Chance (24 page)

I could not say a word.

There was no replying, in any event, for a long, anguished moan filled the room. Mela had awakened from one of her brief sleeps. I hastily crossed the room to be at her side, taking her dry hand in my own. But she looked through me and past me, as always, seeing nothing to help her. Frain stood beside me, and I caught my breath; her vague gray eyes flickered onto his face. But then she turned away her thin face and tossed her head to and fro in a sort of weak, distracted protest against her own misery. Her red hair lay snarled on the pillow, angry and unkempt. I placed a hand on her brow to still her.

“I could try to heal her,” Frain whispered. The words seemed dragged from him. “Tirell says there is healing in me.”

“Prince Tirell may speak truth,” I said roughly, trying to hide my sudden hope. “Though I know more of healing than he is ever likely to learn.”

“I know you were a smith.” Frain turned to me with his steady, questioning gaze, and I could scarcely meet his eyes. “Can no one, then, heal those who are dearest to them?”

“Perhaps not, Frain,” I said quietly, for that was truth, “but I lost my gift for healing years ago, when I grew too fond of wealth—wealth and power.”

“My baby!” Mela whispered, and her frail hands moved on the bedsheets.

“Try, Frain,” I told him, “but do not take it too hard if you fail. She is far gone.”

“But what should I do?” he asked.

“What do you think?” I asked in turn.

“There is something to do with metal,” Frain said slowly, as if the fact puzzled him. Of course, he did not know who he was, what he had come from, that he should be a healer. “I used a knife last time. But I hate to touch her with such an ugly thing.”

“A knife can cut away blight from the stem,” I said. “Clean pain can heal. Use it.”

He did not tell me that he had hardly eaten for days, nor that he had ridden far, in haste, and with little rest. I learned that later, much later, when we were at Melior. He stood by Mela's bed with his back straight and his head bowed, like a hostage for her, and laid a hand on her hot brow. She stirred beneath his touch and whispered again. He curled his fingers around the iron knife blade, sheathing it with his own skin, and moved it over her heart, over her hands and head. He trembled, and I knew what he was feeling, remembered it well. The power moves in you and through you from depths beyond knowing or from some place beyond being; I never understood which. It carries you out of self and you shrink in fear. But I don't think Frain was afraid. He stood with Mela in her own dark place, bent over her, embracing her, struggling to lift her, to free her. Her whole body trembled and strained with the effort, though he had not actually moved; every sinew of his spirit was taut. For the space of countless heartbeats he fought for her, with her, against her—

And for an instant I thought he had succeeded. Her bleary eyes met his and cleared. “My baby!” she breathed. Then an awful tumult of feeling surged into her eyes—love and rage—and the rage snapped her away from him. I saw it happen. Frain swayed as if he had been struck. His knife clattered to the floor, and he clutched at a bedpost for support. He clung to the heartless wooden thing and sobbed.

I went and put my arms around him. He let go of the bed and cried against my shoulder, cried like the child I had never known. “Easy, lad,” I murmured, swallowing, patting him clumsily. “Stop your shaking, now.”

He raised his wet face. “She is trapped in a tangle of rage and despair,” he said wildly, “roots and strength-sucking vines, anger—I tugged and tugged—”

“I know,” I told him.

“The knife would not cut her free. Knives are like water in that place. I—I was a drifting thing, I didn't know who I was, I couldn't remember my name.” He gulped for breath. “I—there was something—if I had only known.…”

If you had known she is your mother, I thought with a pang, it would only have increased your heartache. He had given everything, down to the last dram of his strength; he could scarcely stand. I had never seen such courage. I know that such had not been my courage in my day.

Mela lay quite still. “Is she—dead?” whispered Frain.

I reached out and touched the pulse of her neck. “No, but she is beyond knowledge or pain, and I am glad of it. She will die soon.” I guided Frain toward the door. “Come.”

He was still trembling. “I am sorry …”

“I told you she was far gone,” I said more gently than I had ever heard myself speak. “You did no harm, and more good than you know. Come.” I took him down the corridor, half supporting him. The guards watched us pass in barely concealed astonishment. I led him into my own bedchamber and laid him down, took off his boots and covered him and pulled the curtains around him. “Sleep,” I ordered, and left him there.

