The Summer Tree Read online

  Nor could they say what the third power of the moon was, though all the lios knew there was a third.

  The Goddess worked by threes.

  There was another glade in another wood. A glade where one man alone had dared to walk in ten centuries since Amairgen had died.

  The glade was small, the trees of the grove about were very old, extremely tall. The moon was almost overhead before she could shine down upon Pendaran’s sacred grove.

  When she did, it began. A play of light first, a shimmering, and then a sound following, unearthly like a flute among the leaves. The air itself seemed to quiver to that tune, to dance, to form and reform, coalesce, to shape finally a creature of light and sound, of Pendaran and the moon.

  When it was ended, there was silence, and something stood in the glade where nothing had stood before. With the wide eyes of the newly born, dewed so that her coat glistened in the birthing light, she rose on unsteady legs, and stood a moment, as one more sound like a single string plucked ran through Pendaran Wood.

  Slowly then, delicately as all her kind, she moved from the glade, from the sacred grove. Eastward she went, for though but newly birthed, she knew already that to the west lay the sea.

  Lightly, lightly did she tread the grass, and the powers of Pendaran, all the creatures gathered there, grew still as she passed, more beautiful, more terrible than any one of them.

  The Goddess worked by threes; this was the third.

  To the highest battlement he had climbed, so that all of black Starkadh lay below him. Starkadh rebuilt, his fortress and his fastness, for the blasting of Rangat had not signified his freedom—though let the fools think so yet awhile—he had been free a long time now. The Mountain had been exploded because he was ready at last for war, with the place of his power rising anew to tower over the northland, over Daniloth, a blur to the south, where his heart’s hate would forever lie.

  But he did not look down upon it.

  Instead his eyes were riveted on the impossible response the night sky held up to him, and in that moment he tasted doubt. With his one good hand, he reached upwards as if his talons might rake the moon from heaven, and it was a long time before his rage passed.

  But he had changed in a thousand years under Rangat. Hate had driven him to move too fast the last time. This time it would not.

  Let the moon shine tonight. He would have it down before the end. He would smash Brennin like a toy and uproot the Summer Tree. The Riders would be scattered, Larai Rigal burned to waste, Calor Diman defiled in Eridu.

  And Gwen Ystrat he would level. Let the moon shine, then. Let Dana try to show forth empty signs in heavens choked with his smoke. Her, too, he would have kneeling before him. He had had a thousand years to consider all of this.

  He smiled then, for the last was best. When all else was done, when Fionavar lay crushed beneath his fist, only then would he turn to Daniloth. One by one he would have them brought to him, the lios alfar, the Children of Light. One by one by one to Starkadh. He would know what to do with them.

  The thunder was almost spent, the rain a thin drizzle. The wind was wind, no more. A taste of salt on it from the sea, far away. The clouds were breaking up. The red moon stood directly over the Tree.

  “Lady,” said the God, muting the thunder of his voice, “Lady, this you have never done before.”

  “It was needful,” she replied, a chiming on wind. “He is very strong this time.”

  “He is very strong,” the thunder echoed. “Why did you speak to my sacrifice?” A slight reproach.

  The Lady’s voice grew deeper, woven of hearth smoke and caves. “Do you mind?” she murmured.

  There came a sound that might have been a god amused. “Not if you beg forgiveness, no. It has been long, Lady.” A deeper sound, and meaningful.

  “Do you know what I have done in Pendaran?” she asked, eluding, voice gossamer like dawn.

  “I do. Though for good or ill I do not know. It may burn the hand that lays hold of it.”

  “All my gifts are double-edged,” the Goddess said, and he was aware of ancient blood in that tone. There was a silence, then she was finest lace again, cajoling: “I have interceded, Lord, will you not do so?”

  “For them?”

  “And to please me,” said the moon.

  “Might we please each other?”

  “We might so.”

  A roll of thunder then. Laughter.

  “I have interceded,” Mörnir said.

  “Not the rain,” she protested, sea-sound. “The rain was bought.”

  “Not the rain,” the God replied. “I have done what I have done.”

