Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

Rothesay was three days in the mountain city, roaming with Raian and his liege-boys by day, sleeping like puppies in his bed of undreamt-of softness at night -- except the night they spent on the floor of the governor’s palace’s lowest buttery, having gotten locked in accidentally. That was the night the Prince of Kinnaith came to visit, and held high court, and the governor of Teginau laid a great feast. Raian was not invited. That honor went to his elder brother, sixteen and soon to be knighted, who had no interest in and less use for a precocious tyrant and his rag-tag friends. By now, though, Rothesay had collected that lack of invitation or permission or authority put no bar on Raian’s will, and with heart in throat followed unquestioningly as the boy smuggled the two of them in past guards distracted by his other ‘men.’

They watched from above, through screens upon the second-floor balcony. In the echoing hall below, candle lights and magic lights shone upon expanses of gold beaten in reliefs of horsemen and mountains, and glinted from gold-touched frescoes of voluptuous dancers: not for the feast-hall the beautiful but austere images in Raian’s home, that actually were geometric discussions, old and renowned. The redoubtable Thornac, a much younger man than she had expected but twice as severe, struggled to make Raian learn them, but had not yet been able to answer, “Why should I, when I can just call you?” This intractability scandalized Rothesay, who wanted to know everything; she missed Raian’s chagrin at disappointing Rothric, and would have been almost as astonished as Thornac at his burst of scholarship in the weeks that followed.

Deep-throated trumpets heralded the entrance of the Prince. All the colored, gilded, jewelled throng, the cream of Teginau’s hybrid crop, rose to their feet and fell silent. A crier, with a body like a barrel and a voice that seemed to come from one, stepped out, a cloth-of-gold koli over her deep blue gown making her glow in the firelight. Her bronze-footed staff made the stones ring; a great crystal glittered at its top, high over her head, and the bright ribbons snapped and danced with the force of her punctuation. It was a ruld weara, a Geillan rod of law, shaped by the incomparable Sferan touch. The Dunhaldring staff looked rude and clumsy now in Rothesay’s memory.

“Lords and ladies, the powers and wisdoms of green-stoned Teginau!” she boomed in majestic cadence. The Geilleisil were proud of their reputation for powerful voices. “Behold your Prince, Gudric Adalyar Ethain, Firstborn of Kinnaith and Blood-brother of Dunwyrding, Master of the High Uissig—”

“They say that about the Chieftain, too,” whispered Raian.

“—Protector of the land and all that rightfully dwell therein, Lord Puissant and Beneficent, the Son of the Wind! Behold him and make glad song!”

Ethain was an old man with a white beard; Rothesay thought there were emeralds or some such scattered like green stars in its curls. Emeralds upon his sleeves flashed as he raised his hands in blessing over the heads of his folk bowing like grain as he passed. An anthem rose and followed in his wake, till the huge hall rang.

On the lofty upper floor, Rothesay sat with her nose poking through the decoratively pierced screen, the better to press her eyes all but through, enthralled by the beauty and the pomp and the dignity below. Her feeling of being caged had waned somewhat; she enjoyed this show immensely. But Raian watched Rothric: the ragged garments a grey and faded shadow of their former forest green, darned profusely with threads cannibalized from the ravelling hem; the brogan-laces so shortened by the many mending-knots that they barely held shoe to foot; even the lean and wind-burnt cheeks: these tokens of the traveller sang to him their own anthem of realms beyond the high walls of Teginau, an enchanted maze of strange new challenges and unexpected glory. Out there lay greatness, and he burned to know if he measured up to it. He turned his dream of a few nights ago over in his mind, and resolved to put it before Rothric, in a quieter moment.

Later that night on the hard earth of the buttery’s floor, he held his tongue. They had eaten well in their inadvertent captivity, and shared a truly great laugh over their ridiculous plight; the midst of folly was not the time to speak of dreams of bone-stirring magnificence.

Escaping next morning, he missed the awful news. A day spent dodging Thornac, weaseling into the game-theatres to watch some of the juridical wrestling, and laying plans for taking Rothric crag-climbing next day, kept him from the gossip till nightfall.

“They’re going to kill him!”

Raian’s little army convened before dawn in a sheltered niche where the north aqueduct pierced the city wall. Rothesay crouched on the stone lip, trailed her fingers in the dark, hurrying water, and tried not to hear her young friend’s anxious rage. This scheme was beyond madness. The other boys, some of them legal men older than their impetuous leader, stirred uneasily, as unhappy as she.

