Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  Goh Gam Gar had been forced to pull the sledge and the dragon’s immense weight back uphill at several points so they could make their way around obstacles during their descent, and even the giant’s great strength was utterly exhausted. When they reached the shelf of stone beside the cave, the monster immediately let go his burden, groaned so deeply Jarnulf felt it in his teeth, then curled himself into a shaggy ball to sleep.

  Saomeji was only a few dozen paces away with the rod that kept Goh Gam Gar tame, but Jarnulf still made a wide circle around the giant. The huge creature had been weary and out of temper for days. He might fear punishment, but that would not stop him from lashing out in sudden anger, and even a glancing blow from the giant’s hand could mean broken ribs or worse.

  Jarnulf stepped over an expanse of mud that had pooled at the entrance to the cavern and made his way inside, where he saw to his relief that all the horses were still alive. Kemme would never ride his again, and dying Makho seemed no more likely than Kemme to return to the saddle, but finding the cave again made Jarnulf almost hopeful. His white horse Salt looked bony, almost spectral, and the cave stank of dung and urine, but he and his mount had both survived his long, deadly trip up and down the mountain. Jarnulf could almost believe his life might resume its ordinary course again. But that ordinary course is toward death, he reminded himself grimly—one way or another. Defend me, O God, until I can do Thy will.

  Nezeru entered the cave behind him. Their eyes met, but Jarnulf looked away. She went to her own steed and felt its ribs and belly, then leaned close to whisper quiet Hikeda’yasao words into its ear.

  Why am I the one who turns aside? Jarnulf wondered. If anyone is wicked here, it is the Hikeda’ya, who stole my blood family from me one by one, and who murdered Father’s family as well. And I did no wrong to this shameless female—it was she who offered herself to me, like any mortal whore.

  But though he could feel the righteousness in his head, he could not make himself feel it in his gut as well. Every time he looked at the halfblood woman Jarnulf felt shame, as though he were the one who had done something wrong.

  He led Salt out of the cavern and past the trussed bulk of the dragon, which seemed, like Makho, to live entirely in half-sleep now. It was astonishing to see any living thing so large, to see its breast, big as a fishing boat, rising and falling as breath rasped in and out of its bound jaws. What a world this is, where such a monstrous creature can become commonplace to me!

  Nezeru emerged and saw him staring at the dragon’s huge, half-lidded eye. “Do you think they dream, Queen’s Huntsman?”

  He still could not look at her. “They dream of eating us, Sacrifice Nezeru. Of devouring everything that walks on two legs or four.” He could not keep bitterness from his voice. “But at least the creature will save you for last, because you are the most tender of us.”

  He led his horse to a spot on the slope where a few shoots of green grass still grew among the brown and left it to feed while he sat down to rest. Saomeji, who had taken Makho from his hammock on the sledge, laid him down with little care and looked up.

  “What are you doing, Huntsman? Do you not see the skies? You must find food before the storm is on us.”

  Much as he despised him, Jarnulf knew the Singer was right—there was not much time before an early night fell—but he had something important to do. When Saomeji had walked away Jarnulf sat himself straight and closed his eyes, turning inward until he no longer noticed the noises around him or even the cold bite of the wind.

  My Lord God, my Redeemer Usires Aedon, hear my prayer.

  I am full of confusion, but I wish to do only your will. Must the woman Nezeru die too? She is one of them, a slave of the Witch Queen, but I believe I have opened her eyes. She is different than when I first met her—she asks questions, even seems to think for herself. No longer is her every word one of praise for her superiors and her queen.

  It was strange, this sort of prayer. He almost felt that he was bargaining with the Lord God, which was surely the error of pride grown to its largest size.

  Her father is a powerful man. Should she not be spared to take her questions back to him and to her people some day? Who knows when and how such a seed might sprout? Or must she die? Lord, I am weak. I am foolish. I almost lost sight of my oath. But at the last moment I opened my eyes to the light. Help me now. Send me a sign. Should she live, or must she die? Forgive me, O Lord, because I am weak and wish to spare her, but fear that if she remains alive she will be a threat to Your work.

