The Song of Andiene (8 page)

No wise one would enter a forest without a good reason, and a map, and the certainty that a safehold could be found before nightfall.

And this that lay before her was a true forest. Andiene had seen trees in the city, small ones, friendly ones, lanara and spicewood that grow where people live. These trees were a different breed. Even to her untrained eyes, they bore the look of ancient days.

She tilted her head up, and up. Surely the sky rested on their strong branches. If they measured their lives in years, they had been sturdy and tall before the Rejiseja, her people, entered the land.

Now they were so huge that their hollow trunks would have served for houses. The trunks were gray, and the leaves were blue-gray, huge five-fingered leaves, like clumsy swollen hands. Great strands of pale moss hung from the branches like hair. Tendrils of mist rose up from the earth between their trunks. No man had ever given these trees a name.

Andiene looked down at her hands, almost expecting to see them gray and bleached of color, but her skin was still brown, darkened from golden by the sun. Shivering in the cold, she wondered if she would ever see the sun again.

In the meadow, there were fallen tree-trunks, as high as houses, not quite so long as a day’s journey. She gave them only a passing glance. There was a feeling of emptiness in her. The calling had come from this place, or from the forest beyond. She had expected to be challenged when she reached it, but there was nothing. Or almost nothing. There was a feeling of something, some purpose watching her. The wind was rising and beating the grass sideways, driving the fog inland. It seemed to whisper at her: “Look again, blindling, look again.”

The tree trunk lying nearest her was gnarled and almost branchless, only a few twisted stubs remaining, its bark rough and scaly, overgrown with gray and green mosses. As she looked at it, she saw a certain strangeness, then two green slits widened and became eyes, eyes with great weariness, knowingness, cruelness.

“Dragon,” she whispered in awe, as the tree-trunk’s shape became unmistakable; the huge body narrow compared to its length, the legs like stubs of branches, the furled ribbed wings like shattered branches, the gray moss covering the bark-like scales. The dragon’s jaws opened and white flames flickered out.

He was not one of the red dragons of the south that guard their hoard of gold and jewels and dead men’s bones. They were mindless lizards compared to him. Though he seemed colder, the white-hot flame that burned in him would have turned one of them to ashes.

Andiene was silent and motionless. Though she did not look into his eyes, she felt that green stare on her.

The heat from his breath made her step back a pace, as he opened his great-fanged jaws and spoke with a voice that was powerful, but dry like the scratching of rats running through the fallen leaves.

“Welcome to this land, O daughter of mine enemies. I have waited long for you to come.”

Chapter 6

Ilbran listened dully to the footsteps passing back and forth through the dungeon corridors, echoing noisily in the low-roofed halls of stone. He had heard them for days. He could not think clearly, to know the length of his imprisonment. He thought of his mother and father and clenched his teeth to keep from sobbing aloud. His mind was a crazy jumble of pain and despair, with one red glint of revenge-hope in it. He clung to that one hope—it steadied his mind—but even it was dimming. They had said he would die tomorrow.

Lord of all life, who led my fathers into this wide land, give me the courage to fight them and win a quicker death
, he prayed.

He did not look up as the footsteps came nearer, a firm confident tread, and a stumbling, shuffling one. Then they halted. His cell door rattled, and his mind froze with the terror he had thought he could not feel again. Had they changed their minds? More torture?

This time, he would fight, not go meekly. There would be one moment, when they unshackled him from the wall, before they held him fast again. He glanced up, trying to keep his face numb and uncaring.

Giter! Bruised and bloody, almost unrecognizable, the man that the guards held between them was Giter! Ilbran sprang to his feet and pressed to the limit of his chains, all pain and plans forgotten.

One of the guards let out a bark of laughter. “Back! Be patient! You’ll have your dancing day tomorrow.” He laughed at his own joke so heartily that his hands shook and he could not fit the key into the lock. Finally the other guard, a man with less sense of humor, pushed him aside and opened the door.