“Calion,” Raian said sternly, his passion abruptly, spookily, harnessed. “Remember when we lost our way in the blizzard? Just a few months ago! Who saved us then, eh? Brahald—who took the lashes when you lost your father’s prize ram?”

“Yah, well, I think he also ate him!” Brahald, a stocky boy from a Dunwyrding farm, in town for schooling, retorted, to a tremor of nervous laughter. Raian silently awaited a better answer. “Yah, all right, then, I love him well,” the other conceded miserably. “But, Rai: this is—this is law, boy! What matter if we don’t like it? We can’t defy law!”

“It’s law. Is it right?”

All twelve of his boys as one stared at him, and then at their feet. Rothesay watched the water begin to sparkle with the growing dawn. A breeze blew through the silence.

“I’m coming up for Proving this summer. The priests have been hammering all the Ways of a Man into my head since Yule. I remember that it says, ‘a man stands for the right, though all the world stand against him.’” His voice was low and level, his arms relaxed at his sides, his feet planted apart as though he stood braced for storm. And small as he was, one could believe that it was he would last, and the storm pass.

“It says also,” countered the oldest of the pack, a tall darkhaired beanpole once called Wolfpup, now Wolfman, for his impressive hairiness that Raian jovially suggested he in fairness share with peachfaced Rothric, “that a man stands in support of his people.”

“Yah,” nodded Raian. “I reckon Dagn na Urthan is ‘my people.’”

“He’s mine, too!” snapped Wolfman, his loyalty burned.

Raian thrust out a hand to him. “I can’t save him alone!” It was barely more than a murmur; but his eyes blazed with the fire in his heart.

Wolfman stared at the hand. Raian’s glance swept the rest of the group, a silent summons to battle. But it kindly passed over Rothric, the stranger, who knew neither Dagn nor the law of Teginau, who had nothing to gain and maybe everything to lose.

Rothesay had heard about Dagn last night, all night. She sat upon the hypocaust while the yellow-headed servant-boy took an hour to comb out her great length of hair and twist it in a mage’s fourfold plait, and Raian talked the while and for hours more. Dagn was a vagabond in the mountains of the Uissig, living his own life with neither clan nor city to speak for him, or to tax him. No one knew to what race he belonged; Raian liked to think he was a son of the old savage folk who lived half-wild in Peria even before the Sferiari came. He liked the boys who braved his cliffs and crags, who looked to him as a mentor in a grand and solitary independence that seemed to them to mark the very root and core of manliness, the boys who called him by the name of the Lord of the Wild. He hunted the mountain sheep; but was also known to stop a traveller or two, if he thought they might have something of interest, and trade with them—whether they agreed to the trade or not. Prince Ethain and Fiodric the Wyrdrald had decreed that he must declare a city or a family affiliation, depart, or be destroyed, but for seven years he had eluded the hand of Uissig law. Now he was caught, to be burned alive in the square at noon today, vagabondage being one of the gravest offenses a society knows, a threat to everything that means anything, a betrayal of the forces that hold chaos at bay and make community possible. Rothesay fingered Padriag’s travelling-token, her only defense against a similar charge, and prayed to pass unnoticed. And yet—

What, honestly, was so terrible about it? True enough, that if many men tried to live as Dagn na Urthan, society would disintegrate, and chaos reign; but the fact was, they simply did not. Who would? Who gave Dagn a portion of bread when his own provision fell short? Who tended him in sickness, and to whom would he turn when age began to cripple his bones? Above all, who would remember him after Death had taken him from the world? No, few men regarded freedom from clan obligations as worth the price of everlasting oblivion.

‘It’s law. Is it right?’ No, not hardly, she thought. This Dagn had thrown away more than he realized, perhaps, or maybe he was only mad; in any case, he was the one bereft, and the law—Harrowater and the Dunhaldring had a similar prohibition, of course, but had had no occasion to raise it, in her memory—the law would destroy him for impoverishing himself? Had they not more important things to fear, like raider neighbors?

It was not right; something was deeply wrong about it, though she could not frame it satisfactorily in her thought. She looked at Raian’s outstretched hand, and remembered the weird strength in her own.

Raian coughed in surprise as she clasped it. Before he could protest, however, Wolfman clamped his own upon their joined hands, his furry chin raised high, and one by one all the rest added theirs to the defiant pile. Raian let out a whoop of joy; but more because he knew it was expected than because he felt it. Glad though he was for Dagn’s sake, he was abruptly a young man with a problem. He had realized—he could not say exactly when, but by this morning he knew—that ‘Rothric’ was a girl.

