Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

A shout came down the hillside behind them, and the snapping of undergrowth before a runner—then two runners. Before they could move, another shout answered from ahead, down the valley and much nearer. To the west lay battle-churned bog—and possibly a wounded woman-thing, who might also be heat-madness. They bolted west, leaping for rocks and firmer-looking patches. Then Wolfman yelped and stumbled with an arrow in his thigh. They turned, and four of the Snow Lion men were upon them: three leaf-bladed spears and a nocked longbow advised them to surrender.

The archer barked a demand. Raian stared, confounded, before recognizing the strange tongue as a kind of Geillan at all. Guessing, he tossed down his knives. Wolfman, on the ground, followed suit, but added, “What the hell was that?”

The archer and the spearmen exchanged glances. Raian supposed he had guessed wrong, but they were not complaining. The command was repeated, slightly abbreviated, and louder. Raian shrugged and lifted his empty hands.

One of the spearmen shot an exasperated glare at the archer, that was also a request for cover. Stepping forward, he yanked Raian’s cloak forward and fingered, first, the embroidered wisdom-maze of Dunwyrding, and then the constellation of Kinnaith. Tossing aside his spear, he grabbed the Wolfman’s similar cloak, and almost lifted him to his feet by it. He spoke sharply, but to his fellows, not to the ignorant strangers.

The spearmen pressed closer, hot in discussion, as puzzled by the Geillan badge on a Sferan mantle as Rothesay had been months before. But the archer had a low tolerance for riddles. He did not need to know the whole clan story of a prisoner to know what to do with one: disarm, disable (except to walk, and he was already regretting the furry one’s wounded leg), despoil, and present to the captain and jockey for a prize; then brag for as long as the story was good. Life was as simple as you chose to make it, for Gothlac Ironbow. He chose swiftly.

“Not bad for camp bread.” Wolfman broke a piece between his fingers moodily. The stew given the prisoners had been unexpectedly tasty as well. “You suppose it’s their custom to give the condemned a last good meal?”

“Could be,” Raian glanced over at the small corral of captive great-axe warriors, who had been given the same. “But their surgeon did well by your leg, from what I could see, so I doubt it’s your last. How does it feel?”

“Shut up.” Wolfman rolled away from his empty bowl to stare up at the thick stars. Raian gave his shoulder a squeeze, but for his part watched the rude court convened at the fire scarcely ten yards away.

Raised on a thick pile of new-cut turves, the Snow Lion men set a wooden chair, deeply carved, brightly painted—and cunningly made, quickly assembled or taken apart for travel. The huge man who sat there now, his booted feet planted on the turves as though they symbolized the whole earth, had to be the Snow-lion chieftain himself. White streaks in his thick brown hair and beard suggested that he would look like his own token in none too many more summers.

Deorgard. Raian had heard the name before, but Tre-Uissig, secure in the fastnesses of the mountains, spent little interest on lowland folk. Raian regretted the smug oversight; he began to fear that his people might soon regret it, too, if too late.

Deorgard. The name meant ‘man-wolf’ in the language of the Geillari. “Bastard stole my name,” the Wolfman grumbled.

“Nah, just their form,” Raian retorted. Ddarwath was the Sferan equivalent, yet the Uissig spoke a mingled speech, and Athgarw, as it had become there, would mean nothing to either Geilla or Sfera anywhere else.

He watched the last of the captains give his accounting, and even listened to what he could hear. He was beginning to catch on to this Maldan dialect. The surly archer’s first word to him—something like Gaeioosiurnaamunkhlean-gurt—he had worked out as ‘Give us your name and clan-gurt,’ though that final syllable still escaped him. And when these men spoke slowly, as they did before the fire when they wanted their speech to carry, he understood them well enough. He thought he might even be able to mimic their drawl. Would they notice, and think he mocked them? Or would they only find him more intelligible than otherwise?

After the reports, the great chieftain spent fully an hour, by the moon, dispensing gifts, from confiscated weaponry to copper, silver, even gold bracelets from his meaty arms. To one hero, though, he gave the massive gold torque from about his own neck, and the camp erupted with screaming approval and thundering swords on shields. Raian took note of this popular character: tall, homely, his grim face flushed now with pride. In a moment he vanished in a mob of congratulators; and then more drink went around, and a bard stepped forward.

