The Song of Andiene

The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell


Chapter 1



This is the song of Andiene. This is the song of a few who went out and conquered a kingdom.



She was the youngest daughter, a mute and mindless child, or so they thought. Though her name was Andiene Rejin-Neve Mareja, there is little glory in being ninth heir to the throne.

If she had been born a hundred years earlier, she might have lived the kind of life her great-grandmothers lived—to be married for state, never set foot out of the great courtyard, and die of childbearing.

Those were gentler times. Born in the tenth age, when a queen could rule the city and land, she seemed likely to have a quicker and surer death.

She heard the bells ringing to welcome Year’s Beginning, to give thanks for the healing rain. They rang through all the great city. The sound deafened her. It beat through her body as though the wall to which she was bound pulsed to the deep tones.

If I ruled the city, these bells would never sound again, she thought furiously. I would tear their tongues from their mouths, and drown them in the deep sea!

She was no queen, but a helpless child. The bells rang on. Outside the courtyard walls, the people sang their songs of rejoicing. Andiene heard other sounds, nearer sounds, but she shut them from her mind. It is better, she thought, not to ask for mercy, than to ask where none will be given. No use to weep, when there are none to pity your weeping. No use to beg, when laughter is the reply.

Two-score soldiers, and as many prisoners, filled the courtyard. The ones who had built it were dead and turned to dust long before the proud Rejiseja entered the land, so there were none to say what purpose the rings sunk deep into white stone had served. They served well now to hold prisoners, prisoners who had been lords, and rulers of the land.

The voices grew silent. Two colors blurred before Andiene’s eyes, red and white—the white of festival robes and fresh scrubbed tiles, and the red of heart’s blood, spreading in deep wide stains across robes and tiles. Andiene closed her eyes. Her mind wandered in a labyrinth of pride and hate, grief and fear, wavering on the edge of madness.

Silence—such a long silence—she opened her eyes and stared across the courtyard to the far wall, where Nahil leaned at his ease, and smiled as he watched his brother, Ranes, who had been king.

“So, now there is one left of your brood, and then I am your closest heir,” he said. “Did you ever dream you would live to see the day?”

“The people will tear you in pieces,” Ranes answered, forcing the words hoarsely from a dry throat.

“Do you think so?” Nahil motioned an overeager soldier to be patient. “Listen!”

Outside, a herald called, “Reji Marates! Nahil Reji! Veive Nahil! Veive Reji!”

Though it was the old language, the crowd understood it and took up the cry. “Long live Nahil! Long live the King!” Again the bells rolled their heavy notes through the air, but the people’s singing, their rejoicing, almost drowned the sound of the noisy bells.

If I were ruler of this land, I would hunt these people, the fickle people, the faithless people, as a hawk hunts a grasskit, Andiene thought.

A voice answered her, a dry whisper, tugging at the edges of her mind. You can, child of the Rejiseja; you can; you will. You have the power to destroy them all. Listen, and I will show you. She listened, and tried to understand.

Nahil’s smile was sweeter yet, as he watched his brother. “They spoke too soon to acclaim me, but I wanted you to have the joy of seeing how readily they took up the cry. I almost wish, my dear brother, that you could live to see that I will be more honored than ever you were.”

Ranes, king for the little while that he would yet live, clenched his teeth and did not answer. He had lived a long life, for a king, and had lived by force and trickery. Now his tricks and strength had failed him. His agonized gaze wandered over the courtyard. The bodies sagged against the ropes that held them to the wall. The blood still ran and spread in wider stains. All dead but one: wife, sons, daughters, his children’s children. The soldiers had held his eyes open when he would have looked away. Every sword-stroke was burned into his mind. All dead, all his hopes gone but one, the mindless child, the unloved, the least of all.

Nahil, silent too, had followed his own thoughts, and they had led him down dark paths. His voice changed from mocking cruelty to true anger. “You gave our father no such time to see his own death, did you? You killed him in his sleep!”

“Not so! Not so! They told you lies!” Horror and despair made Ranes stupid. His mind stumbled like a cripple. He knew that he must speak quickly, before his brother lost interest in his agony. If there were any men that were loyal to him, he must give them time to come to his rescue. He searched for words that would serve him, but before he could find any, his brother’s liegeman, traitorous Kallan who had opened the gates, spoke.

