Sirronde’s World
Part 1:
“The Span”
Diane Duane
“The Span” originally appeared in the February 1999 issue of
Dragon Magazine
This ePub edition copyright 2010, Diane Duane
Part 3, "Parting Gifts", is also available in electronic form:
please check http://www.dianeduane.com/shop for more information.
By the same author:
The Young Wizards Series
So You Want to Be a Wizard • Deep Wizardry
High Wizardry • A Wizard Abroad
The Wizard’s Dilemma • A Wizard Alone
Wizard’s Holiday • Wizards at War
A Wizard of Mars
The Middle Kingdoms Series
The Door into Fire • The Door into Shadow
The Door into Sunset
In the Star TrekTM universe:
The Wounded Sky • My Enemy, My Ally
The Romulan Way • Spock’s World
Dark Mirror • Intellivore
Swordhunt • Honor Blade
The Empty Chair
For more information, visit
http://www.dianeduane.com
*
The Span
It was noontime of the thirty-first of Summer when Sirronde came slogging up the steep path to the head of the Sender Pass, and paused among the boulders choking the col’s throat. There she paused to peer down the far side, trying to catch a glimpse of her death.
Below her, a narrow, gravel-strewn path led eastward and downward. Cracked, needly limestone cliffs plunged down from either side of the path. Where it seemed to drop straight off into nothing, a mile of blue air reached out below her and above the Sender Valley proper—a distant vista of fields patchworked in dark gold and green, the patches narrowly limned with pale drystone walls and hedges. Except for the cliffs, a less deadly-looking landscape was difficult to imagine. Yet, You will look for your death, the true-dream had said, and will not see it, but it waits regardless...
The path wound from side to side between the two mountains. After its first switchback the angle of the path lessened, so that Sirronde was able to spend more time enjoying the view. The sky was that particular hard dark blue typical of the mountains of the high South—except to her left, where the air above the peaks was milky pale. There the Sender Glacier lay, further betrayed by the mile-wide slope of scree and boulders laid out like a fan at the feet of the mountain-spur, and the hundred bright runnels of meltwater braiding themselves together at the bottom of the glacier’s terminal moraine to form the uppermost waters of the Sen.
Sirronde looked the valley over as the path became a road, exposing a different aspect each time it turned. Some of the fields between the hedgerows were golden, the first hay already cut and new green showing. Other fields showed bare golden stubble, the standing straw of barley already in the barns. Between the fields ran the white lines of little dusty roads, knotting together here and there. Near some of the knots houses were scattered, all built of stone as was typical here where wood was too scarce to use as anything but fuel.
And Goddess knows there are plenty of stones. The fields were clear, but where cultivation stopped, great boulders lay scattered everywhere. People might have wrested this land to their use, but the glacier still owned it, and had left pointed suggestions that, when the weather turned, it might own it again. Could that be why She sent me? Sirronde thought. Is the glacier on the move again? Am I supposed to stop it?...
It was getting hot. Sirronde shouldered out of her pack and slipped off her big floppy brown wool-and-cotton overtunic. This left her in a loose linen shirt and leather breeches, and a belt from which hung a knife at one side, a longer leather scabbard at the other. She rolled up the overtunic, stuffed it into her pack, shouldered it all again and headed downward. Are there possibly Fyrd left in these mountains?... Sirronde wondered. Or other monsters? She had heard enough stories about the depredations of mantichores, but this far south, truth and legend often got badly tangled.
North of where the road stopped and the water started, Sirronde saw a scattering of pale specks, and on both sides of the water, a graceful pale curve, incomplete—two halves of a bridge, leaning toward one another from the cliffy riverbanks and little obscured by scaffolding. Further north and east, on the near side of the river, a small graying patch in the landscape, veiled by a faint haze of dust, was a quarry.
Interesting, Sirronde thought, looking at the bridge as she came over the last hill before the village. As far as she knew, there was no built bridge on the Sen anywhere south of the Arlid, but this place could use one. With the steepness of those banks, the river must be a misery to get across any time but during the dead of winter, when no one down here traveled much anyway.
The village was a little cluster of perhaps ten houses, stretched along the last road before the river. Coming in along its dusty main street, Sirronde passed some stonebuilt cattle sheds, then a big old house with an ivy-bush tied up over the door to show it served beer and wine. Probably the town common-house... Various pigs of the big golden-skinned Yellow Darthene breed snuffled and rooted in front of the place as Sirronde passed, and a flight of swifts came shrieking down the street behind her, cruising so low that their sickle wings stirred the dust as they snapped up passing flies.
The place was very like the tiny hamlet where Sirronde had grown up, down north. Children stared at her from open doorways, open-mouthed at the sudden appearance of a stranger in a place so far from anywhere else. Sirronde made her way casually through town, nodding to those she passed—a man throwing pot-scourings out into the street, a woman weeding her vegetable patch, another pumping enthusiastically at her forge as she shod a drowsy plowhorse—and headed for the river.
