The Gates of Tagmeth (Chronicles of the Kencyrath Book 8)

by P. C. Hodgell

  “Prid,” said Cyd gently. “Go seek.”

  Lyra grabbed Prid’s arm and the two girls rushed off, giggling. Lyra had already been out of breath. Jame wondered what she had been up to.

  “What are they looking for?” she asked.

  “Ah, yes. You came too late for this the year before last. All of the fires are out and, by lot, Feran was chosen to hide my tinderbox. We must find it before the men return.”

  “Oh,” said Jame, and turned to explain to Char, the previous conversation having been conducted in Merikit.

  “Oh,” said Char, looking dubious. No doubt, after the summer solstice, this sounded rather tame.

  Women’s voices echoed through the dark, calling back and forth. At first they sounded happy, even excited, but then a note of anxiety crept in.

  “It should not be this hard,” said Gran Cyd, listening. “The riddle was a feeble one.”

  “Why does it matter so much?” asked Jame.

  “You do not understand. The tinderbox is a present from the Earth Wife, back from her days as a mortal. Since then it has passed down from Merikit queen to queen. We were never to forget, she said, that our fire kindles that of our mates. They must not come to us until we are ready. Chingetai, though, only sees the significance of fire. He thinks that the power of the box should be his.”

  “Huh.”

  “As you say.”

  Merikit women drifted back to the lodge, speaking to each other in low, worried voices.

  “But it was in my sewing chest,” Feran could be heard to protest. “One eye that cannot see. A needle. Who could miss that?”

  “Now what?” asked Jame.

  “This has never happened before. It would not matter so much if Chingetai had not made such an issue of it. Now, will he come to court or to force?”

  Jame took her meaning and shivered. “Can such a thing really create such a change? Surely, that can’t be true for all of the Merikit men.”

  “Not for most, but some listen to him. Hatch is one.”

  Someone laughed nervously in the darkness.

  “Lady, you needn’t fret,” Lyra said. “I saw where Feran hid the box, and took it. It was only a joke.”

  A few women sighed with relief. Others grumbled. Jame had the impression of a dark mass gathering opposite Lyra, eyes hidden but still accusatory.

  “Give it to me,” said Gran Cyd, holding out her hand.

  Lyra fumbled in her pocket and flinched. “It—it isn’t there. I must have dropped it.”

  Prid burst into tears.

  “It’s only a silly toy,” Lyra protested, trying to embrace her.

  Prid thrust her away. “Oh, how could you? We women took you in. We gave you shelter. Is this how you repay us?”

  “I don’t understand,” cried Lyra and, clearly, she didn’t.

  Gran Cyd took her by the shoulders. “Think, child,” she said, giving the girl a little shake. “Where did you last see it?”

  “In—in Feran’s lodge.”

  “Where have you been since then?”

  “Oh, all over the village. We followed the hunters, you see. It was so funny.”

  “Look!” cried several voices.

  A light had appeared at the top of the slope to the north. The men were waiting.

  “We have to signal them,” said Prid, looking frantic, “but how? All of our fires are out.”

  Upslope, torches descended in an inverted V as the Merikit hauled their log over the crest of the hill. It appeared to be much smaller than the fifty-foot monster that had nearly rammed in the village gates two years ago. Also, only some of its branches had been lopped off, leaving the rest in a hedgehog’s ragged spine.

  Perhaps it was an accident, or perhaps Chingetai lost patience, but the tree tipped and began to descend, bouncing on the stubs of its limbs. Lights fell as the Merikit men threw their torches aside and scrambled to straddle the moving spire. Despite its lurching descent, it was coming fast. Had Chingetai fitted it again with the metal skid that had nearly caused disaster once before?

  “I quarreled with him about that,” said Gran Cyd, as if reading Jame’s thoughts. “This is something new. We still need to set it ablaze when it arrives. The Burnt Man, winter, must be burned and buried, otherwise spring will never come.”

  “Does Chingetai understand that?”

  “What my mate does or does not comprehend is sometimes beyond me.”

