Page 44 of The Bristling Wood


  “I’m hungry myself.” She managed to smile. “O mighty master of mysterious arts.”

  “Do you know what the whole secret of the dweomer is?” Salamander asked abruptly. “Making pictures in your mind. Just that and little else—making the right sort of pictures and saying the right words to go with them. How does that strike you?”

  Startled, Jill looked up from her breakfast.

  “Are you sure you’re not having a jest on me?”

  “I’m not, though I know it must sound like one. There’s this book we all study—eventually you’ve got to learn to read, my little turtledove—which is known as the Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid, though I’ve been told that it’s actually a lot of short bits and aphorisms jotted down by various dweomermasters over the years. Be that as it may, there’s one particular piece that springs to my mind at the moment. ‘You could go to the marketplace and, like a gerthddyn, preach aloud the secret of all dwoemer without one soul being a wit’s worth wiser.’ Do you know why? Because it’s so simple everyone would sneer. Or to be precise: simple to describe, cursed hard to do.”

  “I’ll admit to fighting the urge to sneer if all you’re talking about is a lot of pictures.”

  “Aha, I know a challenge when I hear one. Very well.” He held up his elaborately jeweled table dagger. “Look at this for a moment. Then shut your eyes. Try to see the dagger as clearly as you could with your eyes open—a memory picture, like.”

  Although Jill stared at the dagger for a long moment, she did so blankly, as if she could soak it up the way a bit of rag soaks up spilled ale. As soon as she shut her eyes, its image was gone, and no amount of struggling with her memory would bring a clear picture back. With an oath she looked again, and this time she actively tried to memorize the details, but she could only retain the vaguest general impression, more of a daggerlike shape than a dagger.

  “Harder than it sounds?” Salamander was grinning at her frustration.

  “It is.”

  “By the time you’re done with your ’prentice-work, you’ll be able to walk into a chamber you’ve never seen before, stay but a few minutes, yet be able to call up a picture of that chamber so clearly that you’d swear you were standing inside it. You’ll curse the work before you’re done, too, because learning how to manipulate images is the most boring thing in the world. Think of it as a test, my miniscule finch. The bard tales talk about suffering mysterious ordeals both harsh and lurid to gain the dweomer, but are you willing to be bored sick with it? That’s the true test of every apprentice.”

  “When my father was teaching me how to use a sword, he drilled me until I wanted to weep. Have you ever lunged at a bale of hay over and over in the hot sun? Some days I’d do it a hundred times, while he stood there and criticized the way I was standing or holding my wrist or suchlike.”

  “Gods, I doubt if you’ll find me as harsh a master as Cullyn of Cerrmor must have been. Now, let’s see. It’s easier to start with a picture than it is with a solid thing, somehow. We can search the marketplace for a painted scroll.”

  “Oh, come now, you don’t expect to find some rare dweomer book right out in the Myleton market, do you?”

  “Of course not, but we don’t want one. What we need is the sort of thing a merchant’s wife would have in her reception chamber to amuse a guest, a little scroll with four or five colored drawings on it, maybe pictures of famous temples, maybe seacoast views—that sort of mundane thing. Trained slaves copy them out by the hundreds, so we should be able to find one with little trouble. You need somewhat complicated enough to keep your mind alive while you do the wretched exercises.”

  “Whatever you say. What comes after learning to hold pictures in your mind?”

  “Oh, extensions of the basic work. You start by maybe changing some details of the picture you’re seeing mentally—adding clouds in the sky, say, or putting in a tree. Then, let’s see … uh, well … eventually you have to pretend you’re in the picture yourself and looking around at all its various parts…. I know we did that …” His voice trailed away.

  “You don’t really remember it all, do you?”

  “You may berate me for a wretched and most frivolous elf, if you wish, because, alas, alack, well-a-day, and so on and so forth, you speak the truth. I do remember the beginning banishing ritual, though, and that’s truly important for someone in your state of mind.”

  “Well and good, then. What is it?”

  “There’s no time to go into it right now. If we’re going to buy horses, we have to get to the market before it closes for the midday heat, so let’s wait till we’re out on the road. But don’t let me forget to show it to you.”

  It occurred to Jill that as harsh ordeals went, learning dweomer from Salamander was going to have its moments.

  When they left Myleton, Jill and Salamander had opted for the direct if difficult route straight south from the city, and for over a week now they’d been winding their way through the hill country. Since the traveling was slow and tedious, and the imaging exercises kept her mind off Rhodry, Jill poured herself into the work and made such rapid progress that Salamander admitted he was impressed. Before they’d left Myleton, they had indeed found a picture scroll for her lessons. About a foot high and five long, it unrolled right to left, all backwards to Salamander’s way of thinking. Since she’d never read a Deverry book or scroll, to Jill the direction seemed as good as any other. She rather liked the paintings themselves, three scenes from the history of Myleton, showing the first colonists founding the new city, a famous tidal wave of some hundred years later, and finally the election of an archon known as Manataro the Good. Each picture was crammed with small details, all cleverly arranged so that it seemed she was looking into a box, not down onto a flat surface.

