The Golden Swan

by Nancy Springer

  There was a sense of coming home, home to the primal home, of release of care, of rocking in the arms of the All-Mother. As if we were at last allowed to be tired, we went off again and slept. Then near evening we ate again. Giant fireflies, the brightest I had ever seen, lit up the dusk like the missing stars. We slept through the night without a thought of quest or danger. My dreams were full of magic and bright colors, but I do not remember them well. Then we woke and ate.

  There were ferns everywhere, giant six-foot ferns along the streams, ferns growing right from the bights of the trees, ferns underfoot amid the moss, ferns hanging down from the tangled and hanging vines, feeding on air.

  “How are we to know which fern bears the magical flower?” I asked Maeve.

  She shook her head in that stolid way of hers. The goddess was to tell her somehow, I supposed. The very thought of the goddess annoyed me. I smothered the feeling.

  “You say it blooms only at midnight of Midsummer’s Eve?”

  She nodded. I felt my stomach knot.

  “But—when is Midsummer’s Eve?” I had kept no track of time, amid all our exertions, and I didn’t see how she could have, either.

  She had not. She shrugged. I turned away, flinging up my one good hand in despair. Dair grinned at me. His grin was most aggravating, though perhaps he did not intend it that way.

  “Come on,” I ordered, and stomped off.

  We went exploring. We went to the edge first, where the stream cut its way through the surrounding rock and became waterfall, giving itself to the void. We looked out through the gap into nothing more than mist, a soft, luminous veil of cloud and spray. Cloud nourished the great forest, bedewed the leaves, let light in only gently, here so close to the scorching sun. Mountain cradled us and cloud was the coverlet.

  We walked along the edge for a while, studying the great alabaster rocks that bounded the mountaintop cloud forest. Ferns grew on them, too, and columbine, and snails the size of my fist crawled amid the flowers, their shells as ornate as Fabron’s finest smithwork. We walked for a day and passed two more waterfalls, two more streams, they came out from—somewhere—like spokes of a giant wheel. There were gems in each streambed, and again we let them lie. They seemed no more precious to us than the other marvels of this place. We walked amid wonder. Then we slept and turned toward the unknown center, the Very Source.

  There was a kind of bird, a round, comical-looking bird about the size of a dove, pied green and tan and gold like a harlequin. It was very tame. It lived near the streams and grinned at us from shrubs as we went by. It had a wide beak that ended in a smirk, so wide that when it opened its mouth it seemed to split its head in half. The sound that came out of it was like a hooting laugh. I called it the hootoo bird, or sometimes, to insult it. I called it froggyface. Maeve smiled and called it nothing at all. What Dair called it I do not know. We followed the stream back to the Source, and the hootoos smirked at us all the way.

  It took two days. I felt the tug all the time, like a throbbing ache in my heart, not at all unpleasant, the ache of love. It was sometime during that walk that I noticed the sore on Dair’s arm. The cut the griffin had given him was not healing—it was open and festering. Odd, that in this place where everything was so clean and fresh, dew-bathed, such a thing could happen. I made Dair bathe it in stream water, puzzled; he had been in and out of streams often enough since we had come to this place and he was far cleaner than was his wont. And there was a balm in the water, too; I could feel it. Why had it not helped him?

  Either he or Maeve might have known the truth about the spine hidden in the tuft of hair at the end of the griffin’s leonine tail, about the poison. But of course they could not tell me. Perhaps they would not have told me anyway. They were always protecting me.

  Dair was as strong as a bear, stronger than any man I had ever met, stronger even than Tirell, I told myself. He would soon be better, I thought.

  We were getting very near. I could tell. The tug—it moved me to tears I could not understand, tears I had to suppress. Memories of times—long before I was born? How could that be? How could this place I had never seen be the home of my heart? But I felt that, and I could tell that Maeve felt something of the sort as well. She looked up, taut, expectant. The canopy of forest giants was coming to an end. Tree ferns nodded over us, uncurling spiral heads. We stepped through and saw—

  “Oh, Mother Adalis,” I breathed.

