The Golden Swan (6 page)

I can't bear this
, I said, though I knew he would not understand me.
Three more weeks yet
—

“It can't last much longer,” he said, as if he had understood after all. “It will soon run its course.”

He brought a basin of water and tried to bathe me. He had managed to warm it somehow, even. I had never been one for much bathing, as I suppose he could see, but I felt too wretched to protest. I lay and let him run the cloth over me, and every once in a while a soft sound would escape my lips. I scarcely noticed when he stopped his sloshings and lavings, muttering to himself fervidly. I scarcely noticed when he laid something on my chest and placed his hand on top of it. But when the slight weight stayed there for some time I made the painful effort to open my eyes.

Frain was standing over me, looking desperate. The thing on my chest was the iron knife he always wore at his belt. I saw, wondering but without alarm, for with tight-lipped concentration he took away his hand and laid it on my forehead, pressing gently. I felt the tremor of effort in that hand. For a long moment he held it there. Then he jerked it away, cursing quietly. He turned toward the wall, his shoulders bent and askew, and I made an inquiring sound.

“Dair?” He looked over to see me looking back at him. He smiled darkly and came to get his knife off my chest.

“Old habits are hard to break,” he joked, his voice tight. “I was trying to heal you. I used to be a healer, long ago, before—before I got hurt.”

Something in my silence helped him to go on.

“There is a power in metal and in the sons of metal-smiths,” he explained. “I could take anything made of iron, a knife blade or whatever, and lay it on together with my hands, and the power would flow through me. I thought maybe—” He stopped with a shrug. “The power is gone,” he said after a moment. “I cannot heal anyone anymore, and least of all myself.”

I gazed at him, my own woes forgotten. I signaled my interest with voice and gesture, urging him to say more. He sighed and sat on the stool by my bedside. A long silence followed.

“It's not just the hands,” he said finally. “It's not just that—Tirell has crippled me. Everything went together, power, prowess, happiness—I've become crippled some other way, somehow. Something inside is hurt. My father lost his healer's power to greed and shame, he told me. Well, I don't know the name of the thing that has taken hold of mine, but it has an ugly face.”

He got up abruptly and went out, and I went to sleep.

I felt better. Perhaps the seasickness had run its course, but I think Frain had helped me. Not that there had been any mystic power of healing in his touch, but just that he had cared enough to try—I had seen what effort it had cost him to try. And he had trusted me enough to talk to me. I felt better.

Fran brought me broth in the morning, and I kept it down. And I kept down the sops and slops he brought me thereafter. And a few days later I got up from my bed and wobbled out on deck. The sailors grinned at me and let me alone. Frain stood by me in awkward silence.

“I am glad you are better,” he said finally, and I felt he could not have said it if it were not to some extent true.

He was still distant with me, still put off. But he talked to me more easily and more often as the days went by. He was tense and unhappy, for he liked the sea no better than I did, and the sailors knew it and baited him about it. So he was lonely, and even a mute woodwouse of a companion served better than none. We passed the time with simple games, naughts and crosses, dice and the like. And he would talk about Tirell—how he had loved Tirell. Doglike devotion, folk call it. And he had loved his father Fabron as well, though more as an equal—and Vale itself, his homeland, he spoke of it with longing and love. One day when we had a bit of charcoal at hand he drew me a crude map of Vale on the ship's deck.

“Mountains all around. The river runs down from the northern ones, the dragon range, where there are snow-caps, and empties into a cavern under the king's range to the south and east. No one knows where it goes after that. No one comes into Vale and hardly anyone goes out of it. Those few who do leave, like myself, are as good as dead to those within. I doubt if I will ever wander back.”

I only half listened, staring at the rough oval he had drawn on the planking. In a moment I took the charcoal from him and put my own map beside his. It was very nearly the same shape. Clumsily, for I still found it awkward to use my hands, I showed the river running down from the north and west—dragons lived in those parts in the old days, legend said—and I put a dot at the river's mouth—Nemeton. Glancing up at Frain, I saw that he did not understand. How to show him that this was an island, an oval surrounded by sea? I drew a sort of walnut shell with stick masts at Nemeton harbor—a ship.

