A Princess of the Chameln (34 page)

The ringing sounds of the herald's voice fled off into the misty depths of the forest. There was a moment of silence, then a single bird call and another and another; then the silence flowed back again.

“By the Goddess,” said the Herald, surprised. “The wee devils
are
about!”

“Hush,” said Aidris. “They will hear you!”

“Pardon me, my Queen.”

She smiled at the herald and at Bajan; she could smile at everyone that day.

“You are awaited . . .” said Bajan.

They mounted up, and as the whole company moved off, she saw shapes in the mist upon the road. In a short distance they became clearer: ranks of dark riders, with here and there the colored cloaks of the youths and the maidens and the blonde hair of the Zor. A few whooping cries came out of the mist.

“Come then, my Queen!” cried Jana Am Wetzerik.

Aidris pressed forward on Telavel and cried out to Captain Brock; the standard-bearer followed too, and they rode to meet the northern tribes. They were surrounded, the shouting and wild cries echoed up to the mountain wall. Aidris saw Megan Brock crying out amazed at the welcome, but her words were lost in the tumult. The pace of the ride had not slackened; a double file of riders went ahead; the cheering did not stop all the way to Vigrund. And so the queen was brought home again.

There were signs of fighting in Vigrund: broken shutters on the houses and the remains of a barricade that the citizens had thrown up against the garrison. The garrison of a hundred men of Mel'Nir had been surprised; messengers had been ambushed on their way to the town so that the captain did not know the strength of the Chameln rising until too late. The townsfolk held the soldiers at bay until the northern tribes came down and finished the work.

“There are twenty survivors,” said Bajan in answer to a question from Aidris. “Some are wounded. They lie in the old gatehouse yonder, which they used as a prison.”

Now there were cheering crowds in the streets. The queen was lodged at that excellent inn where Sir Jared Wild and Mistress Quade had rested on their way home. The landlord, Master Keel, and his wife stood beaming in their best clothes to welcome the queen and her followers. There were few green branches to be seen in Vigrund—it was not a custom of the northern tribes. But Aidris looked down an alley as they passed by and saw a woman with a green branch running towards her. A beefy citizen took the woman by the shoulder and deliberately threw her to the ground. Aidris drew rein and shouted. A kedran of the escort brought the woman through to stand beside the queen. She was a woman of about thirty with a widow's scarf; she hardly dared to raise her eyes.

“Come,” said Aidris. “What is your name? What will you ask of me?”

“I am called Mattis, my Queen,” she said in a sweet, soft voice, regaining her courage. “I ask leave to tend a wounded man called Dal, Sergeant Dal.”

“A wounded man?” asked Aidris sharply.

“He is a man of Mel'Nir, my Queen,” said the woman, looking her in the eye. “He was billetted in my house for six years. He is my husband now; we were married by his captain, according to Mel'Nir custom. He is sore wounded and may not live.”

There was a silence in the street, and Aidris caught a quick, questioning look from Bajan. She looked about and said, “Who answers for the prisoners in the gatehouse? Who has the duty?”

A foot soldier of the Nureshen in bronze strip mail came out of the crowd and saluted the queen and Count Bajan. He explained that the watch captain of Vigrund had the duty and he was in the relief troop.

“Let this woman come to the Mel'Nir sergeant,” said Aidris, “and any other woman in her plight. But see that the prisoners stay closely pent up.”

The man bowed low; the woman, Mattis, gasped out her thanks and kissed the hem of the queen's tunic. A murmur, the ghost of a murmur, came out of the crowd. Aidris said loudly, “This is the mercy of the Goddess, which I will bring to all those wounded in battle. My will, the will of the Daindru, is just as strong in this as it is strongly bent to drive the Melniros from our Chameln lands!”

The crowd cheered her to the echo. She went into the inn to rest, but there was no rest for the queen that day. She went in to dine with the Athron knights, all in high fettle, burning to ride further and look at the encampment of the tribes and the lines of Mel'Nir. They had heard talk of skirmishing and single combat. When dinner was half over, there came the tribal leaders, the Dencha, the Little Kings and Little Queens of the Durgashen, the Ingari and the Oshen. She received them in another room of the inn, and Ferrad Harka, Chief of the Durgashen, came with her to the war council of the Chameln lords.

