The Golden Swan

by Nancy Springer

  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 the 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.

  “Please,” he said in Traderstongue, “we are very hungry,” and he extended the hand with palm raised, the beggar’s gesture of appeal. He could never have been taken for a beggar. His bearing was princely in spite of his rags. But the people understood nevertheless, and silently and hesitantly they issued forth, small muscular men and wide-eyed children and women with their hands half hiding their faces, and they took us in.

  They fed us some sort of pudding and great flakes of white poached fish, and then we slept on reed mats that they unrolled for us on the floor. It was good to be back among humans again, very good, even though we were strangers among them and felt it, even though they whispered among themselves and stared at us constantly. The next day they sent us on our way with gifts of fish and wild rice. We stayed that night in another such house, and the next in another. These people lived all along the river. They were gentle folk, almond brown of skin with large dark eyes; their merry round-faced children swarmed through the small dwellings like puppies. We were sorry to leave them, but when the river turned more south than east we saw that we would have to. Our decision caused them great consternation and much high-pitched talk which of course we could not understand.

  “You go east?” an old man demanded of us in a dialect we could comprehend, though barely. We nodded. Indeed, we had to go east.

  “You three, you woman and wild man and man with withered arm.” He pointed at us each in turn. “Legends say end of world is to come when you go east.”

  We looked at each other and shrugged, thinking we could not have understood him correctly; then we raised hands in farewell and took our leave. They let us go amid much wailing, for they were peaceable folk and would not have known how to stop us.

  Once again we were on our own. The land away from the river was no longer desert, but a sort of sandy grassland. The sun shone down with passionate warmth, and birds were mating and singing everywhere. Spring had come, the season of love. Frain did not speak anymore of love, but a poet’s paradise of love stretched all around us, doves and deer with their young dappled fawns at their soft flanks and lovely creatures of every kind. I wondered why the river people seemed so afraid, seemed never to come out on this rich grassland. I realized later that it was because we were nearing the holy place.

  Near seemed as far as ever to us; we walked for weeks. After a while we noticed marshy patches in the plain. Swarms of stinging insects came up from them and attacked us, rather as if they were guarding the hidden place. Once we reached the true fen, though, they troubled us no more.

  That wetland, the most marvelous of fens. We traveled through it for miles and days, our wonder deepening and widening as it did. The spring-green sedges, gathering sand around their roots into hillocks and letting smooth water through in a mazy way betw
een. And waterfowl everywhere, and the white wading birds always standing, and the white water lilies where the shallows deepened into pools. Then islands lush with plumy trees, and the waterways between them golden from the sand beneath and mirroring sky and shadow, meandering, lined with the yellow blossoms of mallow, snakes and turtles sunning themselves on the banks—

  Great red fish flickered beneath the ripples, quite tame. “They look as if a person with two hands could practically pick one up,” said Frain.

  It was not so easy. I tried. Then we tried catching them in Dair’s shirt, and that worked no better. Then Frain cut a six-foot shaft from one of the nodding island trees and tied his knife to the end of it and tried to spear them for us. He stood motionless, biding his time, then let loose a mighty thrust. But he missed his aim, and the knife buried itself in the sandy bottom somewhere; the lashings broke.

  “Marvelous,” declared Frain sourly, searching for it.

  Dair had been watching hungrily. Frustration nudged him into change, and in a moment he was a bear, a great lumbering bear with gray-tipped fur, and he slapped fish out of the water for us with nimble paws. We cheered and roasted them and ate; they were delicious. But Frain never found his iron knife, the knife Shamarra had given him years before. And it occurred to me that I had lost something as well. I had not changed form or felt the call of the moon since I had summoned Alys, since I had become mute. All eloquence had left me.

  I was content, just the same. Our way led through fascination. Sun and shadow and islets and wandering waterways and the high arch of greenery overhead and shifting light. We found mossy stepping stones across shallows, and walkways and crannogs built of stone amid the deeper pools; who had made them, when? Elves, I could only think, the elder folk, millennia past. No men lived here, or had ever lived here, for this was a forbidden place. Deer and rabbits and squirrels gazed at us from the thickets unafraid. A hush lay everywhere, broken only by the ripple of water and the calling of birds. It seemed quite right to me that I was mute.

  One day at the height of spring we came out from under a canopy of cypress to find that it was the last one. A vast lake spread before us, a freshwater ocean. And from out the midst of the lake rose a mountain. It was shaped more like a vast pillar than a mountain, pearly white in color, its sides nearly vertical, its apex hidden in cloud and a silvery cataract streaming down its nearer side. A bright plume of spray went up where the waterfall met the lake, and there were other such plumes rising all around the base of the great alabaster rock from other waterfalls; their steams spiraled up to the cloud above, lambent in the sunlight. There were bits of rainbow everywhere. We all stood openmouthed, staring. The mountain was enormous, and it stood miles away from us across the open water.

  “It is the Source,” Frain whispered.

  I nodded. It had to be.

  INTERLUDE II

  from The Book of Suns

  Do you remember the Source, People of Peace?

  We remember we left it in sorrow.

  Do you remember the Day at the Beginning of days?

  Our father Adaoun remembers.

  Do you remember the Song, Elder Folk, when the One sang out the Source?

  We came but a moment later.

  The unicorn song. The mountain pushed forth, horn of earth, singular and perfect. You cannot remember, for that was first. No ears heard that song, not even yours.

  Sing it for us.