  His prayer finished, he sat in silence with the cold wind on his cheeks, hoping for God’s guidance.

  “Look, you shirking mortal, look!” Saomeji’s words pierced the quiet. “The shadows have covered the mountain. You must go now to find food for the worm. If you wait too long you will not find your way back, and I shall have to send the giant to find you and tear one of your arms loose.”

  Jarnulf opened his eyes to see spinning flakes of white dance past his face like ashes from a fire—but no one had lit a fire. Snowflakes were swirling down from the bulging black clouds overhead.

  “Very well,” he said calmly. “I will go. Sacrifice Nezeru, will you join me? It will make the hunting go more quickly to have two sets of eyes.”

  She looked at him, her face unnaturally still, her eyes intent, as though trying to see what was in Jarnulf’s thought.

  “If you will clean Chieftain Makho’s wounds, Saomeji,” she finally said.

  “Yes, yes,” said the Singer. “Go. But hurry back!”

  * * *

  Was this strangeness she felt but could not understand only in Jarnulf, Nezeru wondered, or was it something common to all his mortal kind? Except for her mother, she had little experience with the Sunset Children, but this long journey had put her much in the huntsman’s company.

  At first, their being thrown together so often had seemed deliberate on his part; later it became deliberate on hers. Partially it was because he was the closest thing to a trustworthy companion—which was perhaps the strangest twist of all. But he had not wanted to couple with her, and that she did not understand. She was not misshapen or ugly: if she was, one of her Sacrifice rivals back in the Order-house would have shamed her for it. And mortals could not be strangers to the act, or why were so many of them spread out across the lands like hungry insects, devouring all before them? His rejection made no sense.

  But whatever the obstacle might have been, the mortal seemed in no hurry to talk about it, and they had been hunting for over an hour in silence. They had taken several rabbits and a sitting mountain goat, but the snow began to fall heavily. Jarnulf looked back over his shoulder, down the hillside they had just climbed.

  “Sacrifice Nezeru,” he said, “the People’s eyes are better than mine. Can you see our horses’ hoofprints behind us?”

  It was a strange question. She glanced back. “A few. Most are already covered. Do you fear you won’t be able to find your way back to the others? You need not concern yourself with me along.”

  “Ah, of course,” he said. “You were trained in tracking back in the order-house. Where they taught you also to kill the queen’s enemies.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What else should they teach me? Why are you so strange . . . Jarnulf?” The name felt ungainly in her mouth. She could not remember if she had ever spoken it aloud before. “Is it because I invited you to couple with me? Let it leave your thoughts. Already for me it is as though it never happened.”

  He turned to stare at her, then patted his horse on the neck. The snow was swirling. “Do you truly wish to hear the truth?” he said after a while. “I seem to remember that you do not enjoy it.”

  “Those were your truths, not mine. I fear no word you might utter. Why should I care what a mortal thinks?”

  “Not all your kind hate mortals,” he said. “Your father loved one enough to make a child with h
er.”

  Nezeru was startled. Her father had confessed to her once, when she had been angry with her mother’s hopeless sentimentality, that though it was difficult to admit, he cared for Tzoja as more than a servant, more than simply a bedmate plucked from the slave pens. How could Jarnulf know that, or was it just a chance strike?

  “So,” she said at last. “Tell me this ‘truth’ of yours, Jarnulf. Soon we will be among my kind again, and I will not have the freedom to flout the laws of my people in this way. So speak.”