  As the women huddled together, watching and murmuring nervously among themselves, Jame looked around. With clouds momentarily obscuring the sky, it was truly the dark of the moon, so black that the earth seemed like a reproach to all life, but she had a Kencyr’s keen nocturnal vision and so saw what the others had missed: a faint light that rimmed Gran Cyd’s door. Leaving the women, Jame crossed to the stair and descended the steps. A push opened the door. The royal lodge appeared to be empty, but more light seeped around the hanging behind the queen’s judgment chair. Behind that was a second door, ajar. Jame slipped through it into the Earth Wife’s lodge.

  She suspected that normally it wasn’t there. Mother Ragga, the Earth Wife, turned up in the most unlikely places whenever she was needed, and that would certainly be on the winter solstice when light and dark, life and death, hung in the balance.

  Tonight her lodge was as Jame remembered it from two years ago, full of hibernating beasts, the Earth Wife herself asleep, snoring, on the hearth.

  The main difference was the circle of little girls sitting crossed-legged on the floor around a small, silver box, feeding its tiny flame with wisps of kindling. Around them, glowing, bleary eyes blinked in the gloom, and a towering cave bear yawned with fanged jaws fit to snap up any one of them.

  Jame carefully shut the tinderbox.

  “But it needs to eat,” Tirresian protested in the sudden darkness.

  “And they need to sleep. Hush.”

  She herded her seven daughters out, among unseen, grumbling forms, and carefully shut the door behind them on renewed snores.

  Outside, Cyd confronted Chingetai beside the log, which had finished its descent and come to rest near the village gates.

  “What, my lodge-wyf,” he was saying with mock reproof, “have you no fire with which to light my hearth? What, then, shall we say of my passion? Clearly, you have tended neither properly. Is that my fault?”

  “Housebond, you do not understand. If we do not kindle this log, winter will never end.”

  He laughed. “Do you truly believe such old wives’ tales?”

  “The Earth Wife’s tales, yes.”

  Jame approached with Tirresian clinging to her hand and Malign trailing after them. She proffered the box. “Here. We found it in Mother Ragga’s lodge.”

  Lyra’s voice sounded in the background: “But I never went there!”

  Cyd accepted it with a sigh of relief and drew a small key out of her bodice. This she fit into hole in the box’s side and turned so that within steel struck flint to produce a spark. Jame wondered how Tirresian had started her own fire. Moreover, where had she found the priceless artifact and how had she drawn her half-sisters to her in that secret place? As her mother had said, though, this child was special.

  And my daughter, she thought with pride, squeezing small fingers, if a bit alarming.

  Gran Cyd applied the spark to a branch. Dried needles kindled, but only at the tip where they burned like a candle’s fitful flame.

  Jame looked more closely at the tree trunk. “This is ironwood,” she said. “It seems to be dead, but just the same it’s going to take a long, long time to burn.”

  “Ah!” said the women, glaring.

  “Oh,” said the men, with a glance at Chingetai who stood by with a self-conscious smirk.

  Cyd drew Jame aside. “This is serious,” she said, under cover of the abuse now flying back and forth. “My dear housebond has presented us with a problem, but we will solve it. The Four be praised that it is only a sapling and, as you say, dead wood, but still expect no
early spring nor soon thaw of the Silver. In regard to that, you must take your young friend away. I might blink at her theft from a host, but come the vernal equinox, who will be chosen to be the Ice Maiden, bride to the Eaten One?”

  Jame remembered Prid’s terrified face when she had found the small, crystal totem in her bowl of stew at the spring festival and the awed, fearful murmurs around her:

  “The fish is caught, the fish is caught . . .”

  And then, oh, the water’s icy grip, the surging scales and glassy eyes . . .

  “I thought that was a matter of chance,” she said.

  “So we tell ourselves, but I have observed the ritual for many years, back to when Chingetai’s little sister was chosen. Whatever our shamans say, however they manage it, the sacrifice is not only always a maid but even then not random. If she is still here, it will be Lyra’s turn next.”

  To one side, Prid raged at Lyra.

  “All of our hopes and dreams, hospitality, friendship, sisterhood—thrown aside for a stupid joke!”

  Lyra burst into tears. “I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t think . . .”

