Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  The withy fences around the slunch in the west pasture had been moved again. The stuff had almost reached the stream. Past the line of the fences the grass was dying; the fences would have to be moved farther still. Three years ago, when slunch first started growing near the Keep, he and Ingold had agreed that neither humans nor animals should be allowed to eat it until they knew exactly what it was.

  And that was something neither of them had figured out yet.

  Short meadow grasses stirred around his feet, speckled bright with cow-lilies and lupine. There were fewer snakes this year, he noted, and almost no frogs. The herdkids waved to him from the other side of the pasture fence and choused the Settlements’ tribute sheep into the main flock. He spotted Tir’s bright blue cap among them, beside Geppy Nool’s blond curls. Geppy’s promotion to herdkid—with the privilege of sleeping in the byres and smelling permanently of dung—had consumed the smaller boy’s soul with envy, and for several days Tir seriously considered abdicating as High King of Darwath in favor of a career in livestock supervision.

  “Damn crazy stuff.” Rudy waved back, then ducked through the hurdles that made up the fence. Alde followed more clumsily, but kept pace with him as he walked the perimeter of the rolling, thick-wrinkled plant—if plant it was. Sometimes Rudy wasn’t sure. He’d never found anything that looked like seeds, spores, roots, or shoots. Slunch didn’t appear to require either water or light to grow. It just spread, some six inches high in the middle of the bed, down to an inch or so at the edges, where wormlike whitish fingers projected into the soil bared by the dying grass.

  Rudy knelt and pulled up one of the tendrils, like a very fat ribbon stood on its edge. He hated the touch of it, cold and dry, like a mushroom. By the tracks all around it there were animals that ate it, and so far neither the Guards nor the Keep hunters had reported finding dead critters in the woods …

  But Rudy’s instincts shrank from the touch of it. Deep inside he knew the stuff was dangerous. He just didn’t know how. He squeezed it, flinching a little at the rubbery pop it gave before it crumbled, then wiped his hands on his soft deerhide trousers. With great effort Ingold had acquired enough sulfur from a dyer’s works in Gae to manufacture oil of vitriol—sulfuric acid—and had tried pouring that on slunch. It killed it but rendered the ground unfit for further use. And the slunch grew back within three or four weeks. It was scarcely worth the risk and hardship of another trip to the ruins of Gae for that.

  “Do you think that thing Maia described to Ingold—the Cylinder he found in the vaults at Penambra—might hold some clue about the slunch?” Alde kept her distance. The dark fur of her collar riffled gently around her face, and the tail of her hair made a thick sable streak in the colors of old gowns, old curtains, and old hangings that had gone into her coat.

  “It might.” Rudy came back to her, uneasily dusting the sides of his breeches and boots. “Ingold and Gil haven’t found zip about slunch in any archive they’ve searched so far, but for all we know it may have been common as daisies back before the first rising of the Dark. One day Pugsley’s going to look up at me and say, ‘Oh, we always dumped apple juice on it—shriveled it right up.’ And that’ll be that.”

  Alde laughed, and Rudy glanced back at the cold, thick mass behind them, inert and flaccid and yet not dead. He said, “But we better not count on it.”

  The sun had slipped behind the three great peaks that loured over Sarda Pass: Anthir, the Mammoth, and the Hammerking. The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees: a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.

  Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough.

  Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives—and we all starve to death.

  It figures.

  “The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North.” The Icefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. “Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch.”

  Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards’ watchroom. Most of the Guards’ allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors—Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres—through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars. Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys’ wickedly accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself.

  Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. “You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?”

  The young warrior elevated a frost-pale brow in mild surprise. “Life among the tribes is difficult enough,” he said. “Why would anyone ask further trouble by going there?”

  “People do,” said Seya, an older woman with short-cropped gray hair.

  “Not my people.”

  “Well,” Rudy said, “slunch is obviously arctic—at least it started to show up when the weather got colder.…”

  “But never was it seen near the lands of the Ice,” the White Raider pointed out logically. His long ivory-colored braids, weighted with the dried human finger-bones thonged into them, swung forward as he chaffed his hands before the fire. Like all the other Guards, he was bruised, face and arms and hands, from sword practice. It was a constant about them all, like the creak of worn leather harnesswork or the smell of wood smoke in their clothing. “Nor did our shamans and singers speak of such a thing. Might slunch be the product of some shaman’s malice?”

  “What shaman?” Rudy demanded wearily. “Thoth and the Gettlesand wizards tell me the stuff grows on the plains for miles now, clear up to the feet of the Sawtooth Mountains. Why would any shaman lay such a … a limitless curse?”

  The Icefalcon shrugged. As a White Raider, he had been born paranoid.

