Daughter of Lir (11 page)

Minas’ bones were uneasy. His father should have come out
for the dancing. As strange and haughty as he had grown, he had never been
known to keep his council waiting so very long or in such great ill-humor.

The dancing was far away now. The fire burned steadily. The
king’s women moved among the council with platters of roast meats, bread fresh
from the baking, and skins of kumiss and honey mead. A strangled squeal marked
the daring of one man greatly gone in kumiss, laying hand on the woman who bent
to fill his drinking horn.

Minas half-rose. He did not know precisely what he would do,
whether he would speak to them all or run in search of his father. Still
someone must do something, or this council would shatter into squabbling
factions.

Just as he began to straighten, the fire flared. In the sudden
light, the king came out of his tent. He loomed tall and terrible, like a bull
in full rut: great head uplifted, broad horns spearing the stars.

He was wearing the bull’s-head crown of the People, and the
cloak of the spotted bull’s hide. His face was shadowed beneath the sweep of
the horns.

Silence fell as he came. Even the dancers, at the camp’s far
edge, chose just then to pause. Nothing stirred. No one seemed to breathe.

He paced through the circle to the royal canopy. Just in
front of it, he turned. The fire blazed on the gold he wore on his arms and
about his neck.

When he spoke, his voice was deep, echoing in the silence.
“The gods have spoken,” he said. “When the moon wanes to dark, we ride, we and
all the tribes who look to us as king. Westward, into the setting sun.
Westward, to the lands of gold and copper, soft men and willing women, to the
lands the gods have given us.”

“The gods have given us the world,” said the warleader of
the Northwind clan.

The others growled assent. It was a chilling sound, soft and
deadly. It put Minas in mind of a council of wolves.

“Chariots,” said the king. “We shall build chariots—tens,
hundreds of them—and train horses, and train warriors. We shall be a storm in
the tall grass, a wind across the steppe. All lesser men shall fall before us.”

The growl deepened. It no longer sounded like the voices of
men, but seemed to come from the earth underfoot.

Minas’ hackles rose. The council should have been lively,
men speaking in swift alternation, boasting, arguing, planning the war as they
had at the beginning of every season since anyone could remember. But they sat
still, and their eyes glittered. They said nothing. The king’s shadow stretched
long across them.

There were no shamans among them. Minas had not looked before,
nor thought to look. But the bone rattles were silent, the horn-crowned heads
nowhere to be seen. Priests of the gods there were none, no workers of magic,
no servants of the Powers. Only the king and his warleaders and the elders of
the People.

Minas escaped. He fled, if he would admit the truth. He felt
no shadow on him—but would he know if it had already corrupted him?

o0o

He hardly saw where he was going. His feet took him where
they would. He did not hear Dias behind him, but he was too craven to go back
and look for his brother. If it was Dias’ mother who had done this, then Dias
was in great danger. But Minas was no priest or shaman. He had no power but
what was in his hands: to wield a weapon, or to make one.

There was one who had power in truth, whom some were calling
a god. He found himself there, in front of his grandfather’s tent, on the far
side of the chariotmakers’ circle.

It was a small tent for so great a man. Two of his daughters
kept it for him. His wives were dead long ago, nor had he taken others. Some
whispered that he had cut away his manhood as a sacrifice to the gods.

He was man enough, Minas knew. He simply did not care. His
spirit burned too bright, with too narrow a flame. All of it was given to his
work. He thought of little else.

He was awake as Minas had thought he might be. His tent was
full of lamps, dazzling bright. They were one of his few indulgences. His tent
was all but bare, his belongings few. If it was not meant for the making of
chariots, he did not wish to own it. Every gift that he was given, he gave
away. Except the horses. Those he kept—but they were among the herds. Here he
had little and would have been content with less.

He sat cross-legged on a single worn hide. He was naked, as
if he had been asleep. But his eyes were fiercely awake. Something gleamed in
his hand.

Gold, it seemed to be, but its color was odd—too flat
somehow. Too shallow. It was shaped into a small blade such as a man might use
for cutting his hair.

