A Princess of the Chameln Page 3

  Aidris found a small path, the track of some animal in the bracken. They ran along it and there before them was the great oak in its own clearing. Telavel and Moon cropped the grass, just as she had seen them, and not far away was the lake. The grey mare lifted her head and whinnied as Aidris and Sharn appeared. They ran across the little space and clasped the gnarled trunk of the oak.

  They waited for the pursuit, but it did not come. No one else entered the clearing; it was as if the power of the oak sealed them off from the world. They saw and heard nothing but the peaceful life of the wood.

  “What happened?” asked Sharn Am Zor.

  “We were attacked,” said Aidris. “Did you see any of them?”

  “What should I have seen?”

  She stared at him. The prince was sitting on the grass, his back against the tree, prizing an acorn from its cup. He was dirty and his clothes were torn, but she sensed his unconcern, his fearlessness. She took it for pure innocence, an innocence she had lost, three years past. She sat down beside him and ruffled his golden hair in loving exasperation.

  “You saw Captain Vesna fall down?” she prompted.

  “The old kedran?” he said. “Was she hurt?”

  “She was shot with an arrow. Did you see anyone . . .?”

  “I saw the blue riders. You saw them too.” said Sharn.

  “Yes, I saw them. But after that?”

  “Maybe there was an archer . . . a . . . a small archer. In a different tree, not an oak, not one of our good oak trees. There were these blue fellows, who climbed trees, do you think? And shot at you and the old kedran. And her horse. I expect they shot her horse because it cried out. I think these were dark, bearded men, frowning. They shot from trees or behind trees . . .”

  “Sharn!”

  He smiled at her, pleased with his romancing.

  “Sharn . . . what did you see? Tell the truth!”

  He had seen the blue riders; he had seen Vesna fall from her horse; he had heard the distant alarm. He had seen a movement in a tree, nothing else, and then the arrow that had driven them into the thicket.

  “I wonder what the alarm was all about?” he asked dreamily.

  Aidris was suddenly impatient with his ignorance and his story-telling.

  “I am afraid Dan Esher might have been attacked,” she said bluntly.

  The prince flushed with anger; he hit out in rage at Aidris.

  “I’ll tell my mother!” he shouted. “You said they might kill my father! You are a dirty black dwarf of the Firn! They will kill you, my mother says, and you have led me into danger. That arrow might have hit me!”

  “It might indeed!” said Aidris coldly.

  She stared at Aravel’s child giving out his mother’s hatred and unreason. She went away from him around the tree to where Telavel stood and bowed her head against the mare’s dark mane. She felt the hard ache in her throat that took the place of tears. She had seldom wept since her parents’ death. The child’s outburst was not much worse than the everyday tensions of Achamar. She found no peace between her struggle with books, the angry silences of the Council Hall, and the soft insincerity of the dressing rooms.

  When her mother’s presence was withdrawn, the bored ladies of Lien turned towards Aravel and her distaste for the world of the Chameln. From one hour to the next Aidris was dressed in long robes and cossetted, then mocked, secretly or openly. Even Riane, her favorite, carried tales, betrayed the child’s and the growing girl’s confidence a hundred times.

  “Aidris . . . I’m sorry . . .”

  Sharn Am Zor plucked at her sleeve. He had lost all his willfulness; he looked woebegone and frightened. She put an arm around him; Sharn was always forgiven, poor wretch.

  “Where is everyone?” he whispered, “I thought I saw . . .”

  “What?”

  “A movement in the leaves . . .”

  They peered round the oak, examined every part of the encircling green, every tree and bush.

  “Are there . . .” said Sharn hoarsely, “Are there little people . . . you know, dwarfs and greddles . . .”

  Aidris knew it at once for a childhood fear, like the fear she had once had of the dark.

  “Of course there are,” she said. “Nothing to be afraid of. There used to be greddles at the palaces in Achamar. The last of them was an old woman, I think her name was Ninchi. A greddle is like a dwarf, it is a kind of misbirth, a creature to be pitied because it cannot grow as others do. But there are the Tulgai. Have you not heard of them?”

