Nor Iron Bars A Cage (26 page)

“He’s going to tell me about himself. I’ll translate at the end.”

“Do that,” King Faro said, but he relaxed back in his seat to wait.

-I am Xan, leader of the Sheergoat Clan, last Chief of the Swiftrock people. Hear my tale.

In the years before the Easterners came through the mountain, I led a thriving tribe. We were many hands of hands, men, women and children, three clans within the tribe. Each year, the clans split up to climb to our summer ranges, and each fall returned together to our winter home in the Valley of the Mist. That year, my clan included my wife, our daughter and three sons, and others dear to me. My youngest son, Nav, had seen but two summers. My clan always climbed highest of the three, living and hunting in the crags in summer, like our namesake, the sheergoat.

My people lived well apart from the flatlanders. We traded, yes, in their markets. A few times a year we would bring down furs and baskets, horn carvings, and perhaps a flamestone. We traded for grain and cloth, steel knives and oil. But we were not friends.

Three times in my father’s lifespan, the flatlanders had come into the mountains with swords raised against us. Once they were only seeking to cross to go to war. Twice, greedy men were trying to get the source of our flamestones from us. They tortured my uncle to death, but he wouldn’t tell them where the stones could be found.

I felt his mind voice shift from narrative pain to a mild curiosity. -
Are the gems of my people still known and prized among you?

I lifted his necklace from my chest.
-This one would buy food and housing for a year in the finest inn in the land, and more besides.

-Mine!
I felt his shock. -
I thought it was lost, taken. Well, of course it was. That’s how it came to your hands.

He was angry and distressed. I waited, unsure how to proceed. Eventually he said,
-What’s a stone against lives? When I found my chiefstone, it was the largest one my tribe had ever seen. My mother said it meant I was destined to be a great leader. I believed it too. More fool I.

King Faro said, “Does he recognize the necklace?”

“Oh yes. He’s angry about it, or about me having it. I’m not quite sure.”

“Tell him that, if he asks, we’ll gladly return it to his people in exchange for his help.”

I relayed the information and felt Xan ease back a little.
-At least your king also puts lives before stones. Many of your people didn’t. Many of mine died for flatlander’s greed for shiny things.

-I’m sorry.
I tried to let him feel that it was true. I’d never been truly no-next-meal poor, so perhaps it was easy for me to scorn wealth and its trappings. But then, the kind of men who killed for gems were rarely the poorest of the poor either.

-Long past. Well, the easterners came before the snowmelt, the next spring. I was in our winter home when word was brought of fighting men coming up out of the earth. I traveled a day to see if it could be true. When I arrived, they still were coming out. It was a large army, but their eyes were turned away from us toward the fertile valleys below, and the distant coast. Still, we climbed to the summer pastures early that year.

I told the king, “Wherever they emerged, it’s a day’s ride from the winter home of his clan.”

“I’ll get Doyd. He’s my expert on the tribes. Perhaps he’ll have some idea.” He waved to the Captain at the door, who stepped outside to run the errand.

-The flatlanders fought each other all summer and into the fall. It was no real concern of ours. It kept them out of our mountains. They killed off the game in the foothills, but hunting was still good higher in the mountains. We didn’t trade at the flatland markets that summer, and the women complained about the lack of ground corn for bread, but we ate as our ancestors had done and all was well.

All through winter, we saw little of the people from the plains below. Then, in the summer, the Great Sickness came.

My heart sank. The plague had followed the invasion, close on its heels. We’d suffered far more from it than the NaR’gin did, and I’d heard it was even worse in the mountain tribes. There’d been a lot of claims back then of an enchantment, a vile spell used to level the last of our resistance. But men had died of Plague on all sides, if not evenly. Modern historians believed it was a natural illness, perhaps brought by the NaR’gin soldiers as they swept across our land. There was an illness like it they called the Summer Shakes, in their home, but although this began the same, it was far worse, and often ended in death. I’d read accounts of those next three years. They’d never failed to make me deeply glad not to have lived back then.

-I can tell you’ve heard of the Sickness.