In the hammering of their strategy, then, his attention flopped like a beached fish, sometimes keen upon their goal to the exclusion of all else, sometimes wondering how to ease his first recruit out to safety without betraying her. Girls troubled him, fay, unfathomable creatures he preferred to avoid. Having spent three days of great good fun with one violated everything he knew, or thought he knew, of their kind, and he had now no time to think. She ought not to be a part of this hazard; she ought not to be traipsing alone across Peria with a pair of swords at her back, either. She ought not to have been as simple a friend as she had been, nor as much plain fun; yet there she was, and the first to stand up with him, for someone she did not even know, just because he had asked.

They had to succeed, and get themselves clear of trouble in the bargain: he owed it to her.

Rothesay wondered if the disguise was necessary, or even helpful. She had on an old badgeless cloak that Calion had dredged up from somewhere, tattered and worn but still green, and a great-brimmed felt hat that cast her face into deep shadow; a crooked cane on which she was to lean as if lame; and smudges of ash on her chin and lips, to give her an unshaven look. (Shaving being an art unknown in Harrowater, she now understood the naked chins of the one guard at the gate and the two Darians at home, though the purpose for the practice escaped her.) Wolfman had at first suggested they dress ‘Rothric’ up as a girl, but Raian crushed that idea heavily, explaining, somewhat inadequately, that poor Rothric took quite enough of that sort of teasing.

A heavy wooden platform, head-high, had been erected in a market square just down from the governor’s palace. The prisoner was to be lashed to the post in the middle, upon an oil-soaked pile of brush and faggots; after proper ceremony, and spells to thwart the ghost’s vengeance, whatever noble citizen held the Venheuri priesthood of Death this year, together with the priestess of Sorche, would light the pyre with torches held ready at hand. Rothesay had passed nearly within arm’s reach of the construction earlier, and felt the evil of its aura almost as a palpable thing, and smothered a sudden urge to smash the whole pile into so much kindling-wood.

An air of carnival anticipation seemed to underlie the morning’s market. Rothesay hobbled out to join folk already beginning to gather about the skirts of the platform for a good view, though her heart screamed to flee. The Dunhaldring had no such horror as this, only beheading, which was at least swift; and most crimes, in any case, were paid for in silver, or in service. Here all about her the life of the market proceeded busily, trade moved in lively dance, a macabre celebration of death. Rothesay wondered if the Runedaur celebrated burnings as lustily, and what Ges Himself thought of the proceedings held more or less in His honor. Death, they said, came only when the soul could bear the burdens of life no longer; it was no triviality to magnify those weights, and call Death before His time. Why, then, this sense of sport?

Though the morning seemed endless, the noon-bells at last rang out from the towers in all the public squares of the city, a great music that shivered in the air long after the last chime struck. The merchants folded away their booths and cleared the square. Their places were swiftly filled by the vigorous citizenry, many with their midday meals in hand or basket, as if it were a civic picnic. Many also came armed with humiliation in the form of rotten produce. Rothesay shifted restlessly. She had seen no sign of her cohorts since they dissipated from Calion’s home this morning; had they found the disturbances they sought? When would they move? Could they move?

A brisk drum staccato rattled down the alley from the Citadel of Law and Teginau’s grimmest dungeon beneath it, quickly drowned by a roar from the crowd. Down marched a column of men-at-arms, white-and-blue striped Dunwyrding tunics peering from under Kinnaith’s articulated armor. Down rode the Teginau governor and the two senior magistrates on restless stallions. Then a curious oblong: on one side, three long columns of priests in the black robes of death—not the warrior Runedaur, but the civic Venheuri, men of the city who served this three-year tour of duty as the lot fell to them, and who looked askance at those who made a career of Death’s service; and on the other, three of priestesses in Sorche’s fiery red. In front walked another black-robed, black-veiled death-priest, and a scarlet-swathed fire-priestess glided behind, but these two glittered and gleamed, their official robes stiff with gold embroideries and bright gems, and torches flared in their hands, pale in the sunlight. Boys walked behind each, carrying the delicate frames of fanciful silken parasols. Fore and center in their square, naked but for a leather breechcloth and his rope bonds, walked a giant of a man, tawny hair and beard uncombed, unbraided, as wild-looking as the heights he loved to roam, Dagn of the Wastelands. He walked tall, and beamed beneficently at the hordes of Teginau, looking as though he were on his way to a feast, and not his own roasting. Rothesay shuddered, and wished darkly that the gawkers should have a taste of fear and fire, and not this genial, hapless lunatic. Then more soldiers, and lastly Prince Ethain himself, beside a high Dunwyrding noble who stood in place of the absent chieftain, with a score of courtiers at their backs.

