The Hero and the Crown (31 page)

again less far; always bringing a few more survivors from more burnt-out villages

here for shelter—always fighting, for almost a year. It began ... shortly after you

left.”

Aerin shivered.

Tor said, and he sounded bewildered, “Even so, it has not been so very long;

wars have lasted years, generations. But this time, somehow, we felt defeated

before we began. Always we were weary and discouraged; we never rode out in

hope that we could see victory.” He paused a minute, and stared down at the

shadowed peaceful face of their king. “It’s actually been a bit better these last

weeks; perhaps we only adjusted finally to despair.”

Tor said, and he sounded bewildered, “Even so, it has not been so very long;

wars have lasted years, generations. But this time, somehow, we felt defeated

before we began. Always we were weary and discouraged; we never rode out in

hope that we could see victory.” He paused a minute, and stared down at the

shadowed peaceful face of their king. “It’s actually been a bit better these last

weeks; perhaps we only adjusted finally to despair.”

Aerin thought of a black tower falling as she tucked blankets, of the Hero’s

Crown no longer on the head of one who worked to do Damar evil as she pinned

bandages; and as she crouched for a moment near the great campfire that threw

wild shadows on the walls of her City, she thought of words spoken by another

fire: How could anyone be so stupid as to bring back the Black Dragon’s head as a

trophy and hang it on a wall for folk to gape at?

Abruptly she turned to Tor and said; “Where is Maur’s head?”

Tor stared at her; he was dazed with grief and exhaustion even as she was, and

he could not think who Maur was.

“Before I left, I asked that Maur’s head be put somewhere that I need not look

at it. Do you know where it was taken?” There was urgency in her question,

suddenly, although she herself did not know why; but the urgency penetrated the

fog in Tor’s mind.

“In—in the treasure hall, I believe,” Tor said uncertainly. “I’m not sure.”

Aerin reeled to her feet, and a plush-furred black head was at once beneath her

hand, propping her up. “I must go there.”

“Now?” Tor said unhappily, looking around. “Then I’ll go too .... We’ll have to

walk; there isn’t a fresh horse in all the City.”

It was a brutally long walk, almost all uphill, for the king’s castle stood at the

City’s peak, a lower Hat-topped shoulder within the encircling mountains. Several

of Aerin’s army came with them, and the tallest ones silently supported Tor, and

he wonderingly stroked the heads and backs he found beneath his fingers. “A long

story you have to tell me,” Tor said; it was not a question.

Aerin smiled as much of a smile as her weariness allowed. “A very long story.”

She was much too tired to weep any more, but she sighed, and perhaps Tor heard

something in that sigh, for he edged a yerig out of the way and put an arm around

her, and they toiled up together, leaning on each other.

The castle was deserted. Tomorrow many of the sick and wounded would be

brought here; for this night they would stay by the fire at the foot of the king’s

way, for even the hale and whole had no strength left, and there had been no one

in the City during the last days’ fighting; all had been below, doing what they

could.

Tor found candles, and by some wonder he still carried his flint. The castle was

eerie in its silence and solitude and darkness; and Aerin’s tiredness drew little

dancing designs at the corners of her sight and pulled the shadows closer in

around the candlelight. She found she had to follow Tor blindly; she had spent

almost her whole life in these halls, and yet in but a few months she had

forgotten her way through them; and then horribly she remembered climbing

centuries of stairs in a darkness very like this, and she shivered violently, and her

breath hissed through her teeth. Tor glanced at her and held out his free hand,

and she took it gratefully for she had been all alone on those other stairs.

“Here we are, I believe,” Tor said. She dropped his hand so that he could attend

to the lock, one of the small magics she had never been able to learn. He

muttered a moment, touched the door in five places, and the door slid open.

