Ivory Lyre (10 page)

“Oh, they
are
spirited! I love a
spirited horse!” She came to Teb quickly and laid a hand on his
arm. “Might I ride that wild stallion when we go out this morning?
I expect he would not be so challenging once I was on his back,
with a proper bit in his mouth and proper spurs.”

“We are going out very early,” Teb said.
“You seem dressed for a grand presentation.” He could hardly keep
his mind on Accacia for wanting to go after Kiri, for wanting to
question her. Kiri was not of the dark; the dragons had proved
that. She did not seem to him a shallow person who would have no
commitment at all.

“We leave in an hour, Prince Tebmund. I
expect you will want to change from your . . . stable
clothes.” Accacia studied his stained tunic with distaste.
“Breakfast is served in the hall. I will have the grooms saddle
your mare for you, and the black stallion, along with the rest of
the mounts.”

“I will saddle my mare,” he said softly.
“And it would not be wise for you to try any of my horses,
princess. They have a strange and cruel dislike of any woman on
their back.”

“I can handle any horse, Prince Tebmund. I
will order a special bridle that—”

“Windcaller bucked off the female
horsemaster of Windthorst’s western province and the woman was
bedridden for six months with a broken hip. Nightraider attacked a
visiting woman soldier from Akemada who insisted on riding him and
broke her arm with one bite.”

Two red splotches flamed across her cheeks.
“You are rude, Prince Tebmund. I tell you I can handle your
horses.”

“I am only trying to protect you. You are
far too lovely to be hurt or disfigured by an angry stallion. Come,
shall we go to breakfast?”

She stared at him coldly, then swept out
ahead of him.

Chapter 9

Roderica watched the party depart the stable
yard dressed to the teeth, Accacia in her lavender satins, the
king’s soldiers turned out in full uniform. From her high bedroom
window behind the stable she could see them leave the main road and
disappear over the crest of the first hill leading down into the
city. Such a lot of fuss for a simple ride through the streets.
Accacia’s idea, she thought, amused. Accacia found the visiting
prince more than handsome. Well, let her. He was too involved with
those horses to be really interesting. Accacia herself said he was
not a very amusing conversationalist at the state meals. All looks
and no fun, so why bother? Besides, it was more interesting to
watch Accacia make a fool of herself. The queen would be amused at
how she overdressed for a simple ride through the city, at how she
threw herself at the prince.

Roderica lived as much on gossip as did the
shut-in queen, the two of them chewing over other people’s lives
but not involved in them. Why get tangled in stupid conflicts? Most
of the passions that drove folk were pointless, she agreed fully
with the queen.

Roderica couldn’t figure out what it was
lately that made the queen act so strangely. Certainly it was not
the secret she carried, at least it had never made her act peculiar
before. Roderica had always known the queen’s secret, ever since
she came to her as a small child. It meant little to her except it
was
a secret to be kept, a degree of loyalty she reserved
for the queen alone. Besides, such a condition had no practical
use. She watched the last soldiers disappear over the hill. The
four foot pages at the head of the procession emerged farther down
where the lane rose between ruined buildings. There was a scuffle,
as if someone had attacked the pages; then they moved on. Roderica
smiled at Accacia’s manipulation of little Kiri. How degrading to
have to walk on foot, through mud and dung, before a line of
mounted royalty and troops.

Accacia had taken Kiri to the stadium games
several times, to wait on her where she sat in the royal box. The
games always made the child deathly pale. Well, Kiri took such
things far too seriously. She’d always had this weakness about
animals. The queen had it, too. The old lady was getting worse
lately, had taken to talking sentimentally about animals. That was
bad enough, but now the queen had begun letting a fox slip into her
chambers, thinking she was keeping it secret from Roderica. The
dirty little fox came in through a hole in the stone wall that led
to an old inner cistern. Roderica had seen it fleeing one night,
then later had found its white fur caught on the stone.

