The man stared at him, eyes narrowed. He was perhaps Eolair’s age. So much dirt was on his lined, weathered face that he seemed to be wearing a mask. A hand ax with a pitted blade was thrust through his belt. “I am Ule Frekkeson. How do you know my name?” He was stiff, tensed as if to spring.
Isorn dismounted and took a step toward him. “I am Isorn, son of Duke Isgrimnur of Elvritshalla. Your father was one of my own father’s most loyal companions. Do you not remember me, Ule?”
A dry rustle of movement around the clearing and a few whispered comments were all this revelation engendered. If Isorn expected the man before him to leap up and joyfully embrace him, he was disappointed. “You have grown since I last saw you, manling,” said Frekke’s son, “but I see your father’s face in yours.” Ule stared at him. Something was moving behind the man’s quiet anger. “Your father is duke no longer, and all of his men are outlaws. Why do you come to plague us?”
“We come to ask your help. There are many beside yourself unhomed, and they have begun to gather together to take back what was stolen from them. I bring you tidings from my father, the rightful duke—and from Josua of Erkynland, who is his ally against Skali Sharp-nose.”
The murmur of surprise grew louder. Ule paid no attention. “This is a sad trick, boy. Your father is dead at Naglimund, your Prince Josua with him. Do not come to us with goblin-stories because you think it would be nice to rule over a pack of house-carls again. We are free men now.” Some of his companions growled their agreement.
“Free men?” Isorn’s voice suddenly grew tight with fury. “Look at you! Look at this!” He gestured around the clearing. Watching, Eolair marveled to see this sudden passion in the young man. “Free to skulk in the woods like dogs who have been whipped from the hall, do you mean? Where are your homes, your wives, your children? My father is alive …!” He paused, steadying his voice. Eolair wondered if the thought had entered Isorn’s head that Isgrimnur’s safety was not quite so sure as he made it sound. “My father will have his lands back,” he said. “Those who help him will have their own steadings back as well—and more beside, because when we are finished Skali and his Kaldskrykemen will leave behind many unhusbanded women, many an untended field. Any true men that we find to follow us will be well rewarded.”
A harsh laugh rose up from the watching men, but it was one of enjoyment at the boast, not mockery. Eolair, sensibilities honed by years of courtly sparring, could feel the spirit of the moment beginning to turn their way.
Ule suddenly rose, his bearlike body wide in his ragged furs. The noise of the onlookers dwindled away. “Tell me then, Isorn Isgrimnurson,” he demanded. “Tell me what happened to my father, who served your father all his life. Does he wait for me at the end of your road, like the man-hungry widows and the wide, masterless fields you speak of? Will he be waiting to embrace his son?” He was shaking with rage.
Clear-eyed Isorn did not flinch. He took a slow breath. “He was at Naglimund, Ule. The castle fell before the siege of King Elias. Only a few escaped, and your father was not one of them. If he died, though, he died bravely.” He paused, lost for a moment in memory. “He was always very kind to me.”
“The damned old man loved you like his own grandchild,” Ule said bitterly, then took a lurching step forward. In the moment of stunned silence Eolair fumbled for his sword, cursing his own slowness. Ule grabbed Isorn in a rib-cracking embrace, dragging the duke’s son forward and lifting the taller man off the ground.
“God curse Skali!” Tears made pale tracks on Ule’s dirty face. “The murderer, the devil-cursed murderer! It is blood feud forever.” He let Isorn go and wiped his face with his sleeve. “Sharp-nose must die. Then my father will laugh in heaven.”
Isorn stared at him for a moment, then tears came to his eyes. “My father loved Frekke, Ule. I loved him, too.”
“Blood on the Tree, is there nothing to drink in this wretched place!?” Dypnir shouted. All around, the tattered men came pressing forward to welcome Isorn home.
“What I am going to say to you will sound most strangely,” Maegwin said. More nervous than she had thought she would be, she took a moment to smooth the folds of her old black dress. “But I am the daughter of King Lluth, and I love Hernystir more than I love my own life. I would sooner tear out my own heart than lie to you.”
