Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles (46 page)

“Summon your estimable Official in Charge of Heat and Cold,” Uabhar cut in. “Let us hear what he has to say for himself.”

The king did not appear to be as fascinated with the two glass bulbs on the metal stand as the tertius had hoped. The Official in Charge of Heat and Cold hurried to obey the royal summons, and showed the king a Heat-Measuring Device. A knopped glass stand upheld six vertical tubes, closed at their tops and filled with clear water. Inside each transparent tube rested a bubble of colored glass shaped like an onion resting upside down. “When the day is hot,” said the official, “these colorful onions rise in the water. When it is cold, they fall.”

The king tapped his foot restlessly. His gaze roamed. “Tell me—what are those men doing in that corner, with one of your glass onion tubes, a mirror and a bucket of ice?”

“They are performing an experiment, my Liege,” said the official, “endeavoring to discover whether cold, like heat, can be reflected.”

“Leading to the possibility of using cold as a weapon?” quizzed the king.

“Well my Liege, that had not crossed my mind, but now that you suggest it . . .” The voice of the official petered out into the deserts of uncertainty.

Ignoring the man, Uabhar turned to the primoris. “Where is the gentleman of whom you spoke earlier?”

“The Official in Charge of Predicting Storms?” the druid enquired in rasping tones. His spindly frame looked to be in danger of collapsing, yet he did not falter.

“The very one. Perhaps his ‘experiments’ will prove to be of some profit to Slievmordhu.”

The Official in Charge of Predicting Storms demonstrated his “storm glasses,” the first of which was the Water Storm Glass. It consisted of a fat vitreous bulb containing water. An upward pointing spout, marked with a set of intervals, jutted from near the base of the enclosed bulb. “We employ the water level to measure air pressure,” said the official. “When the level in the spout is high, this indicates that air is pressing on the water but lightly. Low pressure means that storms can be expected.”

“Interesting,” said Uabhar.

“And over here,” said the Official in Charge of Predicting Storms, gesturing
towards a second glass tube, three feet tall and filled to within four inches from the top with silvery cream, “we have the Quicksilver Storm Glass. More accurate than the Water Storm Glass, it is, my Liege, arguably the greatest triumph of the oracular workshop.” The lower, open end of the tube was immersed in a bowl of quicksilver. “It is the heaviness of air on the quicksilver in the bowl that prevents the fluid in the tube from dropping any further. When air pressure is high, the weight of the air pushes on the quicksilver in the bowl, forcing it further up the tube. The quicksilver rises or falls as air pressure rises or falls. In this manner we can actually predict storms!”

“I commend you,” said Uabhar in tones of genuine approval, to the relief of Secundus Acerbus. “This is indeed an advance. Continue.”

As he moved away from the benches supporting the storm glasses the king murmured to the druid Acerbus, “That last weather-measuring devices seems promising. However, if the oracular workshop is to outdo the weathermasters and make them redundant, we shall need weather
-controlling
devices. When shall you show such apparatus to me?”

“We are still working on them, my Liege,” Acerbus said uneasily.

“Make haste, my good man,” said Uabhar. “Make haste. Time flows swiftly. If the devices are not ready very soon, the repercussions will be—” he paused “—quite horrendous.”

The druid bowed. He felt his heart race, driven by terror.

The fear soon dissipated; he was not a man of deep or enduring sentiments. At sunset, seeking solitude so that he might compose another speech for the benefit of the druidry, Secundus Acerbus climbed to the highest tower of the Sanctorum, where he seated himself at a small desk and gazed out over the city.

“Yea verily,” he said to himself experimentally, “the beginning is but the end, and the end is but the beginning. He that laughs shall weep, and he that weeps shall laugh most heartily. The poor can be called the most wealthy, while those who possess riches are—” He paused, bearing in mind the royal treasury and the necessity of casting the king in a good light, and chose his words carefully, “—
sometimes
the poorer.”