She couldn’t imagine why the queen would
suddenly allow such a thing, a dirty fox slipping in. What could a
stupid speaking animal possibly have to say of interest? And why
would the queen want to listen? The queen was
her
friend,
should want to talk to her, not to a fox. Roderica hadn’t much
liked Prince Tebmund going there, but at least he was a prince. But
a fox—a common animal taking her place as confidant to the queen
was quite another matter. Oh, it had been there often. Roderica had
no doubt they exchanged confidences, from the look on the queen’s
face sometimes, smug and secret. Roderica sighed. It wasn’t fair
that she spend her whole life serving the queen, then be shoved
aside for a fox.

She thought of trapping it and presenting it
to the king for his stadium games, but that idea made her strangely
uncomfortable. Well, she
could
trap it, pay a bargeman to
carry the creature across the strait to Ekthuma or Igness—anywhere
where it would not return to the queen.

When she left the window to find a suitable
box trap, the procession was halfway down the hills into the
crowded center of the city.

The royal party moved through the streets
with precision, its green uniforms bright, Accacia’s lavender satin
brighter, the horses clean, sharply groomed, and stepping at a
measured pace. Ahead of the double line, the four pages cleared the
way of chickens and pigs and small children. Teb watched Kiri,
still consumed with curiosity about her.

She walked lightly with a lithe dignity,
while the other three pages, all boys, marched with rigid
precision, knowing the king’s soldiers observed them. Kiri had
brushed her green tunic and cap very clean and bound up her hair in
a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore her sword with grace, as if
used to it. She led the party, on foot, with much more dignity than
Accacia showed riding surrounded by soldiers.

They were a party of twenty-six. First came
Prince Abisha and a captain of Sardira’s army, a broad-waisted man
who sat his horse heavily. Then four more captains, two and two—the
king had not accompanied them—then Teb and Accacia, and behind them
the remaining soldiers. Accacia rode a sorrel gelding that matched
exactly her tawny hair, a hard-mouthed horse, as she seemed to
require, for she spent a good deal of effort spurring him up into
the bit and jerking him, to make him prance. It was all Teb could
do not to snatch the reins from those unfeeling hands and give the
horse his head. Its neck was already white with foaming sweat,
though the other horses were dry. Accacia was looking at the four
marching pages with smug satisfaction.

“Sometimes,” she said, “people throw things
at a royal entourage. It is good to have pages walking in front, to
catch the mud and dung. Their swords can drive off troublemakers,
too.” Then, glancing along the street ahead, she said casually,
“Well, I see we have some new beasts of burden. Brought in
yesterday’s shipping, most likely.”

Teb stared at the two blinded, maimed wolves
pulling a heavy cart. They were speaking wolves, scarred and thin
under the cruel chains, their proud manes cut to a ragged stubble.
They walked hesitantly, heads down, blind eyes staring at nothing.
Teb was sick with fury and felt Seastrider’s revulsion in her rigid
walk. Maybe he could find a way to release them, find power to
break the chains.

Yet blinded wolves could not survive easily,
alone among hostile men. He must wait. He made a silent promise to
the pitiful creatures. Soon they passed another speaking wolf, a
great male hitched to a wagon of ale barrels. That animal turned
his blind face to follow Seastrider’s progress, sensing her,
sensing Teb, perhaps. Accacia spurred her tired horse into its
perpetual prance as, ahead, two men in wrinkled, muddy clothes
emerged from a tavern, arguing loudly, walking unsteadily. The
pages pushed them aside with the flat of their swords, quick and
skilled; the drunks faded into another doorway. The city still
dropped toward the sea. To their left a long arm of crowded
buildings stretched out along the river, ending at the curved bay
tangled with docks and small barges and fishing boats. The wind
from the river was heavy with fish and the stink of tanneries.

There were more ruins here from the ancient
times, their stone walls describing generous courtyards, cluttered
now with shacks. It had been a graceful city once. Teb saw it in
inner vision as it had been long ago. Below the sea cliff, covered
now by ocean, had once rolled green, rich hills descending to the
Valley of Igness and its orchards and farms, its fields of wheat
and rye that had made Dacia wealthy. As the sea had flowed up to
cover the land, people had moved up, too, constructing hasty shacks
and lean-tos, and digging insufficient drains that were now filled
with refuse. The picture was clear in his bard memory, the frantic
movement of shops and animals, the confusion, though the sea had
risen slowly enough to allow that untidy emigration.

