The Golden Swan (15 page)

“He would be in grave danger of death from thirst and starvation.”

“Huh,” said Alys unsympathetically. “There would have been rain soon enough, and a jackrabbit or two. Maeve, you have no business being here, and you know you have none. You are part of a far larger design than anything that ever happened in this puny land of Vale.”

I knew it was true, as she had said. I made no excuse; I only nodded. “But is Frain part of the pattern here in Vale,” I asked, “or is his destiny at the Source with mine, as I have sensed?”

“Frain is a nuisance,” said Alys grimly.

I waited, and in a moment she went on.

“This matter between Shamarra and Tirell is a pattern which will work itself out in its own time and way and with its own justice. As Fabron has met with justice at last, the usurper. Shamarra was as much a tool of destiny as a crafter of that death—Frain should not be involved. It was not only Shamarra who lured him out of Vale. But since, with that eager stupidity of his, he has gone and gotten himself back in again—” The goddess's tone turned hard. “—I am going to have to intervene, since you have summoned me. And I hate to intervene. It makes me testy. Shamarra knows that.”

I stole a glance behind me. Frain had settled down beside his father and was stroking the dead man's eyelids to close them. Dair had gone wolf, perhaps to threaten Shamarra should she make herself a monster again. Shamarra had folded her hands and stood very still.

“Shamarra,” said Alys with distaste but no wrath, “Frain is not entirely yours. I have work for him.”

“He has doomed himself—” Shamarra started.

“Another destiny encompasses that doom. Play out your own play here, and leave him to his, and see. He has been gone from you this long, and he is to leave you again, I say.” The voice had taken on a touch of sharp edge. “Go now.”

Shamarra nodded, gave a graceful curtsy and rippled away down the mountainside. She grew ghostly, seeming to float in the darkness, then disappeared. Frain stood up and gazed after her.

“He is so much like a child,” Alys sighed, “that it is useless to scold him. But you, Maeve!” Her voice jerked me around to face her again. “You are no child.”

I stood quite silently. I had lost my fear in resignation.

“Nothing to say for yourself?” asked Alys rather nastily. “Well, be mute, then. With the first rays of tomorrow's sunrise. And you will remain mute until the fern flower is found and plucked. That should speed you on your way. When day comes, tend to the dead man, then turn eastward—and take that bothersome Frain with you!”

Thunder sounded, fire ramped and rained, and a blast of wind came that knocked me to my knees. When I looked up, Alys was gone. The great swan had flown, Frain said. Dair told me that the giant moon had faded into starlight. They pulled me up by the elbows and led me back into the shelter of the twin rocks Kedal and Kedur.

We sat all that night shivering and talking, not for diversion but for vital understanding. Frain told us everything that Shamarra had said, and I told him what Alys had decreed. He seemed drifting, dazed, incoherent, even, after Fabron's death and Shamarra's plotting and my own setback. He ended up telling us, not anything about Fabron or Tirell or Shamarra, but about Kedal and Kedur. Two giant and immortal staghounds who had been insulted, called curs, and turned to stone as a result. Fabron had told him the tale when they first met, he said. As he spoke, his eyes remained dry, but slow, seeping tears ran down the rocks from their blind heads far above.

When dawn came we built a cairn over Fabron and left him. No one would ever find him, Frain said. No one came to the mountains except the foolhardy and the most daring of heroes. We trudged back up the steep and rocky slope to the pass, out of the shadow of Lorc Tutosel, the mountains of the night bird. I faced the morning sun. Frain looked back on the far hazy hills of Vale, then down at the cliffs that fell away at our feet, and abruptly he came out of his numbness into anguish.

“Maeve, what in the name of misery am I to do?” he cried, hurling the words out to the heedless wind. “Such a fool I am, I have given my life away to folly—it is not she that I love, she is a stranger, I hardly know her, I detest her, she has betrayed me like all the rest—and yet I love her still! How can that be?” He turned to me fiercely, willing me to understand what he did not. “How has she made such an ass of me? No, it is worse than that; I have done it to myself. I and that lake and an ideal. Look, world, here we see Frain, the noble, loving and faithful one—faithful to what? A witch, a harpy? Ai, I feel like giving my body to yonder void.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but no sound came. The muteness had struck. Desolation filled me.