Giter was shoved inside. The door slammed closed. The key clicked in the lock. Ilbran stared at the butcher, filled with a bitter joy, a fiercer joy than any decent one could be.
When do I tell him? When do I let him know? Not yet. Not yet.

Giter stared at him, wild-eyed. “My Lord Fisherman,” he gasped, and then looked as if he regretted the words.

Ilbran spoke mockingly. “When the stars change courses, lords as well as honest shopkeepers can fall to dungeons. What are you doing here?”

No answer came. “I see. Not knowing who told them the truth, they will torture both till one confesses.” He laughed like a madman, unable to control himself.

Giter backed into the farthest corner, holding out his manacled hands as though to ward off an attack.

Ilbran tugged against his chains, knowing that they were too short to allow him to reach the butcher cowering in the farthest corner, but relishing the look of terror on the other man’s face. Giter seemed to have shrunk and withered within his layers of fat. The guards had not been gentle with him.

A messenger passed through the corridor with brisk confident steps, then came a guard with a slower, heavier tread. Ilbran sat down again, watching the other man narrowly.

Giter was the first to speak, made nervous by the silence. “I never meant to tell them.” Silence was the only reply. Then more silence. Then a man’s scream echoed down the corridors, again and again, high and terrible. It ended abruptly, and then there were heavy footsteps, and more silence. Giter shuddered, and hid his bloodied face in his hands.

“Sometimes they torture one of us in his cell,” Ilbran said in a conversational tone. “They feel it teaches us to speak more promptly, when it is our turn.”

In the stillness, they heard a man sobbing, a nagging sound like a child crying himself to sleep. The late afternoon sun shone golden-dim through the high slit windows.

“I thought you would surely understand,” Giter said, raising his head to look desperately at Ilbran. “She must have paid you. Why else would one of the fisher-folk shelter one of them, like mice rescuing a nestling falcon? It would not have harmed you to share your gold with one other man.” The butcher looked at Ilbran with a kind of baffled fury. “Why were you so greedy?”

Ilbran stared at him. So simple, so heartbreakingly simple. They could have bribed him with Andiene’s gold, and bought safety at least for a while. He thought back to that last conversation. He had been a fool not to realize. Every word burned in his mind, taking on a new meaning. He spoke harshly, trying not to think.

“In my speech, threats mean threats. Why were your actions so different from your intentions?”

“You tried to kill me,” Giter said simply.

If only I had
, Ilbran thought
. Before he was on his guard. It would have been easy then.

Somewhere down the hall, a voice called out, “Any news of Erit Maassanfil Alenefile?”

“No talking,” shouted the guard, before anyone could answer.

“Why did you come, that night?” Ilbran asked softly.

“I saw you at the market-place. You had the look of one with a secret. When I went home, I could not forget. I dreamed about it every night, a voice whispering, telling me of the gold to be gained.”

“What kind of a voice? The voice of your own greed?”

Giter shuddered. “No. It was a whisper, a harsh voice, rustling like rats running over the dry leaves. If I listen, I can hear it yet.”

Ilbran shook his head. It meant nothing to him. Idly, he scraped away a patch of lichen that had grown on the wall for perhaps a hundred years. The fragile lace fell in splinters of pink and white and red, like flesh and bone and blood. “What news of the girl?” he asked.

“None. You hid her well. I swear that is the truth.” Giter eyed him for his reaction, then added, “I heard a wild story from one who was on the beach that night.”

“She spread wings and flew away?”

Giter coughed, and spat blood. “No doubt you know all about it. But they made a song of it, and it must have spread far beyond the city.”

“What do they say?”

“That a boat came in on the tide. That a girl—they say it was the girl—got in it, and then it went out, with no sail, against the tide.”

Ilbran shook his head. “You know nothing of that?” asked Giter.

“Nothing.”

“Then what became of her?”

“I do not know. We told them that we had sheltered her, finally, hoping that it would be a quicker death. For them it was. I saw them die.”

He was silent for a while. If he thought of that first night when the soldiers took them … there were the makings of madness in that. Time for his revenge. “Why did they take you?” he asked.

