The Song of Andiene (14 page)

It was a promise he did not fear to make.
In daylight
, he thought
, the paths are shielded from evil, and if they stay and speak to me then, they are true men, and not demons.

Harsh laughter echoed from the mouths of all that death-faced troop. “One of the wise ones, are you?” the leader said. “You will join us before daylight.” His men turned and walked into the forest, but the dark hounds remained and wove their circle of shadows, and the leader stayed, watching Ilbran and laughing.

One motion of his hand, and the circle of hounds divided and let him through to the foot of the steps, where the dead man lay. “A comrade of yours?” he asked.

“No kin, nor comrade,” Ilbran said.

The stranger’s laughter was louder and more hollow. “More kin and comrade than you think!”

He knelt beside the body, handling it roughly as he stripped off the mail coat, the iron cap and threw them aside. His laughter was louder than the death-song of the hounds. His nails were long and strong to tear off strips of flesh. His teeth were strong, stronger than man or beast, to break and grind the bones. His hands had giant’s strength, to crush the skull between his palms so he could lap out what it contained. Ilbran watched in sick horror, not able to look away.

The others returned, bowed under loads of green branches and dry ones. They threw their burdens down and came to join the feast.

These wore the likenesses of men, but they were no men. Ilbran remembered what the grizane had said.
They became the evil in the world. We imprisoned them in the forest.

When the forest lords were done with their feast, they turned to their bonfire. It was the leader who touched the wood with his fingertips, and made the kindling spring to life. The red glow of the fire turned their faces more deathlike yet.

Ilbran did not understand their purpose until the drugging clouds of smoke billowed out toward him, until the chanting began, in a harsh foreign tongue.

He tore a strip from the bandage that still wrapped his shoulder. Soaked with water, it helped to mask his nose and mouth. He could not stop his ears, to drown their voices. He heard the leader say again, “You will join us before dawn.”

And when was dawn? The night was endless. All things were forgotten but the need to keep his mind his own. At one time, he took the dead man’s sword and scored his own arms. That helped him for a little time, as the salt sweat poured into the stinging cuts. His blood ran down and dripped on the threshold, joining old dark stains already there.

When he looked down at the ghostly crowd, he saw a familiar face among them, glowing and evil—the beak-nosed stranger who had died on the forest path—and then he thought the drugging smoke had truly mazed his mind.

He shouted defiances at the creatures of the night; he screamed curses at them to drown their voices; their laughter was the only reply. He was at war with himself, for a part of him desired to go down the steps to meet the dark ones and their death. And that part grew stronger as the night went on.

Still, he endured. Day came without warning, and before his eyes, the ghostly crowd thinned and vanished like the stars. Ilbran waited till the sun was bright before descending the steps. Even then, he walked in fear, almost expecting to feel a touch on his shoulder from a creature invisible but still present.

The smoke still rose from the bonfire, dizzying him. The discarded green branches were from no tree that he had seen before, one with a narrow green leaf and reddish bark. There were bloodstains at the base of the steps where the man had lain, but if he had not known, he would have passed by without a thought or glance.

He turned his face toward the meadows from which he had come. So quickly had his fear of the kingsmen, and his dread of the city of the dead, become trivial. He would not spend another night within the forest, though all the kings of the earth might bribe, and all the lovely ladies of the world might beg.

But toward noonday, his dread grew again. Where was the honest sunlight, the wide and light-filled meadows? Morning turned to afternoon, and the forest paths stretched before him and behind him the same. What did the songs say? The roads are not as roads in the wide world. He turned his steps back toward the only safety he knew in this strange world, hurrying at first, and then running, as the sun moved to the west.

Twilight was dimming when he caught sight of the clearing. Half-staggering with exhaustion, he climbed up the safehold steps. Though it were the safety of a dungeon cell, he would have welcomed it, with his blood smeared across the doorstep from his fight of the night before.

With nightfall came the dark hounds, and after them, their masters. They taunted and threatened. They burned their incense, but it had less mind-numbing power than it had had the night before.

