Chains of Gold (11 page)

“Lonn?”

“His friend—” I swallowed. “Who died in his stead.”

“Arlen has been favored with such a friend? Few of us ever find a true friend or a true love. Arlen has both! And yet his has been a terrible life.” Briony sounded dazed.

“Yes.” I plunged on. “Twice a year, in preparation for the ceremonials of sacred kingship, they would have the boys over the age of ten taste of a mock death to harden them against the real death to come. They would hang each one by a noose around the neck, hang them until they swooned and then take them down, and when they revived they were mocked if they had struggled, and sometimes a puny one was not taken down, so they never really knew, beforehand—” I stopped, feeling sick. “I can speak no more of this.”

“Nor do I care to hear much more.” Briony got up and gave fuel to the fire. “Yet, if I only knew.…”

“Knew what?”

“Knew Arlen, truly knew what it was like to be Arlen.” He sat down beside me again. “If I could somehow enter into his heart and mind, to understand him, I wonder if I could not somehow help him.… Cerilla, you should have taken him to a better witch. I have been envying him.” The admission came out harshly.

“Great Mother of us all, why?” I was astonished.

“He has—everything, youth, his freedom, your love.… But he has paid.” Briony got up abruptly. “I believe I had better go think.”

“Bri—”

He would not look at me, but he listened.

“I do not understand him either. He has never told me, but—I have sensed a despair, a dark wound, a bleeding—within.…”

Briony went back into his earthworks to be by himself.

I sat with Arlen, quite alone. He did not move or moan; he required nothing of me. From time to time, feeling helpless, I would speak to him, whisper his name, but he did not respond to me, did not even stir. I decided I need no longer forbear from hurting him, and I got down on the pallet with him, took his head and upper body into my arms, rocked him, held him against my breasts. I could hear him breathe, shallow, gasping breaths, but he hung as limp as a lifeless doll in my arms, and anguish set me to weeping. I held him and wept until dawn, and with the dawn he was no better. Dim silver-gold light showed me his face pale and still, and though I yet felt a pulse in him there was no touch of color to his skin; he might as well have been a corpse. Something in my mind crackled angrily, and I called on the dead.

“Lonn!”

I whispered it at first, then spoke up more urgently. He had helped us once, maybe more than once. Perhaps he would help us again.

“Lonn!”

A thickening came into the air of the soddy, and a heaviness. That familiar presence. I knew it, I should have known it before. He had been with us since the cenotaph. He had never truly left us until Briony had sent him away.

This time, since I had called him, I could almost see him. Wavering, insubstantial, not truly connected with the earthen floor or anything around him, but still—I thought I could make out a human figure, the shadow of a face. He stood there, or shimmered there, unmoving.

“Lonn,” I appealed, “you had power, you could have been a great wizard. Help him! You have saved him from death before. Save him yet this once more.”

Nothing happened except that Briony came out of the back of the soddy, looking earthy and weary.

“So,” he remarked, “he loved you too.”

I could not comprehend at the time, thinking it was Arlen whom Lonn loved. “Lonn,” I pleaded, “speak to him, send him back to me.”

I could not clearly recognize the shadowdrift of a face or see the look on it. But it seemed to me that Lonn, or whatever answered to the name of Lonn, stiffened and moved back a trifle, as if discomfited.

“He is incorporeal,” Briony said to me. “He cannot speak. Moreover, it is of no use to call on the dead to heal the living.” He came over and sat by me to take the sting from his words. “Everything about the dead calls us to death.”

“Then you mean—” I whispered, aghast at what I had done.

“No, no, it is of no great harm, having him here.” Briony hastened to reassure me. “He has been with you for weeks, so one more visit is of small moment. It is only—Lonn is dead, so how is he to comprehend that you wish Arlen to live? That Arlen should live?”

We sat numbly; we sat and Lonn waved in air, as the morning light grew stronger, aureate, showing us Arlen's fair young face so still, so shining pale. Gold and russet lights touched his hair. With an odd clarity I noticed the curve of his eyelashes, shining the color of bronze, of orichalc, very fine over his lidded eyes. How lovely he was, almost as if the winterking glory were on him again.

