The Song of Andiene

CHAPTER 7



In the doubtful shelter of a stranger’s doorway, Ilbran waited, alone and helpless. Nothing for him but recapture and death if the grizane did not return. Easy to despair, on this sleepless night. He flinched violently as the door swung open. “Here, take this,” the grizane said, and thrust a bundle of cloth into his hands.

“For me? Did I need new clothes?”

“Of course. These are shabby, but not torn. They will hide the marks of what they did to you.”

Ilbran held the clothes uncertainly. To sort them out, to tell what was tunic sleeve, what was trouser leg, was more difficult than he would have guessed. He pulled the trousers on and knotted the drawstring; then he had to kneel down and feel along the pavement to try to find where he had dropped the tunic. Though it was a small matter, it was frustrating and humiliating. The grizane made no move to help him

And the tunic sleeves were too tight—painful to pull them over the bruises and burns. “Did you find the clothes you needed?” he asked the other.

“Yes, and wide and long to fit over my own garments.” The grizane’s voice slipped up into a high cracked falsetto. “Tell me. You know the ways of your people. Does this sound as it should?”

“A little lower, maybe less shrill. You do not want to be memorable, merely ordinary.”

“How does this sound? Good enough?” Ilbran nodded. The grizane’s voice quavered still, but not as high, an old woman’s broken voice. “We have a chance then. Try to get some sleep.”

Ilbran shook his head. “I cannot.” He sat and waited. The night was long.

***

Morning came with the sound of voices and footsteps. Ilbran and the grizane left the doorway and walked randomly through the streets, waiting till high noon, when the gates would be crowded with people going out to the fields. They chose the eastern gate, farthest from Ilbran’s own quarter.

That was the time of terror. In one morning of blindness, Ilbran’s hearing had sharpened. He heard the voices of the guards, their loud laughter. He heard the clop of horses’ hoofs, the mounted guards ready to pursue anyone who escaped. He heard his own footsteps, boots on pavement, seeming unnaturally loud.

Imagining all eyes turning toward him, drawn by that sound, he tried to step more softly, and stumbled. Only the grizane’s grip on his wrist kept him upright. He tried to put on an idiot’s grin—a sightless stare came naturally enough. He heard voices in front of him. “Traveling to Montrubeja, sir. Out to pull lanara thread, sir.”

“Go on,” the guard said. “Pass. Go on. Go on.” The grizane dragged Ilbran forward. “Well, good mother, where are you going?” the guard asked. His voice was young and light, not taking his duties too seriously.

“Out to the blaggorn fields, for straw to mend my roof, if there is any left. With my useless grandson to help me. Come on!” The grizane gave Ilbran’s arm a jerk that nearly pulled his already sprained shoulder from its socket.

“Good luck,” the guard called after them. “Down by the marshes, it’s harder gleaning, but it won’t be so brittle after the summer.”

So they passed through the gates. Outside, they walked in silence. Though Ilbran listened, he heard no sound of the hunt rising behind him. It was good, so good to be alive, good in spite of all that had happened. He had not known that so much pleasure was possible from breathing sweet air and feeling warm sunlight on his skin. This was the day of my death, he thought in wonder. He followed the grizane gladly.

In a little while, they turned from the main road. Ilbran felt the sun hot on the left side of his face. They were traveling north, farther north than he had ever been.

Something caught his hand, tearing it like a courser’s claw, leaving a poisoned burning from wrist to fingertip. Ilbran put the wound to his lips and tried to draw out the pain. “Follow me closely,” the grizane said. “The thornfruit hems us in on either side.”

Ilbran sniffed the spicy air. Sure enough, there was a sweet scent, like thornfruit candy fresh from the baker’s oven. The sun burned almost as fiercely as aftersummer which follows the first storms of autumn. “Is there any water?” he asked.

“There is a spring ahead,” the grizane replied. “A good one that does not fail, even in the heat of summer.”

They turned from the path to a narrower trail, where the thornfruit plucked at sleeve and leg. The spring lay cold in a circle of stones. Ilbran felt his way over them and drank greedily, scooping up the water in his hands.

“Here is the traveler’s cup,” the grizane said. “Use it for your last mouthful, at least.”

Ilbran dipped up water and drank, the same as any other mouthful of water would be. He turned the wrought-metal cup over in his hands, trying to feel out its shape with his fingers. “Who set it here, I wonder?” he asked idly. The answer chilled him.

