Daughter of Lir (70 page)

o0o

Minas did not see the battle of chariots, but he heard the
tale of it over and over from the warband as they came back to the king’s house
at evening. He was still in the hall. He even still had the bow that he had
browbeaten a servant into bringing him, unstrung and laid beside him. He had
used it to good advantage against Etena’s women.

Now Etena was dead at Rhian’s hand. The child whom she had
killed had been taken away for burial, with such mourning as any of them could
spare. Etena’s head was set on a spear outside the king’s house; her body had
been flung to the dogs. The people of Lir found that appalling. The People
reckoned it just.

They were not making a festival of his return to the land of
the living. That was their courtesy. Nor did they look on him in pity, as the
broken thing he was. They treated him—why, he thought, as they treated Metos:
as one of them, and yet not. Almost as if he were a god himself.

Had he not come back from the dead? He lay and listened to their
stories, and to the news of the battle as it came with newcomers. There was an
odd feeling to it, clear and yet remote.

Some of the king’s guard of Lir came, after Emry was brought
in but before the sun went down. To them Minas was alive and no god. They were
glad to surround him, and maybe to use him as a shield against the men of the
warband.

It was a strange war, and an uneasy peace. There was still
fighting in the city, though the horde was camped quietly without. Dias had
brought in the rest of his own clan, and Mabon’s men and women were with them.

“Most of the priestesses are in the temple now,” said Huon.
His lips were white with pain and loss of blood: he had taken leave from Minas’
guard to fight in the city, and lost his sword-hand to the stroke of an axe.
But he would not go among the wounded. He drank wine with strong spices, and
propped himself up against the side of Minas’ litter, telling him the latest
news of the fight. “The city’s mostly quiet. They’re not sacking it, though
some of them wanted to.” He stopped, flushed. “Ah! Your pardon. You’re one of
them, too.”

“Not any longer,” Minas said. “Not really. And the temple?”

“It’s surrounded. They’ll break in come morning.” Huon
shivered. “Is it an awful thing that I’m glad? The temple was the heart of Lir
for so long, but they ate away at it till there was nothing left.”

“And now there are wild horsemen in our king’s hall,” said a
woman whom Minas did not know.

“We were wild horsemen once,” Huon said. “Or our fathers’
fathers’ greatest great-grandfathers were.”

“We didn’t even have fathers before they came,” someone else
said. “It was all mothers, and mothers’ brothers bringing up the children.”

“My mother’s brother brought me up,” said Huon. He yawned,
and belched. “Who’s for more wine?”

No one else was. He had the jar to himself, and would drain
it, Minas was sure, before the night grew too much older.

He could understand. Huon was dulling pain, and trying to
forget what he had lost. Wine did no such thing for Minas. It only made him
stupid.

He looked up from the circle about him, drawn by the shift
of a shadow. Dias was standing at the edge of the light, watching. He looked as
if he had been there for a while.

Minas could not read his expression. For a moment Minas saw
what he must be seeing: the brother returned from the dead, sitting in a circle
of foreigners, speaking in their language and acting as if he were one of them.

They melted away before Dias, all but Huon, who had fallen
asleep with the winejar in his hand. Dias sat on the other side of the litter,
perched on a stool. He did not say anything.

Minas studied him in the silence. He had grown up. The boy’s
softness was gone from his face. He was a man now, a man who was a king. He had
scars seaming his face, the backs of his hands, and no doubt the rest of him as
well. He carried himself differently: taller, straighter. He was no one’s
shadow now, least of all Minas’.

It hurt, very much. But not as much as Minas had thought it
would. The edge of it was dulled. “It must have been a grand war,” he said,
“when you made yourself king of all the tribes.”

“If I’d known you were alive,” Dias said, “it would have
been shorter.”

“I’m quite dead,” said Minas.

Dias gasped as if at a blow.

“There now,” Minas said. “It really is simpler this way. I
couldn’t challenge you even if I would, and you can’t give it all away like the
fool you were planning to be.”

“It should have been yours,” Dias said.

Minas shrugged. “It seems the gods willed otherwise.”