  Yet, after days of staring at the historically renowned tidal wave and working on seeing it as if it were real in her mind, she was heartily sick of the scroll and the practice both. The banishing ritual she found more tolerable, even though Salamander drilled her mercilessly, because she could see its direct benefit, the control of the floods of imagery that threatened to overwhelm her whenever she was angry. First she would place those images in her mind as if they were practice lessons, then banish them with the sign of the flaming pentagram. At times she still failed, and the fires of rage would seem to burn around her unchecked, but every time she succeeded she felt her skill growing, and over the days the out-of-control images came less and less often.

  On the afternoon that they reached the center of the island, everything seemed to go wrong with her workings. First she stumbled over the words of the ritual, drawing the gerthddyn’s scorn. Then when she tried a new picture from the scroll, she could get only the barest trace of the image of Archon Manataro, and it seemed that all her hard work had gone for naught. When she complained to Salamander, he smiled in his most infuriating way.

  “You don’t dare give this up, you know. Or do you want to go slowly but inevitably mad?”

  “Of course I don’t! And I’ll follow orders, just like I always followed orders when Da was teaching me swordcraft. I just don’t understand why these blasted pictures are so important. I mean, with Da, I always could figure it out—this exercise strengthens your arms or that one worked on your grip, but this is all too peculiar.”

  “Ah. Well, what you’re doing is indeed like your da’s exercises; you’re just strengthening mental muscles. Here, when the bards sing about dweomer, they always talk about strange powers, don’t they? Where do you think those powers come from? The gods?”

  “Not the gods, truly. Well, I suppose, you just get them. I mean, it’s dweomer, isn’t it? That’s what makes it magical.” She suddenly realized that she was sounding inane. “I mean, magical things just happen.”

  “They don’t, at that, although that’s what everyone thinks. All those puissant powers and strange spells come out of the mind, human or elven as the case may be. Dweomer is a matter of mental faculties. Know what they
are?”

  “I don’t.”

  “When you learn to read—and I think me we’d best start lessons in that, too—I’ll find you a book written by one of our Rhodry’s illustrious ancestors, Mael the Seer himself, called On the Rational Categories. In it he defines the normal mental faculties for humans, and most of them apply to elves, too, such as seeing, hearing, and all the other physical senses, as well as logical thinking, intuition, and a great many more, including, indeed, the very ability to make categories and generalizations, which is not a skill to be taken lightly or for granted, my petite partridge. These are, as he calls them, the rational faculties, open and well known among elves and men, although the elves have a few faculties that humans don’t, such as the ability to see the Wildfolk.

  “Then there are the buried, hidden, or occult faculties that exist in the mind like chicks in a new-laid egg. While every elf and human possesses a selection of them in potential, very few are born with them already developed. You can call these faculties ‘powers’ if you wish, though it sounds perhaps too grand for perfectly natural phenomena. Do you understand the idea of a category of the natural? As opposed to the supernatural?”

  “Uh, what? Well, uh …”

  “The Maelwaedd’s book becomes a necessity, I see.”

  “Very well, but what do these rotten picture exercises have to do with all this grand-sounding stuff?”

  “Oh. Truly, I did ramble a bit. Well, if you want to awaken these sleeping powers, you use pictures, mostly, and names and sometimes music to go with them. Once you’ve awakened them, you can use them over and over. Perpend—once you’ve learned how to be logical, can’t you reawaken that faculty whenever you’ve got a problem to solve? Of course. Just so, after you develop the scrying faculty, say, you can open it with the right images and words any time you want. A great master like Nevyn doesn’t even need the names and images anymore, for that matter. For him the occult faculties have become manifest.”

  Although his small lecture was so difficult to understand that Jill felt like a half-wit (as the logical faculties go, Salamander’s were far from being the best in Annwn), everything he said resonated in her soul, with a hint more than a promise that here was a key to open a treasure chest.

  “But I’ll tell you what, my robin of sweet song, you can try a new exercise if you’d like. Instead of using the scroll, make up your own image and try to realize it clearly in your mind. I don’t mean draw it or suchlike—we don’t have any ink, anyway—just decide on some simple thing and try to see it, like an inn you once stayed in, or your horse Sunrise, he who now eats the king’s bountiful oats—somewhat like that.”

  “Well and good, then, I will. As long as it’s all right to jump around like this.”

