Daughter of Lir (34 page)

“Curiosity? The gods’ will?”

“Or maybe for love of you, O prince of the dead.” Phaiston
leaned over the inner edge of the wall, staring down at the fort. He had not
once looked at the river, Minas realized. “No. No, I can’t do it. I’m not that
brave. The river of souls will flow on without me.”

“Why? Are you afraid?”

“Yes!”

“And you a great lord of wolves.”

“If I cross that river,” Phaiston said, “I’ll have no magic
left. Even here I feel the Goddess’ power sapping my strength. If I’m no more
than mortal man, what use will I be to you?”

“Much,” said Minas. “As you knew. Or why would you come so
far?”

“To see the river of souls,” Phaiston said.

“And now you shall cross it.”

“Do you think you can force me?”

“I think,” said Minas, “that I can raise my voice and summon
a garrison of women, and persuade them to take you captive. Is your magic
strong enough to stand against that?”

“The garrison are women?” Phaiston said faintly.

“Women in armor, with swords of bronze.”

“Gods,” Phaiston said.

Minas smiled at him with the love of a wolf for its tender
prey. “And goddesses,” he said.

But Phaiston was a wolf, too, more surely and truly than he.
“Threaten all you like, but I stay in the world of the living. May the gods
help you, prince, and the spirits of your ancestors, because no one else will.”

Phaiston went down the wall as he had come up it,
shrinking to four legs and rough grey fur as he touched the grass again. He
paused to look up. Minas stared flatly down, feeling more truly alone than he
ever had in this world

The wolf tucked its tail and flattened its ears and turned,
running off eastward under the moon.

Rhian found Minas at first light, dozing fitfully on the
wall. She ventured no judgment as to where and how she had found him. She only
said, “You’re wanted. Come.”

He rose stiffly, working knots out of his back and
shoulders. His expression was anything but amiable, but he followed when she
turned toward the ladder. She led him down from the wall and through the fort,
which was already wide awake, to an open space near the wall, where all the
chariots were drawn up side by side.

Bran and a handful of men and women were there, stripped for
work. They had begun to take apart one of the chariots, piece by piece, peg by
peg, noting how each part was made and where it went and how.

Minas stopped short. “What in the gods’ name are they
doing?”

“Learning,” Rhian said.

“Gods,” said Minas. But he did not try to stop them. He
watched instead, arms folded, saying nothing.

Caleva the garrison commander came to stand beside Rhian,
watching Minas watch Bran and the others. “I think you should go to Lir as soon
as may be,” she said.

Rhian glanced at her. “You don’t think it’s better to keep
him here till he’s more nearly tamed?”

“As long as he can see the grass, he’ll be as wild as a
wolf.” Caleva rubbed a scar that ran the length of her arm, absently, eyes on
the redheaded prince. “The sooner he’s in Lir, building chariots, the safer
we’ll all be.”

“Him, too?”

“He’s less likely to run,” said Caleva, “if he’s farther
from the steppe.”

“One would hope so,” Rhian said.

Minas had left off watching and gone to show Bran how to
separate a wheel from its axle. One of the women took the wheel and inspected
it, feeling out the joining of the spokes to the rim.

“Do you see how that’s made?” said Caleva. “He must have
been a god who conceived such a thing.”

“The people of his tribe do believe so,” Rhian said.

“And we are mortal,” Caleva sighed.

“We have his grandson here with us, who was his pupil. He’s
a great gift of the Goddess.”

“That gift were best delivered to Lir,” Caleva said, “and to
the king.”

“And the Mother?” Rhian asked steadily, though her heart had
begun to beat hard.

“The Mother is dead,” Caleva said.

“No one’s been set in her place?”

“The priestesses rule in council,” said Caleva. “Some are
declaring that the age of the Mothers is over; that this is the time of kings
and councils. Others say the priestesses are afraid—they tried to choose a
Mother from among themselves, but every woman they chose was given some sign
that she was not meant for such an office. One, it’s said, went as far as to
sit in the Mother’s place, and was blasted for it, struck dead where she sat.”

