The Blue Sword d-1

by Robin McKinley

  "That mare's line is called Nalan—faithful. You can see it in Tsornin's pedigree."

  Harry asked lightly: "And is there a name for the line of the kings of Damar?"

  Corlath said, "My father's name, and his father's, and mine, is Gulkonoth: stone."

  Harry looked at his right hand resting quietly on his knee. He paused and added as if inconsequentially, "There are other names for the king. One of them is Tudorsond. Scarred hand."

  "Does the korim scar the foreheads of the household, and the faces of the hunt and the horse as well?" And Corlath said, "Yes."

  There was a silence again, and Harry wondered how many other questions she might be able to gain answers for. She said, "Once in the mountains before the trials, Mathin said to me that he could teach me three ways of starting a fire, but that you knew a fourth. He would not tell me what the fourth was."

  Corlath laughed. "I will show you one day, if you wish. Not today. Today it would give you a headache."

  Harry shook her head angrily, her feeling of contentment gone. "I am tired of having things only half explained. Either I am damalur-sol, when it is convenient, or I am to be quiet and sit in a corner and behave till it is time to bring me out and show me to the troops again. Did you choose Mathin to teach me because he is close-mouthed?"

  Corlath looked a little abashed, and Harry guiltily remembered how much Mathin had told her, although—she defended herself—it was not enough. Never enough. But she could not help remembering his answer when she had asked him why he had been chosen for her training.

  "I chose Mathin because I thought he would teach you best; there are none better than he, and he is patient and tireless."

  And kind, thought Harry, but she would not interrupt when she might learn something.

  "We of the Hills—I suppose we are all, as you say, close-mouthed; but do you think you have learned so little of us?" And Corlath looked at her—wistfully.

  "No," she said, ashamed of herself. There was a pause, and she said, "Could you perhaps, please, tell me why Mathin would not tell me any of the legends about the Lady Aerin? They are a part of your lives that all of you share—and it is her sword you have given me—and the legends, why, there are a few sung even at the spring Fairs in the west, where Outlanders can hear them."

  Corlath tapped his fingers, one-two-three, one-two-three, on the brim of the fountain. "Aerin is a part of your destiny, Harimad-sol. It is considered unlucky to … meddle with destiny. Mathin would feel that he was doing you a disservice, speaking much of Aerin to you, and I—I find, now, that I feel the same." Tap-tap-tap. "If you had grown up … here, you would have heard them. But you did not. And if you had, perhaps you would not now be what you are.

  "I am sorry." He turned and looked at her. "If—after we have met the Northerners, and the gods have decided between us, if you and I are left alive, I will tell you all the stories I know of Aerin Dragon-Killer." He tried to smile. "I even can sing a few."

  "Thank you."

  Corlath's smile became more successful. "There are a very great many of them—you may not wish to hear them all."

  "I do wish to hear them all," said Harry firmly.

  Corlath took his hand away from the stone brim and began to shred a chunk of bread into fragments on his plate. "As for the first question," he said, "watch." He blinked a few times, closed his eyes, and a shudder ran through him; then he opened his eyes again and gave a hot yellow glare to the little heap of bread crumbs, which burst into flame, crackled wildly for a few minutes, and subsided into black ash.

  "Oh," said Harry. Corlath looked up; his eyes were brown. They stared at one another. Harry found herself saying hastily, in a voice that was a little too high-pitched, "What is this place—here—?" and she jerked her eyes away, and waved to the mosaic walls. "I have seen nothing else like it anywhere in the City."

  Corlath shook his head. "Nor will you." He got slowly to his feet, and looked around, and cupped his scarred hand under the fountain, and drank from it. "My father built it for my mother just after he married her. She was fond of the color blue—and I think he wanted to tell her that he did not mind that she would never carry the Blue Sword, the greatest treasure of his family, the woman's sword." He looked down at her inscrutably, but his eyes did not focus on her. Then he turned and left her, going through the door into the castle.