  “Let us go, then,” said Dana.

  The moon passed away behind the trees to the west.

  Shortly thereafter the thunder ceased, and the clouds began to break up overhead.

  And so at the last, at the end of night, in the sky above the Summer Tree, there were only the stars to look down upon the sacrifice, upon the stranger hanging naked on the Tree, only the stars, only them.

  Before dawn it rained again, though the glade was empty by then, and silent, save for the sound of water falling and dripping from the leaves.

  And this was the last night of Pwyll the Stranger on the Summer Tree.

  PART III

  THE CHILDREN OF IVOR

  Chapter 10

  He landed badly, but the reflexes of an athlete took him rolling through the fall, and at the end of it he was on his feet, unhurt. Very angry, though.

  He had opted out, damn it! What the hell right did Kim Ford have to grab his arm and haul him to another world? What the …

  He stopped; the fury draining as realization came down hard. She had, she really had taken him to another world.

  A moment ago he had been in a room in the Park Plaza Hotel, now he found himself outdoors in darkness with a cool wind blowing, and a forest nearby; looking the other way, he saw wide rolling grasslands stretching away as far as he could see in the moonlight.

  He looked around for the others, and then as the fact of isolation slowly came home, Dave Martyniuk’s anger gave way to fear. They weren’t friends of his, that was for sure, but this was no time or place to have ended up alone.

  They couldn’t be far, he thought, managing to keep control. Kim Ford had had his arm; surely that meant she couldn’t be far away, her and the others, and that Lorenzo Marcus guy who’d got him into this in the first place. And was going to get him out, or deal with severe bodily pain, Martyniuk vowed. Notwithstanding the provisions of the Criminal Code.

  Which reminded him: looking down, he saw that he was still clutching Kevin Laine’s Evidence notes.

  The absurdity, the utter incongruousness in this night place of wind and grass acted, somehow, to loosen him. He took a deep breath, like before the opening jump in a game. It was time to get his bearings. Boy Scout time.

  Paras Derval where Ailell reigns, the old man had said. Any cities on the horizon? As the moon slipped from behind a drift of cloud, Dave turned north into the wind and saw Rangat clear.

  He was not, as it happened, anywhere near the others. All Kim had been able to do with her desperate grab for his arm was keep him in the same plane as them, the same world. He was in Fionavar, but a long way north, and the Mountain loomed forty-five thousand feet up into the moonlight, white and dazzling.

  “Holy Mother!” Dave exclaimed involuntarily.

  It saved his life.

  Of the nine tribes of the Dalrei, all but one had moved east and south that season, though the best grazing for the eltor was still in the northwest, as it always was in summer. The messages the auberei brought back from Celidon were clear, though: svart alfar and wolves in the edgings of Pendaran were enough for most Chieftains to take their people away. There had been rumours of urgach among the svarts as well. It was enough. South of Adein and Rienna they went, to the leaner, smaller herds, and the safety of the country around Cynmere and the Latham.

  Ivor dan Banor, Chieftain of
the third tribe, was, as often, the exception. Not that he did not care for the safety of his tribe, his children. No man who knew him could think that. It was just that there were other things to consider, Ivor thought, awake late at night in the Chieftain’s house.

  For one, the Plain and the eltor herds belonged to the Dalrei, and not just symbolically. Colan had given them to Revor after the Bael Rangat, to hold, he and his people, for so long as the High Kingdom stood.

  It had been earned, by the mad ride in terror through Pendaran and the Shadowland and a loop in the thread of time to explode singing into battle on a sunset field that else had been lost. Ivor stirred, just thinking on it: for the Horsemen, the Children of Peace, to have done this thing … There had been giants in the old days.

  Giants who had earned the Plain. To have and to hold, Ivor thought. Not to scurry to sheltered pockets of land at the merest rumour of danger. It stuck in Ivor’s craw to run from svart alfar.