A blast of grief, of the deaths of children, of crippling diseases that took beauty

at once but withheld death; of unconsummated love; of love lost or twisted and

grown to hate; of noble deeds that proved useless, that broke the hearts of their

doers; of betrayal without reason, of guilt without penance, of all the human

miseries that have ever occurred; all this struck them, like the breath of a

slaughterhouse, or the blow of a murderer. Tor fell to his knees and covered his

face with his hands, and the beasts cringed back, moaning. Aerin put out her

hand, leaned against the doorframe; just this she had feared, had half expected;

yet the reality was much worse than what her tired mind had been able to

prepare her for.

It is you, responded Aerin. She opened her mouth to gasp, and despair rushed

in, bitter as aloes. Tears filled her eyes, but she pushed herself away from the

threshold and bent slowly and carefully to pick up the candle Tor had set down

before he opened the door. She shook her head to clear her vision, held the

candle aloft, and stepped inside the high vaulted room, despite the silent keening

of the air. I know despair, she said. There is nothing more that you can show me.

Oh?

The keening changed tone and madness edged it, drifted across her skin,

fluttered in her hair like bats’ wings; she ducked, and the candle guttered and

almost went out. Maur laughed. She remembered that silent hollow laugh.

Angry, she said: Nothing!

“Aerin,” a voice said hoarsely behind her: Tor. “Light my way—I cannot—see

you.” The words dragged out of him as he dragged himself to his feet. “This—is

why—we’ve been—so—tired—all along.”

“Yes.” The sibilant hissed in the silence like adders’ tongues, but Aerin’s anger

made a small clear space around her, and her beasts crept to her feet and

breathed it gratefully, and Tor staggered to her like a man crossing a narrow

bridge to freedom, and put an arm around her again, but this time it was for his

own comfort.

“Tor,” she said calmly, “we must get rid of Maur’s head. Get it out of the City.”

Tor shook his head slowly; not in refusal but confusion. “How? It is too huge;

we cannot lift it. We must wait...”

Wait, snickered Maur’s head.

“No.” Aerin looked around wildly. The reek of despair stilt tingled in her nostrils

and in her brain, and her anger was ebbing. She had to think. How?

“We can roll it,” she said at last. “It’s roundish. We can roll it downstairs, and

then downhill—out of the City gates.” She thrust the candle at him. “Hold this.”

She walked purposefully up to the low platform where Maur’s skull lay; the

shadows in the eye sockets glinted. Her beasts came after her, clinging to her

shadow; and Tor came behind them, just clear-headed enough to hold the light

high, and to watch Aerin.

She set her shoulder in one of the ridged hollows at the base of the skull and

heaved. Nothing happened but that Maur laughed louder; its laughter crashed in

her head like thunder, and her vision was stained red. Then Tor found a niche for

the candle and came to help her; they heaved, and heaved again, and barely the

massive skull rocked on its base. Then her beasts came, and clawed at the thing,

and chipped their teeth on it; their lady’s anger and their own fear gave them a

wild frenzy, and the skull shuddered where it lay, but they could stir it no further,

and Aerin cried at last, “Peace!” and laid her hands on her loyal friends. They

calmed under her touch, but they panted where they sat, even the cats, the

curved white fangs glinting in the dim light. The candle was burning low.

“It’s no use,” said Tor heavily. He was still leaning against the skull, pressed up

against it as if he loved the touch of it; Aerin grabbed him by the shoulder and

yanked him away, and he staggered. He blinked at her, and a little more of Tor

crept back into his eyes, and he almost smiled, and with his sleeve he rubbed his

face where it had lain against the skull.

Are you finished yet? inquired Maur’s head.

No, said Aerin fiercely.

I’m glad. This is the finest amusement I’ve had since you fled the banqueting-

hall. Thank you for opening the door, by the way. Your folk by the City gates

should taste me quite clearly by now.