  Two days later the army rode away from the City. Corlath and his Riders rode together down the highway from the castle to the gates of the City, with men and women of the household and the hunt and horse, and pack horses behind them; and the people of the City lined the streets and silently watched them go, although many raised their hands to their foreheads and flicked the fingers as they rode by. Harry had not seen so many before; some were refugees from northern Damarian villages, and farmers from the green lands before the Bledfi Gap. And they rode down to the plain where the army Harry had not seen, for she had not left the City since she rode into it, lay before them; and behind her she heard a sound no Damarian had heard in generations: the City's stone gates closing, heavily, mournfully.

  Tsornin was restless. Now, with the ranks upon ranks of the Hill army drawn up upon it, the plain looked like some other place than the plain where Harry and Tsornin had fought with blunt staves and sword points. Tsornin was too well bred to do more than fidget slightly in place; but his shoulder, when she ran her hand down it, was warmer than the morning air deserved. The muscles under the golden skin were hard; she felt that if she rapped her knuckles against his shoulder ridge it would ring like iron.

  She stood, a little awkwardly, in the group of Riders, only a little way into the plain from the end of the City highway. They were on a little rise of land, so they looked out and down over the rest of the company, and Harry felt unnecessarily conspicuous. "Why couldn't you be liver chestnut or something?" she whispered to Tsornin, who bowed his golden head. A new helm fitted closely down over her bound-up hair, and there were new boots on her legs, with tops that rolled up and lashed into place for battle; and she felt Gonturan hanging expectantly at her knee. Ten days were not enough to accustom herself to being a Rider, however hard she had driven herself and Tsornin round the lonely practice fields with their stiff wooden silhouettes of enemy swordsmen; and while the Riders themselves—particularly one or two: Mathin, and the merry (for a Rider) young Innath—closed ranks around her and accepted her as one of them, she could not believe that they did not themselves wonder, a little, about her presence among them.

  Sungold blew impatiently and began to dig a hole with one front foot. She booted his elbow with her toe and he stopped, but after a moment he lowered his head and blew again, harder, and she could feel him shifting his weight, considering if she might let him dig just a small hole. She looked around: the other horses were showing signs of stress as well. Mathin stood next to her; Windrider, although rock still, unlike the younger Tsornin, wore a dark sheen of sweat down her flank. Corlath's Fireheart was standing on his hind legs again; the king could bring him down as he chose, but Harry rather thought the horse was expressing the mood of both of them. Narknon, so far as Harry could see, was the only one of their company who remained undisturbed. She sat in front of Sungold, just beyond the reach of pawing forefeet, and washed her chest and combed her whiskers.

  They marched west. They crossed the low but steep ridge of mountains between the City and the desert plain that stretched far away, up to the back door of the Outlander Residency in Istan. They retraced Harry and Mathin's route, going in single endless file through the narrow paths; and they came to the desert edge at the end of the second day. Beyond the ridge they turned north.

  All the spies—those still living, for the North had caught a few—that Corlath had sent out in the last several years had come back in the last few months, in a rush, all with the same word: the waiting was over, the Northerners were moving. The last man of them had returned not six days before; it had taken him so long because they knew about him, and he had dodged and
fled and scrambled to get away from their creeping tracking magic. His tale was that their army was only days behind him, and that it was many thousands strong. He had delayed and delayed to take a fairer tally of the total; and yet, he said, even as the army marched south, hundreds and more hundreds appeared as if out of the air to march with it. Out of the air, Harry thought, and wondered if the phrase was more than just a manner of speaking. She had been included in the council of Riders that heard the man's tale; and the candlelight seemed to cast more shadows when he was through. Yet there was nothing to be done; the army that would stand for Damar was already gathered; the plans to face the Northerners were already laid.

  Of the Northerners' dread captain no spy was sure; no Damarian dared get that close, for the uncanny way he was said to smell foreign blood.

  There were hundreds of mounted men and women now following Corlath's word; and as they rode with the eastern Hills at their right hand, they looked a great many. A few hundreds more would join as the southern army made its way to the wide plain before the Gap. But that was all.

