Darkover: First Contact (50 page)

. . . and discovered, to his dismay, that somehow he had gotten turned around, and instead of heading for the shore of the Island of Silence, the boat was heading right up on the sandy beach where the ferrywoman’s hut was located.

Bard swore, impotently, as he felt the boat being rushed by the savage current, right back on the shore he had left. He thrust with the paddle, fending the boat out into the stream again. It took every scrap of his strength to keep the boat in the channel, but try as he might, he could make no headway toward the island. Slowly, inexorably, the boat turned in circles, drifting, no matter how he paddled it. The ferrywoman had hauled herself to her knees and was watching him, cackling with laughter. The boat moved on shore, no matter how hard he paddled, scooted up, scraping on the sand, and his last paddle stroke actually drove it hard aground.

The little ferrywoman cackled, “I told ye, sir. Not if you was to try all day and all night. That boat there won’t go to the island unless the priestesses
call
it there.”

Bard fancied he saw grins on the faces of some of his men. He glared around with such rage that they quickly assumed total impassivity. He took a threatening step toward the old ferrywoman. He felt ready and willing to wring her neck. But she was only an old simpleton, after all.

He considered, standing over her. The ford at Moray’s mill had been spelled. Evidently the boat, here, had been put under sorcery as well. In any case, if the priestesses really meant to keep Carlina from him, and it was fairly obvious that they did, one man alone would meet only more bewitchment and sorcery.

Perhaps a
leronis
could calm the waters, as Melora had done at Moray’s mill; and his men could swim their horses across.

“Melisendra!”

She came quietly. He wondered if she had been laughing behind his back at his struggle with the boat.

“If the priestesses have put a spell on the water, you can calm it and reverse it!”

She looked straight at him and shook her head.

“No, my lord. I dare not risk the anger of Avarra.”

“Is she the Goddess of whom you prate?” he demanded.

“She is the Goddess of all women, and I will not anger her.”

“Melisendra, I warn you—” He raised his hand, ready to strike her.

She looked at him with deadly indifference. “You cannot do anything to me worse than you have done. After what has already befallen me, do you think that a few blows will make me obedient to your will?”

“If you dislike me as much as all that, I would think you would be glad to help me recover my wife! Then you will be free of me, if I am so hateful to you!”

“At the cost of betraying some other woman into your hands?”

“You are jealous,” he accused, “and want no other woman in my arms!”

She kept her eyes on him, straight and level. She said, “If your wife were held captive on that island and wished to rejoin you, I would risk the anger of Avarra to help her to your arms. But she seems not very eager to leave her place of refuge and come over to you. And if you are wise, Bard, you will leave this place at once before something worse happens.”

“Is that the Sight?” Frustration made his words sarcastic.

She bowed her head. She said, and he saw that she was weeping silently, “No, my lord. That is—gone from me forever. But I know the Goddess cannot be defied with impunity. You had better come, Bard.”

“Would you grieve if some dreadful fate befell me?” he asked, savagely, but she did not answer, only turned her horse about and rode slowly away from the lake.

“Come on, men,” he shouted. “Swim the horses; the spell is only on the boat!” He urged his horse right up to the water’s edge, although it fought, shying nervously and backing from the water under its feet. He swiveled his horse and saw that they were not following him.

“Come on! What’s the matter with you? After me, men! There are women on that island, and they have defied me, so I make you free of them all! Come on, men, plunder and women—not afraid of some old witch’s jabberings, are you? Come on!”

About half of the men hung back, muttering fearfully.

“Nay, Dom Wolf, it’s uncanny, it’s forbidden!”

“The Goddess forbids it, lord! No, don’t do this!”

“Blasphemy!”

But one or two of the others urged their horses forward, eagerly, hauling at the reins, forcing the unwilling beasts into the water.