  Maeve said nothing at all, her eyes shining. Dair made a sound, and I knew without question that he invoked something, too—the god of wolves? It was deity, and it was the Tree of all trees.

  It towered above the great moss-bearded oaks behind us as they towered over us. Its trunk was the breadth of a castle and its crown disappeared in cloud; acres of ground lay beneath its spreading boughs. It was a world, a dwelling, a home and a marvel unto itself; it supported forests on its branches; trees grew there, feeding on the rich mold of its upper bark; they looked small, but they were as large as any normal tree in Vale or Isle. A house could have been built on any one of those boughs. And the water—it was the gift of the Tree, it flowed from the seams of the trunk itself, cascading down and forming its several streams and flowing away in every direction of the ringing horizon.

  “Mother Adalis,” I whispered again. “That must send its taproot down to the very fundament of earth, to the flood beneath.”

  Maeve nodded. It was the World Tree.

  We walked slowly nearer, step by hesitant step, gawking. All was in a hush, not silence exactly but silken texture of soft sound, trickle of water and swish of wings—giant dragonflies flew over the many waters, jewelglowing, iridescent; their six-foot wingspan looked small beneath the splendor above them. Lush, deep grass grew underfoot, and the most intricate of ferns, and dense thickets of goldenberry clustered at random amid the grass and ferns and between the streams. I disturbed a great snake resting in the grass. It slid away and flowed into the nearest stream and swam off, not bothering to harm me. There were quail nesting in the grass also. But something drew me besides plenty and magnificence and the cleansing marvel that is water—

  “The Tree,” I murmured with sudden certainty. “It is all made of living metal, the very marrow of earth; it is pure iron. I can feel it right down to my bones.”

  Maeve glanced at me intently. Dair made a questioning sound. I gestured earnestly at them.

  “Folks say smiths have molten metal for blood,” I told them. “That Tree is the lodestone that drew me here. Come and see.” I strode with insane temerity straight up to the trunk that loomed like a wall before me.

  It was true. The bark was yielding, cushiony, but nevertheless metal—spun iron, like foundry bloom. Its color was a dully glimmering dark gray. The substance beneath it was as hard as cast iron, hammered iron or steel. The leaves rustled far above. What they were we could not tell, but there was a golden glint to them—or perhaps that was only the evening light. Night was near.

  “What now?” I asked, suddenly abashed by my own boldness. “Do you think we dare stay here?”

  Maeve sat down on the thick green grass, looking quite serene, and that gave us the answer. We would wait for a sign.

  Chapter Four

  We stayed for some days, eating the many fruits of the streambanks and the meadow. There were trumpet-shaped vineflowers all around the gigantic roots of the Tree, and each of them gave forth a drop of pure, thick honey every morning. We sucked them greedily. We grew lazy, in fact, scarcely bothering to catch the swift fish of the streams or make a fire to cook them on. But as for staying there, we had no choice but to await the goddess’s pleasure—OF wrath. And for all my watching, I could not pinpoint sunrise or sunset through the misty veil of cloud or count the hours between. It seemed to me that the days were still lengthening, but I could not be sure. Midsummer’s Eve might already have passed, unbeknownst to us. And not a sign of a flower did I ever see on any fern.

  Preoccupied as I was with the problem of the fern flow
er, perhaps I had some excuse—but I am ashamed of how long it took me to see that Dair was sickening. It came to me at dusk one day when I saw a flash of white tail in a thicket, a rabbit, and I realized that Dair had not eaten any meat in—weeks? Since we had left the wetlands? And when had he taken to wearing the shirt that usually hung like a rag from his waist?

  “Why do you never hunt anymore?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. Only one shoulder moved—the left arm hung stiffly by his side. I was all too familiar with that unbalanced gesture in myself. One stride took me to him, and he edged away from me, grumbling.

  “Let me see,” I said.

  He started to amble away, pretending not to hear me. I hurried after him and caught him by the shoulder.

  “Let me see that arm!”

  He tried to shake me off, and I clung to him. I was growing frantic. We tussled—any other time I would not have dreamed of challenging him, but it seemed we were evenly matched now, and that fact made me more panicky than ever. He was as one-armed as I. We tripped each other and ended up rolling and wrestling on the ground, no very friendly contest. I panted and Dair snarled, threatening to bite. I caught at his sore arm, still intent on looking at it, and the snarl turned to a yelp of pain. I could have wept for contrition.

