The Hero and the Crown (33 page)

was, after all, their Arlbeth’s daughter too, and Arlbeth they sincerely mourned,

and they read in her face that she mourned too. She stood at Tor’s side while

Arlbeth’s final bonfire burned up wildly as the incense and spices were thrown on

it, and the tears streamed down her face; and her tears did more good for her in

her people’s eyes than the Crown did, for few of them really understood about

the Crown. But she wept not only for Arlbeth, but for Tor and for herself, and for

their fatal ignorance; the wound that had killed the king had not been so serious a

one, had he had any strength left. Maur’s weight on the king of the country it

oppressed had been the heaviest, and the king had been old.

When Tor was proclaimed king in the long Damarian ceremony of sovereignty

officially bestowed, it was the first time in many generations that a Damarian king

wore a crown, the Hero’s Crown, for it had been tradition that the kings went

bare-headed in memory of that Crown that was the heart of Damar’s strength

and unity, and had been lost. After the ceremony the Crown was placed carefully

back in the treasure hall.

When Aerin and Tor had gone to look for it three days after they hurled Maur’s

skull out of the City, they had found it lying on the low vast pedestal where the

head had lain. They had looked at it, and at each other, and had left it there. It

was a small, flat, dull-grey object, and there was no reason to leave it on a low

platform, little more than knee high and wide enough for several horses to stand

on; but they did. And when the treasure keeper, a courtier with a very high

opinion of his own artistic integrity, tried to open the subject of a more suitable

keeping-place, Aerin protested before the words were all out of his mouth,

although they had been directed at Tor.

Tor simply forbade that the Crown be moved, and that was the end of it; and

the treasure keeper, offended, bowed low to each of them in turn, and left. He

might not have wished to be quite so polite to the witch woman’s daughter, for

the courtiers were inclined to take a more stringent view of such things than the

rest of Damar. But any lack of courtesy that survived the highborn Damarians’

knowledge that Aerin-sol had fought fiercely in the last battle against the

Northerners (although of course since she’d shown up only on the last day she’d

had more energy left to spend), and the inalterable fact that their new king was

planning to marry her, tended to back down in the face of the baleful glare of her

four-legged henchmen. Not that they ever did anything but glare. But the

treasure keeper’s visit had been watched with interest by nine quite large hairy

beasts disposed about Aerin’s feet and various corners of the audience chamber.

TOR HAD WANTED to marry her as part of the celebration of his kingship, and

have her acknowledged queen as he was acknowledged king, but Aerin insisted

they wait.

“One might almost think you didn’t want to be queen,” Tor said glumly.

“One might almost be right,” replied Aerin. “But it’s more that I don’t want

anybody to have the opportunity to say that I slipped in the back door. That I was

assuming everyone would be so preoccupied with you that no one would notice I

was being declared official queen by the way.”

“Mm,” said Tor.

“It was Arlbeth who told me that once royalty commits itself it can’t go back

into hiding,” Aerin said.

Tor nodded his head slowly. “Very well. But I think you’re doing your people an

injustice.”

“Ha,” said Aerin.

But Tor was right, although not for the reasons he would have preferred; it had

little to do with her fighting in the last battle, and almost nothing to do with the

Crown. By the time the three months’ betrothal that Aerin demanded was up and

the marriage was performed, thirteen weeks after what had come mysteriously to

be called Maur’s battle, most Damarians (all but a few hidebound courtiers)

seemed to have more or less forgotten that they had ever held the last king’s

daughter in so lively an antipathy; and affectionately they called her Fire-hair, and

Dragon-Killer. They even seemed to enjoy the prospect of Aerin as their new

queen; certainly the wedding was a livelier meeting than Tor’s crowning had

been, and the crowd cheered when Tor declared Aerin his queen, which startled

them both. But many things that had happened before the day Maur’s head had

been dragged into the City had faded from people’s memory, and at the wedding

they said comfortably to one another that it was true that the first sol’s mother

had been a commoner from some outlandish village in the North, and that Aerin-

sol had always been an odd sort of child; but she had grown into her rank quite

satisfactorily, and she had certainly helped turn the Northern tide with that funny

foreign sword of hers and those wild animals that were so fond of her (there are

worse spells than those that make wild animals tame).

Besides, while Tor had remained obstinately single, all the other sols of his

generation had gotten themselves married off; and Aerin was, whatever her

faults, a first sol.

And when Aerin understood at last what had happened, she laughed. So Maur

did me a good turn after all, she thought. That’s the finest victory of all.

It was called Maur’s battle perhaps because it had been fought on what was

now known as Maur’s plain. While much else had been forgotten, or at least

become a little blurry, of the events before the seasons the City had borne with

Maur’s head held in the king’s castle like an enormous jewel, everyone well

remembered that at the end of the battle the stretch of earth at the foot of the

king’s way was a destroyed forest, and that bodies of people and beasts, and of

half-beasts and half-people, lay everywhere, with broken bits of war gear mixed

with the broken landscape. And they remembered Maur’s skull rushing down on

them—flaming, they said, like a living dragon, its jaws open to spew fire—and

spinning past them in the darkness.