Raian rubbed his eyes. The sorrow-songs of these Geillari, like his own, were slow and heavy, and he was exhausted, having borne the brunt of the Wolfman’s weight as well as his cynicism as their captors marched them over the hills that day. He felt no apprehension for either themselves or their quest: any Geilla would recognize the friendship-duty that lay on him. A man who owed a friend’s loyalty needed no other safe-conduct across any country, and those whom he met were obliged to give him aid. Wolfman’s fretting over execution or enslavement wearied him; and the mournful chant cataloguing the incomparable virtues of men he did not know bore him swiftly to sleep.

Sing now the songs of our bold brothers,

Fear-scorning, foe-defying,

Bright their spears in the sun-glade flashing,

Iron-toothed hounds first in the blood-score.

No more shall we see the faces long loved,

Lifting our hearts like the sun’s dawning,

Beautiful they were to us, bewitching to women,

But in the Dead-halls no eye brightens.

Gone is their music, stilled are their voices,

Sweeter than bard-song in the ears of kinsmen.

They shall not call out our names in gladness

From the Silent-realm till the World’s turning.

Thundering Gothmir, born sword-handed,

First to the fray when the war-pipes wailed ....

In the morning the war camp broke swiftly and headed, to Raian’s delight, south. They put a heavy pack on him, which he determined to bear as if it were nothing; but the Wolfman was loaded into a cart with enemy wounded. Though they soon struck a highway as smooth as Sferan skill could make it, the cart was no great triumph of art, and he bounced over the hills in misery. It was, he asserted when they stopped for the noon meal, a way of beating a man to death while being able to claim, “I never touched him!”

The third day of their journey with Deorgard’s company pressed on after sunset, and ended by the ruined gates of a city, Raian’s first view of the devastation wrought by his Geillan kin upon his Sferan cousins. In the rising moonlight, the tumbled blocks of shattered walls looked like a demented Ceidha stone-ring, an undead home to the ghosts of vengeance.

But the army turned, and entered by cheers and torchlight between the lapped ends of a towering timber palisade. In the mountains of Tre-Uissig, the Geillari raised homesteads of wood, steep-roofed, short-walled, their pillars graven with the history and lineage of the family, the rooftrees and eaves warded by the family’s daemons and spirits freed by wood-chisel from naturally-gnarled limbs and roots. But this place was a city of such halls—a city by Geillan standards, if little more than a large village to Raian of Teginau.

To the tallest hall, of double-tiered and slab-shingled roofs and the greatest garrison of ridgepole spirits, the more important great-axe—Duncardrogh—prisoners were brought, and the peculiar half-Dragon, half-human boys as well. The Wolfman was spirited away by a murmuring throng of healer-women: a devil had got into his thigh wound, and he blazed with a fever. When he babbled and mumbled all last night, Raian had worried; since he had fallen white and silent today, Raian feared he had brought his friend to Ges’s Gates. He watched anxiously as the grim women bore Wolf’s litter away down an arborlike walkway. His own impatient herder almost knocked him off his feet in urging him into the side aisle of the Great Hall, to await the king’s pleasure.

Raian sat cross-legged on the pallets piled against the low wall; small as he was, he could barely have stood erect here under the eaves, but only a few feet away, the line of tree-bole pillars met the roof at three times his height. And the torches that burned on every pole could not dispel the lofty shadows at the very peak.

In the storied pillars, he expected to see marks of the Snow-lion’s glorious Dunmadroch fathers. Instead the bright-painted carvings told of a green Serpent who wore a wreath of flame. He glanced up the hall. Deorgard’s great war-throne was even now being assembled on a cloth on the raised earth—no, stone: Sferan marble, he thought darkly—at the head of the hall; down on the rush-strewn floor, but to the throne’s right, the side of honor, stood a more solid stool, with green serpents for arms and a green cushion with flame-colored tassels. So even this Geillan city was not the great war-lord’s native hearth.

Aurochs horns blew. Backed by two bards and a dozen mail-clad spearmen, a man strode up the hall and took the serpent-throne: gold-haired, gold-bearded, proud and cold of glance. His men arranged themselves behind him, to Raian’s eye looking more like massed threat to the overlord than liegemen in service. Perhaps the Serpent chafed under the Lion’s claw. Then, heralded only by the silence spreading like cold wine spilled, Deorgard walked the hall alone, unarmed and unguarded.