The soldiers and the dignitaries assembled behind the pyre. The priests and priestesses climbed the wooden steps in file with their victim, and bound him tightly to the stake. Dagn watched with remote interest, as a full-fed cat watches a mouse. Crazy, surely; but what was that to die for?

A small disturbance brought the attention of the men-at-arms, but it was not the one she hoped for: a knot of brown-robed men, more such priests as visited Harrowater, pressed forward, crying out. But it was not the wrongness they protested; they shouted something about false gods falling before the God of Mercy, and then they were hustled away. A good idea, mercy; but Rothesay had the clear impression that they did not mean it for judgment in this life.

The magistrate came forward and read out the crimes, and a tedious sermon on the duties of citizens that protect their rights and honors. Next to Rothesay, a peasant fellow eyed the speaker and hefted a scabby turnip meditatively. Then the high priest and priestess between them performed an elaborate ritual punctuated by their attendants’ shaking tiny bells. Rothesay heard almost none of it, her anxiety for any sign of her partners in transgression stretching unbearably. Overhead a great, gloomy raven circled .

What seemed like hours later, the black and red partners in this public dance of death reached formally for their respective torches: the moment had come, and Raian had not. Rothesay jigged desperately in place.

“Here, yer wood’s rotted, Holiness!” Her voice broke in a terrified, sheepish bleat as she put a hand on the nearest timber, having no idea what she intended, except delay.

“What?” Sorche’s priestess snapped, startled from her magical trance.

“Rotted!” she squeaked, feeling now as idiotic as frightened, and gave a great shove. The effort shoved herself to the ground. The pyre stood firm, and crowd and soldiers and all turned to stare, puzzled, suspicious.

But the evil she had felt before flooded her senses now at the touch. Maddened with the horror of it, she flung herself back at the sturdy oak. This time it cracked and shuddered as her feet found purchase, the timber bent and splintered, the pyre tipped, and priests, priestesses, bells, torches and Dagn slid crashing into the dignitaries and all their horses. The pyre-fuel caught and blazed.

Chaos ripped away the veil of civility in the square. Some of those most heavily armed with vegetables for the sport of tormenting the condemned (once the fire should be lit and the holy folk withdrawn from range), now turned their armaments heartily against soldiers, courtiers, and all, for the soul of the commoner is seldom far from anarchy. An inrush of fresh soldiery from the Citadel tripped over a tide of pigs loosed from market-carts standing at the square’s edge for transport home, and a sudden, inexplicable flood of goats, geese, and chickens escaped from every household pen for blocks around. And then all were fleeing from the prize of today’s market, a matched pair of huge black bulls who took all but matching paths through the madness, and no one marked the black-haired, violet-eyed elf of disaster who hunkered under a cart and shook with triumphant laughter.

In the middle of the square, Rothesay wrenched timber from beam and bashed them to satisfactory firewood against the flagstones, moving from one to the next when scarcely a piece large enough to swing remained in her hands. Maybe a quarter of the platform had thus fallen to her before her fury began to be appeased, and, cooling, she sensed a strange and empty silence.

Looking up, she found herself ringed by several score or so of townsfolk, guards, and even the prince on his horse, watching her with round eyes, not venturing to interfere.

Fury faded utterly. “Oh, no,” she whispered, and spun and bolted for the thinnest part of the ring. Every ounce of the magical strength of Arngas she poured into her legs, as a cry of pursuit went up behind her. She lowered her head and thought of nothing but speed, her feet finding the shortest way to a gate on their own. Cats, chickens and children scattered before her; an overbold soldier held his ground and she did not know it till her shoulder jarred on his plates and he clattered aside.

The gate neared, but she was anticipated: the portcullis thudded into place, and she dared not match her power against the thick bronze. What else? Crying and fainting she could do later. Jump? A low opening gaped between the stone arch of the tetrapylon and the top of the portcullis bars. A desperate leap, the sickening shifting of a loose flagstone under her toes, flung her into the bars only a few ells short of the top; and, followed by shouts and screaming, she scrambled up, over, and leaped to the roadside grass and fled to the bosom of the wild.

Cover, screening was the idea of fleeing the road and turning at once to the forest (as she told herself later; only that, and certainly not any feeling of escaping to 'home'). Bashing her way through laurel and briar, she soon realized that the Uissig highway would have sped her further and sooner. Then the slope dropped out from under her and down the hillside she slithered on her back. Grabbling madly at the loam, trying to steer clear of uprushing tree-trunks, she slid away with far more speed than any mere road could have afforded, however well run. Then even the slope ended and she dropped two fathoms through open air into a turbulent pool.