And in the morning, when they awoke, instead of low rolling hills despoiled by

war, they found a plain, flat as a table, stretching from the burnt-out fire where

the survivors had slept huddled together to the feet of Vasth and Kar and the pass

where Aerin had paused and seen what awaited her and gathered herself and her

army together. It was a desert plain, and it remained a desert; nothing grew

there, nor would grow, but a little low scrub. Desert creatures came to live there,

and a new sort of hunting dog was bred to run by sight, and the City dwellers

came to love the wild sweet song of the britti, the desert lark. They took to

holding horse races on the plain after the first few years of staring at it nervously

had worn off, and the uncanniness was lost in familiarity; and then various games

of skill were pursued there, mock battles and sword-play, and it became a much

better practice ground than the old cramped space behind the castle and the

royal stables at the peak of the City. It was a handy spot for the drilling of cavalry,

and Tor paid much attention to the rebuilding of his cavalry, for he, like his wife, if

perhaps no one else in the City, remembered very clearly what had happened in

the months preceding Maur’s battle. The Laprun trials therefore grew in size and

importance, which was all to the good; what was less good was the growing

popularity of the churakak, the duel of honor, fought by those a little too proud of

their ability to fight.

But spring did come, and people stirred themselves, and many of them felt

quite like their old selves, and went out to dig in the ground or refurbish their

shops or look to their stock and their holdings with good heart. Those who had

remained in the City over the winter, to nurse their wounds and regain their

strength, went home to their villages and began the long process of rebuilding,

and most of the rebuilding went on cheerfully. Tor and Aerin sent aid where they

could, and some of the new villages were handsomer (and better drained) than

the old ones had been.

It was during the first winter that Aerin, wandering vaguely one day in the

center-court garden of the castle, felt that there was something at the gate she

had entered by. She frowned at it till she remembered what it was: the great oil

green surka vine was gone. She stared round at all the gates to be sure she had

not mistaken it, but it was not there; and she went in search of Tor, and asked

what had happened to it.

Tor shook his head. “There isn’t any surka any more—anywhere. One day—a

fortnight, maybe, before Maur’s battle, they all went. I saw this one; the smoke

came from nowhere, but when it cleared, the surka was a charred skeleton. It was

such a weird sort of thing, and everyone was preoccupied with weird sorts of

things that always turned out to be unpleasant, that the remains were rooted out

and buried.

“Arlbeth said it was a sign too clear to be ignored, even if we didn’t know what

it meant, and so we carried no standard during the final days of the siege of the

City.” He frowned. “The surka seems to be something I want to remind people of;

we’re probably better off without it. No more Merths.” He smiled at her.

“And no more Aerins,” said Aerin feelingly.

Some who had lost too much stayed on in the City when spring came; Katah

had lost her husband, and she and her six children asked to stay on in the king’s

castle, where she had grown up. Tor and Aerin were glad to say yes, for the castle

was a little too empty; not only Perlith was gone, but Thurny and Gebeth and

Orin, and many others. And Aerin found the reliable and practical Katah

invaluable in sorting out which petitions and complaints to bend her royal

judgment on, and which to ignore. “I have found my calling,” said poor Katah,

who missed her husband: “I was meant to be a royal secretary.”

“You were meant to be the power behind the throne,” said Aerin. “I shall cover

you with a velvet drape and you can whisper to me what to tell the people as they

come.” Katah laughed, as she was supposed to.

Katah was not the only one that the passing of time did not heal. Galanna’s hair

had gone grey during that first winter, and was white by the time the second

spring after the battle came. She was quieter, and slower, and while she looked

with no love upon Damar’s new queen, she caused, and wished to cause, no more

trouble.

As Katah was a hard and honest worker, Aerin could contrive to steal a little

time to chase dragons—whose numbers had greatly fallen off since the

Northerners’ defeat—and to teach a suddenly considerable number of interested

young men and women what she knew about dragon-hunting. Among other

things, she found out what she had known all along, that she had a superior

horse. No horse liked wearing kenet, and most of them were much nastier about

it than Talat had ever been; and then there was the fact that Aerin had no idea

what to tell her students to do with their reins while they were trying to pin a

dragon with their spears. Somehow or other Aerin’s dragon-hunting lessons

began to spill into horsemanship lessons, and she taught her pupils first about

riding without stirrups, and later without reins. By trial and error she trained a

few young horses to go as Talat had gone for her—to prove to herself as much as

to anyone else that it could be done with other horses—and she learned to have

an eye for the horses who could learn what she wished to teach them, and those

who could not. Soon the queen of Damar was rumored to be an uncanny judge of

horseflesh, and her opinion on this colt or that mare was frequently sought.

Talat himself was as vain and cheerful as ever after a few weeks’ holiday, and

had as bottomless a hunger for mik-bars, but he was beginning to feel his age at

last, and Aerin or Hornmar had to chase him around with a stick to make him

exercise his weak leg on the days Aerin did not have time to ride. But the leg was

strong enough that when a few mares were cautiously introduced to him in his

pasture, desirable results were born eleven months later. His foals were all bright-

eyed and bouncy from their first breath, and Hornmar and Aerin were very careful

about who had the handling of them; and all of them grew up to go bridleless like

their sire, and many of them had his courage.

The royal kennels were expanded, and the yerig and folstza who chose to stay

near their lady were given their own quarters, although the door to the back

stairs that led to Aerin’s old rooms was always left open. It was observed, though

the thotor kennel-masters were at first too timid to do any crossbreeding

deliberately, that some of the royal bitches gave birth to taller and hairier puppies

than any official royal bloodlines could explain; and it was from these crosses that

the long-legged desert dogs eventually came. And after a few generations of

kittens grew up and had more kittens, the folstza began to accept more human

masters than Aerin, and to hunt on command, at least mostly. Even tamed cats

have minds of their own.

Having her own quarters did not stop the yerig queen, now Kala, from bearing