  “They—they’re hairy . . .” said Sharn.

  “They are a tribe of small hairy folk who roam the great border forests; their leader is the Balg. They are hunters, skilled in forest lore. They still use the Old Speech, and some say they know the speech of the birds and animals, but I think that is only a tale. The Tulgai are part of our own folk, and if we came amongst them, they would do us honor. Every year, Nazran says, they leave tribute for the Daindru at Vigrund, the border town.”

  “Well, I would not mind them!” said Sharn firmly.

  The storm had passed; watery sunlight came through the oak leaves.

  “The others will be searching for us,” she said.

  “We are safe in Ystamar, the valley of the oak trees,” said Sharn.

  “Hush,” said Aidris, “it is a holy place. If you speak of it, you will not come to it.”

  The spell of the oak tree held them fast. They seemed to be outside of time, and it did not help Aidris’s real anxiety.

  “Mount up!” she said. “We must find our way.”

  “Back through the wood?” whispered Sharn.

  “No,” said Aidris. “No . . . we dare not. We will go to the lake people, to Musna, the lake village.”

  When they were mounted, there was room to walk the horses round in a ring, under the oak’s spreading boughs. They made a game of avoiding pursuit—around, around again, as if Aidris might lead off back into the wood, then around a third time. . . .

  “Now!” she cried.

  They peeled off, Sharn leading, left the shelter of the oak and galloped between two birch trees, heading for the lake. There was a jagged sound, a rending of the air as if they had crashed back into the real world by riding through a glass wall. Moon, the pony, danced about on the broad path at the water’s edge but Sharn forced her to the left, with Telavel at her heels. Aidris looked back and saw a blue rider, a figure in cloak and hood on a dark horse, blowing a silver hunting horn. The call was “Gone Away.”

  She bent low and urged Telavel up beside the white pony. Everything depended now on poor Moon and on Sharn’s ability to stay in the saddle. They had no protection; the road led round the head of the lake, a stout causeway of wood and stone set in marshy ground. The village rose up before them; the ancient pile dwellings hung in air over the lake shallows. The barns and the Meeting Hall on higher ground were roofed with red shingles, still wet from the storm.

  They rode on steadily; there was a sound in the air; Aidris did not need to look back. The call of the silver hunting horn had drawn out archers, to shoot them down as they rode. The danger was so great that it made her senses more acute. She saw the hump of a wooden bridge drawing near, saw an arrow strike into its right-hand rail. She shouted to the prince, urging him forward, and took in at the same time the marsh below the bridge covered with blurred clumps of white. She swung Telavel off the road at a soft place and rode into the marsh.

  A hard hand thumped her shoulder and another shook her saddle. Sharn Am Zor was on the bridge, clinging desperately to his pony’s neck, but lasting. Then the air was alive with angry sound and hurtling white bodies. A hundred swans flew up honking with fury as Telavel splashed among them. They brushed Aidris with their heavy bodies and huge webs; they screened the bridge and the marsh with their beating wings. Aidris rode on, feeling her breath come in strange gasps. She brought Telavel out onto the road again beyond the bridge, while the swans still wheeled and circled noisily.

  Sharn
was safe. He had ridden into the shelter of a tall thatched archway over the road on the outskirts of the village. Two men came from their boat, a woman in a red tunic came running along the jetty of the first house. Up ahead a small crowd of figures pressed down the causeway.

  Aidris rode slowly under the archway. The sunlight was fading a little, something seemed to drag her downwards, she could hardly hold the rein. Sharn had dismounted. He stood propped against the trembling Moon, still hugging her neck.

  “Aidris . . .”

  He could only stare and stare at her.

  “Child!” said the woman. “Dear merciful Goddess, who has done this? Get help here . . . take her down.”

  “She is Dan Aidris!” cried Sharn Am Zor. “We were attacked!”

  Dimly, as she was lifted from her horse, Aidris saw half a dozen men and women rush onto the bridge shouting angrily. A child came by nursing a dead swan with an arrow through its breast. Among the persons who lifted her down she saw a young man with long flaxen hair and a pale face. He wore a spray of oak leaves in his straw hat. She twisted her head to look for the blue riders, but saw only the long arrow embedded in her own left shoulder.

