The Song of Andiene

CHAPTER 5



Andiene turned from the light and warmth of the fisherman’s cottage to follow the harsh whisper that clawed at her mind. “Come, come,” it called. It was dry like the scurry of rats running over dead leaves. It crackled like the flames that devour the kindling twigs. It was filled with power like the wildfire that runs across the summer-dry plains.

She had fought it so long. She had hidden from it. Now, there seemed no more reason to fight against it.

She picked her way down the narrow sea-cliff path, a rock and dirt trail irregularly stepped with stones. The storm blinded her with wind-driven rain. The rocks were wet and slippery. The air was cold and numbed her fingers. But there was no room in her for fear.

It was so much easier to go where she was led, not to question, not to fight. Though she stumbled in the soft sand, she rose and went on. Waves washed against her and retreated, eating the sand from under her feet. She did not even notice when her hand unclenched itself and let the two ringstones fall into the sea.

A boat bobbed nearby, moored to a rock. The water was deeper there. Andiene caught at the rope to hold herself up, as a wave broke over her head. The salt stung her eyes and blurred her vision like the tears she had never shed. She blinked to try to clear her eyes, as she looked up to the high cliff. Flames leaped up like a beacon fire, and the men moving at cliff top were outlined darkly against the light.

The knot that tethered the boat to the rock had been tied strongly and well; Andiene’s hands were too weak. She tore at the rope with her teeth, a musty taste on her tongue like clothes laid in a damp chest. The torchlights were halfway down the cliff path before the knot gave way.

Then she climbed clumsily over the side of the boat; it dipped and swayed under her weight. She knelt in it, hardly knowing what she did. When she turned and looked back, the fire and torchlights were farther away, slipping still more quickly away.

Though Andiene knew then that she was in the grip of strong magic, she had had no dealings with the sea, so she did not know how fearful it seemed to those on shore who saw a boat with no sail, no oars, slip to sea against the tide.

She huddled in the boat, the dimming firelight behind her, the open sea before her. “No land to the west,” the minstrels had sung. “No land till they came to the edge of the world, the endless waterfall.” Still, the boat steered itself to the west, and she was not afraid. She did not think she had come so far from that blood-stained courtyard to die on the open sea.

The storm cleared. Bright-night was upon the land again, and long threads joined the stars in webs more complex than the lace she had knotted for Kare. Wheels within wheels, intersecting, overlapping—she stared until she could almost understand the pattern. She had not often seen the stars, for her nurse had guarded her carefully. At last, she slept.

The sunrise woke her, dazzling her with more gold than would be found in any king’s hoard or dragon’s cave. She looked north, east, south, west, and saw nothing but light gleaming from the waves.

A great sea-hawk, gliding far above, saw her, closed his wings, and plummeted toward her, claws spread as wide as a man’s long fingers. In the moment before he reached her, he saw that he had found no fish. The great leathery wings beat and spread, and slowly he lifted himself into the air again. He hung above her all the day long, his shadow passing over her as he circled the wide sea winds.

Night came, and the sky patterns were not so perfect. The threads that joined the stars were drawn more randomly, like the crazy webs of poison-fanged spiders that spin in dark corners.

Another day came. Andiene dipped at the sea-water and tasted it, and knew that it would make her thirst crueler. She waited patiently. A sea courser followed behind the boat, a great beast that could tear a fisherman’s net to tatters without knowing it, or could tear a hole in a fisherman’s boat as easily, and for the same reason, as a man would tap open an egg.

He followed her all the day, and by his very presence kept away the more mindless hunters, but made no move to attack.

Night came, and morning, the third day. Andiene was left alone, the caller silent. The little boat drifted in the waves like any other piece of flotsam. She looked to the west and saw white foam against sharp-toothed rocks and tall cliffs. Her boat was caught in the grip of the tide, driving in toward those rocks, shattering against them, throwing her into the water. She fought the waves, the unsteady waves, the drowning waves. Then her mind cleared and calmed. She lay still and let them bear her up, and carry her to land.

They brought her to the safest place on that wide shore. The rocks thinned and were gone. The waves lifted her up onto the broad beach and left her to lie on the stones and cough out salt water.

At last Andiene raised her head and looked around her as a new-born child would look. “No land to the west,” the minstrels had sung. “The empty circle of waves, the bitter sea.” Still, this land was firm underneath her, and she did not question it. It was a bleak world. Black beach stretched to meet gray-green cliffs. It was a beach of stones, hard and bruising to her feet. With every surge of the waves, those stones roared against each other, grinding finer and finer.

She looked up to the cliffs draped in green on every ledge or crack that gave roots room. This land nourished some life, at least. Through a cleft in those cliffs, a stream ran down to the sea. If she followed it, it would give her a path to the highlands.

