Bard I (8 page)

The spider’s death struggle had already damaged the web. Two of the main anchoring strands were within Felimid’s reach and he cut them, glad indeed of Kincaid’s keen edge. The living captive sagged lower, until Felimid was able to snag his grey swathings with the boar-spear and drag him to earth. Some careful slicing set him partially free.

‘Arrr!’ he declared, snapping his jaws.

‘Regan feverish, myself lamed, and you mute,’

Felimid said. ‘What a band of incapables! Be easy, now. I’m not meaning harm to you. It’s just that I want you to come with me for a while, and you will. Be grateful. Didn’t I save you from the spider? It would’ve sucked your blood else.’

The boy growled and yapped. He was a strange-looking creature, with sharp dark animal eyes, a tangle of coarse hair, and decidedly pointed ears. Plainly he felt only suspicion and fear of the bard, and longed to escape him.

Felimid used the boar-spear as a staff. to aid him in hopping along. With his other hand he gripped the boy’s shoulder. The boy’s arms were still bound tightly to his sides by sheets of grey spider-silk, although he could move his feet.

I’ll not hold him long with one hand. Surely he’ll bolt.

Best I collar his neck with my sword-belt. A sore indignity that. He’ll hate it, and me. But if I don’t halter him so, I may as well turn him loose now.

The boy himself snatched that decision from his captor. With a swift movement of his head, he sank teeth in Felimid’s arm, tore himself free, and going belly-flat to the ground, writhed into a deep thicket of thorns. Felimid heard him squirming about, to get the grey swathings stripped from him. A draconian way to gain freedom. He’d lose half a yard of hide in there.

Felimid sucked the bite he’d received. Well, doubtless the boy thought it worth some lacerations. He seemed harmless enough, except to snails and acorns, and could neither speak nor understand speech unless his muteness had been cunningly feigned, which Felimid did not believe.

The boy flashed out of the thicket’s far side, a few rags of cobweb hanging on him yet. He scuttled up a tree-trunk and vanished. His celerity made the bard blink.

Felimid didn’t curse or rage. He felt no anger. If the boy disliked his company, that was the boy’s poor judgement. He hobbled back to the hut.

He hadn’t broken his ankle. He’d sprained it badly, though, which was just as painful. He’d not be walking about for some days. That didn’t perturb him greatly, either; to what had almost happened, it was nothing. He had ways of getting food without stirring far from one spot, if he had to, and he judged this an occasion where powers must be spent.

He played upon his harp. Summer’s wealth and greenery flowed out of the plangent strings. Blackberry whins fruited within the hour. Felimid filled two osier baskets with the sweet-fleshed berries. Then, licking the juice from his fingers, he played again. Summer in the little glade gave way to autumn, mellow and crisp. Leaves changed color. A hazel bush grew fat nuts by the hundred. Laying his harp away, Felimid plundered those freely too. He gathered mushrooms broad and thick as steaks. Such a way of gathering food took more energy than it gave back, but for Regan’s sake, with hunting beyond him now. he had to do it. It troubled him sorely that he could not get her to eat much of the magical windfall.

He awoke flushed and groggy, with what he recognised as the first signs of Regan’s illness. Outside, it had begun to rain once more. a slow thin drizzle closely blended with mist. Wet brown leaves were falling, in the small untimely autumn he had made. Felimid took his throbbing head in his hands.

‘Give you good day.’

The bard started, for he’d heard no voice but his own and Regan’s in many days. This voice sounded deep. thick and reverberant, like a drum of hide stretched on a heavy wooden frame. Like Kisumola the wizard’s drum.

Mistrust leaped in Felimid. even before his mind recognised the likeness. He stared through the rain. A vague bulk stood motionless beneath the dripping trees.

‘Who’s there?’ he demanded, wildcat tense.

‘One who means no harm. Shall I come forward that you may see me?’

‘Yes. Do.’ Felimid cursed his clogged head. He wanted his wits about him, and his wits, at present, were floundering in a quagmire.

The stranger came ponderously forward. About Felimid’s height. he was heavy of build, even gross. Earth stained his brown wool robe. Thick nail-less fingers with webs of homy skin between them held a rowan staff.

The other hand reached up to doff a peaked badger-skin hat. Like the stranger’s body, his head was large and heavy. Moisture settled at once on a broad brown hairless pate, glistening.