Lifting his quill pen from its stand he dipped it in an inkpot and began to write on a sheet of papyrus.
Hoard not your treasures, good folk, but give them unto the Sanctorum, that the druids may glorify the Fates. For unless you abase yourselves and compliment them without cease, they may well feel injured in their pride and turn their backs upon you.

Having scribbled his notes, the secundus replaced the quill in its holder and raised his head. From his eyrie he could look across to the other two hills
of Cathair Rua, crowned with the palace and the Red Lodge. He watched the cloud-boats fade from pink to grey, and presently he looked down at the roofs spread out below. Far away, quite at the city’s northern edge, the ragged roofs of hovels were already blanketed in darkness. Here and there a window opened a flame-yellow eye, before being shuttered to keep out the shadows.

That night one of the slum’s inhabitants was woken by a strange dream. Her name was Mairead, and by day she served in the kitchens of the Red Lodge. The child, no more than ten Winters old, looked out of the attic window. She saw countless stars, sparks of ruby, sapphire and topaz, and ethereal banners of diamond dust, pinned to the black backdrop behind the towers. The topmost towers of palace and Sanctorum could be glimpsed, hovering at the hem of the sky. People were saying the druids were manufacturing fierce machines that could master the winds. Perhaps they would also be able to gather the stars and make them into necklaces for the gentlefolk. If that were so, Mairead thought, they would be sure to charge an exorbitant price for such ornaments, for the servants of the Fates used every means at their disposal to gather riches. The contrast between the poverty of the slums and the luxury of the Sanctorum—and the palace, too, for that matter—could not be more striking. In private, Mairead despised the avaricious druids, and most of the wealthy classes too. The Red Lodge, however, was a different matter—Gearnach’s Knights of the Brand treated women with courtesy, no matter that they be scullery maids, floor scrubbers, or pail emptiers, and the wages were better than those paid by palace or Sanctorum.

Why were the druids learning to master the winds? she wondered. Did they wish to supplant the weathermasters? The child loved the weatherlords. Every time they passed through Cathair Rua they gave her some pennies and a smile. They were generous to the needy and they maintained no prisons or clandestine machines of torture, like the palace and the Sanctorum. If anyone spoke against them she turned a deaf ear.

The girl was thirsty, so without disturbing the small brothers and sisters who shared her bed, she tiptoed downstairs to creep into the kitchen.

Hearing the susurration of voices emanating from the kitchen, she hesitated on the stair. Wandering John habitually slept beside the hearth—perhaps he was awake and maundering. Her eldest brother was a harmless half-wit, and she had no fear of him. Yet there was more than one voice, and
they sounded unfamiliar. The child’s pinched, triangular face peered out from behind a newel post, and she beheld Wandering John’s form huddled on the floor as usual, not stirring, but breathing regularly. In the corner, however, five child-sized creatures that looked like women were grouped about the family’s wooden water pail, in which they were bathing their tiny babies. Mairead held her breath. The women-beings, smaller than she was herself, had such funny faces that it was all she could do to prevent herself from laughing aloud and alerting them to her presence. She had never seen anyone like them before, but she knew, from the stories told in the evenings by the fire, that they must be eldritch wights. And she knew also that wights took offense to being spied upon, so she remained very silent indeed, hardly daring to move lest she cause one of the floorboards to creak.

After washing their infants, the shrunken wives dried them beside the fire and swaddled them in grey rags, all the while murmuring amongst themselves in a tongue the watcher could not understand. Then one of the creatures said, “Hoose an’ all is clean then, as it should. Here’s summat tae pay for’t.” And she dropped something into the water pail,
ker-plunk.

