Deverry #06 - The Westlands 02 - A Time of Omens

by Katharine Kerr

  In those days the eastern border of the elven lands lay in the middle of a forest. A traveler leaving the high plains and heading east came down a long gentle decline into the oaks to find several rivers that might mark a border—if only anyone at all had lived on either side of them. In that vast tangle of tree and shrub, bracken and thorn, finding the lands of men (that is, the three western provinces —Eldidd, Pyrdon, Arcodd—of the kingdom of Deverry) was no easy job. If you wanted to go from west to east, the sandy coast of the Southern Sea made a much more reliable road, if, of course, you could fight your way south to reach it. The ancient forest had a way of tricking travelers unless they or their companions knew the route well.

  The woman who rode out of the forest late on a summer day traveled with a horde of such companions—not that most human beings would have seen them. Sylphs and sprites hovered round her in the air; gnomes clung to her saddle or perched on the back of the spare horse she was leading; undines rose out of every stream and pool she passed to wave a friendly greeting. Her friends weren’t the only odd thing about Jill. If you looked carefully at her silver hair, cropped short like a lad’s, and the fine lines that webbed her eyes round and latticed her cheeks, you realized that she had to be at least fifty years old if not somewhat more, but she radiated so much vitality, the way a fire gives off heat, that it was impossible to think of her as anything but young. She was, you see, the most powerful sorcerer in all of Deverry.

  The first human settlement that any traveler corning from the west reached on the coast was the holy precinct of Wmmglaedd, although in those days, before the silting of the river and the meddling of humans had extended the shore, the temple lay a little ways out to sea on a low-lying cluster of islands. Jill rode along the sea cliffs through meadows of tall grass to a rocky beach, where the waves washed over gravel with a mutter, as if the sea were endlessly regretting some poor decision. A fair mile offshore, she could see the rise of the main island against the glitter of the Southern Sea.

  She led her pair of horses down to the two stone pillars that marked the entrance to a stone causeway, still underwater at the moment, though when she looked at the water lapping at the carved notches along the edge of one pillar, she found each wave falling a little lower than the one before. Crying and mewling, seabirds swooped overhead, graceful gulls and the ungainly pelicans that were sacred to the god Wmm, all come to feed as the dropping tide exposed the rocky shallows. At last the causeway emerged, streaming water like a silver sea snake, to let her lead her horses across the uncertain footing. At the far end of the causeway stood a stone arch inlaid with colored marble in panels of interlace and roundels decorated with pelicans; it sported an inscription, too, “water covers and reveals all things.”

  About ten miles long and seven wide, with a central hill standing in the midst of meadows of coarse sea grass, the island sheltered four different temple complexes at that time, brochs as tall as a lord’s dun, clusters of wooden guest houses, cattle barns and riding stables as well as a series of holy shrines placed at picturesque locations. Although the temple had been founded in the year 690 as a modest refuge for scholars and mystics, during the long civil wars of the ninth century its priests had the shrewdness and the good fortune to play a crucial role in placing the true king on his throne. When the wars were over, their fame drew an occasional desperate soul seeking an oracle, and as the long years went by, the rare case became a swarm of pilgrims, all laden with gifts to earn the favor of the god.

  Now Wmm was rich. Still leading her horses rather than riding, Jill left the causeway and followed a fine road, paved with limestone blocks, through the smallish town that had sprung up near the temples. In among the round, thatched houses townsfolk and visitors strolled around or sat in the windows of one of the many inns, and peddlers kept accosting her with trays of sweetmeats or baskets of little silver medals and pottery souvenirs. She brushed them all off and strode on her way, skirting the main complex, too, bustling with visitors and priests here in the summer season, and took a little-used path that ran southeast through pine trees, all twisted and bowed down from the constant wind. In a little bay of rocky shore a jetty stood with a ferry bobbing at anchor beside it. Beyond, a scant mile away, she could see the rise of East Island, a long sliver of land that most visitors knew or cared nothing about.

