The Song of Andiene

CHAPTER 21



In the weeks to come, there was no more singing, nor any dancing, nor any wearing of fine robes. The days were spent in half-darkness in the caves beneath the palace, each person lying on a separate patch of earth, sprawled like a cross so that skin would not touch skin, taking shallow breaths of the heavy dead air.

No one could sleep, not truly sleep. The earth that they lay on became heated, so that they turned restlessly and constantly, trying to find a place to lie that was still cool from the night.

Andiene and her people huddled in a corridor apart from the rest of the palace dwellers. The others, king, nobles, and commoners alike were quiet, suspicious, afraid to give offense.

“Look at them glance at us out of the corner of their eyes!” said Lenane. “Just as you said, we are summering in a palace—but I see no difference.” She fanned herself. It was night time; the air had grown damper. Her clothes clung to her and dripped salty-wet with sweat.

Kallan marked another day on his wall-tally. “No history is made in summertime.”

Ilbran counted the tally-marks. How many more days? This was grim shelter, heavy with the never-ending memories of pain and death. “Nahil’s dungeons were not empty like this,” he said.

“They were as bare as this by summertime,” Kallan said. “Emptied of prisoners as fast as the executioners could work. Taules Reji is the same as any other lord.”

They are all the same. That thought filled Ilbran’s mind as they left their dark shelter and climbed up the shallow worn steps to go out into the night. The wind does not blow in midsummer, for that is when the sea hawks build their nests on the stilled waves. But now the air moved slightly, enough to cool them, and tell them that they had passed the crest of the summer.

Throughout the city, people were coming to the surface of the earth like earthworms tunneling upwards in a drowning rain.

The stars were scattered and broken, but gave a little light. Though the people were half-dazed with lack of rest, they found work enough to pass the time. But when they saw Andiene and her companions in the inner courtyard, they took their work elsewhere.

Ilbran called his daughter to him, and tried to pick the tangles from her long hair. But she fussed and fretted, impatient at his clumsiness, and at last pulled away from him, to go to where Andiene sat and knotted lanara thread into lace, working slowly, but her hands so skilled she scarcely needed to look at what she did.

He recognized her work. She had shown lace such as that to his mother long ago. Now she taught the art to his child, who learned it eagerly, a new game.

Lenane had found work of her own that would occupy her for ten summers, or twenty. She did not waste her lute-work on melodies. Instead, she drove their nerves near to snapping with repetitions of one note, over and over, softer to near silence, then shading louder. She played endless patterns, running up and down the ladder of notes. At last, she would look at her companions, judge that they could bear no more, and break into some dance-song that made their hearts laugh to hear it.

“One part melody to ten parts lute-rack,” Kallan said once.

Syresh sprang to her defense. “The same as sword-fighting, as you teach us. Power and control and endless practice. How else could she make a plucked string sing with a human voice?”

Kallan looked at him and laughed. Ilbran rose wearily and returned to the endless sword-drill.

Kallan tutored them both. Through the long summer he had taught them, as patient and merciless toward them as Lenane was toward herself. Still, he would not let them match against each other.

“Syresh is not skilled enough,” he said to Ilbran. “He might easily kill you through clumsiness. Our lady Andiene has only two and a half men-at-arms to fight for her, as it is, and we cannot afford to lessen that number.”

Ilbran took that judgment of his skills without complaint. He had no true desire to fight, and his body was covered with bruises to prove he had no talent for it. He still moved painfully, also. The gift of the grievers’ jaws would be with him for all his life. But that was no excuse for his awkwardness.

“Hold the sword lightly, not as though you’re trying to crush the hilt,” Kallan said.

“It will fly from my hand.”

“Not loosely, lightly,” and Kallan demonstrated two identical styles, or so it seemed to Ilbran. “You are strong enough! But when you hold it like that, the strength of your wrist alone goes into it. When you hold it more lightly, you can put the weight and power of your arm, your whole body, behind the blow.”

Ilbran tried again, and once again. At last he improved—or maybe Kallan had grown weary of teaching. Then they rested, and drank cup after cup of the stale musty-tasting water, till the cask was empty.

At the other end of the courtyard, Lenane tuned and strummed, plucking one note a score of times before she was satisfied with it. Syresh sat by her side and listened.

“I’ll get more water,” Ilbran said, glad of the chance to rest and take off the leather ring-shirt borrowed from the king’s storerooms. Sweatily hot, it was all that had saved him from worse injuries than bruises.

“He welcomed us royally, after all,” he said.

“Who, Taules Reji? He is no fool, and Andiene—our lady—was right. He fears her too much for treachery.”

