The Song of Andiene (30 page)

He glanced dubiously at the formal dance steps. “We did it differently. This is like a grasskit’s courting, one step forward and one step backward. It will never quicken your blood or breath.”

“We can dance it the way our people do.”

“Not in these skirts! I have never seen such unrighteousness, to make the women’s skirts so wide, and the men’s so narrow.”

“Excuses will not do!” She giggled, full of a mood like the first time he had seen her. “You’ll not be rid of me so easily.” Then she caught hold of his arm, and pulled him into the dance.

Andiene watched them with a smile, until they disappeared into the crowd. Then she looked around, to see Kallan and Syresh standing apart from the crowd, locked in some dispute. She made her way toward them, staying close to the wall. “Ask her then,” she heard Kallan say.

Syresh shook his head and walked away. “I’ve had enough of good advice,” he said over his shoulder as he left.

Kallan watched him stalk away into the crowd. “There’s nothing more pitiful than a jealous man with no rights in the matter, like someone who’s drunk without ever having tasted a drop.”

Andiene smiled. “Let him play the fool in his own way.”

“He will, whether I let him or not.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Why did you play such a fool’s trick? Announce yourself as though you had an army of ten thousand men behind you?” He seemed more bewildered than angry.

“You said that Nahil lived in fear now. He will have all the long summer to think of me. He will know that I am returning. And he will know other things besides. How great do you think his fear will be, when he hears what took place today?”

The music had stopped; the talking grew louder; the feasting would begin soon. “Guard my back now,” she said, and she walked swiftly to where a juggler spun a ring of balls in the air. Kallan followed her.

The juggler stared and his hands stopped their turning, as his toys sprang away into Andiene’s hands. The wooden balls leaped into the air again, though her hands did not move. They arched higher, higher yet, faster, still faster, merely a painted blur. Then they slowed, but as each one spun separately, flames sprang from them. The crowd was silent and staring.

Syresh rejoined Kallan. “What is she doing?”

“We should have kept our swords. We may have to fight our way to freedom.”

“Not if she is on our side,” Syresh said in simple awe. As the juggling slowed, the flames leaped higher, a ring of fire spinning on her hands. Then her hands slowed still more, and the balls spun through the air to where the juggler stood amazed. He did not try to catch them, but let them roll into the crowd. Though the flames had died, the people stepped aside and let them roll where they would. When Andiene rejoined Syresh and Kallan, there was a wide circle of bare flagstones around the three of them, and people had drawn into little knots, to murmur and whisper.

“Will a messenger dove fly to my land in time that he may hear of this?” she asked.

“Yes,” Kallan said. “Nahil’s summer will not be easy—but what of ours?”

“They will not touch us now—from sheer fear,” she said confidently. “Besides, power is pleasant to wield like a toy. I have never used it so childishly before.”

“You cannot trust this king.”

“I know, I know, but now he will walk wide of me. So full of fear, he will not dare to plot and scheme.” She glanced down the corridor, to where the king sat, his hands clenched white-knuckled tight, his gray eyes watching her with a look of grim appraisal.

“I did not like the way he looked at us this morning, as though we were only barefoot wanderers,” she said simply.

The dancing was over; the tables were being set up for the feast; the benches were being lifted down from their high stacks. Andiene stood and watched and smiled.

Lenane bent over her lute again, with Ilbran standing by her side. Her fingers rippled in many patterns, the deep strings hummed in harmony, until the notes shaped the lilting tune of Iasaprer’s Quest, how he searched for the end of the world.

Then Ilbran sang, and Lenane’s voice was silent, but her fingers wove harmonies and subtle counterpoint for his tune, until it seemed as though a whole chorus of ghosts sang with him. Syresh listened in gloomy jealousy.

“I never realized,” Andiene whispered, when the song had ended, and Lenane tuned and tuned again, a lutenist’s endless task. “I never knew. She is a master. This trip would have been worth our while if only to give her fingers a voice.”

The songs continued, of kings and commoners, and the crowd was more at ease, though Andiene, Kallan, and Syresh still stood alone. Then Ilbran bent low, and spoke to Lenane. She nodded, and plucked the first notes of a prelude that was sad and proud, fit to mourn a king’s passing.

