“God’s mercy on us!” Cadrach said in a strangled whisper. Isgrimnur echoed him.
The great beast, long as ten men, wide as a mason’s barge, turned its head to regard the little boat slipping across the lake. Both Miriamele and Isgrimnur ceased rowing, hands clammy and nerveless on the sweeps.
“Don’t stop!” Tiamak hissed. “Slowly, slowly, but keep going!”
Even across the expanse of water, Miriamele thought she could see the creature’s eye glitter as it watched them, feel its cold and ancient stare. When the immense legs shifted and the clawed feet dug briefly at the ground as though the giant would turn and re-enter the water, Miriamele feared her heart would stop. But the great crocodile did no more than send a few gouts of sand into the air, then the huge, knobby head dropped down to the beach and the yellow eye closed.
When they had made their way across to the waterway’s outlet, Miriamele and Isgrimnur began rowing hard, as if by silent agreement. After a few moments they were breathing heavily. Tiamak told them to stop.
“We are safe,” he said. “The time has long gone when he could follow us up this way. He has gotten far too big.”
“What was it?” Miriamele gasped. “It was horrible.”
“Old Sekob. My folk call him the grandfather of all crocodiles. I do not know if that is true, but he is certainly the master of all his kind. Year after year other crocodiles come to fight him. Year after year he feeds on these challengers, swallows them whole, so he never has to hunt any more. The strongest of all sometimes escape the lake and crawl as far away as the riverbank before they die. Those were the bones you saw.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Cadrach had gone quite pale, but there was a quality of exhilaration in his tone. “Like one of the great dragons!”
“He is the dragon of the Wran,” Tiamak agreed. “There is no doubt of that. But unlike drylanders, we marsh-folk leave our dragons alone. He is no threat to us, and he kills many of the largest man-eaters that would otherwise prey on the Wran people. So we show him respect. Old Sekob is far too well-fed to need to chase such a puny morsel as we would make.”
“So why did you want us to be quiet?” asked Miriamele.
Tiamak gave her a dry look. “He might not need to eat us, but you do not go .into the king’s throne room and play children’s games, either. Especially when the king is old and quick to temper.”
“Elysia, Mother of God.” Isgrimnur shook his head. Sweat beaded his forehead, although the day was not particularly warm. “No, we certainly would not want to get that old fellow upset.”
“Now come,” said Tiamak. “If we keep on until first dark, we should be able to reach Village Grove by tomorrow midday.”
As they traveled, the Wrannaman became more talkative. When they had reached waters so shallow that rowing was no use, there was little else to do but listen to each others’ stories as Tiamak stood and poled the boat along. Under Miriamele’s questioning he told them much about the life of the Wran, as well as about his own unusual choices which had marked him out from his fellow villagers.
“But your people have no king?” she asked.
“No.” The small man thought for a moment. “We have elders, or we call them that, but some of them are no older than I am. Any man can become one.”
“How? By asking to?”
“No. By giving feasts.” He smiled shyly. “When a man has a wife and children—and whatever other family lives with him—and can feed them all with some left over, he begins to give what is left to others. In return, he might ask for something like a boat or new fishing floats, or if he chooses he can say: ‘I will ask payment when I give my feast.’ Then, when he is owed enough, he ‘calls for the crabs,’ as we say, which means he asks all those who owe him things to pay him back; then he invites everyone in the village for a feast. If everyone is satisfied, that man becomes an elder. He must then give such a feast once every year, or he will not be an elder in that year.”
“Sounds daft,” Isgrimnur grumbled, scratching. He had been by far the greatest target for the local insect life; his broad face was covered in bumps. Miriamele understood, and forgave him his short temper.
“No more daft than passing land down from father to son.” Cadrach’s response was mild, but held an edge of sarcasm. “Or getting it in the first place by braining your neighbor with an ax—as your folk did until fairly recently, Duke.”