Ilbran picked up the little water cask and walked away. Behind him, he heard the ring of steel on steel begin. Syresh was being reminded, once again, that he still had much to learn.

The streets were dark, lit by neither torches nor stars, but Ilbran had no fear of ambush. He wore a sword; though he could not use it well, his size alone would frighten away most would-be attackers.

He waited his turn at the well. The water was low, but blessedly cool. Some unease made him turn his head. A gray robe, waiting in the shadows; grizanes must drink, the same as any others.

But as he returned, he glanced behind him. The gray one followed. Ilbran quickened his steps, as much as he could while shouldering the heavy water cask. The grizane walked swiftly. In his gait, at least, he showed no sign of his dreadful age. His steps made no sound on the cobbled pavement. He followed relentlessly.

At last, Ilbran set the cask down and turned to wait. “What do you want?”

Silence. Even in the dark, the grizane’s eyes gleamed under his gray hood.

“Do all your kind love mysteries? I mean no harm to you or any other of Carvalon.”

“What do you know of that land?” The other took a step forward; Ilbran took a step back.

“I traveled with one of your kind, and he saw with my eyes for many days.”

“Go on.”

Ilbran told him, the escape, the archers, the dying message, his long sojourn in the forest. Grizane’s questions are difficult to ignore. The other listened intently.

“Had you learned any of this?” Ilbran asked when he was done.

“We had. Your message comes late. Do you know what it means?”

“No.”

“Go back to your princess, then, and tell her … ”

“You can tell her yourself,” Ilbran said, and the grizane followed his gaze to where Andiene came toward them. Her borrowed summersilk became her well. The fierceness of royalty was clear upon her face.

The grizane watched her; she faced him, challenges and rebuttals in their silences. Ilbran was like a deaf man. There was maneuvering here, motionless vying for position. He touched the hilt of his sword, but did not draw it. Sea-coursers fight on land, on the coldest days of winter, and it would be a madman who would step between them as they eye each other silently on the sandy beach.

“You cannot stop me.” Andiene spoke in words at last.

“We can slow you.”

“Not for long. My power is greater than yours.”

“A child playing with coals has great power too,” the grizane said. “He can set the plains aflame from the sea to the high mountains.”

“I know what I am doing. I do not have to draw patterns in the dust! Res!” The grizane was motionless. “Come,” she said to Ilbran. He followed after her.

“Where are you going?”

“Anywhere.”

“What of the water I was to get?” he asked, realizing that he had left it where he had set it down.

“Tell them you dropped the cask down the well,” she said. “They will not die of thirst.” The very tone of annoyance in her voice reassured him, told him that she had descended from the unhuman level on which she had confronted the grizane.

Ahead of them lay an empty city square, one corner anchored with a tall bell tower. “Have you ever climbed to the top of one of these?” he asked. She shook her head. “Come then!” And he led her up the curving steps, past the wide-mouthed bell, to the very top.

Andiene leaned on the waist-high wall. “Nothing to see.”

“At dawn, the view will be clear, from the mountains to the sea.”

Silent, biting her lip, she looked out into the summer darkness of the city. Then she burst out, “The old fool! I have more power than his kind could dream of, and I am as human as my ancestors were.” There was anger in her voice, but doubt, also.

“He has no right to stand between me and my own! And what could it matter if it did hurt them, the fickle people, the faithless people?”

“Not fickle or faithless,” Ilbran said, “but indifferent. And rightly so. You kings hunt us like a sea-hawk hunts the little birds that nest on land, and then you expect us to love you, be loyal to you?”

“Is that how you see me?”

He was appalled at what he had said. “No. No, it is not, but I won my revenge once, on Giter who betrayed me. I won it soon, with little effort, before I had burned out my life with hate. No joy more cruel, no victory more desolate. You lead us on this journey to the north, and it is not worth it.”

“I tell you, I will be a good ruler,” Andiene said. “The people will love me as they never loved him.”

Then she caught her breath. “He said that. He said it too.” Her anger burned and died. Ilbran could read her thoughts in her eyes. He held her in his arms. She wept for a while, and then wept no longer. “I saw them die,” she said despairingly. “I saw them all die.”

And I saw my father and mother die, he thought, but did not say it. He remembered a dream he had had, again and again. He would see her standing on the edge of a high cliff, her back turned to him, the wind blowing back her silver hair, grown long to her waist. And when he ran to her in joyfulness, she turned her head, and her face had the placid emptiness of Malesa. Summer dreams that mean nothing. She was not like Malesa. He had seen honest anger and honest grief in her, honest love, and true gentleness.