“How did he learn it?” Syresh murmured. “When did she teach it to him?” And then Lenane played and Ilbran sang, the Song of Andiene, of how she went from the city a hunted child, of how she would return in pride and power.

The torches burned lower, smoking in their holders. The crowd was hushed. The children slept, Kare among them. Lenane and Ilbran spun out the story of tragedy, magic, and glorious prophecy.

Chapter 21

In the weeks to come, there was no more singing, nor any dancing, nor any wearing of fine robes. The days were spent in half-darkness in the caves beneath the palace, each person lying on a separate patch of earth, sprawled like a cross so that skin would not touch skin, taking shallow breaths of the heavy dead air.

No one could sleep, not truly sleep. The earth that they lay on became heated, so that they turned restlessly and constantly, trying to find a place to lie that was still cool from the night.

Andiene and her people huddled in a corridor apart from the rest of the palace dwellers. The others, king, nobles, and commoners alike were quiet, suspicious, afraid to give offense.

“Look at them glance at us out of the corner of their eyes!” said Lenane. “Just as you said, we are summering in a palace—but I see no difference.” She fanned herself. It was night time; the air had grown damper. Her clothes clung to her and dripped salty-wet with sweat.

Kallan marked another day on his wall-tally. “No history is made in summertime.”

Ilbran counted the tally-marks. How many more days? This was grim shelter, heavy with the never-ending memories of pain and death. “Nahil’s dungeons were not empty like this,” he said.

“They were as bare as this by summertime,” Kallan said. “Emptied of prisoners as fast as the executioners could work. Taules Reji is the same as any other lord.”

They are all the same.
That thought filled Ilbran’s mind as they left their dark shelter and climbed up the shallow worn steps to go out into the night. The wind does not blow in midsummer, for that is when the sea hawks build their nests on the stilled waves. But now the air moved slightly, enough to cool them, and tell them that they had passed the crest of the summer.

Throughout the city, people were coming to the surface of the earth like earthworms tunneling upwards in a drowning rain.

The stars were scattered and broken, but gave a little light. Though the people were half-dazed with lack of rest, they found work enough to pass the time. But when they saw Andiene and her companions in the inner courtyard, they took their work elsewhere.

Ilbran called his daughter to him, and tried to pick the tangles from her long hair. But she fussed and fretted, impatient at his clumsiness, and at last pulled away from him, to go to where Andiene sat and knotted lanara thread into lace, working slowly, but her hands so skilled she scarcely needed to look at what she did.

He recognized her work. She had shown lace such as that to his mother long ago. Now she taught the art to his child, who learned it eagerly, a new game.

Lenane had found work of her own that would occupy her for ten summers, or twenty. She did not waste her lute-work on melodies. Instead, she drove their nerves near to snapping with repetitions of one note, over and over, softer to near silence, then shading louder. She played endless patterns, running up and down the ladder of notes. At last, she would look at her companions, judge that they could bear no more, and break into some dance-song that made their hearts laugh to hear it.

“One part melody to ten parts lute-rack,” Kallan said once.

Syresh sprang to her defense. “The same as sword-fighting, as you teach us. Power and control and endless practice. How else could she make a plucked string sing with a human voice?”

Kallan looked at him and laughed. Ilbran rose wearily and returned to the endless sword-drill.

Kallan tutored them both. Through the long summer he had taught them, as patient and merciless toward them as Lenane was toward herself. Still, he would not let them match against each other.

“Syresh is not skilled enough,” he said to Ilbran. “He might easily kill you through clumsiness. Our lady Andiene has only two and a half men-at-arms to fight for her, as it is, and we cannot afford to lessen that number.”

Ilbran took that judgment of his skills without complaint. He had no true desire to fight, and his body was covered with bruises to prove he had no talent for it. He still moved painfully, also. The gift of the grievers’ jaws would be with him for all his life. But that was no excuse for his awkwardness.

“Hold the sword lightly, not as though you’re trying to crush the hilt,” Kallan said.

“It will fly from my hand.”

