Bristling Wood (2 page)
Over a thousand years ago, so long that some doubted when the Burning had begun, whether it was a thousand and two hundred years or only a thousand and one, several millions of the People lived under the rule of the Seven Kings in a long age of peace. Then the omens began. For five winters the snows fell high; for five springs, floods swept down the river. In the sixth winter, farmers in the northern province reported that the wolves seemed to have gone mad, hunting in big packs and attacking travelers along the road. The sages agreed that the wolves must have been desperate and starving, and this coupled with the weather meant famine in the mountains, perhaps even some sort of blight or plague that might move south. In council the Seven Kings made plans: a fair method of stockpiling food and distributing it to those in need, a small military levy to deal with the wolf packs. They also gathered dweomerfolk and sages around them to combat the threats and to lend their lore to farmers in need. In the sixth spring, squadrons of royal archers went forth to guard the north, but they thought they were only hunting wolves.
When the attack came, it broke like an avalanche and buried the archers in corpses. No one truly knew who the enemies were; they were neither human nor elvish, but a squat breed like enormous dwarves, dressed in skins, and armed only with crude spears and axes. For all their poor weapons, their warriors fought with such enraged ferocity that they seemed not to care whether they lived or died. There were also thousands of them, and they traveled mounted. When the sages rushed north with the first reinforcements, they reported that the language of the Hordes was utterly unknown to them. Half-starved, desperately fleeing some catastrophe in their homeland, they burned and ravaged and looted as they came. Since the People had never seen horses before, the attackers had a real advantage, first of surprise, then of mobility once the elves grew used to the horrifying beasts. By the time that they realized that horses were even more vulnerable to arrows than men, the north was lost, and Tanbalapalim a heap of smoking timbers and cracked stone.
The kings rallied the People and led them to war. After every man and woman who could loose a bow marched north, for a time the battles held even. Although the corpse fires burned day and night along the roads, still the invaders marched in under the smoke. Since he pitied their desperation, King Elamanderiel Sun-Sworn tried to parley with the leaders and offered them the eastern grasslands for their own. In answer, they slew his honor guard and ran his head onto a long spear, which they paraded in front of their men for days. After that, no mercy was offered. Children marched north with bows to take the places of their fallen parents, yet still the Hordes came.
By autumn the middle provinces were swept away in a tide of blood. Although many of the People fell back in a last desperate attempt to hold Rinbaladelan on the coast, most fled, taking their livestock, rounding up the horses that had given the invaders such an edge, loading wagons and trekking east to the grasslands that the Hordes despised. Rinbaladelan fought out the winter, then fell in the spring. More refugees came east, carrying tales the more horrible because so common. Every clan had had its women raped, its children killed and eaten, its houses burned down around those too weak to flee. Everyone had seen a temple defiled, an aqueduct mindlessly toppled, a farm looted then burned instead of appropriated for some good use. All summer, refugees trickled in—and starved. They were settled folk, unused to hunting except for sport. When they tried to plant their hoarded seed grains, the harsh grasslands gave them only stunted crops. Yet in a way few cared whether they lived another winter or not, because they were expecting that the enemy would soon follow them east. Some fled into the forests to seek refuge among the primitive tribes; a few reached what later became Eldidd; most stayed, waiting for the end.
But the Hordes never came. Slowly the People learned to survive by living off their flocks and herds while they explored what the grasslands had to offer them. They ate things—and still did—that would have made the princes of the Vale of Roses vomit; lizards and snakes, the entrails of deer and antelope as well as the fine meat, roots and tubers grubbed out wherever they grew. They learned to dry horse dung to supplement the meager firewood; they abandoned the wagons that left deep ruts in the grassland that now fed them in its own way. They boiled fish heads for glues and used tendons for bowstrings as they moved constantly from one foraging ground to another. Not only did they survive, but children were born, replacing those killed in flash floods and hunting accidents.
Finally, thirty-two years after the Burning, the last of the Seven Kings, Ranadar of the High Mountain, found his people again. With the last six archers of the Royal Guard he rode into an alardan one spring and told how he and his men had lived among the hills like bandits, taking what vengeance they could for their fallen country and begging the gods to send more. Now the gods had listened to their grief. While the Hordes could conquer cities, they had no idea how to rebuild them. They lived in rough huts among the ruins and tried to plant land they’d poisoned. Although every ugly member of them wore looted jewels, they let the sewers fill with muck while they fought over the dwindling spoils. Plague had broken out among them, diseases of several different kinds, all deadly and swift. When he spoke of the dying of the Hordes, Ranadar howled aloud with laughter like a madman, and the People laughed with him.