He’d felt my distress. I said,
-Yes.

-Hearing of it and seeing it, those are two different things.

-You don’t have to tell me.

-Ah, but you wanted my story, didn’t you?

I’d thought perhaps I could glean information from it that might help us. I really didn’t want to hear about a death so bleak that it kept him lingering as a ghost for a thousand years. I asked,
-What town did you trade with?

-I’ll not name it.
I thought he was just being obstructive, but he added,
-I pray to the Skygod that it was wiped from the face of the earth.

I swallowed hard. My mind was a dark enough place, but the corrosive sadness and hate that Xan carried was drowning me. I didn’t realize I’d put out a protesting hand until Tobin took it in both of his.

“Lyon, what? Do you need to stop? Is there anything I can do?”

Some scholar I was. Faced with a first-hand account of the Great Plague, and desperate to spare myself the hearing of it. I stiffened my spine and shook my head. “No. But… he’s telling me of deaths and… stay close?”

“Always.” He sat on the floor beside my chair, still holding my hand, and braced my knee with his shoulder. The warmth of that touch dispelled a little of my darkness.

The King asked, “What deaths?” but I couldn’t tell him yet.

I said to Xan,
-Go on.

-We were in the high mountains. The clans were split, each to their own pastures. It was a lovely summer, with rain to keep the grasses green. The goats were sleek and fat. One day a runner arrived. It was Pak, of the Kestrel clan of my Swiftrock tribe, and my wife’s brother. He was thin and ragged, and he came into camp and collapsed at my feet. And told me the Kestrel clan was no more. They were all dead.

-All of them?
I knew that the Plague had been fierce, but still, a whole clan?

-Down to the babes in arms. He described it, how the Sickness came upon them, and within days half the clan was suffering from it. How it waxed stronger and stronger, the healthy trying to care for the sick, and then falling ill in their turn. Until all were dead but Pak. He said he burned the bodies in the end, and came to find me and bring the news.

I had no words for that. I felt his grief and disbelief, and the ominous welling up of worse to come.

-My wife took him into our tent. He slept a night and a day. When he woke, I asked if he’d heard from the Marmot Clan. He had not, for weeks, and nor had I. I decided to set out to find them.

Acid regret made my eyes burn. My fingers tightened on Tobin’s and he squeezed back.

-I should have sent someone else, but… they were my people. If they too were suddenly stricken, too ill to send for help, it was my duty to know that. And if they were not, there had been Marmot daughters and cousins among the dead. It was my place to carry the news. Further, our tribe’s witchman was with Marmot, and I urgently wanted his advice. So I set out the next day.

When I found them, the illness was there too. Five had already died, and half the rest lay shaking and sweating in their bedrolls. The witchman had no cure for them. But he said the flatlanders did. He’d heard of the Sickness. He’d been told that the flatlanders fell ill of it too, but had a miraculous root that could save the dying.

I had a bad feeling where this story was going.
-Corms from the root of the spreadtree,
I told Xan.
I’d heard of how that had been used.
-It helped. It was not a cure.

-It was more than we had. We agreed that I would return immediately to my camp and gather our stock of flamestones, and offer all of them to the flatlanders below, in exchange for this miraculous root.

It had taken two days for me to climb down to the camp of the Marmot clan, and a day spent there, three more to climb back up to our own. Six days. And in those six days, my wife had died.

I said aloud, “Goddess give her rest.” And to Xan,
-May the Earthmother hold her safe.

-The Earthmother failed us all. When I reached camp, seven of my clan, including Tia, already lay dead. Many more were ill. My son, small Nav, had the first flush of fever on him. Pak said that it took three days or four or perhaps five, from that moment until death. I put Nav in a pack on my back, took the three flamestones we’d found so far that season, and Goli’s best horn carvings, better than any we ever sold, and headed down the mountain.

I stopped for nothing but to give Nav a little goat’s milk. And when he stopped taking it, to trickle water in his mouth. I reached the grazing grounds and got my pony. Then I rode when I could, led the beast when I must. In four days I stood on the outskirts of that accursed town. Nav was limp in my arms, his heat like a stone laid on the fire, but he still breathed.