A sorceress, a princess she might be, but she was human, as human as any mortal made of flesh and blood. Her lips met his eagerly. So for a little while their loneliness was less. Ilbran thought of words and ways to make her turn aside from her quest; he planned and dreamed again.

Together they watched the sun rise over the eastern mountains, driving them back to the dim shelter beneath the palace, where they were silent, as cautious as any lovers born of warring families—though there was no one to oppose them.

***

Kallan marked the days on his tally and added them up. In all his life, he had never worked so hard in summertime, but it was almost over. He had had enough of sword-fighting. Syresh had been made capable, at least, and Ilbran had learned enough to make him a greater danger to his opponent than to himself.

But most of his work had not been done with those two. It had been done quietly, watching and learning, making friends and allies among the kingsmen. They had sounded him out, hinted of the power he might win if he changed his allegiance. He had done work of his own of that kind. Now he walked along the dark streets to a place he had watched for many days.

No torches lit the streets; the stars were dim and sparse in the sky, but he had lived in the darkness so long that it did not trouble him. He narrowed his eyes to peer ahead of his destination. There should have been no movement around the cote now, for the doves had buried themselves deep in the sand, barely living, making no movement that would waken their fires again.

But there was a hunched mass of brown feathers on top of the cote, not moving even when Kallan approached. He lifted the exhausted bird and unrolled the scrap of thornfruit petal tied around its leg. He had to study it, for the writing was scribbled and formless, written in hasty terror. Its familiarity helped him. He had seen messages written in this same hand many times before.

“ … I tell you she is mortal. A knife when her back is turned will be enough … ”

Wise words, a simple truth. It is enough for us all. He wrung the dove’s neck and put it under his cloak. As he returned to the palace, he met the keeper of the dovecote, and nodded and greeted him, receiving in return a suspicious stare. A little further on, no one was in sight, and a black courser waited expectantly in the courtyard of some nobleman’s home. Kallan tossed the bird over the wall and saw it disappear in a snap and a flurry of feathers. “In a few more days of spying, I think you would take me for your master,” he said.

In the courtyard of the palace, Andiene sat cross-legged and knotted her lace, a wide collar of star-web stretched like the paths of the forest and trails of the stars. Kare kept her company.

Kallan sat down on the ground beside them. The child greeted him eagerly. “Look!” she said, and held up her lace, as grimy as her hands, so full of mistakes that they almost formed a pattern of their own. She did not wait for his praise, but thrust it into his hands. “Here, I will show you. You wrap the thread around the crook … See? And you turn and pull it through.”

Kallan tried to follow her instructions. The thread uncoiled easily from around the crook. Trying to wrap it again, he moved clumsily and too quickly; the thin pointed crook drove itself under his fingernail. He bit his lip and did not speak. When he shook his hand, beads of blood spattered onto Kare’s lace. Andiene smothered a laugh.

“As dangerous a sport as any duel,” Kallan said, “but I’ll make one good stitch of it.”

He drew the thread tight, so tight he could not pull it over the crook. He tugged harder, and the thread snapped short. Kare’s work began to unravel. “I am sorry,” Kallan said. Looking at the grimy and ragged lace, he said, “You are doing fine work, Kare. You are learning well.”

He gave it back. “Here, go and show it to your father now,” he said. The child obeyed.

Andiene held up her work, neat and beautiful. “My nurse said that it would help to bring the stars back, and shorten the summer. We need that, do we not?”

Kallan nodded, all foolishness forgotten. “Nahil sent another command to his spies, to have you killed. He is growing more afraid.”

Her face showed pleasure, not fear. “How do you find the messages so quickly?”

“Arilsan sleeps late, and heavily, and I rise before him. We drink together at night, good comrades indeed. Perhaps I drink less than he does, and perhaps my wine is purer. Our thief has taught me one of the drugging herbs.”

Andiene was amused at that, as he had known she would be. Then she became earnest again. “Is it safe for us here?”

“No. I do not know all his spies. I fear it might come to war, if we stayed. You do not want that?”

She shook her head. “I do not want to conquer this land. I want what is mine alone, and for the other lords of the land to fear me and stay far from me.”

“I know some of Nahil’s men,” Kallan said. “The ones who try to coax me and bribe me, and the ones I knew before. But if I kill them, the others that I do not know may act in fear. And if I misjudged, and killed Taules’s men, or ones he thought were his, I would make you an enemy here to the south.”

“I’ll have no killing here.”

“What then?” Kallan asked. “Though they have had no orders, sooner or later they will act without orders. I think that Arilsan suspects me.”