“They did not.
She
did.”

“She is dead in every possible way, soul and body. Her debt
is paid.”

“And what of mine? She was my mother.”

Minas gripped Dias’ hands. “She gave you nothing but the use
of her womb. Everything else was my mother’s, and mine. You owe us nothing.”

Dias shook his head, but he did not try to break free. His
eyes were full of tears. “Though I live a hundred years, I will never forgive
her.”

“I can forgive her for one thing,” Minas said. “You.”

“I would rather never have been, than see what she has done
to you.”

“Brother,” said Minas, “I will mend. I may mend crooked, but
I’m not broken. I’m going to ride. I’ll walk, too, for all that the old crone
says. That I promise you.”

Dias’ tears overflowed. Minas pulled him in and held him,
and let him weep himself out.

There were no tears in Minas. The fire on the steppe had
burned them all away.

When at last Dias’ shoulders stopped shaking, Minas held him
at arm’s length and looked him in the face. “Good,” he said. “You can feel. A
king should be heart-whole. That way he understands his people better and
tempers his justice with mercy.”

“What, you’re an elder now?”

Even better: Dias’ dry humor was coming back. “I’m more than
that,” Minas said. “I’m an ancestor.”

“Some ancestor,” Dias said, tugging at Minas’ coppery plait.
“You still look like a yearling cub.”

“That’s my curse,” sighed Minas. “Should I grow a beard, do
you think?”

“Can you?” Dias asked, rubbing his own dark-shadowed chin.

Minas bared teeth at him. “More than I could before.”

They sat with hand locked in hand, gripping hard enough to
bruise, grinning at one another. There was a strong tang of grief beneath, but
joy, for the moment, was uppermost. Minas had his brother back again, and Dias
his. Day and night, sundered for so long, were together at last.

o0o

“I heard your promise,” Rhian said.

Dias had gone out again, with tearing reluctance, but there
was still a battle to finish. Minas would have given heart’s blood to be
striding beside him. But that was not the gods’ will. He slid into a doze,
aware of people passing in the hall, but resting on the edge of a dream.

Her voice pulled him back into the waking world. She sat at
the foot of his litter, feet tucked up, eyes fixed on his face.

“I’m going to hold you to it,” she said. “You will walk.”

“Yes,” he said. “I will.”

“You’ll have to be alive to do it,” she pointed out. “Or no
more undead than you already are.”

“I know that,” he said.

“Good.”

The silence had edges, like a bronze blade. And yet it was
oddly comfortable. Sparks were interesting, Rhian liked to say. They kept the
heart from growing dull.

This was worse than a simple quarrel. Minas was not the man
he had been before. Nor would he be again, for all his proud promises. If—when—he
walked, he would walk lame.

She rose to her knees and walked on them up the length of
his body, taking care not to jar his splinted legs. Halfway to the top of him,
she stopped. His blanket was no barrier, nor the trousers she had been wearing.
Nor, to his abiding shock, was the fact that they were in the hall, and it was
full of people coming and going, and though they were set apart near a corner,
anyone could look and see.

One part of him was everything it had been before. She made
sure of that. She lowered herself onto it and began the slow rocking rhythm
that he loved best, like a long easy gallop over rolling country. She smiled
down at him, rich and sweet as cream.

She was the most beautiful woman in Lir. The young men of
the city had decreed that soon after she came there. They were terribly jealous
of Minas.

He looked in that face for pity. He saw only beauty and
strength, and deep contentment.

She stooped. Her lips brushed his. Her rhythm quickened, and
his breathing with it. She had said no word, and yet he never felt more a man,
or more beloved. Her kiss was as certain a promise as his words to Dias. He
would walk. And she would walk beside him.

Dias stormed the temple in the morning, broke down its
walls and rode over the rubble, and let in the horde of his People where no man
of foreign nation had ever walked. While they hunted the last of the
priestesses, he took a torch, and with his own hand set fire to the innermost
shrine.

Its wood was ancient beyond reckoning. It burned like a
torch itself, flames leaping up through the elaborate carvings and roaring to
the sky. The birds that for long ages had nested in its eves flew up in a
torrent of wings.

