Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  “That is a strange thing to say,” Fayn answered, frowning. “You saw the twin dragons of the king and queen flying from our battlements and towers. We are loyal to our lord and to the High Throne. Why would you wonder?”

  “And who is your lord?”

  “Raynold, Baron of Uttersall is master here, steward by order of the king and queen in Erchester. I hazard that you will meet him before the evening grows too much older.”

  “I am glad to hear that. I bear important tidings.”

  Fayn’s creased features grew a little more drawn around the eyes. “I hope not too important. Tonight is the Feast of St. Granis and all in the castle are celebrating, including Baron Raynold himself. But come—I can see your horses are lathered and your men not much happier. Come in and let us show you some Erkynlandish hospitality.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Baron Raynold was old but still in good health, thin and active, but he had already had much to drink that evening and did not seem to take Aelin’s desire for private conversation very seriously.

  “Come, is there an army outside our gates?” Raynold shook his head. “I think not. It is the saint’s day. We will save all such dour business for the morrow. Now, come and join us at the table, good travelers!”

  “But I bear word from both Count Eolair and Earl Murdo,” Aelin protested. “And we have seen things ourselves that must be discussed.”

  “Then you have my permission to discuss them at table. Come!”

  The whole of the baron’s small court was in attendance. A fat pig had met its proper ending and the food was excellent. Aelin’s men were clearly happy to be under such a formidable roof and so well entertained, but their leader could not enjoy the meal until he had delivered his news.

  Maybe when the baron has some food in his stomach he will be a bit more sober, Aelin thought. I dare not talk about the Norns in front of all, but there may be a moment when I can get Raynold alone. I will ask Fayn to help me.

  But before the pig and its honor guard of baked apples had even been much diminished a commotion started in the entrance hall and the door guards signaled for Captain Fayn. Aelin rose from his seat and moved as inconspicuously as he could to follow the captain, drawn by a fear he tried to keep hidden.

  “Well, Cuff, what has you so talkative?” Fayn asked a man who was being restrained by two of the guards, although not in a way that seemed intended to hurt. The stranger was short-legged, broad of shoulder, and long of arm, but had the look of a simpleton. Fayn saw Aelin standing by. “This is Cuff Scaler, who takes the flags up and down on the tower tops,” the captain explained. “He cannot count to three but can climb like a round-headed ape. Come, lad, what is troubling you?”

  Cuff was doing his best to tell them, but his speech was hard to understand. “He says it’s clouds, sir,” one of the guards explained. “I can make him out better than most. Known him since we were both boys.”

  “Clouds?” Baron Raynold had joined them at the doorway, head bent forward like a stork’s. “What nonsense is this to bring me when we have guests?”

  The baron’s appearance only made the bandy-legged man stutter more dreadfully, and Raynold was about to turn back to the table when the guard who understood Cuff best spoke up again. “He says the clouds are on the ground. They’re on the ground and they’re wrong, he says.”

  The baron waved a slender hand in dismissal. “Fog on the hills, that is no news. In all honesty, I am out of temper with this afflicted fellow. He is let to come and go too freely. One of these days he will hurt himself or someone else with his frenzies. Come, Sir Aelin. I would hear more news from Hernysadharc. Your tales were a bit lacking in color, so I think we must get more wine into you.”

  But as Raynold returned to his seat, Aelin gripped Fayn’s arm. “I would see what the steeplejack claims to have seen,” he told the captain quietly. “Will you take me? Also, I need to speak to you alone because it seems I will not have the baron’s attention for a while yet.”

  Fayn gave him a puzzled look but nodded. Cuff Scaler was set free to lead them to the tower from which he had seen the disturbing clouds, and was so relieved to be able to show someone what had alarmed him that he scampered ahead of them like a dog let out of doors for the first time all day.

