Magesong (3 page)

The Monjor's main house was the biggest of thevalley.  Old
Monjor in his day had divided the ancient family hall into two rooms, and his
son Kurnt added the three separate bedrooms, each with its own small brick
hearth in the corner.  That was when Aksel, not to be outdone, hired Celvake to
help him build the two upstairs bedrooms along with the interior stairwell.  Those
stairs were still talked about in Hyerkin, and the way Celvake told the story
of building them made a bear hunt seem tame.

Syliva discovered as she entered the Monjor house that
Kestrin had arrived before her and had busied herself in the kitchen preparing
the soup that, while it would not cure the grippe, would at least allow the
family to rise from their beds and take care of themselves.  Kestrin juggled
soup stirring, herb chopping, and root grinding, did not hear Syliva enter the
room, and started when she spoke, turning fast and breathing in audibly, her
wavy red hair swishing, a glare beneath black eyebrows softening at once.

"Do you — I'm sorry, dear, I didn't mean to frighten
you.  Do you need alderclove for the soup?"

"No," Kestrin said, turning back to finish the
grinding.  "I still had some of that you gave me last week."

Kestrin had always looked older than she was.  She moved and
spoke abruptly, with a nervous way that made some folk keep their distance from
her.  Still, she had already had suitors call on her father and could be in
courtship if she wished, but she had no eye for young men.  Her piercing grey
eyes were always on Syliva, always learning.

No particular event had marked the beginning of her
apprenticeship with Syliva, for they had been special friends since her birth. 
She had been only hours old when her mother died, and her father had let Syliva
take her home for the first month while he recovered from his grief.  Her
mother had conceived unexpectedly late in life, and so her father was old
enough to be her grandfather.  The little red-haired girl began following
Syliva on her calls in the village as soon as she could walk fast enough to
keep up, and Syliva's love for her was natural as breathing.

She watched her protégé mix the herbs into the soup and
reduce it to its best potency.  Kestrin looked at her.

"That's exactly how I would have done it," Syliva
said, tasting a drop of the broth.  "I do believe you don't even need me
here today.  Well, you keep everything they give you.  It will most likely be a
slab of butter."

"That's alright.  Father is eating nothing but
flatbread and butter anyway."

"How much flour do you have?"

"We have enough for about a dozen loaves."

"Is that all?"

"Yes," Kestrin said, unconcerned, ladling soup
into clay drinking cups.  "We still have a keg of cheese in the cellar,
though, and can trade some to the Barlsens for millet and meal.  But my father
says we'll soon have to start feeding brambles to the goats."

"Tell him to bring a nanny or two over to my house.

My son Jonn is going to take all of ours up to the high
valley to look for good grazing.  He can tend a few extra."

"I'll tell father."

"Oh, and could you do something for me when you're
finished here?  I must go to the woods this afternoon to look for spindlewort
and wild nionae.  Would you be able to go to my house and take care of the
stranger until I return?"

"I'm done here now," Kestrin said hastily, the
glint of intrigue in her eyes.  "I'll go there right away."

"No need to hurry."

Syliva left the Monjors and walked along the axis of the
village to Celvake's house, gladdened to have a reason not to bring Kestrin,
for she wanted to go to the pond.  After looking at the carpenter's hand in
bright sunlight and finding no insect bites, no lumps, no swelling, reddening,
or bruising, she gave him extract of iollaheat and said a farewell, leaving
Lorendal by the path to Hyerkin.

She soon turned away from the trail, walking north by west
across what was once and would be again a pasture of tall wild grasses, now a
dry patch of dirt and straw-colored stubble.  Above the bare poplars bordering
the field and the blue firs beyond, the Skialfanmir rose from a heavily-wooded
ridge, a seamless tower of grey and gold stone soaring two thousand feet above
the sea.  It was the highest of all the pinnacles running northward along the
coast, and the Poem of Ancient Truths made some mention that it was the home of
the spirit of the valley, the spot where the land touched the sky being an
in-between place.

The poplars looked sickly, the firs dull at the end of
winter.  She passed them, entering the woodland and following an unmarked way
through the maze of evergreens.  The twist of this pine or the lean of that fir
served as pilots, and she knew that if she missed them she would never find the
grove of willows, for she had tried many times to get to the pond by other ways
and had always got lost.  The forest is strangely hushed, she thought as she
listened to her own soft footfalls on the floor of dried pine needles. 
Something was missing.  There were no birds.

