Fallowblade (49 page)

But Asr
ă
thiel turned away from Zauberin in cold rage and would listen to him no longer.

To Zwist she said, ‘I had thought of you as polite, gallant, solicitous and helpful, utterly unlike any preconceptions of goblin hordes, and now I have seen you at this appalling work. You have shocked me back to reality. I was a fool. Never was there a truer saying, “Be wary of wights. Be especially wary of unseelie wights.’’ ’

‘I vow, Lady Sioctíne,’ said the knight, ‘I will never harm you while you are under the protection of the horde. I vow the same for all the Glashtinsluight, and you must believe me, for we do not lie and we cannot help but honour our word as you know.’

‘You mistake my meaning. It is not myself I am concerned for,’ she said, and she took herself from their company.

Next night, in a tall barge draped with cloth-of-silver, Asr
ă
thiel was floating with Zaravaz upon Ice Axe Tarn, mirrored and mist-twined. She brooded upon the situation of the horde’s captives, and wondered how she could aid them. Her anguish was extreme. She was torn, unbearably, between hating her lover for authorising—and probably encouraging—the savagery she had witnessed, and yearning only to cleave to him, excluding all others.

Some women, Asr
ă
thiel knew, claimed to be attracted to ‘bad’ men, but she had never subscribed to that view or even come close to comprehending it. Cruelty could never compel her admiration—on the contrary, she despised it with heart and mind. It violated everything she stood for. Her anger and confusion rose like a flood, drowning out coherency, and for some while she had been unable to bring herself to speak.

Clouds muffled the sky, and there was no breeze. Silver filigree lanterns hung at prow and stern, casting circular pools of clear white light around the boat, their radiance penetrating several yards into the walls of fog.

‘Why have I not seen your human slaves before?’ Asr
ă
thiel asked suddenly.

‘Oh, so you have found your tongue at last,’ said Zaravaz, ‘and the
boddaghen
also. They have been kept from your sight, lest their mewlings should distress you.’

‘An ill secret, ill kept.’ As she said this, Asr
ă
thiel knew what look would flash into his eyes. She dared not glance up, but stared out across the water. ‘Your harshness is beyond belief.’

The mists parted and she spied a group of bobbing lights, weak and yellow as withered dandelions. Ragged, emaciated men were straggling across the tarn in a flotilla of ramshackle boats, which they rowed with their hands. The damsel’s heart went out to them in pity.

‘They are starving!’ she said indignantly to her companion, who turned his head to see what had caught her attention. ‘Give them food and let them go.’

The goblin king did not reply, but a deeper stillness settled upon him. Asr
ă
thiel recognised that stillness and her senses sharpened.

Small baskets woven of reeds plugged with clay came bobbing on the water. Some little fruitcakes nestled therein. Noticing these dainties, the men began to paddle eagerly towards them.

‘It is clear to a blind man that this is some trap!’ Asr
ă
thiel cried. ‘Those victuals are illusions created by glamour. I daresay they are nothing but pebbles, or wads of moss.’ She shouted a warning to the men, but they took no notice. ‘They are under some spell or curse!’

Zaravaz said coolly, ‘Perhaps hunger is a curse.’

She called out again, but the goblin king gestured decisively with one hand. Their silver-draped barge tilted to one side and began to slew around to face the opposite direction. Before the men disappeared from view, however, the damsel saw them lean out of their vessels and grab the cakes, stuffing them into their mouths. Inclined lines, like bare willow withies, sketched themselves faintly against the mist . . .

The vapours closed in, muffling sounds, but through the thickness Asr
ă
thiel heard a series of tremendous splashes. They were followed by spluttering and thrashing, as if paddles flailed in the water, interspersed with the sound of screaming. Waves fled across the surface, rocking the barge. Through the thinning mist Asr
ă
thiel discerned a row of whip-like rods angling up from the shore, bending and bucking. The
graihyn
were winding in their catch.

