It was.
Jahor reached into the cart, pulled out a ladder that hooked over the sideboard. Myrgot smiled about her, then mounted; she offered Norema her arm when she climbed up next. Raven, with the strangest smile below her mask (thought Bayle), stepped back for Bayle to climb in, just as Bayle had stepped back for Norema. Then Bayle, boxes, Raven, and Jahor were all in place. The cart trundled up the dock road (dawn light as they rounded a turn laid bronze palms on Myrgot’s, Norema’s, Raven’s, then the driver’s shoulders) between the men, women, and children coming down to load from, or simply to gawk at, the boat.
‘Certainly this has got to be –’ said Myrgot (the cart bounced), folding her hands and looking beyond the rim – ‘the most beautiful countryside in all Nevèrÿon.’
‘It certainly –’ Norema began (the cart hit another pothole) – ‘is very lovely.’
Raven spread her arms out behind her, gripping the plank left and right, grinning with her tiny teeth. ‘How long will it take us to get to his Lordship’s castle?’
‘But there.’ Myrgot’s face creased with an elderly grin. ‘I have not even told you of the greatest inconvenience his Lordship will subject you to. For you see, Lord Aldamir is not here – in Garth. At his castle. Today. Something has come up. He’s had to go south – quite suddenly. Just three days ago he left with a very impressive retinue from his court, leaving only guards, servants – a skeletal staff … really, you know these ancient piles, half fortress, half dungeon, with their open roofs and fetid cells. Most of them are not fit to live in anyway.’ She looked around brightly. ‘This is why Lord Aldamir has requested that I house you in the Vygernangx Monastery – which, believe me, is a lot more comfortable. And he begs you not to take offense because he does not have you chambered in his home.’
‘When will Lord Aldamir be back?’ Norema asked.
And Bayle relaxed just a little because she had asked before he had.
‘My dear, we don’t know. His departure was very sudden. It was an emergency of some kind. And one just doesn’t question a man like that.’
‘When did he leave?’ Bayle asked.
‘Oh, just before I got here. That’s been, now – let me see: well, I said before – at least three days.’
From her side of the cart, Raven suddenly barked above the creaking axle: ‘You mean I’ve come all this way to kill a man, and you tell me he’s gone?’
‘I’m afraid –’ the cart jounced again – ‘I do, my dear.’ Myrgot’s face held as tenaciously to its faint smile as Raven’s held to its gross one; Norema’s look went strangely blank. Bayle felt his features tugged around on the bone, seeking for the proper expression of surprise.
Myrgot folded her hands in the lap of her shift as if nothing of any seriousness had been said. ‘His Lordship hopes the three of you will be comfortable with the priests. They are a provincial lot – I know them of old. But they are always anxious to hear the tales from distant travelers. I know you don’t feel as if you are, but all three of you are distant travelers now, strange and exotic to the likes of the locals. And the priests have their share of ancient stories – if you are interested in ancient stories.’
Bayle was staring at a patch of straw where a length of Myrgot’s hem lay: bent straws and straw ends made tents and puckers in the stuff; one, leaning, shook a filament of shadow over the cloth as the cart shook – he watched it all as if this play of detail might obliterate what seemed like the all too miserable form of the journey so far.
Myrgot was saying: ‘The valley you can see to your left is known as the Pit, where General Babàra made his famous stand fifty or five hundred years ago, at the behest of a dream in which his aunt, Queen Olin – my great aunt, by the bye – warned him to be on the lookout for a green bird flying between two branches of a sacred pecan tree…’
Carved in the lintel stones, one section on each arm-long block, a dragon spread wings and beak. From the tiny doorway beneath, a robed figure bustled forward; the design on his hem and sleeves (the cloth blotched with food stains) Bayle remembered once having seen on some southern pottery that had briefly come through Old Zwon’s shop.
‘Well, Feyer Senth,’ said Myrgot (Bayle recalled that Feyer was a southern form of address that meant both ‘maternal uncle’ and ‘priest’), ‘I have done as Lord Aldamir wished. Here are your guests.’