“No man should have what he is not strong enough to protect,” Isgrimnur responded, but he seemed more preoccupied with digging at a difficult spot between his shoulder blades than with continuing the debate.
“I think,” Tiamak said quietly, “that it is a good way. It makes certain that no one starves and that no one hoards his wealth. Until I studied in Perdruin, I could not imagine that there was another way of doing things.”
“But if a man doesn’t wish to be an elder,” Miriamele pointed out, “then there’s nothing to make him give up the things he is gathering.”
“Ah, but then no one in the village thinks very highly of him.” Tiamak grinned. “Also, since the elders decide what is best for the village, they might just decide that the excellent fish pond beside which a rich and selfish man has built his house now belongs to all the village. There is little sense in being rich and not being an elder—it causes jealousy, you see.”
Duke Isgrimnur continued to scratch. Tiamak and Cadrach fell into a quiet conversation about some of the more intricate points of Wran theology. Miriamele, who had grown tired of talk, took the opportunity to watch old Camaris.
Miriamele could stare without embarrassment: the tall man seemed quite uncaring, no more interested in the business of his fellows than a horse in a paddock might be with the traders talking by the fence. Observing his bland but certainly not stupid face, it was almost impossible to believe that she was in the presence of a legend. The name of Camaris-sá-Vinitta was nearly as famous as that of her grandfather Prester John, and both of them, she felt sure, would be remembered by generations yet unborn. Yet here he was, old and witless, when all the world had thought him dead. How could such a thing have come to pass? What secrets hid behind his guileless exterior?
Her attention was drawn down to the old knight’s hands. Gnarled and callused by decades of toil at Petippa’s Bowl and on countless battlefields, they were still somehow quite noble, huge and long-fingered but gentle. She watched him twisting aimlessly at the material of his ragged breeches and wondered how such deft, careful hands could have dealt death as swiftly and terribly as his legend said. Still, she had seen his strength, which would have been impressive even in a man half his age, and in the few moments of danger the little company had experienced in the Wran, when the boat had threatened to overturn or someone had fallen into a pit of sucking mud, he had responded with amazing quickness.
Miriamele’s eyes strayed back to Camaris’ face once more. Before encountering him at the inn, she had never met him, of course—he had disappeared a quarter of a century before her birth—but there was something troublingly familiar about his face. It was something that she only saw at certain angles, a phantom glint that left her feeling as though she were on the verge of some revelation, of some profound recognition ... but the moment would always pass and the familiarity would disappear. Just now, for instance, the nagging sensation was not present: at this moment, Camaris looked like nothing but a handsome old man with a particularly serene and other-worldly expression.
Perhaps it was only the paintings and tapestries, Miriamele reasoned—after all, she had seen so many pictures of this famous man! There were likenesses of him in the Hayholt, in the ducal palace at Nabban, even in Meremund ... although Elias had only hung them when his father John was coming, to honor the old man’s friendship with Osten Ard’s greatest knight. Her father Elias, who had considered himself the paramount knight of his father’s kingdom in latter days, had shown little patience with stories of the old times of the Great Table, and particularly with tales about the s
plendor of Camaris....
Miriamele’s thoughts were interrupted by Tiamak’s announcement that they were nearing Village Grove.
“I hope you will forgive me if we stop and spend the night at my little house,” he said. “I have not seen it for several months and I would like to make sure that my birds have survived. It would take us another hour or so to reach the village anyway, and it is later in the day than I thought it would be.” He waved a hand toward the reddening western sky. “We may as well wait until morning to go see the elders.”
“I hope your house has curtains to keep the bugs out,” Isgrimnur said somewhat plaintively.
“Your birds?” Cadrach was interested. “From Morgenes?”
Tiamak nodded. “To begin with, although I have long since been raising my own. But Morgenes taught me the art, it is true.”
“Could we use them to send a message to Josua?” Miriamele asked.
“Not to Josua,” Tiamak said, frowning in thought. “But if you know of any Scrollbearers who might be with him we could try. These birds cannot find just anybody. Except for certain people whom they have been trained to seek out, they only know places, like any ordinary messenger birds. In any case, we will talk about this when we are under my roof.”