  “Jill, halloo!” The ferryman, a stout priest draped in an orange cloak, waved both hands at her as she led her horses gingerly down the steep path. “Back so soon?”

  “I am, at that. How have things been? Quiet?”

  “They always are, out our way.” He grinned, revealing brown and broken teeth. “His holiness has pains in his joints again.”

  “I’m surprised you aren’t all as bent and stiff as village crones, frankly, out here in the fog.”

  “True, true. But well, we’ve got a bit of sun today at least. Enjoy it while we can, say I.”

  Since the tide was running out, the journey was quick and easy, though the ferryman was bound to have a harder trip rowing back by himself. Jill coaxed her horses off, left him sighing at the job ahead, and headed across a wind-scoured meadow to a complex much smaller and plainer than those of the main island. At the base of a low hill stood a clutter of roundhouses and a stables, shaded by a few stunted oaks. Dust drifted and swirled over the threadbare lawns and sickly vegetable gardens. She turned her horses over to a groom, carried her saddlebags and bedroll to a hut that did for a guest house, dumped her gear onto the narrow cot, and decided that she’d unpacked. With a deferential bob of his head, a servant came in, bringing her a washbasin and a pitcher of water.

  “His holiness is in the library.”

  “I’ll join him there.”

  After she washed up, she lingered in the silence for a moment to get her questions clear in her mind. Like all the other pilgrims, she’d come to Wmm’s temple for help in making a decision, in her case about a voyage to the far-lying islands of the Bardekian archipelago, a very major undertaking indeed in those days. It was likely that she’d be gone for years and almost as likely that she wouldn’t even find what she was looking for, the translation of a single word that she’d found inscribed inside a ring. The word, written in Elvish characters though it made no sense at all in any language, might have been a name or sheer nonsense for all that she knew. What she did know, in the mysterious way that dweomermasters have, was that the inscription would make the difference between life and death to thousands of people, men and elves alike. When, she didn’t exactly know. Someday, perhaps even soon.

  She suspected—but only suspected—that the answer lay in Bardek. She was hoping that the priests of Wmm could either confirm her suspicion or lay it to rest.

  The library of Wmm was at that time an oblong building in the Bardek style of whitewashed stucco, roofed in clay tiles to cut down the fire danger. Inside, in a row of hearths peat fires constantly smoldered to keep the chill and damp off the collection of over five hundred books and scrolls—a vast wealth of learning for the time. Jill found the chief librarian, Suryn, standing at his lectern by a window with a view of the oak trees beyond. Unrolled in front of him was a Bardekian scroll. He looked up and smiled at her; as always, his weak eyes were watering from the effort of reading.

  “Oh, there you are, Jill! I’ve been looking for that reference you wanted.”

  “The history scroll? You’ve found it?”

  “I have indeed, and just now, so it’s a good thing you wandered in like this. Must be an omen.”

  Although he was joking, Jill felt a line of cold run down her back.

  “In fact, I’ve found both
of the sources you were talking about.” He tapped the papyrus in front of him with a bone stylus. “Here’s the scroll, and it does indeed have a reference to elves living in the islands. Well, maybe they’re elves, anyway. Take a look at it, and I’ll just fetch the codex.”

  The scroll was an ancient chronicle of the city-state of Arbarat, lying far south in the Bardekian islands. Since Jill had learned to read Bardekian only recently, it took her some minutes to puzzle out the brief entry.

  “A shipwrecked man was washed up on shore near the harbor. His name was Terrso, a merchant of Mangorat . . . ” There was a long bit here about the archon’s attempt to repatriate the man, which Jill skipped through. “Before he left us, Terrso told of his adventures. He claimed to have traveled far, far south, beyond even Anmurdio, and to have discovered a strange people who dwelt in the jungles. These people, he claimed, were more akin to animals than men, because they lived in trees and had long pointed ears. Because he was so ravaged by fever, none took his words seriously.”

  “Curse them all!” Jill snapped.