“Lord, you would harm your soul by slaying the least one. She is maimed from birth, and is no danger. She can never inherit.”

“Maimed? She seems whole.”

“In mind, not in body. She is simple and does not speak.”

“Brother, is this true?”

A flash of hope leaped into Ranes’s eyes. “Yes, yes, she is a mindless one.”

“Why then did you name her heir? A useless thing?” He saw the hope in his brother’s eyes, and smiled. “Ninth heir serves a fisherman best to pull the nets,” he said, and laughed. “No use to a king, but it spared you the shame of owning a flawed one. With so many strong sons, you never thought you would be left with a half-grown girl as your only get, did you?” He looked at his brother in contempt. “Well, are you mute, too?”

Ranes did not answer. Nahil strode across to where Andiene was tied, and forced her chin up, to look into her eyes.

She came back from the twilight world, the mazy paths filled with strange voices and wild dreams, to stare at him, a face so like her father’s, like her own, a face she could remember for a thousand years.

Nahil saw the hate in her eyes, and hard and unbelieving as he was, for a moment he recognized it, his fate, his death. Then he stepped back, fighting away the knowledge, and spoke in a more careless and loud voice than he had used before. “Mute, maybe, but not mindless. I’ll not have a knife put in my back some evening. Kill her.”

Kallan hesitated. “What harm is there … ” he began, though he knew he could not argue with his sworn lord. That hesitation gave Andiene time to act. Knowledge and power had come to her.

She saw two-score soldiers in that courtyard, and one who commanded them. They had cast off the white Festival robes that had disguised them, and wore mail and leather, black with blood like butcher’s clothes. Minds attuned to slaughter and drunk with blood are simpler, easier to control. That made her task less hard. But still, to seek out the guiding thread of each mind in all that group was no easy job. She gathered them and held them lightly, so lightly that they scarcely realized they were being held prisoner, till they tried to act of their own will, and could not.

Then Andiene spoke softly, in the old language which none had spoken for more than a thousand years except in rituals, the naming of the king. “Ven ame.” Words, like wizards, grow in power as they age. She spoke as to a servant. “Nahil, come to me.”

He came in anger and terror, his mind struggling but held powerless by her will. The others, too dazed to understand, stood motionless. “Set me free,” she said.

That was the most dangerous moment, when he drew the bronze dagger from his belt. He was so close to her, and barely under control, his mind fighting for freedom, driven by all his dread of sorcery. Little rivers of sweat ran down from his forehead. His lips twitched like one who has the palsy. But he was docile enough as he cut the ropes that bound her. As she took the dagger from him, his fingers tightened for one moment on the hilt before they released it.

“Res,” she said. “Stay there.” Outside the courtyard, the bells rang again, great discordant waves of sound.

Andiene stepped carefully as she walked toward her father, for the ground seemed to sway with the rhythm of the bells. On either side of her lay destruction: Siope, who had given her a doll when she was small; Akerr, who had slapped her just yesterday; Lene’s baby, whom she had held while Lene combed her hair. She tried to look away. No use. Nothing but blood and death.

And her father stood silent like the others, his mouth half-open, fear and hope in his eyes. She sawed at the ropes that bound his hands behind his back, working clumsily with her numb fingers.

He wore a sleeveless night-robe, not like his children, who had been wakened early to be dressed in Festival robes. As he clenched his hands more tightly, the deep sword cut in his arm sprang open again, and blood flowed down his brown arm. The dagger slipped and cut his wrist, a tiny trickle of red. When he was free, still he stood and stared, till she tugged at his arm and said, in the common tongue, “Come, I cannot hold them long.”

In that moment, a mind more subtle than the others tugged at its leash and almost twisted away. She held it fast, but in her fright and weariness she let loose two others. They were quicker-thinking than many of their kind would have been—their swords were out the instant that they were freed. As she tried to recapture them, more minds fought their way out of her grasp. Then they were all free.

