must wake the Heroes."

  Cashel cleared his throat. "What's to stop us going down to this cavern, ma'am?" he asked, concentrating really hard on the wad of wool he rubbed along the smooth length of his quarterstaff. "Just bad feelings, like you were saying? Or are the Made Men going to be waiting for us when we get lower down?"

  Mab looked at him and laughed, though the sound didn't have much joke to it. "You don't believe in bad feelings, in a miasma of evil, is that it, Master Cashel?" she said.

  Cashel shrugged. "I believe, I guess," he said, "if you tell me it's so, ma'am. But I don't-"

  He raised his eyes to meet hers.

  "-figure it's going to stop me."

  Cashel looked down the line of the Sons, all of them staring at him. "Look," he said, then paused to frown. It wasreally important that they understand what he was about to tell them, but he'd never been good at words. "A lot of times it's really hard. The sun's hot and you ache all over, and it doesn't seem like anybody really cares anyhow. But you've got to go on and finish it anyway, just slogging on."

  He shrugged, his hands spread on the quarterstaff. "You've got to finish it," he repeated, "because otherwise it's still there to do. For you or anyway for somebody, and you're the one whose job it was. Right? Because we've told everybody this is our job, going down to wake the Heroes."

  "If there's any such thing!" Orly burst out. "If the Heroesare sleeping, if there's even a cavern! Nobody of all the people alive in Ronn today has seen it, you know."

  "We don't need to worry about that," Cashel said.

  "Don't worry?" Stasslin sneered. "Of course it's a worry! If there aren't any Heroes, then we can't wake them!"

  "Wedon't need to worry," said Cashel, raising his voice just a little more than he had to so that they could all hear him clearly, "because that's not our job. Our job is to go down and do what we can. If there's no cavern or no Heroes, that's not our fault. So we don't need to worry about it."

  Enfero suddenly laughed. "He's right," he said. "We only need to worry aboutour task. The questions as to whether our task is impossible or even pointless-those matters aren't our concern. Master Cashel's logic is impeccable."

  "Are the Made Men in the lower levels?" Ather asked, unconsciously rubbing the bruises he'd taken when Cashel demonstrated what he could do with a quarterstaff. "You didn't answer that, milady."

  Mab whisked her brilliant blue fingernails through the air. "No," she said. "We won't find Made Men. The King can't physically enter Ronn, except over the walls if he defeats Ronn's army. But his power influences the growth of things already in the city, and that increases the deeper we go. We'll have more to deal with than bad dreams."

  For some minutes Cashel had been hearing chants and a sibilant ringing sound. Now a line of young people wound into the shady garden area, spinning and whirling as they followed one another. The men held tambourines which they slapped overhead while the women shook castanets to the same wild rhythm. As they danced they sang, "…Our Mother Queen leads us to a seat and bades us sit, she gives us nectar in a golden cup…"

  Mab fell silent, following the dancers with her eyes till the last of them jingled his way out of sight again. Cashel didn't try to count
them, but there were at least as many as he had fingers on both hands. Their cheerful voices faded slowly.

  Mab turned again to face her companions. A cold smile spread across her lips. She said, "As you see, the citizens of our city depend on us… though they aren't aware of the fact. Unless we succeed in waking the Heroes, there'll shortly be no dancers waking the sun, and perhaps no sun at all for Ronn."

  Cashel got up with the smooth grace of a gymnast, holding his staff out before him to balance the weight of his body as his knees straightened. "Well, ma'am," he said, smiling also. "We already said we were going to do that, right?"

  "Yes," said Herron, lurching to his feet more clumsily than Cashel had but with a frown of fierce determination. "We did. Because it's our job."

  Cashel smiled more broadly. It seemed like they'd understood what he was trying to tell them after all.

  ***

  Sharina's first thought was that the wooded hill to the right of the road was steep-sided and oddly symmetrical. Then she realized it was artificial.

  "That's the tomb," said Under-Captain Ascor, riding alongside the carriage Sharina and Tenoctris shared. "We used to escort the king here on Commemoration Day to make sacrifices. Though he gave that up the last couple years before, you know, your brother took over."

  The Mausoleum of the bor-Torials, the family of the Dukes of Ornifal who'd for the past several generations claimed the kingship of the Isles as well, was a mound more than a hundred feet high. The plantings, cypresses interspersed with plane trees, were on four ascending terraces; at the top was a statue which, though large, was beyond Sharina's ability to identify at this distance.

  A brick wall separated the grounds from road traffic. There was a keeper's house and a barred iron gate through which Sharina saw neatly-tended vines mixed with olive trees which would shade the grapes from the direct summer sun.