  “Oh, by the gods! This ’prentice-work isn’t truly even dweomer. You’re just learning some useful tools. I can’t imagine that the least harm could come of it.”

  When she went to bed, Jill lay awake for a long while, her mind drifting on the borderlands of sleep. She happened to remember the Dark Sun, the elven goddess whom she and Salamander had called upon to witness their vow of vengeance against Rhodry’s tormentors. It seemed years ago, not a matter of months, when back in Cerrmor they’d pledged death with goblets of mead. The goddess had death wolves, or so Salamander had told her, and the vow invoked those beasts to run ever before them on their bloody hunt. She liked that vow, liked the image it called to mind, of a goddess standing tall, an elven longbow in her hands, quiver at her hip, and at her feet the two crouched black wolves.

  In her mind one of the wolves turned its head and looked right at her. With a little yelp she was wide awake, annoyed with herself for letting her mind play tricks. Yet she could remember the picture perfectly, and when it was time to do her exercises with mental images, she chose the wolf—but without, unfortunately, telling Salamander what she was doing. Since it was an ancient nexus of power on the astral, the image built up remarkably fast, and since it was so easy to work with, she decided to go on using it for a while in her practice.

  Both Salamander and Jill were used enough to the Bardekian custom of the afternoon nap to spread out their bedrolls and lie down for a couple of hours. Although Salamander went straight off to sleep, all of Jill’s rage came to a head that afternoon. She was thinking of Rhodry, as she so often did, and she burst into tears that were more frustration than grief, a baffled rage at all the dark and magical events that had pulled them apart. Once her fit of weeping had run itself out, she gave up trying to sleep and began to think of her wolf image. It built up fast, and she imagined the shaggy creature lying at her feet.

  As Salamander had taught her, she used all her senses in building the image, imagined she could smell it, could feel its weight across her ankles and its warmth through the thin blanket. All at once, she felt something snap into place in her mind. Right where she’d imagined it, the wolf appeared, a bit misty and thin, to be sure, but the image actually seemed to be there, living apart from her will. She worked on bringing it into focus, made it appear more substantial, thickened its glossy coat, imaged the teeth and the panting tongue. When she noticed it was wearing a gold collar of elven design, she was suddenly afraid, because she’d imagined no such thing. The great head turned her way, and the dark eyes considered her. Only then did she realize that a thin, misty cord seemed to connect her solar plexus with that of the wolf; yet whenever she tried to look directly at the cord, it faded away.

  With a stretch like a real dog, the wolf got up. Although she started the banishing ritual immediately, her words and motions had no force behind them, because frightened though she was, she was fascinated with her creation. The wolf ignored the ritual, anyway, merely sniffed Salamander and his blankets with a remarkably real-looking wet black nose.

  “It’s a pity you’re not real, you know. I could send you tracking Baruma down.”

  It swung its head and looked at her. She found herself talking to it, then, a confused babble of all her hatred, all her scraps of knowledge about Baruma, what he was, what he looked like, but she somehow knew that his physical appearance was of little moment to the wolf. With a toss of its head it leaped over her, trotted into the trees, and disappeared….

  The choice and potency of the image Jill has summoned will come back to haunt her as her quest goes on. The dark errand on which she has unwittingly sent her creation will become pivotal in her life, symbolizing all that is yet to face Jill, Nevyn, and Rhodry. The wolf’s dark origins and the power that created it will change forever Jill’s hopes, her dreams, and not only her own fate but the fate of Deverry as well.

  The Dragon Revenant

  Now available wherever Bantam

  Spectra Books are sold.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KATHARINE KERR spent her childhood in a Great Lakes industrial city and her adolescence in a stereotypical corner of southern California, from whence she fled to the Bay Area just in time to join a number of the various Revolutions then in progress. Upon dropping out of dropping out, she got married and devoted herself to reading as many off-the-wall, obscure, and just plain peculiar books as she could get her hands on. As the logical result of such a life, she has now become a professional storyteller and an amateur skeptic, who regards all True Believers with a jaundiced eye, even those who true-believe in Science.

  Kerr is the author of the Deverry series of historical fantasies; Polar City Blues; Resurrection; and the Dragon Mage series.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious,

  and any resemblance to actual persons, living or

  dead, is purely coincidental.

  THE BRISTLING WOOD

  A Bantam Spectra Book / published by arrangement with

  Doubleday

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Bantam

  Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1989 by Katharine Kerr.

  Cover art copyri
ght © 1990 by Keith Parkinson.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-30132.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

  in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopying, recording, or by any information

  storage and retrieval system, without permission in

  writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Doubleday.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76037-1

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, New York, New York.

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  Katharine Kerr, The Bristling Wood

 


 

 
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