“Isle?” Frain asked, astonished.

I nodded.

“But—great goddess, what a coincidence! Are they both nearly the same size?”

They were. We discussed it in our way, he figuring weeks of travel and I agreeing. It would take just about a year to make the rounds of either kingdom with any ease.

“And Trevyn and Tirell, True Kings,” Frain muttered, more to the air than to me. “So alike, and yet so different. I believe the old woman is playing tricks on me again.” He strode off, and that was the end of our one-sided colloquy for that day.

I grew stronger quickly, even on shipboard fare, and I grew more hopeful daily, for Frain was most surely more at ease with me, and maybe one day he might truly be my friend. He grew somewhat more candid with me. One day toward the end of the voyage he asked me a stark question.

“Dair, were you really a wolf for a while?”

I nodded.

“Maybe we are what the goddess meant by wolf meeting dog. People used to call me Puppydog in Vale.… Because your mother was a wolf when you were born?”

Nod.

“Swans and serpents,” he breathed. “She must be a potent sorceress.”

I shrugged in wary agreement. Frain stared at me and then past me, thinking hard.

“Though why that should bother me, I don't know,” he said finally. “I've seen enough strange things in my life, especially in a certain lake.” He shuddered slightly. “Dair,” he burst out, “if you would smile once in a while, it would help.”

Trevyn had told me that my expression was fixed and unnerving. The muscles of my face did not work as they usually did in humans, it seemed. But certainly I was willing to try them, I wanted only to please. I flexed my lips. Frain gave me a startled look and glanced quickly away.

“No good. You're baring your teeth,” he said quite gently. “Never mind, it was a stupid idea.” He rested his elbow on his knee and his head on his hand. A large wave splashed over the ship's railing and drenched him, and he jumped up, cursing.

“Go ahead, douse me!” he shouted at it. “Who am I, anyway? A leaf on the tide, cloud feather, bird dropping or some such. First I search seven years in one direction, and then she sends me back in the other—” His anger turned to a sort of desperate amusement, and he lapsed into laughter, watching the water trickle away from him like tears. “Dair, I'm all wet.”

I rose, offering to get him dry clothes, and he followed me below, still softly laughing. Then he stopped with a sigh. “I hate this endless water,” he said.

All I could do was hand him dry clothes.

“I never used to be so full of the mubblefubbles,” he told me wryly. “So fearful, so bitter—but the days when I was—when I was myself—seem so long ago that I can hardly remember them.”

The voyage drifted on. Every morning we sailed blind, straight for the rising sun. Finally one day a rim of black showed below the sun, and the next day cliffs loomed up. We had come to the rocky coast of northern Tokar. It was all wilderness—no towns or homesteads were there.

It was a shock to me, I admit it, that first landsight. I had always lived under the mantle of. Trevyn's magic, and I had not known how drab the shadowed world would be. Rocks and twisted trees—without being anything less it was all somehow shrunken, there was no dream in this place. The greens were not the true dream green, the manycolors did not inhabit the tree trunks, the rocks would never sing or roses bloom in the snow or frost-flowers in the heat. It was a sere and unfriendly place even by mainland standards, I suppose, and to my eyes it seemed full of ill omen.

“I hope we are not taken by slavers, as Trevyn was,” Frain said.

We fetched our packs of gear and victuals as the ship turned broadside to the coast and sailed along it, searching for a landfall for us. The cliffs looked sheer, but after a while we sighted a jagged ravine where a stream ran down to the ocean. The smallboat was lowered to take us ashore.

Half an hour later we stood on a spit of gravel beach and watched the ship sail away toward Isle, leaving us behind. For the first time I felt desolate.

“Well, Dair,” Frain said, “now we're on our own.” But he had been on his own for years, without even mute me for company. Was he sensing how I felt?

I turned my back on the sea and looked toward the mainland.

Trevyn had told me where Maeve's home lay. It was somewhere in the jagged ridge country, at the end of the trail that led northward from Jabul. Its tall trees stood like an island in the scrub. We were coming at it from the west, but I felt confident I could find it. The house was encircled by a haunt, an invisible barrier of fear that kept it safe from the brigands and robbers who roamed these wilds. A haunt was a special place. We would be sure to hear talk of it—

If the brigands did not do us in first. Neither of us bore any weapon to speak of. Frain had his iron knife, which we would need for cooking and the like, but he had steadfastly refused to take a sword. And as for me, I was human, but not so human as to have mastered the arts of combat.