“Do the dead love death,” I asked Briony wistfully, “as the living love life?”

He stirred to answer, but then he sat up arrow straight and stared at me. And then he leaped up with a shout and darted across the room, brushing aside Lonn's presence with the haste of his passing, making for the worktable where he kept his herbs and powders and the stone slabs and tools for mixing them.

“Cerilla, you have given me the answer!” he shouted, frantically concocting. “Love, life—they were never allowed to love it, these sacred kings, don't you see? Half hanged, mocked if they struggled—” He reached up to snap off one from a bundle of dried roots. “And love spells I can do. But what is life?” He turned on me suddenly, his black eyes glinting. “What are the things that make life? Cerilla, quickly!”

“Why, everything,” I faltered. “The animals. The horse.…” Moving with sudden unreasoning sureness, I went and found a horsehair on the saddle pad I had been using for a pallet, a long gray hair from Bucca's mane. “Here,” I said, handing it to Briony.

“And one of yours.” He took it from my head with an odd tenderness in the twist of his deft brown hand. “All right. What else?”

“The world.…”

“A pinch of earth from outside. And a blade of grass, and a twig or a leaf if you can find them. Make haste.”

I ran to fetch the things. I had not been outdoors in so long, I was dazed to find the snow was melting.

“That will have to do for now,” Briony said when I brought him what he needed. “I could do better with a little more time, but we will put the rest in words. Now, the wine—”

I brought him the elderberry wine, poured half a tumbler full. Briony added his potion.

“And we are going to get this down him if it kills him,” he said grimly.

We nearly did kill him in stark fact, administering that draught. He choked on it in his stupor, and Briony had to beat him to make him breathe again. Then he swallowed, and groaned—and then I breathed; I had been holding my breath and pleading with the goddess. Then he swallowed the rest of it, slowly.

“Sunshine,” Briony was saying, “and the way it dapples through leaves, and there will be the first buds of leaves in a month or so. Trees. Oak, ash, willow; the whitethorn will flower in May. Birds. The robin and the little crowned wren. Swans on the Naga, are there not? Soon the swallows will return and nest. Horses, are they not beautiful? So curving their necks. And the broad sweep of the moors, so much sky, and sunrise and sunset—have you ever seen the heather in bloom, Arlen? Have you?”

Arlen stirred and muttered as if in pain or protest.

“Arl!” I called to him.

“You talk to him, Cerilla,” Bri said.

“But I have never been in the world much—”

“Surely you have dreamed.”

“I dream of people. Of love, friendship.”

Briony turned away and went back to his worktable.

“Do you feel that too, Arl?” I appealed to him. “The warm hearth fire, and the cup of the house served to the guest. It need not be a grand house, not a tower keep, only snug, a cottage. And a dog by the fire, a dog with warm brown eyes, and some chickens by the door. And—a cradle.… And the corn growing nearby, golden. Arlen?” I waited. “Arl, can you hear me?”

He moved one hand just a flicker and whispered something. I could not hear what it was, but I nearly wept with joy, for I knew then that he was going to be well.

He moaned and muttered and whispered from time to time all day. Bri and I took turns talking to him, and sometimes he seemed to move or speak in answer to my voice. Toward evening Briony gave him another potion—a better one, stronger, he said, as it had had more time to steep. And he said a sort of charm he had composed about swans and swallows and the little crowned wren. Briony told me to sleep that night, but Arlen kept me awake with tossings and groanings and senseless mumblings; sometimes he nearly shouted. The sounds were as sweet as birdsong to me, sweet as bells that hail the dawn after the long dark night.

In the morning we gave him broth and bread and wine as well as a potion, and he took them all eagerly, though he seemed hardly to know where he was. Then he slept, now that the time for sleeping had passed and I was waking. But sometime before midday he opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Rae,” he said, holding out a hand toward me shakily, and I went and drew him up toward me to kiss him.

“Ooch,” he said, “that hurts.”