I felt ill at what would surely come next. I could imagine the town, with the Plague loose and a ragged, alien stranger at the gates. No matter how many flamestones he brought. Spreadtree corms had been prized above diamonds in those years.

-The man who spoke our tongue came out. I told him of our need. I showed him my son. He said, perhaps they had the medicine. I laid all the goods I’d brought on the ground for him. He laughed. I added my chiefstone, that same stone you wear. He was silent a moment then. I’d bet he’d never in his days seen the like of that stone. He picked it all up and told me to wait. I stood at the gate, with my child in my arms. In the hot sun, but that was like ice compared to my son’s fever. I waited. Until they began throwing stones.

I begged them. I, who’d never asked for so much as a stalk of grass from another, dropped on my knees and begged them. A stone struck Nav’s face, bringing blood. He was too ill to even know it. I held him up, for them to see what they’d done. When the next stone flew, I left.

A day back into the hills, I burned the body of my son. Two days in, I fell ill myself. I welcomed it. Better dead than to return a failure. But I lived. Three days I lay fevered and then it passed. I was weak but I climbed, night and day, until I reached the summer camp. There were only a few left alive, and all but Pak and I were sick.

We tried. I climbed to find snow and we packed it around them, until it steamed away in the heat of their fevers. We laid Col in the stream when he began to convulse, but even the snowmelt couldn’t cool him. Day and night we nursed them, and day and night they suffered and died. One morning I laid my head down, just for a moment, just to close my burning eyes, and fell asleep. When I woke, the camp was silent. They were all gone. My sons, my daughter. And Pak lay among them, dead by his own hand.

I could feel my own chest heave with Xan’s emotions. Or maybe mine. There was no way to separate them. His mind-voice was steady, but each word heaped pain upon anguish.

-I climbed to the top of Eagle Ridge. The sun was bright. A soft wind kissed the bare rock, and in the air above a hawk soared. All was as it ever had been, but below me, all of my clan lay dead. I stood on the edge and I spoke to the Skygod. I asked him, if ever he favored my tribe, to let one of my people someday hold in their own hand the way to save the lives of flatlanders. Let my kin laugh in their faces and deny them. I begged my revenge, in my son Nav’s name. And then I stepped out onto the air.

There was a long pause, as I fought for breath, and then he added,
-This was not what I envisioned, and yet, it feels like the answer of the god.

“Crap. Shit. Mother of us all.” I tried to think of better swearwords, but all I could do was cry for a dead child and an eternity of hate. Tobin reached up for me and I leaned down so he could hold me. It was safer and less dark in his arms.

King Faro said, “Tell us what went wrong.”

I took a shaky breath and said, “A moment, Sire.” I rubbed my face on my shoulder and tried to give Tobin a smile. The words that came were from our childhood. “This stinks worse’n a dead mole-rat.”

His return smile was tentative. “Can you explain?”

“I found our ghost’s driver. The thing that kept him on this side of the veil for a millennium. Ready for it? He begged a god for the chance to say no to a flatlander in desperate need. Isn’t that perfect?”

King Faro said, “Crap. Shit.”

I actually laughed, and he gave me a tight return smile.

“Sorcerer Lyon, do you think there’s a chance he might change his mind? Or that you might change it for him?”

“Not by force or sorcery. Maybe by persuasion. He’s not an evil man, or uncaring. A big wrong was done to him before he died, and he’s been seeking to balance the scales. Maybe I can change the game.” I pulled back out of Tobin’s hold.

-Chief Xan, I apologize for the actions of my people.

-That’s worth the spit in my mouth

-It’s all I can offer. I can’t bring back the dead, yours or mine.

For a while I/we just sat there, contemplating the truth of that. Slowly his bitter anger ebbed.

-I feel empty, like the hate has leached out of me. And yet, if I’m not meant to deny you this, what am I still doing here?

I was on tricky theological ground, and didn’t want to annoy him, but I suggested,
-Maybe the god allowed the anger to preserve you this long, so you could give up your hate before crossing to the other side.