She paused by it just long enough to be shocked at the sheerness of the drop to the old ford—ten yards at least, and no way down but by a rough switchback path with holding-ropes driven into the cliff by iron spikes. This will be much preferable, she thought as she turned to walk up toward the bridge. Scaffolding was tied and spiked up all over the growing twin arcs of stone, and complex-looking piers and crossbuttresses of wood held up both sides of its unfinished span. The design was beautiful, the width and thickness of the bridge decreasing gradually toward the center. Workers moved here and there, some helping move a big stone off a pallet into place on one half of the span: others pushed a rope-ferry off into the river to pull it to the far side with a load of stone and buckets of mortar. Off to one side, chisels rang.
Some yards from the bottom of the nearer half of the span were a rough wooden table and a couple of long benches. At the table, bent over it and paging through a pile of parchments, stood a tall woman in a large loose tunic and breeches. Her long red hair was pulled back tight and tied at the neck.
The woman looked up at Sirronde as she came—an expression suggesting the woman considered her a potential problem. Then her glance lingered briefly on Sirronde’s sheathed Rod. After a moment she nodded. “Fair day, Rodmistress,” the woman said, and picked up a rock from the table, dropping it on the parchments on the table to keep them in place in the wind.
“Fair day,” Sirronde said, “and the Goddess’s greeting to you. Is this the road to Egen?”
“It will be, as soon as the bridge is done.”
Sirronde smiled. “You’d be the builder, then.”
“By the king’s courtesy, yes,” the woman said. “Dyla is my name.”
“The King of Arlen’s engineer? Well met!”
“Thank you,” said Dyla.
“It’s a long way south for you,” Sirronde said. “This must have been an important job.”
“A
tricky one, maybe,” Dyla said. She sounded impatient. “But it will make getting stone north from the quarry easier. This is some of the best limestone in Arlen.”
“So how is it going?”
“Oh, very well, now: very well indeed.”
Sirronde underheard a quick flash of anger, despite the casual words. “‘Now’?” Sirronde said, trying to sound innocent.
“Oh, there was some trouble earlier,” said the Builder. “Subsidence of the banks on both sides. But you have to expect that when you’re putting real pressure on the ground for the first time. We’ll be setting in the keystone early next week. Then the scaffolding comes down, and we can all get back to our lives.”
She looked pleased, but Sirronde sensed something sealed under the pleasure—and the sealing-over was new, a scab rather than a scar. “It’s a wonderful piece of work,” she said. “But isn’t it harder to do this way, without any piers to hold up the span in the middle?”
“They wouldn’t last,” Dyla said. “You don’t know what this river is like in the spring.” She looked upstream. “Huge rocks come rolling down into the headwaters from the glacier in the thaws...they’d smash any pier. A clean single-span arch was the only way to go. That’s been the source of the trouble. This kind of bridge is the hardest to build.”
“You might have called in someone with the Fire,” Sirronde said, trying to sound casual about it.
The master-builder looked at her suspiciously, but with humor. “Angling for work, Mistress? Business too slow?”
“Never that. But wouldn’t it have been easier?”
“Maybe,” Dyla said. “But maybe I’m old-fashioned. In past times there wasn’t so much Fire around, and people built bridges very well without it. Most of those are still standing. Blue Fire, now—” Dyla looked thoughtfully at Sirronde. “Do Fireworks keep working after the death of the one who wrought them?”
“All the ones I’ve seen, if they’re well wrought.”
“‘If,’” Dyla said. “Well enough for you. But I’m responsible for this. I can’t have it dropping into the river when someone drops dead.”
“You would be thinking of sorcery,” Sirronde said. “Among Fireworks, death-failure only comes of ill intention. But even among works made with the hands, nothing lasts forever.”
“Stone does,” said the Builder, “nearly, if you treat it right. And it needs to. People will need this bridge after all of us are long gone. Let’s just say I prefer working with forces I understand. Cohesion, gravity...” She turned away, smiling.
Sirronde smiled too, but rue edged the look. Though everyone alive had at least a spark of the Fire, those who didn’t have enough of it to focus and use could naturally enough come to feel that the Flame was a waste of time, something unimportant. “Well, I hope it may go well for you, madam,” Sirronde said, and turned to make her way back into town.
She turned in at the house with the ivy-bush over the door. It was, as she thought, the town’s common room, beginning to fill with people wanting a cup or a sup at the end of the day. Sirronde sat down by a window and waited. Soon enough the commoner came over to her, a big bustling woman, muscular and fair, who summed Sirronde up as quickly as the master-builder had, if more kindly. “Tell me if I’m wrong—” she said.
Sirronde smiled, reached down to the longer of her two scabbards, and pulled out her her Rod, a straight slender branch of blackthorn as long as her forearm, sanded smooth and polished to a soft green-brown gleam. Blue Fire wreathed and danced briefly around the exposed length of it. She slipped it back into place.
“Thought so. Firebearer, what would you like for your dinner?”
“I’m able to pay—”
“Nonsense,” the commoner said. “Would I ask Her to? Are you passing through, or will you stay the night?”
“The night at least,” Sirronde said.
“There’s a room upstairs for you, as long as you like. Meantime, dinner is rockpool perch or old chicken in lentils.”
“How old?”
The commoner raised her eybrows. “Old enough to have known better than to stand still last night.”
