Daughter of Lir (42 page)

Even as the last of them took the eastward way, the wind
shifted yet again. The wall of flame slowed its advance. But they were in
motion, and there was open country ahead of them, country that they had
conquered.

They were on that road a hand of days. They ate what they
had brought with them, taking no time to hunt. Yet when they did stop at last,
the hunting would be splendid: there was ample sign of game, beasts fleeing the
fire as did the people of the tribe.

Emry traveled with the king’s clan: his women, his children,
the men of his warband. The maker of chariots came with them, and a full half-hundred
battle-cars, each with its charioteer. They were a terrible number, and strong,
with all their men and weapons.

The camp they settled in had the look of a place that had
been occupied often before. It was a wide grassy bowl atop a hill, with a
stream running round the foot of the hill, and a wonder in the bowl’s heart: a
spring that bubbled up out of the rock.

From the rim of the bowl one could see a great expanse of
the steppe, and mark the line of fire along the horizon. It was dying down,
maybe, or burning farther away. The whole of the west was barred, like the wall
that so many in Lir had hoped would be enough to hold back the chariots.

No wall would stop them for long. This year, yes; and if the
Goddess willed, Rhian had taken her charioteer back to Lir and persuaded him to
teach the people what he knew. But next year, or the year after, the chariots
would come. Emry was as sure of that as of the winter that would follow this
searing blast of summer.

o0o

The king’s sons did not come back from their raid. When
the fire was dead at last, some of the king’s warband went to look for them.
The wait for their return seemed endless, and the mood in the camp was brittle.
Emry became adept at dodging sudden blows. Etena never called for him, never
showed herself to him. The son of her body, the prince Dias, who would be
king’s heir if Minas did not come back, took to spending his days on the
western rim of the bowl, standing or sitting like a stone, unmoving for sun or
wind, clouds or rain.

He had been as close to his brother as the two halves of a
nut’s kernel. Born on the same day, nursed at the same breast, though never
nurtured in the same womb, they had been all but inseparable.

“Not that they went everywhere together,” one of the princes
said.

He was in a talkative mood, and the weather that day was
vile. He sat just inside the opening of the princes’ tent and looked out at
Dias on the rim, being buffeted with cold rain. Emry was mending harness for
another of the princes, a more exacting task than usual: one of the colts had
objected to it with excessive vehemence. It was a ghastly tangle, much torn and
broken, but Staris professed himself greatly attached to it.

Emry pieced it together fingerlength by painstaking
fingerlength, while Kritas, who was bored, amused himself with chatter.

“They would go off alone or with other people,” Kritas said.
“Usually it was Minas who did it, mind; Dias would be asleep or in the privies,
and Minas would disappear on him. When Dias was young he’d pitch terrible fits,
but when he grew into a man he taught himself to endure it. Minas was always
the leader. Dias would follow. Day and night, we’d call them: the sun and the
moon. Minas could live without his brother, but Dias—I don’t think he’ll want
to live alone.”

“He may have to,” drawled another of the princes from the
shadows of the tent. “Do you know what I heard? It wasn’t a raid they all went
out on. They tricked Minas, took him away and killed him, because Etena wanted
him dead.”

Emry kept his eyes fixed on the rein he was repairing.

“And the gods took their revenge by setting the steppe
afire?” Kritas shivered, and perhaps not entirely from the gust of wind that
chose that moment to rock the tent. “That’s a terrible thing, to dispose of a
king’s son. Why not dispose of his brother, too? You know that if Dias
discovers that Etena had Minas killed, he’ll take revenge.”

“He won’t kill his own mother,” Staris said.

“For Minas he might.”

“No, not Dias. Dias fears the gods.”

“Etena doesn’t. And that may be her undoing.”

“Or Dias’. She’s a witch. If she lays her spell on him as
she did on the king, she’ll have everything she could ask for, for as long as
she wants it.”

Emry labored diligently over the harness. He was not easily
astonished, but he had been thinking that if he had been given to these of the
king’s men, then they must be bound to Etena. Evidently that was not so.
Equally evidently, they had not been part of the conspiracy that took Minas out
of the camp.