‘Delightful!’ announced the little priest, who had large, freckled hands, and a thin, freckled face. ‘Delightful! Now for news! Gossip! Tales of travel! Romance!’ (Another and another priest emerged from the door. The youngest was probably Bayle’s junior by five years; the oldest, who, with the youngest, hung back near the shrubs, could have been Old Zwon’s father.) ‘We will have tall tales and religious chatter, and – who knows – perhaps some deep and lasting insight into the workings of the soul.’ He lowered his freckled eyelids, narrowing the yellow pupils. ‘It happens here, you know. Come, let us help you down.’
Bayle climbed out to the pine-needled ground as priests hurried up to take down Norema’s bags and crates. At Feyer Senth’s orders, they carried and scurried in and out of the low stone walls, all hung about with ivy hanks. Bayle’s bedroll got handed down; and Raven, for all her sumptuous cabin back on the ship, seemed to have no baggage, save the sword and purse at her hip. The priests clustered about Bayle now, to help the women down. Norema, helped by three eager feyers, climbed out – more hindered, really, than aided. Raven, seeing, vaulted off on her own.
Myrgot made small, dismissive gestures; feyers fell back. (Bayle’s own discomfort grew; he tried to help the priests, who kept snatching boxes and bags out of his hands with solicitous grins and hurrying off. Should he offer to help Myrgot?) ‘There,’ the noble woman said from her seat in the wagon. ‘That’s everything. I have done as Lord Aldamir wished and will be on my way.’
‘But Vizerine Myrgot,’ cajoled Feyer Senth, ‘won’t you stay for the evening and enjoy our hospitality?’
Myrgot’s face lined with unexpected intensity. She said: ‘I have spent too much time as your guest already … dirty little priest!’ this last as if noticing an offensive smear on a child’s face. With a wave of her hand, servant and driver were in their place and the cart trundled away.
Feyer Senth laughed. ‘Wonderful woman! What a wonderful woman! Completely open and forthright! A fine quality in a noble lady! A fine quality … indeed!’ He turned among feyers and guests. ‘And she is among the noblest. But come in! Come in, all of you. And let us make you at home here for the length of your stay.’
Hooking big, freckled fingers over Bayle’s and Norema’s shoulders, Feyer Senth guided them to the dark door and through it, the last priest preceding them with the last of Norema’s boxes. Shadow and the dank smell of monastery walls closed over. Bayle heard the shrill laugh bark ahead in the passageway: Raven had already gone into the lowering pile.
Bayle found his expected confusion, as well as his own natural friendliness, both in a kind of suspension (and he was a young man who, when he became confused, tended to become over-friendly); but the chapels, storage cells, common rooms, and what have you that Feyer Senth busily pointed out as they walked did not so much confuse him as simply slip off across his memory without ever gaining traction. While the little priest babbled and pointed, Bayle wondered what his red-headed competitor was thinking. Then the wall flares’ oily light fell before a wing of dawn, patterned with leaf-shadow.
They came out on a stone porch – perhaps it was a porch. At any rate, one wall was down – rather raggedly, as if it had been knocked in, or perhaps out, with violence and, over years, vague efforts made to straighten the debris and change the chamber into a patio.
Feyer Senth turned, chuckling. ‘We can sit here and relax a while. That, incidentally – you can just see it if you squint, out there between those two hills – is Lord Aldamir’s castle. The Dragon Castle, we call it here.’
‘Where?’ asked Raven, coming back across the moss-webbed flags.
&n
bsp; Feyer Senth took the masked woman’s shoulder (he and Raven were the same height, which surprised Bayle because he still thought of the Western Woman as tall while the priest was indeed quite short) and pointed up between the spottily forested hills. ‘You should be able to get a glimpse right through there. Sometimes, though, the elm leaves are so thick this time of year you can’t make out a thing. Here, sit down. We’ll have some wine, some food.’
Wooden legs scraped stone as one priest pulled a bench out from the wall. Another stepped up between Norema and Bayle with a basket of glossy-rinded fruits.
Two priests were already sitting on the floor, backs to the wall and arms around their shins.
‘Sit down! Please sit down.’