  “As for foods that will grow in the cold,” he went on, settling with a rag to clean the mud from his black leather coat, “when game ran scarce, we ate seeds and grasses; insects and lizards as well, at need.” Constant patrols in the cold and wind had turned the Icefalcon’s long, narrow face a dark buff color, against which his hair and eyes seemed almost white. Rudy observed that even while working, the Icefalcon’s right hand never got beyond grabbing range of his sword. All the Guards were like that to a degree, of course, but according to Gil there were bets among them as to whether the Icefalcon closed his eyes when he slept.

  “Sometimes in days of great hunger we’d dig tiger-lily bulbs and bake them in the ground with graplo roots to draw the poison out of them.”

  “Sounds yummy.”

  “Pray to your ancestors you never discover how yummy such fare can be.”

  “We used to eat these things like rocks.” Rudy hadn’t heard Tir come up beside him. Small for his age and fragile-looking, Tir had a silence that was partly shyness, partly a kind of instinctive fastidiousness. Partly, Rudy was sure, it was the result of the subconscious weight of adult memories, adult fears.

  “They were hard like rocks until you cooked them, and then they got kind of soft. Mama—the other little boy’s mama—used to
mash them up with garlic.”

  The Icefalcon raised his brows. He knew about the heritable memories—an old shaman of his tribe, he had told Rudy once, had them—and he knew enough not to put in words or questions that might confuse the child.

  Rudy said casually, “Sounds like …” He didn’t know the word in the Wathe. “Sounds like what we call potatoes, Ace. Spuds. What’d that little boy call them?”

  Tir frowned, fishing memories chasms deep. “Earthapples.” He spoke slowly, forming a word Rudy had never heard anyone say in the five years of his dwelling in this world. “But they raised them in water, down in the tanks in the crypt. Lots and lots of them, rooms full of them. They showed that little boy,” he added, with a strange, distant look in his eyes.

  “Who showed him, Ace?”

  Melantrys, a curvy little blonde with a dire-wolf’s heart, was offering odds on the likelihood of Graw finding a reason not to send up any of the hay that was part of the Settlements’ tribute to the Keep come July—betting shirt-laces, a common currency around the watchroom, where they were always breaking—and there were shouts and jeers from that end of the room, so that Rudy had to pitch his voice soft, for Tir’s hearing alone.

  Tir thought about it, his eyes unfocused. He was one of the cleanest little boys Rudy had ever encountered, in California or the Wathe. Even at the end of an afternoon with the herdkids, his jerkin of leather patches and heavy knitted blue wool was fairly spotless. God knew, Rudy thought, how long this phase would last.

  “An old, old man,” Tir said after a time. He stared away into the darkness, past the lurching shadows of the Guards, the stray wisps of smoke and the flash of firelight on dagger blade and boot buckle. Past the night-black walls of the Keep itself. “Older than Ingold. Older than Old Man Gatson up on fifth north. He was bald, and he had a big nose, and he had blue designs on his arms and the backs of his hands, and one like a snake like this, all the way down his head.” Tir’s fingers traced a squiggly line down the center of his scalp, back to front. Rudy’s breath seemed to stop in his lungs with shock. “And it wasn’t a little boy,” Tir went on. “It was a grown-up man they showed. A king.”

  It was the first time he had made the distinction. The first time he seemed to understand that all the little boys whose memories he shared had grown up to be men—and after living their lives, had died.

  Rudy tried to keep his voice casual, not speaking the great wild whoop of elation that rang inside him. “You want to go exploring, Pugsley?”

  “Okay.” Tir looked up at him and smiled, five years old again, rather solemn and shy but very much a child ready for whatever adventures time would bring his way.

  “They won’t thank you, you know,” the Icefalcon remarked, not even looking up from his cleaning as they rose to go. “The know-alls of the Keep—Fargin Graw, and Enas Barrelstave, and Bannerlord Pnak, and Lady Sketh. Whatever you find, you know they shall say, ‘Oh, that. We could have found that any day, by chance.’ ”

  “You’re making me feel better and better about this,” Rudy said.

  The White Raider picked a fragment of dried blood out of the tang of his knife. “Such is my mission in life.”

  It’s him! Rudy thought as, hand in hand, he and Tir ascended the laundry-festooned Royal Stair. It’s him! For the first time, Tir’s memories had touched something that lay verifiably in the original Time of the Dark.

  The old man with the big nose and the bald head and the tattoos on his scalp and hands was—had to be—the Guy with the Cats.

  Records did not stretch to the first rising of the Dark. Gil and Ingold had unearthed archives dating back seven hundred years at Gae; two of the books salvaged from the wreck of the City of Wizards were copies of copies—said to be accurate—of volumes two thousand years old. The Church archives the ill-famed and unlamented Bishop Govannin had carried from the broken capital contained scrolls nearly that age, in dialects and tongues with which Ingold, for all his great scholarship, was wholly unfamiliar. When the mage and Gil had a chance to work on them, they had arrived at approximate translations of two or three—at least two of the others Gil guessed had been copied visually, without any knowledge of their meaning at all.