It would have been a quicker and surer slaughter if there had been one fourth the number of soldiers. That would have been enough for two people, one wounded and weary, the other a child. But as it was, the soldiers blocked each other; they wounded each other. Swords rang fiercely; Andiene heard her father shout “Run!” It was his last command, and she obeyed it. The gate-bar was almost beyond her strength as she fought at it, sent it crashing to the pavement, flung her weight at the gate. It scraped open, and let her go staggering out into the crowded and unfamiliar street.

In the courtyard, Ranes Reji fought his last fight, wielding a sword snatched from one of his enemies, knowing it was a hopeless fight, but filled with a sort of joy that he could die free, not bound like a calf for the butcher. His last thought, as Kallan’s sword went through his body, was that what he had seen was only part of the delirium before death.

Out on the street, Andiene ran through the crowds of Festival rejoicers. They still sang, but not so loudly. Some who saw her running thought, in their fondness, that a young girl ran in fun from her lover, or merely ran for the joy of youth and strength. Others knew the truth when they saw the grim soldiers pouring from the palace. It had happened before; it would happen again.

They did various things, as their natures inclined them. Some eagerly pointed the way that the fugitive had run. Some joined in the hunt. Some shrugged and were silent when the harsh-faced men questioned them. Some awkwardly stumbled into the path of the soldiers, or innocently pointed down alleyways where none had passed in many days.

Andiene had never been in the open city unless carried in a litter on the days of High Festival. She knew none of the winding ways. Still, something led her from the crowded ways to the less frequented streets, to the dim alleys close to the sea cliffs, narrow ways smelling of fish and salt and rotting seaweed, almost empty on this festival day.

It was not so strange that she eluded her pursuers. Almost all in the city had pale hair, and darker skin. All, men, women, young, old, rich and poor had put on white robes and crowded into the streets to celebrate the healing rain, the cleansing cold, the patterns of the sky mended and made whole again. It was a day when there was no work, and all people filled the streets rejoicing. On a day like that it is not easy to follow one girl as she dodges from group to group like a grasskit hunted by coursers.

Andiene crouched in a doorway, her breath coming in gasps. The horror of what she had seen, and the strangeness of what she had done, began to mingle in her mind. The shouting was distant and faint, but the unlearned knowledge which had come to her told her that if she once slept, or even rested, she would be helpless. She looked around her. This place would offer her no refuge.

Will, not strength, drove her on. Every breath knifed into her side, and the air burned in her throat and lungs. Her heart lurched against her ribs. She looked about her in bewilderment. The multicolored stone of the true city had given way to the mud-brick and straw-roofed hovels by the very water’s edge. She had never known of places such as these that surrounded her.

The few people that saw her looked at her incuriously. The noise and terror of the hunt were far behind her. In this part of the city, even on Festival Day of Year’s Beginning, unkempt hair and a bedraggled robe would not seem strange.

Her feet were cut and bleeding from the sharp stones, but she forced herself to step evenly. I am a king’s daughter, she said to herself. I do not show my pain to ones such as these.

She did not think of trusting any of the people she passed; she did not even turn her head to look at them, too weary to fear them. She followed the path in front of her, and found herself at last alone on the edge of the cliff, looking out across the sparkling sea.

“No land,” she had heard the minstrels sing in her father’s hall. “No land to the west, no matter how far the white-winged ships could sail.”

The sea-wind chilled her. Her thin Festival robe had not been woven for outdoor adventuring. The cliff path descended in roughly-cut steps. At the bottom, her feet sank deep into the sandy beach. The salt air was heavy with the smell of decay. Something drew her to the water’s edge—gentle waves, ankle deep, knee deep, thigh deep, waist deep. Something called her, drawing her as she had drawn Nahil to her. The water was warm, warmer than the wind had been.

The next wave rolled higher, lifting her feet up, tugging on her, trying to draw her out to sea. No foothold—water above her, water below her. She fought to regain the air, the solid ground. The wave receded. She clawed at the sand. When she struggled to her feet again, coughing and blinking her eyes to wash away the burning salt, the compulsion to enter the sea was forgotten.

The wind stripped all warmth from her body. The sand gritted itself into her torn feet. She fell to her hands and knees and crawled along the beach, seeking a shelter, any shelter that would hide her from the hunters.