“A knife of gold?” Minas asked, squatting in front of his
grandfather.

Metos tossed it at him. He caught it by the blade; gasped
and recoiled. Blood welled from the cuts in his fingers. “
Ai
! It bit me. What spell is on it?”

“That,” said Metos, “I should like to know.”

Minas lifted the thing gingerly, by the haft this time. That
was carved of bone. Minas did not recognize the clan-marks that were on it.
“Where did you find this?”

“A trader brought it,” Metos said. “He said it came from
beyond the river of souls.”

“The river that flows round the feet of the setting sun? But
there’s nothing past that. Except maybe the gods’ country.”

“No,” said Metos. “He said not. He said there’s more to the
world. Tribes as numerous as ants in a hill. Great wealth. Vast camps—cities,
he called them: camps that never move, where men live year after year.”

“I’ve heard of cities,” Minas said. “The tribes we overrun,
they babble of them. But how can men live so? They’d hunt the land bare inside
of a year.”

“They keep cattle,” Metos said, “and teach the earth to grow
fruit at their command. You’ve seen that, child. You saw the tribe that we
overran, that had fields growing beside a camp where they lived most of the
year. They said they’d learned it from a western shaman.”

“We slew every man of them,” Minas said. “My father took the
chief’s wives. They wept a great deal. They all sickened and died before the
winter was out.”

“They were soft,” Metos said. “That is the way of cities.
But this . . .” His finger brushed the blade of the little knife
that Minas still held in his hand. “This is as sharp as the jaws of death.
Whoever wrought this was no soft man.”

“What is it?” Minas asked.

“He called it bronze.” Metos frowned at it, then lightly,
barely touching, ran it down his arm. It left a swath of shaven skin behind it.
“He swore he knew nothing of its secret.”

“You believed him?”

“He died swearing it.” Metos spoke calmly, as a god might,
or a king. “He was a thief. He had stolen the knife from a prince. He tried to
sell it to me—fool, to tell me how he got it.”

“Blades of bronze,” Minas said, “would be as deadly as
chariots.”

“And the king wants a hundred chariots,” said Metos. “We’ve
all but exhausted the wood that our allies brought us from the north. There’s
none to be had here, nor within many days’ ride. But westward, across the
river, there are forests, the trader said. Great stands of trees. We must have
those trees, if we’re to have chariots.”

Minas stared at him. “It was
you
who moved the king to speak?”

“No,” said Metos. “There’s gold in the west. The king loves
gold. The king’s wife loves it even more. But I need those forests. And you—what
do you need? Why do you want to stay here?”

“I don’t,” said Minas. “I want to see the cities of amber
and gold, if they are real. And see swords of bronze. But—”

“But?”

Minas ran his tongue over his lips. “There’s an ill thing
behind the king’s face. What it is, why it came, what it wants—I don’t know.
But it makes my skin shiver. Why does it want to take the war westward? What
does it need there?”

“Blood and souls,” Metos said. “Tender young virgins.
Newborn infants. What does any dark thing hunger after?”

“What,” said Minas, “if it wants us? What then? There were
no shamans in the council tonight. Already it’s stronger than they. The warleaders
had no word to say. It’s mastered them. It will devour us next. All of us—we
who are here, our allies, our kin, our vassals across the plains. Then it will
use us to devour the western cities.”

Metos did not tell him that he was rambling, or that he was
starting at shadows. He said, “I don’t doubt that it will try. Did you ask a
shaman why he wasn’t there?”

Minas opened his mouth, then shut it again. Carefully he
said, “My bones knew.”

“Your bones were aquiver with horror of the thing in your
father. Go,” said Metos. “Ask the shamans.”

“Will they speak to me?”

“To the king’s son, the heir, the prince beloved of the
sun?”

Minas flushed. “Now you’re laughing at me.”

“I am not,” Metos said. “Ask them.”

That, too clearly, was all Minas would get from that most
maddening of men. And maybe, he thought, Metos was a god after all. Gods were
beyond the comprehension of mortals. Even mortals who were princes.