The seat edge bumped the backs of Bayle’s knees as another priest smiled suddenly over his shoulder.
‘Please, sit and be comfortable, here where we can look through the forests of Garth, out at the lovely Vygernangx morning.’
‘Feyer Senth!’
They looked at Raven – indeed, half the feyers stopped bustling.
‘Feyer Senth, I will decline your hospitality.’ The masked woman stood with one foot on the ragged wall edging the porch. ‘My god is not your god. My habits are not your habits. I have a mission to complete now which cannot be completed. I must return to my employer and so inform him.’ The glazed smile took on the brilliance of ice smashed in the sun. Raven climbed up, jumped, and, to the sound of thrashing leaves, moved away.
Norema, sitting on one of the proffered chairs, looked at Bayle.
Feyer Senth laughed. ‘Such a fascinating girl, too. It’s sad she didn’t choose to stay. But here, have some wine. Lord Aldamir wishes us to do well by all his visitors. His family is illustrious and his history, which does honor to all Nevèrÿon, is intimately connected with these border territories. You, of course, would be too young to remember, but it was a branch of Lord Aldamir’s family who sat on the High Throne of Eagles, in the city then called Neveryóna, before the current Child Empress – whose reign has, at times, been both wrathful and rapacious, though I gather one would never dare say such a thing were we fifty miles closer to Kolhari. The Aldamirs have supported the Empress since her coming to power. But we here have always known – known since the time of Babàra’s invasions of the Garth – that such a relation between the dragon and the eagle would never be truly easy. Well, his Lordship is of course concerned with maintaining the freest commerce back and forth with that city (called, under his unfortunate cousin’s reign, Neveryóna). That is no doubt why he has called you down to negotiate with him for the franchise of children’s rubber balls; and no doubt that also explains why he is so anxious that we entertain you as grandly as we can here during his unexpected absence. You have no idea how mortified he was that he had to leave. His messenger came down from the castle to me in person and conveyed his Lordship’s most sincere regrets and apologies,’ and, without punctuation, turned to Norema: ‘the presence of that Western Woman must have made you feel terribly upset. I mean, for a woman used to the place of women in this society.’ Recalling her expostulation when he had asked for her reaction to Raven’s creation tale, Bayle expected some similar restrained outburst now. But Norema returned that silent, serious look across the rim of her wine cup (and what cups they were! Metal creations of leaves and flowers in which were set ceramic plates so thin the light passed through, stained crimson with the wine! What sort of potters threw cups like this here in the south, wondered Bayle, as the glitter from his own deviled his vision from below), which said that though she of course would not say it, she felt no such thing.
What Bayle found himself thinking, as conversation, wine, and food drifted on their various ways through the morning (and what food they ate! Crisp, roasted birds stuffed with fruit and nuts! Pastries filled with spicy meats! Puddings that combined terrifying bitternesses and sweetnesses!), was just how present Raven, now she was gone, seemed. The conversation somehow managed to return to her at least once every hour. In between, it was almost as if she were lurking just outside, or spying from the dark niches behind them, or hiding in some chapel near them, observing and overhearing every inane and innocuous word or gesture made or uttered.
‘So, you have made up your mind, my dear?’ Feyer Senth’s voice was nearly lost among the crickets’.
‘Lord Aldamir has gone to the south. No one knows when he’ll return. But you suspect it may be quite a while. It is silly to come all this way and give up just like that. I can hire people to carry my packages and guide me after him. I shall leave in the morning. After all, I have money.’
‘But you must remember,’ Feyer Senth said, ‘as one goes further and further south, money means something very different from what it does in the city once called Neveryóna.’
‘You have money.’ Bayle, a little drunkenly, swirled wine in the bottom of his goblet. ‘And I do not. At least not very much money. So tomorrow morning I shall get a ship back to Kolhari –’ For an hour, following Norema, he too had been saying ‘the city once called Neveryóna,’ as the priests did; but as the sky had gone salmon outside the porch, then indigo, and the wax had been pried from the mouth of yet another jug, he had gone back to the ‘Kolhari’ he had used all his life.