Her people, gathered together in the largest of the caverns beneath the Grianspog, the great high-ceilinged catacomb where justice was dispensed and food was shared out, listened attentively. What Maegwin said might indeed prove strange, but they were going to hear her out. What could be so odd as to be unbelievable in a world as mad as the one in which they found themselves?
Maegwin looked back to Diawen, who stood just behind her. The scryer, eyes radiant with some personal happiness, smiled her approval. “Tell them!” Diawen whispered.
“You know that the gods have spoken to me in dreams,” Maegwin said loudly. “They put a song of the elder days into my head and taught me to bring you here into the rocky caverns where we would be safe. Then Cuamh Earthdog, the god of the depths, led me to a secret place that had not been seen since before Tethtain’s time—a place where the gods had a gift in store for us. You!” She pointed at one of the scribes who had descended to Mezutu’a with Eolair to copy the dwarrow’s maps. “Stand and tell the people what you saw.”
The old man rose unsteadily, leaning for support on one of his young pupils. “It was indeed a city of the gods,” he quavered, “deep in the earth—bigger than all Hernysadharc, set in a cavern wide as the bay at Crannhyr.” He threw his thin arms apart in a helpless attempt to indicate the stone city’s vastness. “There were creatures in that place like none I have seen, whispering in the shadows.” He raised his hand as several of the onlookers made signs against evil. “But they did us no harm, and even led us to their secret places, where we did what the princess asked us to do.”
Maegwin gestured for the scribe to sit down. “The gods showed me the city, and there we found things that will help turn the tide of battle against Skali and his master, Elias of Erkynland. Eolair has taken those gifts to our allies—you all saw him go.”
Heads nodded throughout the crowd. Among people as isolated as these earth-dwellers had become, the deprture of the Count of Nad Mullach on a mysterious errand had been the subject of several weeks’ worth of gossip.
“So twice the gods have spoken to me. Twice they have been correct.”
But even as she spoke, Maegwin felt a twinge of worry. Was that really true? Hadn’t she cursed herself for misinterpreting—even at times blamed the gods themselves for sending her cruel, false signs? She paused, suddenly beset by doubt, but Diawen reached forward and touched her shoulder, as if the scryer had heard her troubled thoughts. Maegwin found the courage to go on.
“Now the gods have spoken to me—a third time, and with the mightiest words of all. I saw Brynioch himself!” For surely, she thought, it must have been him. The strange face and golden eyes burned in her memory like the afterimage of sun against the blackness of closed eyelids. “And Brynioch told me that the gods would send help to Hernystir!”
A few of the audience, caught up in Maegwin’s own fervor, raised their voices in a cheer. Others, unsure but hopeful, exchanged glances with their neighbors.
“Craobhan,” Maegwin called. “Stand and tell our people how I was found.”
The old counselor got up with obvious reluctance. The look on his face told all: he was a statesman, a practical man who did not hold with such high-flown things as prophecies and the gods speaking to princesses. The folk gathered in the cavern knew that. For this reason, he was Maegwin’s master stroke.
Craobhan looked around the chamber. “We found Princess Maegwin on Bradach Tor,” he intoned. His voice could still carry powerfully despite his years; he had used it to great effect in the service of Maegwin’s father and grandfather. “I did not see, but the men who brought her down are known to me, and … and trustworthy. She had been three
days on the mountain, but had taken no hurt from the cold. When they found her she was …” he looked helplessly at Maegwin, but saw nothing in her stern face that would allow him to escape this moment, “… she was in the grip of some deep, deep dream.”
The gathering buzzed. Bradach Tor was a place of strange repute, and it was stranger still that it should be climbed by a woman during frozen winter.
“Was it just a dream?” Diawen said sharply from behind Maegwin. Craobhan looked at her angrily, then shrugged.
“The men said it was like no dream they had ever seen,” he said. “Her eyes were open, and she spoke as though to someone who stood before her … but there was nothing there but empty air.”
“Who was she speaking to?” Diawen asked.
Old Craobhan shrugged again. “She … was speaking as though she addressed the gods—and she listened betimes, as though they were speaking to her in turn.”
