Hall of the Mountain King
THE HALL
OF THE
MOUNTAIN KING
Avaryan Rising: Book One
Judith Tarr
Book View Café Edition
May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61138-260-0
Copyright © 1988 Judith Tarr
For Meredith
The old king stood upon the battlements, gazing southward.
The wind whipped back his long white hair and boomed in his heavy cloak. But
his eyes never blinked, his face never flinched, as stern and immovable as an
image carved in obsidian.
The walls fell sheer below him, stone set on stone, castle
and crag set in the green Vale, field and forest rolling into the mountain
bastions of his kingdom. North and west and south, the wall of lofty peaks was
unbroken. In the east lay the Gate of Han-Ianon, the pass which was the only
entrance to the heart of his realm. On either side of it rose the Towers of the
Dawn. Gods had built them long ages ago, or so it was said; built them and
departed, leaving them as a monument, the wonders of the north. They were tall
and they were unassailable, and they were beautiful, wrought of stone as rare
as it was wonderful. Silver-grey under stars or moons, silver-white in the sun,
in the dawn it glowed with all the colors of the waking sky: white and silver
and rose, blood-red and palest emerald.
That same stone glimmered still under his feet although it
was full morning, the sun poised above the distant Towers. An omen, the priests
would say, that the dawnstone had kept its radiance so long. Against all
reason, against all the years of hopeless hope, he yearned to believe in it.
oOo
From his post at the southern gate Vadin could see the
lone still figure dwarfed by height and distance. Every morning it stood there
between sunrise and the second hour, in every weather, even in the dead of
winter; it had stood so for years, people said, more years than Vadin had been
alive.
He swallowed a yawn. Although sentry duty was the least
strenuous office of a royal squire, it was also the least engrossing. And he
was short on sleep; he had been at liberty last night, he and two more of the
younger squires, and they had drunk and diced and drunk some more, and he had
had a run of luck. In the end he had won first go at the girl. This time, at
the thought of her, it was a smile that he swallowed.
Swallowed hard and as close to invisibly as he could. Old
Adjan the arms master asked very little of the young hellions in his charge.
Merely absolute obedience to his every command, absolute perfection in hall and
on the practice field, and absolute stillness while on guard. One’s eyes might
move within the sheltering helmet; one might, at regular intervals, pace from
portal to portal of the gate, which was when one could glance upward at the
flutter of black that was the king. For the rest, one made oneself an image of
black stone and lacquered bronze, and made certain that one observed every
flicker of movement about one’s post.
It had been excruciating at first, that stillness. Raw boy
that he had been, brought up wild in his father’s castle in the hills of
Imehen, he had imagined no torture greater than that of standing in armor with
his spear at one precise angle and no other, hour upon hour, while the sun beat
down upon his head or the rain lashed his face or the wind bit him to the bone.
Now it was merely dull.
He had learned to take his ease while seeming to stand at
rigid attention, and to set his eyes to their task of observation while letting
his mind wander as it would. Now and then it would wander back to his eyes’
labor, contemplating the people who passed to and fro in the town below. Some
approached the castle, urchins staring at the great tall guards in their
splendid livery, one at each of the lesser gates and half a company at the Gate
of Gods that faced the east; at servants and sightseers and the odd nobleman
passing within or going out.
At the very beginning of Vadin’s watch, the Prince Moranden
himself had ridden out with a goodly company of lords and attendants, armed and
accoutered for the hunt. The king’s son had had a glance for the lanky lad on
guard, a flicker of recognition, a quick smile. A proud man, the prince, but
never too proud to take notice of a squire.
Vadin glanced at the sun. Not long now before Kav came to
relieve him. Then an hour of mounted drill and an hour at swordplay, and he was
to wait on the king tonight.
A signal honor, that last, rarely granted to any squire in
his first year of service. Adjan had been sour when he announced it, but Adjan
was always sour; more to the point, the old soldier had appended no biting
sarcasm. He had only growled, “Pick up your jawbone, boy, and stop dawdling.
It’s almost sunup.” Which meant that he was pleased with his newest and most
callow recruit, gods alone knew why; but Vadin had learned not to argue with
fortune.
While his mind reflected, his eye had been recording on its
own, independent of his will. The Lady Odiya’s elderly maid scuttling on an
errand; an elder of the council with his followers; a gaggle of farmfolk come
to market, taking time to gape at the glowing wonder of the castle. As they
wandered back down toward the town, they left one behind, a man who stood still
in the road’s center and stared up at the battlements.
No, not a man. A boy perhaps Vadin’s own age, perhaps a year
or two younger for his beard was just beginning, very erect and very proud and
patently no rustic. He could not but be Ianyn, blackwood-dark as he was, yet he
was got up like a southerner in coat and trousers, with a southern shortsword
at his side.
Vadin would have called him a paradox but for the flame of
gold at his throat, the torque of a priest of the Sun, and the broad white
browband that marked him an initiate on his seven years’ Journey. This one was
young for it, but not overly so; and it explained the Ianyn face atop the dress
of the Hundred Realms. No doubt the trousers were a penance for some
infraction.