  “You never do!”

  Lyra threw herself into Jame’s arms. “Oh, let me stay! I don’t want to go back to Restormir!”

  Jame detached her gently but firmly. “The lodge belongs to Prid. I am only her housebond. Think: Do you want to stay where you are no longer welcome?”

  Lyra drew a sleeve across her streaming eyes and nose. “When am I ever welcome, anywhere?”

  “Come back to Tagmeth with me and we will see.”

  Grunts came from the still-darkened village behind them: “Huh. Huh? Huh!”

  There was a thud, then a drumming of hooves on the wooden walk.

  “Squeee!”

  Merikit scattered as the yackcarn bull burst through the gates. Jame stepped in front of Malign.

  “Don’t you dare. She’s only a baby.”

  The bull veered off, saw Chingetai, and charged. The Merikit chief looked as if he meant to tackle that hurtling black form. However those menacing horns, even cut short, instead made him dive sideways at the last moment in among the bristling stakes of the ironwood log. The yackcarn paused, pissed on the ground, and rushed off into the night, which immediately hid him, except for the clang of the bell around his neck. Starlight glimmered on white hide as, with the taunting flick of a tail and a flourish of heels, the rathorn galloped after him.

  Chingetai struggled out of the branches, shouting for ponies and dogs. A hastily assembled hunting party scrambled after him into the dark, pursued by the women’s hoots:

  “Lost your manhood, have you, little boys? Then go and seek it!”

  Jame found Char standing beside her.

  “You let him out, didn’t you?” she asked quietly, under the general uproar.

  “I may hate the ugly brute, but he didn’t belong in a pen.”

  From out in the night, under the shadow of the mountains, came the receding triumphant cry:

  “Squeee . . . huh, huh, HUH!”

  IV

  JAME AND CHAR spent the rest of the night in Prid’s lodge, Lyra in Gran Cyd’s.

  Jame emerged near dawn, her breath a plume on the crisp air, her gloved hands shoved into her armpits for warmth. The women had dragged the ironwood log into the village and placed it in front of the royal lodge. The tips of all its branches were crowned with tiny flames and a pit had been dug under it to bed a fire now burned down to embers but continually fed. So far, the log’s bark had barely been scorched. It would be a very long winter.

  Tired dogs streamed back into the village and went whining for food to their respective lodges. Perhaps, like the dwellings themselves, like most Merikit possessions, they belonged to the women rather than to the men. The men followed them, also looking tired and dejected except for Chingetai, who looked furious. No need to ask how the hunt had gone.

  “You owe us ten cows and a bull,” said Char, coming up to the fire, not to be swayed from essentials by tact or timing.

  Chingetai drew himself up. “P’ah. Our bull is gone due to that wretched rathorn of yours. Our ponies could have overtaken him and our dogs pulled him down if that white monster had not crossed our path again and again. He even found some way to free the yackcarn of his bell, no doubt by hooking it off. We owe you nothing.”

  Cyd emerged from her lodge in time to hear this, a fine red shawl threaded with gold wrapped around her white shoulders. Lyra trailed after her. From the girl’s puffy eyes, it appeared that she had not slept well.

  “Come, housebond. Did you not tell me that you sealed your bargain with spit, water and earth as your witnesses?”

  Chingetai snarled at her. She handed him a mug of steaming beer and patted his arm, then stroked it, tracing his tattoos with a fingertip.

  “Come now,” she said again with a smile. “Is the yackcarn bull really such a loss? What did he have that you do not?”

  The corner of Chingetai’s lip twitched. “Quantity, perhaps, rather than quality?”

  “There speaks my man.”

  With that she stood on tiptoe to whisper in his ear, and he laughed outright.

  “Well then, come along, boy, and we will find you some cows. The bull I leave to your choice, if you have the eye to choose.”

  Malign trotted after them, trying to convince Char that he hadn’t already fed her.

  “Find me a willing milch cow,” he said, as they passed out of sight, “and I might blink.”

  An hour later, after the others had had a breakfast of bread and fresh goat milk curds, they were back, apparently still in good humor with each other. Char had picked out his new herd and announced with pleasure that one of the cows had let Malign nurse.