  So the third tribe stayed. Not on the edge of Pendaran—that would have been foolhardy and unnecessary. There was a good camp five leagues from the forest, and they had the dense herds of the eltor to themselves. It was, the hunters agreed, a luxury. He noticed that they still made the sign against evil, though, when the chase took them within sight of the Great Wood. There were some, Ivor knew, who would rather have been elsewhere.

  He had other reasons, though, for staying. It was bad in the south, the auberei reported from Celidon; Brennin was locked in a drought, and cryptic word had come from his friend Tulger of the eighth tribe that there was trouble in the High Kingdom. What, Ivor thought, did they need to go into that for? After a harsh winter, what the tribe needed was a mild, sweet summer in the north. They needed the cool breeze and the fat herds for feasting and warm coats against the coming of fall.

  There was another reason, too. More than the usual number of boys would be coming up to their fasts this year. Spring and summer were the time for the totem fasts among the Dalrei, and the third tribe had always been luckiest in a certain copse of trees here in the northwest. It was a tradition. Here Ivor had seen his own hawk gazing with bright eyes back at him from the top of an elm on his second night. It was a good place, Faelinn Grove, and the young ones deserved to lie there if they could. Tabor, too. His younger son was fourteen. Past time. It might be this summer. Ivor had been twelve when he found his hawk; Levon, his older son—his heir, Chieftain after him had seen his totem at thirteen.

  It was whispered, among the girls who were always competing for him, that Levon had seen a King Horse on his fast. This, Ivor knew, was not true, but there was something of the stallion about Levon, in the brown eyes, the unbridled carriage, the open, guileless nature, even his long, thick yellow hair, which he wore unbound.

  Tabor, though, Tabor was different. Although that was unfair, Ivor told himself—his intense younger son was only a boy yet, he hadn’t had his fasting. This summer, perhaps, and he wanted Tabor to have the lucky wood.

  And above and beyond all of these, Ivor had another reason still. A vague presence at the back of his mind, as yet undefined. He left it there. Such things, he knew from experience, would be made clear to him in their time. He was a patient man.

  So they stayed.

  Even now there were two boys in Faelinn Grove. Gereint had spoken their names two days ago, and the shaman’s word began the passage from boy to man among the Dalrei.

  There were two in the wood then, fasting; but though Faelinn was lucky, it was also close to Pendaran, and Ivor, father to all his tribe, had taken quiet steps to guard them. They would be shamed, and their fathers, if they knew, so it had been only with a look in his eye that he had alerted Torc to ride out with them unseen.

  Torc was often away from the camps at night. It was his way. The younger ones joked that his animal had been a wolf. They laughed too hard at that, a little afraid. Torc: he did look like a wolf, with his lean body, his long, straight, black hair, and the dark, unrevealing eyes. He never wore a shirt, or moccasins; only his eltor skin leggings, dyed black to be unseen at night.

  The Outcast. No fault of his own, Ivor knew, and resolved for the hundredth time to do something about that name. It hadn’t been any fault of Torc’s father, Sorcha, either. Just sheerest bad luck. But Sorcha had slain an eltor doe that was carrying young. An accident, the hunters agreed at the gathering: the buck he’d slashed had fallen freakishly into the path of the doe beside it. The doe had stumbled over him and broken her neck. When the hunters came up, they had seen that she was bearing.

  An accident, which let Ivor make it exile and not death. He could not do more. No Chieftain could rise above the Laws and hold his people. Exile, then, for Sorcha; a lonely, dark fate, to be driven from the Plain. The next morning they had found Meisse, his wife, dead by her own hand. Torc, at eleven, only child, had been left doubly scarred by tragedy.

  He had been named by Gereint that summer, the same summer as Levon. Barely twelve, he had found his animal and had remained ever after a loner on the fringes of the tribe. As good a hunter as any of Ivor’s people, as good even, honesty made Ivor concede, as Levon. Or perhaps not quite, not quite as good.

  The Chieftain smiled to himself in the dark. That, he thought, was self-indulgent. Torc was his son as well, the whole tribe were his children. He liked the dark man, too, though Torc could be difficult; he also trusted him. Torc was discreet and competent with tasks like the one tonight.