  “They don’t truly go into detail, do they?” Suryn came up at her elbow. “Here’s the Lughcarn codex. Do be careful with it, won’t you? It’s very old.”

  “Of course I will, Your Holiness. Don’t trouble your heart about that. May I take it back to the guest house to read? I need to rest from my journey.”

  Suryn blinked at her for a moment.

  “Oh, you’ve been gone. Of course—silly of me. By all means, keep it with you if you’d like. There’s a lectern in the hut?”

  “A good one, and a candle-spike, too.”

  Jill bathed and ate a sparse dinner before she got around to looking at the codex. By then, early in the evening, the fog was coming in thick, darkening the hut and turning it chilly, too. She lit a fire in the hearth, lit it by the simple means of invoking the Wildfolk of Fire with a snap of her fingers, then stuck a reading candle, as long and thick as a child’s arm, onto the cast-iron spike built into the lectern. Before she lit the candle, though, she sat down on the floor by the fire to watch the salamanders playing in the flames and to think for a while about the work she had in hand, gathering every scrap of available information about the mysterious inscription. Although it was a pretty thing, made of dwarven silver and graved with roses, the ring itself carried no particular magic. It might, however, be important as a clue.

  She already knew much of its history. Once it had belonged to a human bard named Maddyn, who had traveled to the western lands and given it to an elven dweomermaster as a gift. That master had in turn given it to a mysterious race of not-truly-corporeal beings called the Guardians. She was assuming that the Guardians had added the unintelligible inscription for the simple reason that the ring hadn’t been inscribed before they’d got hold of it, but when one of their kind returned it to the physical world by giving it to another bard, elven this time and named Devaberiel, it carried its little riddle. As far as dweomermasters could tell, the Guardians perceived important omens about future possibilities as easily as most men see the sun. Since they insisted that the inscription had some important Wyrd to fulfill, Jill saw no reason to doubt them. Abstract terms like “why,” however, seemed to have no meaning for them, and there was much in the way of explanation that they’d left out of their tale.

  As she always did toward evening, she found herself thinking about her old master in the dweomer and missing him. Although Nevyn had been dead for months now, at times her grief stabbed so sharply that it seemed he’d died just the day before. If only he were here, she would think, he’d unravel this wretched puzzle fast enough! A gray gnome, a creature she’d known for years, materialized next to her and climbed into her lap. All spindly arms and legs and long warty nose, he looked up at her with his pinched little face twisted into a creditable imitation of human sadness.

  “You miss Nevyn, too, don’t you?” Jill said. “Well, he’s gone on now like he had to. All of us do in our time.”

  Although the gnome nodded, she doubted if he understood. In a moment he jumped off her lap, found a copper coin wedged into a crack in the floor, and became engrossed with pulling it out. Jill wondered if she would ever meet Nevyn again in the long cycles of death and rebirth. Only if she needed to, she supposed, and she knew that it would be years and years before he would be reborn again, long after her own death, no doubt, though well before her next birth. Although all souls rest in the Inner Lands between lives, Nevyn’s life had been so unnaturally prolonged by dweomer—he’d lived well over four hundred years, all told—that his corresponding interval of rest would doubtless be unusually long as well, or so she could speculate. It was for the Lords of Wyrd to decide, not her. She told herself that often, even as her heart ached to see him again.

  Finally, in a fit of annoyance over her mood, she got up and went to the lectern to read, but the chronicle only made her melancholy worse. She’d been trying to recall an event that had happened in one of her own previous lives, but she could remember it only dimly, because even a great dweomermaster like her could call to mind only the most general outlines and the occasional tiny memory picture of former lives. She was sure, though, from that dim memory, that she—or rather her previous incarnation, because she’d been born into a male body in that cycle—had been present at the forging of the rose ring. During that life, as the warrior known as Branoic, she’d ridden with a very important band of soldiers, the true king’s personal guard in the civil wars— that much, she could remember.