  Innath, riding at her elbow, said conversationally, "Less than half of the Northern army will be mounted; and not many of them will be riding horses; and very few of their horses will match the poorest of ours. One can double our tally at least, just for our horses; for they are Damarians and will fight for Damar as fiercely as we human beings, for all that we are the only ones who talk about it."

  "Yes," said Harry, her voice only a little muffled. Noontimes they stopped briefly, loosening girths to let the horses breathe, and eating bread and dry meat and water. At night they camped behind ridges of shale and scrub, and lit fires enough to boil the terrible dry meat to a slightly more edible consistency, and rolled up in their blankets to sleep where they sat. A few of the hunting-cats and a dozen dogs were with them; but they could not spare the time at present to use them. Narknon continued at Harry's heels and, as she had done once before, began hunting on her own, and brought back some of her grisly victories to lay at Harry's pillow. As the days passed and Mathin's stew pot became generally known as the only one reliably containing fresh meat, it grew very popular.

  The nights were clear and quiet, and the weather-casters among them promised no sudden windstorms; the edges of the Damarian Hills were known for their unpredictable weather, where mountain storms bottled up by the steep slopes might suddenly find their way to the flatter lands where they could rage and riot as they chose.

  Corlath was not trying to strike at once for the center of the northern mountains and the Bledfi Gap. After the Hill army crossed the narrow range behind which the City lay, they worked their way around the curve of the mountains, trotting through the sandy sour grass and broken rock at their feet. At first this made them ride almost due north, then in an increasing arc to the west; and the sun moved across the sky before them. Often in the mornings when the mist was still lying around them, trailing from the mountains' shoulders into their camp, a little group of riders, or even a solitary figure on horseback, would loom up at them from nowhere; but Corlath always seemed to be expecting them, and they always knew what to say to the guards that they might pass; and in this way the army a little swelled its ranks. Occasionally Harry heard a woman's voice among the strangers, and this made her glad; and often she'd rub a finger over the blue gem in the hilt of Gonturan and think of the sword no man could carry. Mathin said to her once: "We did not think to see so many women—few have fought with us within any man's memory, although in Aerin's day it was different. But I think many fathers are letting their daughters join us who had not thought to till they heard of Harimad-sol, and that Gonturan went to war again."

  Many of these women she met; particularly after Mathin had spoken to her, for then she began to feel a little uneasily responsible for them. Senay she saw several times—and saw too that she was wearing a sewn-together sash as if she were proud of it. Harimad-sol asked the names of the women when she had a chance, and they answered gravely; and they often gave her the back-of-hand-to-forehead gesture of respect, and none ever asked her her name, even when she was not carrying Gonturan and ought to look—she thought—like any other disheveled soldier. Most of those who came thus late to join Corlath's army did not carry a sword, and wore no sash; these were men and women who had spent their lives in their own villages, on their own farms and in their own shops, and had never attended laprun trials, nor felt the lack that they had not.

  One evening they rode into a hollow where nearly a hundred strangers, all mounted, and with several pack horses and hunting-beasts besides, waited for them; and Corlath rode forward with a great hearty cry of welcome, a sound nearer happiness than any Harry had heard from him since they began their march north. A rider at the head of the group rode to meet him, and they seized each other by the shoulders while their horses bumped uneasily together and rolled their eyes at each other. A third man then detached himself from the new group and joined Corlath and his friend.

  "Murfoth and his son, Terim," said Mathin in Harry's ear. "Murfoth was one of the old king's friends, though he's not much more than ten years older than our king. He might have been a Rider, had he wished, but he chose instead to stay at home and look after his lands; and a good job he's made of it too. Some of our best horses now come from him, and grain to feed many more."