What do I do? What do I do first? She looked around her almost eagerly. The mindless daze that had gripped her was gone, and she felt that she was free at last of the shadowlands that had surrounded her.

So she turned first to simple things. Her robe hung soddenly heavy, clammy cold. She untied it and wrung the salt water from it, spreading it in the sun to dry. Her hand felt strange and light. She looked down, and looked again in dismay, for her signet ring, proof that she was a king’s daughter, was gone. No glint of gold caught her eye anywhere on the beach, though she scrabbled and hunted among the rocks. Her hand bled from a long scrape. The rock that had shattered her boat must have torn the ring from her hand. It had sunk unnoticed into the sea.

Its loss angered her. That ring was no mere symbol. If men went by law, it could be her passport back to a palace. It would open the way, and then the city itself would speak, and know her for its rightful sovereign. She still clung to that belief, though now the wide sea stretched between her and her birthright.

But the ring was gone, and rage would do her no good. She was thirsty. She went to seek fresh water. The stream was cold and clear, running over rocks in rapids, and pooling in deep stillnesses. She bent over a pool and drank long and deep of the sweet water, and washed the dried salt from her skin. Her weariness was greater than her hunger. She would search for food after she had slept.

When Andiene woke, her hunger was greater, but she did not know how to satisfy it. She looked up the deep gorge, its walls draped with flowers. Sangry, bittery, and eye-of-the-sun grew red and orange and yellow. Skyglass, sleepbalm, and sweetsnow grew blue and purple and white. She knew their names, for they sprang in the palace courtyards from every handspan of unpaved soil. But they gave her no promise of food; she did not know their uses.

She knelt on a clump of sleepbalm, oblivious to the crushed leaves, and watched the sparkling water, and the slim red fish that lay bankside in mats of roots, then flashed quicker than a frightened heartbeat into the shelter of the opposite bank.

The air was filled with a sharp scent like the paste that Nane had used on scrapes and bruises. Andiene remembered … just a few days before … she had come running down the stone stairs that led from courtyard to the cellars, slipping and rolling down the whole flight.

Nane, her nurse, had rubbed her with heal-all paste from sole to crown, till none of her brothers or sisters cared to be in the same room with her. Her face grew more grim, as she remembered, but she did not weep.

Something touched her mind like the brush of a cobweb. Then the calling began.

“Come, child,” it whispered. Pictures flashed through her mind, of peace and comfort, love, laughter, a home with fire in winter and cool refuge in summer.

It drew her for a moment, then she laughed. “Find some other bait for your trap,” she shouted.

The call came again, that dry powerful whisper. “Come, Andiene, come. Your kin have been slaughtered. Blood calls for blood. Your benefactors have been taken and tortured. Do you not owe them revenge?”

Visions came again, scenes of torture and bloodshed, ones she had seen, others she had never seen. Nahil was in all of them, smiling as he ordered his men to kill. And in one scene, a gentler one that roused her to greater rage, he smiled as he watched his lady, Amile, cradle her new-born son, the heir to the kingdom.

The call came from up the green gorge. “Will you let him live in peace and joy? Come and you will have revenge.”

Andiene clenched her right hand around a tuft of sangry leaves. The saw-toothed blades cut deep. The pain cleared her mind, the calling died away, but when she opened her hand, a dozen cuts sprang open. She sank her hand in the cold water. If she held her fingers curved slightly and motionless, the pain was less. Bloodfish gathered and lipped her skin curiously, but flickered away at the slightest motion of her fingers.

Silence. A watchful silence. No sound echoing in mind or air. So easy a victory? Hunger reminded her of her first need. The tri-fold Gifts, Tree and Grain and Thorn, were nowhere to be seen. All she could see were the fish that flickered to and fro, and how was she to catch them?

An answer came, a memory of her brother boasting to the younger children of his trip to the eastern mountains with a tutor who believed that even lords of a kingdom ought to know how to survive in the wilderness.

By the time that the sun had passed its height, Andiene regretted her idea. She lay flat on her belly at the edge of the pool, her right arm submerged up to her shoulder. At first, she had imagined touches that were not there. Now, her arm was so numb that she doubted that she could feel a fish brushing against her fingertips.

She raised her head, cautiously, so she could look down into the pool. Something moved there. Her hand clutched it, moving swifter than she had known that she could move. She flung the fish out onto the wide bank, and plunged after it to catch it and strike it with a stone before it could flap itself back into the water. Then Andiene looked at it and laughed with triumph as she turned to shout up the gorge, defying the power that lay waiting.

“I can feed myself! Do you hear me? I can feed myself! And when I choose, I will win my own revenge! I will build me a boat to take me home to my kingdom!”