  But in the Keep attics above the fifth level, in the hidden crypts below, and in the river caves up the valley, they had found gray crystalline polyhedrons, the size and shape of the milk-white glowstones: remnants of the technology of the Times Before. And when Gil figured out that the gray crystals were records, and Ingold learned how to read the images within, they got their first glimpse of what the world had been like before that catastrophe over three millennia ago.

  The Guy with the Cats was in two of the record crystals.

  The crystals themselves were magic, and readable only through the object Rudy described to himself as a scrying table found hidden in an untouched corner chamber of the third level south. But less than a dozen of the thirty-eight were about magic, about how to do magic. Even silent—neither Rudy nor Ingold had figured out how to activate the soundtrack, if there was a soundtrack—they were precious beyond words. Magic was used very differently in those days, linked with machines that Ingold had tried repeatedly—and failed repeatedly—to reproduce in the laboratory he set up in the crypts. But the crystals showed spells and power-circles that were clearly analogous to the methods wizards used now. These Rudy and Ingold studied, matching similarities and differences, trying with variable success to re-create the forgotten magic, even as Gil studied the silent images in the other stones to put together some idea of that vanished culture and world.

  On the whole, Rudy guessed that their conclusions were about as accurate as the spoofs written in his own world about the conclusions “scientists of the distant future” would draw about American motels, toilets, and TV Guides.

  But in the process, he and Gil had come to recognize by sight a bunch of people who died about the time of the Trojan War.

  They had given them names; not respectful ones, perhaps, but convenient when Gil noted down the contents of each crystal.

  The Dwarf.

  Mr. Pomfritt—named less for his resemblance to a long-forgotten character in a TV show than for his precise, didactic way of explaining the massive spiral of stars, light, and silver-dust that funneled, Ingold said, a galaxy-wide sweep of power into something kept carefully out of sight in a small black glass dish.

  The Bald Lady.

  Mother Goose.

  Scarface.

  Black Bart.

  And the Guy with the Cats.

  And now Tir said that the Guy with the Cats had been in the Keep. That meant whoever that old mage was, he’d been of the generation that first saw the Dark Ones come.

  The generation that fought them first. The generation that built the Keep.

  “The little boy got lost here once,” Tir confided in a whisper as they wound their way along a secondary corridor on third south. Night was a time of anthill activity in the Keep, as suppers were cooked, business transacted, courtships furthered, and gossip hashed in the maze of interlocking cells, passageways, warrens, and bailiwicks that sometimes more resembled a succession of tight-packed villages than a single community, let alone a single building. Rudy paused to get an update on Lilibet Hornbeam’s abscess from a cousin or second cousin of that widespreading family; nodded civil greetings to Lord Ankres, one of the several noblemen who had survived to make it to the Keep—His Lordship gave him the smallest of chilly bows—and stopped by Tabnes Crabfruit’s little ill-lit workshop to ask how his wife was doing.

  Tir went on, “He was playing with his sisters—he had five sisters and they were all mean to him except the oldest one. He was pretty scared, here in the dark.”

  What little boy? Rudy wondered. How long ago? Sometimes Tir spoke as if, in his mind, all those little boys were one.

  Him.

  “They sent a wizard up to find him?” Rudy was frequently asked to search the back corners of the Keep, or the woods, for straying children
.

  They ascended a stair near the enclave owned by Lord Sketh and his dependents, a wooden one crudely punched through a hole in the ceiling to join the House of Sketh’s cells on the third level with those on the fourth. Warm air breathed up around them, rank with the pungence of cooking, working, living, drawn by the mysterious ventilation system of the Keep.

  One more point for the wizards who built the place, Rudy thought. However they’d powered the ventilator pumps and the flow of water, most of them still worked. He and Ingold had never been able to ascertain that one to their satisfaction. They’d found the pumps, all right, and the pipes and vents like capillaries through the black walls, the thick floors, but no clue as to why they still worked.

  A young boy passed with two buckets of water on his shoulders, accompanied by a henchman wearing the three-lobed purple badge of the House of Sketh—Sketh was notorious for thinking it owned the small fountain in the midst of the section where most, but not all, of its servants and laborers lived. Alde suspected they were charging for access, but couldn’t prove it.

  “Uh-huh,” Tir said. “There were three wizards in the Keep then, an old man and a lady and a little girl. The girl found the little boy.”

  “So these were different from the guy who showed the King how to find the potatoes.”

  Tir thought about this. “Uh-huh. That was … I think the King was before. Way before.” It was the first time he’d identified anything resembling a sequence to his memories. Eldor—Tir’s dead father—had had some of Dare of Renweth’s memories, toward the end of his pain-racked life; according to Ingold, few others of the line had. Ingold deduced that the wizards who built the Keep had engineered such memories into certain bloodlines to make sure of their preservation, but it was never possible to predict who would remember what, or when.