She came to a thick copse of willow trees cradling a natural
well of clear cold water.  This was her place.  She had found it on her own. 
No one in the valley knew of it, and if her own teacher had known she had never
told.  Syliva never planned to keep it forever secret, but she wasn't yet ready
to give up the one part of herself she did not share with anyone.

The water always lay still there, even when a gusty breeze
shook the tops of the willows.  It was a quiet place.

She let out a breath as she passed under the bare branches
and into the sun-splashed clearing.  Out of the earth, between the outcroppings
of lichen-covered rock, a few dry shoots of last year's foxtail peered upward
at her.  She circled the silent spring with twenty quick steps looking for
signs of sprouting spindlewort among the foxtails and the beginnings of furry
catkins on the tips of the willow branches.  She saw none.  And she finally
knew that the land had been truly blighted.  If there were any place in the
valley where things would be growing it would be here.

She sat at the edge of the pool and looked at herself in its
stillness.  She wasn't afraid.  The folk must keep faith with the spirits of
earth and sea and sky.  Winter was hard and unforgiving, but not cruel.  People
could be cruel, but not the world.  And certainly the spirits of people
couldn't be stronger than the spirits of the world.  Certainly not, she
thought, trying to look into the depths of the well.  But an old dry twig fell
from a willow branch into the spring, sending a ripple across the water.

The compulsion to touch it was overwhelming.  He ran his
fingers lightly along its inward-curving side, his breath coming more quickly
now.  Silk.  That was what it felt like, silk, not wood.

He wondered if he should remove it from the trophy room and
place it closer to his own.

Libac looked at his other trophies.  The emerald serpent —
virtually priceless, the gold yeti-mask from Baskillia, the shaman's staff from
the Silekai Isles, the jade bowl from Tassa — a lucky find, he had bought it in
the marketplace for only thirty silver kandars.  But their monetary value was
unimportant to him.  Each piece seemed to hold something of the spirit of its
maker, something completely singular, not like Sorrow of the Angels.  Rastini's
famous masterpiece often moved him as he sat gazing at it late at night in his
library, but Rastini had produced at least eighty paintings, and every week one
of his dozen protégés loosed upon the world another work of the school of
Rastini.  No, his collection was a menagerie of uniqueness.  And it manifested
his own uniqueness.  Even among his peers, the most powerful of the local
nobility, it was proof that he was a singular man.

He thought of Conarra, the inventor from Sevdin.  When they
had first met, Libac knew at once that they were of the same ilk.  Conarra, who
first dreamed of rising above the earth on a winter's morning, suspended
beneath sails of hot air, and then did so. 

He let his hand flow along the dark seamless wood, the last of
many to touch it, perhaps thousands of hands over dozens of generations
polishing it to smoothness.  It looked somewhat like a little house, did it
not?  Convex on its top side, a pointed dome, it was slightly concave on its
five other sides, all the curves flowing together in perfect smoothness with no
hinges, joints, or openings, as if it had grown that way as a seed-case from a
monstrous tree.  It was certainly hollow, though.  One had only to rap on its
surface to know this.  And he could never have hefted it alone had it been
solid.  Yet the wood of the roof was thick enough to support a deep inlay of
ornate gold scrollery.

He had asked his furniture maker to explain the apparent
hollowness.  The reply had been that it was indeed hollow, would have been made
in two pieces and was simply the work of a master craftsman.  The seam where it
had been glued with dowel joinings was undetectable, but he must rest assured
it was there.

Libac had then borrowed his cousin Ranni's most powerful
Syrolian glass, the one he used for dissecting insects, and spent an entire
afternoon scrutinizing the artifact.  With the glass he could make out
imperfections in the wood's grain that were invisible to the naked eye:  tiny
nicks, miniature scratches, signs of weathering of course, yet nothing so
ungainly as a continuous seam, not even one perfectly fitted.

Finding it, of course, had been an unexpected delight.  The
shrine had lain austere with centuries of disuse, the only surviving statuary
being the guardians, each weighing over half a ton.  In some ways the
expedition had been extravagant.  Connara's fee for building and piloting the
new airship had alone exceeded the cost of manning and outfitting the old sloop
for a three-month voyage. And he remembered how the two men working the
propellers had struggled even in the light pre-dawn airs.  They had been lucky
indeed to successfully land on that mountaintop.  Foolish, rather.  And the
descent in the airship had been even more dangerous.  They all could have been
killed.