Old Zabrandor unrolled his map again, and without palaver, Chief Ferrad, a grim-faced man with long moustaches and stinking black furs, said, “We have lost ground in the few days since the lords went to fetch the queen. The Melniros have cut the road to Zerrah, beaten off the riders of the Ingari, and thrown up more earthworks on the plain.”

“What is the strength of Mel'Nir?” asked Aidris.

“We have no certain numbers, my Queen,” replied Ferrad Harka, “but the warriors of Mel'Nir number upwards of a thousand, more than half of them mounted. Then they have mercenaries, two hundred bowmen.”

“What, have they come out of Lien?” she asked.

“No, my Queen,” answered Bajan. “They are most of them men of Lien, but Werris has had them in Achamar for some time.”

“They have been marched here, poor brutes,” said Jana Am Wetzerik, “and for little pay.”

“We have more than four thousand of our folk ready to take the field,” said Ferrad Harka, “and of those a thousand are mounted. We should gain the victory over Mel'Nir if we could come to them in the right way.”

“As Dencha Harka has said,” murmured the general tactfully, “but we have all the swiftness on our side and none of the weight.”

“How is the water supply for the horses?” asked Aidris.

“It stands much better with us than it does with Mel'Nir,” said Bajan, “but we are ravaging the lands of our comrade Lingrit Am Thuven.”

“The cause is good,” said Lingrit sadly. “Thuven Manor is there, such as remains of it, only to serve the queen.”

“A place has been kept for you, my Queen,” said Ferrad Harka. “Your own royal lodge is being built among the tents of the tribes.”

“Let us ride out at once,” said Aidris, “and see the encampments.”

The road through the forest from Vigrund was lined with cheering tribesfolk and kedran on watch. She looked into the South Ride and wondered if it might be a place to exercise Tamir. Then the road wound out of the trees, and she saw the plain. She had hardly seen it from this vantage point but only from Thuven. There to the southeast were a few small villages and sheep folds of the plains, breaks of trees, and all among them the whitish tents of Mel'Nir, made of thick cotton cloth. The road was cut less than three miles away, and earthworks had been thrown up on either side, made higher by screens of brushwood.

She looked at the brown hide tents of the tribes that clustered all along the edges of the forest on both sides of the road. There were pickets for the horses and several railed pens. Cooking fires burned before the tents, and beside the lodges of the chieftains there were storehouses upon stilts like the houses of a lake village.

She looked fearfully towards Thuven and what she saw was a more sorrowful sight than ruin and waste. The trees and the lake were as beautiful as she remembered them; behind the trees the beloved house rose up as it had always done, and the setting sun of autumn put a light in the staring dark windows. She gave the excited Telavel her head a little and rode along the front of the camp with Lingrit after her on his tall brown gelding. The wind that always lived there turned the grasses to silver, and she and Telavel both remembered that this was the plain at last, only the sea more boundless. A cry reached her. She saw a movement behind the earthwork and turned Telavel towards the barrow before the watchers of Mel'Nir could undertake anything against a solitary outrider.

She waited now and did not ride up onto the barrow; Lingrit came up, followed by Bajan and the other councillors. She could look through the windbreak of dark trees to the overgrown driveways and the lake shores. Folk were coming and going with leather buckets and waterskins. The house was an empty shell with trees and vines growing up inside the ruins.

Bajan pointed to a fine lodge against the forest fringes.

“That is the guest lodge,” he said. “It could be finished in the night if you wish it, my Queen.”

“Let them take their time,” said Aidris. “I will stay one or two more nights at the inn.”

They stood looking back the way they had come and beheld the Athron knights on their chargers dancing about down the road. One of them, surely Sir Jared Wild on Snow Cloud, made a foray to the southeast. His boldness did not go unnoticed; two armored men of Mel'Nir on their war horses appeared upon the plain, their panoply glowing in the light of the setting sun.

“Fools!” swore Ferrad Harka.

“Not so,” said Jana Am Wetzerik coldly. “That is what these rash painted knights are for, noble Ferrad. They will draw out the mounted lords, challenge them by name, joust with them.”