Could it be, he wondered, that Etena’s most loyal men were
gone, lost in the fire? If it was her will that drove the king, and that will
was weakened, its support taken away, it might be possible to delay the tribe’s
advance—perhaps for years.

A war within the tribe, he thought as he stitched the torn
and broken rein. If he could foster that, who knew how long it would last, or
how much harm it would do?

Truly the Goddess was great, to have set him in this place.
He sang a hymn to her in his heart, as he mended harness for an enemy’s
chariot.

The king’s men came back when the moon had begun to wane,
when the fire was but a rim of ash along the horizon, and the first breath of
winter was blowing over the steppe. Their faces were blank with shock. They
brought back word of the wagons in the abandoned camp: that enough of them were
whole for a herd of oxen to be sent for them, and men to drive them.

But that was not why their faces were so bleak. They bore a
burden wrapped in cloaks, pitifully small: a few bones, a handful of ornaments
half-melted by the fire, and a thing that, when Dias saw it, made him howl
aloud.

It was a sword of bronze, darkened with fire. Emry
recognized the hilt. Minas had carried this sword; had cherished it as a woman
cherishes her child.

“The heir,” said the man who had led the hunt. “The heir is
dead, consumed by fire. His brothers—all who went with him—dead. Dead and
burned. The fire consumed their camp, their chariots, horses, everything. This
is all that was left.”

Dias’ howl rose to a keen. Others echoed it, till the whole
camp was one great wail of lamentation. The king’s heir, the prince, the lord
of warriors, was dead.

Nine days they mourned him and the brothers who, they
thought, had died with him. Nine days of fasting and dirges. All the royal clan
rent their garments and heaped ashes on their heads. The surviving sons shore
off their limed and stiffened hair, and offered it to the shades of the dead.

The king himself came out, whitely naked, shaved bare. Three
whole days and nights he lay on his face before the bier on which was laid the
few remains of his sons. He took no food or drink. He lay like the dead
himself, save that, intermittently, he wept.

When at last he rose, gaunt and ravaged, a handful of his
women came out unveiled, their hair cropped short, their gowns torn and smudged
with ashes. Emry knew the one who led them. Her beauty was all the keener with
her hair in cropped curls and her face stripped of flesh by grief and fasting.
Her eyes were all but blind. She saw nothing but the bier and the sword that
was laid on it.

The women who followed her, who must be the mothers of the
rest, shrieked and wailed. She was silent. She took the sword from the bier and
cradled it. The rest she left, nameless remnants all.

The others began a wild dance of grief and anguish, dipping,
whirling, flinging themselves to the earth and beating upon it. Aera turned and
walked through the tumult, light on bare feet.

She did not return to the king’s tent. She crossed the camp
instead, still cradling the sword, and vanished into the chariotmakers’ circle.

Few seemed to notice. Emry followed her, drawn as he had
been in the early days of his captivity. He told himself that he did it to help
his people: to feed the dissension between the most powerful of the king’s
wives.

In truth he went for her sake. Her beauty, her strength,
captivated him. He grieved for her, even knowing that her son might not be
dead; and knowing that he could not tell her what he knew. She must mourn, nor
would he be at all wise to comfort her.

She sought her father’s tent and shut herself within. Emry
hung on his heel, wisdom warring with the heart’s urging.

The heart won. He lifted the flap, pausing in surprise; for
the tent was not the dim closed space he had expected. The rear of it was open
in a sort of portico, a canopy that looked out upon the camp’s rim and the
western horizon.

Aera stood there, still with her son’s sword in her arms. “I
will not go back to the rite,” she said.

“I haven’t come to ask that of you,” said Emry.

She started and half-spun. “You!”

He lifted his shoulders in a shrug and let her see his
hands, that they were empty, and that he was unarmed.

“Where is Dias?” she demanded.

“I haven’t seen him, lady,” Emry said.

“Then he didn’t send you?”

“No, lady,” said Emry.

“You should find him,” she said, “before he does something
desperate.”

“Would he let me stop him?”

“He might.”