Rhian heard her as if she spoke from very far away. It was
strange to be told these things, and to remember how she would have heard them
if she had been in Long Ford. Now when Caleva spoke of the Mother, she spoke of
the woman who had given Rhian life; whose heir Rhian should have been, but the
priestesses had forbidden it.

Rhian was going to Lir. She could hardly avoid it. Minas was
her captive. She was not about to hand him over to any troop of guards, though
they were chosen of the king.

“We had better go tomorrow,” she said with sudden decision.
“Can we be ready then?”

“It can be done,” said Caleva.

“Good,” said Rhian. “Will you help us see to it?”

“With pleasure,” Caleva said. She rose, creaking a little,
for she was not a young woman. She stood looking down at Rhian. Her expression
was more approving than not. “You did a great thing, bringing this tribesman
here. But have a care. He’s not a tame thing. Nor may he ever be.”

“We’ll keep him under guard,” Rhian said.

“Guard yourself,” said Caleva.

Rhian frowned at her. “Are you afraid for me?”

“I think that one can break hearts as well as take heads. Be
wary of him.”

Rhian considered a number of things that she might have
said. She elected to say none of them. She nodded and pushed herself to her
feet. Caleva was already on her way, Rhian supposed, to prepare for her guests’
departure.

They were all in the midst of the chariot’s scattered bits
now. She heard Bran say, “That would be stronger if it were metal rather than
wood.”

“Is metal so common,” Minas asked, “that you can stud a
chariot with it?”

“How common is wood on the steppe?” Bran inquired.

Minas grinned. He looked like a wolf indeed just then,
though his manner was easy and his humor light. “Less common by far, I would
wager, than it is across the river. Is it true what they say? That you have
whole great forests in your country?”

“We have forests,” Bran said, “and mines for our metal, or
traders who bring it to us from our allies far away.”

“Rich,” Minas murmured. “So rich. Your Goddess has blessed
you.”

“She has,” Bran said. “Now look here, what does that do?”

Rhian did not listen to Minas’ explanation. Caleva’s words
had affected her oddly. She saw Minas as clearly as she ever had, surely. Yet
when she heard him speak, she heard things she had not heard before.

Not tame. Indeed. And in no way willing to accept either his
captivity or his death to the tribe. He would be dreaming of revenge; and in
that dream, he was lord of a country richer than his people might ever have
imagined.

Still she was not afraid. All men were weak at heart, and it
was through the heart that she would rule him.

Minas stared at the hollow shells that floated on the
river. Boats, those were boats. All the chariots were laden in them, and heaps
of baggage, and guards in armor.

But not the horses. Those were on the other side, with more
armored guards to watch over them. They must have swum the river in the dawn.
Surely they had not crossed over in boats. No horse would endure such a thing.

Minas did not intend to, either. “And why,” he asked as
reasonably as he could after numerous repetitions, “can I not ride with the
horses? I was born on horseback. I was never born to swim like a duck on the
water!”

“You go with the chariots,” Rhian said implacably. The
garrison commander, who had been hearing Minas’ arguments, had turned away to
see to something with the boats.

He had hoped to find more softening in Rhian, but she was
like an image carved in stone. She beckoned to a pair of burly guards. As if to
worsen the insult, one of them was a woman.

Minas glared at them all, but especially at Rhian. “Call off
your dogs! I’ll go.”

The woman in particular seemed to regret his surrender. Both
guards hovered close while he scrambled into the boat that waited, drawn up on
the bank.

It was no worse, he told himself, than a chariot drawn by restless
horses. He sat where the boatmen directed, in the middle, atop a bale that
carried a strong scent of new wool. There was no chariot in this boat, only
baggage and trade-goods, and half a dozen guards, and Rhian.

She was seated in the bow, leaning against the high curve of
the prow. “Isn’t this marvelous? Comfortable, too. Won’t your feet be glad not
to be standing in a chariot day after day?”

Minas’ feet wanted earth under them. But he held his tongue.