The fish was not one of the swift slim bloodfish, but large, gray-brown, with long tentacles around its mouth, a sanderling. Andiene had spent long hours in the kitchens, standing out of the way of the servants, watching, so she knew what to do. She hacked off the tough unscaled hide, with a sharp stone and cut the fish open. Then she looked at it, half-sickened by her work, her stomach rebelling at the thought of eating it raw.

An answer came to her, more memories of idle talk. The descent from river gorge to beach was more difficult than the climb had been, but she stepped carefully, and did not slip. Flint struck against flint and flashed out sparks countless times, but the dry sea-grass that she had gathered did not catch fire.

She threw the flints aside, at last, and looked at the fish doubtfully. After she had starved for a few more days, she might be hungry enough for it.

Then, as Andiene abandoned her attempt to draw fire from the rocks, the unlearned knowledge came to her once again. Not understanding what she did, she set hands together, fingertip to fingertip, palm to palm. As she drew them slowly apart, flames leaped up between them. The sea-grass caught and burned, with twistings of blue and green among the yellow flames.

Though her hands trembled and she could not control them, she fed the fire with dry driftwood, broiled the fish, then banked up the coals with ashes. She had learned her first lesson in the use of power, that it is more wearying than the hardest labor a man might do.

As she was picking the last tiny bones from the fish, the calling came again. “Come, Andiene, come. You are rightful ruler and the people will not deny you.”

She saw herself in robes embroidered in silk and gold, ruling, judging, waging war. She walked the white corridors of the palace of Mareja. She heard a minstrel sing her praises, the Song of Andiene. The kings to north and south sent tribute in dread of her. She was Lady of fire and air and water, holding power in her hands.

Andiene rose to her feet. She took an uncertain step up the gorge, another one, and then stopped. Was this the way to gain power, to move to another’s will like a puppet on a string? Anger freed her. She struck out with all her mind’s force, and the link that bound them stretched and was gone, as a spiderweb will stretch and then turn to tattered cords.

Almost, she longed to have the voice, the presence back, to fill the emptiness and silence. She laughed at her own folly, and stretched herself upon the sand to watch the stars. It was as though she had walked in a dream for all her life, and had only just awakened.

She had paid a heavy price for that wakening, to be sure. When she slept, she dreamed of the blood-soaked courtyard, dreams of terror from which she could not wake.

In daytime, though that terror was gone, the thought of the fisherman’s family troubled her. In the few days that they had sheltered her, she had seen more love than she had seen in all her twelve years of life. She had abandoned them to an uncertain fate. If she had been able to summon power at will, she could have stayed and fought to protect them, as rulers should protect their people. But the power had eluded her, or else she had been afraid to use it.

She thought of it often, the great power she had used to free herself from Nahil’s men, the little power she had used to start a fire to cook her meal. It was an unknown thing, coming to her with no warning. No stories or songs had ever told of sorcery—and sorcery it must have been—acting without tools, herbs, incantations.

She found no reason to use her power again. She searched until she found a hollow branch fallen from the cliff far above, to fill with ashes and coals to carry with her, so she would not need to call fire from the air.

As the days went by, the caller remained silent. Once or twice she reached out with her mind, in a way she did not understand. She could feel no other presence.

The life she lived was easy enough, though bitter hard compared to the princess’s life she had been born to. The sanderlings grew no warier. She learned which plants could be eaten. After another storm, a sea-hawk’s nest, built out of season, drifted ashore. She fried its eggs, one by one, on a great flat stone.

And so Andiene grew thinner and taller and stronger. She learned her land well—a day’s walk north and a day’s walk south, to where the cliffs ran into the sea and she could not pass. The land fed her, but not easily enough to give her leisure to think to the future. She lived, for the most part, like a wordless animal.

Still, the caller was silent. Her impatience grew. She longed to war against his harsh subtle voice.

The river’s gorge was steeper as it went inland. As Andiene grew more skilled in climbing, she traveled further. One day, she did not turn back. She built a fern fire to cook her dinner at the very edge of the high cliffs, and lay down to sleep afterwards in a clump of springy, sweet-smelling bittery.

The stars had moved into the most perfect patterns she had ever seen, circles within circles like the Great Dance.

Her quarry, the one who had called her, was near. She would find him on the morrow. Her thoughts were full of excitement touched with fear, more fear of the unknown than fear of any harm that could come to her.

She did not examine her motives closely. The one who had called her—she wanted to find him, to know what he was. Still, she was drawn by more than simple curiosity. Perhaps the promises of power and knowledge had touched her deeper than she realized.

The next day was bright and chill. That sign of approaching winter would have troubled one who was wiser in the ways of the land, but Andiene was ignorant. She had lived all her life in thick-walled rooms, where winter was warm, and even the heat of summer was eased.