The priest left off his staring and began to walk, drawing
closer to the gate. Vadin blinked. The world had gone out of focus. Or else—
If Vadin’s training had been beaten into him even a little
less thoroughly, he would have laughed. This boy with the face of a mountain
lord, who carried himself as if he had been as high as all Han-Ianon, was hardly
bigger than a child. The closer he came, the smaller he seemed. Then he raised
his eyes, and Vadin’s breath caught. They were full of—they blazed with—
They flicked away. He was only a ragged priest in trousers,
standing not even shoulder-high to Vadin.
And Vadin was flogging himself awake. The boy was almost
through the gate. With haste that would have won a scowl from the arms master,
Vadin thrust out his spear to bar the way.
The stranger halted. He was not frightened; he was not
visibly angry. If anything, he seemed amused.
Gods, but he was haughty. Vadin mustered his harshest tone,
which was also his deepest, booming out in most satisfactory fashion. “Hold,
stranger, in the king’s name. Come you out of the Hundred Realms?”
“Yes.” The priest’s voice was as startling as his eyes, a
full octave deeper than Vadin’s but eerily clear, with the soft vowels of the
south. “I do.”
“Then I must conduct you to his majesty.”
At once, the order went, without exception, without regard
for any other order or duty. Beneath the stoic mask of the guard, Vadin was
beginning to enjoy himself.
He had the immense satisfaction of collaring an armed
warrior, a full knight to boot, and ordering him—with all due respect—to hold
the gate until Vadin or his relief should come. “King’s business,” he said,
careful not to sound too cheerful. “Standing order.”
The man did not need to ask which one. The torque and the
trousers made it obvious.
Their bearer looked on it all with the merest suggestion of
a smile. When Vadin would have led him he managed to set himself in the lead,
striding forward without hesitation, asking no direction.
He had a smooth hunter’s stride, barely swaying the black
braid that hung to his waist behind him, and surprisingly fast. Vadin had to
stretch his long legs to keep pace.
oOo
The king turned his face toward the cruel sun. Again it
was climbing to its zenith, again it brought him no hope. Once he would have
cursed it, but time had robbed him of rage as of so much else. Even the omen of
the dawnstone meant nothing. She would not return.
“My lord.”
Habit and kingship brought him about slowly, with royal
dignity. One of his squires stood before him in the armor of a gate guard. The
newest one, the lordling from Imehen, for whom Adjan had such unwontedly high hopes.
He was standing straight and soldierly, a credit to his master.
“Sire,” he said clearly enough, if somewhat stiffly, “a
traveler has come from the Hundred Realms. I have brought him to you as you
commanded.”
The king saw the other then. He had been lost in his guard’s
shadow, a shadow himself, small and lithe and dark. But when he lifted his
head, the tall squire shrank to vanishing.
He had a face a man could not forget, fine-boned and
eagle-proud, neither handsome nor ugly but simply and supremely itself. The
eyes in it met the old man’s steadily, with calm and royal confidence; almost,
but not quite, he smiled.
Almost, but not quite, the king returned his smile. Hope was
rising once more. Swelling; quivering on the edge of fear.
The boy stepped away from his guard, one pace only, as if to
shake off the intruding presence. Something in the movement betrayed the
tension beneath his calm. Yet when he spoke his voice was steady, and unlike
his face, incontestably beautiful. “I greet you, my lord, and I commend your
liege man’s courtesy.”
The king glanced at Vadin, who was careful to wear no
expression at all. “Did you resist him?” the king asked the stranger.
“Not at all, my lord. But,” the boy added, again with his
almost-smile, “I was somewhat haughty.”
From the glitter in the squire’s eyes, that was no less than
the truth. The king swallowed laughter, found it echoed in the clear bright
eyes, and lost it in a dart of memory and of old, old grief. He had not laughed
so, nor met such utter, joyous fearlessness, since—
His voice came hard and harsh. “From the Hundred Realms, are
you, boy?”
“Han-Gilen, sire.”
The king drew a slow breath. His face had neither changed
nor softened. Yet his heart was hammering against his ribs. “Han-Gilen,” he
said. “Tell me, boy. Have you heard aught of my daughter?”
“Your daughter, my lord?” The voice was cool, but the eyes
had shifted, gazing over the southward sweep of Han-Ianon.
The king turned, following them. “Once on a time, I had a
daughter. When she was born I made her my heir. When she was still a young maid
I consecrated her to the Sun. And when she reached the time of her womanhood
she went away as all the Sun’s children must do, on the seven years’ wandering
of her priestess-Journey. At the end of it she should have returned, full
priestess and full wise, with wondrous tales to tell. But the seven years
passed, and seven again, and she did not come. And now it is thrice the time
appointed, and still no man has seen her, nor has she sent me word, I have
heard only rumors, travelers’ tales out of the south. A priestess from the
north, Journeying in the Hundred Realms, abandoned her vows and her heritage to
wed a ruling prince; but nay, she spurned the prince to rule as high priestess
in the Temple of the Sun in Han-Gilen; she went mad and turned seer and
proclaimed that the god had spoken to her in visions; she . . . died.”
There was a silence. Abruptly the king spun about, swirling
his black cloak. “Mad, they call me. Mad, because I stand here day upon day,
year upon year, praying for my daughter’s return. Though I grow old and soon
will die, I name no heir, while yonder in my hall my son leads my younger
warriors in a round of gaming, or sleeps deep beside his latest woman. A strong
man is the Prince Moranden of Ianon, a great warrior, a leader of men. He is
more than fit to hold the high seat.”