Bard I (9 page)

‘I must see it!’ Pendor declared. ‘More! I’ll bring the carcass back here and cut it apart!’

Felimid hastily drained and refilled his cup. ‘I owe you much, and I’d not think of resenting your pastimes, I. But this favor I will ask. Let me know in what corner of your garden you’ll be performing the work. I’ll be sure to stay away from it.’

‘You neglect a rare chance for knowledge. But do that if you wish. I wonder how long the creature can have lived?’ Felimid smoothly changed the subject. He knew more than he wanted to know about the spider as it was. The magician fed his guests a thick barley broth, accompanied by bread, cheese and apples. Then, pottering among his shelve, he prepared a mixture of herbs and shaved bark. He assured the bard that giving Regan hot infusions of it thrice daily would help her, and advised him to take it himself.

‘Use this as well,’ Pendor said, showing the bard a stoppered flask of thin, pungent oil. ‘Smooth it over the lass’s back, ribs and breasts. Rub it in. She’ll breathe more easily for it, and you’ll enjoy the work. Now tell me. By the sylvan powers little and great, what were you thinking of to travel in the Forest of Andred at this season?’

Felimid felt sleepy. None the less, he poured more of the dark wine. ‘Staying alive is what we were thinking of,’ he said, with a smile. ‘The choice was none of ours.

I guested with King Oisc of Kent for his Yule feast. Regan was a slave in his hall, pining for her own folk. King Oisc took the notion that I was a spy for some British king; I was lucky to come away with my life, and Regan escaped with me. Only the forest offered sanctuary.’

‘Then you’ve crossed it nigh from east to west.’ Pendor exclaimed. ‘But two of you! It may well be that nobody else has done as much.’

‘Few ca n have wished to try! Now you have our story.

Pendor. What of yours? Why does a magician dwell in the forest with thieves and robbers?’

Pendor scowled. ‘My tale’s not unlike yours. The seawolves are to blame . . . foul, abominable beasts in human form. Four years since, I lived at Hamo. when King Natanleod ruled. The pirates of Vectis under their chieftain Cerdic took the kingdom with their spears. Natanleod died in battle; his daughter was wed to Cerdic’s son. I fled, and here I bide.’ He glanced at Regan. ‘Sound asleep, and she’s the better for it.’

‘If your robber friends discover she is here, I’ll have trouble persuading them she is not to be abused.’ Felimid said slowly, ‘She’s my lover, but your guest. Will you help me persuade them?’

Pendor smiled, rather sourly. ‘You have a fine polite way of putting things. Mine’s blunter . . . you are my guests, and while you bide within my hedge of thorns, you remain so, and untouchable. I can enforce that. From events beyond the hedge, it’s my way to hold aloof unless I am threatened. In short, you are safe here, and welcome to stay. When you leave, the risk’s your own.’ Felimid was neither disappointed nor resentful. Despite the congestion in his head, and the effects of the wine, he felt strongly curious about Pendor. The magician was as interesting a man as he’d met in some time. That he didn’t care to risk his living arrangements for a couple of random strangers was hardly cause for outrage. The local robbers shouldn’t prove much of an obstacle once he and Regan were fit.

The next nine-night was miserable. Felimid swiftly grew even sicker than Regan, and recovered more slowly. Without Pendor’s medicines. and the warm dry surroundings of his tree house, he might have died. As it was, the sickness ran its course and departed. The resilient bard swiftly threw off the effects. Ten days had passed since the morning Pendor had found them.

The eleventh dawned, and then the re was no more peace.

Regan perched on a stool on Pendor’s narrow thatched porch, mending her lover’s tunic. It had needed mending for some time; across the back, from shoulder to shoulder, it was so wholly in rags that she was simply replacing the cloth with a piece of soft leather.

Next to her. Pendor sliced odd vegetables Regan did not recognise. Now that she was in a state to take notice, she had come to appreciate his cooking. Never had she tasted better.

‘You don’t know the full degree of his skill yet,’

Felimid had laughed. as Regan exclaimed and smacked her lips over steaming pork liver. ‘Pendor. I marvelled to see you toss offal from your rubbish heap into a pot, add strips of mouldy oxhide and still less appetising things, and heat them together, stirring. Don’t laugh, a gradh! I mean it! He talked to the frightful muck in wizard­words, traced signs above it, and within the hour it was a stew giving off fine savors.

