The Rose of Sarifal (20 page)

He filled the pockets of his trousers. There were jewels, too, some cut and faceted, some not. One of them, a smooth sphere, gleamed like a demon’s eye.

He looked at the druid, who cocked her head. “What?” he said, “this is what you want, isn’t it?”

But she was still anxious and unhappy, until he reached down for the king’s thighbone. She had lost her own totem stick, and perhaps this would help her, he thought. And as soon as she had it in her jaws, she dropped to her four paws and ran out through the burrow’s entrance in the light of the setting sun.

Marikke watched her from the door of a ruined building. She had seen the dragons fly up into the amber light a few minutes before. Now she watched the wolf stop and lower her muzzle to the ground, the bone in her jaws, a raised ridge of hair between her shoulder blades as she picked through the piles of lycanthropes in their most bestial shapes, asleep or else regarding her blearily, having forgotten what they were there for, or what it meant to be a prisoner. The Beastlord, after all, had given them no commands, and Marikke’s had been ambiguous. She watched the wolf lope down one of the streets of the ruined town.

After a few more minutes she watched the Savage staggering after, the king’s sword awkwardly perched under his arm. He held his bandaged arm. His shoulders, too, were scratched and bleeding.

She watched them disappear among the rocks. Then, raising her head high, combing her hair back from her face between her fingers, she walked back to the stone porch below the mountain. Once there, she turned again into the sunset, sniffing the air, admiring the light. The torches flared behind her in the tunnel’s entrance, and all the twisting way down to the Beastlord’s lair. She made her prayers as she descended, murmuring the names of the Earthmother not in supplication but in farewell. Since her last encounter with the goddess, she had decided to put her faith in the hearts of mortal creatures. Because how was it possible to know the truth?
Perhaps we fool ourselves by worshiping Chauntea and despising Malar, and Talos, and Bane, and Asmodeus, the entire pantheon of blood and evil fury. Chauntea is generous and loving, we might tell ourselves, the source of all good things. But if there was only one god with many aspects, and if her purposes could not be understood by mortal creatures, any more than a dog could hope to understand Marikke, then it was best to trust in people after all. Why would Chauntea permit Malar to roam free?

No, she would put her trust in Kip, the shifter boy who loved her, because she had saved him from starvation and death, and given him a home in the world. Surely there was enough of him left inside his own body and his own heart for him to remember her, perhaps to pardon her. She would not run with the others. Knowing her as he did, the Beastlord would find her in an hour. There would be no High Hunt for her.

Now she was in the slimy, agate-floored cavern once again. The torches burned up bright. Kip sat on the surface of his table, and he turned his calico head and smiled as she approached. Her heart rose up to see him smile.

“Did you do what I asked?” he said, his voice light and musical, just as she remembered. Surely there was something of him left.

He had the black kitten on his lap, and he played with it. “Oh, Kip,” she said at once. “Forgive me. I was preparing for the hunt. I had them all locked up in one of those old crypts on the mountain. But the chains
were all rusted and they broke free. We’ll have to go quick. But the trail is clear.”

A pucker appeared between the boy’s clear brows. “Hunt? There’s no hunt. That’s not what I asked.”

“What do you mean? I didn’t understand …”

“I wanted them dead. I told you. They killed a dozen of my people, and my angel, too—my angel, who kept me nourished all these years.” He paused. “What crypt? There’s one on the ridge that Argon Bael used to guard for me. Not there. You did not put them there.”

She bowed her head. “Forgive me,” she said. Already she knew it was useless, that the god had spoken. “Do you remember,” she pleaded, “my father’s house in Alaron, on the heights? Do you remember the pear tree in the field, when it blossomed in the spring? Do you remember when you—”

“I gave you the knife to cut their throats, to water with their blood my holy ground. I gave you the knife. Do you have the knife?”

She brought her hands up to her face in supplication. “I don’t have it.”

“This was the knife for Malar’s sacrifices and the Black Blood on Malar’s altar,” interrupted Kip with his soft, childlike voice. “Do you have it?”

As he spoke, he rose to his feet on the tabletop. And the lycanthropes who had been resting, curled up against the cavern’s walls, got to their feet. Some of them stretched and showed their claws. Summoned by their master’s voice, they gathered in a circle. Marikke spoke. “Kip, do you remember that first evening we came to
Caer Callidyrr, and you were so frightened I had to lead you by the hand while you closed your eyes? We came in through the gate, and when they rang the bell you put your hands over your ears …”

This was probably not the best thing to remember, but it was all that came to mind. Marikke watched the circle close around her, a pack of wolf-men taking charge. She would have preferred someone else, for her last wish. Briefly she examined the interior spaces—the glade, the lakeside, and the snowy field—where Chauntea had so often visited her, but they were empty, barren, not a footprint there.