  “Then listen well,” he said. “Much of what I have told you was true. I was raised in the slave barracks of White Snail Castle on the flanks of the mountain. My brother died of cold, my mother and then my sister were taken away by your people, our masters. I learned swordplay from the great master Xoka, who trained me in the same spirit as a noblewoman might train an ermine to nuzzle her cheek and eat from her hand.” Nezeru thought the mortal’s face was so hard, so expressionless, that he might have been a death-sung Sacrifice like her. “When I was old enough I escaped, and after coming close to death in the wilderness beyond Nakkiga, I fell in at last with the Skalijar, those Rimmersgard bandits we fought against on our way to the mountain. Their leader Dyrmundur—the one you saw recognize me—made me his servant.” He saw her expression and smirked. “Do not think I murdered an old friend just to keep my secret, Sacrifice Nezeru. Dyrmundur was a cruel, drunken beast, and when I was young he used me badly in every way. Not everything was pain, though. He taught me skills that even Xoka could not, the ways of treachery and ambush, of living off the wilderness and off my fellow men, because that is how the Skalijar live—by robbery and pillage.

  “So one day I ran from them too, and made my way east into the outer plains of Rimmersgard, stealing from mortal farmers, hiding out in the forests and fields. But after so many shivering nights of my life I had come to hate the cold, so as I went from place to place I moved ever southward, looking for a land where the sun shone.”

  The wind had grown harder as he spoke, so that the snow was flying almost sideways. Jarnulf urged his horse into the lee of a rock outcrop and Nezeru guided her own mount to join him there.

  “Let us wait until the wind dies down,” he said as he swung himself down from his saddle. “You may not feel its bite, but I do. The sun is gone now and our tracks are covered by snow, so it will make no difference if we wait a little longer.”

  She could sense neither his mood nor his intent, but could not see any harm in it, so she dismounted and seated herself beside him, her back against the stone so that it felt as if the world itself was her chair. She could tell he was not done speaking, so she waited in silence as the horses nuzzled at the snow-powdered ground, looking for grass to crop.

  “I made my way at last into Erkynland at the south of the Frostmarch, where my life changed. I came to rest in a good-sized town with a market and several churches, so I was able to add to my thefts with food given me by a kind watchman at one of the churches, and there my destiny found me. Because that is where I met Father.”

  Nezeru was surprised. “You met your father in Erkynland?”

  He shook his head, the phantom of a smile on his lean, sun-browned face. “No, that is only what I called him. He had been an Aedonite priest, and from him I learned much of the catechism. Other than the church watchman and a precious few villagers, he was the first person who was kind to me. I became his companion, and we wandered from town to town, begging bread for Father, reciting from the Book of Aedon. Sometimes even giving a bit of a sermon, though he was not always up to it. He had suffered some terrible shock before I met him, and at times he wept in the night. When I finally had the courage to ask him, he told me that all his family had been murdered, and that it had been the soldiers of the silver-masked queen who had done it.” He did not look at her. “Your people.”

  “Why do you tell me this?”

  “Because it is the truth, Sacrifice Nezeru. Because I said I would speak the truth to you, and I will—this of all days.” He had one hand in his jacket, protecting it from the cold, but he raised his other hand as though swearing an oath. “Now listen, Sacrifice, because what I say next concerns you closely.

  “Years later, when I lost Father, I swore an oath that I would devote my life to repaying everything he had done for me, especially for what turned out to be greatest gift of all. You see, through Father I found my lord Usires Aedon, who ransomed all mortal men from God’s wrath by dying on the Execution Tree.”

  “You are an Aedonite?” Nezeru was confused and disturbed not just by his words, but by his heedless urge to vomit all this out, as though he did not expect to live much longer. “That cannot be. You are a Queen’s Huntsman.”

  “I was never a Queen’s Huntsman.” He withdrew his hand from his jacket and clapped it across her face, throwing his weight onto her and bearing her to the ground. Nezeru tried to scream her rage at this treachery, but the powerful smell of something sweet and yet slightly foul filled her nose and mouth, the odor of something that had died long ago in a locked room and had then become dust. The powder-sweet scent of sacred witchwood flooded her nostrils, and she could not breathe the choking fumes out again no matter how she tried. Nezeru struggled to pull Jarnulf’s hand away from her face, but he was sitting on her now, kicking out with his legs to keep his balance even as she struggled to get free.