Drunk with weariness, Ilbran mocked them in turn. “You filth, you scum, carrion feeders. You have bows slung at your sides. If you are such fine hunters, why do you not use them?”

They made no move to attack. His guess had been good. This place sheltered him from such things.

Daybreak came, and Ilbran slept, and did not wake till the hounds returned at nightfall. Again he had to fight off their masters, but their powers of fear were even less. He looked at the safehold walls, the watchful beautiful statue, with love and gratitude. They had guarded him well.

At first light, once the sun had truly risen, and the hunters gone, he set out, back along the same path. Refreshed by his day of sleep, he was confident that he could hurry, and be out of the forest perhaps by noon.

But at midmorning, he stopped perplexed. Two paths branched before him, plain and clear. He had no remembrance of the one that turned off squarely to his left, a fine clear path. Could his memory have failed him so much? Maybe it was the one on which he had entered, the one that led out onto the wide free meadows.

He blazed markers on the trees edging the path he had taken. This time, at least, he would not be led astray by his memory, or by some magic in the woods. He hurried on his new way, though he seemed to hear, or feel, a rushing of wind deep in the forest.

Toward noon, he halted in bewilderment, as he saw a clearing ahead, but another one, a strange one. At no time had he come this way.

A field of blaggorn stretched half-harvested, and thornfruit grew in scattered clumps. There was no rough shelter in the center of this clearing, but a cottage built of the same night-blue and cream-laced stone. A score or more of white-trunked trees grew in an ever-widening golden-leaved spiral out from the cottage, like the coils of a snake.

On paths and clearings is no danger—in the daytime. No danger from magic, that is. But danger from other living things could be anywhere. A viper coiled in the path in front of him, unblinking eyes, and wedge-shaped head, and earth-dark body. Ilbran stepped aside. It watched him as he passed, turning its head on the mass of heavy coils.

But that was a danger of the earth, to be met at any time. On paths and clearings is no danger. And the woman who picked thornfruit in the clearing—she was of humankind. Ilbran had not realized how much joy there could be in seeing one of his own kind, even one with the coloring of the southerners. She was dressed in animal skins patched together to make a many-colored sleeveless tabard and a short skirt to her knees. Ilbran watched her as she worked with experienced ease, plucking the thornfruit from their daggered branches, and dropping them in a woven basket.

Then she turned and saw him, and came to him quickly, showing no fear. She stripped the heavy leather picking gloves from her hands and cast them aside. “Welcome … Welcome … My lord … you are weary.” Her hands were warm, tiny but strong. She had a slow and hesitant voice, as though she did not speak much.

“What manner of land is this?” he demanded. “It has hunted me in circles, I think. I made a half-day’s journey into the forest, and have been wandering in a maze ever since.”

“Who twined your map?” she asked. “Where were you going?”

“Indeed, I had no map, lady, nor any guide nor destination. I had been told that they of the forest welcomed strangers.”

“We do,” she said. “Come … Come … You are tired and thirsty.”

She led him into her home and fed him well—dried thornfruit and blaggorn bread, and stew with strange but tasty herbs and spices. The afternoon grew to evening as they sat beside the fire and talked.

As the evening went on, she spoke more fluently, the habit of speech returning to her. Her name was Malesa. She had been born in the forest and had lived there all her life. “My mother and father came from some other land,” she said. “But they never spoke of it. They found this cottage empty. I do not know why it was.”

“All through the land are homes and land lying empty,” Ilbran said. “They who lived here before us were many more than we are.”

“That may be true,” she said indifferently. “My mother and father died when I was yet young, some four summers and four winters ago.”

“Why do you stay here alone?”

She looked at him in wonder. “It is a part of me. I can call every plant and tree by name. I know every stone, every turn in the paths, the lesser and the greater ones. I am a part of it, as it is a part of me. It feeds me well, blaggorn and thornfruit, and a hundred plants and herbs that you do not know. I set snares for the little animals of the forest—they feed and clothe me. I can gather honey from the black bees and they will not sting me. Besides, it is not as easy to leave as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will show you.” She gathered up a skein of threads, and began working on them, knotting a web.