The fog was rising again, thicker and thicker; and this time it had a strange, eerie greenish color. It seemed that there were faces within it, faces that grimaced and leered and menaced him, and slowly, slowly, the faces were drifting ashore. One of the men hanging back, unwilling to go near the water, suddenly howled like a madman, and cried, “No, no! Mother Avarra, have mercy! Pity us!” He jerked the reins savagely and Bard heard his horse’s hoofs suck and splash as he turned about and galloped back the way they had come. One after another, although Bard rose in his stirrups and yelled and cursed them, his men turned and bolted their animals back up the trail, until Bard was alone at the water’s edge. Damn them all! Frightened of a little fog! Cowards, he’d break them all and reduce them to the ranks, if he didn’t hang them one and all for cowardice!

He sat defying the fog. “Come on,” he said aloud, and clucked to the horse, but she did not move, quivering beneath him as if she stood in the chill of a blizzard. He wondered if she could see the horrid faces, drifting nearer and nearer the shore.

And suddenly a blind terror chilled Bard, too, to the bone. He
knew
, with every fiber in him, that if one of the faces touched him through the fog, all the courage and life in him would drain out, cold, and he would die, the fog would bite through to the bone and he would fall from his saddle, strengthless and screaming, and never rise again. He jerked at the reins of his horse and tried to gallop after Melisendra and his fleeing men, but he was frozen, and the mare sat trembling under him and did not stir. He had once heard that the Great Mother could take the form of a mare. . . . Had she bewitched his horse?

The faces drifted closer and closer, horrible and formless, the faces of dead men, ravished women, corpses with the flesh hanging from their bones, and somehow Bard knew they were all the men
he
had led into battle and death, all the men
he
had killed, all the women
he
had ravaged or raped or burned and driven from their houses, the screaming face of a woman in the pillage of Scaravel, when he had taken her child from her and flung it over the wall to be shattered on the stones below . . . a woman he had taken in the sack of Scathfell, her husband lying dead beside her . . . a child, bruised and bleeding from a dozen men who had used her . . . Lisarda, weeping in his arms . . . Beltran, all the flesh melted from his bones . . . the faces were so close now that they were formless, lapping at his feet, his knees, swirling higher and higher. They wrapped about his loins, sucking, biting, and under his clothing he felt his genitals shrink and wither, unmanning him, felt the cold rise in his belly; when they rose to bite at his throat his breath would fail and he would fall, choking, dying. . . .

Bard screamed, and somehow the sound gave him life enough to grab at the reins, to kick frantically at his horse’s flanks. She bucked and bolted. He clung for his life, letting her run, letting her take him anywhere, anywhere away from that place. He lost the stirrups, he lost the reins as she bolted, but panic somehow gave him strength to cling to her back; at last he felt her slowing under him to a walk, and came to consciousness dazed, finding that he was riding at the rear of his men, next to Melisendra.

If she said a single word, he resolved, if she spoke a syllable indicating that she had warned him, or that he should have taken her advice, he would hit her! Somehow that damned woman always seemed to come off best in their encounters! He was sick to death of having her there to sneer at him! If she said one word about what a ludicrous figure he had cut, fleeing, clinging to his horse. . . .

“If you’re so damned well suited by piety and chastity,” he snarled at her, “and so glad of my defeat, why don’t you go back to them yourself and stay there?”

But she was not jeering at him. She was not looking at him at all. She had her veil pulled over her face and she was weeping quietly behind its shelter.

“I would go,” she said in a whisper. “I would go, so gladly! But they would not have me.” And she lowered her head and would not look at him again.

Bard rode on, sick with rage. Once again, Carlina had escaped him! She had made a fool of him again, when he had been so sure of her! And he was tied still to Melisendra, whom he was beginning to hate! He turned as they rode up the steep path, and shook an angry fist at the lake which lay silent, pale in the falling dusk, behind them.

He would come back. The women there had defeated him once, but he would devise some way to come back, and this time he would not be driven away by their witchcraft! Let them beware!

And if Carlina was hiding there, let her beware too!

Summer had come to the Kilghard Hills, bringing fire season, when the resin trees burst into flame and every available man was called out on fire-watch. On a day late in summer Bard di Asturien rode slowly southward, with a small group of picked men and bodyguards, and at last crossed the border from Marenji into Asturias.