You shall not bully me again! Aerin said, and, almost not knowing what she did,

pulled Gonturan free of her scabbard and slapped the flat of her across the base

of Maur’s head where once the backbone had joined. Blue fire leaped up in sharp

tongues that lit the entire vault, with its many shelves and cupboards and niches,

and doors into further strongrooms. It was a ghostly unhealthy color, but the skull

shrieked, and there was a crack like a mountain splitting, and the skull fell off its

pedestal to the floor.

“We must rest,” murmured Tor.

“Food, “said Aerin.

Tor roused himself. “Bring some. Wait.”

The slightly moldy dry bread and more than slightly moldy dry cheese he found

gave them more strength than they would have thought possible. “Second wind,”

said Tor, standing up and stretching slowly till his spine cracked.

“Fourth or fifth wind,” said Aerin grimly, feeding the end of her cheese to her

beasts; “and the strength of panic.”

“Yes,” said Tor, and they put their shoulders to the work again, the grim echoes

of bone against rock ringing terribly in the dark empty City. Depression still

gnawed at them, but in a curious way their weariness worked to their advantage,

for depression often went with weariness, and so they could ignore the one as a

simple unfearsome result of the other. Maur had lost its ascendance once

Gonturan had struck it, and while the skull still stank, it seemed almost an organic

stench now, under the open sky; no more than the faint rotting smell of ancient

carrion.

It was a little easier once they reached the king’s way; each heave grew a little

less, the fall-over a little hastier, and the crash a little more forceful. Then it began almost to roll; for each circle it lurched seriously twice, but it did not quite come

to a complete halt each time; Tor and Aerin needed only to push with their hands.

Both Aerin’s shoulders were raw beneath her tunic, and there was a long shallow

cut along her jaw where one of the dragon’s ear spines had caught her briefly;

and the old cut on her palm from Gonturan’s edge throbbed dimly.

Then, just above the City gates, the vast head broke away from them. It was

not merely the incline, which was little greater now than it had been down most

of the slope behind them; it was Maur’s final moment, and Aerin heard its last

scream of gleeful malevolence as it plunged down the road.

“Scatter!” shouted Aerin, just as Tor’ bellowed, “’Ware!”

The folk before the gates had indeed smelled Maur’s foul miasma after the

door of the treasure house was opened, and most of them lay or crouched

wherever they had been when that dreadful wind had first blown over them. It

had lifted a little since, but the days past had been too much, and once undiluted

despair had touched them they found it hard to shake themselves free. They

shifted a little now, at the voices, and the desperate urgency in them, and looked

up.

The fire had burned down, for no one had had the strength of purpose to feed

it since the treasure-house door opened. Maur’s skull struck the fire’s center, and

the still smoldering branches flew in all directions, and the embers splashed like

water; and while a few people cried out with sudden pain, there was too little fire

to do much harm. The skull crashed into one of the fallen monoliths, which

shattered, and then the black skull disappeared into the night, and there was a

rumbling and an echo, like an avalanche, and the people, shaken out of their

lethargy, looked around fearfully and wondered which way to run; but no

mountains fell. The rumbling grew louder, till people put their hands over their

ears, and Aerin and Tor knelt down in the roadway with their arms around each

other. The rumbling became a roar, and then there was a sudden storm of wind

from the battlefield, laden with the smell of death; but the death smell passed

them and in its place came a hot, dry, harsh smell like nothing the green Hills of

eastern Damar had ever known; but Tor raised his head from Aerin’s shoulder and

said, “Desert. That’s the smell of the western desert.” And on the wind were small

gritty particles, like sand.

Aerin and Tor stood up slowly and came into the firelight, and the rest of

Aerin’s beasts came joyfully up to greet them, those that were still alive, for many

of them had not left the battlefield. She blinked up at Tor for a moment and said:

“What have you done with the Crown?”

Tor looked blank, then sheepish. “I left it in the treasure hall. Not such a bad

place for it; it will be spending most of its time there anyway.”

Aerin felt a curious tickling sensation at the back of her throat. When she