‘If I find his Lordship, I shall tell him you answered his messenger!’ Norema said with an intensity that probably came from the wine they had been drinking all day on the porch, or in the chapels near it, or about the grounds just in front of it. ‘I will! I promise you, Bayle!’
Bayle said nothing – though he smiled – and swirled his dregs. His feelings had alternated between a very real desire to accompany this city merchant’s bold little red-haired secretary and a very real apprehension; he was only eighteen, this was the first time he had been away from the city; things had not gone according to plan; best return and leave heroics to a later year.
‘I have money,’ Norema repeated. ‘Now if I only knew where, to the south, Lord Aldamir has gone. But you say I should not have any trouble finding him …?’
Bayle stood up; the flares, in metal holders bolted to the stone, wavered and flapped uncertain light about the porch. ‘I must go to bed,’ he said thickly. ‘Good night, and thank you for a wonderful day … ’ Two feyers, who either had not drunk such amounts as he or who were used to imbibing such amounts, were instantly at his side, leading him toward his cell somewhere off in the wobbling dark.
4
‘I too should retire.’ Norema rose. She was by no means as drunk as the boy. Still, the last hour’s drinking, with only the smokey flares to keep away night bugs, had left her quite tired. And her thoughts and feelings over the day of priestly entertainment had been much closer to what yours and mine would have been: between polite interest and polite boredom, she too had wondered what part the ritual realities of actual religion played in the lives of these rather indolent feyers. The decision to continue her journey had been sudden, and the thought she had given to it since was the sort one lavishes on an onerous but inescapable obligation. Now she wanted to retire early enough for the coming travail of tomorrow’s tasks: the collecting of guides, bearers, tents, and provisions by the waterfront at dawn – a service she had performed several times for Madame Keyne before at Kolhari and whose difficulties she therefore knew. ‘No, I can find my own way,’ she said, taking the flare from the priest who started forward to guide her.
Some ‘Good-night’s’ chorused beyond the flare’s glow. An arch, and she entered it. Smoke trickled from the brand to lick back on the ceiling, already ribboned with soot from how many years’ sleepy travelers’ lighting their way to bed. A stone doorway inches lower than the top of her head, and she ducked through.
The cell seemed much higher than she remembered; but it was the right one: there, in brand light, were her boxes and sacks. Through a window high in one corner she could see brand-lit leaves and beyond them faint stars. A bed; a metal wall-holder for the flare; a three-legged amphora of water, a standing basin for
washing.
She put the brand in its holder.
When – after washing, after plunging the brand in the washed-in water, after dripping water on the tops of her bare feet in the dark while she tried to get the extinguished brand back in its brace, after turning once and then turning again on the fragrant bed – sleep came, she was not sure.
She woke at a strangled gasp, not hers; something fell down to hit the bed’s edge, thudded to the floor. Blinking, she pushed herself up, started to swing her feet to the stone –
‘Don’t, or your toes will be a-wash in blood,’ followed by a barking laugh above her – but a soft bark.
Norema looked down: someone lay with arms and legs at awkward angles, while wetness crawled out across the flags. She looked up; blocking moonlight, Raven squatted in the window. She put one leg in and let it hang.
With a shudder, Norema curled her feet up under her – and Raven dropped down on to the bed’s foot.
‘What’s happened …?’ Norema whispered hoarsely.
‘Well, Heathen Woman,’ Raven whispered back squatting on the rumpled blanket and folding her arms, ‘someone was going to kill you. So I killed her – or him, as the case may be.’ She bent forward, rolled the body back – ‘Him … but I should have expected that by now in your strange and terrible land –’ and pulled something from the flank. An arm flopped on the floor; blood welled, Raven turned her two-pronged sword, examining it, wiped it on the bed, examined it again.
‘Kill me?’ Norema demanded, trying to match Raven’s whisper. ‘Why on earth …?’
‘Most probably – ‘Raven, still sitting, managed to get the sword, after several plunges, into its shaggy sheath – ‘because you were going to go on looking for Lord Aldamir and they don’t want you to find him – or rather they don’t want you to find out something about him once you start looking.’