No longer,
he thought,
truly a border.
The Shire of Marenji, despite the protests of the sheriff, lay under arms, protected by soldiers quartered in every house and village in Marenji. A system of beacon fires and telepathic relays had been established to warn the people of Asturias of any attack from north or east, from bandits from over the Kadarin, or riders from Serrais.

The people of Marenji had protested. When had the people, he wondered, ever known what was good for them? Did they
want
to stand unarmed between Serrais and Asturias, being ridden over by armies every few years? If they did not want soldiers there from Astunias, they should have had their own armies to keep them out.

He spent one night in his old home, but no one was there except the old
coridom;
Erlend had been sent to join his mother at court. Soon, Bard thought, he would have to take thought about suitable fosterage for his son in some nobleman’s house. Even if Erlend was destined to be a
laranzu,
he should know something of war and arms. Bard remembered that Geremy, who knew he would never carry arms in battle, had been nothing behind his foster brothers in swordplay. . . . he cut that thought off, clean, setting his jaw, refusing to think about it.

Erlend should be a
laranzu,
if his gifts lay that way; he was only a
nedestro
son. When he had found the right way to reclaim Carlina, she could give him lawful sons enough. But Erlend must be fostered as befitted his rank, and be supposed Melisendra would make some sort of scene over that. Damn the woman, all the disadvantages of having a wife, and none of the advantages! If she were not his father’s most valued
leronis
he would send her away at once. Perhaps one of Dom Rafael’s men would be willing to marry her, surely his father would give her some kind of dowry.

He rode in to Castle Asturias at dusk, finding the courtyard filled with strange horses, Hastur banners, embassies from all over the Hundred Kingdoms. What had happened? Had King Carolin sent at last to ransom Geremy?

That, he learned, was only a part of it. Forty days before, the Lady Ginevra Harryl had borne a son to Geremy Hastur; Geremy had chosen, first, to legitimatize the boy, and at the same time had chosen to marry the woman
di catenas.
As a way of proving that Geremy Hastur was no prisoner but an honored guest (the legal fiction, Bard thought wryly, about all hostages), Dom Rafael had chosen to perform the marriage himself, and to hold the wedding with great ceremony, with Hasturs coming from far and wide to attend the wedding. And while Dom Carolin would not venture, himself, into Asturias, he had sent one of his ministers, the
laranzu
Varzil of Neskaya, to solemnize the ceremony.

Bard cared little for this kind of merry-making, and the preparations reminded him, painfully, of the fact that he had hoped to hold this kind of wedding for himself some time this summer, before his defeat at the Lake of Silence. Nevertheless, the commander of the king’s armies must be present; brooding, he got into his embroidered tunic and ceremonial cloak of blue, richly trimmed with copper threads and fine embroidery. Melisendra, too, looked noble and proud, her hair done high in looped braids, in a gown of green and a cape of marl-fur. Before they left the suite little Erlend came in, stopping wide-eyed to admire his parents.

“Oh, Mother, you are beautiful! And you too, Father, you are beautiful too!”

Bard chuckled and bent to lift up his son. Erlend said wistfully, “I wish I might go down and see the wedding and all the fine clothes and noblemen and ladies. . . .”

“There is no place for children—” Bard began, but Melisendra said, “Your nurse may take you into the gallery for a peep at them, Erlend, and if you are a good boy she will fetch you some cakes from the kitchen for your suppers.” Bard put him down, and Melisendra knelt to kiss him.

Bard, jealous of the way the boy clung to his mother, said, “And you shall ride with me tomorrow.” Erlend trotted away with his nurse, quite dazzled at the thought of the promised treats.

But Bard frowned as he went, at Melisendra’s side, down the great stairway.

“Why in the name of all the gods did Father choose to hold Geremy’s wedding in such state?”

“I think he has a plan, but I do not know what it is; I am sure it was not because of any good will he holds toward Geremy. Nor, I suppose, toward Ginevra; although Dom Regis Harryl is one of the oldest nobility of Asturias, and of the Hastur kin a few generations back.”