He was too weak to talk much, and he spent that day eating everything that we would give him. Some of the color came back to his face. And we changed the bandages; the swelling had gone down, and the wounds looked as if they were beginning to heal. I believe Arlen had not been aware, before, of his many injuries, and as he took accounting he seemed shocked and sickened, although he had recalled himself sufficiently to refuse to cry out in pain. We could see that he was not entirely indifferent to it, however. Afterward I went to him and took his head in my lap, auburn hair and white wrapping, and he lay there and looked at Briony and asked what I had not dared.

“Why are you helping us?”

“Professional challenge,” said Briony crisply.

“Love of craft,” I remarked wryly to Arlen, “has made him devote days to us, turn away others, lose sleep for your sake, spend his winter's supply of food on us …”

Briony stared straight at us with a flat brown face and black expressionless eyes, as if daring us to think otherwise.

“Something hurtful has changed,” Arlen said to him at last. “Thank you.”

The next day, when he was stronger, he told us what it was.

“I felt as if—all reason argued against it, but I felt somehow that I had failed. That I had betrayed my calling, that I was a coward and a renegade for not dying. Lonn's death reproached me. He and all the others had died. Why did I deserve to live?”

“Arl,” I exclaimed, “there is no deserving about it! Only living.”

“I know that now.”

“But why did you not tell me how you felt?” I sat holding him in my arms again, head and upper body cradled against my shoulder, my bosom.

“I did not understand it myself. It was all so—unthinking.”

“You were feeling as they had taught you to feel,” Briony said.

“Yes. But now I feel differently.” Suddenly he sat straight up, out of my arms and unsupported, and he looked hard at the apparition that wavered at the center of the room.

“Lonn,” he said to it, “I am going to leave you behind.”

“How did you know?” I marveled.

“I always suspected. It seemed so apt that he should haunt me. But now it no longer seems fitting. For, let the dead think whatever they like, the reward is mine. I am alive. Alive!” He suddenly gave a great fierce shout of laughter; defiance rang in it, and joy. The presence of Lonn shrank visibly from that joy.

“Alive, breathing, loving, beloved!” Arlen cried. “With a body for pleasure and a true love to cherish and the wide sky for riding under. It is all mine, for any reason and no reason, and I embrace it.” He sank back against me, his strength gone for the time but his green eyes shining. “So leave me to it.”

The presence of Lonn went out, leaving the air of the soddy clear again.

“He was your friend,” I said to Arlen, puzzled. “Why would he wish to trouble you?”

Arlen shrugged, then grimaced with the pain of his shoulder wound and lay back with a sigh. “I do not think he means me any harm,” he said. “It is only—I do not know what he wants of me. Perhaps nothing. Do you know, Briony?”

“I suspect he does not desire anything of you,” Bri said, “any more than I do.” His words seemed plain, but the look in his black eyes was opaque.

NINE

We stayed with Briony until the warmer days of springtime came. Arlen was up and about within a week after Bri's cure, but he did not regain his full strength soon, for we had both been worn down by winter. And it was a joy to live within the warmth of the soddy, to sleep on a soft pallet, to cook good food on a fire—I learned to cook somewhat, those days, when I was not coughing. For as soon as Arlen was on the mend I took cold. Briony showed no inclination to be rid of us, so we stayed.

Our good mandrake gave us the freedom of his home, and sometimes he left us to tend it. Every fortnight, on the eve of the dark moon or the full, he would step out into the dusk and be gone as if whirled away on a horse of air. And with the dawn he would return, exhausted, and spend the day buried in earth in the deepest shadows of his soddy before emerging to speak with Arlen and me once more.

Arlen was fascinated by Briony, his craft, and his books, especially his herbal. He had never been taught to read, not on the Sacred Isle, but I knew how, for reading was one of the useless things that ladies learned. So, as Briony had no objection, I would sit by the hour and read the herbal aloud to Arlen. Afterward he and Briony would have long talks, and they would stand about studying the dried plants that hung from the rafters. When the early spring herbs began to sprout, Briony would go out into the copse or onto the moorlands to look for some he needed, and often Arlen would go with him.

Spring. The trees budded, ash and oak. The heather bloomed. The swallows returned to nest, as Briony had promised they would. The winter, which I had felt might go on forever, was over. White birches put out pale green crowns.