My wife died two nights later. I did not see Frain in the interim, though I often thought of him. I ordered the servants to extend to him the fullest hospitality: bath, clothing, food, whatever he needed. I knew he would feel weak and drowsy for a few days after what he had done for Mela, so I was not really expecting him as I sat with her. In fact, I suppose, he avoided the sickroom, for he was still very young. Death makes grim company. But it came easily enough for Mela. She slipped away without a movement or a word to me. I wept a bit, and then I slept for a good while.

By the sun, it was past noon of the next day when I awoke. I immediately went looking for Frain, and found him readily. He was in my chamber, dressed but resting. He winced when he saw me, so I knew he had heard the news.

“I am sorry about Queen Mela, my lord,” he said.

“There are some who cling to their ills,” I replied. I felt calm, almost dreamy, but he had started me crying again even so; I could feel the tears on my face. I let them run. Kept within, sorrow turns to poison.

He had started to rise when I entered, and I had waved him back. Now I sat beside him. “I have never seen courage to match yours in a healer,” I said.

He shrugged. “Tenacity. Dogged pertinacity, if you will. In Melior, people call me Puppydog behind my back because I can't be put off.” A note of bitterness crept into his voice, even though he tried to speak lightly, and my tears abruptly stopped. I sat straight up in indignation that anyone could speak of him so.

“Because you are faithful, you mean? But it seems hardly fair—”

“Faithfulness is not too highly regarded in Melior.”

“Well, it is here,” I said warmly. “And I wish people would remember that the dog is the emblem of honor and fidelity.” I leaned forward, my elbows on my knees, gesticulating. “Have you heard the legend of the Dog King of Vaire?”

He shook his head, settling himself in willingness to hear. So I told the tale.

“On the night in which Nolan of Vaire was born, his sister, the magical she-dog Vlonda, birthed two pups, and they were called Kedal and Kedur. They lay with Nolan in his cradle. One was black and one was white, and the baby was red as fire. In seven short years he grew to be a tall man, and the pups grew to be giant hounds, each big enough to fell a stag by itself. They were all constant companions to each other, and the dogs served Nolan as well as if they had been men.

“Now in those beginning days, dogs were not yet heard of. That is why Aftalun had bedded and then transformed Vlonda, the warrior maiden: to give this gift to man. Wherever Nolan went with his hounds, people watched in envy and awe. The dogs fought beside him in battle, guarded his sleep, kept his possessions safe from thieves, provided meat for his table, and helped him, and in course of time his children, through danger of every kind. They fought with fierce animals, ran through fire, swam through floods, climbed towers, and jumped pits in his service, and neither of them ever mouthed a complaint. Nolan, their master, was the best king Vaire has ever known, and no one in the realm lacked anything during his reign.

“Nolan lived for two hundred years. Before he was an old man, every great lord had a dog; wars were fought for the stealing of dogs. But the most faithless followers were put to shame by the faithfulness of the dogs, for it is in the nature of a dog to be constant, and in the nature of a man to be willful. That is why each can help the other. But petty men came to envy the dogs, and hate their nobility, and kick them for spite, and use their name as a name of reproach.

“Nolan saw all this with sorrow. He feared that his loyal companions might be subjected to insult after he was gone—for Kedal and Kedur, being born of Aftalun, were immortal. So, in his old age, Nolan turned his canton over to his sons and set out for a final adventure in the mountains to the south. Kedal and Kedur bounded around him like young pups. When the three of them reached the slopes of Lord Tutosel, he breathed easier, for he judged that they would meet no people there. But at the top of the first pass their way was blocked by a hideous, misshapen old man. ‘Filthy curs!' he shrieked. ‘Go dig in garbage; go roll in manure!' Nolan tried to silence the old man, but it was too late; the mocker slipped away, and the dogs had turned to stone.

“Nolan spent the rest of his days in the mountains, living in the open, windy pass by the two stones that once were his faithful servants. Folk will point out to you the peak where Kedal and Kedur still watch over Vaire with tears rolling now and then from their blind, stony eyes. For what Nolan feared has come to pass: every shepherd boy now has a dog, and men have forgotten that dogs are the gift and get of the gods. But no one goes near those mountain ways, for Vlonda remembers. She roamed long in search of her brother and her sons, and folk say she still skulks, brooding, beneath the shadows of Kedal and Kedur.”

