Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (2 page)
Kinth was a late child of a father with many children, and had it not been that a bachelor uncle adopted him, he would have inherited no land of his own. As it was, he moved to Mikinoos to live with his uncle and met and loved my mother.
Mother was a beauty and might have married many a man, or so my grandmother liked to claim, though even I knew the truth from overhearing family quarrels. Everyone in Mikinoos believed both Mother and Grandmother to be witches, and witches do not make good wives, as the saying goes. No one supposed them to be very powerful witches, not the sort who could summon storms or shake the ground. Not the sort who could stand on the High Place like the wizards in stories. They were the kind of witches who were convenient to blame when the neighbor’s milk soured or someone’s crops went bad. Once upon a time such women would have been respected in our community, but under the present circumstances, with the Queen opposed to all religion and most Wisdom, witches were looked upon with suspicion. My Grandmother liked to act mysterious about the rumors and used to shake her head in warning whenever I asked questions about her magic powers. “Some things aren’t for talking about,” she said.
When my father and mother married, Fysyyn sold the boarding-house to the grain-master Kraf for a tidy parcel of gold, as she used to brag, smacking her paper-thin lips.
Mother and Fysyyn went to live on Kinth’s farm after he and Mother reached the appropriate nuptial agreements. They settled on the northern form of marriage, under which Papa agreed to share his house with her, and to raise whatever children she bore under his roof, and each agreed to respect the other’s right to occasional liaisons with others. Their eldest child would inherit the farm after both of them were dead, but Mother would hold title if she outlived Papa. This was considered a good bargain since Kinth was from a family who served in Lady Kiril Karsten’s household before the Lady vanished, whereas Mother’s family was not particularly distinguished except for a dubious claim of kinship with the Chieftainness of the Svyssn.
I spent an unremarkable babyhood in the usual gurgling manner. My mother was a long time recovering from my birth, and kept me beside her till she was able to get out of bed. Sometimes I dream I remember her from those earliest days, a tall pale woman with dark hair and large brown eyes, propped against fat feather pillows. A gentle person, not meant for the fate that fell to her. She held me carefully and sang in my ear. I remember her wonderful fine hair spilling free and wild over her shoulders, floating soft in the air. When I was older, at night after the supper dishes were cleaned and put away, she would sit by the fire spinning thread or doing some other hand work, listening with me to the stories Grandmother told.
It was from Grandmother I learned Grandfather Veneth had been renowned as a hunter and that her own father Aretaeo was more famous still, so famous it was dangerous to say his name out loud. She told me tales of Cunavastar and the YY-Sisters, the Forty Thousand and the Awakening, the Twelve who did not die, the Uncreated and the Long Wars, Arthen and the City in Arthen, the Wars of the Sorcerers, the Priests who made the song that offended God. She told me the history of Falamar Inuygen who made himself King, of the Lady of Curaeth, of the Prophet and his book of riddles, of Lord Mordwen of the Eye, the Drii People, and Pel Pelathayn. On a rare occasion she would tell one of the tales concerning the Red King, warning me never to mention the King’s name aloud, not even to my father or mother. Long ago the King had ridden into Arthen, to wait for the Queen to tire and call him out of the Woodland to rule again. But now the Queen hated his memory to the point that it was treason to mention his name. “No more stories about Kirith Kirin,” Grandmother would say when I pressed her for more. “The Queen has spies outside every farmer’s house; she knows everything we say and think, and she hates nothing worse than his memory.”
Mama for the most part let Grandmother have her way in picking stories to tell, though now and then, when I was listening to some gory account of a battle between Jurel Durassa and Falamar Inuygen, Mama would shiver and say, “Hush, you’ll make him have bad dreams.”
“This one?” Grandmother shook her head. “Not my Jessex. It would take more than a few stories to give this boy bad dreams.”
“Then stop before you give them to me.”
