The Song of Andiene (4 page)

His prayer went unanswered, as he knew it would be. The girl lay as before, scarcely breathing, a sleep like the sleep of death. She did not wake, or even move, as he dragged her from beneath his boat. He gathered her into his arms—a light weight, and much of that lay in her heavy robe, sodden with sea water—and carried her up the steep cliff path.

Nothing but boldness would answer. He knelt at the top of the cliff, scanning the streets for the length of ten heartbeats, then picked her up and carried her into his home.

His mother and father looked up from their meal, amazed and silent. “If I judge rightly,” he said softly, laying the girl on the hearth beside the dying sea-grass fire, “she is the youngest child and only living heir of Ranes Reji—Andiene—with blood price and shelter death on her head.”

“Do you know her beyond all doubt?” asked his father.

“No, but how many of her age and riches would seek rough shelter on this night?” He held up her hand so his father could see her soft skin, unhardened by work, the three gold rings, two of them gem-set, and her nails grown so long that they curled and touched the second joint of her fingers, the few nails that were not broken and torn back from her fingertips.

“Fel led me to her, under my boat,” he said.

His father and mother looked at each other, exchanging understanding and agreement without one question or word. Kare rose from the straw mat where she sat leaning against her husband’s knee. “Son, turn your back a little while, and your father’s chair, also.”

Ilbran obeyed, without question, but in some bewilderment. “Do I smell laswit?” his father asked softly.

“I’ve not been smoking it. I’ve been keeping bad company,” Ilbran said with a feeble chuckle, and he explained.

Hammel laughed. “You are lucky he did not decide you were his best and only friend, and follow you back.”

“He found a girl. She will keep him occupied the rest of the night—and pick his pocket, too.”

His father reached out and touched the dried blood of the claw-marks on his arm. “And what about you? Have you been playing with cats?” Underneath the light tone was seriousness, a little worry. Ilbran shook his head. He called Fel to him, and stroked the courser’s lustrous black fur, soft and thick even after the long summer.

Kare hurried to the storage chest, then back with a ragged brown robe, warm felted lanara. “Ilbran, give me your dagger. Oh yes, you may turn back now. Turn your father’s chair, too.”

With the dagger, she neatly pared the unconscious girl’s fingernails down almost to the quick. “There,” she said proudly, “does she not now look one of us?”

“Not exactly,” said Hammel. “If you would take some soot from the hearth and rub it into her face and nails, it would better the resemblance.”

Mother and son laughed. “That is unjust,” Kare said, but Ilbran looked down at his hands, huge and grimy, and was glad he could not see his face.

The girl, the princess, did not look one of them, and no dirt or disguises would change that. The noble families were a race apart. For centuries, they had chosen their own kind. He looked at her—the light bones, the hair straight as a silver shield, her skin fairer than most, almost golden. Though her eyes were closed, he knew that they would be gray as a sunless sky, not the brown or blue of the common folk.

He reached out and stroked her silver hair, matted with dark blood. “Maya, do you think if it were cut short, it might curl? Then, she would look less like a changeling.”

“I doubt it,” his mother said, but she cut off the girl’s hair to the nape of her neck, and threw it into the fire. The hair coiled like snakes as it burned; the stench reminded Ilbran of things best forgotten. Kare dampened a rag and washed what was left of her hair, patiently rubbing it again and again, combing it with her fingers to work out the mats. The rag came away brown and red.

“What ails her?” asked Hammel. “That is not sleep.”

“I do not know. She has no wounds. This on her robe and hair is the blood of others.” Kare picked up the stained Festival robe, where it lay crumpled on the hearth. The fire had dried it. She stroked the cloth, fine woven lanara, flowing through her hands like water, where the stains had not stiffened it. “It seems a pity to destroy it. Richer cloth than I have ever touched. So easy to bleach the stains out.”

“It would be our death if it were found,” Ilbran said.

She ripped the robe in strips with his dagger, and fed them into the fire.

“The rings also,” Ilbran said.

“The fire will not touch them.”

“I’ll walk down to the sea strand. Let them return to where they came from.”

“No,” Hammel said. “She may have use of them. She is a king’s child. We do not know, when she wakes, what path she will wish to take. Bury them in the floor.”