  “Dair, please,” I begged.

  Then I realized I was playing the fool again, fighting him for nothing—it was too dark for me to see anything by then. I got up and left him, cursing and trying not to cry. And, the perversity of him, he came after me.

  “In the morning,” I told him. “Promise me.” And of course I could not understand what he said in reply.

  It must have been a promise. In the morning he was there and he let me look at the arm. The black fist of fear gripped me at the first glimpse of it. The sore itself had not spread, but the arm was pasty white and useless, bloated, paralyzed, the skin cracking open bloodlessly. Dair’s fingers felt like sausages in mine, nothing more. I met his eyes, stricken.

  “Name of the Almighty, Dair, what contagion is this?” I stammered.

  He could only look back at me. The eyes of truth on me—I could not face them. I turned to Maeve, and she winced away as I had, biting her lip. It struck me that she looked not much better than Dair—too pale, far too thin. Why? Had she come to her Source only to die? My mind whirled.

  “I wish one of you could talk to me,” I whispered. I felt as helpless as an infant, but I struggled against the feeling.

  “There has to be something I can do,” I said stubbornly. “A poultice, a potion—something has to help.”

  I brought gemmy mud from the streambank and plastered it on Dair’s arm, hoping vaguely that the muck would draw something unclean out of him—I was not skilled in this sort of healing, and I knew it, to my dismay. Dair tolerated my attentions much as all men suffer fools: not gladly. When I came at him later that day with a mash I had made out of mushrooms he muttered ungraciously and shuffled away.

  Within a few days, though, he was too weak and listless to evade me. I watched him with ever-increasing alarm, forgetting all about the fern flower. I could see that he was having trouble moving around. Then he stopped trying altogether; he sat or lay near the World Tree through the days, and he stopped eating as well. I brought him fruit, honeyflowers, even grubs and snails and some of the other horrid things I knew he liked. At first he would turn away his head. Later, though he still did not eat, he would accept the stuff from me with a docility that sent chills to my spine. I had never seen him so tame. He did not have the strength even to growl at me.

  I tried every way I could think of to help him. I mixed every kind of drink I could devise, short of poison, and begged or badgered him into trying them all. I made poultices out of all sorts of odd and barbaric things. The contagion, whatever it was, had moved from his arm through most of the rest of him; his limbs were as useless as so many sticks of wood. I tried to rub his stiffened body to warm and ease him, but the skin cracked open right under my hands, and his flesh was oozing and yellowish beneath; it was awful. I pounded fruit into mush and tried to make him eat it, tried to force it in between his tightening teeth. He would take water from me, nothing more. As the days crawled by I cooked fish, fungi, moss, ferns, whatever came into my hazy mind for him, without avail.

  Maeve probably afforded him more comfort than I did. She would sit by him and hold his head on her lap for hours at a time, stroking his hair and trying not to trouble him. I could not be still. My mind was in a constant broth and boil, in desperate search of a remedy—there had to be a remedy.… I often felt Maeve’s gaze on me, full of pity and concern. Concern, for me! Her son lay—I would not say dying, I refused to think that. Her son lay terribly ill, and her concern was for me. I felt dismally unworthy, and angry at the same time that she could not talk to me to comfort me.

  Dair became shaky. He shivered in the slight chill of night and could not sleep. Maeve and I would lie close on either side of him to warm him. Sometimes, dozing, he moaned. Those small sounds went through me like swords. Here we were at the navel of the world, the very Source of all that was, cradled by ineffable beauty, surrounded by marvels of every sort, every moment a new joy to the senses, flower-scented breeze, pearly rainbow sky, food fit for the gods, sweet music of birdsong, a paradise beyond belief, and—he was wasting away, my friend was—dying before my eyes.…

  I had not said that, I could not bear to even think it! I pushed the thought far away.