“Or he might kill me; but what matter? I’m a slave. My life
is worth nothing.”

“Your life is worth a little,” she said. “Maybe more than a little
if we come to your country. Do your people know what it is to keep a hostage?”

“We’ve held hostages from the tribes,” he said. “What would
you hold me for?”

“Whatever we could.” Her arms tightened on her son’s sword.
Emry’s heart was in his throat, though she could not have known the truth of
his presence in this place. But after a while she loosed her grip; her
shoulders drooped. “Who knows how long that would be? The west is walled in
fire. By the time it’s passable again, winter will have come. Your country is
safe from us for now. Later . . . it’s as the gods will.”

“Lady,” said Emry, “I grieve for your loss.”

Her glance was clear and hard. “Do you?”

“He had great gifts,” Emry said, “in war and in the making
of chariots. I saw him sitting in judgment—young as he was, he had skill in
that, too. And he was your son.”

“Yes,” she said. “He was my son. I know he did not lead that
raid. I suspect that there was more than wine and kumiss speaking in the
brothers who instigated it. None of them had ever been his friend.”

“I have heard,” Emry said, “that they were encouraged to set
him in harm’s way. Though I doubt they expected to die in fire.”

“Do you think that he died then? Or that he was dead when
the fire came?”

“He could have died by the sword,” said Emry, “which would
be a gentler death than fire.”

“She will pay,” Aera said quietly. “For the king’s soul, for
my son’s life—there is a price, and I will take it.”

She was as straight and strong and keen as a bronze blade.
Emry drank in the glory of her. “In my country,” he said, “you would be a
Mother—a woman who is a king.”

“Women are not kings,” she said, but without passion. Her
mind was not on him. She was rapt in grief, and in anger so deep it had gone
stone-cold.

He began to withdraw, but she astonished him: she said, “No.
Don’t go. Stay.”

He was glad to obey her. As soon as he stopped, she seemed
to forget him, and yet it also seemed that she needed his presence, or a
presence. After a little while he sat on his heels, at his ease, and let
himself slide into the guard’s stillness: empty of thought and yet keenly
alert.

The sun had sunk halfway to the horizon before she turned.
Her eyes were full of its light. Yet she saw him clearly. “You belong to my
enemy,” she said.

“I belong to myself.”

“She owns your body.”

“She may think she does,” Emry said.

“Are you loyal to her?”

“I serve my Goddess,” said Emry.

“Do something for me,” she said. “Guard my foster-son, the
son of her womb. If you have any power to protect his soul, do it.”

“You trust me for that?”

“I think,” she said, “that you would destroy my tribe
without a qualm. But when you give your word, it is truly given. Will you
protect my foster-son?”

“While I can,” said Emry, “while my city and my Goddess have
no part of it, I will guard him with my life and heart.”

“That is enough,” Aera said.

o0o

That was his dismissal. She was safe here in her father’s
tent. Emry had but to walk out of it, past a circle of empty chariots and up
the slope to the rim of the hilltop.

Dias the prince sat where he had sat since they came to this
camp. He wore nothing under his mantle but a smearing of ash. Unlike the rest
of them, he had not cut off his hair; it hung in matted locks. His cheeks were
rough with unshaven beard.

“Have you come to kill me?” he asked the sky.

“The lady Aera sent me,” Emry said.

“She trusts you?”

“I gave her my word.”

“See that you keep it,” Dias said.

Emry bowed slightly.

Without warning Dias whipped about and seized him by the
throat. Emry stood still, his body loose, his eyes level. Dias’ fingers
tightened just short of pain. “If you had anything—
anything
—to do with his death, I will break your neck.”

“In the Goddess’ name,” Emry said, hardly more than a
whisper against those cruel fingers, “I never in this world wished him dead.”

“You’re lying.”

“If he is dead,” Emry said, “it was none of my doing. That
is the gods’ own truth.”

Dias let him go abruptly. “No. No, of course you had nothing
to do with it. You are her plaything. He was her enemy.”

“She is your mother,” Emry said.

Dias laughed, harsh as the cry of a raven. “She is no kin to
me. She cast me out when I was born.”