  She saw a candle flame and dreamed that she was in the world of the stone. The Lady of the stone was caring for her; the Lady had taken all her pain and care away. She had healed the world and made it whole again. The dream vanished with the whiff of fever herb and the feel of bed linen against her skin. She lay on her back propped up with many pillows; at least this meant that the arrow had been removed. Earlier she had been lying face downwards, forced into consciousness by pain.

  “Drink, princess,” said a man’s voice.

  She sipped a warm brackish draught from a metal cup held to her lips. The man was holding a candle because the place they were in was cavernous and dark. Yet she knew it was still day, in fact not much time had passed. She looked up to the beams overhead and knew that she was in the Meeting Hall of Musna Village.

  “Your right hand,” said the voice. “Move your right hand.”

  She obeyed, focussing on him at last.

  “Now the left. Move the fingers of your left hand.”

  It felt like a dead thing, a block of wood strapped across her chest. She concentrated and the fingers moved. There was a numbness in her shoulder that masked a deep pain. The man laid a hand on her forehead.

  “You are very strong, Dan Aidris,” he said.

  She saw that he was middle-aged and clean shaven, with a long, pale, blunt-featured, almost comical face. His thick yellowish grey hair was cut sharp and square at the level of his jaw bone; his eyes were dark and up-curving.

  “I am Jalmar Raiz, Healer,’ he said.

  “Am I . . . healed?” she whispered.

  “Your wound should heal,” he said.

  “How is Sharn Am Zor?”

  “Unharmed. You saved his life.”

  “The swans did it,” she said.

  “Quick thinking,” said the healer.

  She moved her head and found that they were quite alone at one end of the Meeting Hall. She had been doctored upon a table covered with featherbeds. The bloody instruments, even the arrow itself, lay upon a side table. At the far end of the hall sat a silent group of villagers, three or four older men and women.

  “The elders . . .” he said quietly.

  “I must thank them,” she said. “I have not even thanked you, Master Raiz.”

  “Drink a little more,” he said, holding the metal cup to her lips.

  The warm broth gave her strength, made her less light-headed.

  “The court?” she asked. “The hunting party?”

  “They have been summoned. We expect them.”

  He took her wrist between his fingers and sat beside the makeshift bed on a stool, staring at her intently.

  “You were pursued by four men,” he said. “Two mounted, two on foot. Do you know who they were?”

  “No—no—enemies . . . I don’t know!”

  She moved her head from side to side on the pillows, and he held up a long hand to still her restlessness.

  “One of the runners was caught,” he said. “The smith of Musna, the strongest hurler in these parts, felled him with a bolt of wood.”

  “Is he . . .?”

  “Alive? Certainly. We are holding him.”

  She sighed and it hurt to sigh. The left side of her body was full of aches and stiffness.

  “How will this go on?” asked Jalmar Raiz, with a trace of strong emotion. “You have too much to bear.”

  “I am strong. You said so yourself.”

  “It is too much for the mind and the spirit,” he said. “You may never be whole again.”

  “What should I do?” she asked. “Tell me what I should do, Healer Raiz.”

  “Leave the court and the city,” he said shortly. “Save yourself.”

  He stood up and reached for his staff, crisscrossed with white bands, held in place with thorns. He rapped with it on the floor, and they came from nowhere, from the shadows: a young man with flaxen hair and a child-sized creature with a small balding head and thick reptilian skin on its hands . . . a greddle.

  “These are my two sons,” said Jalmar Raiz, “Pinga and Raff.”

  Pinga, the greddle, busied himself clearing the instrument table. The smiling look that he gave Aidris forbade pity. She cried out, “You met the hunt! You gave a scroll to Dan Esher!”

  “We seek justice for the village, Princess,” said the healer.