His hand slowed in its caress of the artifact and drifted
away.  Touching it felt good.  More than good, it felt revitalizing, gave him
some of its own radiance.  This was his best thing.  In time, he would loan the
other pieces to the Museum of the Royal Library, or even donate one in return
for a favor.  But not this.  With this he would never part.

When he woke, she was standing near the window, veiled by
smoke rising through the sunbeams.  He lay pinned under thick wool blankets on
a mattress of sheepskin over straw, his head heavy, his ankle stiff and feeling
like it was sewn with iron filings.  She saw him and smiled, coming to his side
to gently push him back down as he propped himself up on one elbow.

"Thank you," he croaked in what he hoped was
intelligible Pallenor.  "Thank you, very much."

Her eyes widened slightly, and she spoke to him with a
soprano voice in her musical northern tongue.

"I'm sorry," he said again in her speech, "I
do not understand.  I speak only a few words of your language."  He knew
about two dozen vital phrases in Keltassian, Baskillian, and Pallenor, and when
he travelled to those lands he was always amazed at how much it helped, and at
how many other travellers from Avic-speaking lands never bothered, causing
confusion and ill-feeling simply because they could not say, "How much
does this cost?" or, "I would like your cheapest meal."

"Not a trouble," she said as if she really meant
it.  Pointing to her heart, and with a nod, or bow of her head she said,
"I am Kestrin."

"I am Reyin," he said, holding out his hand in the
custom of the Avic people.

Hesitantly, lightly, she touched it, and they looked at one
another, and he saw a light in her eyes.  She dropped his hand, looked down,
muttered something about food, and went swiftly out the door of the little
house.

She returned a short time later with a tray bearing a large
piece of thin crusty bread which served as a plate holding cheese and butter,
and a huge bowl of fish stew, and a cup of milk and honey in which floated some
very bitter rust-colored roots.  He ate all of it with an urgency that
surprised him.  When he finished, she unwrapped his bandaged ankle and bathed
it in a soothing greenish water.  All this time she looked at him with only a
kind of impartial compassion, as she would do for any injured creature.  Her
eyes, no longer windows, had become mirrors.

It was easy to like her from the very start.  He lay sick
and injured, and she was his rescuer, his fair maiden of mercy and comfort.  He
had been dangerously ill in the wilderness, had seen his own death, and she was
his caretaker in this warm safe haven.  And she was beautiful.  Not a soft,
girlish beauty — hers was strong and fierce, like that of a sea eagle.

Kestrin took away the dirtied tray, and Reyin dozed fitfully
through the afternoon, finally coming acutely awake, curious and bored.  At
last the door swung wide and an older woman came into the room, her face made
kind by an easy smile and soft eyes.  She had a stillness about her, like one
of pure being, like those Reyin had met who knew mystic ways:  warriors, at one
with the sword spirit, or magicians, at one with the Essa.

She sat heavily in a chair near the fire pit, smoothing her
coarse woolen skirt with one hand.  "I am Syliva.  You speak some of the
Pallenor tongue?"

"A bit.  Very little."

"Do you travel
atengis
?"  His lack of
comprehension must have been obvious.  She tried another tack.  "You go
alone?"

"Yes, I travel alone."

She seemed relieved.  "There is no more danger for
you," she said, trying to use simple words.  "One week, you'll feel
well; in two weeks, you will walk."

Reyin nodded.  "I understand.  May I stay here?"

"Yes," she smiled, showing him her palm, fingers
down and spread wide.

He had a good guess what that meant.  His trousers hung from
a peg on the near wall.  He got them down and slid a finger into the hidden
pocket in the waistband.  Yes, it was still there.  He took out the coin, a
silver kandar, and reached to give it to her, but surprisingly, she let out a
little gasp, withdrew her hand, and motioned it back to him, apparently in awe
of its value.  In Kandin, the largest city in the world, it would be three days
wages for a laborer; in this remote place, it might pay for three month's
lodging.

Reyin turned to find a wiry man in his mid-fifties,
white-haired with an equine face, no doubt the woman's husband, standing at the
threshold and glaring at him openly.  Syliva spoke a few quick words and
scowled at the man, who stepped back out of sight.