“And risk blasphemy?” Ilbran said lightly, though he knew, and they knew, that the Law was too strait to be kept as it was taught. “What do we say if any catch a glimpse of her?” he asked.

“Why, we say that she is my brother’s daughter, Rile,” his mother said, as she dampened another rag, and gently washed the sand and dirt from the girl’s torn feet. “Come from Meyrens to the south with her parents, who died of traveling, and so she is ill with grief.”

Ilbran laughed, in spite of himself, as he looked at his mother’s calm and innocent face. He had never heard her tell a lie, not even the tiniest shading of the truth. “Maya, how many fugitives have you sheltered, that you tell a story so easily?”

Andiene slept through the next day, while Ilbran gathered sea-grass and twisted it into bunches for their winter fires. Hammel sat and knotted a net, his hands strong and skilled yet, though the rest of his body had wasted away.

Sometimes scarcely seeming to breathe, Andiene slept through the week that followed. The fish began to run, traveling down the coast; the tide of autumn had turned. Every day that Ilbran took out his boat, he dreaded what he might find when he returned, his home burnt to a roofless shell, his parents gone, the soldiers waiting.

But he had luck with his fishing. One day he dragged back his nets heavy with leaf-green kervissen. His father’s face was filled with pride, and Kare danced with joy like a young girl. “More of them than I have ever seen.”

“Work yet to be done.” He picked his father up in his arms to carry him down the cliffside path, another pair of hands to help him in the dirty and dangerous work.

“No, Maya,” he said, when his mother moved to go with him, to help. “The house … .” She understood well enough what he meant, that she should stay to ward off any visitors who might enter and see their unwanted guest.

But his father could help him. Though the path was steep, he had climbed it countless times with heavier weights than what his father had become.

Down at the shore, they drew on the heavy gloves that reached above their elbows, and set to work beheading and gutting the kervissen, and, above all, cutting off the poisoned spines that curved long and golden along their backs and over their heads. Many fishermen feared them, and would tack their boats to some other quarter of the wind if they saw the wake of a school of kervissen before them. Ilbran tried to search them out, studying wind and weather to tell him where they could be found.

He gave them due respect, though. He had seen men with the flesh rotting and sloughing off from their arms from tiny scratches, and less fortunate men dying in poisoned agony.

Fel, the courser, knew to keep his distance, but he gobbled fish entrails with delight, the best food he had had since summer began. Even after he had had his fill, he taunted the sea-hawks who came to the bounty. One, young and foolish, was not quick enough; Fel leaped high on his powerful back legs, snatched the sea-hawk flapping and clawing out of mid-air. He ate all but the leathery wings.

Ilbran sang as he worked, enjoying the sound of his own voice, spinning out the many verses of the song of the kervissen, how they were as wise as men once, till the first fisherman betrayed them. At last the fish were ready for market. Ilbran looked appraisingly at the pile. “If salfish had run today, I could have brought back twice as much.”

“Kervissen bring us a higher price.”

“Yes, but are less food, all the same. We must sell to the rich to buy food to feed ourselves, and be cheated buying and be cheated selling.” He held up one of the fish. In the sun it shone like a great transparent leaf, not scaled and mailed like ordinary fish, but covered with soft skin like a man. “Beautiful, though,” he muttered grudgingly.

His father looked surprised. “So it is. I had never thought of that.”

At the market, the servants of rich ones of the city came and bought eagerly, since only two other fishermen had caught kervissen that day, and they, only a scanty few. In mid-afternoon, the herald came, as he had every day. “Felon-freed … Andiene Ranesfil … to any who would betray her, gifts of gold and honor; to any who would hide her, death by pitch and fire.” He named the reward; it grew richer every day.

When he was finished, the marketplace broke into a louder buzz. Ilbran was silent. A stout woman standing by the wall said in a shrill voice to her friend, “But she’s no felon. If she’s still alive, she’s the true queen, that’s why they want her,” and then stopped, appalled at the danger her tongue had led her into. Her neighbors fell silent also, and edged away from her, as though she might carry plague on her breath or the hem of her robe.