“Can we travel now?”

“Some have, in late summer, but not for long.”

“We will,” she said.

“When?”

“This very night.” She smiled slowly. “And they will send a message north that we left while it was still summer. How much greater will his fear be then?”

“No fear at all, if we die in the sun,” Kallan said, but he obeyed her commands. The night was almost over before they left, wandering in different directions, on separate errands, to try to fool any spy. They met by the wide northern gate, open at night during the fierce summertime.

The guards looked strangely at them, but glanced aside quickly when Andiene turned toward them. So she and her companions went out between the dragon’s paws. Outside the city, they walked slowly but easily through the desolate land.

As the brassy sun began to rise, it showed a brown and barren landscape, though these were the plains that would bloom and feed the people in autumn and spring. No soft green leaf on tree or plant. No shade or shelter to be gotten from any living thing. The trees stood in bare black witchwood against the horizon, and the glory of gold and red beneath them had crisped away to nothingness.

The sun hung bloatedly huge in the sky. Five people and a child walked under that sun for a little while, then huddled in the scanty shade of a heap of rocks. Kallan opened the sack he carried and pulled out a dove, too gentle to flap and struggle.

“These, so my drinking companion said, were bred and born in Mareja. The faithful fools will try to return.”

“Write what I told you,” Andiene said.

“Do you not want to?”

“I cannot. They never taught me. Why waste learning on a wordless child?”

Kallan took the tiny scraps of thornfruit petals. Using his blood for want of a better ink, he formed the letters carefully. Though he did not know her plans, her message troubled him. “I am returning, and the army of summer marches with me.” He signed them A-R-M; she could call herself Queen of Mareja now; she was no longer the ninth heir. Andiene rolled her ring on them to make her signature, the same one that Nahil could read carved in the palace wall, beside those of her father and brothers, who were dead.

The doves pecked at a bowl of water, drinking before they were set loose to fly north. “Will any live through this summer?” Syresh asked.

“One out of the five might. To ask if we will, would be wiser.”

Kallan spoke lightly, but soon he feared that they would not live. He had never tried to travel in summertime. The others had known even less. They had trusted Andiene, but no magic could shorten the summer.

The air was much dryer than it was in the cellars, the dungeons of the palace. At first it did not seem so hot, but it drew the life from them. Though they drank deep, no water was enough. That night they crossed the river dry-shod, though in winter it would run man-killing swift and deep. When they dug in the dry sand, and waited for the water to slowly rise, only a tiny dampness came, no more, no matter how deep they delved.

“We will not dig in the earth … ” Kallan quoted mockingly, as they scraped deeper and deeper, but the others were too weary to even acknowledge his claim, that all laws must be broken to live.

The plain had been fireswept; the soft ashes puffed into their faces with every step. They found no daytime shelter, and their skin burned raw as though it had been blistered by the flames themselves. They shared out the last of their water, and tented their cloaks to make some shade.

Toward noon, the wind rose, blowing fiercely for the first time in four months, and though it was a sign of summer’s end, it added the last stone to their burden. Lenane broke first, under the drying heat, the choking dust, the burning sun. That evening she did not rise, and neither words nor force could bring her to her feet. She looked pinched and old as her mother’s mother might have seemed. She cried out in pain when they touched her scalded skin.

They had been taking turns in carrying Kare all the night before, a heavy enough burden. Now that Lenane had failed, they could go no further.

“No use to travel, in any case,” Syresh said. “It would not make the summer end sooner.”

By nightfall, the wind had risen to a gale, picking up sand and gravel and hurling it along. They turned their backs to it and tried to suck in clean air through masks of cloth, but the fine ashes filtered through and choked them.

Syresh held Lenane, only partly conscious, so that she faced away from the storm. No stars to be seen on this night, but he longed for light. Andiene could call up fire, he thought, and laughed and choked. Fire is all we need! He was almost mad from the endless screech of the storm.

The wind lashed them like a whip set with knives. They had no water, and he knew that none of them, not even Andiene or Kallan, would have the strength to search for more, in the killing daylight.

Lenane still breathed, fighting each breath through her mask. Syresh fought the urge to rub his eyes, burning with sand and grit. The storm cried with the mocking sobs of the grievers of the forest. It screamed with the voice of a woman in bitter agony. It numbed his senses, deafened him, so that he scarcely realized when it died down.

Ilbran began to laugh, high cracking laughter out of a dry throat. Kallan joined him. Have they gone mad? Syresh wondered dully. Then the first warm drops of rain began to fall.