She spoke. I learned later what was said, for the language of Vale was strange to me. At the time I heard only her cold, numbing tone, wash of words as cold as a mountain stream.
“Well, Frain, of all people!” She laughed again, the tinkling, liquid laugh of icy water. “How quaint of you to come.”
“You—” Frain could not speak; his voice was wooden, splintering. Shamarra nodded almost coyly.
“I have found my human form again, yes, and many others, and powers you cannot dream of. I have grown. You have had fantasies of rescuing me from my cruel fate, have you not?” She smiled benignly. “How very sweet of you.”
“You—why have you killed Fabron?”
“Oh, your father.” She cast a cool glance on the corpse. “Poor fool. It was because he would not help me kill Tirell.”
Frain made a sound that was not speech, a strangled, stunned and questioning sound. Shamarra went on readily. She seemed quite willing to talk to him; she condescended to him, as it were. In a sense she treated him as an old friend. She ignored Dair and me. I have never felt so glad to be ignored.
“Vengeance,” she said quite quietly. “You know what he did to me, Frain—I must have vengeance. It patterns all my days and dreams, my waking and my sleeping. I have worked toward vengeance these eight long years. Luring you away was only an easy first step, my pet. Then I had a setback, and I had to find my way out of that night bird form—weary work, but my powers have only increased by it. Lately I have taken council with Raz. He is only too glad to challenge Tirell now that I have showed him what I can do for him, how I can turn the river in its course and make it run against Melior. And there is that fool Sethym. He is always eager for fresh-spilled blood.”
Raz and Sethym were canton kings of Vale, as Fabron had been.
“And I felt sure I could persuade Fabron to join cause with us,” Shamarra went on. “He has been very bitter against Tirell on your account, young my lord, as I intended him to be. At first he seemed willing enough to turn traitor, but lately some absurd notion of loyalty has taken hold of him. And of course I could not have that. So—” She shrugged her delicate shoulders, indicating the body which lay behind us with a slight movement of one pearly bare foot.
Frain stepped forward, and Dair and I reached out with one accord to stop him. Shamarra was very dangerous—any fool could see that. He must not get too close to her. I could feel him trembling, perhaps not with fear.
“But you must not kill Tirell!” he cried at her. “You can’t! He is—he is True King!”
“I can’t!” she mimicked, mocking him. “Mustn’t kill Tirell! And what of his death that dwells in your heart, that makes your teeth grow long with yearning for his blood? I know how you dream of dispatching him when you dare to let yourself dream.”
Frain stood as white as if he had been stabbed.
“It is all right, you can tell me! I am the dark lake of death; have you forgotten?” She spread her slender hands. In that moment she seemed more his friend than in any other.
“You are hateful!” Frain blurted. “Ghoul—” Convulsively he started toward her, his one fist clenched. We restrained him. I felt very frightened at the slight stirring of her face, shadow on deep water—very frightened.
“So I am a ghoul, now,” she said softly, too softly. “I suppose I am. But, Frain, I will not kill Tirell quite yet.”
Life’s breath seemed to have left us all. We waited for the final blow.
“I intend to dishonor him first.” Cruel delight was in Shamarra’s every word, a catlike, nearly playful delight. “Raz has a scheme to make his wife leave him. And there are ways to make his warriors turn against him, and his officers, and even the people of his hall. I want him to see quite clearly his doom as it draws near.” She smiled again, the most warmthless of smiles. “And I want it to break his heart. I may even be able to make some use of you, my pup.” The epithet came out hurtfully; her eyes glittered with grisly inspiration. “I may let you slay him for me yourself!”
It was nearly full dark. Shamarra shone in the gloom like so much pale ice. Her hair was a shimmering waterfall, her dress a silver flow, her features smooth as lilyleaves without being at all soft, and for all her beauty and for all my soul’s sympathy with her, I felt weak with terror of her. The purity of her wrath had filled her with insuperable power.
