The Legacy of Gird (101 page)

"But it was more, of course," said Arranha.

"Of course it was." Luap heard his voice go up, and took a deep breath. "It was far more than that; we all knew it who lived through it. But later—I think of those in the future, Arranha, who will not have even the shadow of a real memory handed down from grandparents. To say that Gird was, for most of his life, as confused, frightened, and ignorant as they are will not make them believe in his greatness later. To say that he died uttering strange words, with no mark or wound upon him . . . well, so do many old people die, and if their families feel a sudden wave of relief and joy that the elder's struggle is over, that's no proof of the gods' intervention."

"So you do not trust Gird's own people to understand his real life?"

Luap shook his head. "No, I don't. I read all the old legends I could find, Arranha, and had the elders tell me the legends they recalled—of their own folk, not just mageborn tales. There's a difference, of course. The mageborn legends all name their heroes prince or king, princess or queen; the peasant legends are full of younger sons and daughters, talking animals, and the wise elder. But they still follow a pattern. The young hero looks like one—it's clear to friends and family that this is the hero. The hero never works with the evil he overcomes—he never submits to it. And he always knows what he's doing. I'll grant you, after knowing Gird I doubt this has always been true. But it's what people believed to be true, believed enough to remember. If I show Gird too different from that pattern, I don't think his legend will survive."

Arranha nodded. "Your reasoning is clear. But for that reason I suspect it's faulty in dealing with the life of someone who could no more reason than a cow can fly. Gird
felt
his way along, knowing the right as a tree knows good soil, by how it flourishes. In all my life, I never knew another like him, someone so infallible in his perception of good and evil, whose taproot sought good invisibly, in the dark. I learned from watching him that those with none of Esea's light—inspiration, intelligence, what you will—may have another way to seek and find goodness. Because Gird, as we know and can say with utmost respect, was not a man given to intelligent reasoning. Shrewd, yes, and practical as a hammer, but incapable of guile, which comes as naturally to intelligent men as frisking does to lambs." He laughed, shaking his head. "And I have only to think of Gird to find myself mired in agricultural images: listen to me! Cows that can't fly, tree roots feeling their way through the soil, frisking lambs—that's Gird talking through me, or my memory of him."

Luap could barely manage a smile in response to that. He felt colder than the raw early-spring day. He had not felt Gird's memory come alive while he was working on the
Life
; he had not felt Gird's presence at all, since the first days after his death. And if Arranha felt it, if others felt it, was that why they did not agree on his way of telling the story? Because they felt so close to Gird, they could not understand that distant ages would not have that feeling? He could not think what to say, how to ask the questions in his mind that troubled him without taking definite form. He waited a moment, one finger tracing the floral carving of the chair-arm, then reverted to his first topic.

"So you think I should ask the elves or dwarves where that pattern took us?"

Arranha's brows rose. "Yes, I said that. I admit I'm surprised you haven't already done so, though I suppose you've been too busy . . ."

"I felt—I wanted to finish Gird's
Life
first. But now—it will take me as long to rework it, and even then they may not like it. I just thought—"

Arranha's smile was sweet, understanding, without a hint of scorn; it pierced him just as painfully as Arranha's disapproval. "You just thought of your secret realm, a place of refuge. Quite natural. Yes, by all means ask them. But think of this, Luap: what will you do if they claim it as their own realm, in which we are not welcome?"

That had occurred to him before; he knew that was the root of his reluctance to ask. What is never asked cannot be refused: an old saying all agreed on. "The day I took Gird," he said, having thought long about it, "we saw at first only two arches, which I had seen before. But another appeared—"

"Gird saw this?"

"He saw three arches; I had seen but two, and saw two when we first arrived. You saw the third that is there now, with the High Lord's sigil upon it. When I told him there had been but two, he felt—I think he felt, for I admit he did not say it thus—that our presence, or at least his human presence, had been accepted." Luap had no idea himself what the appearance of that third arch meant, but trusted Gird's interpretation.

"I wonder if they'll see it that way. But better to find out now, before you take a troop out there and find you're intruding and not welcome. Will you ask the elven ambassador first, or the dwarves?"