“I can do nothing right,” Frain ranted, not looking at me. “I should be speeding to Tirell to warn him, help him, no matter what the goddess says—but I would not be able to face him. I am frightened at the very thought of it, as I was when I saw Fabron. I am such a coward—”

He was talking nonsense, as usual, and I could not tell him so. It is a hard thing not to be able to speak one's mind. I sobbed in anger and self-pity. Frain spun around to peer at me, and his face crumpled.

“And you cannot even speak to me to scold me,” he whispered. “And that is my fault as well. Maeve, I am so sorry—”

That was worse than his ranting. I stamped my foot at him, furious at him and at my own sniveling. He grew suddenly very calm, smiling at me oddly.

“Well,” he remarked, “it can hardly be said any longer that I go to the Source to learn to speak to Shamarra.”

I forgot my tears and watched him warily. The cliff fell away jagged below. Dair stepped to his other side, taut and alert as well. We should have known better. There was always more to Frain than we expected.

“But I am going nevertheless, Maeve Mother,” he said almost jauntily. “And I am going to see that you get that flower if I have to find it for you myself. If it takes another eight years. From one madness to the next I flit. So off to the Source we go. Yo ho.”

He moved morosely down the shelving rock, and we followed meekly.

From that day on, by some odd shift of fate or will, Frain became our leader, and he felt it. He grew keen as a hound on a faint scent. He seldom slept, and when he did doze he would awaken himself shouting from vivid dreams. Mostly he paced the nights away, his face lean and questing. He did not mention Shamarra again, or the goings-on in Vale; whatever his feelings were in that regard, he kept them very much to himself. He walked steadily, following the straight tug of the Source as surely as I had, and he never led us astray.

He took us down the way we had come and then eastward along the scarp of the Lorc Tutosel with the desert to our right, too close for comfort. Vultures flew there; they reminded me unpleasantly of the Luoni. We found water and food when we needed it in the hollows of the mountains, but just barely enough; we were never really satisfied. The goddess was being severe with us, I could tell.

We made an odd trio, we travelers. Frain could talk to either of us, but for the most part he kept silence. Dair could talk only to me, and I could talk to no one, but I could understand, whereas Frain could understand nothing, and Dair had no one to listen to but Frain. And we were thin and brown and tangled of hair; I no longer looked much like a respectable matron. And we limped from the constant walking; we were all cripples and all mutes and all fools, one way or another. Sometimes, for no reason, I laughed. I could still laugh, much as Dair, in his way, could sing. He sang sometimes at night to amuse us, the notes glassy clear, smooth and sliding, with no cozy human quality about them at all. Once as he sang the wolves of the mountains joined in, each on its own key of wild harmony, and as soon as Dair changed pitch they all did, sliding to a new note with a delicate quaver and a dying fall at the end.

That's all they accept me for
, Dair said.
The singing
.

I doubted if anyone would have wanted any of us for anything except oddities. Even the slavers would have thought twice about taking us by now, I believed. But there were no slavers about, not on the edge of the desert. And when the barren expanse of sand blocked our way again we struck out across it with an absurd and mindless willingness and a total lack of supplies.

She has made ninnies of us, I thought.

It was hot, too, far hotter than before. The sand burned our bare feet—we had all abandoned our footgear by then, it was worn to pieces. But the way was not long. Only a few days after we started across that wasteland we spied the most unexpected sort of haven, a line of bright green ahead. And as we drew nearer we saw a shine of silver. Not until we stood on the very verge could we believe. A great sheet of water, a magnificent river, bubbled up from the sand at that spot and flowed away between banks of verdant reeds. One foot on sand and the other in marshland, we stood and blinked at each other.

“I declare,” said Frain in a startled way, staring at the water that lapped at his instep.