  What she’d forgotten was that Nevyn had been not only present but very much an important actor in those events, perhaps the most important figure of all. There was his name, written on practically every page. As she read the composed speeches the chronicler had put into his mouth, she found herself shaking her head in irritation: he never would have sounded so stiff, so formal! All at once, she realized that she was crying. The flood of long-buried grief, not only for Nevyn but for other friends her soul had forgotten this two hundred years and more, seemed to work a dweomer of its own. Rather than merely reading the chronicler’s dry account, she found herself remembering the isolated lake fort of Dun Drwloc, where Nevyn had tutored the young prince who was destined to become king, and the long ride that the silver daggers had taken to bring the prince to Cerrmor and his destiny. All night she stood there, reading some parts of the tale, remembering others, until the sheer fascination of the puzzle buried her grief again.

  past

  The year 843. In Cerrmor that winter, near the shortest day, there were double rings round the moon for two nights running. On the third night King Glyn died in agony after drinking a goblet of mead . . .

  The Holy Chronicles of Lughcarn

  The morning dawned clear if cold, with a snap of winter left in the wind, but toward noon the wind died and the day turned warm. As he led his horse and the prince’s out of the stables, Branoic was whistling at the prospect of getting free of the fortress for a few hours. After a long winter shut up in Dun Drwloc, he felt as if the high stone walls had marched in and made everything smaller.

  “Going out for a ride, lad?”

  Branoic swirled round to see the prince’s councillor, Nevyn, standing in the cobbled ward next to a broken wagon. Although the silver dagger couldn’t say why, Nevyn always startled him. For one thing, for all that he had a shock of snow-white hair and a face as wrinkled as burlap, the old man strode around as vigorously as a young warrior. For another, his ice-blue eyes seemed to bore into a man’s soul.

  “We are, sir,” Branoic said, with a bob of his head that would just pass for a humbler gesture. “I’m just bringing out the prince’s horse, too, you see. We’ve all been stable-bound too long this winter.”

  “True enough. But ride carefully, will you? Guard the prince well.”

  “Of course, sir. We always do.”

  “Do it doubly, this morning. I’ve received an omen.”

  Branoic turned even colder than the brisk morn
ing wind would explain. As he led the horses away, he was glad that he was going to be riding out with the prince rather than stuck home with his tame sorcerer.

  All winter Nevyn had been wondering when the king in Cerrmor would die, but he didn’t get the news until that very day, just before the spring equinox. The night before, it had rained over Dun Drwloc, dissolving the last pockets of snow in the shade of the walls and leaving pools of brown mud in their stead. About two hours before noon, when the sky started clearing in earnest, the old man climbed to the ramparts and looked out over the slate-gray lake, choppy in the chill wind. He was troubled, wondering why he’d received no news from Cerrmor in five months. With those who followed the dark dweomer keeping a watch on the dun, he’d been afraid to contact other dweomermasters through the fire in case they were overheard, but now he was considering taking the risk. All the omens indicated that the time was ripe for King Glyn’s Wyrd to come upon him.

  Yet, as he stood there debating, he got his news in a way that he had never expected. Down below in the ward there was a whooping and a clatter that broke his concentration. In extreme annoyance he turned on the rampart and looked down to see Maryn galloping through the gates at the head of his squad of ten men. The prince was holding something shiny in his right hand and waving it about as he pulled his horse to a halt.

  “Page! Go find Nevyn right now!”

  “I’m up here, lad!” Nevyn called back. “I’ll come down.”

  “Don’t! I’ll come up. It’ll be private that way.”

  Maryn dismounted, tossed his reins to a page, and raced for the ladder. Over the winter he had grown another two inches, and his voice had deepened as well, so that more and more he looked the perfect figure of the king to be, blond and handsome with a far-seeing look in his gray eyes. Yet he was still lad enough to shove whatever it was he was holding into his shirt and scramble up the ladder to the ramparts. Nevyn could tell from the haunted look in his eyes that something had disturbed him.