Daughter of Lir (15 page)

Minas shook his head, which made him stagger. Dias slipped
the cup from his fingers. Others were there, born out of air: familiar faces
now blurred and shadowy, as if they too were more dead than living. But their
hands were strong, too strong for Minas. They carried him away from the hill of
sacrifice.

“It’s time we taught him what he needs to know,” the wolf
said.

“Perhaps past time,” said the boar. “And if it is too late—”

“Not yet,” grinned the wolf.

Minas’ mind was perfectly clear. He knew that he was lying
in the healers’ tent with an unconscionable number of people fretting over him.

And yet he was also crouched on the high steppe, with the
wind driving clouds overhead, obscuring dim stars. The shamans stood in a
circle about him. Their eyes were brighter than the stars, but no less chill.

“His sight is growing keener,” the wolf said, “but his
understanding is still a child’s.”

“He fancies himself a man,” the bear growled.

“All men are children,” said the wolf. “But this one we can
teach.”

Minas rose slowly. He felt strange. He came up on four legs—strong
legs, with hard round hooves. His head shook. Mane rippled on his long arched
neck.

He was a beast as they all were, a red-gold stallion. His
body felt as strange-familiar as did his presence in this place. As if he had
done such a thing in dreams, or in a life before this.

“Yes,” the wolf said, grinning. “You do remember. Good. So
much the less to learn, if your memory serves you.”

“I am not a shaman,” Minas said. He said it calmly, but with
deep conviction.

“What, because there’s nothing twisted about you?” The wolf
laughed. Its teeth gleamed in the starlight. “Don’t fret, king’s son. You’re
not condemned to our poor existence. Ruling in the world of the spirits,
walking through the gates of the otherworld. Dancing amid the lightings.”

“Hiding on the steppe in fear of my father.” Minas snorted
and stamped. “Tell me what he is. Why you’ve let him drive you out.”

The shamans shifted, growling. But the wolf never stopped
grinning. “Let that be your first lesson,” he said.

The stars came down out of the sky and whirled about them both.
They walked on ways that Minas remembered in dreams. They swam the stream of
stars, and trod the moon’s road.

A wall of darkness loomed before them. The wolf had circled
round before Minas, barring his way. He pressed against Minas’ forelegs. His
body was trembling, though he tried to seem as insouciant as ever. “Your first
lesson,” he said. “You can pass that. He—it—doesn’t know what you are. But you
need to wear a man’s face.”

Not only the face, Minas thought. Of all the beasts that
trod the steppe, only a man had hands. Strong hands, quick fingers.

He stood on a man’s legs, with a man’s hands, reaching for
the wall, opening it as if it had been the wall of a tent. It strained against
him. He set his teeth and dug in his feet and pulled. It yielded reluctantly.

He looked out across the camp of the People, standing above
it as if on a high hilltop. Though it was starlit night where the shamans were,
it was morning here. The sun was just risen, and with no help from him, either.

They had moved the camp from its old place among the
barrows, to what had been the camp of the western tribes. Captives huddled
under guard still in a circle of alien tents. Heaps of booty lay beyond it,
gleaming in the early light—so much, so extravagant, that it seemed as common as
grass.

The wolf pressed against Minas’ leg. He was trembling still,
and whimpers escaped him, as if he could not help himself.

Minas looked for the thing that frightened him so. With
these eyes there seemed to be nothing, except that they stood in starlight and
before them was clear morning.

The wolf’s nose pointed toward the camp’s center, where the
king’s tent always was. The king had taken that of one of the conquered kings,
as was his custom. It was as rich as the rest, and wider than any he had had before,
full of wondrous things. Minas found that he could see through the felted wool
of its sides, and look on whatever he pleased—a skill that made him eye the
shaman sidelong.

But he had not been shown this simply to reveal a secret
that shamans never told. He saw the king’s women in their places, and the young
children with them. He saw captive women huddled together under the sleepless
eye of an older wife.

He saw the king in a chamber as large as most great
warriors’ tents, lying on his back, naked as he was born. His hands were at his
sides. His eyes were open. He might have been dead, but that the broad breast
rose and fell very slowly.