  After many long hours on horseback there were quite a number of things Aelin would rather have done than climb the hundreds of small, winding steps to the top of the tower, but his heart was not beating fast merely from the hard work of ascending. As they made their way out onto the battlements Cuff pushed his broad upper body through one of the crenellations, leaning out over a long, deadly fall while holding on carelessly with but one strong hand. He pointed out across the valley.

  “Clouds,” he said, slurring like a drunk. “See good. Cuff see good.”

  “I see nothing,” said Fayn irritably, but Aelin was sharper-eyed and also had an idea of what he was looking for. In the moon-silvered darkness on the far side of the river, beyond the sparse lights of the town, he saw what Cuff Scaler had seen. Aelin’s blood seemed to thicken and chill like the life’s essence of a dying man.

  It was a fog, as Raynold had said, but a fog that never dispersed even along its edges, and it was coming nearer and nearer, creeping across the valley toward Naglimund like a living thing. Aelin felt his skin prickle and his breath grow short. He felt all too sure he knew what that fog was hiding.

  “Quickly,” he said to Fayn. “I need to talk to the baron alone. There is no time to waste.”

  Fayn was still staring out across the dark valley. “My eyes are not up to it. What is it you see?”

  “Our deaths—and not just our own. I fear that another war is upon us, Captain, one at least as terrible as the last.”

  “The last. . . . ?” But even as Fayn spoke, Aelin took his arm and steered him back to the stairs. Cuff Scaler still crouched beside the battlement, uncertain whether they were upset with him or with the clouds he had been first to discover.

  “I speak of the last war, Captain,” Aelin said. “The Storm King’s war. There are White Foxes hiding in that mist. That is what I came to warn you about, but I did not dream they would follow so close on our coming here. The murdering Norns who once captured this place and killed all its defenders are before your walls.”

  “Norns?” Captain Fayn made the Sign of the Tree as he hurried to lead them down the stairs, almost losing his balance in the process. When next he spoke, his voice was different, like that of a man half-dreaming. “Oh, I pray that you are only making a clumsy jest—tell me you are, Sir Aelin, for the love of the Aedon, our sacred Ransomer. Because if not, then God help us. God help us all.”

  27

  The Flowering Hills

  Tanahaya set a swift pace. By Morgan’s measure they walked a great distance, through stands of stout oak, trembling birch, and smooth-trunked beech, through splashes of shade and bright summer sunshine for hour after birdsong-ringing hour. After so long in the treetops walking felt unfamiliar; Morgan fought a constant worry of being vulnerable to attack. But as the day wore on he began to find the rhythm of a full day’s trek again, and was almost able to enjoy himself despite hunger and the constant pang of what he was now willing to admit was homesickness. The memory of Misty Vale still troubled him as well. He had avoided thinking of it during the darkness of the previous night, but now he felt strong enough to face it again.

  “What do you think that thing was?” he asked suddenly, out of a long silence. “Ogre, you said. The kind in stories, the kind that eats children?” Tanahaya slowed to hear him, and he hurried to catch up. “Was it a giant like my grandfather fought, just bigger?”

  She considered for a moment before answering. “All I have been told is that Misty Vale is a place to avoid at all costs, that old and dangerous things walk there. There are other such places in the world—Nakkiga, Queen Utuk’ku’s c
ity in the mountain is another—but the one in the valley is the only one I have ever seen, and now I know the Uro’eni is something real.”

  “What is—” He paused, struggling to produce her quicksilver vowels. “—Uro’eni? Has anyone seen it?”

  “Ogre. Giants can grow quite large but not to such an immensity. And even the smallest dragons do not walk upright. What else it might be I do not understand. Master Himano’s said only that the ogre is something born out of the deeps of the reckless past, and that the whole of the Vale is forbidden to our folk by the word of Amerasu Ship-Born herself.”

  Morgan caught a glimpse of Tanahaya’s face. It seemed set and hard. For a moment he thought he had done something to anger her.

  “Forgive my unhappiness,” she said. “We Zida’ya can never forget the queen’s cowardly attack that took Amerasu’s life,” she continued. “We still mourn her. But Amerasu showed rare favor to your grandfather. I am sure you are very proud.”