Sirronde chuckled. “That sounds fine. Thank you, mistress—”
“Leni,” said the commoner.
“Sirronde.”
“Sirronde, you’re very welcome in Dalthant. White wine? Red? Or barleydraft?”
“Draft for the moment.”
When Leni headed for the kitchen, people sitting at some of the other tables began to drift over to Sirronde to greet her. Shortly she was submerged in names and trying to pay proper attention to their owners and learn their faces while answering their questions. That she was a Rodmistress was for these people an attraction, but her value to them as a wandering rumormonger seemed greater. So for the next hour or so, as drinks came and food started to, Sirronde concentrated on telling them all the news she knew of the Middle Kingdoms. It took a good deal to satisfy them, and it was nearly an hour before they fell quiet long enough for her to say, “So tell me, who or what here needs the Fire? Is anyone sick?”
“Not at all,” said a little bald wrinkled man called Hatch. “Except for Arl who has the breathing trouble, and little Risk the herbman is taking care of that just fine.”
“Are all the animals well?”
“No problem with them, Mistress,” said Maren, the russet-haired town smith. “The herd’s prospering.”
“And just look at the size of those chickens,” Hatch said. “They run into the milking pens and kick the cows around!”
Sirronde had seen them scratching in the street and bullying the pigs, and could believe it. “Anyone unwell in the mind or the heart?”
“No, not at all.” “Of course there’s Rald the town gossip—” Sirronde then got to listen to half an hour of energetic backbiting while her pitcher of barleydraft ran out. Finally Leni arrived with the chicken stew and another pitcher, of wine this time, a cool white from the southern Medelnya grape. Her two husbands came out of the kitchen with more plates and bowls, some of which wound up in front of Sirronde’s tablemates, and silence fell for a while, punctuated only by the clatter of spoons on crockery.
The door creaked, and faces looked up at someone coming in. Sirronde looked too. It was the master-builder, Dyla, as well as a young man, tall and very handsome, who smiled around the room, and incidentally at Sirronde when he saw her, then turned to follow his lady.
Lovers, Sirronde thought. Looking at the expressions worn by her tablemates—some sly, some noncommittal, some disapproving—she knew she was right.
“Know who that is?” said one of the men sitting by her, a gruff silverhaired old creature called Spalin.
“Dyra d’Furnen,” Sirronde said. “Master-builder to King Freol.”
“Master-builder,” said Spalin, softly scornful. “Haven’t seen her build anything that stayed up, yet.”
“She said the bridge had had some problems,” Sirronde said.
“Fell down twice,” said Maren. “That’s problems, if you like.”
“All those stones had to be fished out of the river,” said Hatch. “Those that wasn’t shattered. The biggest had to be quarried out again. Up the bridge went once more, and no sooner did the scaffolding come away than down the bridge came again.”
“They didn’t even finish taking the scaffolding down—”
“Messengers came riding down the road from the King—”
“From the King’s Treasurer, you mean,” said Spalin. “Told madam high-and-mighty there that the bridge had better stay up the third time. Otherwise, the King would bring in someone else, and Herself would have to make up the lost price of the labor.” His voice had dropped to a whisper. Sirronde saw Dyra throw a glance in their direction.
“It looks to be going well enough this time,” said Sirronde.
“It looked all right the first two times,” said Maren.
Sirronde drank again, put her mug down. Hatch poured more wine. “Might be some kind of curse o
n her,” a slight dark woman called Berynn said. “She’s supposed to be a great builder—”
“She is,” Sirronde said. “She’s famous all over the north. She rebuilt Blackcastle in Darthis after the earthquake.”
“Then why can’t she build a bridge that stays up?”
Sirronde shook her head. Subsidence... But it had to be more than that.
Sirronde’s tablemates abruptly quietened. There was a small sidetable near them, with sauces and seasonings on it, and Sirronde looked up from her wine to see Dyla standing there, spooning conserve of hot southern whitefruit onto her lentils. Turning toward the table where the young man sat, she paused a moment by Sirronde. “We were hurried earlier, Rodmistress: I didn’t catch your name.”
You didn’t ask for it, Sirronde thought. “Sirronde d’Aneik.”
“Darthene, with a name like that.”
“Originally. But now I’m out on Her business, every country’s mine.”
Dyla put her eyebrows up and looked amused. “And everything’s Her business, eh?”
“Why wouldn’t it be? She made it all.”
Dyla smiled in the manner of someone graciously conceding a point to an inferior, and headed back to sit with a group whom Sirronde’s tablemates had identified as the town elders. They began a serious bout of flattery directed toward some favor she could do them when she went back to Prydon with her commission finished. Sirronde glanced over at the young man, sitting in the middle of the group but ignored. He threw her a look in return that said, It’s nothing new I’m used to it.
She smiled back, then turned her attention to her seat-companions. “Handsome one, isn’t he,” said Berynn.
“He is,” Sirronde said. “Is he local?”
There were guffaws at that. “Him? Look at the hands on him!” said Maren.
“Young Adri’s from one of them cities, like her,” said another of them. “Never been off a paved street in his life until now, I bet.”