Even among a race of men scorned by the Dragon-lords as crude and clumsy giants, Deorgard was big. Taller than Raian’s father Wylfric, twice as massive, his thigh could not be compassed by Raian’s belt, nor his shoulders by Raian’s uttermost embrace. All in black he walked, from his flowing mantle to his black-fringed tunic to trousers and garters alike, as if the colors of his own clan straitened him too narrowly, he who would make himself the lord of many. Berulf himself, it was said, often went thus in black. Against this the gold that covered his arms, spangled his hands and draped his neck gleamed like the pure fire of life and power, and he passed like a demigod, a sullen son of Earth and Fire.

The Serpent-king kept his seat till Deorgard passed the hearthfire. Then he sprang up, swept off his great green cloak and threw it open upon the rushes and the stones before his high king’s boots and Deorgard missed not a step as he trod across the gay embroidered cloth. Stepping upon the raised dais, he turned, flung his mighty weight upon his throne, slouched heavily on one arm rest and dangled a knee over the other. A dim blue shadow flickered from the far aisle, and the same ancient bard of the war-camp three nights before ranked his strange power behind his master’s left shoulder. Over Deorgard’s head, he held aloft in old, blue-veined hands a thick crown of hammered gold, then slowly settled it upon the high king’s brown head. For a bare moment the king sat moveless; no one in the hall seemed to breathe. Then Deorgard nudged the heavy band with one huge thumb, setting it ever so slightly askew, and waved for court to get on with it.

With great fanfare the Duncardrogh men were brought to Deorgard’s feet. Their chieftain, a young stumpy brownbearded fellow named Harka, whom Raian had learned to like and respect on the trek, stood forward to speak for his people. In a loud, clear voice, following the bard’s instruction, in several stanzas he proclaimed Deorgard his lord and theirs. Then he named it high honor to be in their turn regarded as the people of so great a war leader and king.

This part, almost a poem in its own right, was Harka’s own invention, outside the ritual conducted by Deorgard’s bard, and it succeeded in surprising the king. He sat up slowly, like a lion at stretch, raked his knifelike stare over this newest sword-point vassal, to cut the veil of deceit such pretty words might embroider. Raian could not see Harka’s face, but he noted the young king’s straight spine with approval. Harka meant what he said, as Raian knew already, and the Geillari held such sentiments as noble and manly—in poetry; they were, however, thought old-fashioned, even quaint, in the flesh. Deorgard’s glance flicked to the back of the Serpent-king’s blond head, and Raian wished he could read the warlord’s thought. Would it be, ‘You should speak so fittingly’? Or was it, ‘You, I understand’?

Then Duncardrogh’s nobles each had to come forward, lay their hands in Deorgard’s, affirm their chieftain’s pledge and make their own. Bards in the aisle across the hall from Raian made a music of harps and bells, and a soft but bone-stirring thunder of man-sized tambours, for each. At the end the Duncardrogh were seated with honor on floor-cushions at the Serpent-king’s right hand, awaiting feasting later as brothers. And at last, long last, Raian na Drogh, still in his double-blazoned Sferan cloak, came before Deorgard the Madroch, king in Aellicia, lord of Maldan, who looked down at him as if he were an odd bug that stirred an idle curiosity before being squashed.

The bug felt puny and fragile. Raian loved his mother, willowy lady, but he wished that she had given him rather more of his father’s stature than her own. Mastering himself with all his force, he went to one knee as he had seen young King Harka and his nobles do, yet strained to make the crown of his head reach the dim, smoke-veiled ridgepole far above.

“Who are you?” the bard demanded ponderously. His voice must have been smoother, more resonant in his youth, but it could not have been more powerful; nor lower-pitched.

“I am Hadrad Wylfhaer Wylfring Traga Gulfwisa Wylfric Raian, of the Dunwyrding, Second-born and Second-son of Iril ma Sunarre—”

That was enough for Geillan convention; more than enough, for outside the Uissig, only bastards gave their mother’s lineage. Raian knew it, but he dared his captors to sneer: in his mountains, both lines mattered. “—ma Corandere ma Tersyn ma Linnas ma Meyal ma Linnas, Kinnatysel.”

A glower from Deorgard cut off the snickering like a scythe in the hay. “Half-breed,” he observed curtly, the first word outside ritual he had troubled to speak all evening.

