The Summer Tree Page 8

  From where he stood by the window, Paul could hear a different bird now lifting its voice in song. He supposed it must be getting close to dawn, but they were on the west side of the palace and the sky was still dark. He wondered if the King had completely forgotten his presence. At length, however, Ailell drew a tired breath and, laying the sceptre down by the gameboard, moved slowly to stand by Paul, gazing out the window. From where they stood, Paul could see the land fall away westward, and far in the distance rose the trees of a forest, a greater darkness against the dark of the night.

  “Leave me, friend Pwyll,” Ailell said at length, not unkindly. “I am weary now, and will be best by myself. Weary,” he repeated, “and old. If there truly is some power of Darkness walking the land I can do nothing about it tonight unless I die. And truly, I do not want to die, on the Tree or otherwise. If this is my failing, then so it must be.” His eyes were distant and sad as he gazed out the window towards the woods far off.

  Paul cleared his throat awkwardly. “I don’t think that wanting to live can be a failing.” The words rasped from too long a silence; a difficult emotion was waking within him.

  Ailell smiled at that, but with his mouth only, and he continued to look out at the darkness. “For a king it may be, Pwyll. The price, remember?” He went on in a different voice, “Some blessings I have had. You heard Ysanne in the hall this morning. She said she had loved me. I never knew that. I don’t think,” the King mused softly, turning at last to look at Paul, “that I will tell that part to Marrien, the Queen.”

  Paul let himself out of the room, after bowing with all the respect he had. There was a queer constriction in his throat. Marrien, the Queen. He shook his head, and took an uncertain step along the corridor. A long shadow detached itself from the wall nearby.

  “Do you know the way?” Coll asked.

  “Not really, no,” Paul said. “I guess I don’t.”

  They passed through the hallways of the palace, their footsteps echoing. Beyond the walls, dawn was just breaking in the east over Gwen Ystrat. It was dark still in the palace, though.

  Outside his doorway Paul turned to Diarmuid’s man. “Coll,” he asked, “what’s the Tree?”

  The burly soldier froze. After a moment a hand went up to rub the broad hook of his broken nose. They had stopped walking; Paras Derval lay wrapped in silence. For a moment Paul thought his question would not be answered, but then Coll did speak, his voice pitched low.

  “The Summer Tree?” he said. “It’s in the wood west of the town. Sacred it is, to Mörnir of the Thunder.”

  “Why is it important?”

  “Because,” said Coll, lower yet, “that’s where the God would summon the High King in the old days, when the land had need.”

  “Summon him for what?”

  “To hang on the Summer Tree and die,” said Coll succinctly. “I’ve said too much already. Your friend is with the Lady Rheva tonight, I believe. I’ll be back to wake you in a little while; we’ve got a long ride today.” And he spun on his heel to walk off.

  “Coll!”

  The big man turned, slowly.

  “Is it always the King who hangs?”

  Coll’s broad, sunburnt face was etched with apprehension. The answer, when it came, seemed almost to be against his will. “Princes of the blood have been known to do it instead.”

  “Which explains Diarmuid last night. Coll, I really don’t want to get you in trouble—but if I were to make a guess at what happened here, I’d guess that Ailell was called because of this drought, or maybe there’s a drought because he hasn’t gone, and I’d guess he is terrified of the whole thing, and Loren backs him because he doesn’t trust whatever happens on the Summer Tree.” After a moment Coll nodded stiffly, and Schafer continued.

  “Then I’d go on to guess, and this is really a guess, that Diarmuid’s brother wanted to do it for the King, and Ailell forbade him—which is why he’s gone and Diarmuid is heir. Would that be a good guess?”

  Coll had come very close as Schafer was speaking. He searched Paul’s eyes with his own honest brown ones. Then he shook his head, a kind of awe written into his features.

  “This is deeper than I can go. It would be,” he said, “a very good guess. The High King must consent to his surrogate, and when he refused, the Prince cursed him, which is treason, and was exiled. It is now death to speak his name.”

  In the silence that followed it seemed to Paul as if the whole weight of the night was pressing down upon the two of them.

  “There is no power in me,” Coll said then, in his deep voice, “but if there was, I would have him cursed in the name of all the gods and goddesses there are.”

  “Who?” Paul whispered.

  “Why, the Prince, of course,” said Coll. “The exiled Prince. Diarmuid’s brother, Aileron.”

  Chapter 6

  Beyond the palace gates and the walls of the town, the depredations of drought came home. The impact of a rainless summer could be measured in the heavy dust of the road, in the thin grass peeling like brown paint on hills and tummocks, in stunted trees and dried-up village wells. In the fiftieth year of Ailell’s reign, the High Kingdom was suffering as no living man could remember.

