The Book of Isle

by Nancy Springer

  But the sun next day came up in a sultry, coppery glow. The wolf loomed against it featureless and terrible, like a faceless specter in a dream. Trevyn stared at it in spite of himself, this thing that he could neither fight nor flee, and he paced the deck in unrest. The sky was filled with omen, a clamor heard with inner ears. Soon dark gray clouds blotted out the murky sun, and the storm clamored in truth. Rain fell, hiding the land like a molten curtain. Wind harried the rain, and the swell grew. The glittering ship plunged on stupidly, like a fish hauled in by a heavy hand, smashing through the heaving water. Spray flew as constantly as the rain; Trevyn wondered where he still found air to breathe. The ship did not swamp, for it rode very high, but it spun and teetered dizzily. Trevyn could not stand on the deck, and he did not want to be trapped below. He crawled to the filigree rail, and there he clung.

  When night came, scarcely to be distinguished from the dark day, Trevyn knew that the ship would break. He did not care how soon. Nausea had long since purged him of any desire and left him limp. When the shock came and timbers flew like the spray, Trevyn was torn away from the rail and hurled through a confusion of water and rubble. Feebly he fought and thrashed, clawing at illusion, gulping at water and air. His gear hampered him. He rid himself of boots, sword, purse—even his father’s brooch. He seemed to be sinking into a dark and alien place. Then he was quite naked, and found that he could breathe again, and opened his eyes.

  Unaccountably, the sea was calm. Not far away, the wolfish figurehead glinted, its gilded form eerily etched on the dark water by the flickering lightning of the retreating storm. Trevyn shied away from it, but it did not come at him. Straight as an arrow it made off, dragging through the water like a stick through sand, and Trevyn knew that it laid a line toward the rising sun. He wheeled a quarter turn northeastward and swam toward the remembered sight of land.

  He paddled through blackness unlit even by a star. The sea was warm in these southern parts, far warmer than the day of soaking rain and chilling wind. Trevyn relaxed in its embrace, surrendered to its flow, scarcely feeling the effort of his motions. The sea was a mother, a lover for whom he yearned. He laid his face upon her bosom as on a pillow, and more than once he breathed her watery essence into his lungs. He stirred in her at random, kicking out like an infant in the womb, cushioned by warm liquid from any harm, so it seemed, for all eternity. How cruel it was, then, how unfathomably harsh, when a pounding rhythm took hold of him and forced him away from this deepest haven, rushed and battered him, tossed and shoved him through a weary stretch of time and space, abandoning him at last in a strange place from which he might never return.

  Trevyn crawled up the beach, just out of reach of the grasping sea surf, and collapsed onto the cold, hard sand.

  He awoke with a shock to full daylight and the sound of rough voices. Four muscular, sun-scorched men stood around him, seized him as soon as he opened his eyes. He struggled to throw them off, but he was weak and dazed; a hard cuff to the side of his head stunned him. The men bound his wrists behind him with thongs and jerked him to his feet, prodding him to make him walk. Trevyn stumbled and fell to his knees, then sprang up as a lash bit his shoulders. His captors roared with laughter. “It works every time,” one said.

  They walked along the seaside, driving him before them. He would bring a fine price, they said, by the goddess of many names! Some lord would pay well to have such a handsome, yellow-headed oddity in his household. If he had been shipwrecked, there should be more. They would search the beaches well.

  It did not surprise Trevyn that he could understand them, for he had studied many languages. He knew now that he was in the country called Tokar—a villainous place. Though he had expected nothing more, he felt desolate, like an abandoned child. Corruption flourished in Tokar; the rulers were sunk in greed. Isle had endured such eastern rulers for seven generations, until Hal and Alan had shed their blood to free her.… And now he, a Prince of Isle, had come to the realm of Herne’s sorcery and Gwern’s goddess, it seemed. Well, he was freeborn, with a freedom dearly bought, and he would not yield it easily, Trevyn silently vowed. Not to slavers or to any god or goddess that bore a name.

