His friend came back from the woods and sat down beside him on the bench awhile. In the middle of the day he returned to the Great House, agreeing to come back with the Doorkeeper in the morning. They would ask all the other Masters to meet with them in the Grove. “But he won’t come,” Deyala said, and Azver nodded.
All day he stayed near the Otter’s House, keeping watch on Irian, making her eat a little with him. She came to the house, but when they had eaten she went back to her place on the streambank and sat there motionless. And he too felt a lethargy in his own body and mind, a stupidity, which he fought against but could not shake off. He thought of the Summoner’s eyes, and then it was he that felt cold, cold through, though he was sitting in the full heat of the summer’s day. We are ruled by the dead, he thought. The thought would not leave him.
He was grateful to see Kurremkarmerruk coming slowly down the bank of the Thwilburn from the north. The old man waded through the stream barefoot, holding his shoes in one hand and his tall staff in the other, snarling when he missed his footing on the rocks. He sat down on the near bank to dry his feet and put his shoes back on. “When I go back to the Tower,” he said, “I’ll ride. Hire a carter, buy a mule. I’m old, Azver.”
“Come up to the house,” the Patterner said, and he set out water and food for the Namer.
“Where’s the girl?”
“Asleep.” Azver nodded toward where she lay, curled up in the grass above the little falls.
The heat of the day was beginning to lessen and the shadows of the Grove lay across the grass, though the Otter’s House was still in sunlight. Kurremkarmerruk sat on the bench with his back against the house wall, and Azver on the doorstep.
“We’ve come to the end of it,” the old man said out of silence.
Azver nodded, in silence.
“What brought you here, Azver?” the Namer asked. “I’ve often thought of asking you. A long, long way to come. And you have no wizards in the Kargish lands, I think.”
“No. But we have the things wizardry is made of. Water, stones, trees, words …”
“But not the words of the Making.”
“No. Nor dragons.”
“Never?”
“Only in some very, very old tales. Before the gods were. Before men were. Before men were men, they were dragons.”
“Now that is interesting,” said the old scholar, sitting up straighter. “I told you I was reading about dragons. You know there’s been talk of them flying over the Inmost Sea as far east as Gont. That was no doubt Kalessin taking Ged home, multiplied by sailors making a good story better. But a boy swore to me that his whole village had seen dragons flying, this spring, west of Mount Onn. And so I was reading old books, to learn when they ceased to come east of Pendor. And in one I came on your story, or something like it. That men and dragons were all one kind, but they quarreled. Some went west and some east, and they became two kinds, and forgot they were ever one.”
“We went farthest east,” Azver said. “But do you know what the leader of an army is, in my tongue?”
“Erdan,” said the Namer promptly, and laughed. “Drake. Dragon … .”
After a while he said, “I could chase an etymology on the brink of doom … . But I think, Azver, that that’s where we are. We won’t defeat him.”
“He has the advantage,” Azver said, very dry.
“He does. So … . So therefore, admitting it unlikely, admitting it impossible—if we did defeat him—if he went back into death and left us here alive—what would we do? What comes next?”
After a long time, Azver said, “I have no idea.”
“Your leaves and shadows tell you nothing?”
“Change, change,” said the Patterner. “Transformation.”
He looked up suddenly. The sheep, who had been grouped near the stile, were scurrying off, and someone was coming along the path from the Great House.
“A group of young men,” said the Herbal, breathless, as he came to them. “Thorion’s army. Coming here. To take the girl. To send her away.” He stood and drew breath. “The Doorkeeper was speaking with them when I left. I think—”
“Here he is,” said Azver, and the Doorkeeper was there, his smooth, yellowish-brown face tranquil as ever.
“I told them,” he said, “that if they went out Medra’s Gate this day, they’d never go back through it into a house they knew. Some of them were for turning back, then. But the Windkey and the Chanter urged them on. They’ll be along soon.”
They could hear men’s voices in the fields east of the Grove.
Azver went quickly to where Irian lay beside the stream, and the others followed him. She roused up and got to her feet, looking dull and dazed. They were standing around her, a kind of guard, when the group of thirty or more men came past the little house and approached them. They were mostly older students; there were five or six wizard’s staffs among the crowd, and the Master Windkey led them. His thin, keen old face looked strained and weary, but he greeted the four mages courteously by their titles. They greeted him, and Azver took the word—“Come into the Grove, Master Windkey,” he said, “and we will wait there for the others of the Nine.”
“First we must settle the matter that divides us,” said the Windkey.
“That is a stony matter,” said the Namer.
“The woman with you defies the Rule of Roke,” the Windkey said. “She must leave. A boat is waiting at the dock to take her, and the wind, I can tell you, will stand fair for Way.”
“I have no doubt of that, my lord,” said Azver, “but I doubt she will go.”
“My Lord Patterner, will you defy our Rule and our community, that has been one so long, upholding order against the forces of ruin? Will it be you, of all men, who break the pattern?”
“It is not glass, to break,” Azver said. “It is breath, it is fire.”