  For Kevin and Paul, riding south with Diarmuid and seven of his men in the morning, the way of things registered most brutally in the pinched, bitter features of the farmers they passed on the road. Already the heat of the sun was casting a shimmer of mirage on the landscape. There were no clouds in the sky.

  Diarmuid was setting a hard pace, though, and Kevin, who was no horseman and who’d had a sleepless night, was exceedingly happy when they pulled up outside a tavern in the fourth village they came to.

  They took a hasty meal of cold, sharply spiced meat, bread, and cheese, with pints of black ale to wash away the throat-clogging dust of the road. Kevin, eating voraciously, saw Diarmuid speak briefly to Carde, who quietly sought the innkeeper and withdrew into another room with him. Noticing Kevin’s glance, the Prince walked over to the long wooden table where he and Paul were sitting with the lean, dark man named Erron.

  “We’re checking for your friend,” Diarmuid told them. “It’s one of the reasons we’re doing this. Loren went north to do the same, and I’ve sent word to the coast.”

  “Who’s with the women?” Paul Schafer asked quickly.

  Diarmuid smiled. “Trust me,” he said. “I do know what I’m doing. There are guards, and Matt stayed in the palace, too.”

  “Loren went without him?” Paul queried sharply. “How …?”

  Diarmuid’s expression was even more amused. “Even without magic our friend can handle himself. He has a sword, and knows how to use it. You worry a good deal, don’t you?”

  “Does it surprise you?” Kevin cut in. “We don’t know where we are, we don’t know the rules here, Dave’s gone missing, God knows where—and we don’t even know where we’re going with you now.”

  “That last,” said Diarmuid, “is easy enough. We’re crossing the river into Cathal, if we can. By night, and quietly, because there’s a very good chance we’ll be killed if found.”

  “I see,” said Kevin, swallowing. “And are we allowed to know why we are subjecting ourselves to that unpleasant possibility?”

  For the first time that morning Diarmuid’s smile flashed full-force. “Of course you are,” he said kindly. “You’re going to help me seduce a lady. Tell me, Carde,” he murmured, turning, “any news?”

  There was none. The Prince drained his pint and was striding out the door. The others scrambled to their feet and followed. A number of the villagers came out of the inn to watch them ride off.

  “Mörnir guard you, young Prince!” one farmer cried impulsively. “And in the name of the Summer Tree, may he take the old man and let you be our King!”

  Diarmuid had raised a gracious hand at the first words, but the speaker’s last phrase brought him to wheel his horse hard. There was a brutal silence. The Prince’s face had gone cold. No one
moved. Overhead Kevin heard a noisy flap of wings as a dense cluster of crows wheeled aloft, darkening the sun for an instant.

  Diarmuid’s voice, when it came, was formal and imperious. “The words you have spoken are treason,” Ailell’s son said, and with a sideways nod spoke one word more: “Coll.”

  The farmer may never have seen the arrow that killed him. Diarmuid did not. He was already pounding up the road without a backwards glance as Coll replaced his bow. By the time the shock had passed and the screaming had begun, all ten of them were around the bend that would carry them south.

  Kevin’s hands were shaking with shock and fury as he galloped, the image of the dead man engulfing him, the screams still echoing in his mind. Coll, beside him, seemed impassive and unperturbed. Save that he carefully refused to meet the glance of Paul Schafer, who was staring fixedly at him as they rode, and to whom he had spoken a treasonous word of his own the night before.

  In the early spring of 1949 Dr. John Ford of Toronto had taken a fortnight’s leave from his residency at London’s St. Thomas Hospital. Hiking alone in the Lake District, north of Keswick, he came, at the end of a long day afoot, down the side of a hill and walked wearily up to a farmyard tucked into the shadow of the slope.

  There was a girl in the yard, drawing water from a well. The westering sun slanted upon her dark hair. When she turned at the sound of his footstep, he saw that her eyes were grey. She smiled shyly when, hat in hand, he asked for a drink, and before she had finished drawing it for him, John Ford had fallen in love, simply and irrevocably, which was his nature in all things.

  Deirdre Cowan, who was eighteen that spring, had been told long ago by her grandmother that she would love and marry a man from over the sea. Because her gran was known to have the Sight, Deirdre never doubted what she had been told. And this man, handsome and diffident, had eyes that called to her.