Tiamak guided the boat through a succession of tiny streamlets, some so shallow that the whole company was forced to stand waist-deep in the water to lift the rowboat over the sandbars. At last they entered a slow-moving waterway that took them down a long alley of banyan trees. They drew up at last before a hut so cunningly hidden that they would surely have drifted past if its owner were not guiding the boat. Tiamak hooked down the ladder of twisted vines and one by one they climbed up into the Wrannaman’s house.
Miriamele was disappointed to find the interior of the hut so spare. It was obvious that the little scholar was a man of humble means, but she had at least hoped in this, her first experience of a Wran dwelling, to find a little more in the way of exotic furnishings. There were neither beds, tables, nor chairs. Other than the firepit set into the floor of the house beneath a cleverly vented smoke hole, the only household belongings were a small chest of wickerwork, another much larger. and sturdier wooden chest, a stretched-bark writing board, and a few other odds and ends. Still, it was dry, and that alone was such a change from the last few days that Miriamele was grateful.
Tiamak showed Cadrach the wood piled beneath the eaves outside one of the high windows, then left the monk to start a fire while he himself clambered up onto the roof to see to his birds. Camaris, whose height made him seem a giant in the small house—although Isgrimnur was not much shorter and was certainly a great deal heavier—squatted uncomfortably in the comer.
Tiamak appeared at the window, upside down. He was leaning over the edge of the roof, and he was clearly delighted. “Look!” He held up a handful of powdery gray. “It is Honey-Lover! She has come back! Many of the others, too!” He disappeared from sight as though jerked up by a string. After a moment, Camaris went to the window and climbed out after him with his usual surprising dexterity.
“Now if we could only find something to eat,” Isgrimnur said. “I don’t really trust Tiamak’s marsh-muck—not that I’m not grateful.” He wet his lips. “It’s just that I wouldn’t turn down a joint of beef or something like. Keep our strength up.”
Miriamele could not help laughing. “I don’t think there are many cows in the Wran.”
“Can’t be sure,” Isgrimnur muttered distractedly. “It’s a strange place. Could be anything here.”
“We met the grandfather of all crocodiles,” Cadrach said as he fumbled with the flints. “Could it be, Duke Isgrimnur, that somewhere in the dank shrubbery lurks the gigantic grandmother of all cows? With a brisket big as a wagon?”
The Rimmersman would not be baited. “If you mind your manners, sirrah, I might even leave you a bite or two.”
There was no beef. Isgrimnur, along with the rest of the company, was forced to make do with a thin soup made from various kinds of marsh-grass and a few slivers from the one fish Tiamak was able to catch before dark. Isgrimnur made an offhand remark about the charm of an ember-roasted pigeon, but the Wrannaman was so horrified that the duke quickly apologized.
“It’s just my way, man,” he grumbled. “I’m damned sorry. Wouldn’t touch your birds.”
Even had he been serious, he might have found it more difficult than expected. Camaris had taken to Tiamak’s pigeons as though to a long-lost family. The old knight spent most of the evening up on the roof of the house with his head stuck in the dovecote. He came down for only a few moments to drink his share of the soup, then climbed back to the roof again, where he sat in silent communion with Tiamak’s birds until everyone else had curled up in their cloaks on the board floor. The old man returned at last and lay down, but even then he stared fixedly at the shadow-darkened ceiling as though he could see through the thatch to where his new friends roosted; his eyes were still open long after the sound of Isgrimnur and Cadrach snoring had filled the small room. Miriamele watched him until drowsiness began to send her own thoughts spinning slowly around like a whirlpool.
So Miriamele fell asleep in a house in a tree with the quiet slapping of water beneath her, the questioning cries of night birds above.
Different birds were shrilling when the tree-filtered sunlight awoke her. Their voices were coarse and repetitive, but Miriamele did not find it too distracting. She had slept astonishingly well—she felt as though she had gotten the first solid night’s sleep since leaving Nabban.