  She tried to reach up and scratch his eyes but could not, because she could barely feel her limbs now. Both her movements and her thoughts grew slower, and the struggle began to seem unimportant, something happening far away, like the sound of Jarnulf’s voice.

  “You see, I swore an oath to the Lord God that I would revenge the theft of Father’s family and my own by destroying every Hikeda’ya I met. But then I discovered from a corpse-giant that the queen of death herself still lived . . .”

  Nezeru did not hear the rest of his words. The world dropped away beneath her and she tumbled down into nothing.

  * * *

  • • •

  At first she could only sense that she was something separate from the blackness, and for a while that was enough. Then, as memory returned, she began to struggle to escape.

  Her oath came back to her before her name, but at last the name came back as well. Slowly, as if donning a set of familiar, well-worn clothes, Nezeru slipped back into herself, though her thoughts were still as halting as if her head was filled with thick caterpillar honey.

  Kei-vishaa. She could still taste its sickly-sweet taste in her mouth and nose. Where did he get it? And why would he use it on me?

  She was on her stomach, she realized, and something was holding her so tightly she could not move anything between her knees and neck. Her face was pressed against something rough—the shoulders of a horse, she suddenly realized. Jarnulf’s horse, by its scent. She twisted her head as far as she could and discovered she was tied to the saddle and bent forward against the horse’s neck, held by tight coils of silvery Hikeda’ya cord.

  “I do not know whether Saomeji might track one of the Nakkiga horses—your horse—with his Singer’s skills,” Jarnulf said from just beside her. His voice seemed to echo in her ears, as if from down a deep hole. “So you are being given my greatest gift—Salt, my faithful friend and companion. He has carried me all over the north.”

  She fought to make words, but her tongue was as thick and useless in her mouth as a leather scabbard. When she finally spoke, even she found it hard to understand. “Why . . . are you—”

  “Call it Aedonite mercy.” He gave a last pull on the rope, which she felt across the small of her back, then tied the ends in a knot. She could see only his hands and the edge of his face.

  “You said . . . you not a Queen’s—”

  “Huntsman,” he finished. “And I am not. But that is the last truth I will share with you, Sacrifice Nezeru. I think you are clever enough to work yourself loose after a time,
but we will be long gone by then. I wish you luck—at least of a sort.”

  She struggled to free herself, but the ropes were looped many times around her and tied tight. “But why? Why?”

  “Take a deep breath, Sacrifice.” Jarnulf was out of her sight now. “You will thank me for it later. Goodbye to you, old friend.” She felt a moment of outrage that he should dare call her ‘old friend,’ but then he shouted “Laup, Salt!” and must have slapped the horse on the quarters because it sprang forward as if jumping from a cliff. It was too late for Nezeru to take that deep breath; the horse was already running, crushing her against its back and the saddle with every surging step, driving the air from her lungs.

  She fought to keep her head up, to see something of where she was and where they were going, but she was so dizzy she could barely even think, and now the point of her chin was striking the horse’s back like a hammer against a warm, hairy anvil. She let her head sag forward and tried merely to breathe as the horse pounded downhill.

  So many knots . . . so many webs. She didn’t even know what the thought meant. The kei-vishaa was still in her. The horse’s hooves sounded loud as thunder, thunder that shook her and shook her until she could hear nothing but endless roaring. After a little while her thoughts began to fall apart, and she slid into the blackness once more.

  * * *

  Jarnulf’s return out of darkness was hastened by the pain of his cheek. It wasn’t a single pain, the ache of a rotted tooth or a healing wound, but the same sharp pain, over and over, growing in discomfort as he made his way back toward the light.

  “Tell me, you mortal fool! Where is she?”

  The kei-vishaa Jarnulf had breathed made Saomeji’s pale face, looming above him, appear as broad as the moon, and he could not help staring. Something about the face was so strange—the golden eyes, like little suns, but how could there be suns on the moon?—that he almost laughed. The shadows in his head were beginning to drift away like smoke.