  Morgan did feel proud, but also nettled. His grandparents’ names seemed to hang over him everywhere he went, like trees blocking the sun from the lesser plants beneath them.

  When sunset had turned one end of the sky red as rhubarb stalks they finally stopped. Tanahaya chose another hollow for their camp. A fallen pine made a windbreak behind which they huddled as the breezes quickened in the twilight air.

  Nothing came in the night from either within or without to disturb Morgan’s slumbers—no enemies, no dreams, no Sithi voices. He fell asleep listening to the night sounds with Tanahaya sitting beside him, and when he woke she was still sitting there, as if she had spent the whole night awake beside him.

  Morgan broke his fast with another unsatisfying meal of leaves and petals and one particularly tasteless, chewy root that Tanahaya found for him; by mid-afternoon, after walking for hours, he was wondering hungrily what sort of table this Lord Himano set. Would he have honey, or cheese, or any of the things Morgan had been craving? Do the Sithi even eat meat? He enjoyed a brief daydream about Himano (whom he imagined as a golden-skinned version of his own grandfather) presenting him with a massive haunch of venison, saying, “I know this is what you mortals like. Go to—eat! Enjoy!”

  This charming vision was shattered when Tanahaya said, “I wonder if my old teacher is still nimble enough to gather wild apples. I hope so—I would prefer not to go another night with nothing in our stomachs.”

  This plunged Morgan so deeply into gloom—if her master ate nothing but apples, what was the chance he’d be serving wine?—that he hardly noticed when Tanahaya stopped to look at a small tree growing beside the hill track they were climbing. But when she burst into low but throbbing song, he stopped in surprise.

  “Ya no-i mamo, ya Mezumiiru shu,

  So’e no shunya dao, dao

  Isiki sen’sa kahiya yin-te.

  Kahiya yin-te!”

  “We have found the outskirts of the Flowering Hills,” she said with a smile when she saw his expression.

  “What’s the song about?”

  “Oh, an old tale of the Zida’ya, Mezumiiru and her husband and her dowry—the moon. Look and you will see the reason. Here is the first of Himano’s moon trees!”

  Morgan stared at what seemed like nothing more than another tree to him, the bark silver-gray, the limbs twisted, the leaves sparse. “Why moon trees?”

  “You will discover the answer as we climb. Let us hurry so we can reach the house before dark.”

  Morgan felt revived by the thought of journey’s end, but when they reached a higher part of the hill he was surprised to see what looked like the exact same tree with the exact same array of out-thrust branches growing beside the trail. He stopped in confusion, certain for a moment that they had been going in circles, but Tanahaya laughed and said, “It is not the same tree, though it looks so at first. Every tree is a different mirror, as when we see a different face in our own mirror each day, although it is also always the same face.”

  Morgan must have looked at her with utter incomprehension, because Tanahaya put on a more serious expression and said, “I will explain later. Now I think you need to eat and rest. But watch the trees as we pass them and you will see what I mean. Each is slightly different, but unquestionably still the same, as the moon itself changes but remains the same.”

  Tanahaya was right at least about one thing—all Morgan wanted now was to stop walking. When they passed a third seemingly identical tree, he did his best to try to see what might be different, but to him it looked as alike to the previous moon tree as one fly to another.

  “It is a shame that we have come in this season,” Tanahaya told him in reverent tones. “There is always beauty here, but during the moons of spring the Flowering Hills are covered with all the colors that are, and even some that have no names because they appear nowhere else. The blooms seem to try to out-shout each other, each calling out its hue as loud as it can—‘Blue, blue as Nakkiga ice! Red as a dying star! Yellow as a bee’s pollen-basket legs . . . !’”

  She stopped abruptly. Morgan thought she might raise her voice in song again, but the look on her face did not speak of music. Instead she began walking uphill with determined, swift strides, and Morgan had to hurry just to keep her slender form in sight.