“Ones who were no blood and bone of your kind. Before your ancestors entered this land, a thousand years ago. It is part of the enchantment of the earth.” Ilbran dropped the cup as though it were a snake writhing in his hand. It clanged against a rock and rolled away.

“An unthankful way to treat a gracious gift,” the grizane said. “The pavement you walk on was laid, the houses you live in were raised before your kind walked the earth. Why should little things be different?”

“Perhaps I notice them more because I am in the company of a magician,” Ilbran said. “It is good water, but where is the food to follow?”

“We will walk long before we find food.”

Ilbran laughed aloud. “When you were raiding the clothes chest in that lord’s house, why did you not think to rob the larder too?”

There was a strange note in the grizane’s voice. “You can still laugh, after what has happened?”

“Why not?” Ilbran’s mood had swung to recklessness again. “I do not know why you wish for me to follow you, but I am glad to be alive. About now, they would have been scattering my ashes to the four ways of the earth. This is not the time for grief—though I will not forget. When you have no more need of me, I had thought that I might find my way to the forest folk, my mother’s people. I have heard tales that they would welcome even someone who was maimed or blind.”

“That would be a wise choice,” said the grizane. “The forest people are like any others, in spite of the tales told of them. They welcome strangers eagerly, and even a blind man would find a home and a wife and some work within his skill. But that is not for you yet.”

As they followed the winding paths to the north, Ilbran’s mind was filled with those words. What does he want with me? I am but a useless weight to stumble behind him. They walked slowly. He had time to think of his future. He could tell what direction they traveled by the sun’s warmth on his face, as though his skin had eyes. When the air grew cool, he knew that sunset was near. If he listened intently, he could hear the padding footfalls of the grizane in front of him.

Little accomplishments. Worthless ones. The grizane brought him food, sweet thornfruit from the ungleaned bushes, mealy blaggorn, easy to chew raw and unground, not like the flinty grain that grew near to the sea. Ilbran ate it gladly, but his thoughts were grim. Had I been alone, I would have starved while this food surrounded me.



But the grizane found food enough for them both. He walked slowly and rested often, keeping to a pace that Ilbran could follow without stumbling. In three days they came out on the wide north road.

“Wait here,” the grizane said. “I must set wards on this road, so that my fellows will not enter and be caught in the same trap that seized me.”

Ilbran had learned to obey without questioning. He stood at the side of the road and listened to the tuneless chanting, the footsteps padding up and down the dusty roadway. That one sees with my eyes. Dark magic, but I made the bargain, and made it willingly. I would have died by sword or fire. He walked back and forth restlessly. Grown accustomed to his night, he could step boldly, and did not often fall.

Then the air was silent. The grizane came to him, his voice slow and weary. “It is done, the first of three. Now, time for another part of the bargain. Do you remember what you swore to me? ‘Anything and everything?’”

His thin fingers gripped Ilbran’s wrist before he could answer. Though the touch filled Ilbran with terror, he did not try to escape. “‘Anything and everything,’ I swore, and I will pay my debts,” he said.

Once again, he felt the pain of torn flesh, the weariness of great age, and then the otherness faded away, and he could see again. Blinding gold and blue and green! Thickets of green, jeweled with red fruit and silver thorns. Why even the dust on the wayside leaves seemed to sparkle with light. He babbled incoherent words of wonderment.

“Calm your ecstasies,” the grizane said. “Do you remember our bargain? I could have left you here sightless and alone, and not have been forsworn. Now I ask you that you will guide me, and help me in what I must do, until I can call one of my own kind to me.”

Ilbran’s new-found sight blurred with tears. “Lord, I could follow you to the ends of the earth and it would not repay you.”

“Do not thank you for your sight,” the grizane said. “I gave it back to save myself, a selfish act. I have seen ones who began with a simple act of legality and ended running on all four feet through the wide forest.” He said nothing to explain what he meant, but the bright day seemed a little colder as he spoke. Ilbran did not question him.

They turned to the east, following the thornfruit paths, Ilbran leading the grizane now. The gray one had put off the black servant’s robe and wore the garments that had given his kind their name. “They are my own,” he said. “They give me strength. I need no disguise now.”

At last, they came to the wide eastern road that went up into the mountains. “If you would aid me,” the grizane said, “you must give me the gift of sight again. This road must be warded like the others.”

Ilbran hesitated, warring within himself, fear against trust. At last, he held out his hands to the other one. “I will give you what I can.”