  Throughout the day the slave traders tramped the beaches, prodding Trevyn before them or tugging him along behind. He gave them as much trouble as he could, dragging and blundering along. Even making allowances for his weakened state, they soon found it necessary to discipline him with the lash. They felt no particular desire to put welts on their merchandise, but a balky slave would be no bargain to anyone. By nightfall, when they had gained nothing for their day of searching except growling stomachs, they were mightily tired of Trevyn. They hurried him through the dark, flogging him to his feet when he fell, giving up finally and half carrying him to the slave pen. Sick as he felt, Trevyn thrashed when he heard the noise of bolts and bars being undone, nearly struggled free. Cursing, the slavers quieted him with dizzying blows. They seized him by the arms, cut his bonds, and flung him forward. Trevyn fell through emptiness, hit the bottom limply, and lay still. Above him he heard the bars slide into place and the bolts clang to. He turned his face to the dirt, letting despair take him.

  From the hushed silence rose a murmur of voices; there were other people in this place. A hand touched Trevyn, feeling him over blindly. He did not stir.

  “Better move aside, lad.” It was an old man’s voice. “They’re liable to send something down on top of ye.”

  Trevyn moved, crawling forward, and hands guided him to a stony wall. There he huddled. The night was filled with voices and noises; he did not heed them. Dimly he sensed bodies pressed close beside him, as naked as his own. They stank, as did everything in this den, but he did not recoil. The night air was chill, and his companions, whoever they might be, were warm. Trevyn settled himself on dank earth and slept.

  He awoke the next day to shouts and scramblings. Chunks of bread were falling through the high, barred trapdoor. Below it, the slaves sprang and shoved for a share. Trevyn blinked, but before he could stir his stiffened limbs the bread was all taken. He sat up slowly to watch the others eat. An old man approached him, picking his way carefully over the uneven floor. He stood before Trevyn and spoke with dignity. “I am old and have small need of this. Eat.” Trevyn took the bread and broke off a mouthful. The rest he gave back. He chewed his morsel very slowly; it was heavy stuff and sank in lumps to his stomach. When he had finished, the old man still stood before him, offering the bread. “Eat.”

  Trevyn shook his head, but the old man did not move. A few paces away, a big slave stirred dangerously. “If ye’ll not eat it yerself, graybeard,” he growled, “then give it to one who will.” Yet the old man scarcely glanced at him. Turning his back contemptuously on the other, he squatted beside Trevyn and poised the bread under his nose.

  “Eat!”

  Trevyn ate. Bit by slow bit, the bread disappeared. The other slaves watched in silence, but no one made a move to hinder. When the bread was gone, Trevyn sank back and lay very still, afraid he might retch. But he kept it down, and toward evening he felt strength coming of it. He sat up and looked around.

  “Whence d’ye come?” a slave asked him, but he only smiled and shook his head. There were about a dozen men in the pit, of all ages and sizes. Some had black hair, some brown or russet, but none were as blond as he. They stared at him curiously. “Were ye shipwrecked?” another ventured, but again Trevyn gave no spoken reply. Almost insensibly he had resolved to be a mute in this land, so that he would not betray himself. And also in silent, inward rebellion.… Throughout the long day on the beaches he had uttered no sound. That had been his father’s stubbornness in him; they could enslave him, but, by blood, they could not make him cry out. Now Trevyn realized that his bravado might stand him in good stead. Better even to be a mute slave than a dishonored prince held for ransom, or dead, or worse.

  The slavers kept Trevyn in the pit with the others for a week. The food was only bread in the morning, raw turnips or carro
ts at night, and dirty water that seeped down the walls into shallow stone cups. But even on this diet Trevyn gained strength, for he was allowed to rest. Indeed, he paced the stony floor with boredom and restless rage. Every once in a while some wretch was hurled down from above as he had been. Many had been slaves all their lives and picked themselves up almost as if they were used to it. Others looked as miserable as he had been. But none, Trevyn noticed, had been beaten as cruelly as he.

  The morning of Trevyn’s eighth day in the pit, a narrow ladder dropped through the trapdoor and a slave merchant shouted at the slaves to come up. They went docilely, almost numbly, took their places, and were roped into a line as if they were indeed nothing more than trade goods. Hatred and pride would not let Trevyn go so tamely. Let them come get him, he grimly thought. Heart pounding, he waited.