There was, he had to admit, a certain pleasure in lying in
the shade of a canopy that the boatmen raised as the sun ascended and grew
warmer. The boat rocked gently. The oars dipped and swayed. The oarsmen rowed
to the strong slow beat of a drum.

In all his life he had not imagined such a thing: not only
riding on a river but riding upriver against the current. Once he had put his
dread of the water aside, the maker in him roused and grew curious. He looked
to see how the boat was made, how the oars were shaped, how the men wielded
them against the ever-running water.

He slid to the side, leaning over it, peering down. The
river slipped past, dark water shot with a gleam of sunlight. He saw nothing in
it but once the silver flash of a fish. No dead souls. No spirits from the
realms below.

There was power here. It was strong, and deep and old. But
it had nothing to do with men or the souls of men. It was as purely itself as
the wind of heaven.

Maybe he simply lacked the eyes to see. He trailed his hand
in the water. It was cold and strangely smooth, and it parted before his
fingers, streaming over them.

He laved his face. In one of the other boats, the rowers had
begun to sing. It was a slow song in a strange mode, weaving the voices of men
and women. There were no such songs among the People. Women did not sing with
men. It was highly improper.

Impropriety was a different thing here, if indeed these
people knew it at all. He had passed from world into world, as sure and as
complete as if he had entered the land of the dead.

o0o

Toward evening the river curved away from the sea of
grass. There had been trees enough on the farther bank, but now they grew
thicker. Rhian gave him the words to name them: a copse, a wood, the outriders
of a forest. In among the trees, amid fields of green or ripe gold, he saw a place
like the garrison’s fort, but much, much larger. It filled the inward curve of
the river’s bend and stood high over the wooded lands beyond.

It was a fortress, Rhian said, and a traders’ town. Its name
was World’s End.

With trees, Minas had gone from copse to forest, so that he
better understood how they grew together. With dwelling places of these people,
he began with a forest, as it were: with a stronghold too large to encompass
with his mind. Even in the gathering of tribes he had never seen so many
people, so closely crowded together, as he saw here.

They moored the boats on the western bank in the shadow of
the crag, where wooden piers jutted out into the river. All the chariots were
covered and guarded, not obviously, Minas noted, but as if they were no more
than traders’ cargo. The crowds of people on the shore barely took notice of
them; there were other boats, other guards, and a tumult of coming and going.

Somewhat to his startlement he realized that he was not
unusual here. There were other rangy fair-haired men, even some whose hair was
red, though none that he saw had his true bright copper. They wore tribesmen’s
garb, some in fashions that he knew, from tribes that his had conquered in this
season or the season before.

He, who was dressed like a westerner, attracted barely a
glance. Such of those who did notice him were usually women, and they looked
him over boldly, with an expression that he could hardly mistake.

He sidled as close to Rhian as his pride would allow,
stepping from pier to trampled earth.

A long sigh escaped him. It was living earth. These were
mortal people all around him, and a strong mortal scent to them, too, in the
heat of the day. The sky overhead was the same sky he had left behind on the
steppe, as blue and remote as ever, though he was hemmed in human bodies.

He walked in a circle of men, the dozen who had come as
traders to the People. There was a sort of comfort in them, a familiarity that,
just then, was welcome.

They brought him up a steep and narrow track under the frown
of a high wall and a massive wooden gate. He shuddered as he passed under it.
His heart felt small and cold, his spirit crushed down by the weight of these
walls.

The others waited for him within, in an open space under a
patch of sky. This outer wall was just that. There was a second, smaller wall
inside, and that, he could see, held up a roof.

This commander, like the last, was a woman. Her name was
Britta. She was not young; her hair was shot with grey, and her face was seamed
with lines of care and laughter. Still she looked strong, and her dark eyes
were clear.

She had received them in the center of the second tower,
which like the space within the first wall was open to the sky. There were
lamps lit around the edges, and a table laid with a feast that put that in the
garrison to shame. It was, he was beginning to understand, a simple meal as
these things went here; she apologized for it, as if he could find fault with
such richness as would have befit a festival among the tribe.