The chanting seemed briefer this time. The pain was less and lasted for only a moment. Then the darkness overwhelmed him. He listened to the grizane’s voice and trembled in fear. It would be so easy for him to walk away. There would be no way to follow, no way to fight against his magic. The night held more terror for Ilbran now than when he had thought that he would live in night for all his life.

But no more time for those imaginings. The grizane took his hands, and his eyes were his own again. “You give up your sight too easily,” the gray one said.

“I trust you.”

“You should not. I have been greatly tempted, knowing what a halting and useless life I will live. And if I died, holding your gift of sight, then it would die with me, and you would walk blind in the bright world.”

“You will not die,” Ilbran said confidently. He stared a newborn stare at the dusty road with strange characters scrawled across it from side to side.

“I can read, a little,” he said, “but those characters are none that I have ever seen.”

“They are none that your people have ever read or written,” was the reply. “The flesh had rotted off the bones of the ones who last spoke those words, before your kind ever entered the land.”

Ilbran did not question him further. They turned back to the south, circling the city, and as they traveled now, the grizane seemed turned inward on himself, brooding or thinking. He made short answers, or none at all, to any questions that Ilbran dared to ask him. They walked the footpaths through the blaggorn fields, sparse black kernels to be gleaned from the old stalks, the new crop still milk-green and heavy on the bowed stems.

“We will be on the south road, tomorrow,” the grizane said one evening, talkative for the first time in many days. “Once I place a ward on it, and set up a calling to bring one of my own kind to me, I will have no need of you.”

They were waiting for a brace of grasskits to finish roasting in the coals of the fire. Ilbran had killed them with thrown stones, a skill he was improving as they traveled. He stirred the fire carefully, heaping up more coals. Then he asked, “Would you not wish me to stay till your … till one of your own comes?”

“If you please,” the grizane said indifferently. There was a long silence. Then he turned to Ilbran. His hood was pulled low over his forehead and shadowed his ruined eyes. “You have served me well, and trusted me. Why?”

Ilbran’s answer came promptly. He had rehearsed it for many days, waiting for a chance to speak. “Because you are honorable. You have work that you must do; I know how easy it is to find reasons to do what we want. I have seen what it is like to be blind. By the terms of our bargain, you could have kept my sight, but you gave it back freely. You trusted me. And so, I do not understand you, or even know if you are human, but I love you and would follow you and help you. I have no people now, nothing to do. All that I know is fishing, and that is useless to me now.”

Ilbran took a deep breath. His words stumbled faster. The grizane remained silent.

“I know I could join those who gather thornfruit, or harvest blaggorn in season, and live every minute watching for the kingsmen to recognize me. Or I could go into the forest and find a warm welcome there—or have my soul torn out and fed to the spirits of the earth, more likely. But I owe you a debt, and you have need of me, I think. I have seen wonders in the time that I have been with you, and I wish to see more.”

He waited for an answer. Grasskits chittered and rustled through the dry grass. Far off, a night-crake gave its grating cry. At last, the answer came.

“You may come with me,” the grizane said. “After I ward the southern road, I will turn north again. Carvalon is a fortnight’s travel through the highlands above the forest. It lies in a wild country, but there is little to fear from evil creatures. Outlaws live there, but then, what else are we?”

“What do your people do there, Lord?” Ilbran asked.

“We study. Those who lived here before you came did not write on lanara petals that rot and fail, but carved their words into the stones. With much study, they can be understood, and we learn what this land truly is.”

“What do you mean? The land is what it is.”

“Look up at the sky. What do you see?”

“The starweb, not the purest, but well formed. Soon it will be winter.”

The grizane spoke without anger. “You fool, describe what you see. As you would to one who had never gazed at the sky.”

“I see narrow streaks of light, weaving a pattern of light across the sky,” Ilbran said carefully. “They change from night to night, so gradually that you can scarcely see the difference. In the course of a month, they will change from a black sky, to witches-hair cobwebs, to regular patterns, like lace, or netting. And now they are like lace, but poorly made lace, not fit to sell.”

“Have you wondered why the webbing disappears in summer, and there are only dim spots of light shining in the sky? Why the patterns are finest and most complex in dead of winter? Why the patterns change from month to month, and year to year?”

“That is the way things are.”

The grizane sighed, and seemed to change the subject. “Have you never questioned the meaning of the Law of the Land? ‘We will not sow, we will not plant, we will not set one stone atop another?’ Have you ever wondered why they read ‘the measure of a man’ when every child is born, and when it is named?”

Ilbran shook his head. “It is the Law.”