It cost him a great effort to speak.
“It does not know death,” he said, but he spoke in his own language, and they did not understand him. He drew closer to Irian. He felt the warmth of her body. She stood staring, in that animal silence, as if she did not understand any of them.
“Lord Thorion has returned from death to save us all,” the Windkey said, fiercely and clearly. “He will be Archmage. Under his rule Roke will be as it was. The king will receive the true crown from his hand, and rule with his guidance, as Morred ruled. No witches will defile sacred ground. No dragons will threaten the Inmost Sea. There will be order, safety, and peace.”
None of the mages answered him. In the silence, the men with him murmured, and a voice among them said, “Let us have the witch.”
“No,” Azver said, but could say nothing else. He held his staff of willow, but it was only wood in his hand. Of the four of them, only the Doorkeeper moved and spoke. He took a step forward, looking from one young man to the next and the next. He said, “You trusted me, giving me your names. Will you trust me now?”
“My lord,” said one of them with a fine, dark face and a wizard’s oaken staff, “we do trust you, and therefore ask you to let the witch go, and peace return.”
Irian stepped forward before the Doorkeeper could answer.
“I am not a witch,” she said. Her voice sounded high, metallic, after the men’s deep voices. “I have no art. No knowledge. I came to learn.”
“We do not teach women here,” said the Windkey. “You know that.”
“I know nothing,” Irian said. She stepped forward again, facing the mage directly. “Tell me who I am.”
“Learn your place, woman,” the mage said with cold passion.
“My place,” she said, slowly, the words dragging—“my place is on the hill. Where things are what they are. Tell the dead man I will meet him there.”
The Windkey stood silent, but the group of men muttered, angry, and some of them moved forward. Azver came between her and them, her words releasing him from the paralysis of mind and body that had held him. “Tell Thorion we will meet him on Roke
Knoll,” he said. “When he comes, we will be there. Now come with me,” he said to Irian. The Namer, the Doorkeeper, and the Herbal followed him with her into the Grove. There was a path for them. But when some of the young men started after them, there was no path.
“Come back,” the Windkey said to the men.
They turned back, uncertain. The low sun was still bright on the fields and the roofs of the Great House, but inside the wood it was all shadows.
“Witchery,” they said, “sacrilege, defilement.”
“Best come away,” said the Master Windkey, his face set and somber, his keen eyes troubled. He set off back to the School, and they straggled after him, arguing and debating in frustration and anger.
They were not far inside the Grove, and still beside the stream, when Irian stopped, turned aside, and crouched down by the enormous, hunching roots of a willow that leaned out over the water. The four mages stood on the path.
“She spoke with the other breath,” Azver said.
The Namer nodded.
“So we must follow her?” the Herbal asked.
This time the Doorkeeper nodded. He smiled faintly and said, “So it would seem.”
“Very well,” said the Herbal, with his patient, troubled look; and he went aside a little, and knelt to look at some small plant or fungus on the forest floor.
Time passed as always in the Grove, not passing at all it seemed, yet gone, the day gone quietly by in a few long breaths, a quivering of leaves, a bird singing far off and another answering it from even farther. Irian stood up slowly. She did not speak, but looked down the path, and then walked down it. The four men followed her.
They came out into the calm, open evening air. The west still held some brightness as they crossed the Thwilburn and walked across the fields to Roke Knoll, which stood up before them in a high dark curve against the sky.
“They’re coming,” the Doorkeeper said. Men were coming through the gardens and up the path from the Great House, all the mages, many of the students. Leading them was Thorion the Summoner, tall in his grey cloak, carrying his tall staff of bone-white wood, about which a faint gleam of werelight hovered.
Where the two paths met and joined to wind up to the heights of the Knoll, Thorion stopped and stood waiting for them. Irian strode forward to face him.
“Irian of Way,” the Summoner said in his deep, clear voice, “that there may be peace and order, and for the sake of the balance of all things, I bid you now leave this island. We cannot give you what you ask, and for that we ask your forgiveness. But if you seek to stay here you forfeit forgiveness, and must learn what follows on transgression.”
She stood up, almost as tall as he, and as straight. She said nothing for a minute and then spoke out in a high, harsh voice. “Come up onto the hill, Thorion,” she said.
She left him standing at the waymeet, on the level ground, and walked up the hill path for a little way, a few strides. She turned and looked back down at him. “What keeps you from the hill?” she said.
The air was darkening around them. The west was only a dull red line, the eastern sky was shadowy above the sea.
The Summoner looked up at Irian. Slowly he raised his arms and the white staff in the invocation of a spell, speaking in the tongue that all the wizards and mages of Roke had learned, the language of their art, the Language of the Making: “Irian, by your name I summon you and bind you to obey me!”
She hesitated, seeming for a moment to yield, to come to him, and then cried out, “I am not only Irian!”