  "We Riders," said Innath from her other side, "as you may have noticed, tend to be fourth sons or otherwise penniless—or incurable wanderers like Mathin here—but Murfoth now, when he comes to ride with his king, can bring eighty men with him." Innath's voice, for all its careless pride, sounded almost wistful. Harry found herself remembering her father's words to her—it seemed decades ago: "You haven't a penny, you know."

  Terim was Harry's age, and when he and his father came to sit at the king's fireside he came to her and sank down beside her, folding up his long legs as all the Hillmen did. She looked at Terim and he looked at her; his look was eager and a little, to her embarrassment, reverent. "I was First at my laprun trials three years ago," he said; "but when I took my turn against Corlath my sash was on the ground before I had a good grip on my sword." He thumped the hilt of his sword, which jangled as it bit into the ground. "My father gave me Teksun here anyway, he said no one ever got a grip on a sword against Corlath. You did, though." His eyes shone in the firelight.

  Harry ran a meditative finger over the careful seam in her sash, which she had put in under Mathin's promised tutelage. "I didn't know it was he—I never thought. And he allowed me to cross swords with him; and when I realized how much of it was allowing, I got … mad." She paused. "I was surprised too." She frowned, remembering the awful headache she'd had for most of that day, and then the more awful sick lurch that seemed to start behind her eyes, where the headache was, and quiver all the way through her body, when she saw the face behind the scarf she had just removed. No one had called her baga for the cut at the corner of Corlath's mouth, though. She met the boy's eyes somewhat ruefully and said, "It wasn't as pleasant an experience as you might think."

  Terim gave a little snort of laughter and said, "Yes, I believe you," and Harry looked across to where Corlath sat with Terim's father and found him watching her. She wondered if he had heard what she had just said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the hollow where they met Murfoth they set up their first proper camp. The hunting-beasts all went out that night, and everyone, not just a few Riders, had good fresh meat for dinner. The king's zotar was put up, and it was obvious that it was the king's, for it was the biggest, but this one was plain, a dull dun color, and the door was just a tent flap, and inside there were a few carpets, and hooks on side poles for lanterns, but that was all; although the black-and-white banner still flew bravely from the peak of the roof. She and the king and Murfoth and most of the Riders—Innath and Mathin among them—slept within it; but she lay awake a long time listening to the others breathe. You didn't hear the person next to you breathing if there wasn't a ceiling over you to keep t
he noise closed in. She missed the stars.

  The next morning there was breakfast at a long table similar to the one where she had first met the Riders; they were all there again, with a few others of those who had joined them over the last few days. Corlath explained what was immediately ahead of them: how they would climb into the mountains again—the range was widest where the curve west was sharpest—to meet the high plateau where the Lake of Dreams lay, and where Luthe lived. Luthe? thought Harry. Most of the army would not climb all the way to the meeting-place, but fade into the forest in little groups and pretend to be invisible; for, so far at least, Corlath and the outriders believed they had not been sighted. Harry blinked and wondered if the morning mists that seemed to continue all day long every day as a kind of dull haze had after all been more than a curious local weather pattern. Luthe himself—Mathin told her this during an interval while the household folk brought in hot malak—had ways even Corlath did not understand of seeing things, and Corlath wished to see and speak to him. But Luthe never left his lands, and so it was necessary to seek him there. "Luthe claims that lowland air confuses him," Mathin said, and shrugged the uneven Hill shrug. "It is not for us to know." He picked up his cup.

  "Yes, but who is Luthe?" said Harry.

  Mathin regarded her with his inscrutable expression. "No one knows," he said. "Luthe is … someone who lives in the mountains, who sees things—things something like what some of us see when we taste the Meeldtar. He has been there a very long time. No one can remember when Luthe came, or when he has not lived on his mountain."

  "And the Lake of Dreams?"

  Mathin stared into his cup. "There is a spring that runs into the Lake of Dreams, and it is where the Water of Sight is found; but sometimes the water from the spring is only water, and no one knows why; although it is believed that Luthe knows. Water drunk from the Lake of Dreams does not give the Sight, as the true Meeldtar does; but it is not quite like drinking … water."