The Song of Andiene (11 page)

“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.

Chapter 8

Wide and deep is the water that lies between the Nine Kingdoms and Dragonsland
. Andiene stood on the foggy plateau and knew she had crossed the channel that no ships may sail. She was not in the world of men.

Still, she stood silent. She had heard many tales of dragons. She had been carried through the square that marked the heart of the city, where a chain, massively forged, fettered white dragon’s bones. She stared at the great gray dragon again. One foreleg was gnarled like a tree stump, heavy claws digging rootlike into the ground. The other … tattered and unfinished …

“Yvaressinest,” she said.

“How are you so learned, daughter of mine enemies, that you know my name?”

“The songsters have sung of you for a hundred summers and a hundred winters,” she said.

The dragon’s voice, dry and inhuman though it was, seemed tinged with human pleasure. “So they still sing of the revenge of Yvaressinest?”

She was spurred to pride in her own people. She remembered the stories she had heard. “They sing of the madness of Karstir—how he vowed to his love, Cresine, that he would bring her a dragon meek, tamed, and chained. They sing of how that dragon was the marvel of the Rejiseja, of all the Nine Kingdoms, till he escaped, forced to gnaw off his leg and escape like some animal in a trap.”

White flames licked out from the dragon’s half-opened mouth, flickered and died like the motion of a serpent’s tongue. “And what of the city that died in flames that day?”

She smiled. “In all the songs, they sang much of dragon’s indifference, but little of dragon’s curiosity. They might have told more and been more truthful. In the songs I heard, the city lived unharmed.”

A mutter, deep down in the dragon’s throat, that could almost have been a growl. Andiene met his eyes fearlessly. In the huge slit pupils, she saw herself, a tiny figurine, a shadow in the darkness. She was dizzy, as though she stood on the edge of the sea cliffs. She swayed, took a step nearer, another step. Great circles of green surrounded those doll-like images of herself, but they had no meaning—it was important only to come closer … closer … to that gray-barked tree-trunk lying in the flowerless meadow. Moving was like wading upstream. She lifted her foot, moved it forward. The water swept it back again. Moving was like walking in deep sand. She floundered and sank.

Black shadows of herself, black, green, gray—she looked outward from the center, and stopped, and laughed. “Lord Dragon, I will not walk into your jaws so easily. I did not come to your call. I came of my own free will to strike a bargain with you.”

“What do you have that you could offer me?” Yvaressinest asked. He raised his heavy head, wedge-shaped like that of a poisonous snake. His mouth opened. She saw the teeth like curved yellow swords, venom dripping from each fang.

The white flames sprang out and engulfed her; they burned deep but did not consume. In summertime the air is so dry and hot that it seems to sear the skin. Though the air is still, the weight of it lies on men like a heavy garment. The flames lay on her like that.

She tried to beat them out with her hands. She fell to the ground and rolled to smother them. They clung and burned like executioner’s fire. Under the cliffs, the waves crashed against the rocks.
Water will quench the flames
, she thought in her madness.

No!
The cliffs were high; the rocks were cruel. The answer came like a door opening on a familiar land.
Fight flames with flames!
She called fire of her own, from her body, from her mind. It pressed outward, warding off the dragonbreath. White fire warred with white fire. Then both were gone.

Andiene laughed arrogantly. “You see, Lord Dragon, I am not for you.”

His eyes regarded her, jewel-green as the depths of the green sea. “In the days that I knew your kind, they would have leaped over the cliff into the sea to escape that burning.”

“But not I.” Andiene looked down at her hands. No pain, no burns; the fire had left no marks. There had been greater joy and excitement in that struggle than in anything she had done in her short life. Already, though, she felt the weariness, the paralyzing weakness. In all wisdom, she knew that she should flee while she was able. Instead, she asked, “Why did you call me here?”

“I wished to see what manner of royalty they bred on the other shore. I know what you saw, what wakened your powers. I was with you when you fled from that courtyard. Nahil reigns now by conquest and birthright, with no one to oppose him. The city will not speak to him, but he has no need of that. He has no one to fear.”

“Does he not?” she asked.

The dragon’s voice went on, harsh and dry. “There is much I can teach you. If you stay with me, you will gain the power to return to that other shore and destroy them. Destroy your uncle and all his kin, to the very least one. Set yourself over the people and trample them into the dirt, the filthy people, the fickle people, ready to cheer for anyone.”

Andiene looked deliberately at the dragon. “So you will help me gain my revenge, and in doing so, you will win your own vengeance?”

If dragon’s voice could have smiled, then the voice of Yvaressinest did. “Indeed you are right, child of the Rejiseja. You need what I have to offer. Down on the beach, you lit a fire to bake your fish, and it left you as weak and sick as a woman who has given birth to a brat. You will need greater power than that to conquer your kingdom.”

It is true
, Andiene thought.
I need what he has to offer. But once I gain power, I do not need to use it to work his will. Once on that other shore, I can choose my own way. Wide and deep is the water that lies between the Nine Kingdoms and Dragonsland. He will have no power to bind me to his will.

She looked around the meadow where she stood. Though it must have been very late in the day, the twilight was no dimmer, the air no colder, than when the fog first closed in around her.

“I want to learn all that you can teach me.”

“Then listen while you learn of yourself,” said Yvaressinest. “You know the laws of the land, that those gray-cloaked fools taught your kind. There was a race once that kept to a straiter law. They vowed that they would gather in one day only the food they needed for that day, that they would raise no animals for slaughter, that they would not shelter in the earth in summer. So they thought that the land would not corrupt them.

“That first summer they died, and that winter they starved, and the ones who remained broke their oath that they might live. And because they broke it, it crushed them more certainly than if they had never tried to abide by it. They are mine now.”

His cruel voice continued. “And so, think of the law that your kind holds to. They break it also, and scarcely know that they have done so. You are the result. You are what they have been guarding against for these thousand years.”

The dragon’s flames licked out almost casually toward Andiene. With her new-learned skills, she warded them off the way that a man brushes away a fly.

His voice was full of mockery and rage. “They are weak, fools and weak. ‘We live in the houses that other men have built,’ they say, and think that will save them. When they need metal to forge a sword, they fear to dig in the earth to find it; they do not even dare to turn over a stone in search of it, but go scrambling over the hills, looking for where the rain has washed the rocks bare. They crawl on the surface of the earth like maggots, too weak to burrow deeper into the rotten flesh they devour.

“And for all their care, their petty laws, they have failed, like all before them. ‘Let our children not be born as strangers,’ they say. You are the stranger they fear. Did you see the fear in your father’s eyes when he saw you for what you are?”

The dragon’s words lashed against Andiene, crueler than the flames of his breath. “Even before you were born, they failed. Do you think your ancestors looked like you, with white hair and bleached eyes and mud-colored skin? I saw them when they first came, singing prayers of thanksgiving for a land they feared to understand. Dark hair and pale skin like the people of the south that they hate. Their own fear has changed your people, though they do not realize it. The ones that they once were would have run from your kind in terror.

“Look, and I will show you what they are.”

His contempt overwhelmed Andiene. So weak, so silly, so futile, the people that lived their little lives. She saw them through his eyes, as he relived his imprisonment.