At that the Summoner ran up toward her, reaching out, lunging at her as if to seize and hold her. They were both on the hill now. She towered above him impossibly, fire breaking forth between them, a flare of red flame in the dusk air, a gleam of red-gold scales, of vast wings—then that was gone, and there was nothing there but the woman standing on the hill path and the tall man bowing down before her, bowing slowly down to earth, and lying on it.
Of them all it was the Herbal, the healer, who was the first to move. He went up the path and knelt down by Thorion. “My lord,” he said, “my friend.”
Under the huddle of the grey cloak his hands found only a huddle of clothes and dry bones and a broken staff.
“This is better, Thorion,” he said, but he was weeping.
The old Namer came forward and said to the woman on the hill, “Who are you?”
“I do not know my other name,” she said. She spoke as he had spoken, as she had spoken to the Summoner, in the Language of the Making, the tongue the dragons speak.
She turned away and began to walk on up the hill.
“Irian,” said Azver the Patterner, “will you come back to us?”
She halted and let him come up to her. “I will, if you call me,” she said.
She reached out and touched his hand. He drew his breath sharply.
“Where will you go?” he said.
“To those who will give me my name. In fire not water. My people.”
“In the west,” he said.
She said, “Beyond the west.”
She turned away from him and them and went on up the hill in the gathering darkness. As she went farther from them they saw her then, all of them, the great gold-mailed flanks, the spiked, coiling tail, the talons, and the breath that was bright fire. On the crest of the knoll she paused awhile, her long head turning to look slowly round the Isle of Roke, gazing longest at the Grove, only a blur of darkness in darkness now. Then with a rattle like the shaking of sheets of brass the wide, vaned wings opened and the dragon sprang up into the air, circled Roke Knoll once, and flew.
A curl of fire, a wisp of smoke drifted down through the dark air.
Azver the Patterner stood with his left hand holding his right hand, which her touch had burnt. He looked down at the men who stood silent at the foot of the hill, staring after the dragon. “Well, my friends,” he said, “what now?”
Only the Doorkeeper answered. He said, “I think we should go to our house, and open its doors.”
Memory, Sorrow and Thorn
TAD WILLIAMS
THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR (1988)
STONE OF FAREWELL (1990)
TO GREEN ANGEL TOWER (1993)
Tad Williams’ trilogy takes place all across the lands of Osten Ard, from the marshes of the southern Wran to Yiqanuc, the icy northern home of the trolls, but its heart is in the great high keep known as the Hayholt.
The story begins when the death of Prester John, the powerful human king who has been the castle’s master for many years, and who has extended his empire out from Erkynland to rule nearly all the nations of Osten Ard, sets in motion a falling-out between his royal sons—a war that eventually brings the entire world to the edge of actual extinction as the undead immortal Ineluki exploits the conflict for his own purposes. Among those caught up in this vast apocalyptic struggle are the scullion Simon Snowlock; Miriamele, the daughter of one of the royal brothers; Binabik the troll; the mysterious witch woman known as Geloë; and several members of Ineluki’s own Sithi—the near-immortal people he once gave his life to protect.
Five centuries before Prester John’s era, in the failing days of his race’s multimillennial empire, Ineluki had been the lord of the Hayholt, known then by its ancient name of Asu’a. As mortals besieged his castle, he had cast a terrible spell, a final and suicidal attempt to defeat the human upstarts. Ineluki and his followers had died in the conflagration, and Asu’a had been largely destroyed, but the mortals who survived merely rebuilt on the ruins of the Sithi’s great keep, making it their own. Several mortal kings of different lands claimed the castle over the centuries, among them the Heron King, Holly King, and Fisher King of Osten Ard’s legends, but none ever held it long until Prester John began his storied reign.
The Burning Man
TAD WILLIAMS
Years and years later, I still start up in the deepest part of night with his agonized face before me. And always, in these terrible dreams, I am helpless to ease h
is suffering.
I will tell the tale then, in hope the last ghosts may be put to rest, if such a thing can even happen in this place where there are more ghosts than living souls. But you will have to listen closely—this is a tale that the teller herself does not fully understand.
I will tell you of Lord Sulis, my famous stepfather.
I will tell you what the witch foretold to me.
I will tell you of the love that I had and I lost.
I will tell you of the night I saw the burning man.
Tellarin gifted me with small things, but they were not small to me. My lover brought me sweetmeats, and laughed to see me eat them so greedily.
“Ah, little Breda,” he told me. “It is strange and wonderful that a mere soldier should have to smuggle honeyed figs to a king’s daughter.” And then he kissed me, put his rough face against me and kissed me, and that was a sweeter thing than any fig that God ever made.
But Sulis was not truly a king, nor was I his true daughter.
Tellarin was not wrong about everything. The gladness I felt when I saw my soldier or heard him whistling below the window was strange and wonderful indeed.
My true father, the man from whose loins I sprang, died in the cold waters of the Kingslake when I was very small. His companions said that a great pikefish became caught in the nets and dragged my father Ricwald to a drowning death, but others whispered that it was his companions themselves who murdered him, then weighted his body with stones.