We filled our water flasks at the stream and climbed the ravine, dragging our packs behind us. Then we silently shouldered them and set off eastward.

Chapter Six

Within a few days I had put away hope of reaching my mother's dwelling before midsummer. There was the heat, to start with. We had not reckoned with such heat so early in the season, or at least I had not. It sapped us. I soon shed all possible clothing. Frain seemed more used to the heat than I, but he could not manage the terrain very well with only one usable arm. The land was rugged, always putting barriers in our way. I cut a staff for each of us, for use as a weapon as well as for help with the rough going. But Frain found his staff as much hindrance as help, and I often had to carry it for him.

Our second day in Tokar we happened on a sort of trail, only the faintest of paths, it might have been made by deer. We followed it gratefully. But we had not been on it more than a quarter of an hour when I sensed danger. I got Frain by the arm and pushed him into a tangle of grapevines, where we crouched in silence. Soon three rough-looking men passed by us close enough to touch, towing some poor unfortunate behind them by a rope. They were slavers. We kept to our cover until they were well gone.

“Thank you, Dair,” Frain whispered to me. He looked shaken. “How did you know?”

I pointed to my nose.

“The wolf caught their scent on the air, you say? Well, I am glad to have you with me. I wonder how much they would get for a crippled slave.” He studied the trail with a sigh. “I suppose we must go off in the woods again. As long as we keep to a track we are easy prey for them or for robbers.”

It was very true. But the going was slow in the woods. I missed my four sure paws, my narrow body that could glide between the branches. Frain was even slower than I.

Within a week after we landed, our provisions were low. There is a limit to how much food a human can carry, and we found it was not as much as was needed. The human body does not behave like the wolf body. It wants its food far more often, especially when it is on the move. So although our packs were lightening daily, our steps were heavier. There was not much forage in the forest. The wild grapevines which hung everywhere bore not even green fruit yet. We found a few mushrooms now and then which Frain ate. One day, after he had stripped the fungi off a rotting log, I turned it over and ate the grubs and earthworms I found underneath. When I had finished Frain handed me the mushrooms as well.

“My appetite has left me,” he said wryly, and I felt worse than ever.

I smelled game everywhere, but I had no idea how to catch it. If I had been a wolf again I could have provided for us, I often thought.… Frain must have had some human notion of hunting, but he would not or could not use it. He threw stones that missed, set snares that were clumsy and caught nothing. I suspected that he could do better—how would he have survived, otherwise? But I had no way of saying so. I think he was afraid of killing anything, afraid of what the flow of blood might release in him.

We trudged on. We avoided slavers again, then robbers. Sometime in the second week we came to a burned place where the sun beat down on a dry meadow surrounded by the brushy forest. Tiny wild strawberries grew in the grass around the blackened stumps. We both picked them and ate them ravenously until our mouths and fingers were stained red. Frain ate more slowly than I because of his withered arm. He could only pluck one berry for my two. After a while I left the rest of them to him and tried to catch grasshoppers for myself in the taller weeds. It was hard, for the hands were stupid. I probably would have done better with my gaping mouth. But I caught a few and gulped them down. Frain looked at me oddly.

“This is laughable,” he said. “We are starving faster than we can eat. Let us go on.”

We walked until nightfall and then camped. There was no fire, for we did not dare make one. We ate our last scraps of hard shipsbread and then lay down to sleep. Frain drowsed off promptly—hunger made him tired. But I felt very restless, even more restless than usual, and the moon was at the full. I could see quite plainly Frain's face beside me, too thin. My bond brother, how was I to help him? … I got up finally and moved off to the crest of the nearest ridge, snuffed the night air, smelled deer not too far away and rabbits everywhere, and we were likely to die of want in the midst of it all.… I could not speak, but I could sing—that is to say, I could howl. I flung up my head and howled out my sorrow to my mother moon.