‘Pendor, you cannot desire wealth or you’d be serving a king! The same art must go into the wine and ale you brew, am I right?’

Although Pendor smiled, he had not been forthcoming. Regan supposed the bard had exaggerated or outright invented his praise. As it happened, she was wrong. Felimid had spoken unembellished truth for once.

Regan still found it hard to believe that any man could be so improbably ugly as Pendor. Each time she looked at him, it struck her anew, and each time she ceased to look, the full extent of his grotesqueness escaped her again. Yet Regan felt no revulsion, nor had she, even initially; his was the sort of ugliness that is strangely compelling. She wondered much more why a man with his powers lived in the wilderness.

She knew by instinct that he did not hide his face in shame or shyness. By his own telling, he’d lived openly in a town until a few years ago, and he was not awkward with Felimid, a handsome man, or with her, an attractive woman. Deliberate, slow-spoken, a bit heavy; yes, all that. Regan wondered if he simply found moving elsewhere not worth the effort,since chance had brought him here.

He listened more than he spoke. Regan had told him of her marriage to a farmer, her son’s death in his first year, her husband’s murder and her own enslavement by raiding Jutes; a common sort of story. Rome’s empire had been broken past mending in the west, and lawful dominion with it. Law had become what the nearest man with the strongest sword arm said it was.

‘Like your robber neighbors,’ Regan said. ‘I’ve little fear of them; Felimid got me away from Kent, and brought me safely through leagues of forest. I suppose he can talk or trick his way past them too.

‘But he’d not have to, were you to help us! I remember as in a fever-dream how you carried us here in Basket, which floated above the ground. Could you not carry us above the treetops in the same way, until we’re clear of the forest?’

Pendor shook his massive head. ‘No. Basket’s strength is drawn from the deep black earth. It cannot rise high. nor travel fast. You will be better afoot. I wove Basket to bear heavy loads for me, not to fly through the air and win races with lark or wyvem.” He grinned, a reckless act which came close to severing his ears. ‘Do you see me playing such games?’

‘No,’ Regan agreed, laughing. ‘Felimid, now-he’d enjoy them. I’m more like you. I belong on the ground.’

‘I’d say so. Where on the ground will you go with him, do you think?’

‘lie’s helping me to reach a British kingdom where he has friends. But he has enemies there too-he says he mu. t guide me there unnoticed, and he’s warned me not to speak his name. I’ll take care. For the rest, I’m strong, and can work. I can’t be worse off than I was in King Oisc’s burg.’

A horn blew loud, peremptory and wrathful in the forest. Pendor’s great bald head and Regan’s small, black-haired one turned toward the sound. Below. in the garden, Felimid also looked about.

‘Do your forest bandits blow horns like that, Pendor?’

‘No.·The magician was frowning. ‘It’s a note wholly strange to me.’

Seizing his rowan staff, he stared at the archway in his protective hedge. Creatures came through it even as he looked. Regan felt a strong urge to run to Pendor for comfort and protection, but something about him forbade it, and her own pride.

Pendor raised his staff in both hands and spoke a command. Thorn-branches writhed, moved, twisted themselves together impassably. The gap in Pendor’s hedge vanished as if it had never existed. Three intruding creatures were trapped in his garden, the rest effectively shut out.

Regan’s face twisted in loathing as she gazed on them. Pendor was startlingly ugly, but these beings were horrible. Facing Felimid, they made a brief. still tableau. It fixed itself in Regan’s mind; the brown head and lithely muscled back of her lover, bare to the waist, the set of parallel claw-marks he’d had from a giant bear showing red above his shoulder-blade, and the three creatures facing him.

But they weren’t attacking, yet. Pendor vanished within the house.

‘Hiding?’ Regan wondered.

Suddenly, the thorn barrier where the archway had been went up in a red, roaring blaze. It happened too swiftly to be natural, considering the wet weather. Wild leaping flames threw sparks as high as the treetops. They burned and burned.

Pendor returned, bearing a coil of silvery-grey rope.

He gaped at the flames devouring his hedge. Plainly shaken, he muttered, ‘Fire magic.’

Fire magic, the swiftest of all. His, Pendor’s, derived from the earth. The bard’s powers were airy in nature, and he must have his harp to invoke them . . . so Pendor shrewdly guessed. A contest of magic against magic was not likely to prove gainful.

Pendor eyed the intruders. Manlike they were, and taller than Felimid, stoop-shouldered, loose-limbed, with hard gaunt muscles, grey skins, and big, bony, graceless hands and feet. Lank black hair fell to their shoulders. Their eyes were black pits under shelves of bone.