Those wide pale eyes were empty. No spirit looked out of
them. It was a shell that lay there.

Etena the king’s wife sat beside him with her women on
either side of her. Her hands were folded in her lap. Her face was serene. She
made no sound, but the women sang in a soft slow drone like the humming of bees
in a field of flowers. It was a song to numb the mind, to dull the spirit, to
build a wall between the body and the soul.

As they sang, they tended a brazier in which burned sweet
herbs. The smoke was full of sleep, of heedlessness, of forgetting.

Minas saw nothing there that he had not already known.

“Wait,” whispered the wolf. “Watch.”

The song had no end to it. The smoke was gaggingly sweet.
Minas was close to succumbing himself, when something made him stir. His
hackles rose. The fog of song and smoke lifted a little, enough to see that not
all the smoke curled from the brazier. Some of it drifted above the king’s
body.

It had no shape. It had no eyes. But it had hands, and a
mouth. It hungered. It crept in through the king’s eyes, through his mouth. It
filled his body until it was no longer a shell.

The king sat up. His face was pale. His eyes were alive, but
there was still no soul behind them. Only hunger.

Etena’s hunger. That was her will, her spirit in him. She
had made this. It was born of her, a barren seed, lifeless and yet craving
life.

Those eyes fixed on Minas. He had known no fear before then.
He knew none at that moment either, but his heart, wherever it was, had drawn
in tight and small.

He was raw spirit here, a breath of air, invisible. Yet this
thing of shadow saw him. It yearned after him. It wanted—life. Breath. But more
than that, the warmth of the living soul.

He could almost pity it. What it most wanted, it could never
have, because its coming destroyed the very thing it hungered for. It could
never be warm, never content. It could only want, and wanting, devour.

He retreated as an unarmed man backs away from a charging
bull. He could not fight it, not as he was, but neither would he fall before
it. He drew the shades of night about him, clean night and starlight and the
sky above the shamans’ circle.

He had returned without memory of passage from his father’s
tent. No dark thing obscured the stars.

The shamans’ eyes gleamed on him. He could not read their
expressions. Even the wolf’s face was blank, expressionless, the alien mask of
an animal.

“You want me to fight,” Minas demanded of them, “against
that? But there’s nothing to strike against!”

“There is everything,” the wolf said. “It eats life. You’re
full of it, flesh and blood and bone. It’s focused now on the king, but if it
sees how delectable a morsel you are, it will come hunting you.”

Minas rounded on him. “You did that. You made sure it would
see me!”

“It saw a shadow,” the wolf said, “in a stallion’s shape. It
thinks you’re one of us. It will hunt you, but it will find us. We’re your diversion,
prince. We’re going to keep you safe until you can vanquish it.”

“That’s folly,” Minas said.

“Would you rather we let it go direct to you?”

Minas bit his tongue. The small sharp pain, the taste of
blood, steadied him somewhat. “It may do that regardless.”

“Prince,” said the wolf, and its grin had come back, white
and mocking, “do trust us to know what we were set in this world to do. We’ll
defend you. Your part is to live beside it, hide the truth from it, and when
the time comes, be the cause of its destruction.”

“How am I to do that?”

“In time,” the wolf said, “you will know.”

Minas considered any or all of the responses that came to
him, but none seemed quite to be sufficient. He settled on silence.

The wolf laughed and danced about him. “Wise, O wise prince!
Now go, back to your body. Rejoice in the heat of the blood. Cherish the life
that’s in you, and the soul that sustains it.”

“No.”

The word fell in sudden silence. The wolf stared, for once
reft of speech.

“First,” said Minas, “you will tell me what has become of my
father’s soul.”

None of them answered, not even the wolf. Minas crouched
down in front of him, eye to slanted yellow eye. That this was not the waking
world, he thought he was sure of. But the wolf was very real, his scent sharp,
wild. His breath reeked of old kills. It was, like the stars and the darkness,
a thing of living earth.