Ilbran watched her. Her skin was pale, like a new-bloomed thornfruit flower, and her hair was night-colored, her eyes as dark as her hair. He had seen some such as her, southerners, stared at and mistrusted as they passed through the city.

Besides that strangeness of coloring, she was not truly beautiful. Her face was broad, her eyes set strangely in it. But her hair was beautiful, hanging to her knees in wrist-thick braids, swinging gently as she bent her head. If she were naked, that hair would cover her like a cloak.

Malesa glanced up from her work. “Why do you stare at me?”

“I am sorry.” He looked away.

She bent her head over her work again. Ilbran marveled at what she had done. Like him, she had fended for herself. She had been orphaned young, had lived alone. She had fed herself, had kept her sanity, had learned well the ways of the world into which she had come.

Anything that she had, she had made for herself. Yet this home was better than the one he had lived in for all his life. They were not sitting on straw mats, but on cushions stuffed with dried grass. They had eaten and drunk out of carved wooden bowls. The candles on the table were sweet wax, fit to light a lord’s chamber. Though she lived alone, she had hung a curtain to screen off another room in the small house, where she slept. Crude branch-shelves were fastened to the walls and stacked with wooden jars, filled with all she had gathered from forest and field.

She had spoken truly; she lived as richly as a princess in her own domain.

Malesa looked up from her netting. “Tell what has happened to you. What led you into the forest? What led you here?”

Ilbran told her how he had lost his family; he had escaped; the kingsmen had hunted him, so he had entered the forest; the creatures of the forest had hunted him in turn. “And the paths were not the same. I could find no way out.”

She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “How could you have gone so far astray? I did not know it was possible to make so many mistakes. Do you learn nothing in that world of yours?”

“What did I do wrong? I knew that the paths were not safe at night, that I must find a safehold or be lost. They told me that much.”

“Look,” she said, and she spread out the net she had knotted. “This is a map of what I know. The strands are the paths of the forest and the knots are places of safety, like the one that you found, and like this one where I live. The paths of the forest shift like the shifting patterns of the sky. The distance between the safeholds will change with the rising of the sun each day.

“On one day, a man might walk from one to another in half a morning’s loitering. On another day, a horseman might set out at sunrise, riding as fast as his horse would carry him, and still be lost in the forest at nightfall. I think you know what would become of him then.”

Ilbran shuddered. The girl looked at him gravely, then continued. “So when you travel, if you have not reached a place of safety by noontime, you must turn back. And when you pass one, you take your knife and leave a drop of your blood on the doorstep as a sacrifice and as a talisman that will hold the path open for you to return, if your way forward is not clear.

“You did that by accident, and it preserved you. But it was barely enough. What possessed you to speak to those uncanny ones? They are creatures of air. A sword will not touch them, and though they eat flesh, they do not need it to live. If you do not speak to them, or meet their eyes, they cannot reach you, for all their chanting and their drugged smoke.”

Ilbran thought of the three nights of terror spent fighting them, and shuddered. Malesa went on. “But if you had marked your entrance into the forest with your blood, the way would have been shortened for you, and you could have left the forest safely.”

She smiled suddenly. “I am glad that you did not, since you have no great errands. It has been long since any wayfarers visited here.”

She held out her netting map once again. “See, this knot is my home, and this strand is the path that leads to it. You see, it does not join firmly to the main path, but lies across it. Sometimes, it is there to be traveled on. Most of the time, it is not.”

“At the last, I was wise, and blazed a trail to guide me back,” Ilbran said, only half understanding what she had been saying.

Malesa turned pale. “You fool! You utter fool! What you call wisdom is folly so great … so great … You did not only endanger yourself, but me and all travelers. The forest will be at war with all of us, and it had almost grown to be my friend. You would get your just reward if I gave you to them!”