  “That towheaded lout must be deaf as well as mute,” he heard one slaver say.

  “If he has eyes, he knows well enough what he’s to do,” another snapped. “If he weren’t so good-looking, I’d kill him now and save someone else the trouble.”

  Three of them came down after him. He crouched, hands at the ready; by any god, they had better beware of him now that he had the use of his hands! They came at him from three sides. He lunged at one … and then they pinned him more deftly than he would have believed possible, tied his wrists with cutting force. One of them glared angrily, a bruise forming on his swarthy face.

  “Give me that whip,” he said, reaching for it.

  “We’re already late starting,” the other replied testily. He turned on Trevyn. “Get up the ladder, you, or we’ll leave you here to starve!”

  He wanted to make them hoist him up by main force. But he sensed that the threat was not idle; the slavers seemed to have reached the last stages of exasperation. Reluctantly, slowly enough to make them lash at him from behind, he went up and took his place in line. He had never felt less willing to yield; his helplessness would not let him yield, his lost self cried out for recognition like an infant screaming in the night. But the body wished to survive.

  The slavers placed him just behind the old man in the string, and Trevyn was glad of it. Even to the unspeaking, the old man provided more decent company than most. They all set out toward the distant market. The four slave traders rode shaggy ponies and led pack animals. With their whips they kept their human merchandise to a shambling trot over wild, rocky terrain. Most of the slaves went along readily enough on thickly callused feet, but Trevyn’s feet, long accustomed to boots of soft leather, had not had a chance to toughen. Before the first day’s journey was half over they had started to bleed. Trevyn’s pace slowed, and the slavers had run out of patience with him. They kept him going with the lash.

  At dusk they stopped at last, and the slaves dropped where they stood while the slavers pitched camp and built fires for themselves. After a while one moved down the line of slaves tossing each a chunk of bread and, for a wonder, a bit of cheese. But when the slave trader came to Trevyn, he only paused with a hard smile. “None for ye, bully,” he said. “By the goddess, ye’re too full of sauce to bear feeding. Bow when ye face me, sirrah!”

  He passed on, laughing aloud, while Trevyn stared. When his back was well down the line, the old man halved his portion and passed Trevyn a share. “Pride makes a thin porridge, lad,” he remarked. Trevyn was thankful that his muteness saved him the necessity of replying.

  The slaves huddled their naked bodies together through the night while their masters dozed blanket-wrapped by the fire, taking guard by turns. The next morning Trevyn’s feet were oozing pus. The slaver who brought bread noticed it and came back with a bucket of brine. He grasped at his slave, but Trevyn stepped in with high head and a level look, though the pain took his breath. The man scowled and went away, bringing no bandaging for the feet.

  That day was a nightmare for Trevyn. He could not keep the pace, stumbling and limping despite himself, and the slavers flogged him until his back was as raw as his feet. Pain and hunger made him reel lightheadedly. More than once he would have fallen if the old man had not caught him with the rope. Nearly hallucinating, he imagined that none of this was happening to him, that he was not himself at all, but Hal, facing the torturers in Nemeton’s dark and hellish Tower.… Had Hal cried out? But he was Trevyn, after all. He would not cry out.

  “If ye’d only yelp once in a while, or even lower yer head a bit,” the old man whispered to him in honest concern, “I believe they’d treat ye less cruelly.”

  Trevyn answered him only with a wry smile, wishing in a way that he could take the advice, knowing that, being what he was, he could not.

  Chapter Two

  In a small chamber of the royal palace at Kantukal sat the king of Tokar, Rheged by name, and his counselor Wael. Rheged was a lean, long-armed man of middle age. Sparse, flabby flesh draped his loose frame; his look was hungry. He hungered insatiably, though not for food, and he could be as dangerous as a starving wolf. Wael, his advisor, was a shrunken wizard of incalculable years, a scholar of intrigue and the arts of influence as well as a sorcerer. The two men found little to like in each other and less to trust, but their mutual greed for power bound them almost as securely as love, for the time. They hunched in council over a figurehead in form of a leaping, gilded wooden wolf.