“Good morning!” she said cheerily to Tiamak, who was huddled over the firepit. “Something smells nice.”
The Wrannaman bobbed his head. “I found a pot of flour I had buried in the back. How it stayed dry I will never know. Usually my seals don’t hold.” He pointed his long fingers at the flat cakes bubbling on a hot stone. “It is not much, but I always feel better when I get hot food.”
“Me, too.” Miriamele took a deep, savoring sniff. How astonishing yet reassuring it was that someone raised around the groaning banquet tables of Erkynlandish royalty could still find herself so pleased by unleavened biscuits cooked on a rock—if only the circumstances were right. There was something profound in that, she knew, but it seemed a shame to brood so early in the morning. “Where are the others?” she asked.
“Trying to clear some rocks out of the narrow part of the waterway. If we can get the boat past this spot, we will have an easy time in to Village Grove. We will be there long before noon.”
“Good.” Miriamele considered for a moment. “I want to wash. Where should I go?”
“There is a rainwater pool not too far away,” Tiamak said. “But I should take you there.”
“I can go by myself,” she said, a little briskly.
“Of course, but it is very easy to make a bad step here, Lady Miramele.” The slender man was embarrassed to have to correct her, and Miriamele immediately felt ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s very kind of you to take me, Tiamak. Whenever you’re ready, we’ll go.”
He smiled. “Now. Just let me pull these cakes off, so they do not burn. The first crabs should go to the one who made the trap, don’t you think?”
It was not easy to climb down from the house while juggling hot cakes. Miriamele almost fell off the ladder.
Their three companions were a little way up the estuary, waist-deep in green, scummy water. Isgrimnur straightened up and waved. He had doffed his shirt, and his great chest and stomach, covered with reddish-brown fur, were revealed in all their glory beneath the murky sun. Miriamele giggled. He looked just like a bear.
“There is food inside,” Tiamak called to them. “And batter in the bowl to make more.”
Isgrimnur waved again.
After wading through the thick, clinging underbrush for a few moments, skirting patches of sucking mud, Miriamele and Tiamak began to climb a short, low rise. “This is one of the little hills,” Tiamak said. “T
here are a few in this part of the Wran—the rest is very flat.” He pointed into the distance, which was just as tree-choked where he pointed as in any other direction. “You cannot see from here, but the highest point in the Wran is there, half a league away. It is called Ya Mologi—Cradle Hill.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I think that She Who Birthed Mankind is supposed to have lived there.” He looked up, shy again. “One of our gods.”
When Miriamele did not comment, the little man turned around and pointed along the rise a short distance to a place where the land folded in upon itself. A row of tall trees grew there—willows again, Miriamele noticed. They seemed far more robust than the surrounding vegetation. “There.” Tiamak headed toward the spot where the land dipped down.
It was a tiny canyon, a mere wrinkle in the hillside, less than a stone’s throw from end to end. The bottom was almost entirely filled with a standing pond choked with hyacinths and water lilies and long trailing grasses. “It is a rainwater pond,” Tiamak said proudly. “It is the reason my father Tugumak built his house here, although we were far from Village Grove. There are a few other such ponds in this part of the Wran, but this is much the nicest ”
Miriamele looked it over a little doubtfully. “I can bathe in it?” she asked. “No crocodiles or snakes or anything else?”
“A few water beetles, nothing more,” the Wrannaman assured her. “I will go and leave you to your washing. Can you find your way back?”
Miriamele thought for a moment. “Yes. I’m close enough to shout if I get lost, in any case.”
“True.” Tiamak turned and made his way back up the shallow defile, then disappeared through the hedge of willows. When she heard his voice again, it was quite faint. “We will save some food for you, Lady!”
He did that to let me know he was far away, Miriamele thought, smiling. So I wouldn’t worry that he was staying to watch. Even in the swamp, there are gentlemen.