A thought came to Reyin suddenly.  "My things," he
said to Syliva, "my baggage?" 
Let it all be looted, just keep
safe  my mandolin
.

Syliva shrugged.  "Maybe Farlo.  Maybe tomorrow." 
He nodded, the need to lie down growing very strong.

For two days the welfare of his instruments didn't much
concern him, as he was tossed about on waves of fever, chills, and painful
spasms of coughing.  Syliva poured a hot pungent broth into him every few
hours, and her son Jonn, a big young man who looked strong as a lumberjack,
kept a fire burning in the central hearth all that time.  In Syrolia, where
Reyin was born, only the estates of the wealthy had outbuildings for guests.  Yet
these folk had every mark of being commoners — landowners, yes, with a well-built
house of fine timbers that he could see through the window, but commoners all
the same.  In this untamed region, he supposed, land must be free to any who
could live on it.

On the morning of the third day he woke at the first hint of
light, feeling clear-headed, his back aching from the days abed.  He would
spend this day sitting up if nothing more.  He rose and tested his ankle. 
Useless, but he could hobble a short way.  He hopped to the small window and
pushed open the shutters to look out at a grey and yellow valley patched with
dark fallow fields, and at the lower end of the valley a ribbon of blue — the
bay he had tried to cross.  The farmhouses ranged from one-room cabins to stout
two-story lodges with shingled roofs raked very steeply.  Large or small, all
of the houses had an enclosed porch with its own steep roof in front of each
door.  All the windows were small, and none lower than head high.  Reyin
imagined a winter that buried the land in snow.  To the west a sheer crag,
shaped much like the horn of a goat, stood aglow in the light of the sunrise.

He dressed then noticed that all was quiet, that no one was
outside, so he checked his pocket watch.  It was only a quarter to four. 
Perhaps he was far enough north to see the famed midnight sun come summer.

Later that morning Aksel presented him with a long crooked
stick that served as a crutch.  After breakfast he watched as Jonn, with a
bedroll and a sack of flatbread slung across his back, unpenned all the goats
and drove them up the valley, two short-legged dogs darting up and back along
the flanks of the herd barking and nipping at any nanny or kid that tried to
stray.  In the afternoon Reyin went out into the delicious sunlight to hobble
about the yard and garden.  He saw nothing but old dead grass and bare earth. 
He knew little about farming, had never planted a seed in his life, yet he felt
that it should not be, like the wrong he had felt in the wilderness.  He sat on
a large stone and gazed at the range of peaks and pinnacles that followed the
coast northward.

The other dark man came to visit him there.  Reyin felt his
coming before he saw the man pass the gate.  Syliva came out to greet him,
smiling and gossiping as they walked the length of the yard to where Reyin
waited.  The man was certainly a countryman of Reyin's. He had the hawk nose,
and even under the thick untrimmed beard Reyin could detect the jutting chin — classic
Syrolian features.

The man forced a thin smile and spoke to Syliva politely,
but his countenance was one that had always been grim.  His stride was the
stalking movement of a hunting cat.  When he stood still, he stood ready for
something to happen, and his hand never strayed far from the long knife at his
belt.

The man stopped, facing him just beyond arm's reach.  Reyin
rose, balancing himself with the crude crutch, finding that the other man stood
half a head taller, with broad shoulders and a barrel chest set in a manner
that could be thought of as military.  The man's unkempt beard, rising high
along the cheeks, grew patchy and streaked with white along the left side.  The
strip of skin between the beard and the eye was pink and grey, twisted and
wrinkled.  No doubt he had suffered a terrible burn there and wore the beard to
hide the scars.  Strangely, his hair was cropped close to the scalp, without
any thought to style, and one might think him an idiot except for his eyes.

Those eyes had seen much evil.  And they were the eyes of a
man who had killed other men.  Not anonymously, a hundred yards across a
battlefield with an arquebus volley, he had killed with his hands, close up,
his eyes seeing the last spark of life fade away in those of his enemy.  Reyin
had no need of his secret ways to know this.  It was plain.

The man spoke in native Avic.  "Syliva has told me your
name.  You can call me Farlo."

Neither man offered his hand in greeting.  "I found
your gear in the woods," Farlo said, "and brought it back to my
house.  You can leave it all there, or I can bring you what you want.  It don't
matter to me, but it'll all be safe either way."