Just then a gust of cold wind blew in beneath the door, and banged at the shutters. The wights lifted their long, drooping noses and sniffed the air. They looked around the room and glanced at one another, but the watching child remained hidden, and so quiet that apparently they did not notice her. They muttered as they quickly tied their shawls about their heads, wrapped up their babies and gathered up their scanty belongings. Then they slipped soundlessly out the door, closing it as quietly behind them. The girl ran to the window, her bare feet making no noise on the floor of beaten dirt. Peering through a gap in the shutters, she saw the queer visitors flitting like somber wraiths, away from the hovel, into the night, and the moon was a silver seashell rising before them in the north, and Mairead wondered what it could be that had called them away.

Her mother always said the child had been born with some form of intuition. Be that as it may, as she gazed at the moon she felt that this was not the first time such a phenomenon had manifested; wights moving northwards as if attracted by some compelling gramarye. It had happened before—yet not in this place. Not in this world, perhaps; somewhere far off, further than could be comprehended; yet also, in an inexplicable way, somewhere close by. Some place out there in the Uile, deep amongst the stars.

When she went to the pail to scoop out a drink, the water was clean and
pure, and a silver coin lay glinting at the bottom like a tiny moon; a three-penny bit . . .

The trows meanwhile hurried along the road in the night, sometimes cutting corners, usually keeping to the verges, which were overgrown with briars and nettles and rampant wildflowers. To the eyes of many mortal passersby, their transit would have seemed little more than the wind blowing through weeds. Far ahead of the wights, their road meandered through meadow and field, across brook and stream, over hill and vale, past farm-stead and hamlet. Through the village of Market Deeping it went, and over the Canterbury Water before passing between the Eldroth Fields and the Mountain Ring, then rolling on towards the royal city of Narngalis.

Nights and days winked on and off.

Late in Averil, the Councilors of Ellenhall with eight weathermages who were not on the council and six bri-prentices, arrived at the village of Market Deeping, traveling from the Mountain Ring. As prearranged, they rendezvoused there with King Thorgild and his retinue, who were to escort them down the Mountain Road to Cathair Rua, so that all might attend King Uabhar’s Mai Day feast of reconciliation.

It was a magnificent cohort that followed the winding road southwards from High Darioneth on the following morning. The crack knights of Grïmnørsland, the Shield Champions, formed the greater part of Thorgild’s suite, led by their commander, Sir Isleif. Sunlight glinted from their helms, and from the polished trappings of their horses, while their pennons, emblazoned with the west-kingdom’s emblem of a square-sailed longboat, fluttered skittishly in the breeze. No chariot or carriage was to be seen; the weathermasters, too, had elected to travel on horseback. Their chieftain, Storm Lord Avalloc Maelstronnar, was not amongst them; nor was his granddaughter Asrathiel. The former, never in full health since the departure of his son Arran, had contracted an ague and had taken to his bed, while the latter had gone to Silverton. King Warwick had requested that his weathermage help with the investigations into the uncanny carnage. Ordinary methods of enquiry had met with no success, wherefore Asrathiel would employ her weather senses to try to extract clues from the atmosphere. She possessed the ability to alter the direction of local winds, bringing her scents and sounds from afar; moreover, she could fearlessly seek out eldritch wights and question them.

Thirty weathermasters, old and young, in the company of a king’s cortege, made a splendid spectacle, with their fine steeds, their fair raiment and their rich caparisons. Folk in every village along the way rushed out to gawk and
exclaim as the riders passed, and in later days they would say amongst themselves that they had seen the flower of High Darioneth on that afternoon, and some made songs about the noble progress. A merry company it was, traveling in good comradeship. Thorgild, accompanied by his sons, was in a high humor.

“I look forward to the wedding of my daughter,” he said to Baldulf Ymberbaillé-Rainbearer, who rode at his side. At sixty-eight years old the weathermage was still spry, and although twenty-four years separated his age from the king’s, he handled his steed with skill no less consummate.

“Indeed, ‘twill be a blithe occasion,” was the mage’s warm reply.

“And I expect joy of this Mai Day Feast also,” said the red-bearded monarch. “I am only too happy to help mend the friendship between Rowan Green and Slievmordhu. ‘Twas a trifling dispute, after all, and not worth strife.”