“What do you think became of the people who came before your kind?”

“The evil in the world rose up and overwhelmed them.”

“Not quite so,” the grizane said. “Some of them became the evil in the world, or at least a part of it. The forests are their prisons. We bound them there with strait and heavy bonds. But what begins the changing, we do not know, nor do we know why it begins. The houses you live in were built before we ever entered the land, and we entered the land while your kin were wandering in some distant world. Time after time, people have come, like waves that roll up onto the beach and sink into the dry sand. We are what is left of one wave, no children, man and woman become the same, doomed to live out our long, long lives watching the patterns of the stars, dying one by one.

“Then there were other people,” he whispered. Ilbran was not even sure if he was speaking to be heard, or only talking to himself. “One race came into the land when the forces of changing ran highest. Their children failed and were gone, a weak stock. They left no mark on the land.”

Ilbran struggled to understand. “So of all who came into the land, who prospered? The forest folk only?”

“The forest folk, and your own kind, the Rejiseja. They have lived in the land for a thousand years, as proud and foolish as when they first entered.”

A note of pride came into the grizane’s own voice. “That is our doing. We taught you the Law, how you should live on the land, but not of it. You glean the grain that the wind has sown. You live in houses built by other men’s hands. You do not bury your dead deep in the earth, but lay them on the high rocks for the golden ones to devour. In every way, you live on the surface of things, and so you have lived but have not been changed.”

Ilbran shook his head. As the grizane spoke, the things he had known all his life seemed to fall into place to form a greater pattern. Then the pattern dissolved and was lost. He was left only with a great sense of weary time, a thousand years—and who knew how long before that? He was overwhelmed by visions of people fair and dark, bright embroidered clothes and sober gray robes, group by group marching into the world, one by one washed away by the tide, like a child’s castle built in the sand.

“These riddles are beyond me,” he said.

“It does not matter,” the grizane said. “I spoke for myself. It has been long since I dealt with men. But if you wish to come to Carvalon, you may. You will do the same work that you would do elsewhere, but you will be far from your own kind. You will learn to harvest thornfruit without tearing your arms to tatters. You will learn to strip blaggorn from the stems without spilling half the crop on the ground. You will learn to felt lanara petals, and dye the cloth with grireed. You may stay as long as you wish.”

The grasskits had roasted. Ilbran pulled them from the coals. “I will go with you to Carvalon.”

Next morning, they stood on the southern road. “We shall be far from the city by nightfall,” said the grizane. Then came the moment that Ilbran dreaded. On such a light-filled morning, to be plunged into darkness was doubly horrifying. The very air seemed more chill, and the chanting of the grizane seemed to come from a great distance. Ilbran forced himself to walk away and lean against a tree, outwardly at ease.

The birds and insects had stopped their singing. There was a sound he could not name, a muffled blow, a soft cry. “Lord, are you well?” Ilbran called.

“Come to me, but crawl along the ground,” the grizane answered in a faint whisper. Ilbran started forward, uncomprehending. Then something tugged at his sleeve, like the hand of a friend claiming his attention. Arrows! He threw himself on the ground. The kingsmen had caught them unaware.

He kept himself flat to the ground. He heard the muffled thunk of two more arrows striking the dirt near him. The dust he stirred up choked him, and his sense of direction failed. “Lord?” he asked.

“Here,” was the barely audible reply.

Ilbran changed his direction, crawling his way along the ground. He touched clothing, at last. He felt along the grizane’s body. Fingertips touched fingertips, and he could see again.

There was no time to waste on wonder, for the arrow had gone through the grizane’s chest. Ilbran reached out his hand to touch it, and then drew back.

“No use,” said the grizane. “No more use for your gift.” A shadow of a smile touched his lips, and then was lost in his pain.

He coughed once, shallowly, and bright blood sprang from his lips. Though he choked on it, he forced himself to speak.

“Go … Leave … me … Carvalon … Danger … Dragon … The broken bridge … mended again.” He made a great effort to speak plainly, though his voice grew fainter every moment. “The break in the web … The first changing. She is the greatest danger your people have known.”

His eyes were sightless, but his whole face seemed to express urgent need. Then he shuddered and was still.

Ilbran had no time to grieve. Under his hand, the flesh grew cold and gray. For an instant, it seemed harder, stone-like, then face and hands crumbled, shattered, and fell to nothingness. The robe crumpled in on itself. Nothing lay in the southern road but a heap of gray rags pierced through with a bright-feathered arrow.