“Thank you, Craobhan,” Maegwin said gently. “You are a loyal and honest man. It is no wonder my father valued you so highly.” The old counselor sat down. He did not look happy. “I know that the gods have spoken to me,” she continued. “I was given a sight of the place where the gods dwell, of the gods themselves in their invincible beauty, caparisoned for war.”
“For war?” someone shouted. “Against who, my lady? Who do the gods fight?”
“Not who,” Maegwin said, raising an admonitory finger. “But for whom. The gods will fight for us.” She leaned forward, quelling the rising murmur of the crowd. “They will destroy our enemies—but only if we give our hearts to them wholly.”
“They have our hearts, lady, they do!” a woman cried.
Someone else shouted: “Why have they not helped us before now? We have always honored them.”
Maegwin waited until the clamor died down. “We have always honored them, it is true, but in the manner that one honors an old relative, out of grudging habit. We have never shown them honor worthy of their power, their beauty, worthy of the gifts they have given our people!” Her voice rose. She could feel again the nearness of the gods; the sensation rose inside her like a spring of clear water. It was such an odd, heady feeling that she burst out laughing, which brought amazement to the faces of the people around her. “No!” she shouted. “We have performed the rites, polished the carvings, lit the sacred fires, but very few of us have ever asked what more the gods might wish as proof that we are worth their aid.”
Craobhan cleared his throat. “And what do they want, Maegwin, do you think?” He addressed her in a way that seemed untowardly familiar, but she only laughed again.
“They want us to show our trust! To show our devotion, our willingness to put our lives in their hands—as our lives have been all along. The gods will help us, this I have seen for myself—but only if we show that we are worthy! Why did Bagba give cattle to men? Because men had lost their horses fighting in the wars of the gods, in the time of the gods’ truest need.”
Even as she spoke, it all suddenly became clear to Maegwin. How right Diawen had been! The dwarrows, the frightened Sitha-woman who had spoken through the Shard, the frighteningly endless winter—it was all so clear now!
“For you see,” she cried, “the gods themselves are at war! Why do you think that snow has fallen, that winter has come and never left although more than a dozen moons have changed? Why do ancient terrors walk the Frostmarch—things not seen since Hern’s day? Because the gods are at war even as we are at war. As the soldiering games of children ape the combats of warriors, so is our small conflict beside the great war that rages in the heavens.” She took a breath and felt the god-feeling bubbling inside her, filling her with joyful strength. She was sure now that she had seen the truth. It was bright as sunlight to a new-wakened sleeper. “But just as the learning of childhood is what shapes the wars of grown folk, so does our strife here on the green earth affect the wars of heaven. So if we wish the help of the gods, we must help them in turn. We must be bold, and we must trust in their beneficence. We must work the greatest magic against darkness that we have.”
“Magic?” a voice cried, an old man’s distrustful rasp. “Is that what the scryer woman’s taught you?”
Maegwin heard Diawen’s hiss of indrawn breath, but she was feeling too bold for anger. “Nonsense!” she shouted. “I do not mean the fumblings of conjurors. I mean the sort of magic that speaks as loudly in heaven as it does upon the earth. The magic of our love for Hernystir and the gods. Do you wish to see our enemies vanquished? Do you wish to walk your green land again?”
“Tell us what we must do!” a woman near the front shouted.
“I will.” Maegwin felt a great sense of peace and strength. The cavern had grown silent, and several hundred faces peered intently up at her. Just before her, old Craobhan’s deep-lined, skeptical brow was creased with anger and worry. Maegwin loved him at that moment, for she saw in his defeated look the vindication of her suffering and the proof of the power of her dreams. “I will tell you all,” she said again, louder, and her voice echoed and echoed again through the great cavern, so strong, so full of triumphant certainty that few could doubt that they were indeed hearing the chosen messenger of the gods.
Miramele and her companions lingered only a few moments to put Charystra ashore on an isolated dock in the furthest outskirts of Kwanitupul. The innkeeper’s violated feelings were only partially soothed by the bag of coins Isgrimnur tossed onto the weathered boards at her feet.