"I had thought the elven. The legends say they're the Eldest of Elders."

"They will ask," Arranha said, "why you did not ask them before. Gird's will could not have withheld you past his death, not in their eyes."

Luap knew they would ask exactly that: another reason he had not asked.

The elven ambassador arrived a few days before the Evener. Luap had never been sure why the elves chose to recognize Gird or his successors; they had not, Lady Dorhaniya told him, ever come to the court in her lifetime. But from the first year of Gird's rule, an elf or two had come at Midwinter, Midsummer, and the two Eveners, at first asking audience with Gird, and then with the Council of Marshals. Then the dwarves had begun to appear, on the same festivals, glaring across the Hall at the elves, who ignored them except to proffer an icily correct greeting. Some of Gird's followers preferred elves, and some preferred dwarves—the dwarves, Luap had heard, made good gambling and drinking companions. He himself found elven songs too beautiful to ignore.

This elf he recognized: Varhiel, he had said, was the closest human tongues could come to his real name. He stood taller than Luap as most elves did, a being of indeterminate age whose silver-gray eyes showed no surprise at anything. He greeted Luap in his own tongue and Luap made shift to answer in the same. He had discovered a talent for languages, both human and other; he particularly enjoyed the graceful courtesies of the elves. When the preliminaries were over, Luap felt his heart begin to pound. He should ask now, before he changed his mind. . . .

"When Gird was alive," he said, "I found a place which might have been elven once."

Varhiel raised his brows. "Once? What made you think it is not still elven?"

"I found no elves there, or sign of recent habitation," Luap said. His palms felt sweaty. Why was this so hard?

Varhiel shrugged. "Perhaps it is a place we do not frequent; perhaps you came between habitations . . . but I doubt a place once ours would be abandoned." He picked a hazelnut from the bowl on Luap's desk and cracked it neatly between his fingers. "Where did you say this was?"

"I'm not entirely sure." Luap took a hazelnut himself, cracking it on his desk. He pushed across a basket for the shell fragments. "It's a long story . . ."

"Time has no end," the elf said He leaned back in his seat with the patience of one who will live forever, barring accidents.

Luap wondered what it would be like to feel no hurry, no pressure from mortality. He pushed that thought aside, and began his tale. Necessarily, since the elf could not be expected to take an interest in minor human affairs, he left out much of it. He told of his first visit to the cave, of his discovery of his mage powers, and of the later discovery that the cave and those powers transported him somewhere.

"Say that again!" The elf's gray eyes shone. "You travelled—?"

"Somewhere," Luap said, nodding. For a moment he felt he had been saying that word forever, telling one after another that he went
somewhere
, to meet the same incredulous response each time. "I don't know where. That's why I'm talking to you."

"Say on." The elf's wave of hand was anything but casual.

Luap tried to read the elf's expression as he described the great hall in which he had arrived, the arches out of it . . . and then Gird's journey.

"You took
another
there before asking our permission?" Luap had never seen an elf angry, but he had no trouble interpreting that.

"Gird was my . . . lord," he said. "He held my oath; all I learned went to him first." Then he realized that "there" had been said with complete certainty. "You know where it is?"

"Of course I know. And it is not a place for you latecoming mortals. You must not go again." The elf looked hard at him. "Or have you been more than those two times?"

"When Gird came," Luap said, side-stepping the question, "another arch appeared. One with the High Lord's sigil on it—"

"No!"

"—And thus Gird said our presence was accepted."

The elf stared at him. "Another arch . . . appeared?"

"Yes."

"When Gird came?" At Luap's nod, the elf sat back. "A mageborn human blunders into
that
, which we have kept inviolate for ages longer than your people, Selamis the luap, have existed . . . it is a clangorous thought."

"Gird walked through that arch," Luap said warily. He felt he must say it, but he did not know why he felt so. "He walked through, and then up the stair—"

"I hardly dared hope you had seen only the hall," Varhiel said. "And Gird would, yes—would have no doubt that he could walk through any arch he wished, or climb any stair, and I suppose he opened the entrance for you, did he? What was it like, your first view of that land?"