“Alys!” I screamed out. “Alys, come here at once, I need you. Come, hurry!”
Shamarra took the two steps to Frain—she seemed to flow rather than walk. She raised one lotuslike hand and laid the fair fingers on his arm, taking possession of him as completely as if she had bound him in chains.
“You are mine,” she said. “Follow me.” He stood in helpless horror.
“To think I once longed for those words,” he whispered. “But you enslaved me years ago.”
Then Alys came down to the mountaintop, and all things stopped as they were.
Chapter Seven
Frain saw her as an enormous white swan with wings outspread, and Dair saw her as a huge and blinding argent moon. But I saw her as the massive Great Mother, she who sits like a sphere of white marble, unmoved by the world’s pleading.
At times of great trouble, peculiar vexations take hold of a person. Frain turned from the apparition and looked at me fixedly.
“That is the goddess,” he stated rather than asked.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I know it is. I met her in Isle. You called her?”
“Yes,” I whispered hurriedly. “I hope she might help you. For myself I have little hope. Shhh!”
“Great galloping damnation!” he shouted out loud. “You mean I’ve tramped over half the world looking for her, and she was in Vale all the time?”
“Of course she was!” I hissed at him fiercely. “Now hush, before she blasts you!”
Dair added his voice to the muted uproar. Confound it, he complained, wasn’t one goddess trouble enough? Now we have two to deal with.
Shamarra stood frozen in the presence of Alys as we had stood before her. Alys was far more dangerous than she but, I hoped, less malicious.
“Silence, Dair.” The voice came from everywhere, chillingly, but the tone was not unkind. She liked Dair, I knew at once. His father was Trevyn, her favorite, after all, and Dair was a marvel in himself. “Silence, Frain.” She sounded merely bored. “Maeve.” Suddenly there was thunder in the tone, and fire flickered over the mountaintop. “Come here.”
I walked forward about a half dozen steps, then stopped. I could not force myself any nearer. I have never felt so craven.
“What,” said Alys, “are you doing here.” It was not so much a question as a rebuke and an accusation. I bowed my head.
“We came to find water—” I whispered like a girl child, I, a woman of more years than I cared to count.
“Speak up!”
I squared my shoulders and spoke rapidly in the Old Language. Frain would not be able to understand me, but Alys would know that I told only truth. “We came to find water. Then Frain sensed his homeland and had to see it. We were very hungry as well, and foraging all the way. When we came to the top of the pass we saw Shamarra kill Fabron—well, cause him to die. And now she has told Frain to follow her. That is why I called you.”
“You should be on your way eastward,” said Alys angrily. “If you had kept to your course, Frain would be in no difficulty.”
“He would be in grave danger of death from thirst and starvation.”
“Huh,” said Alys unsympathetically. “There would have been rain soon enough, and a jackrabbit or two. Maeve, you have no business being here, and you know you have none. You are part of a far larger design than anything that ever happened in this puny land of Vale.”
I knew it was true, as she had said. I made no excuse; I only nodded. “But is Frain part of the pattern here in Vale,” I asked, “or is his destiny at the Source with mine, as I have sensed?”
“Frain is a nuisance,” said Alys grim
ly.
I waited, and in a moment she went on.
“This matter between Shamarra and Tirell is a pattern which will work itself out in its own time and way and with its own justice. As Fabron has met with justice at last, the usurper. Shamarra was as much a tool of destiny as a crafter of that death—Frain should not be involved. It was not only Shamarra who lured him out of Vale. But since, with that eager stupidity of his, he has gone and gotten himself back in again—” The goddess’s tone turned hard. “—I am going to have to intervene, since you have summoned me. And I hate to intervene. It makes me testy. Shamarra knows that.”
I stole a glance behind me. Frain had settled down beside his father and was stroking the dead man’s eyelids to close them. Dair had gone wolf, perhaps to threaten Shamarra should she make herself a monster again. Shamarra had folded her hands and stood very still.
