Master of the Cauldron (22 page)

“Yes, Master Cashel,” Mab said, her voice prodding politely so that he'd say what he was working himself up to.

He turned and faced her. He'd ever so much rather be fighting somebody, anybody, than having this conversation; but there he was, with no choice about it.

“Mistress,” Cashel said, “if you're thinking I can lead your army, you're wrong—I can't. I wouldn't be any more use than the Sons were. I'm not afraid—and I'm not afraid to
fight
. But a man with a quarterstaff isn't much good against real soldiers, and I'd been no use at all with a sword.”

“No, I wasn't thinking of that,” Mab said with a dismissive wave of her left hand. Cashel wasn't sure whether his eyes were tricking him or if the fingernails really did make five rosy streaks in the air as they passed. “You're a stranger, Master Cashel. No matter what your skills were, the people of Ronn wouldn't follow you; and even you couldn't fight the Made Men alone.”

Her expression changed to one that Cashel couldn't quite describe, serious and, well, affectionate at the same time. Mab touched the back of his hand and added, “Your pardon. You
would
fight the Made Men alone. But not even you could win.”

“I guess I said that already,” Cashel said. He was feeling even more uncomfortable than he'd been when he brought the subject up. “Look, mistress—what do you see as the way out of this? Because you do see something, you're not the sort to just wallow in how bad everything is, are you?”

Mab laughed, clapping her hands in delight at the joke. People at neighboring tables, toying with the remains of their meals or carafes of wine, glanced over in mild surprise.

“Oh, my, no, I'm not that, Master Cashel!” Mab said. “My hope, my plan if you want to put it that way”—she smiled in wry self-mockery—“is that the Heroes will awaken in their cavern and lead the people of Ronn against the king and his minions, his
monsters
. That the citizens of Ronn
will destroy the enemies of the city and of all men finally instead of scotching them as so often in the past.”

Cashel didn't say anything for a moment, just sat and thought about what she'd said. His staff leaned against the parapet beside him. He didn't pick it up, but he reached back with his right hand and ran his fingertips over the hickory.

“So you figure the Heroes have been sleeping, then?” he said. “Ah, how long would that have been for, ma'am? Because you said Valeri had gone down there….”

“Yes, Valeri whom Dasborn brought up as his son and trained,” Mab said. “Valeri with blood soaking through the bandage where a sword had found the joint between the halves of his cuirass. And before Dasborn, the twins Minon and Menon, blond and handsome as the very Gods till the day they went to cavern to sleep; Minon in his brother's arms, and Menon staggering despite his strength because of the shaft of the broken spear protruding from his thigh.”

By then the sky was almost dark, but lights floated through the air above the tables. Although they were faint and the color of old parchment, Cashel could see his companion as clearly as he could've in a full moon.

“They're sleeping, mistress?” Cashel said quietly. “With wounds like those?”

“Minon and Menon were sister's sons to great Hrandis,” Mab said, as though she hadn't heard the question. And perhaps she hadn't: she was looking down toward the diamond lake, but Cashel had the feeling her eyes were seeing much deeper than that, back in time as well as far into the core of the world.

“Hrandis was shorter than you,” she continued, “but his shoulders were even broader. He swung an axe in either hand. When he led the citizens for the last time, he left a swath of the bodies of Made Men the width of both arms and his axe helves all the way from the walls of Ronn to where he fell at the mouth of the Great Ravine.”

“Fell?” said Cashel. “Then Hrandis is…?”

“Minon and Menon escorted their uncle to the cavern,” Mab said, “holding his arms over their shoulders and walking on flowers and the rich garments the grateful citizens threw before their feet. Hrandis and his axes sleep there still; waiting for the city's greatest need, the legend says. Waiting as Virdin waits, the queen's first champion and Ronn's first Hero. Virdin whom the blades of the Made Men never touched, Virdin who went down
to a well-earned rest in the cavern with his white beard spreading like a mountain cataract. Waiting for the city's need.”

Cashel didn't speak. His fingers had been rubbing the familiar smoothness of the wood. Now he took the quarterstaff in both hands for comfort as he thought.

Mab gave a brittle laugh. “I think Ronn is in need now, don't you, Master Cashel?”

Before he could answer, she rose to her feet, as supple as an otter. “Come,” Mab said in a cheerful tone. “The sun's down, so I can show you the way the Heroes guard the walls of the city yet today.”

She took Cashel by the hand and guided him toward one of the platforms that effortlessly lifted Ronn's citizens through the city-mountain's many levels.

