The Stone of Farewell (56 page)

“She was born on this land,” the witch woman told the prince. “I would not worry for her too much.” Geloë's own face, however, showed more than a trace of concern.

Hotvig and his men roused Josua's band after a too-short rest and the march began anew. A wind sprang up from the northwest, soft at first, then blowing stronger, until the ribbons on the Thrithings-men's saddles whipped like tournament pennants and the long grasses bent double. The prisoners labored on, shivering in their wet clothing.

Soon they began to see signs of habitation: small herds of cattle grazing on the low hills, watched over by solitary horsemen. As the sun rose closer to its noon apogee, the cattle herds they passed grew larger and closer together, until at last the prisoners found themselves following the snaking course of one of the Ymstrecca's tributaries through the very midst of an immense throng of animals. The vast herd seemed to run from horizon to horizon and contained mostly cattle of the ordinary sort, but shaggy bison and bulls with long, curving horns also grazed among them, lifting their heads to stare blearily at the passing prisoners, mouths solemnly chewing.

“It is obvious that these folk do not follow Geloë's advice on vegetable-eating,” Deornoth said. “There is enough meat on the hoof here to feed all Osten Ard.” He looked hopefully to his prince, but Josua's smile was a weary one.

“Many of them are sickly,” Gutrun pronounced. In her husband's frequent absences, she ran the duke's household at Elvritshalla with a firm hand, and rightly considered herself a good judge of livestock. “See, and there are not many calves for such a huge herd.”

One of the riders who had been listening made a noise of disgust, as if to show his disdain for the opinions of prisoners, but one of his mounted companions nodded his head and said: “It is a bad year. Many cows die birthing. Others eat but do not grow fat.” The Thrithings-man's beard fluttered in the wind. “It is a bad year,” he repeated.

Here and there among the great herd were circles of wagons, each circle surrounded with fences of hastily-driven posts. The wagons themselves were all wooden, with large, high wheels, but otherwise were quite different from each other. Some were tall as two or three men, wheeled cottages with wooden roofs and shuttered windows. Others were little more than a wagon-bed topped with a cloth-covered shelter, the fabric rippling and snapping in the stiff breeze. Children played in many of the enclosures or darted in and out among the milling, amiable cattle. Horses grazed in some of the paddlocks—and not just dray horses and wagonpullers. Many were slender-limbed and wild-maned, with something light and strong as forged steel to be seen in their step even from a distance.

“Ah, God, if only we had a few beasts like those,” Deornoth said wistfully. “But we have nothing to trade. I am mightily tired of walking.”

Josua looked at him with a trace of sour humor. “We will be lucky if we walk away from here with our lives, Deornoth, and you are hoping for a brace of battle steeds? I would rather I had your optimism than their horses. ”

As the prisoners and their captors continued south, the sprawl of separate wagon-camps began to come together, clumped like mushrooms after an autumn rain. Other groups of mounted men rode in and out among the settlements; Josua's escorts exchanged shouted remarks with some of them. Soon the wagons stood so near each other that it began to seem that the prisoners traversed a city without roads.

At last they reached a large stockade, its fence posts hung with ornaments of bright metal and polished wood that clattered in the wind. Most of the riders sheared off, but Hotvig the leader and six or seven others ushered the prince's party through a swinging gate. There were several compounds within the stockade, one of them containing a score of fine horses, another a half-dozen fat and glossy heifers. In an enclosure by himself stood a huge stallion, his shaggy mane twined with red and gold ribbons. The great horse nosed the ground as they passed and did not look up—he was a monarch more used to being stared at than staring. The men escorting Josua's party touched their hands to their eyes reverently as they passed.

“It is their clan beast,” Geloë said to no one in particular.

At the far end of the encampment stood a great wagon with wide, heavy-spoked wheels and a banner bearing a golden horse billowing from the roof-peak. Before it were two figures, a large man and a young girl. The girl was knotting the man's long beard into two thick braids that hung down onto his chest. Despite his age—he looked to have passed some sixty summers on the grasslands—his black hair was only faintly striped with silver and his wide frame was still knotted with muscle. He held a bowl upon his lap in his huge beringed and braceleted hands.

The riders stopped and dismounted. Hotvig strode forward to stand before him.

“We have captured several trespassers who walked the Feluwelt without your leave, March-thane: six men, two women, and a child.”

The March-thane stared the prisoners up and down. His face split in a wide, crooked-toothed grin. “Prince Josua Lackhand,” he said, without the least trace of surprise in his voice. “Now that your stone house is fallen, have you come to live beneath the sky like men do?” He took a long swallow from his bowl, draining it dry, then handed it to the girl and waved her away.

“Fikolmij,” Josua said, bleakly amused. “So you are March-thane now.”

“When the Choosing came, of all the chieftains there was only Blehmunt who would stand against me. I broke his head like an egg.” Fikolmij laughed, patting at his new-braided beard, then stopped, lowering his eyebrows like a nettled bull. “Where is my daughter?”

“If that young one was yours, you just sent her away,” Josua said.

Fikolmij clenched a fist in anger, then laughed again. “Stupid tricks, Josua. You know who I mean. Where is she?”

“I will tell you the truth,” Josua said. “I do not know where Vorzheva is.”

The March-thane looked him over speculatively. “So,” he said at last. “You are not so high in the world today, stone-dweller. You are a trespasser in the Free Thrithings now, as well as a daughter-stealer. Perhaps you will seem better to me with your other hand cut off, too. I will think on it.” He lifted his hairy paw and gestured carelessly to Hotvig. “Put them in one of the bull runs until I decide which ones to cut up and which to keep.”

“Merciful Aedon preserve us,” Father Strangyard murmured.