"I thank you for that," Reyin said cautiously,
feeling those deadly eyes looking at him in judgment.  "I am, by trade, a troubadour. 
Perchance you found two cases with a mandolin and a flute in them?"

"Aye."

A seafaring dialect?  Or simply that of a provincial?

"Oh I would very much like to have those with me.  As
long as I cannot walk, I may as well practice.  And — "

"You any good at singing?" Farlo asked with
serious interest.

"I can sing well."

Farlo turned to Syliva and spoke to her briefly in fluent
Pallenor.  She smiled and nodded a happy assent.  He turned back to Reyin. 
"The whole village comes together every night around a fire to sing a
song.  We want you to join us while you're here."

Yes, the firelight had guided him, and he remembered the
tune very clearly now.

"Every night?"

"Yes.  It's sort of a custom.  In the springtime."

"Very well.  Tell Syliva that I would be honored to
join all of you in song, and it would please me to give an entertainment
afterward in an attempt to thank everyone."

"For what?"

"For saving my life.  If there had been no fire and no
singing, I would never have known this place was here."

"No, a minstrel show wouldn't be right.  Not at the
circle of the Song of Returning."  Suddenly the eyes of the inquisitor
were again on him.  "You say you didn't know this village was here?"

Reyin nodded.  "I was going to Noraggen for a
troubadour gathering.  A squall forced me ashore and wrecked my skiff in the
night, and I walked around the inlet the next day.  I couldn't have kept going
if I had not seen the firelight."

Farlo seem eased, almost satisfied with the story.  If not
very likely, at least it was plausible and could be confirmed.

"Which reminds me," Reyin said.  "I'd also
like to have the oilskin bag with the quadrant and the pistol."

"Oh, I didn't tell you.  Some critter, probably a
fenwolf, got into your kit.  Popped open your powder horn and somehow poured it
all out.  'Course we don't have any here, so your pistol 'll be useless for a
while.  They're very clever, those fenwolves.  They can get into
anything."  And with that, Farlo looked at Reyin with one eyebrow cocked,
defying him to challenge the explanation.

Odd.  The man was lying about the gunpowder.  Reyin knew
that he was lying, and he knew that Reyin knew he was lying.  But why did Farlo
feel the need to disarm him?

"What's a fenwolf?  Is it something like a timber
wolf?"

"No, a fenwolf is smaller and not really a wolf at
all.  They're shaggy little scavengers.  They ain't vicious, but they aren't
afraid of people.  And you can't even eat them — they have a bad smell and
carry some kind of disease.  If you get bit by one, you'll take sick for
certain."

"They must have quite a set of teeth to crack into a
powder horn.  And some nose, too."

"Um-hmm."

Reyin decided to let it go.  He looked around at the empty
plowed fields, the barren garden, then up at the cloudless, birdless sky. 
"Farlo, is nothing growing here?"

"Aye.  No grasses of any kind.  No buds on the trees.  Naught."

"Why is that?"

"I'm not a farmer," he said, "I guess Syliva
knows as much as anyone about growing things."  He translated the question
and the answer.  "She says that no one really knows.  There's been a
drought, but even with water from the stream our gardens won't sprout, so some
think only rainwater will help.  Some think the land has been blighted.  Others
say that the soil here is exhausted."

"You don't sound like you really believe any of that,
Farlo."

"No one is saying what
they really believe.  But you'll see.  Tonight."

The meeting place lay only a few hundred yards from the
house, but Reyin's good leg had tired and the makeshift crutch began cutting
into his armpit as they reached the crowd of villagers.  Aksel went ahead, bent
under a bundle of large sticks, and younger men ran forward to meet him and
take the kindling to the fire circle.  Syliva walked easily beside Reyin,
taking his arm the last few steps to show him an old stump where he could sit.

He had spotted Kestrin at a distance without difficulty. 
Children chased each other carelessly, laughing wildly as they ducked and
dodged and collided with adults, and she sidestepped them as she made her way
to Syliva and gave the subtle bow of the head that these people used for a
greeting.  Most of those who did not approach Syliva still made the nod of
respect, and indeed it seemed to Reyin that everyone began arranging themselves
as soon as she arrived.  He had supposed that she was simply the village
midwife.  Now she seemed to be a leader in this community.  He saw no one there
in the role of chief or mayor, no overlord or council of elders.