For a long time there was talk of a return, of letting the plagues do their work, then slaughtering the last of the Hordes and taking back the shattered kingdom. For two hundred years, until Ranadar’s death, men gathered nightly around the campfires to scheme. Every now and then, a few foolhardy young men would ride back to spy. Even fewer returned, but those who did spoke of general ruin and disease still raging. If life in the grasslands hadn’t been so harsh at first, perhaps an army might have marched west, but every year, there were almost as many deaths as births. Finally, some four hundred and fifty years after the Burning, some of the younger men organized a major scouting party to ride to Rinbaladelan.
“And I was among them, a young man,” Manaver said, his voice near breaking at the memory. “With twenty friends I rode west, for many a time had I heard my father speak of Rinbaladelan of the Fair Towers, and I longed to see it, even though the sight might bring my death. We took many quivers of arrows, for we expected many a bloody skirmish with the last of the Hordes.” He paused for a twisted, self-mocking smile. “But they were gone, long dead, and so was Rinbaladelan. My father had told me of the high temples, covered with silver and jet; I saw grassy mounds. He told of towers five hundred feet high made of many-colored stones; I found a broken piece here and there. He told of vast processions down wide streets; I traced out the grassy tracks. Here and there, I found a stone hut, cobbled out of the ruins. In some, I found skeletons lying unburied on the floor, the last of the Hordes.”
The crowd sighed, a grief-torn wind over the grassland. Near the front a little girl squirmed free of her mother’s lap and stood up.
“Then why didn’t we go back, if they were all dead?” she called out in a clear, high voice.
Although her mother grabbed her, the rest of the gathering laughed, a melancholy chuckle at a child’s boldness, a relief after so much tragedy. Manaver smiled at the little girl.
“Back to what, sweet one?” he said. “The kingdom was dead, a tangle of overgrowth and ruins. We’d brought our gods to the grasslands, and the grasslands became our mother. Besides, the men who knew how to lay out fine cities and smelt iron and work in stone were all dead. Those of us who survived were mostly farmers, herdsmen, or foresters. What did we know about building roads and working rare metals?”
Her mouth working in thought, the girl twisted one ankle around the other. Finally she looked up at the dying bard.
“And will we never go back, then?”
“Well, ‘never’ is a harsh word, and one that you should keep closed in your mouth, but I doubt it, sweet one. Yet we remember the fair cities, our birthright, our home.”
Even though the People sighed out the word “remember” with proper respect, no one wept, because none of them had ever seen the Vale of Roses or walked the Sun Road to the temples. With a nod, Manaver stepped back to allow Devaberiel forward to sing a dirge for the fallen land. The songs would go on for hours, each bard taking a turn and singing of happier and happier things, until at last the alardan would feast and celebrate, dancing far into the night. Ebañy got up and slipped away. Since he’d heard his father practice the dirge for some months, he was heartily sick of it. Besides, his Deverry blood pricked him with guilt, as it did every year on the Day of Commemoration.
By talking with Deverry scholars, Ebañy had pieced together something about the Burning that no one else knew. Since it would only lead to hatred between his two races of kinfolk, he kept the secret even from his father. The Hordes had been driven south by the great influx of the people of Bel, as the Deverry men called themselves, when they’d come from their mysterious homeland over a thousand years ago. Although to the People’s way of thinking the Deverry men were a bloodthirsty lot, in the old days they’d been ruthless conquerors, hunting their enemies’ heads to decorate the temples of their gods, In their wanderings before they founded their holy city, they’d swept through the far north, slaughtering, looting, enslaving some of the strange race, even, before they passed down the valley of the Aver Troe Matrw to their new lands. And the Hordes had fled before them, fled south.
“You never lifted a sword against us, O men of Deverry,” Ebañy whispered aloud. “But you slaughtered my father’s people sure enough.”