  He gave her a cool bow and bent to give instruction to the greddle, his deformed child. Aidris felt bereft and desperate now that the healer had withdrawn his attention. She turned her head and found the young man, Raff, sitting at her bedside. He had a likeness to his father, a rather long, smooth face, not at all handsome, and lacking Jalmar’s firmness; his eyes were deep blue, fringed with sandy lashes. His expression was one of wistful sadness; when their eyes met, he turned up one corner of his wide mouth and the sadness was suddenly comical, a shared joke at the state of the world.

  As Pinga carried the healer’s equipment away, Jalmar Raiz was pacing down the hall to summon the village elders.

  “Do you follow the Lame God?” asked Aidris.

  “Healers often follow him,” said the young man. “We came here from a college of healing on the borders of Lien, where my father gave a dissertation. It is a foundation of the Pilgrim Brothers of Inokoi.”

  Outside in the sunshine there was a sound of shouting, hoofbeats, hunting horns: the royal hunt. The village elders, ready to approach a wounded princess, stood irresolute at the end of the hall: the king himself was coming.

  “Help me!” said Aidris.

  She moved on the pillows, and the pain began to spread out from her wound. Her tunic had been unlaced and drawn down modestly on one side only so that one arm and shoulder were covered only in bandages.

  “Take the stone on the bronze chain from the table there,” she said. “It must be hidden. The silver swan can be replaced around my neck.”

  Raff moved quickly and expertly; he smoothed her pillows and drew up the embroidered coverlets. She told him the hiding place for the stone; her boots, freshly cleaned, stood at the bedside.

  Her head was clear now, but she felt weak, and the pain was beginning to trouble her. She smiled at those elders who had come to greet her and thanked them. An old woman in a starched cap wept and kissed her hand.

  “So young . . . so young to feel the world’s pain!”

  Sharn Am Zor ran into the Meeting Hall dragging his father, Dan Esher, by the hand. After them strode Dame Bergit, her habit spattered with mud and stag’s blood, and Bajan Am Nuresh.

  Esher was a man of the Zor, tall, well-built, with golden hair and eyes blue as the sky. His skin was rough and reddened by the outdoor life he preferred. Since the death of his co-ruler, Dan Racha, a puzzled sadness had grown upon him. He seldom smiled, although Aidris felt that he was a man meant to smile and to lead the simple life of a count
ry lord or a tribal leader. Now at last she had a smile from him, for the preservation of his son, for her own safety, even for the death of a magnificent fire-crest stag.

  Aidris told her tale as simply and as urgently as she could. She strained to catch and hold Dan Esher’s attention. She pleaded for him to hunt down her attackers . . . to “ferret them out,” not to let them “go to earth.”

  “Child!” trumpeted Bergit of Hodd. “You shouldn’t bother your head with such things. Have you no woman to attend you, to stand by while you were doctored?”

  “Uncle,” cried Aidris desperately, “do not let this attack remain a mystery . . . I ask it in the name of my father!”

  She had gone too far. Esher Am Zor mumbled and hawked, letting her hand fall. In his blue eyes, she saw a flash of disgust and impatience. He rallied quickly.

  “We’ll scour about . . . we’ll find the vermin, be sure of it.”

  He gave his arm to Dame Bergit.

  “Come cousin. We’re bidden to table . . . I’ve dust in my throat. Aidris will do very well here . . .”

  Further down the hall the villagers had set out food and drink on trestle tables. Sharn, overexcited, danced away down the long room, clowning and chattering. At last Aidris was alone with Bajan.

  “I have offended Dan Esher,” she said wearily.

  “He will pardon you,” said Bajan.

  “Bajan, why was the alarm sounded in the wood?”

  “Fire,” he said. “One of the roundhouses on the Royal Ride threatened to go up in flames. The kedran troop barely put it out.”

  “Was the fire set deliberately?”

  “It might have been.”

  “And my good captain, Eri Vesna?” asked Aidris.

  “Her horse was found down a bank with a leg broken. Then, close by, her body was found. The kedran fetched me from the head of the hunt, with Jana Wetzerik and some others. We began to search for you and for Sharn.”

  “Bajan, have you seen the man they caught, the prisoner?”