 

They'd found several coarse sacks hanging from the outer wall of the shed. Ilna had handled them; they told her of nothing worse than hot sun and the leaden exhaustion of the laborers who'd chopped the leaves from which the fibers were rotted before being woven. Now Chalcus carried the bread and cheese from Nergura's cupboard in one, leaving Davus' hands free to juggle three stones: two of them of a size to behead a pigeon if thrown accurately, the third big enough to dish in a man's skull.

Three homunculi, carrying the vine on which their siblings grew, trotted toward the east as soon as they were out of the maze. Ilna didn't see any advantage of the terrain in that direction instead of another, but the creatures seemed in no doubt. They went over a rise bristling with clumps of silkgrass and vanished from her life, except for the snatch of angry grumbling a vagrant breeze brought her a moment later.

Davus looked at Nergura, who'd stayed at the mouth of the maze as the three of them followed the homunculi out. He said, “You may think that you can catch them again if you hurry, wizard. If you do, I will come back for you.”

“Let's go,” said Chalcus quietly. “I'd like to get some distance on before we bed down for the night.”

They started forward, walking abreast this time. Ilna was between the two men.

“Do you think you're better than me?” the wizard shouted. “Is that what you think?”

Ilna turned. “I know I'm not better than you,” she said. “But I'd be worse yet if I said that what you were doing was no business of mine because you weren't doing it to me personally.”

She and her companions started toward the Citadel again. The lowering sun turned the crystal into an orange-red blaze.

“From this valley they say you are leaving…”
sang Chalcus in his lilting tenor.
“Do not hasten to bid me adieu…”

Davus laughed and began to juggle his stones in an intricate pattern, and before long the maze and the wizard were out of sight behind them.

“There's no call for concern,” said Chalcus in the same light tone with which he'd been singing
I'm goin' away to Shengy,
“but I believe something's following us with such care that I've caught no more than a whisker here and there.”

“I've thought there's something too,” Ilna said, taking the silken lasso from around her waist. “I haven't seen anything I could point to, but the…well, I thought there was.”

She couldn't say, “because of the way the clouds stand overhead,” or “because of the way the tree roots crawl across the ground,” and expect it to mean anything to people who weren't already disposed to trust her instinct for patterns. Chalcus
did
trust her; and so, apparently, did Davus. She didn't need to explain the things that shimmered on the surface of her mind.

They'd entered this valley around midafternoon. It was well watered, but the soil was a sickly yellow-gray and supported only coarse vegetation. Scrub oaks provided a welcome shade, and they'd been able to drink their fill from a little creek, but an enemy would find concealment easy. Shortly the sun would go down.

“It could be a jackal following us, hoping for scraps,” Davus said conversationally. “There are jackals in these parts.”

He let the two walnut-sized pebbles he'd been juggling along with a larger stone fly off to the side as he bent. He snatched a block of quartz out of the dirt, fist-sized and jagged.

“There's other things as well,” Davus added, grinning at his companions. “Things that the jackals follow, hoping for scraps.”

They saw the crops before they noticed the houses, a double handful of them on the other side of alternating fields of lentils and grain—oats, Ilna thought, but it might've been barley. The low buildings were made from chunks of pale limestone that weathered out of the ground. They were set on one another without mortar. Though the houses were close together, there wasn't a wall around the whole community.

A man with a girl of about ten at his side stepped between two houses and raised his hand. “Welcome, strangers!” he called. “We're just in from the fields. Come join us for dinner.”

More people were appearing in the spaces between the dwellings. None of them were armed. A boy of three or so stared at Ilna, his thumb in his mouth. Suddenly he gave a cry of fear and ran behind a woman breast-feeding an infant. He continued to watch from between her legs.

“Since the king's law died with the Old King…,” Davus said. He fed a thumb-sized lump of chert into his pattern so that he looked like a juggler executing a complex pattern instead of a man ready to bash skulls by throwing stones. “I can't swear that their hospitality is more than a lure. But if something's prowling about us now, I'd as soon have stone walls around me in the dark.”

The three of them continued to saunter forward together. Chalcus raised an eyebrow to Ilna. “Agreed,” she said, looping the lasso back around her waist. It would shortly be too dark for her knotted patterns to be of much use, but the noose was no help at all against a whole villageful of people.

If they were enemies, which they certainly didn't seem to be.

“Thank you, good sir,” Chalcus called cheerfully. “We're three travellers far from home who thought we were going to spend another night under the stars. Though we've no intention of putting you to trouble—we've slept rough in the past and can do so again.”