His startlingly ugly face held experience and strength;

his eyes were fierce and bright under heavy brows. His smile showed large teeth, discoloured but strong and sound. Though far from comely, he was an awesome figure, a man of wit, and perhaps wisdom.

‘You need not fear me. I am Pendor, an herb-doctor, apothecary, magician, and banished exile.’ He looked about the glade, autumnal in late winter. ‘Do I address a fellow magician in you?’

‘I have powers,’ Felimid said, treading softly. ‘I am a bard of the third rank, a noble person, like the triangular branch which is in the wood. As it shelters the stem which is under it, from cold and from heat, in the same way I shelter the art of the two who precede me, and my own art the third. Ah-choo!’

‘Mighty credentials,’ Pendor said gravely. ‘Then I’d be impertinent, would I not, to offer you shelter?’

‘You’d be a splendid and generous man,’ Felimid answered, ‘and unless you stand well back from your own threshold, I may knock you down leaping across it. But your coming is very timely. How did you find me?’

‘I’m a magician, and you have been working magic. I was bound to become aware in the end. But as it happens, I was guided here. Look above you.’

A lean, naked figure crouched upon an oak branch, several wet leaves plastered to his body.

‘I know him!’ Felimid said. ‘I met him yesterday! A friend of yours?’

‘Of a sort. I call him Kev. I tended him once when he was injured, and he can come to me for food, always. There is little in the forest he does not see or hear. I would that he could speak, but he’s never learned how, and I have not been able to teach him. He is not a human child.

‘Well, he came to my garden yester-eve with his hide in strips and cobwebs upon him. Although he grunted and gestured, I could not get his meaning. At last I followed him here. In due time I’d like to know what befell him and you.’

‘It was epic,’ Felimid assured him.

‘Then may I have a name to know you by? I’ve given you mine.’

‘Excuses. My mind’s clouded. I’m Felimid mac Fal of Erin, and sir, I’m not knowing how we’re to reach your house, for Regan cannot walk at present, and I must hobble.’

Pendor wiped moisture from his pate with a sleeved forearm. Replacing the badger-skin hat on his head, he half turned toward the trees.

‘Basket,’ he said loudly, ‘come serve your master!’

Something came out of the mist like a shallow boat drifting through air. No. Not a boat. It more resembled a giant’s oval shield, woven of withies, lacking the usual leather covering. The pattern of its weave was intricate, eye-baffling, like the decorative knotwork of Erin. Neither then nor later, examining it closel did Felimid discern even one cut end of wicker. The whole might have been twisted from one large pliant hoop. Its concavity was about a foot deep, piled with furs.

‘I rode, coming here,’ Pendor said matter-of-factly.

‘You shall ride back.’

Luck, Felimid thought. What astonishing luck, when our need is greatest. Herb-doctoror apothecary, he said. What luck!

Felimid the bard was somewhat light-headed.

Pendor lifted Regan from the hut; placed her in the basket with Felimid. They cuddled together as if in a bed. Pendor, meanwhile, poking about their hut, found the blackberries and hazel nuts, so out of their time in the yearly round. He carried them out, eyes shining. Pendor liked the pleasures of the belly. Some austere magicians felt contempt for a man who would turn the seasons’ order about, merely to get food or increase his comfort. Pendor didn’t share their feeling.

Under the double weight, Basket sagged nearer the earth. Tapping one end with his rowan staff, the magician said tersely, ·come!’ Then he set off, leading the way at a dogged pace. Basket followed him.

Regan hardly seemed to know what was happening. In a brief while, she was asleep again. Felimid might have copied her, had the experience been less odd. It was like being towed smoothly through some tideless bog, by a creature who, from behind, looked part man, part toad.

Beneath the hides and furs, Felimid unobtrusively slid Kincaid from his scabbard. He didn’t, after all, know where Pendor was taking them. The bard’s last host had hung him by the heels above a wolf pit. Pendor’s fierce appearance was nothing against him; he might be benevolent. The woodland boy Kev had found him so. But Felimid didn’t care to take it for granted.

They followed a dim, narrow, twisting trail, the work of deer and elk through all the years the trees had been growing. These had the mass and presence of ages. Roots thick as Felimid’s body writhed in the ground with movement too slow to be perceived in a lifetime of hurtling human perceptions. Moss grew deep as a bed on weathered boles. Mistletoe flowered yellow, trailing in luxury from hawthorn and linden. High above, scuttling and leaping with a squirrel’s agility, Kev stayed with them. Felimid saw him now and again as a moving shadow in the mist.