Thakkur, the white otter, had spoken of such
things. That was before Teb’s bard memory came alive in his mind.
Thakkur had stood tall in his cave, his dark eyes filled with
ancient knowledge, his voice caught in sadness for the wonders that
were all but forgotten. “Humans don’t remember . . . the
long-shadowed tale of this world, or even that there was a time
before the small island countries existed. They don’t remember the
five huge continents,” Thakkur said sadly. They did not remember,
Teb thought, the wonders of Tirror before the dark came.

Teb stroked Seastrider’s neck, seeing in
vision with her the small city nations where each person pursued
his own talent in craft or farming, seeing again the wonderful
things that were made and grown with the help of the magic Tirror
then knew. Seeing the intent bartering and trading as craftsmen
traveled from city to city, and children traveled to learn their
chosen trades, living with the animals, often, in the old
sanctuaries, or with the mining dwarfs in the far mountains. Teb
saw how folks’ vision of the world, and of themselves, flowed
through time, from the very birth of Tirror, all linked in a
continuity that had meaning for each person, all kept alive through
the song of dragons. The dark had not been strong yet to cast its
pall on the world.

Folk did not remember now, as they did then
with dragon song, a vision of Tirror’s birth. “A ball of gases,”
Thakkur had said, “formed by a hand of such power that no creature
can know its true nature, the power of the Graven Light. But,”
Thakkur said, “from the very beginning, the fire and bareness and
the promise of life lured the dark that always exists in black
space. The dark crept through crevices into the molten stone, and
it lay dormant. Even the power that made Tirror could not rout it.”
So the dark had come to the young world, so the dark had waited and
grown stronger. It had driven the dragons out at last, and killed
or captured the bards. Memory was at last destroyed. Then into
Tirror from other worlds came dark beings to join it—came the
unliving, came Quazelzeg and his kind.

Ahead, the pages slowed where six men were
circled around two women fighting with sticks. The onlookers stared
up at the soldiers. The women stopped fighting and stared, too, but
no one moved out of the way until the pages drove them back. One
staggering man threw up at Kiri’s feet. Two more hit out at the
pages suddenly, knocking one to the ground, then fled. Pigs
wallowed in a mudhole where cobbles had been removed. A little
ragged girl came out of a shop carrying a screaming baby and stood
staring as they passed. As the pages turned a corner, Kiri glanced
back at the entourage. Her eyes met Teb’s in an instant of shared
disgust; then she looked quickly away.

“It is a city of contrasts,” he said
diplomatically, when Accacia turned to him. “I thank you for
bringing me to see it.” He smiled. “Someone has taken the time to
grow beautiful roses.” He indicated a tiny garden wedged between a
cow pen and a closed shop, where a yellow rose vine bloomed.

Accacia sniffed. “Some of them keep
flowers—but what is the use of it? They are only peasants. They
would do better to grow beans in that space.”

It was then, as they turned a corner
approaching the harbor, that Teb saw the slave children. A
straggling line of ragged children hardly more than babies,
carrying heavy bundles on their shoulders, in from the barges at
the quay. Five children pulled a wheelless sledge piled with
packets of cloth and long bundles that might have held spears. Teb
could see chain marks on the children’s ankles. He supposed they
slept chained at night, as he once had. Tattered tunics covered
their backs, likely hiding scars from the lash. He wanted to leap
down and cut them loose, and fight whoever would stop him. As he
passed close to a line of straining children, he saw the blank,
mindless stares that told him the rest of the story.

Beside him Accacia kicked her horse around a
pile of barrels and seemed hardly to notice that her gelding nearly
trampled three small children struggling with a hamper of clay
jugs.

Seastrider had begun to tremble, shivering,
so he leaned to rub her neck. She spoke to him with pain, not in
words but with the same fury he felt. Seastrider, like every
singing dragon, knew clearly all the sins and pain of Tirror’s long
past. Yet she was driven to fury at the sight of the small slave
children.