  I cannot. I sang seasons, and sky, stars and sun and moon, rainbow, thunder, light, mist. I sang trees, ivy, mistletoe, grass. I sang birds, gave them voice, I sang scampering lizards and squirrels, creatures larger than those, insects, dragons, deer, all that is air and breathes, all that is fearsome—

  Sing again!

  I cannot. Songs of power can be sung but once and once more—at the end.

  The end?

  Oneness that was will return from the reaches. Dream of the wanderer on that far shore, the fair white form of single horn.… Do you recall, Fair Folk, how oneness was lost?

  To men.

  My poor creatures of passion. Elves, tell me.

  We remember, remember. We are very old. We know the birds flew, the trees were tall, the waters ran pure, there was enough for all to eat and then as our numbers grew still enough and more—

  Then men, filled with love and fear.

  Passionsong. Mighty One, why did you utter it?

  I wanted their heartslove, which you cannot give me.

  We saw only fear in men. Why did they fear us? They backed away from us whenever they met us, hid their young from us, confined within walls. They bred beyond reason, grew crowded and restless. They looked outward, wondering what lay beyond the mist—

  Very just. The world was put there to know.

  We tried hard to help them. We cut them the pathway, hastily, in mere years, since they were impatient. Some went. But they always came back, the place drew them. In passing of seasons they forgot how to speak with us. They threw stones and shouted, called us evil and heartless. They hunted the creatures and killed them for food.

  That is their right.

  Yes, but how can they stand it? You speak of their love, but we never saw it. They hardened their so-called hearts. They tried to kill us.

  Only the cowards tried that.

  There were cowards aplenty. All that they wanted was to cut the trees, hunt the birds, harrow the land. We prevented them from it and then they attacked us.

  With knives?

  With clubs and bows and knives. We learned quickly, we learned bloodshed that day. We used clubs and our own knives and drove them away, threw them down from the high walls, they fell to their deaths who were not dead already—

  Then you left as well.

  We were sickened and sad, we could not bear to stay. You helped us.

  I placed the guardian.

  Yes. It comforts us that all the fair things remain there under the eye of the watcher who will not sleep, even though we are absent.…

  You wandered for many a year.

  Seven ages. Far, far from men, somewhere, there would be a place we could dwell in peace, we thought, but we have not found it, for the humans are everywhere. Tell us, Aene, may we never return to the Source?

  Perhaps, at the very end. Where will you go till then, Fair Folk?

  To the place you have told us of, the unlit land. To the island where wild swans fly, the farthest strand.

  book three

  FRAIN

  Chapter One

  I am Frain, speaking to you from the swanlands beyond. I was a wanderer when I lived in the sunlit lands; I made my way from Vale to the coastline and from the snowladen northlands to the tin mines of Tokar to the tamarind forests of the south. I met many friends and dangers, suffered much and learned much. But I carried my own darkness with me everywhere, no matter how I tried to leave it behind, and I learned nothing that could help me until I met Dair and Trevyn and Maeve.

  I was under the black wing by the time I reached Isle—so much so that I did not care any longer what happened to me. It all comes of trying to be noble. Well, I had been so of necessity for Tirell, all my life, he needed me so—and when he came into his own I continued to be noble for Shamarra, who needed me not at all. Old habits are hard to break. So off I went—I can tell you now why I was so frightened of Dair. It was because his marvelous eyes were the eyes of truth on me, and there was so much that I wanted to hide. All the things that were not noble—the pettiness, the jealousy, the angers, all the squelched things I could not abide about myself. Odd; I cannot recall that I did a single noble thing during the time of all that hiding.

  Dair hid nothing. He was all honesty, he was most thoroughly and utterly himself. And the beauty of him, this ensorcelled prince with the regal face and the body women swooned over even though he could not be bothered to keep it clean—there’s the jealousy again, and a sniffle of self-pity: poor crippled thing, I! Now I can see it, but then I had to be taken by surprise to see anything clea
rly, and Dair surprised me constantly. He startled love out of me, the rogue. He was so good to me—and Trevyn, True King. I would have stood in awe of him if it were not that I felt as if I had known him all my life. I would look at him and dream of my brother. Tirell could converse with dragons, face their yellow eyes and speak with them mind to mind, and he was a visionary. But I talk too much about Tirell; I always have since I left Vale.

  So then there was Maeve, the moon woman, she who roamed the night in form of cat or wolf and who smoothed her hair with prim hands by day. By the time we reached her, Dair had me well in hand. I had been shocked into reluctant acceptance of almost anything except myself—that came later. Maeve mothered me and taught me. And if her son was supremely himself, she was the unity of opposite selves, of many selves, the Maeves of night and day. Talk of the One made more sense to me after I had met her.

  “This Source of yours,” I asked her one twilight as we walked, “will it be a sort of paradise?”

  “What do you mean by paradise?”

  There she went again, turning the question back on me. The worst of it was, I seldom knew exactly what I meant.

  “Well—no hunger, no danger or enemies, no need to labor.…”

  “I doubt if it will be like that,” she said. “The One made it, and Aene would not have sung something with so much negation in it.”

  “What is this One?” I burst out with a degree of frustration. It was a god I had never heard of.

  “Aene is hunter and hunted, the stag and the serpent,” she said. “Aene is rising sun and setting sun and changing moon, all phases including the dark, the sable moon. Aene is day and night, wholeness, abundance of life. There will be nothing lacking in the One’s creation.”

  “You mean there will be danger even there?” I asked in dismay. I very much wanted to rest.