  What came over her just then? Was it a bad memory? But she had seemed so eager to come here.

  When he caught up to her she was standing silently beside a tree stump, the exposed wood raw and pale. Branches lay scattered around it but the rest of the tree was gone, and now he saw something in her expression that looked like fear.

  “What is it?” he asked, his heart suddenly speeding. “What’s wrong?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps everything. Lord Himano would never take one of the moon trees for wood, and if someone else did, he would have planted another.”

  “I still don’t understand,”

  “Nor I, but I sense something very badly amiss. Stay here and do not move or make any noise until I return.” Tanahaya turned from the hillside track and stepped noiselessly into the undergrowth, then glided silently up the slope like a shadow. She was gone from his sight within moments, leaving him alone on the track beneath the darkening sky. Suddenly the wooded evening hillside seemed a place where dozens of enemies might wait and watch him. A single thrush cried, and the sound was so forlorn that Morgan immediately started walking up the sloping track despite Tanahaya’s warning.

  He could see now through breaks in the trees that something was strange about the hilltop. It jutted upward in a pure wedge of limestone as bold as the prow of a ship, though the white stone was streaked with a great vertical smear of black. Could that darkness be some kind of entrance? Perhaps Himano’s house was a larger version of the crevice where Morgan and little ReeRee had sheltered, a palatial residence built in a cavern. Certainly the indications he saw around him as he climbed suggested that however much pride this Himano might have about his gardens, they would be difficult if not impossible to see until someone was right on top of them, since they were woven through the substance of the forest.

  But as he turned a final bend all these thoughts suddenly flew from his head like bats at sundown. Tanahaya was kneeling by the side of the track just a little way below the hilltop, her posture so slack, so abject that he wondered if she had hurt herself somehow. As he hurried up the path he saw that she was looking down at a bundle of dirty, wind-tattered rags.

  “It is Gayali,” she told him without looking up. “He came to Himano as a student just before I left.”

  For a moment Morgan had no idea what she meant, but then he saw the hand protruding from the rags and his stomach lurched. “What . . . what’s happened?”

  “Terrible things.” She picked through the rags until she revealed something that had once had a face. “Here, see. They cut his throat.”

  He recoiled from the eyeless horror. “But I don’t underst
and—who? The Norns?”

  “Yes, the Hikeda’ya, the cursed Hikeda’ya.” Tanahaya climbed to her feet with little of her usual grace. “Look.” She pointed toward the top of the hill. “Look!”

  Just below the very top of the peak, where the track ended between two low cypresses, a doorway and window had been carved directly into the limestone outcrop and fitted with a wooden door and shutters. But the door hung open and crooked, attached solely by its bottom hinge, and it was badly charred. Above the doorway stretched the great smear of blackness he had seen from below, a charcoal-black tongue extending up the limestone wall almost to its peak, left by the fire that had burned fiercely inside the cave.

  Tanahaya walked past him, then leaned in to look beyond the door. When she turned, Morgan thought her high-boned face seemed so coldly murderous that he was almost more afraid of her than the situation.

  “They have piled his books and scrolls in the middle of the room and burned them,” she said in a dreadful, stony voice. “All destroyed. A hundred Great Years of wisdom—twice that!—obliterated in an hour.”

  “Is . . . is your master . . . ?” He didn’t want to finish the thought.

  “I do not see him inside, though many things are burned there, and it will not be easy to say for certain until morning light. Perhaps he escaped.” But nothing in her posture or voice suggested she believed it. Morgan guessed he was seeing a Sitha in a rage, and his guts pinched him again.

  “Why?” she suddenly asked. “Why do such a thing, except to show hatred of knowledge? Do those in Nakkiga no longer value even the purest wisdom—not even the things we learned together in the Garden?” Without another word she left the track and began walking away around the curve of the hill, forcing a path through the trees and shrubbery and rows of stones that looked too natural to be ornamental, but too ornamental to be entirely natural. Morgan was now even less willing to be left behind and scrambled after her.