  “She’s uncommonly large for the valley breed,” he reported. “There may well be some yackcarn blood in her.”

  “What about the new bull?” Jame asked.

  “Oh, he’s all right—bigger in some respects, smaller in others.”

  Gran Cyd presented Lyra with the dapple gray pony she had been riding during her stay—Dewdrop, she called it.

  Lyra had been unusually subdued, but cheered up some when Prid rushed up at the last minute to embrace her.

  “Maybe we can be sisters again someday,” the Merikit girl said tearfully. Then, to Jame, “Good-bye, dear housebond, good-bye, good-bye!”

  The ride back to Tagmeth was uneventful. The new cows seemed better behaved than their sisters farther south and their presence put the bull on his best behavior, as did Death’s-head. Malign trotted most of the way at her new foster-mother’s side, only to be carried across Char’s saddle bow when she tried to steal naps.

  Lyra mostly remained quiet. This was so unusual that Jame didn’t press her to talk. Better that the girl should think about what had happened than be lectured about it, which in the past had done little good.

  In the late afternoon they rejoined the River Road and at dusk they reached the gorge above Tagmeth. The sound of rushing water and mist covered their descent. Likewise, the latter prevented them from seeing the fortress until they emerged at the rapid’s foot. Then they stopped short, staring.

  The field opposite the keep was full of tents and campfires. Armed Kendar—a good three hundred of them—passed back and forth between them while a legion of horses fretted on a picket line, no doubt annoyed to find the grass snow-covered and already close-cropped. Flags hung around one tent of lordly proportions and a fire leaped before its door. A large carcass turned over the fire, its grease feeding the flames beneath. The succulent aroma of roast beef drifted up.

  “That’s one of my cows,” said Char, indignant, and would have started forward if Jame hadn’t stopped him.

  A flag stirred in an errant breeze. Fading light barely picked out its emblem, a golden serpent feasting on its young.

  The Caineron had come to Tagmeth.

  Chapter XIV

  An Enemy at the Gates

  Winter 66—74

  I
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  “THE GOOD NEWS,” said Brier, as Rue handed Jame a mug of warm cider, “is that it’s only Tiggeri, not his lord father Caldane. You were barely out of sight when he turned up on our doorstep. The bad news is that he wants Mustard.”

  “Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? How did he know that she was here?”

  “We’ve guessed, remember, that Caldane’s scouts have been spying on us. More likely, though, your friend Gorbel told him. If so, neither brother would know about her death.”

  Jame sipped the amber brew, frowning. “Gorbel as much as promised me he wouldn’t tell, and I believe him. Yet,” she waved a hand, “as you see.”

  Her gesture took in the busy Caineron camp on the other side of the Silver, spread out beneath the parapet on which she, Brier, and Rue stood. It was the morning after her return to Tagmeth. As on the previous night, Knorth Kendar guarded the bridge and, downstream, the River Road. To the best of Jame’s knowledge, there was no closer ford to the south than Restormir. For once, she was glad of the keep’s unusual setting.

  A figure dressed in hunting leathers emerged from the grand tent and paused for a moment on its threshold to don his gloves. Then he stumped down to the New Road.

  “Hello!” he shouted, waving to them. “Good morning! Permission to approach?”

  “We may as well talk to the fellow,” said Jame, and gestured broadly toward the bridge.

  Brier put a hand on her arm. Jame looked down at it, then up into her marshal’s eyes. They hadn’t clashed over her risk-taking since Jame’s sortie into the Western Lands. This was no time to resume that conflict. Brier let go.

  Meanwhile, Tiggeri—for surely it was he—had waved acknowledgement and set off northward up the road.

  Corvine’s command held the bridge span while Damson’s ten stood nearby in reserve. All were fully armed and armored, and very much on the alert. Glittering spear points came down on either side of Jame as she stepped forward.

  She watched Tiggeri approach. They had never met before, although, thanks to Brier, she knew his reputation.

  “Smarter than the average Caineron,” the Southron cadet had said, “but not as funny as he thinks he is.”