‘Stop this barbarity!’ Asr
ă
thiel shouted, but the goblin king spared her not so much as a glance, and the barge approached the land, bumping against the rocky shore. Zaravaz leaped onto dry land, but as he did so, a dirty human man ran up and prostrated himself at his feet.

‘Lord, I beg for mercy,’ said the man, too terrified to raise his eyes from the ground. ‘Do not treat us like animals.’

‘Are you not animals?’ Zaravaz said in astonishment. ‘Are you trees, or stones? You yourself, fisherman,’ he continued in a voice of steel, ‘have served other creatures worse than you are being served.’

‘Great lord,’ moaned the supplicant, ‘we are not like dumb beasts and do not deserve to be treated thus. We have character, spirit and speech. Beasts are not the equals of mankind!’

‘Surprising news,’ said Zaravaz. ‘You are wrong.’ He shot a quick look at Asr
ă
thiel—who was climbing out of the barge—and added, with an air of sorely tried patience, ‘Let me teach you, fisherman. Your prey is infused with social intelligence. They recognise individuals, and are mindful of complicated social relationships. Fish display consistent cultural traditions, and cooperate with one another to examine predators and gather food. Some wield tools, some construct houses, others tend underwater gardens. Their memories are exceedingly long. Their spatial memory is as good as that of your own kind; they can create complex cognitive maps by which to navigate. They feel agony as you do, for the pain centres in their brains match your own. You think they have no language? Their communication is not by speech but by pulses of electricity or by movement, or by altering their colours.’

Zaravaz stared haughtily down at the man, who had hoisted himself onto his knees. ‘Fisher, is the way you view the world necessarily unbiased? Is it the
only
way? I will answer; no it is not, for like your fellow men your viewpoint is self-centred and narrower than a worm’s gut. You, who have only ever seen fish contorting in the bottom of a boat or dead on your plate, would not know any of the secrets of this remarkable race. So go you now, fisher, and flop about on a hook, that you may learn how they die, if not how they live.’ He made a gesture as if flinging away a stone and the dirty man fell over backwards. Sobbing, he scrambled away. Zaravaz watched him depart, displaying no sign of emotion.

Asr
ă
thiel approached the unseelie king. She was shaking from head to toe. ‘You tell me,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘that you wish to make me glad. Do so by ceasing at once your torment of these people. Release them!’

He turned his shoulder and began to walk off. ‘It pleases me to please you when the whim strikes me,’ he threw back in wintry tones. ‘But never delude yourself that you rule me.’

Zaravaz was well aware of Asr
ă
thiel’s hostility to his unkindness, but he made no alteration to accommodate her views other than, she surmised, generally separating her from scenes that would upset her. He could not be bothered with people who opposed him, and if she made a fuss he simply went away.

This, too, was difficult to bear.

To make matters worse, First Lieutenant Zauberin had taken to slyly winking at the damsel. She had overheard him, behind her back, derisively referring to her as ‘the king’s eager pupil’ and ‘his noonday dancer’. Recently that knight’s every gesture, glance and word seemed filled with innuendo, so that she felt sullied in his presence, and she shunned him whenever she could. At such times Asr
ă
thiel would say to herself,
Once I was a powerful weathermage. Now I am reduced to being the doxy of a Lord of Wickedness, infatuated with a misanthropist who is rightly accursed and reviled by my race.

Zauberin always made certain his leader was out of earshot when he quipped. ‘How merrily the water tumbles down yonder cliffs,’ he said to Asr
ă
thiel, pointing out the view through one of the windows. ‘A pretty morning for a tumble, is it not?’ and he pinned her with a meaningful smile, clearly tickled by her angry blushes.

‘Pray, do not spurn me,’ he would protest. ‘Do not be discomfited! Your efforts are admirable.’

‘Spare me your ridicule,’ the damsel coldly retorted, walking away.

He pursued her. ‘So quick you are to take offence, proud Sioctíne! I was about to compliment you, for you are a diplomat amongst us at this period of conflict, an ambassador for your people.’

Vexed and resentful, the damsel did not deign to give reply.