The March-thane chuckled, flicking a wind-blown curl of hair from his eye. “And give these city-rats a blanket or two and some food, Hotvig. Otherwise, the night air may kill them and rob my sport.”

As Josua and the others were led away at spearpoint, Fikolmij turned and shouted for the girl to bring him more wine.

It
was a dream, Simon knew even as he dreamed it. It started in an ordinary enough fashion: he was lying in the Hayholt's great loft, hidden in tickling hay, watching the familiar figures of Shem Horsegroom and castle smith Ruben the Bear talking quietly below. Ruben, his broad arms glimmering with sweat, was hammering clankingly away at a scarlet-hot horseshoe.

Suddenly the dream took on a strange cast. Ruben's and Shem's voices changed, until they sounded nothing like their real selves. Simon could now hear the conversation perfectly well, but the smith's hammer was silent as it struck the gleaming iron.

“...
But I have done all you asked for,”
Shem abruptly said in a queer, rasping
tone. “I brought King Elias to you.”

“You presume too much,”
Ruben replied. His voice was like nothing Simon had ever heard, cold and remote as the wind in a high mountain pass.
“You know nothing of what we want ... of what He wants.”
There was more wrong with the blacksmith than just his voice: a feeling of wrongness emanated from him, a black and bottomless lake hidden beneath a crust of thin ice. How could Ruben seem so evil, even in a dream—kind, slow-talking Ruben?

Shem's lined face smiled cheerfully, but his words sounded strained.
“I do not care. I will do anything He wishes. I ask little in return.”

“You ask a great deal more than any other mortal would,”
Reuben replied.
“Not only do you dare to call on the Red Hand, you have the temerity to demand favors.”
He was chill and uncaring as graveyard dirt.
“You do not even know what you ask. You are a child, priest, and you grasp at gleaming things because they seem pretty. You may cut yourself on something jagged and find that you bleed to death.”

“I don't care.”
Shem spoke with a lunatic firmness.
“I don't care. Teach me the Words of Changing. The Dark One owes me ... he is obligated ...”

Ruben threw back his head in wild laughter. A crown of flames seemed to blaze about his head.
“Obligated?”
he gasped. The sound of his amusement was terrifying.
“Our master? To you?”
He laughed again, and suddenly the blacksmith's skin began blistering. Little gouts of smoke jetted into the air as Ruben's flesh burned away, peeling back to reveal a shifting kernel of flame beneath, pulsating with reddish light like a coal fanned by wind.
“You will live to see His final triumph. That is more reward than most mortals can expect!”

“Please!” Even as Ruben flared, Shem had begun to shrink, becoming small and gray as a charred parchment. His tiny arm waved, crumbling.
“Please, undying one, please.”
His voice was oddly light, fraught with a kind of slyness.
“I will ask nothing further
—
Iwill not speak of the Dark One again. Forgive a mortal fool. Teach me the Word!”

Where Ruben had stood, a living flame glowed.
“Very well, priest. There is, perhaps, little risk in giving you this dangerous but final toy. The Lord of All will be taking this world back soon enough—there is nothing you can do that He cannot make undone. Very well. I will teach you the Word, but the pain will be great. No Change is without some cost.”
Laughter bubbled again in the unearthly voice.
“You will scream
...”

“I don't care!”
Shem said, his ashy form swirling away now into darkness, as did the shadowed smithy and then the hayloft itself.
“I don't care! I must know... !”
Finally, even the glowing thing that had been Ruben became only a bright point in the blackness ... a star....

 

Simon awakened, breathless as a drowning man, his heart thudding in his chest. There
was
a single star overhead, peeping through the hole in the top of their sleeping shelter like a blue-white eye. He gasped.

Binabik lifted his head from Qantaqa's shaggy neck. The troll was half-asleep, but struggling toward full wakefulness. “What is wrong, Simon?” he asked. “Were you having a dream that frightened?”

Simon shook his head. The tide of fear was ebbing a little, but he was sure it had been more than just a night fantasy. It had seemed that an actual conversation was taking place nearby, a conversation that his sleeping mind had woven neatly into the stuff of his dream—a mundane happening that he had experienced many times. What was strange and frightening was that there were no other speakers anywhere about: Sludig was snoring, Binabik obviously new-wakened.

“It's nothing,” Simon said, struggling to speak evenly. He crawled to the front of their lean-to, mindful of the bruises from the evening's stave-practice, and pushed his head out to look around. The first star he had seen had a great deal of company—a spatter of tiny white lights across the night sky. The clouds had been driven away by the brisk wind, the night was clear and cold, and the unrelieved monotony of the White Waste stretched away on every side. There was not another living thing to be seen anywhere beneath the ivory moon.

So it
had
only been a dream, a dream of how old Shem Horsegroom might speak with Pryrates' croaking tongue, and how Ruben the Bear might speak with the sepulchral tones of nothing on God's living earth....

“Simon?” Binabik asked sleepily. “Are you... ?”

He was frightened, but if he was to be a man he could not run to cry on someone's shoulder every time he had a bad dream. “It's nothing.” He crawled shivering back to his cloak. “I'm well.”

But it seemed so real.
The branches of their flimsy shelter creaked, wind-handled.
So real. Like they were talking in my head
...

 

Taking the silver sparrow's fragmentary message to heart, they rode from first light to last every day, trying to outpace the coming storm. Simon's mock-combats with Sludig now took place by firelight, so that he had scarcely a moment to spend alone from the moment he rose until he tumbled into exhausted sleep at the end of each day. The days of riding passed in a procession of sameness: the endless, humped fields of white, the dark tangles of stunted trees, the numbing insistence of the wind. Simon was grateful for his thickening beard: without it, he often thought, the relentless wind might rub away his face, down to the very bones.