“Why do you suppose they have no defenses?” said Davus, speaking quietly but without seeming furtive. “For I can tell you that even in my day, there were things in this part of the land that were less innocent than we are.”

“Some claim there's a part of the world that the Gods bless and cherish,” said Chalcus in a similar voice. “Mayhap they're right. Though the chance the likes of
me
would ever see such a spot, that I find hard to credit.”

The field had been plowed, not planted in separate holes made with a dibble. A cow lowed, and as they walked toward the houses down three parallel furrows, Ilna caught the smell of cattle. There was also another animal odor, one she didn't recognize.

“I'm Polus,” said the man who'd first greeted them. “This is my daughter Malia. Ah, are you traders? We don't get many traders here.”

Polus wore a kilt and separate poncho, both of a vegetable fiber that Ilna hadn't seen before. The material had possibilities, but the workmanship was crude, and the embroidered decoration was childishly bad.

Ilna smiled minusculely. Not the sort of work she herself did as a child, of course.

“Not traders, just travellers on our way north,” said Davus. He caught his small rock and a large one in his left hand. The other large one remained in his right. “If we could sleep in your cow byre tonight, we'd appreciate it.”

They'd walked between two houses and found themselves on the front side of the village; the community, anyway—it wasn't half the size of Barca's Hamlet, which seemed tiny in recollection now that Ilna had experience of the largest cities in the Isles. The houses were built as single rooms on three sides of a square, around a courtyard of tamped earth. All the dwellings faced the same way.

Though there wasn't exactly a street, the long drystone corral ran parallel to the line of the dwellings at the distance of four or five double paces. Everyone in the community stood in that plaza, watching the strangers.

“We can provide you with a room to sleep in,” Polus said. “There's one in Anga's house they could use, isn't there, Anga?”

“If they don't mind sharing with storage jars, I guess,” said another man, stocky and heavily bearded. He rubbed his neck. “We'd be honored, I guess.”

“And dinner, you'll have dinner, won't you?” asked the woman suckling the infant. She seemed to be Anga's wife; at any rate, she'd moved closer to him when he spoke, accompanied by the child still clinging to her legs. “That is, we don't have enough cooking, but others…?”

She looked around at her neighbors. Ilna, following the woman's gaze up the plaza, saw a great cat holding a child between its paws.

Ilna dropped her knotted cords—only an owl could see well enough for her patterns to work in this half-light—and snatched the lasso free again. Chalcus had drawn both his sword and dagger in shimmering arcs, and Davus cocked the stone in his right hand back to throw.

“Wait!” cried Polus. “What's wrong?”

The cat got to its feet with lazy grace. The child, a girl of three or four, rubbed the creature's ear while continuing to stare at the strangers. It wasn't really a cat: its thick, jointed tail had a curved sting at the tip like a scorpion's. The lithe body was tawny, with gray-and-brown mottlings that almost perfectly mimicked the pattern of the corral against which it'd reclined with the child.

“The beast!” said Chalcus, lifting his chin to indicate the creature rather than using one or the other of the blades he held. A sword point was a threat even when meant only as a gesture.

“Why yes,” said Polus. “He protects us. He's always lived here.”

The cat sauntered toward the strangers, its head high and its long ears pricked up in interest. The boy hiding behind his mother suddenly darted back to the creature instead. He tugged at the long whiskers for a grip. The cat turned peevishly and licked the child's arm away, while the little girl on the other side said, “Don't pull, Ornon! Play nice, or I won't let you play at all!”

Chalcus sheathed his sword and, after a moment of consideration, his dagger as well. His hands remained close to the pommels, however. Ilna bunched the lasso in her hands, but she didn't loop it back around her waist.

“He eats porridge and offal when we slaughter a cow,” said Anga's wife. “And he hunts for himself. There's deer and wild hogs in the valley.”

“They'd eat half our crops if it weren't for him,” Polus said. “And there's other things that'd find us sooner or later. They don't dare.”

The cat, as Ilna'd decided she might as well call it, was nearly the height of a heifer at the shoulder, though of much rangier build. Two double paces short of Ilna it sat on its haunches and began to groom itself. Its eyeteeth were curved and as long as her index fingers. While it licked and combed itself with its dewclaws, one eye or the other remained on the newcomers.

“I've never seen a fellow who looked quite as this one does,” said Chalcus, watching the cat as carefully as the cat watched them. “What is it that you call him?”

The cat suddenly shifted as smoothly as quicksilver flowing, bounding halfway up the plaza to where it flopped on its back. Children, all the children in the village who could walk, it seemed—cried out in delight and ran after it to throw themselves on its belly.