‘In times of hostility,’ the lieutenant persisted, ‘when humankind takes issue with eldritchkind, it is only reasonable that the representatives of each nation should come together in congress to discuss their differences and grapple with the questions.’

Away she would hasten, but he’d locate her again, eventually, and lead her into some other eloquent snare.

The harasser went even further. Once, catching her off guard, he whispered in her ear, ‘Dwelling here must be a tedious struggle for you. Perhaps, if you become bored, you would like to struggle with someone new?’

On a night when Asr
ă
thiel had again met Zauberin as if by chance, and been forced to bear his suggestive allusions, she made the wrenching decision to cease her liaison with Zaravaz. Her lover’s harsh treatment of human beings had, since the beginning, been driving her to break the bond with him, coupled with ill-defined qualms about whether there was some sort of moral
wrongness
to such a bizarre eldritch-human union. For certain, much of her uneasiness sprang from the fact that she had been raised to believe that all dalliances outside the covenant of wedlock were unethical. Against all these doubts she had been inwardly contending, day and night. The remarks of the lieutenant pushed her at last beyond the limits of endurance.

At the evening banquet she behaved coolly towards the goblin king, and would not look at him for fear she might change her mind, though they sat side by side.

‘What troubles you?’ he asked at last, when the feast was over and the music beginning. His voice was low, so that none might overhear. His black hair fell down, draping inside and outside the high
svartlap
collar that flared like the upright petals of a dark flower around his neck.

‘I regret,’ the damsel murmured stiffly, ‘what happens between us in the mornings.’

‘Why?’

There were so many reasons. ‘For a start,’ she replied, fixing her attention on an arrangement of jewellery fruit that adorned the table, ‘amongst my people, such liaison should not be undertaken outside marriage.’

For a suspended moment, it was as if the air had frozen.

‘Oh,’ Zaravaz said loudly, ‘you wish to be married? Why did you not say so?’ He snapped his fingers.

With improbable swiftness, trow-wives placed a wedding veil on Asr
ă
thiel’s head, held in place by a silver chaplet decorated with tiny jewels. Before she could protest, or even move, they had wrapped her in a dress as white as new-fallen snow, covered with ice-fern traceries, festooned with filigree spider webs of silver thread, bordered with silver netting and silver lace, and beaded with seed pearls. Lieutenant Zauberin appeared before them all, solemn and pious in the white robes of a druid, while a band of trows struck up a wedding march on their squeaky fiddles.

The whole enterprise smacked of pantomime buffoonery. As Asr
ă
thiel gaped at Zaravaz, who was suddenly dressed most dashingly in a long frockcoat and a top hat at a rakish angle, a squinting kobold thrust a bunch of crystal flowers into her hand. The goblin king clamped her arm under his elbow and said, ‘Well, lady, are you ready to be wed?’

Asr
ă
thiel wrenched herself free. ‘No!’ she cried, throwing down the bouquet, which smashed to pieces on the floor.

‘Is it Zauberin you object to? We can always abduct a real druid . . . ’

On impulse, Asr
ă
thiel shouted, ‘It is William that I love!’

This deliberate untruth seemed to have an effect. Zaravaz stared at her, and it was as if he wore a mask of iron. Then he strode away.

She did not see him again for three weeks.

During that time the damsel’s attitudes were mixed indeed. She teetered between heartbreak and misery, loathing and longing, despair and anger. At her wit’s end, she had no idea what course to take. Seated at her escritoire she wrote a flood of letters, but all incoming messages had ceased and she feared Zaravaz had blocked them, severing her only access to the outside world. Next it occurred to her that he probably scanned her outgoing messages, and wondered whether they were still delivered to her friends and family, or if it was a waste of time putting pen to paper. She asked the trows, but as usual they did not know, so she searched for Zwist, to beg him for information, but she could not find him or any of the knights. The feast hall was always empty, and the trows brought meals to her in her apartments, but she did not want to eat and left the food untouched on the trays, drinking only a little of the wine.