Giter twisted his hands together. “I do not know. They seem to think that I was your confederate. If you swore to them that I was not, that I had nothing to do with it, have no idea where she is … ” His eyes showed unquenchable hope. “They think it is a case of ‘when thieves fall out’, but if you said that I knew nothing of it, they would believe you, would they not?”

Ilbran smiled grimly. “There is no chance at all that they would believe me. They promised me a respite from torture if I would name my allies, and I could think of only one man worthy to be so named.”

Giter looked at him in shock. “They believed you?”

“You are here. They do not take chances, it seems. But I did not expect to have the pleasure of your company so close.”

Giter whimpered, and cowered in his corner. “They tortured my son, to make me confess, and when I confessed to stop them, they killed him. My wife, my children, they took them away. I do not know what they did with them.”

Ilbran caught his breath in horror. He had not realized, he not stopped to think, what his impulse for revenge would bring.

His thoughts ran in mazes of self-condemnation.
They believed me. Nahil’s men believed me because I had broken. I would have betrayed anyone. If I had known her hiding place I would have told them. But not knowing that, I lied, and brought death on many, ones I do not even know. I am without honor or pride.

He bowed his head. Little was left to him but emptiness and despair. He thought of the future—of the few hours he had remaining. The torturers had been skilled; they had given great pain but little injury. They had left his body strong to live a long time tomorrow, when they would strip him and tar him, chain him to the tall stake in the center square of the city and set him on fire, the slow fire that would cling and burn, and would only spread and burn the more, for all that he tried to stifle it.

Burning, the cruelest death of all. He would try to fight, to win a better death on a soldier’s sword.

He had seen an execution for treason once, when he was too young to understand. They muted them somehow, so that their screams would not disturb the gentle nerves of the executioners.

He had thought that the black animal dancing and capering on the end of the chain was some sort of a clown, and so he had laughed and amused himself with the rest of the crowd, until his mother came and dragged him away. That night he was scolded and sent to bed supperless, filled with the shame of doing something terribly wrong, though he did not know what it could be.

Now he understood. His parents had thought he knew. They had thought he was laughing at the sight of death. Now he could never explain.

He had escaped lightly from the torture, because the soldiers, clever brutes, had known that the surest way to a confession was to torture father and mother while he watched.
We were too stubborn
, he thought.
We should have betrayed the girl, worthless royalty, the moment the soldiers seized us.

Giter still moaned and shuddered in the corner. Ilbran, gazing at him, tried to recapture the bitter joy of revenge, but now he felt nothing but shame. What use to apologize? It would be a coward’s act, to ask for forgiveness when no repayment could be made.

The doors clanged open, and the familiar footsteps came down the corridor. “Where will we put this one?” asked one of the guards, the humorist. “In here. They won’t be crowded for long.” He guffawed at his own wit.

“These days, the Sudains should give us a cut-rate price on tar,” the other guard agreed.

The door of Ilbran’s cell swung open. He stared in amazement and incomprehension.

The man that the guards held between them, gray-clad, in bulky robes. A grizane? Or some impostor masquerading in gray robes? No, a grizane, true enough. It would have been less amazing to see Nahil Reji himself a prisoner manhandled by the guards.

No king would ever … no king had ever … set himself to war against the grizanes, who went where they pleased and swore oaths to no lord, spoke little with men and had powers beyond imagining. At least, so the stories went.

Ilbran could answer at least for their foreknowledge. “Whatever choice you make, it will bring you sorrow,” the gray one had said. Sorrow had come, and despair.

But what had brought a grizane to this place? Some doubted that they were men. This one seemed human enough, leaning against the cold stone of the cell wall and drawing great gasping breaths as though to calm himself. They had chained his hands together, but otherwise he was free. The blood was dry on the sides of his face where it had run down from his empty eye sockets.

Outside the cell, the guards talked, trouble and bravado mixing in their speech. “They say they can spell you with a glance,” one said.

“Who cares for that? This one won’t be glancing at anybody anymore!”