“Him?” said Polus, the village spokesman by default if not in more formal fashion. “We call him Friend, because he's the friend who keeps us safe.”

“Such a creature is no friend to men,” Davus said. He hadn't relaxed even as much as Chalcus and Ilna did. “I do not, I
will
not, believe that it can be.”

Polus shrugged. “Folk in your land have different customs than ours,” he said. “But please, it's getting dark. Won't you have bread and porridge with us?”

He gestured toward the central courtyard of the nearest house. Anga's wife had swung the infant over her shoulder to burp it. She trotted into the door in the left-hand wing, murmuring something like, “Not enough bowls!”

“Aye,” said Chalcus, gesturing Ilna ahead of him into the open court. He smiled broadly. “If it won't offend you, though, we'll sit with our backs against the wall as we eat. I'd be pleased to be wrong, but I worry that your Friend is not necessarily our friend.”

He laughed to make a joke of it; but it was no joke, as Ilna well knew.

 

The
Star of Valles
rocked as water coalesced out of the glowing stars beneath her keel. Sharina gripped the railing with one hand and put the other around Tenoctris' shoulders, just for safety's sake.

The four remaining vessels of the squadron settled with faint slapping sounds behind the flagship. The nymphs who'd been guiding the sea worm released the hawser. The great creature undulated toward the depths, growing faint and vanishing long before it could have drawn away in physical distance.

The eastern horizon—it was a shock to have a horizon again—was bright enough to hide the stars. Sharina thought the ship might be at the
mouth of the River Val, but even in full daylight she wasn't enough of a pilot to be certain of one landfall against another.

“Come on, you lazy scuts!” Master Rincale shouted, dusting his palms together in enthusiasm as he strode sternward along the catwalk. “Oarsmen to your posts! We've got three leagues against the current before we dock in Valles! Move! Move! And you bloody landsmen, get your asses off the lower benches unless you're willing to pull oars!”

The sailors don't doubt where we are,
Sharina thought.

The nymph rose toward them. At first she was only a glint in the water far below their keel, but she wriggled into full sight before Sharina had time to wonder what the object was. The nymph swam with her body and webbed feet, keeping her arms flattened back along her torso except when she wanted to turn abruptly in the water.

“This is as far as we will take you, missy,” she called. Her eyes had the opalescence of pearl shell, and the pupils were slitted rather than round. “The water here hasn't enough salt for comfort, and going farther up the river's course would poison us. We have kept our bargain, missy, have we not?”

“You've kept your bargain,” Sharina said, touching the hood covering her bare scalp instinctively. “Go with, with my blessing!”

She'd intended to say, “with the Lady's blessing,” but she realized before the words left her tongue that these nymphs and the Goddess might be…not on the same side, say, even if they weren't enemies. The nymphs had helped Sharina and helped the kingdom; she didn't want to insult them.

“Perhaps we will sing to you someday, missy,” the nymph called. She arrowed away, once waving back toward Sharina.

“We hope to sing for you, lovely missy,” caroled the chorus of her sisters from invisibly far to seaward.

“Given who they are,” said Tenoctris with a faint smile, “and where it is they sing, I rather hope that neither of us take them up on their offer. Though no doubt it was well-meant.”

The soldiers and oarsmen were shifting places, the former with more enthusiasm than their relative clumsiness justified. The
Star of Valles
rocked side to side; common sailors, not just the officers, shouted curses at the landsmen. When Sharina glanced over the railing, she saw that all the narrow-hulled triremes were wobbling similarly.

Lord Waldron walked forward, looking haggard. He hadn't hidden in the belly of the ship the way most of his men did, but neither had he cared to stand in the prow and watch the great worm swim through the waste of stars.

“Your highness,” he said in a tired voice, nodding in a sketch of a bow. “Lady Tenoctris. Your highness, I, ah…I'm in your debt for the time you've saved us in returning to Ornifal.”

“We're all acting in the interests of the kingdom, Lord Waldron,” Sharina said, trying to sound as cheerful as she'd been when her mind had settled down. She could see in the old warrior's haunted eyes how little he liked the means by which they'd voyaged, but he was too much of a man not to acknowledge the debt regardless.

“The kingdom?” Waldron said with a snort. “Oh, the army could serve the kingdom's need without having to hurry. I'd have to resign, of course, but your brother wouldn't have to look far for a replacement. If he even bothered! He's got a real man-of-war's head on his shoulders, Prince Garric does.”