Great snuffling wide-nostrilled noses jutted snoutlike above repulsive hare-lips. That was the worst of their hideousness. The teeth looked human, although too large and strong-the eye-teeth especially.

Felimid saw these details at far closer range than Pendor. He didn’t like it. He was forced to note other things, too. The beings wore sandals and kilts of brown leather. Each was branded on the breast with a mark meaning nothing to the bard. Still, it suggested to him that they were owned.

So did their manner. Although they plainly lusted to attack. they refrained, like savage, well-trained dogs awaiting a command. All carried broad-bladed knives at their belts.

Without turning his head, Felimid said, ‘Pendor. I may be requiring help any moment. Either come down here with me. or prepare to drop something heavy on the heads of these half-goblins.’

He backed smoothly toward the timber stairs. If it came to fighting, he wanted these adversaries below him. Thanks be, they didn’t have spears. The length of his sword was another advantage.

The fire ceased to burn with such sorcerous fury; it lapsed into soft cracklings and hissings among the thorns, while across a three-yard gap nothing was left of Pendor’s hedge but ash, in smoking drifts. Three more semihumans hurdled it, moving into the garden with teeth bared. their knives as yet undrawn.

Their master made his entrance.

He swept through the gap astride a black mare whose beauty was like a hand clenching Felimid’s heart. Black she was, gleamingly black, with a mane and tail like two snowfalls. The fluent grace of her movements, and the brief spiral of ebony horn upon her forehead made her first cousin to the unicorn, that milk-white beast with pearly horn long as a lance. Because he was a horseman bred, Felimid saw her first and her rider next, despite the danger.

Long-limbed, wide-shouldered, red-haired, handsome and arrogant summed him up. The worth in wrought gold of a thousand cattle glittered on his person and horse-furniture, from the spiral collar around his neck to his spurs. One thing spoiled his good looks-his mouth was curiously small and prim.

His gaze passed over Felimid, mounted the stair, and encompassed the two silent figures above.

‘You, toad, and you, girl,’ he snapped. ‘Come down at once, or your hovel and the tree it sits in will bum as did your silly hedge.’ The haughty gaze returned to Felimid. ‘You!’

‘Is this recognition?’ asked the bard mildly. ‘Do you know me?’

‘What?’ The stranger seemed taken aback that such a tattered object was able to question him. Felimid did wish fleetingly that he were better clad to confront this arrogance. ‘Hear me, thief! I am Lord Avraig the Hunter, and these are my hounds, half man, half goblin. They will rend you apart at a word from me. Answer me then, and truthfully, and you may live to see the morrow. Was it you who maliciously destroyed a great spider in this forest?’

‘My lord, I did not.’

‘No?’ The Lord Avraig’s eyes glittered. ‘You crawling dung-beetle, will you dare tell me so? My hounds tracked you here from the place of your crime, and they can follow a trail a year old, though it has been scoured by fire and flood in the meantime. They smell the monster; its dead body is here for proof! And you deny slaying it?’

‘That, no, my lord,’ Felimid said. Pendor and Regan stood on the stair behind him; he sensed their presence.

‘I slew it surely, but not with malice, and isn’t that what you were asking me? I was forced to. The ugly beast had made a meal of me else. What is there in that to offend? May I ask what the spider was to you?’

‘My intended quarry,’ the Lord Avraig answered.

‘You ruined my sport! That creature was sole of its kind! I’d have gloried in slaying it! I’d have told the story to the wonder of all!’

That settles it, Felimid thought. The man is mad.

‘Then pardon me. I’ve said that I acted ignorantly, not from malice. Had I been granted choice in the matter, I’d certainly have left the beast to you.’

‘Indeed so,’ Pendor added. ‘Forget your anger. Come within and be my guest. I can offer meat and drink with which you’ll find no fault, and few strangers come this way to–’

‘Pah!’ the Lord Avraig spat. He gestured to his semi-human hounds. ‘Kill them all.’

The hunting knives flashed forth.

Felimid met them with his ancestor’s blade. He had not been observed to draw; first Kincaid rested peacefully in his scabbard, and then he burned blue-white in the bard’s hand. The point slotted between discernible gaunt ribs and slid through a lung. Reddened, it flashed free. Before the first half-man had fallen, Felimid crippled the knife-arm of another, then opened its throat.