I was more forthcoming. I fell right into the river and drank. The water was fresh and sweet, sand-filtered, and very clear. It seemed to me at the time the best I had ever tasted. Dair drank as well, then whooped and splashed me, capering. Frain still stood bemused. He turned and looked behind him to where the Lorc Tutosel still showed tiny and serrated on the far horizon.

“I declare, it must be where the Chardri comes up again, the great river, after it tumbles beneath the mountains down the south abyss.”

I did not know and I did not care. The river, whatever river it was, ran south and east, more east than south for the time, and we followed it. We found wild asparagus and duck eggs and ate them ravenously; even Dair ate the greens. Then we went on. After a while bushes grew along the shore as well as reeds, and then dwarf willows, and then tall sycamore trees, real trees. In their gently shifting shade, half over the water, stood an odd stilt-legged sort of house.

A house!

We froze like startled deer and stared at it, half inclined to flee, as if we had forgotten we were human. The people within were as uncertain as we. Shy brown faces peeped out at us from between reed window slats. Frain collected himself and stepped forward, his one good hand raised to signify peaceful intent.

“Please,” he said in Traderstongue, “we are very hungry,” and he extended the hand with palm raised, the beggar's gesture of appeal. He could never have been taken for a beggar. His bearing was princely in spite of his rags. But the people understood nevertheless, and silently and hesitantly they issued forth, small muscular men and wide-eyed children and women with their hands half hiding their faces, and they took us in.

They fed us some sort of pudding and great flakes of white poached fish, and then we slept on reed mats that they unrolled for us on the floor. It was good to be back among humans again, very good, even though we were strangers among them and felt it, even though they whispered among themselves and stared at us constantly. The next day they sent us on our way with gifts of fish and wild rice. We stayed that night in another such house, and the next in another. These people lived all along the river. They were gentle folk, almond brown of skin with large dark eyes; their merry round-faced children swarmed through the small dwellings like puppies. We were sorry to leave them, but when the river turned more south than east we saw that we would have to. Our decision caused them great consternation and much high-pitched talk which of course we could not understand.

“You go east?” an old man demanded of us in a dialect we could comprehend, though barely. We nodded. Indeed, we had to go east.

“You three, you woman and wild man and man with withered arm.” He pointed at us each in turn. “Legends say end of world is to come when you go east.”

We looked at each other and shrugged, thinking we could not have understood him correctly; then we raised hands in farewell and took our leave. They let us go amid much wailing, for they were peaceable folk and would not have known how to stop us.

Once again we were on our own. The land away from the river was no longer desert, but a sort of sandy grassland. The sun shone down with passionate warmth, and birds were mating and singing everywhere. Spring had come, the season of love. Frain did not speak anymore of love, but a poet's paradise of love stretched all around us, doves and deer with their young dappled fawns at their soft flanks and lovely creatures of every kind. I wondered why the river people seemed so afraid, seemed never to come out on this rich grassland. I realized later that it was because we were nearing the holy place.

Near seemed as far as ever to us; we walked for weeks. After a while we noticed marshy patches in the plain. Swarms of stinging insects came up from them and attacked us, rather as if they were guarding the hidden place. Once we reached the true fen, though, they troubled us no more.

That wetland, the most marvelous of fens. We traveled through it for miles and days, our wonder deepening and widening as it did. The spring-green sedges, gathering sand around their roots into hillocks and letting smooth water through in a mazy way between. And waterfowl everywhere, and the white wading birds always standing, and the white water lilies where the shallows deepened into pools. Then islands lush with plumy trees, and the waterways between them golden from the sand beneath and mirroring sky and shadow, meandering, lined with the yellow blossoms of mallow, snakes and turtles sunning themselves on the banks—

Great red fish flickered beneath the ripples, quite tame. “They look as if a person with two hands could practically pick one up,” said Frain.

It was not so easy. I tried. Then we tried catching them in Dair's shirt, and that worked no better. Then Frain cut a six-foot shaft from one of the nodding island trees and tied his knife to the end of it and tried to spear them for us. He stood motionless, biding his time, then let loose a mighty thrust. But he missed his aim, and the knife buried itself in the sandy bottom somewhere; the lashings broke.