Giter, the butcher, laughed a gusty laugh, and tapped Ilbran on the shoulder. “None but a fool would shelter one such as that, eh?”

“True enough.”

“They lost her trail in our quarter, so I heard. Perhaps she fell over the cliffs into the sea?”

“Perhaps,” Ilbran said curtly. It was not a subject that he felt able to discuss, especially not with Giter, a stout merry man with a smile and a joke for all who stopped by his stall, and a heavy thumb on the scales for the unwary, old and young.

Ilbran pulled away from him, but he leaned over the counter of his stall to chat further. “Great happenings. The sand-doves will be flying north and south with strange messages. They tell queer stories of how she escaped, for all she was only a child … ”

Ilbran walked away, but not so quickly that he could not hear Giter’s mocking voice saying, “My Lord Fisherman is more sensitive than usual, is he not?” The men standing nearby guffawed in agreement. Ilbran flushed red with embarrassment and anger. He should have stayed and listened, smiled and asked him how his wife did, and his ever-increasing brood of brats. But he loathed the man, his sturdy children, his fine clothes bulging over his well-fed belly.

Still, this was no day to rage and fret. He was going home early from market, with a double handful of red-metal coins knotted in his pocket. He sat on a low wall and basked in the gentle sun. In a moment, a guard might come to drive him away, but he did not care.

He could see through a lacework of wrought metal into the courtyard of the house, people there that he would never meet or know, unless it was on Festival day, when the unseen walls came down. A man tutored his son in his catechism. They had gone beyond the Naming questions, and begun on the questions of the Land.

“What are the three gifts of the Land?”

“The gifts of Tree, Grain, and Thorn,” the child said. “Lanara, that gives us paper to write on, that we do not forget our ways and past, that clothes us warmly in winter and coolly in summer, and quenches the thirst of the traveler in summertime. Blaggorn, that feeds the people from sea to mountains, and fattens the cattle when they graze on the plains. Thornfruit … thornfruit that … that … ”

The boy fidgeted, forgetting the lofty phrasing. From the looks of him he was a year or so from his first naming, perhaps five years old, three summers and two winters. He fretted over the formal words that had escaped him, finally bursting out with: “Thornfruit that gives us candy and good things to eat.”

It caught Ilbran by surprise. His quickly suppressed bark of laughter was heard by the other man, who shouted, “Get away from here, loiterer!”

Ilbran walked on, but from a distance he still heard the piping childish voice repeating the familiar words. “The law of the land, that we swore when we entered it: We will not sow; we will not plant; we will not set one stone above another. We will not delve in the earth; we will not lay our dead to rest there … ”

How much of that does a child understand?
Ilbran wondered.
Yet he learns it. We all learn it—and yet we do not understand
. To hear the childhood-learned ritual was a reminder of days when his father was strong and his mother was young.

We came into this land empty-handed … It was like a table set for us, a bed turned down for us … Though the dark ones run in the forests, yet the fields are wide and welcoming … The grizanes taught us what to do … We live in the houses that other men built; they took the burden of blasphemy on themselves … If we should fail in our vows, let our children be born as strangers.

But not all men lived in homes where the builders had broken the Law of the Land. Ilbran looked at his mud-brick and thatched home almost fondly. Dimness, the smell of smoke, of fish stew, the relieved smiles of father and mother, glad to see him safe. He spread out the money on the floor, a fine scattering of coins, more than he had ever brought from one day’s marketing.

Kare counted them delightedly, and scraped another hole in the floor for safekeeping against the day of king’s tribute. Ilbran said softly to her, “Your niece has brought us luck.”

“Hold your tongue, son,” she whispered back, smiling.

But the next day, there was no talk of luck. Ilbran sailed out early and returned late, and brought back nothing to show for it. That evening, he watched as his mother patiently fed broth to the girl, spoonful by spoonful. She swallowed obediently enough if the spoon was put in her mouth, but she gave no other sign of awareness.

“How long will this last?” he asked. “And what will we do, when we decide that we can keep her no longer?”

Hammel raised his head and looked appraisingly at his son. “Verthan’s father lived for thirty years unknowing, after thieves struck him on the head, and then he woke, and spoke to his daughter thinking she was his wife who had been dead those twenty years.”