With a little shudder, he ducked into the tent, where the sun came through the dyed leather and turned the air to ruby. Since they’d arrived late for the alardan, piles of tent bags and gear lay scattered on the leather ground cloth. Idly he picked up a few bags and hung them from the hooks on the tent poles, then sat down, in the clutter to poke through a canvas bag of the Deverry sort. Down at the bottom he found a tiny leather pouch, opened it, and took out a simple silver ring. A flat band about a third of an inch wide, it was engraved with roses on the outside and words in Elvish characters but some unknown language on the inside. The roses caught the reddish light and seemed to bloom double hybrids of the cultivated sort now found only in Deverry,
“And are you spoil from Rinbaladelan or Tanbalapalim?” he asked it. “The only roses my people know now are the wild ones with their five meager little petals.”
The ring lay mute on his palm, a gleaming paradox. Although it possessed no dweomer of its own, it was tied to the dweomer. Many years ago a mysterious, nameless wanderer had given it to Devaberiel as a present for one of his as yet unborn sons. Now the omen reading of a dweomerwoman showed that it belonged to Rhodry, the youngest of the three and, like Ebañy, a half-breed. But unlike Ebañy’s, Rhodry’s mother was no pretty village lass, but one of the most powerful noblewomen in the kingdom. Rhodry could never learn the truth about his real father, who had given Ebañy the task of taking the ring to him.
“And what am, I supposed to tell him, when I find him?” he grumbled aloud, because talking came much easier to him than thinking. “Oh, well, this peculiar personage said it was yours but I can’t tell you why. Of course, I don’t know why it’s yours—no one does—so, dear brother, I won’t be lying to you when I make my most feeble excuses. One dweomer says it encircles your Wyrd, and an other working says that your Wyrd is Eldidd’s Wyrd, and so here we are in the land of vagaries, nuances, and secrets. Ah, by the gods, doesn’t my elvish curiosity ache to know the truth!”
With a laugh, he slipped the ring back into its wrapping, then put that pouch into the one he carried around his neck. Soon he would be riding into the lands of men, where thieves prowl, and he would need a better hiding place for the ring than an open canvas sack. Thinking of the journey ahead of him, he went outside and wandered down to the riverbank, where the Delonderiel rolled by, flecked with gold in the lowering sun. Distantly he heard his father’s voice, firm and clear in its sorrow as the stanzas marched on. He stared at the river and used it to focus his mind, until at last his dweomer scryed Rhodry out, a pale image of him at first, then a clear picture.
Rhodry was standing on the ramparts of a rough stone dun and looking out over countryside where patches of snow still lay under dark pine trees. He was wrapped in a cloak, and his breath came in a frosty puff. Now that Ebañy knew they shared a father, he could see what had eluded him the summer before, when he’d met Rhodry by chance and wondered why this young warrior looked so familiar. Although Rhodry had raven-dark hair and cornflower-blue eyes, they looked enough alike to be what they were, brothers. As he studied the resemblance, Ebañy found himself grumbling again.
“So I’m not supposed to tell you the truth, brother, am I? What am I supposed to do, smash every mirror within your reach? Rhodry has to think himself human and a Maelwaedd, says my master in dweomer. Oh, splendid! Then I’d best hand over this ring and disappear before you look too closely at my face!”
In the vision, Rhodry’s image suddenly turned and seemed to be staring right at him, as if he were listening to his faraway kin. Ebañy smiled at him, then widened the vision, switching his point of view this way and that around the countryside to the limits of the scrying, about two miles away from its focus. He saw sharp rocky hills, covered with pine, and here and there among them small farms, Most likely Rhodry was in the province of Cerrgonney, then, a good five hundred miles away at the very least.
“It’s going to be a long summer’s riding, then, Ebañy, lad,” he told himself. “On the other hand, it would be a wretched shame to leave before the feasting’s over.”
Although it was cold up on the ramparts of Lord Gwogyr’s dun, Rhodry lingered there a few moments longer and looked out over the Cerrgonney hills without truly seeing them. For a moment he wondered if he were going daft, because it seemed he’d heard someone talking to him though he was the only man on the walls. The words had been indistinct, but someone had called him brother and talked of giving him a gift. In irritation he tossed his head and decided that it had only been some trick of the wind, Since the only brother he knew of hated him with his very soul, it was unlikely that he’d be giving him any gift but a dagger in the back, and those words—if words they were—had sounded warm and friendly.