No warrior willingly sought out the shamans, least of all
in the dark before dawn. Minas thought, dimly and very distantly, of sleep.
Morning’s light would serve him better, surely, for calling on the
spirit-speakers of the tribe.

And yet when he left his grandfather’s tent, he turned not
toward the young men’s place but toward the camp’s outer reaches. The shamans
kept their own circle of tents, their own fires, even their own herds for rite
and sacrifice. All young of the herds that were born black or misshapen or on
days of ill omen, went to the shamans. So too the menchildren marked with
strangeness either within or without.

Minas was as unlike them as any man could be. And rightly,
for the king must be perfect in all his limbs, unmaimed, unmarred, and
beautiful before the gods.

Yet that was nothing to be proud of in this dim cold hour.
The stars burned too fiercely overhead, as if they would defy the sun that came
to conquer them. Minas was still bare under his mantle, still marked with paint
that had blurred and run on his body. He was no very prepossessing figure.

The shamans would be the last to care for any such thing.
Minas thrust down the cold grues. He came in good faith, at the command of a
living god. He had nothing to fear.

Nothing indeed, though the skin quivered between his
shoulderblades, and his manly parts did their best to crawl into his belly. He
trod more slowly, the closer he came to those dark and silent tents clustered
apart from the rest. His nostrils twitched at the scents that wafted from them.
Smoke and tanned hides and unwashed flesh were familiar enough, but there were
other things beneath, subtler and darker. Odors of death; of decay. Strange
spices, musk, ash, and something for which at first he had no name. Heated
bronze, he thought with a start of recognition, though he had never known that
precise scent before.

The tents were shut tight. The fires were banked to embers.
There was no sound, not even the whisper of wind.

Minas had to drive himself forward. Only pride kept him from
turning tail and running back to his own tent and his own belongings and his
brother’s swift mockery. Each step he took felt like a profanation of holy
ground. He trespassed where his like had no right to go. The night itself
pressed against him, urging him to retreat.

The sun was coming. The horizon to the east was paling
slowly. It gave him strength to advance against the press of shadows.

There was no one in the tents. Except for their ghostly
guardians, they were empty. Not even an apprentice lingered to tend the herds.

Minas searched in all the tents. There was no one. Nor did
he find any sign of flight, nor any belongings in disorder, nor trail of
confusion. For all that he could discover, the shamans had vanished into air.

Surely they were out on the steppe, performing one of their
rites—striving perhaps to restore the king to his rightful self. They could not
all be gone away. Shamans were the lungs and liver of the tribe, as warriors
were its heart and limbs. Without them, no tribe was truly strong.

He hunted them. By then he had little will in the matter; he
only knew that he must see them. It was like a geas laid on him.

He went as a hunter goes. He cleansed the paint from his
body with ashes and bull’s fat and green herbs. He slipped into the young men’s
tent, where they were all snoring raucously, and gathered his clothing and
weapons, and slipped out again under the swiftly lightening sky.

He tracked the shamans by the bending of grass in the wind,
and the slant of shadows, and the long rays of the sun climbing over the
horizon. He was not truly in the world, nor had been since he saw his father’s
shadow looming in the firelight.

What he did now, he did for the tribe. He told himself so,
over and over, as he caught and bridled a horse and rode out into the grass. It
was spring on the steppe, and the sky had been clear when he left the camp, but
as he rode, mist closed in about him. The light of morning muted and went grey.
The song of birds, the chirring of insects, sank into silence. He was all
alone, he and the mouse-colored gelding, in a world without form or substance.

Voices whispered in the mist. At first he thought he
imagined them, but they grew slowly louder. They spoke no language he knew: the
language of the spirits, he supposed. He thought he heard the faint beat of
drums, hardly louder than the hammering of blood in his ears, and a far
skirling of pipes.

He neither saw nor heard the thing of horror that sent his
gelding mad. He who had ridden before he could walk, who had grown to manhood
on the back of a horse, tumbled ignominiously to the ground.

The sound of hoofbeats faded swiftly. He lay in the trampled
grass, winded and half-stunned.