  It was the next day that I noticed how labored his breathing was. Paralysis had spread through his limbs and to his organs, and now each breath became a gasping effort. I went through the day with Dair’s death looming and looming at the back of my mind, unfaceable, like the thing in the dark inscrutable lake. When I brought him water I noticed that his eyes were the color of purple twilight, unfocused, dim. Or was it only that dusk was indeed falling—

  I had not helped him, I had failed him, I had failed him utterly, and I hated to hurt him and fail him again, but I had to try. I steeled myself to try.

  “The Tree,” I said hoarsely. “The Tree is made of iron. Lay him by the Tree.”

  Maeve looked at me in mute plea, begging me not to disturb him.

  “Lay him by the Tree, I say!”

  I tugged at her, and she also must have had her insane hopes, for she helped me. We carried him the little distance to where the massive roots swelled out of the ground, and he groaned but did not cry out. We laid him under the slight overhang of one bulging root, the chill, gray ferrous bark pressed against his belly and side. I knelt by him and laid my forehead against the Tree, against hard, striving muscles of living iron. I closed my eyes and pressed my one good hand to Dair’s pallid flesh, trying to think, trying to pray, to call on my god—what god? Some god, any god, goddess, whatever, for healing—there was not a hint of power in me, no healing in me, as I had known quite well there would not be. I could kneel there all night and the end would be the same.

  A thought occurred to me. I groped around and found a sharp rock, a white flint—damn it that I had lost my knife, or I would have done better. I sawed away at the wrist of my useless left arm until the blood ran. The accursed crippled thing might be good for something after all, I thought. I hoisted it, dripping, streaming, and laid it on Dair’s face and tried to open his mouth to let the drops run in. I felt certain at the time that this would be the remedy at last, but Maeve ran over to me with a gasp of shock, plucking at me in an annoying way, as if I had done something quite untoward.

  “He needs red,” I explained to her lucidly. He had not eaten meat in so long, was it any wonder that his face was gray? But she tried to pull me away.

  One of those smirking birds flew by and gave its hooting laugh, hootoo, hootoo. And quite suddenly I went crazy.

  Chapter Five

  I struck at the Tree with my flint, struck, stabbed, again and again, with the spongy bark bearing it all quite indifferently. Finally I threw it, hard, at Maeve. She dodged. Methodical
ly, as if it mattered, I began to rip the honey-trumpet flowers from around the Tree. Damn it that I had lost my knife—

  “It is not fair!”

  I stood still for a moment and shouted the words at the darkening sky.

  “It is not fair! Dair is the only one who has ever loved me not to betray me—you cannot take him from me! You cannot!”

  I picked up a rock, the biggest one I could heft in my one hand, and flung it, not bothering to watch where it fell. Damn it that I had lost the use of my other arm. With it I would have been able to fling a larger rock. Maeve stood watching me warily.

  “They all betrayed me,” I choked. “Tirell—” I tried to stop, but there was a torrent of anger in me pressing to be let loose. I had unleashed a trickle and it was fast turning to a flood. Maeve could not ask the questions, say the prodding words, but it did not matter; she had trained me well. She might as well have been speaking to me. I turned from the unresponsive sky and shouted at her.

  “The arrogant bastard, he always knew he could treat me like dirt, take me for granted, he didn’t care! He—” I paused, panting, and dropped down to claw at the grass. “He drove her away from me, raped her, took her, he—”

  I glanced at Maeve, who nodded gravely. It seemed absurdly important that I should make this all perfectly clear.

  “He hit me!” I cried. “He came at me with that great bludgeoning sword of his and wounded me, broke my shoulder, crippled me for life—and then he got a kingdom for it and a doting bride—and I—”

  Pettiness. Self-pity. I didn’t care. I plunged on.

  “I got only a broken heart. And Fabron, my father, my own father, sold me into slavery, deceived me, lied to me, pretended to be my friend but didn’t have the guts to tell me the truth—”

  How unfair of me, how ignoble. I didn’t care. I felt saliva run down my chin. Or was it tears. No matter. Nothing mattered.

  “Made a fool of me in front of Shamarra,” I panted. “As if she had not made me fool enough. And that damn Adalis—Alys—whatever the bloody flood her name is—she laughed at me!”