T
HE
B
ATTLE OF
C
AER
M
ORAY

I
N THE UNNAMED CITY BELOW
S
COURTOP, AN INCARNATION
of the Beastlord, standing with his weak legs spread on the stone tabletop, directed and administered the sacrifice. Only when the priestess’s body was successfully dismembered and its smoking parts distributed among the temple’s altar stones did he pause to remember the High Hunt. By that time the Savage and Eleuthra had several hours’ lead.

But Kip the cat-shifter was not the only embodiment of Malar on Moray Island. That night, a hundred miles north, among the human settlements along the coast, sleeping next to their exhausted husbands, the Northlander women struggled and cried out, disturbed by the same nightmare: A great panther, its heavy jaws befouled with blood, crouched over their marriage beds, polluting the sheets with the stink of his hot breath. Shivering in the cold dawn, they shook their men awake, begging them not to go out that day in their frail boats to catch the spring herring and the langoustines, or climb up into their potato fields—not that day.

In the hills and forests above the towns, the Beastlord marshaled his troops. The great panther, his shoulders striped with mange, moved between the cedars in the dark woods, his tail weaving like a serpent. Down below, the Northlander farmers cursed and whipped their animals when the wooden plows stuck in the marl, until the crazed oxen and draft horses turned and trampled them. Out at sea, the fishermen were lucky with their catch, returning with their bulging nets to empty towns, their women and their children gone.

In the afternoon the animals had rebelled against them, the simple beasts, maddened by instincts they didn’t understand, and the lycanthropes who hid among them, who had crept in through the palisades among the rats and dogs. They stole children from their cribs, and dragged women, screaming, from their household tasks. Chattering and cursing, the wolf-men lit fires and threw open the gates.

Toward evening the first refugees arrived beneath the walls of Caer Moray on the bay, and were welcomed inside. Lady Amaranth was sitting in an upstairs room with Captain Lukas. Gaspar-shen, feeling better, was taking a bath, his head and body entirely submerged in the iron bathtub, his slitted eyes staring up through the cold seawater as he lay blowing bubbles from the bottom. He’d been in there for hours.

Lukas was playing the violoncello, its long neck over his shoulder, its squat body between his knees. Lady Amaranth sat entranced. Many females of her closest court had come into the room and pressed against the
walls, as many as could fit, while even outside in the halls and corridors the lycanthropes huddled to listen. In the courtyards work had stopped.

During the course of renovations, the day before, a pig-woman had discovered an old storeroom, its door choked with fallen timbers. Left over from human times, unlooted by orcs, the room contained a number of old treasures, including some musical instruments wrapped in velvet, with waxed pouches for the strings.

Lukas had not had much opportunity to play in recent years. So for him the dances and sonatas that he managed to conjure from the delicate old spruce wood felt like an emanation from the past, a rediscovery of his childhood in the big house in Loudwater, where his father’s third wife had taught him music. Small things—the smell of the rosin, the squeak of his fingers on the strings—brought big memories, and in the middle of one sequence of arpeggios he caught a sudden glimpse of his stepmother as if she had been with him in the room, her bright eyes and pale lips outlined in kohl. She’d been scarcely older than himself, younger than he was now. And then other sensations also, the fragrance of her dark skin, the pressure of her hands as she corrected some mistake. Oh, he had studied diligently under her care and learned much skill. But his father had not forgiven him.

Who can step into a river twice? For the water is different and we ourselves are different. At these moments when we are borne into the past, our unhappiness can become a kind of pleasure. Music makes it so. Lukas
in a single trembling note recaptured an image of his stepmother as she paused at the threshold to rearrange the bodice of her dress, to compose herself before she reentered the public spaces of the house to reassume her duties there. She looked back at him, smiling crookedly as if she almost blamed him for taking something from her—no, his father had not forgiven him, and he had had to flee the house. No doubt his younger brother had inherited everything.

Lukas’s eyes were closed, and he told himself that he must open them or else risk embarrassment. When he did, he found himself in a room full of lycanthropes who, through their listening, had been transformed beyond the ordinary upper limit of their humanness. He found himself in the center of a circle of women whose faces and features were only slightly out of true, and whose rapt eyes followed every motion of his fingers. And Lady Amaranth was weeping, without any groaning or moaning or distortion of her beautiful features. But tears dropped from her lashes onto her cheeks. She, too, he guessed, had sunk back down into the past. To follow her he slipped into a minor key, one of the few gifts to humankind that the eladrin had brought up from the Feywild, and the foundation of all their music. He played her a love song from Karador, and wondered as he watched her face if this was the first music she had heard since she left home, and whether she recognized the tune, and what it meant to her. He wondered what she remembered of her first nine years, the richness of her life then, its poverty now. There being
no connection between morality and art, he imagined Lady Ordalf’s court was full of music.