The steep slopes were hard to climb. Leaving the river far below her, she followed a rough track along the side of the cliff. After a while, she drew her robe up through her belt, kilting it to her knees for easier traveling.

The trail became rougher, until it was hard to know if it were a true path, or merely a chance shaping of the cliff. If it were a path, it was for creatures braver or nimbler than humankind. Andiene had grown surefooted, but at every step she took, the edge of the cliff broke loose and fell in clods, splashing far below into the river.

When it crumbled, she stopped and pressed herself against the cliffside, clinging to handholds and tufts of grass as though the whole path might crumble from under her feet. Sangry leaves slashed her hands when she moved unwarily, but she paid them no heed; they made clean cuts that healed well.

At last the path widened into a broad way that even the blind or halt could have followed with ease, but it was a level way, stretching on and on between the sky and the earth, fifty paces above the river, eight paces below the cliff top. Andiene studied the wall above her, and began to climb.

It was a better place for climbing than most, with handholds and footholds deep-cut into the gray stone. Since her fingers and toes were small, they found notches and ledges where a man would have found none. Still, she did not dare look up or down. She lost all knowledge of time.

What seemed hours later, she put both arms over the edge of the cliff and dragged herself up, lying quietly as her breath and heartbeat slowed, before she opened her eyes to look around her in wonder.

She could see the bright ocean, and the cliff’s edge that overlooked it; the tableland stretched inland half a league, perhaps, and as far south as eye could see.

The air had grown suddenly chill. Thin gray clouds hid the sun and sky, and as she watched, fog rose from the sea and hid the waves. She had found a cold gray world, like an island floating on the mist. No flowers bloomed in the gray-green meadow, not even sweet-snow which grows in all places. She was perhaps a few hundred paces from where the tufted grass met the forest’s edge.

Andiene looked at that forest with dread. She had listened to the traveler’s tales told in the great hall, the stories of the ones who run in the forest. She knew of the red grievers that weep as though they bore all the sorrow of the world, and drink men’s blood. She knew of the simas, that wear the guise of a friend to lure travelers to a lonely death. She had heard the stories of the rissan, the waylayers, all the hunters and trappers of men.

No wise one would enter a forest without a good reason, and a map, and the certainty that a safehold could be found before nightfall.

And this that lay before her was a true forest. Andiene had seen trees in the city, small ones, friendly ones, lanara and spicewood that grow where people live. These trees were a different breed. Even to her untrained eyes, they bore the look of ancient days.

She tilted her head up, and up. Surely the sky rested on their strong branches. If they measured their lives in years, they had been sturdy and tall before the Rejiseja, her people, entered the land.

Now they were so huge that their hollow trunks would have served for houses. The trunks were gray, and the leaves were blue-gray, huge five-fingered leaves, like clumsy swollen hands. Great strands of pale moss hung from the branches like hair. Tendrils of mist rose up from the earth between their trunks. No man had ever given these trees a name.

Andiene looked down at her hands, almost expecting to see them gray and bleached of color, but her skin was still brown, darkened from golden by the sun. Shivering in the cold, she wondered if she would ever see the sun again.

In the meadow, there were fallen tree-trunks, as high as houses, not quite so long as a day’s journey. She gave them only a passing glance. There was a feeling of emptiness in her. The calling had come from this place, or from the forest beyond. She had expected to be challenged when she reached it, but there was nothing. Or almost nothing. There was a feeling of something, some purpose watching her. The wind was rising and beating the grass sideways, driving the fog inland. It seemed to whisper at her: “Look again, blindling, look again.”

The tree trunk lying nearest her was gnarled and almost branchless, only a few twisted stubs remaining, its bark rough and scaly, overgrown with gray and green mosses. As she looked at it, she saw a certain strangeness, then two green slits widened and became eyes, eyes with great weariness, knowingness, cruelness.

“Dragon,” she whispered in awe, as the tree-trunk’s shape became unmistakable; the huge body narrow compared to its length, the legs like stubs of branches, the furled ribbed wings like shattered branches, the gray moss covering the bark-like scales. The dragon’s jaws opened and white flames flickered out.

He was not one of the red dragons of the south that guard their hoard of gold and jewels and dead men’s bones. They were mindless lizards compared to him. Though he seemed colder, the white-hot flame that burned in him would have turned one of them to ashes.

Andiene was silent and motionless. Though she did not look into his eyes, she felt that green stare on her.

The heat from his breath made her step back a pace, as he opened his great-fanged jaws and spoke with a voice that was powerful, but dry like the scratching of rats running through the fallen leaves.

“Welcome to this land, O daughter of mine enemies. I have waited long for you to come.”