The river snatched her away, tossing and twisting her about. She fought to get her face above the foam, and then to keep it above. Her shins banged the rocks and then she struggled to keep her feet high as well. Her tailbone banged instead.

Down between a pair of troll-like boulders she was carried, mere flotstam, tumbled about in another pool and flung over the lip of a falls at least twice her own height. The weight of the plunging water bore her down and shoved her head into sand. She wrenched about, planted her feet and thrust, caught a current and shot headfirst through the rapids below. Rocks peeled her arms and elbows and cracked her knees. A faceful of water from a standing wave made her choke and realize she had been screaming. Then the river-channel bent sharply and poured into a deeper, quieter though still swift-flowing stretch. As she caught her breath, at last it occurred to her to try to get out of the water. Embarrassed, she stroked for the bank and crawled out shaking. She lay for a while, staring at nothing till slowly a grin crept across her face. She would never have chosen such a trip but—since she was alive and whole—what a thrill it had been, after all! At length she sighed, pulled herself to jellylike legs and stumbled on, still grinning.

Areolin the Sailor of the Sun approached the western peaks when she dropped exhausted into the soft needles beneath the Elder Pendiu. She had no idea how she had found her way here, still less where she would go next. Her pack and her swords, her blanket and her own cloak lay under Raian’s bed in Raingold Enclave, and there they would stay till world’s end if she had to fetch them. She pressed her hand to her bosom: the faint, damp semi-crackle told her that Padriag’s map and letter were still with her. Yet she could hardly go on with no more than a stolen cloak and hat to her name. She stared up into the branches as she rolled her dilemma over ponderously, and was suddenly asleep.

“Waaagh!” she yelped, leaping up like a cat.

“Relax, it’s me!” Raian laughed. “I’ve brought you something.”

She blinked. She had not slept long, only enough for the sun to slip below the hills. “Uh. Hi,” she mumbled. “How did you—? I didn’t even know—I mean, I’m lost, really; I’m here by accident.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. Seems an accident to you, yah, but they do say that this old tree draws fate instead of water by the roots. As for me, well, you left a trail like a charging cow till—what, did you fall in the Kellstream?”

“Yes—whatever it’s called.” She shivered, half-grinning, and her eyes grew round at the recollection of that wild, watery tumble down the stony breast of the Uissig. The bruises were just beginning to throb, and she was deeply grateful they were not fractures.

He laughed, at once sympathetic with the terror and envious of the thrill. “Here.” He handed her her forgotten property. “I know how the Kell twists. I took a chance that you might have ended up here, if you hadn’t broken your neck and drowned.”

“No, I’m not so lucky. Um, thanks.”

“We saved Dagn,” he explained simply. “He burned his bonds and escaped—what with half the Watch chasing you. Wolfman’s going to take him out a knife and some stuff tomorrow. Now,” he stood up expectantly, and picked up a tall black bow. A fat pack crushed his cloak to his back. “How far do we travel before supper?”

“What?” she yelped.

“You did say you don’t mind travelling after dark. How far before supper?”

She flung her own belongings to her back and marched out from under the tree. “You aren’t coming!”

“You can’t go alone. I will help you meet the perils of the road,” he promised chivalrously, striding after her.

She gaped at that, all the horror of the morning rising again like an undead spirit. She did not understand what had overcome her in the square, but the shattered oak vividly spelled for her the terrible price of an unguarded temper. She cast wildly about for an answer. Seizing on a fallen trunk, she snapped it in two against a standing bole. “I am the perils of the road!” she roared. “Who will help you meet me?”

Raian blinked; he had not missed her performance in the market-square; but stoutly he asserted his faith that she would not harm him. Bursting into tears, she hugged him with a delicacy that would not have ruptured a soap bubble, picked him up and wedged him by the pack in a crotch of a dogwood, blew her nose and ran.

Raian roared and struggled; but he had done on his pack altogether too securely; he would be long enough getting free of it. A huge raven soared down, following the crash of Rothesay’s passage; for sheer pique, he raised his bow and shot it.

As he worked his way free, he realized that he had never taken a chance to tell her of his dream. Strange and remote it seemed now, that vision of standing as king before all of Peria, with a storm like a huge black dragon at his back. He wondered if she would laugh.

At sunset in Castle a Geste, Asilay el-Seremay screamed and dropped to the stony floor.