Raian raised his chin. “Double-blooded.”

Chastened once already, his men waited on their high king before venturing opinion. They waited long. Deorgard stared inscrutably at the boy, and the boy stared boldly back, unblinking though his eyes began to sting before the king raised one bushy eyebrow. Then the bard would have spoken again, but Raian was not done answering as he understood the question: “I am a man of Raingold Enclave, of the city of Teginau, queen of the Tre-Uissig.” He should not have said ‘man,’ properly speaking; still, it was only the feebleminded or sickly who were ever denied manhood’s yoke, and he knew himself to have long since surpassed the priests’ demands.

Deorgard stabbed him again with his glance, and this time did not check the mirth of his men, old and new, that erupted at this claim. Only Harka did not laugh, nor Deorgard himself, nor the ancient bard who bent to his king’s ear

“What brought you to my battle?” Deorgard himself asked next.

“Chance alone, Athariad. I am seeking a friend, who is pursued unaware by a man who would harm—” Raian did not know whether to say ‘her’, which was true, or ‘him’, which was her wish and which in any case made it easier to elicit news of her. But the Geillari distrusted a man of hesitant speech, believing that the honest man spoke both boldly and plainly, confident of his truth. Raian hurried on, hoping his lapse was too brief to count against him, “—him. I ask all men who have ever known the blessing of friendship to give me aid and succor!” He could not in courtesy look away from the king to address all present, but he made sure to project his voice to the walls.

The king’s gaze narrowed; the bug fought not to squirm.

“Name?” Deorgard demanded.

“Rothric,” Raian replied promptly, but less surely. How could he explain how he did not know his supposed friend’s very name?

The old bard bent to Deorgard’s ear again, but the king waved him back irritably. “And you would have me do what?”

Raian spread his hands. “Only grant my companion and me shelter for a day or two, till he is fit to walk again, and safe passage out of your land—”

Deorgard’s men interrupted with laughter again, and one cried loudly, “’T is ay loong wak thet t’t’ aind of t’ Maddroch’s gddahsp!”

‘T is ay loong wak—ah: ‘it is a long walk, that, to the end of the Madroch’s grasp.’ No doubt, thought Raian. He raised his cupped hands like a priest offering libation: Teodhan’s sign. “Teodhan, Who is the fountain of that sweet love that flows from the heart of a friend and restores a man’s soul, and strength, and valor: let His holy gift be praised by the honor that we do one another’s sacred bonds!” It was not quite the proper invocation, which he last heard half-asleep a few weeks ago, at a cousin’s betrothal yet, but he was pleased with it. He hoped the king was.

“Pretty,” said Deorgard, as murmurs ran through his hall. He nudged the rim of his crown again. The bard visibly ached to whisper to him again, but held his peace, oak-stern and straight. Then the king gave the bug one last, black gaze, and squashed him. “No.”

His men pounded their spear-butts on the floor as Deorgard stretched magnificently, unhooking his indecorous knee from the armrest at last. Raian only just made out his command to the bard: “Take him to my chamber, and get a collar on him.”

“No!” Raian was on his feet without knowing that he moved.

The hall fell silent, almost silent, watching for the strange boy’s further humiliation. Deorgard leaned forward, his elbows propped on his knees—and grinned. “Maybe a willow-switch?”

An erring child’s perennial chastisement. Raian stiffened, furious: furious, and impotent as a child.

“Thrice a liar, and once a boor,” the king explained, his grin fading like moonset in the night of his ferocity. He snapped his big fingers, and as the Dunmadroch warriors laughed and hooted, the grim old bard stepped down, gripped Raian’s shoulder in iron claws and forced him from the hall.

As they reached the hall gate, open wide to the sweet summer night, soft and sweet as the sleep of the heedless gods, Deorgard’s bellow halted them: “Hey, Bradgith!” With a mighty heave, and then another, he flung his great black boots down the hall. “Make him understand I want ’em clean by dawn!”

Bradgith shoved Raian toward the boots. Numbly he picked them up. He could refuse, if he had a mind to be beaten. But it seemed a fruitless rebellion, fruitless, and worse: if he was going to extricate himself and the Wolfman from Dunmadroch enslavement, he was going to need a clear head and whole bones. He followed the bard dully.