“I’m only telling the truth. In the old days a child was thought ignorant if he couldn’t name the wizards from ten thousand years ago and count them off on his fingers. Nowadays we aren’t even allowed say the King’s name. Why do we live like frightened animals in these modern times?”
I always thought, mostly from his expression and his way of shaking his pipe, that Kinth agreed with Grandmother, and I know for a fact he hated Queen Athryn the same as everybody else. Kinth was a tall, broad-shouldered man with clear blue eyes and the same wide-boned face that marked his clan for miles about. He had a dark streak of temper, and when he was teaching me the outdoor work of the farm I was always wary of his broad flat hands. He could be patient to a point but after his patience was gone he punctuated his lessons with sharp pops across the back of the head, to jog the memory, he said. But he was a good father in the distant way of fathers.
If he had been left to tend his land and prosper I think Papa would have been a happy man and bothered nobody. We were better off than most, having a big house and rich fields, three barns, twenty head of cattle, four oxen, half a dozen horses, even a mill for a while till father sold it to avoid the taxes. Besides Grandmother’s cottage, there was a house where Sim, the eldest son, lived with his wife Kare. Many folks were worse off, as Mama and Papa reminded us at supper. As it happened, however, we were not left to prosper in peace and neither was anybody else.
We north-men have a saying, still current, that trouble begins and ends in the south, and this is true whether we are ruled by Red King or Blue Queen. But in the days of my boyhood this was no longer simply tavern talk. Queen Athryn had ruled for a long time, and while I did not understand what was wrong with that, I knew that something was. There was a law governing the change from queen to king and back again, and she had broken it. As a ruler, her open avarice was a perpetual scandal. She had suspended the Yneset a generation ago and made laws and set taxes as she pleased, without consulting anybody. She had a tax collector for every village and district and a new table of taxes every year, to pay for her palaces in Ivyssa and on Kmur Island, to pay for her wardrobe, her court, to pay for her armies, her numerous forts and the continuous patrols around the border of Arthen. Yet, complain as they might, every farmer on the Fenax Plain paid his or her taxes promptly for fear the Queen would send her Wizard north to devastate our country. When he finished in Turis only the Verm could live there. Stories of the Verm were used to frighten children into obedience.
Taxes are bad enough. But a people will put up with a lot if they are left to live freely, to ride about their country as they wish and hunt wherever they choose. When the Queen banned all entry into Arthen, the north country came near rebellion. The Arthen forest is the heart of our memory and folks resented being kept out of it.
The year I began to tend flocks on my own, rumors of a new rebellion in the north were flying thick and fast. In the mountain city Cordyssa, an army of rebels was said to be in training, and the stories drew women and men hoping to join from across the Fenax Plain. My half-brother Jarred could talk of nothing but running away to Cordyssa.
In response to the rumors, Queen Athryn tripled her garrisons in Cordyssa and in the northern fortresses. In our part of the world, so close to Arthen, the Queen had dared build no forts, but since she could not leave us lightly watched she quartered troops in our houses during the months of unrest when her tax collectors were making their annual rounds.
I remember scarce detail about the ill-bred southern louts our family was lucky enough to obtain as its patriotic allotment; for me they were mere uncouth blurs beside an otherwise cozy fireplace. But my mother later told stories of how the southerners ate everything with sticks and knew only enough of Upcountry, our language, to get themselves well-fed. They lived in the barn with the pigs and cows. We were able to house them that way because we had money and could bribe the officers; poorer folks weren’t so lucky and had to give up their beds.
That same year Grandmother Fysyyn took sick and died.