"It was blowing snow," Luap said. The memory could still make him shiver. Varhiel laughed.

"I'm glad. It is unseemly, but I take pleasure in the thought that at least one protection held against invasion. Now, I suppose, we must go to the trouble of destroying the patterns."

"No," said Luap. The elf's look reminded him he had no rights to argue. "Please," he said more softly. "Please listen—let me tell you the rest." As smoothly as he could, he told of his later visits, of the need for a place where the mageborn could train their powers to good, of Arranha's approval, and the Autumn Rose's. "They felt—we all felt—the holiness of that place, the great power of good that lies in it. This I'm sure would prevent any misuse of our powers, as our people learn to use them well."

"It is impossible," the elf said. "It is not your place; you did not make it; you do not understand those who did."

"But it is so beautiful," Luap said. He could feel tears gathering in his eyes, and blinked them back. Never to taste that pine-scented air, that cold sweet water? He could not bear that. Varhiel stared at him.

"You find that beautiful, all that bare rock?"

Luap nodded. "It eases something—I know not what—in my heart. And it's not barren—if you have not been there for years of human time, you may not know the trees that grace those narrow valleys."

"Canyons," Varhiel said. "That is what the Khartazh calls them, at least." He sighed. "If you find it beautiful, I am sorry to forbid it to you—but it is not yours. Even if I had the right to permit you, I would not, for I know why it was built, and under what enchantments it lies: it is not meant for mortals, and certainly not for humans. But I have not the right; you would have to have leave of the King—our king, of the Lordsforest, in the mountains far west and north of here—and I can tell you now you would not receive it."

"You could ask him," Luap said, in desperation.

"Ask him! You want me to ask the King to let a gaggle of latecomer humans inhabit a hall built by immortals for immortals? So you can practice your paltry powers in safety?"

Luap felt himself flushing. What he might have said he never knew, for the Autumn Rose came in at that moment. She had clearly overheard the last part of that.

"
I
will ask, of your courtesy, and as you are the ambassador, whose duty it is to carry requests from Fin Panir to your lord." Luap had not imagined that any human could approach elven arrogance, but the Autumn Rose angry came gloriously close. "Pray ask him, if you will, if he minds the corners of a deserted palace being home to those who have no other home, if they agree to be responsible for damages."

Varhiel stood. "Damages! Little you know, lady, what you say . . . little you know what damages such a place might sustain, or how to mitigate them. But as you command, and courtesy requires, I will take your message, and bring back his, which I am sure I could do without the effort moving from my seat. Yet you will have what you ask: the King's command, and speedily." He did not quite push past the Autumn Rose, yet she felt his movement, as a tree feels the gale that shreds its leaves.

She raised her brows to Luap. "If your meekness would not work, could it hurt to try my boldness? We shall see: I suspect Varhiel is not in his king's pocket any more than I am in yours, or the reverse. And you are a king's son; he owes you a king's answer."

"But if they're angry," Luap said. "If they never let us return—"

"Then we will find other mountains," she said. He wished he could believe her. He felt a cold wind sweeping through him; he could not bear to be barred from those red stone walls forever.

"Let's go there," he said suddenly. "Let's go now, before he returns."

She stared at him, eyes wide. "Luap—what is it? We can't go haring off to the cave now, and you can't get there by magery without those patterns . . . can you?"

"No. But—perhaps I could reproduce the patterns. It may not be the place, but the patterns laid there—" He wet his finger and began to trace a design on his desk. "See . . . like this, and this . . ."

She frowned. "Luap—I've seen that somewhere else."

"The design? You can't have."

"No, I have." She stood motionless a moment, brows furrowed. Then she looked at him. "Luap, come with me."

"Where?"

"Just come." She grasped his hand, and when he asked if she wanted to find Arranha first, shook her head. Down the stairs, outside, across the courtyard, and into the High Lord's Hall. He was halfway up the Hall toward the altar when he remembered what she was talking about. Incised in the floor just behind the altar was a pattern he had never really noticed. "That's the same, isn't it?"