“Then they must be prepared to joust indeed,” said Lingrit Am Thuven, “for there are no knights in Mel'Nir, no knightly orders. They fight to the death, if they choose, and without quarter.”

“So do we!” said Bajan.

He drew his own horse, a new grey called Rastha, up beside Telavel, and the young stallion widened its nostrils and forgot its manners so far as to nip and nudge at the little mare. Bajan smiled at Aidris. As they rode back, a small drum began to sound.

“A Shaman is praying for our enterprise,” said Bajan.

“We need his prayers,” she said. “Which is your lodge? Are your brothers and sisters here, too?”

“I share the lodge of Batro, you remember, Batro with the yellow hair, my sister Ambré's husband. My brother Abrajan lodges with the young men. See . . . there is Batro's lodge, with the eagle banner for the Nureshen.”

By the time she came to the inn again and sent Telavel to the stable, Aidris found she was so weary she could hardly climb the stairs of the inn. She almost fell asleep in her bathtub before the fire.

“No, my Queen,” said Yvand, “it is not charm of sleep that has smitten you, it is the people.”

“I rode all day as a kedran,” said Aidris with a yawn, “and tired as little as Telavel.”

“A kedran does not have the duties of a queen,” said Yvand, “to smile and wave and talk with lords and commons.”

“Who keeps the watch?” she asked. “See that they bring me word if Mel'Nir begin mustering.”

“Sleep, my Queen,” said Yvand. “You will be summoned.”

Vigrund still rang with voices. Fires had been lit in the marketplace and there was dancing in the streets. High up in the best room of the inn the queen fell asleep.

She had fallen asleep before supper, and she woke hours later when it was still very dark. For a moment she thought she was in her dear, narrow room at Kerrick, then she remembered: “I am queen and come to the inn at Vigrund.” She saw the glow of the banked fire; she slept alone in the big room, with Yvand and Millis off in a little dressing room. She could not tell what had awakened her: a cry? a clattering in the dark street? Now all was still.

She had been dreaming, but nothing remained of the dream except a voice crying out her name, crying out for the queen. She tried to forget this dream, but another image from the dream took hold of her. A beating of dark wings, black feathered pinions beating and beating, blotting out the light as they passed over the forest and cast a shadow upon her upturned face.

She sat up, pushing aside the featherbed and held up the scrying stone. It gave off its soothing light. In the world of the stone there was a brown cloth and on it a bunch of mistletoe. The message of the magical plant was one of peace and protection, but it could not drive away her dream. Then, from one heartbeat to the next, the light was snuffed out in the world of the stone; it became a cold dead thing in her hand.

She was afraid then and angry, because there was nothing to fight against, no reason for her fear. The room was quiet, nothing moved in the shadows, nothing stirred outside her door or scrabbled at the windows of the inn. If she cried out, she would only wake her tired servants from their earned sleep. She sat still, hardly breathing, resisting the insidious fear. What made the stone so dark? Why was her protection withdrawn? She knew the answer, and it filled her with fresh anger and with despair. The Lady herself was afraid, and of their oldest enemy: the night-flyer, Rosmer, the sorcerer who had looked out from the forest stone. The fear, the night alarm were his presence.

She shouted at the intruder in her mind: “You shall not have me! I am not your creature, not Aravel nor Kelen nor any that you can bend to your will. Go back old man, old Eildon bastard, Shame of a noble house! You are wrinkled and hideous, your gimcrack spells have not worked. You have a pain in your side . . . you must be cut for the stone!”

She sat in silence, shrieking this childish raillery, feeling the presence of her enemy grow and grow, as if she conjured him up, dragged him into the light, made him palpable by her taunting. A gust of wind struck the mullioned window; a log crashed down in the fireplace and the sparks rose. Yvand called sleepily from the next room, “My Queen? Dan Aidris?”

“A gust of wind,” she said. “Sleep, Yvand.”

The old one had come and gone. What was it Nazran had said? “Dark magic festers in the mind like fear.”

Aidris slept again and woke with the first streaks of dawn lightening the sky over the plain. At last the streets of Vigrund were empty and quiet; she found she loved this stillness and emptiness. The escort went with her to the stables where Sergeant Lawlor had the two horses saddled. Tamir was very restless.