We had wonderful talks those last days before she fell into her final sleep. I don’t know whether she was in much pain; Grandmother was not the kind to show much, and knew a medicine for everything. Dying loosened her tongue. She told me the story of the fall of the Jisraegen from beginning to end. What I learned from her served me well in later years. Not least was a cryptic statement I would not understand for a long time. She gripped my arm and told me she was not a real magician but her grandmother was, not Matvae, Kiniseth’s wife, but the other one. She dare not say her real grandmother’s name. I sat with her day and night, listening to her labored breath; in the end I stayed with her more even than Mother did, though of course Mother had the farm to run. As Grandmother’s death drew near she dreamily talked about mundane matters, like my grandfather’s habit of coughing in her ear in bed and the best technique for working the milk out of a deer’s tit. Her death, when it finally came, was welcome relief; she was wracked with a sharp cough and could find no relief for the pain in her joints for weeks, fading into long periods of sleep, and one day dying while she was sitting on the chamber pot. We dressed her body in white cloth for the burning, as north-folk have always done; white is the color of death, we think.
As I remember, the Blue Queen’s soldiers came to Grandmother’s burning out of respect for her age, age being highly prized in the south. By certain signs the soldiers let it be known we might conduct any ceremony we pleased and so we lit lamps on the night of Fysyyn’s burning, one at her head and one at her feet, a custom thought necessary to help YY-Mother find Grandmother’s soul. The Blue Cloaks helped to tie together the pyre, and when we hoisted Grandmother’s thin body to the bed of sticks they sang the old song with us: “Kimri,” “Light in the Darkness,” sung, as the saying goes, when there is need for hope. This touched my mother and father some, since the soldiers could have gotten into a lot of trouble for singing that hymn. They could not sing it very well, of course, since the southerners all have a tin ear for sound. They whispered words of superstition in their own harsh language, standing reverently as the flames fanned out over my Grandmother, Fysyyn daughter of Donraele, child of Aretaeo.
When word got out that the Blue Cloaks had come to her funeral and we were criticized, Mother simply said there was no help for it. Neighbors will talk about the wind if they can’t think of anything else to talk about. My father muttered something under his breath, his face darkening.
The farmers had been meeting secretly for some time by then, according to stories I heard later. The meetings evolved innocently in the course of hiding the priest who journeyed secretly from village to village to bless the recently dead, married and born. Priests were executed if Queen Athryn caught them.
Our neighbor Commiseth was one of those who met to hide the priest, and soldiers were quartered in his house, too. His contingent was not so well-behaved as the southerners who lived with us, however, and he had four soldiers as his allotment, partly because he was too poor to bribe anybody. Worse, a young lieutenant numbered among the four, and he set himself up like a petty baron in Commiseth’s household, ordering Commiseth about like a servant. One heard horrible stories about the treatment the family endured. Soon the lieutenant took a fancy to the eldest daughter Sergil. At first the certainty of displeasure of the parents was enough to deter him. But as the days passed, the lieutenant became convinced Sergil thought he was nice and set out to win her to his bed. When she protested he took her there anyway. The priest, who was hiding on Commiseth’s farm at the time, tried to help the girl and was discovered.
When Commiseth learned what had happened he tried to kill the lieutenant as any decent fellow would have. Because of the presence of the priest, the lieutenant accused the family of treason and hanged Commiseth’s sons in front of him, and raped his wife, and killed Commiseth.
The wife and remaining children were marched off to the south, along with the priest, where later the Queen’s courts declared them traitors and had them sold into slavery. Sergil never finished the journey, dying on the march. I passed their house sometimes when I was grazing the flock in neighboring pastures. Vines overran the sod walls in a season, and every window lay open to wind and rain. Grass grew waist deep in the door-yard; the whole aspect was sad and broken, and we told tales that it was haunted.
The Queen prospered from the best year of tax collections in history. She commissioned Charnos shipwrights to build a royal yacht for sailing across the bay to Aerfax in the summer. After tax season the soldiers withdrew from the vicinity of Arthen, shutting themselves up in the forts. While we no longer had Blue Cloaks as guests in our houses, their presence was evident everywhere. Each day patrols swept across Athryn’s girdle round the Forest, the patrols maintaining vigilance lest anyone enter Arthen against the Queen’s wishes.