“I have never had a dog,” Frain remarked. “Abas hates them. He will not allow any in Melior's court.”

I got up, and he got up as well, courteous youth that he was. I took off my fine cloak of royal blue, my golden stag-hound clasp. It was presumptuous of me to place the emblem of Vaire on Frain, but I refused to worry; in this way, at least, I would claim him as my son! I put the cloak around his sturdy shoulders, fastened it with the red-gold clasp.

“Wear this,” I said, “and if anyone calls you pup, smile.” I suppose I was weeping again. He put his arms out to me, hesitantly. I welcomed his embrace. I wept quietly for a while, to get it out of the way, but I was thinking far ahead. I knew that I would never willingly be far from him again, that I would ride with him even if it meant following his mad fool of a brother.

“Stay here a few days,” I told Frain, “and stand by me at the burial. Then I will go with you to see Tirell.”

“Thank you, my lord,” he stammered. He was startled. “And thank you for the tale as well,” he added. “I will remember it.”

I did not know that I had named the place of my own death, telling him that tale. I, the ambitious smith, the extortionist and usurper, would die at the feet of the ancestral staghounds of Vaire. And not kingship or power or a healing touch or all of Frain's faithfulness would be able to save me.

WE BUILD A SHRINE

So we build a shrine to suffering,

Sprinkle ourselves with our own holy tears

And eat the bread of bitterness

And lift our voices to the god of suffering

Saying, for these my enumerated sorrows

I deserve:

Your love, your kiss of favor, your praise,

Pity, respite, reward, bliss

eternal, embrace, accolade—bah!

I wish I could leave my childhood

Behind me as my father left Ireland,

Step onto the boat to somewhere else.

He put an ocean between him and that

Petty, bitter, lush green land, every sod of it

soaked with blood,

Land of sorrows—

But the Irish never really leave.

The brogue stays on their voices, on their

Tongues that sacramental blood-red wine,

That holy water in their eyes, on their lips

that ancient cry—

And as I bewail my childhood,

They bewail the childhood of their race.

And so and still we build a shrine

to suffering.

© Nancy Springer 1984

PRIMAL CRY

Coal town. Hoadley, PA. Big house on the hill, high Victorian, mansion almost. That would be the mine owner's place, formerly. Avenue of elms all stumps since Dutch elm disease. Some other houses just below, ornate, less big. Doctor, lawyer, mayor, maybe. Several houses, comfortable, along Main Street. Stores, school, Post Office. And taverns, numerous, one on every corner. And churches, nearly as numerous. Slovak, Irish, Polish, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian, Brethren, Lutheran. Railroad tracks right through the center of town, length of Main Street. Below that, houses again, row on row, two stories, peaked roofs, weathered siding or peeling fake brick made of asphalt. Nothing extra. Plain sparrow-brown boxes, enough of them to fill seventeen streets, numbered. Below again, the warehouses, the tarpaper shacks, the creek, orange from acid runoff. Only bony piles and scrub forest beyond.

Me, I'm an outsider. Only lived in Hoadley a few months. Like another world, Hoadley.

We moved to Hoadley when Brad took a job with one of the private-sector agencies in Steel City. Career-change counselor. The mills had closed, see. I was four months pregnant with our first child, so no use hunting a job. No jobs to be had, anyway.

Just waiting for baby, I was good and bored when I met Deb.

Brad found the apartment in Hoadley. One of the big old places on the hill, cut up—we had the whole first floor. Felt like mine barons. No ten-acre lawn, no wrought-iron fence, no avenue of elm trees, but yes bay windows, yes bevel glass framing the great door with the fanlight above, yes deep shady porch. Looked down over strata, social. Fine view of the slag heaps. Big brick house next door, similar.

Met Deb at the County Historical Society a few doors away. Place with real slate siding, old horse-drawn ambulance parked on the lawn. Christmas time, I wandered down there to take in the crafts display. Deb was there behind the counter, flanked by blue-haired wrinklies. Odd. She's about my age, late twenties, tall and slim, terrific clothes, got life enough for the whole place. Cute face, lots of glossy black permed hair, ditzy way about her. Overgrown kid.