Hours passed; they travelled as in a dream.

When they reached Pendor’s home, the bard saw only a mass of undergrowth at first. Coming closer. he recognised it as a crude, shapeless hedge of thorns. which enclosed a sort of garden. The thorns were murderous wooden daggers a hand’s length long. An arched gap in the hedge gave the only ingress.

Pendor’s garden proved as disorderly as the hedge around it. Herbs had been planted at random among flowers and vegetables and bushes. Felimid supposed Pendor knew where everything was. At the center of his garden stood a gigantic oak. He’d built his house in its branches, with a straight, substantial and comfortably wide timber stair leading to the door. The house itself had the look of a workmanlike structure, too-looked, and was, from floor to thatch.

Tidy it was not. Watrle partitions divided it within. All was musty and cobwebbed. The many shelves held pottery jars containing dried seeds, leaves and roots, sticky ointments, elixirs, juices, oils, and much else. Three crescent-shaped benches built against the circular outer wall were Littered with spoons, bowls, rods, a pestle and mortar, a tiny bronze brazier shaped like an owl. a beech board with a dead frog pinned thereto, lumps of beeswax, knives, scrapers, graters, two books, and a cluster of fresh mistletoe.

A cage of strong wooden bars lashed together with cord dangled from a beam. Cuboid, about three feet by three by seven, it was the right size to hold a man. Seeing it, Felimid stiffened. He drew Kincaid once more and menaced Pendor’s belly with the point in a flickering instant.

‘Tell me, if you will. . . just to indulge my curiosity, see you . . . what is the use of that cage?’

‘Sudden are you,’ Pendor observed. He hadn’t flinched. ‘The use of that cage is to hold captives. I live not far from the forest’s edge. There are bands of robbers hereabouts. They haven’t burned me out, as they fear my magic and value my services. They even trust me to a degree. Thus it’s become their custom, when they take a prisoner for ransom, to leave him with me while they dicker for payment. The prisoner’s kin like it better as well. I’m not apt to cut a throat in a fit of ill-temper, you follow? When the ransom is paid, I see the man restored to his folk.’ He shrugged. ‘One does what one can. I profit, but I’ve saved a few lives. Now put up your sword and let me see that foot of your!.’

The sword slid neatly back into his sheath. With streaming nose and swollen-lidded eyes, Felimid croaked, ‘My manners have fled me altogether. I ask your pardon. I’m less than myself. . . but then, cages offend me and make me mistrustful.’

To hear him, anybody would have thought his suspicions were quite dispelled.

‘That’s sense,’ Pendor grunted. He felt gently of the bard’s booted calf and ankle. Felimid sucked air between his teeth. Pendor, glancing at his guest, rose and poured him some wine from a stoneware flask.

Felimid had never tasted a richer, stronger brew. One draught made his head ring, especially as he’d drunk only water for three score days. Setting down the cup, he saw with annoyance that Pendor had slit his boot down the front while the bard was distracted.

‘You might have asked,’ he said. ‘Those are. those were, the best pair of boots for foul weather I’ve worn yet; tanned walrus hide, lined and trimmed with fur, and whoever did the work was a craftsman. I’m no believer in bearing pain I can avoid, at all. I promise you, but just the same I’d rather have set my teeth and let you unboot me the ordinary way.’

‘There’s no difficulty,’ Pendor answered. Slipping one unlovely hand into the ruined boot, he held the cut edges of leather together from the inside. His brow furrowed with concentration. Then he ran his other hand the length of his peremptory slash, as if soothing some pet animal.

That was all. Without display or dramatics, the boot was in one piece as before.

‘A wonder!’ Felimid said. ‘How was it done?’

‘Minor,’ the magician told him. He jerked Felimid’s foot sharply. The bard grunted as something clicked into place. Tendons and muscles pained fiercely.

Pendor rubbed a dark, smelly salve into his foot, and bound up the member.

‘Give it a day or two, salved and bandaged anew each day. The swelling should go down. That’s if you have a mere sprain. It’s to be hoped you have. With a broken bone somewhere, not much can be done. There’s a mort of small bones in a man’ foot. Your ankle isn’t broken, anyhow. Now, tell me what happened.’

Felimid told him in true bardic fashion. with trimmings. Pendor lost his matter-of-fact phlegm and became downright excited: not about his guest’s exploit, but about the spider. He’d had no inkling that there was such a creature.