  “It seemed faultless,” Wael breathed in his soft old voice, hypnotic as the hissing of a serpent. “A young prince must perforce fancy a fairy boat of gold, and once he was on it, all was easy. I drew him here more surely than if I held him by a rope in my hand. Who would have thought it would shipwreck? Never has such a storm been seen in the spring of the year. In autumn, perhaps—”

  “Ay, ay,” Rheged interrupted impatiently, “no one can fault your scheme, laugh though they might that we took armed men to the harbor to await a swimming wolf! They do not smile to my face, not unless they wish to die quite slowly, but I cannot stop the snickers behind my back. But that is past; the question now is, what to do about Isle? It is small use to us that the heir is dead, if his body cannot be found.”

  “Perhaps he is not yet dead,” Wael mused. “If he got ashore, he could be anywhere by now; it has been almost two weeks. But we should hear news of him, for he would cut a strange figure in these parts. Perhaps he has been enslaved. It would be wise to check the markets.”

  Rheged nodded sardonically and made a note.

  “If I could only have something that belonged to him, a piece of clothing or a knife or even a coin,” Wael went on intensely, “I could draw him to me, dead or alive, as surely as if—”

  “As if you held him by a rope in your hand,” Rheged finished sourly. “What of it? Am I to send to Isle, now, for an article of his apparel?”

  “Nay, nay, Majesty, send men to search the beaches! Offer rewards enough to render them honest. And send spies throughout the realm to find news of him. Offer rewards for that, also.”

  “You make plentifully free with my gold,” muttered Rheged. “Even so, it shall be done. It will be worth much gold if I can hold that prince my hostage.”

  “Or even,” whispered Wael, “your sacrifice at the altar of the Wolf.”

  “As you will,” Rheged growled. “But how is that to help my invasion of Isle?”

  “That upstart little country, Isle!” Wael laughed softly, a wheezing, murky sound. “King, I could have given you that victory a dozen times by now. But it is the game itself that brings more joy, and the game has just begun, do you see? Just begun!” Wael lurched forward in his intensity. “And you know wolves belong to the winter. We will strike then.”

  “If you say so, wizard,” the monarch wearily assented. “As you say.”

  The slave market was nothing more than a large cobbled clearing set amid the houses and shops of a place called Jabul. Here the traders came with their wares at the dawn of the market day, and even before the arrival of the buyers the place was crowded. Thousands of human beings filled it—an eerie gathering, Trevyn thought, for the slaves ha
rdly moved or spoke. The silence of despair hung over them all. About half of the slaves were women, bound in their own strings apart from the men, many with babes at their breasts. Trevyn stared, gaped indeed, for they were as naked as himself. The sight did not thrill him so much as dismay him; they were as beaten, as filthy, and as bereft of dignity as he. Suddenly he thought of Meg, imagining her in such company, and his face turned hard as stone. He stood like rage immobilized while the buyers arrived and looked him over, feeling his limbs for soundness as if he were a draft animal.

  “Here is a man looking for a mute!” one of the traders cried to another, leading a buyer through the lines of slaves.

  “Then here is his mute!” shouted the other, striding to Trevyn and jerking him forward. “Right here, sir, a fine, strong fellow!”

  “Are you quite sure he is unable to speak?” the buyer asked, addressing the slave trader with distaste he made no effort to conceal. He was a slender young man, a bit shorter than Trevyn, with a high, pale forehead over eloquent eyes. The noisy slave merchant did not seem to mind his evident distrust.

  “Why, he’s not made a sound these two weeks past,” the slaver blustered, “not even in pain. Here, let me show ye.” He grabbed Trevyn’s finger and wrenched it back, but the young man gasped and struck his hand away.

  “That will not be necessary,” he said imperiously. “I take it, then, that he has not lost his tongue?”

  “Nay,” answered the slaver, crestfallen. Then he brightened. “But if ye want him, sir, I’ll take the tongue out of him for ye, right enough—”

  “Great goddess, nay!” The man was emphatic, and Trevyn allowed himself a sigh of relief. “Mischance enough if it was born in him.” The young man turned to Trevyn, studying him, not poking at him as the others had done, but looking into his eyes. Trevyn met his gaze steadily, and the man nodded, satisfied. “How much?” he asked.