  Awake beside Leith, his people all about him in the camp, the horses shut in for the night, Ivor felt better knowing Torc was out there in the dark with the boys. He turned on his side to try to sleep.

  After a moment, the Chieftain recognized a muffled sound, and realized that someone else was awake in the house. He could hear Tabor’s stifled sobbing from the room he shared with Levon. It was hard for the boy, he knew; fourteen was late not to be named, especially for the Chieftain’s son, for Levon’s brother.

  He would have comforted his younger son, but knew it was wiser to leave the boy alone. It was not a bad thing to learn what hurt meant, and mastering it alone helped engender self-respect. Tabor would be all right.

  In a little while the crying stopped. Eventually Ivor, too, fell asleep, though first he did something he’d not done for a long time.

  He left the warmth of his bed, of Leith sound asleep beside him, and went to look in on his children. First the boys; fair, uncomplicated Levon, nut-brown, wiry Tabor; and then he walked into Liane’s room.

  Cordeliane, his daughter. With a bemused pride he gazed at her dark brown hair, at the long lashes of her closed eyes, the upturned nose, laughing mouth … even in sleep she smiled.

  How had he, stocky, square, plain Ivor, come to have such handsome sons, a daughter so fair?

  All of the third tribe were his children, but these, these.

  Torc had been having a bad night. First the two idiots who had come to fast had managed to end up, totally oblivious, within twenty feet of each other on precisely opposite sides of a clump of bushes in the wood. It was ridiculous. What sort of babies were they sending out these days?

  He had managed, with a series of snuffling grunts that really were rather unnerving, to scare one of them into moving a quarter of a mile away. It was an interference with the ritual, he supposed, but the fast had barely begun, and in any case, the babies needed all the help they could get: the man smell in those bushes had been so strong they’d have likely ended up finding only each other for totem animals.

  That, he thought, was funny. Torc didn’t find many things funny, but the image of two fasting thirteen-year-olds becoming each other’s sacred beasts made him smile in the dark.

  He stopped smiling when his sweep of the grove turned up a spoor he didn’t recognize. After a moment, though, he realized that it had to be an urgach, which was worse than bad. Svart alfar would not have disturbed him unless there were a great many. He had seen small numbers of them on his solitary forays westward towards Pendaran. He’d also found the trail
of a very large band, with wolves among them. It had been a week before, and they were moving south fairly quickly. It had not been a pleasant thing to find, and he’d reported it to Ivor, and to Levon as leader of the hunt, but it was, for the time being, no direct concern of theirs.

  This was. He’d never seen one of the urgach, no one in the tribe had, but there were legends enough and night stories to make him very cautious indeed. He remembered the tales very well, from before the bad time, when he’d been only a child in the third tribe, a child like all the others, shivering with pleasurable fear by the fire, dreading his mother’s summons to bed, while the old ones told their stories.

  Kneeling over the spoor, Torc’s lean face was grim. This was not Pendaran Wood, where creatures of Darkness were known to walk. An urgach, or more than one in Faelinn Grove, the lucky wood of the third tribe, was serious. It was more than serious: there were two babies fasting tonight.

  Moving silently, Torc followed the heavy, almost overpowering spoor and, dismayed, he saw that it led eastward out of the grove. Urgach on the Plain! Dark things were abroad. For the first time, he wondered about the Chieftain’s decision to stay in the northwest this summer. They were alone. Far from Celidon, far from any other tribe that might have joined numbers with them against what evils might be moving here. The Children of Peace, the Dalrei were named, but sometimes peace had been hard won.

  Torc had no problems with being alone, he had been so all his adult life. Outcast, the young ones called him, in mockery. The Wolf. Stupid babies: wolves ran in packs. When had he ever? The solitude had made for some bitterness, for he was young yet, and the memory of other times was fresh enough to be a wound. It had also given him a certain dour reflectiveness born of long nights in the dark, and an outsider’s view of what humans did. Another kind of animal. If he lacked tolerance, it was not a surprising flaw.

  He had very quick reflexes.