“Shamarra,” said Alys with distaste but no wrath, “Frain is not entirely yours. I have work for him.”
“He has doomed himself—” Shamarra started.
“Another destiny encompasses that doom. Play out your own play here, and leave him to his, and see. He has been gone from you this long, and he is to leave you again, I say.” The voice had taken on a touch of sharp edge. “Go now.”
Shamarra nodded, gave a graceful curtsy and rippled away down the mountainside. She grew ghostly, seeming to float in the darkness, then disappeared. Frain stood up and gazed after her.
“He is so much like a child,” Alys sighed, “that it is useless to scold him. But you, Maeve!” Her voice jerked me around to face her again. “You are no child.”
I stood quite silently. I had lost my fear in resignation.
“Nothing to say for yourself?” asked Alys rather nastily. “Well, be mute, then. With the first rays of tomorrow’s sunrise. And you will remain mute until the fern flower is found and plucked. That should speed you on your way. When day comes, tend to the dead man, then turn eastward—and take that bothersome Frain with you!”
Thunder sounded, fire ramped and rained, and a blast of wind came that knocked me to my knees. When I looked up, Alys was gone. The great swan had flown, Frain said. Dair told me that the giant moon had faded into starlight. They pulled me up by the elbows and led me back into the shelter of the twin rocks Kedal and Kedur.
We sat all that night shivering and talking, not for diversion but for vital understanding. Frain told us everything that Shamarra had said, and I told him what Alys had decreed. He seemed drifting, dazed, incoherent, even, after Fabron’s death and Shamarra’s plotting and my own setback. He ended up telling us, not anything about Fabron or Tirell or Shamarra, but about Kedal and Kedur. Two giant and immortal staghounds who had been insulted, called curs, and turned to stone as a result. Fabron had told him the tale when they first met, he said. As he spoke, his eyes remained dry, but slow, seeping tears ran down the rocks from their blind heads far above.
When dawn came we built a cairn over Fabron and left him. No one would ever find him, Frain said. No one came to the mountains except the foolhardy and the most daring of heroes. We trudged back up the steep and rocky slope to the pass, out of the shadow of Lorc Tutosel, the mountains of the night bird. I faced the morning sun. Frain looked back on the far hazy hills of Vale, then down at the cliffs that fell away at our feet, and abruptly he came out of his numbness into anguish.
“Maeve, what in the name of misery am I to do?” he cried, hurling the words out to the heedless wind. “Such a fool I am, I have given my life away to folly—it is not she that I love, she is a stranger, I hardly know her, I detest her, she has betrayed me like all the rest—and yet I love her still! How can that be?” He turned to me fiercely, willing me to understand what he did not. “How has she made such an ass of me? No, it is worse than that; I have done it to myself. I and that lake and an ideal. Look, world, here we see Frain, the noble, loving and faithful one—faithful to what? A witch, a harpy? Ai, I feel like giving my body to yonder void.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but no sound came. The muteness had struck. Desolation filled me.
“I can do nothing right,” Frain ranted, not looking at me. “I should be speeding to Tirell to warn him, help him, no matter what the goddess says—but I would not be able to face him. I am frightened at the very thought of it, as I was when I saw Fabron. I am such a coward—”
He was talking nonsense, as usual, and I could not tell him so. It is a hard thing not to be able to speak one’s mind. I sobbed in anger and self-pity. Frain spun around to peer at me, and his face crumpled.
“And you cannot even speak to me to scold me,” he whispered. “And that is my fault as well. Maeve, I am so sorry—”
That was worse than his ranting. I stamped my foot at him, furious at him and at my own sniveling. He grew suddenly very calm, smiling at me oddly.
“Well,” he remarked, “it can hardly be said any longer that I go to the Source to learn to speak to Shamarra.”
I forgot my tears and watched him warily. The cliff fell away jagged below. Dair stepped to his other side, taut and alert as well. We should have known better. There was always more to Frain than we expected.