“Not loosely, lightly,” and Kallan demonstrated two identical styles, or so it seemed to Ilbran. “You are strong enough! But when you hold it like that, the strength of your wrist alone goes into it. When you hold it more lightly, you can put the weight and power of your arm, your whole body, behind the blow.”

Ilbran tried again, and once again. At last he improved—or maybe Kallan had grown weary of teaching. Then they rested, and drank cup after cup of the stale musty-tasting water, till the cask was empty.

At the other end of the courtyard, Lenane tuned and strummed, plucking one note a score of times before she was satisfied with it. Syresh sat by her side and listened.

“I’ll get more water,” Ilbran said, glad of the chance to rest and take off the leather ring-shirt borrowed from the king’s storerooms. Sweatily hot, it was all that had saved him from worse injuries than bruises.

“He welcomed us royally, after all,” he said.

“Who, Taules Reji? He is no fool, and Andiene—our lady—was right. He fears her too much for treachery.”

Ilbran picked up the little water cask and walked away. Behind him, he heard the ring of steel on steel begin. Syresh was being reminded, once again, that he still had much to learn.

The streets were dark, lit by neither torches nor stars, but Ilbran had no fear of ambush. He wore a sword; though he could not use it well, his size alone would frighten away most would-be attackers.

He waited his turn at the well. The water was low, but blessedly cool. Some unease made him turn his head. A gray robe, waiting in the shadows; grizanes must drink, the same as any others.

But as he returned, he glanced behind him. The gray one followed. Ilbran quickened his steps, as much as he could while shouldering the heavy water cask. The grizane walked swiftly. In his gait, at least, he showed no sign of his dreadful age. His steps made no sound on the cobbled pavement. He followed relentlessly.

At last, Ilbran set the cask down and turned to wait. “What do you want?”

Silence. Even in the dark, the grizane’s eyes gleamed under his gray hood.

“Do all your kind love mysteries? I mean no harm to you or any other of Carvalon.”

“What do you know of that land?” The other took a step forward; Ilbran took a step back.

“I traveled with one of your kind, and he saw with my eyes for many days.”

“Go on.”

Ilbran told him, the escape, the archers, the dying message, his long sojourn in the forest. Grizane’s questions are difficult to ignore. The other listened intently.

“Had you learned any of this?” Ilbran asked when he was done.

“We had. Your message comes late. Do you know what it means?”

“No.”

“Go back to your princess, then, and tell her … ”

“You can tell her yourself,” Ilbran said, and the grizane followed his gaze to where Andiene came toward them. Her borrowed summersilk became her well. The fierceness of royalty was clear upon her face.

The grizane watched her; she faced him, challenges and rebuttals in their silences. Ilbran was like a deaf man. There was maneuvering here, motionless vying for position. He touched the hilt of his sword, but did not draw it. Sea-coursers fight on land, on the coldest days of winter, and it would be a madman who would step between them as they eye each other silently on the sandy beach.

“You cannot stop me.” Andiene spoke in words at last.

“We can slow you.”

“Not for long. My power is greater than yours.”

“A child playing with coals has great power too,” the grizane said. “He can set the plains aflame from the sea to the high mountains.”

“I know what I am doing. I do not have to draw patterns in the dust!
Res!
” The grizane was motionless. “Come,” she said to Ilbran. He followed after her.

“Where are you going?”

“Anywhere.”

“What of the water I was to get?” he asked, realizing that he had left it where he had set it down.

“Tell them you dropped the cask down the well,” she said. “They will not die of thirst.” The very tone of annoyance in her voice reassured him, told him that she had descended from the unhuman level on which she had confronted the grizane.

Ahead of them lay an empty city square, one corner anchored with a tall bell tower. “Have you ever climbed to the top of one of these?” he asked. She shook her head. “Come then!” And he led her up the curving steps, past the wide-mouthed bell, to the very top.

Andiene leaned on the waist-high wall. “Nothing to see.”

“At dawn, the view will be clear, from the mountains to the sea.”

Silent, biting her lip, she looked out into the summer darkness of the city. Then she burst out, “The old fool! I have more power than his kind could dream of, and I am as human as my ancestors were.” There was anger in her voice, but doubt, also.