“God will punish you for treating an Aedonite woman this way!” she cried as they rowed away. She was still standing on the edge of the rickety dock, waving a fist and shouting incomprehensibly, as their slow-sliding boat nosed down a canal lined by twisted trees and she was lost from view.
Cadrach winced. “If what we have experienced lately has been God’s way of showing His favor, I think I would be willing to try a little of His punishment, just for a change.”
“No blasphemy,” Isgrimnur growled, leaning hard on his oar. “We are still alive, against all reason, and still free. That is indeed a gift.”
The monk shrugged, unimpressed, but said no more.
They floated out into an open lagoon, so shallow that stalks of marsh-grass poked from the surface and wavered in the wind. Miriamele watched Kwanitupul slipping away behind them. In the late afternoon light, the low gray city seemed a collection of drifting flotsam that had snagged on a sandbar, vast but purposeless. She felt a terrible longing for some place to call home, for even the most mindless and stifling routines of everyday life. At the moment, there was not a single scrap of charm left in the idea of adventuring.
“There is still no one behind us,” Isgrimnur said with some satisfaction. “Once we reach the swamps, we will be safe.”
Tiamak, sitting in the bow of the boat, gave a curious, strangled laugh. “Do not say such a thing.” He pointed to the right. “There, head for that small canal, just between those two large baobab trees. No, do not talk like that. You might attract attention.”
“What attention?” asked the duke, irritated.
“They Who Breathe Darkness. They like to take men’s brave words and bring them back to them in fear.”
“Heathen spirits,” Isgrimnur muttered.
The little man laughed again, a sad and helpless giggle. He slapped his hand against his bony thigh so that the smack rang echoing across the sluggish water, then he sobered abruptly. “I am so ashamed. You people must think me a fool. I studied with the finest scholars in Perdruin—I am as civilized as any drylander! But now we are going back to my home … and I am frightened. Suddenly the old gods of my childhood seem more real than ever.”
Next to Miriamele, Cadrach was nodding in a coldly satisfied way.
The trees and their raiment of clinging vines grew thicker as the afternoon wore on, and the canals down which Tiamak directed them grew progressively smaller and less well-defined, full of thick weeds. By the time the sun was scudding toward the leafy horizon, Camaris and Cadrach—Isgri
mnur was taking a well-deserved rest—could hardly drag their oars through the mossy water.
“Soon we will have to use the oars as poles only.” Tiamak squinted at the murky waterway. “I hope that this boat is small enough to go where we must take it. There is no doubt we will soon have to find something with a more shallow draft, but it would be good to be farther in, so that there will be less chance our pursuers will discover what we have done.”
“I don’t have a cintis-piece left.” Isgrimnur fanned away the cloud of tiny insects that hovered around his head. “What will we use to trade for another boat?”
“This one,” Tiamak said. “We will not get anything so sturdy in return, but whoever trades with us will know that they can sell this in Kwanitupul for enough to buy two or three flatboats, and also a barrel of palm wine.”
“Speaking of boats,” Cadrach said, resting against his sweep for a moment, “I can feel more water around my toes than I like. Should we not stop soon and patch this one, especially if we are condemned to keep it for a few more days? I would not care to look for a camping place on this mucky ground in the dark.”
“The monk is right,” Tiamak told Isgrimnur. “It is time to stop.”
As they glided slowly along, with the Wrannaman standing in the bow inspecting the tangled coastline for a suitable mooring place, Miriamele occasionally caught a glimpse through the close-leaning trees of small, ramshackle huts. “Are those your people’s houses?” she asked Tiamak.
He shook his head, a slight smile curving his lips. “No, lady, they are not. Those of my folk who must live in Kwanitupul for their livelihood live in Kwanitupul. This is not the true Wran, and to live in this place would be worse for them than simply enduring the two seasons a year they spend in the city, then returning to their villages after their money is earned. No, those who live here are drylanders mostly, Perdruinese and Nabbanai who have left the cities. They are strange folk who are not much like their brethren, for many of them have lived long on the edge of the marshes. In Kwanitupul they are called ‘shoalers’ or ‘edge-hoppers,’ and are thought to be odd and unreliable.” He smiled again, bashfully, as if embarrassed by his long explanation, then returned to his search for a campsite.