“But I am going nevertheless, Maeve Mother,” he said almost jauntily. “And I am going to see that you get that flower if I have to find it for you myself. If it takes another eight years. From one madness to the next I flit. So off to the Source we go. Yo ho.”
He moved morosely down the shelving rock, and we followed meekly.
From that day on, by some odd shift of fate or will, Frain became our leader, and he felt it. He grew keen as a hound on a faint scent. He seldom slept, and when he did doze he would awaken himself shouting from vivid dreams. Mostly he paced the nights away, his face lean and questing. He did not mention Shamarra again, or the goings-on in Vale; whatever his feelings were in that regard, he kept them very much to himself. He walked steadily, following the straight tug of the Source as surely as I had, and he never led us astray.
He took us down the way we had come and then eastward along the scarp of the Lorc Tutosel with the desert to our right, too close for comfort. Vultures flew there; they reminded me unpleasantly of the Luoni. We found water and food when we needed it in the hollows of the mountains, but just barely enough; we were never really satisfied. The goddess was being severe with us, I could tell.
We made an odd trio, we travelers. Frain could talk to either of us, but for the most part he kept silence. Dair could talk only to me, and I could talk to no one, but I could understand, whereas Frain could understand nothing, and Dair had no one to listen to but Frain. And we were thin and brown and tangled of hair; I no longer looked much like a respectable matron. And we limped from the constant walking; we were all cripples and all mutes and all fools, one way or another. Sometimes, for no reason, I laughed. I could still laugh, much as Dair, in his way, could sing. He sang sometimes at night to amuse us, the notes glassy clear, smooth and sliding, with no cozy human quality about them at all. Once as he sang the wolves of the mountains joined in, each on its own key of wild harmony, and as soon as Dair changed pitch they all did, sliding to a new note with a delicate quaver and a dying fall at the end.
That’s all they accept me for, Dair said. The singing.
I doubted if anyone would have wanted any of us for anything except oddities. Even the slavers would have thought twice about taking us by now, I believed. But there were no slavers about, not on the edge of the desert. And when the barren expanse of sand blocked our way again we struck out across it with an absurd and mindless willingness and a total lack of supplies.
She has made ninnies of us, I thought.
It was hot, too, far hotter than before. The sand burned our bare feet—we had all abandoned our footgear by then, it was worn to pieces. But the way was not long. Only a few days after we started across that wasteland we spied the most unexpected sort of haven, a line of bright green ahead. And as we drew nearer we saw a shine of silver. Not until we stood on th
e very verge could we believe. A great sheet of water, a magnificent river, bubbled up from the sand at that spot and flowed away between banks of verdant reeds. One foot on sand and the other in marshland, we stood and blinked at each other.
“I declare,” said Frain in a startled way, staring at the water that lapped at his instep.
I was more forthcoming. I fell right into the river and drank. The water was fresh and sweet, sand-filtered, and very clear. It seemed to me at the time the best I had ever tasted. Dair drank as well, then whooped and splashed me, capering. Frain still stood bemused. He turned and looked behind him to where the Lorc Tutosel still showed tiny and serrated on the far horizon.
“I declare, it must be where the Chardri comes up again, the great river, after it tumbles beneath the mountains down the south abyss.”
I did not know and I did not care. The river, whatever river it was, ran south and east, more east than south for the time, and we followed it. We found wild asparagus and duck eggs and ate them ravenously; even Dair ate the greens. Then we went on. After a while bushes grew along the shore as well as reeds, and then dwarf willows, and then tall sycamore trees, real trees. In their gently shifting shade, half over the water, stood an odd stilt-legged sort of house.
A house!
We froze like startled deer and stared at it, half inclined to flee, as if we had forgotten we were human. The people within were as uncertain as we. Shy brown faces peeped out at us from between reed window slats. Frain collected himself and stepped forward, his one good hand raised to signify peaceful intent.
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