Emry saw the burning from the roof of the king’s house. He
was imprisoned there under heavy guard; every door and window was barred to
him. Did they not think that he could leap from the roof?

It seemed they did not. He clung to the wall that rimmed the
edge. If he had had wings he would have beat toward heaven like the Goddess’
birds. His wounded cheek stung with tears.

All the priestesses that were still alive, that could walk
or run, came together toward the pyre of the shrine. They had forgotten the men
who hunted them, forgotten any fear of death. They flew like moths to the fire,
flung themselves into it before the eyes of the tribesmen, and vanished in
smoke and flame.

Last of all came the Goddess’ Voice, preserved surely by her
will. She was dressed in the garb of the most sacred of rites, in the scarlet
kilt, the collar of gold, the blank shield of the mask. Emry knew her by her
gait and by the blindness of the mask, which had not even slits for eyes. She
was stiff and slow in her age, but none of the horsemen could come near her.

She paused only once, as she passed Dias. What she said,
Emry could not hear, not from so far away. Dias offered no response. She turned
from him, bowed low to the flames, and gave herself into their embrace.

With her passing, the earth seemed to draw a great sigh. The
fire of the temple roared up anew, reached for the trees of the grove, leaped
from bough to ancient bough, swifter than a man could run.

The tribesmen recoiled from the heat, drawing back in a long
ragged line. The fire pursued them as they had pursued the priestesses, with
the same deadly purpose. First one and then another, and then the whole tribe
of them, wheeled and abandoned dignity and ran.

o0o

The temple burned all that day and into the night.
Tribesmen and people of the city labored side by side to keep it away from the
king’s house and the Mother’s house and the rest of Lir.

For that, Emry was allowed out of the king’s house. They
needed every willing pair of hands, and every bucket and basin and waterskin.
But Dias would not suffer them to pass beyond the line of the broken walls,
even if the heat of the flames had permitted. The temple would burn, and burn
to the ground. That was his will, as conqueror king.

They stood leaning on one another in the firelit night, Emry
and Dias, and watched the flames at last die down. The skeletons of trees, the
charred remnants of the temple, glowed ember-red. The pall of smoke burned
their eyes and clawed at their throats.

Dias’ face was black with soot. Emry supposed his own was,
too. All his wounds ached. He was beyond exhaustion.

It dawned on him, slowly, that the person leaning on his
other side was Aera. He had not even recognized her among all the shadowy
figures struggling to keep the fire at bay.

They held one another up, the three of them. When Dias
spoke, his voice was a rasp. “I think it’s dying now.”

Emry nodded, though his head felt as if it would fall from
his shoulders. “There must be someone who’s fresh enough to keep watch while
the rest of us collapse.”

“I’ll see to it,” Dias said.

“You’ll sleep,” said Aera. “I’ll call in one of the clans
from the camp. They’ve been idling about long enough. It’s time they made
themselves useful.”

Dias opened his mouth at the same time as Emry. She silenced
them both with a firm word. “Go! Sleep. I’ll see to it.”

Emry was raised to obedience, but so it seemed was Dias.
Still arm in arm, staggering with exhaustion, they retreated to the king’s
house.

o0o

Emry knew where there was a jar of wine from the
southlands, strong and sweet. Dias was still awake to help him drink it: like
him, too tired to sleep. They drank in the room that was Emry’s, sprawled on
the broad bed, passing a cup back and forth.

They had stripped off their filthy clothes and washed away
the worst of the smoke and soot. There was still a reek of fire on them, sunk
deep in skin and hair, but the fumes of the wine lessened that.

Dias dipped the cup in the jar, drank a draught, passed it
to Emry. “I’ll make you a cup of her skull,” he said.

“I think that belongs to my sister,” said Emry. His tongue
was pleasantly numb, his mind limpidly clear.

“She doesn’t want it. She said when she needs a snake’s head
for anything, she’ll find one with less poison in it.”

Emry laughed. It hurt less than smiling, after the
sword-stroke he had taken in the face.

“You people are soft,” said Dias.