“I do not think,” Minas said, “I will not believe, that my
father is destroyed. The witch is too hungry. She has his body and his will,
and the power he holds; but she hasn’t fed on his spirit. Has she? Where is his
soul? What has she done with it?”

“We don’t know,” the wolf said. He spoke without reluctance,
but without pleasure, either. “She eats souls. That’s what Blackroot witches
do. If she hasn’t eaten his—”

“She has,” said the boar with a clashing of tusks. “Foolish
boy. Grieve for you father, that’s a good son, but don’t deceive yourself with
vain hope. Your father is gone.”

“Yes, he’s gone,” Minas said, “but gone where?”

“Gone beyond our recall or yours,” the stag said. It sounded
almost gentle, and almost sad. “Don’t waste what time there is in hunting for
him. The creature who devoured him will devour the whole of the People if she
can.”

“My father is the king,” Minas said. “He is the People. His
soul is our soul. If it is lost, how can we keep our own?”

“If you lose yourself in looking for him,” said the boar,
“there truly is no hope for the People.”

Minas set his lips together. When he did battle, he
preferred to do it with enemies.

“Don’t do anything foolish,” said the wolf, who saw through
him as if he had been made of water.

“I’ll do nothing but what I must,” Minas said. “That much I
can promise you.”

“Well enough,” said the wolf, though the others liked it
little. “Now will you go? Your body is waiting.”

“Now I will go,” said Minas.

Minas lay long in his dream between life and death. After
the first day, when the roil of battle was ended, Aera had taken him into her
father’s tent. No one made a move to stop her, even his brother Dias. That prince
hung about like a worried hound, till Aera was ready to fling him bodily out of
her way; but her heart was too soft.

“He shouldn’t be like this,” Dias said on the third day, and
far from the first time, either. “His wounds were all scratches. No one hit him
on the head. He wasn’t struck down. He just—dropped.”

“His soul is wandering," said Metos. He had come in
behind them, with a sharp scent on him of the forge. He was seeking out the
secret of the bronze, and hot odorous labor it was. But it made him happy.

Aera regarded him quietly, but Dias’ eyes were wide.
“Someone’s stolen his soul?”

“Not likely,” Metos said. He rummaged in a bag, found what
he had been looking for, turned to go out again. But Dias stood in his way.

“Tell me how to get him back again,” said Etena’s son.

Metos frowned. “Get him back? What do you want to do that
for?”

“
Look
at him!”
Dias cried.

“He’ll wake when he’s ready,” said Metos, stepping around
the obstacle. Dias snatched at him, but he was too quick, though he moved
without haste.

Dias crumpled in a heap like the child he had been. But his
eyes that lifted to Aera were not a child’s eyes. They were wide and dark, and
could seem both soft and innocent, but there was strength behind them. Many
reckoned him the lesser of the brothers, the quiet one, the follower, but Aera
was his foster-mother. She knew better.

“Dias,” she said. “He will wake.”

“But when?”

“When he’s done whatever task has taken him away.”

Dias did not understand. She could hardly have expected him
to. He was a man of the sun and the green earth. He had nothing of his mother
in him.

She comforted him with words that mattered little as she
said them, calmed him and soothed him and yes, maybe laid a spell on him, a
memory of her voice crooning him to sleep when he lay at her breast. He chose
to allow it; he was not a fool, but he trusted her. He went back to Minas’ side
where he had been since the prince fell, and schooled himself visibly to
patience.

Aera sighed. If she had let herself listen to her heart, she
would have been pacing and fretting over the still form laid in Metos’ sleeping
furs. He might have been dead, but that he breathed. He would not eat the gruel
she fed him, nor take water. He lay utterly still, save that, once in a great
while, his eyelids twitched as if he dreamed.

She had not Metos’ surety that this was no ill thing. Her
son was not given to fainting fits. Nor had her husband been, upon a time—before
Etena came to take his soul away.

Minas had been the king’s charioteer, everyone said, just
before he fell. If the thing that possessed the king had reached for him through
the weakness of his wounds—

She knotted her hands into fists and made herself breathe
quietly. Her son seemed asleep, if deeply so. If any ill thing lurked in him,
she could not sense it.