  Ford spent that night in her father’s house, and in the quietest dark before dawn Deirdre rose from her bed. She was not surprised to see her gran in the hallway by her own bedroom door, nor to see the old woman make a gesture of blessing that went back a very long way. She went to Ford’s room, the grey eyes beguiling, her body sweet with trust.

  They were married in the fall, and John Ford took his wife home just as the first snows of the winter came. And it was their daughter who walked, a Dwarf beside her, twenty-five springs after her parents had been brought together, towards the shores of a lake in another world, to meet her own destiny.

  The path to the lake where Ysanne lived twisted north and west through a shallow valley flanked by gentle hills, a landscape that would have been lovely in any proper season. But Kim and Matt were walking through a country scorched and barren—and the thirst of the land seemed to knife into Kim, twisting like anguish inside her. Her face hurt, the bones seeming taut and difficult within her. Movement was becoming painful, and everywhere she looked, her eyes flinched away.

  “It’s dying,” she said.

  Matt looked at her with his one eye. “You feel it?”

  She nodded stiffly. “I don’t understand.”

  The Dwarf’s expression was grim. “The gift is not without its darkness. I do not envy you.”

  “Envy me what, Matt?” Kim’s brow furrowed. “What do I have?”

  Matt Sören’s voice was soft. “Power. Memory. Truly, I am not sure. If the hurt of the land reaches so deeply …”

  “It’s easier in the palace. I’m blocked there from all this.”

  “We can go back.”

  For one moment, sharp and almost bitter, Kim did want to turn back—all the way back. Not just to Paras Derval, but home. Where the ruin of the grass and the dead stalks of flowers by the path did not burn her so. But then she remembered the eyes of the Seer as they had looked into hers, and she heard again the voice, drumming in her veins: I have awaited you.

  “No,” she said. “How much farther?”

  “Around the curve. We’ll see the lake soon. But hold, let me give you something—I should have thought of it sooner.” And the Dwarf held out towards her a bracelet of silver workmanship, in which was set a green stone.

  “What is it?”

  “A vellin stone. It is very precious; there are few left, and the secret of fashioning them died with Ginserat. The stone is a shield from magic. Put it on.”

  With wonder in her eyes, Kimberly placed it upon her wrist, and as she did, the pain was gone, the hurt, the ache, the burning, all were gone. She was aware of them, but distantly, for the vellin was her shield and she felt it guarding her. She cried out in wonder.

  But the relief in her face was not mirrored in that of the Dwarf. “Ah,” said Matt Sören, grimly, “so I was right. There are dark threads shuttling on the Loom. The Weaver grant that Loren comes back soon.”

  “Why?” Kim asked. “What does this mean?”

  “If the vellin guards you from the land’s pain, then that pain is not natural. And if there is a power strong enough to do this to the whole of the High Kingdom, then there is a fear in me. I begin to wonder about the old tales of Mörnir’s Tree, and the pact the Founder made with the God. And if not that, then I dare not think what. Come,” said the Dwarf, “it is time I took you to Ysanne.”

  And walking more swiftly, he led her around an out-thrust spur of hill slope, and as they cleared the spur she saw the lake: a gem of blue in a necklace of low hills. And somehow there was still green by the lake, and the profuse, scattered colours of wildflowers.

  Kim stopped dead in her tracks. “Oh, Matt!”

  The Dwarf was silent while she gazed down, enraptured, on the water. “It is fair,” he said finally. “But had you ever seen Calor Diman between the mountains, you would spare your heart’s praise somewhat, to have some left for the Queen of Waters.”

  Kim, hearing the change in his voice, looked at him for a moment; then, drawing a deliberate breath, she closed her eyes and was wordless a long time. When she spoke, it was in a cadence not her own.

  “Between the mountains,” she said. “Very high up, it is. The melting snow in summer falls into the lake. The air is thin and clear. There are eagles circling. The sunlight turns the lake into a golden fire. To drink of that water is to taste of whatever light is falling down upon it, whether of sun or moon or stars. And under the full moon, Calor Diman is deadly, for the vision never fades and never stops pulling. A tide in the heart. Only the true King of Dwarves may endure that night vigil without going mad, and he must do so for the Diamond Crown. He must wed the Queen of Waters, lying all night by her shores at full of the moon. He will be bound then, to the end of his days, as the King must be, to Calor Diman.”

  And Kimberly opened her eyes to look full upon the former King of Dwarves. “Why, Matt?” she asked, in her own voice. “Why did you leave?”

  He made no answer, but met her look unflinchingly. At length he turned, still silent, and led her down the winding path to Ysanne’s lake. She was waiting there for them, dreamer of the dream, knowledge in her eyes, and pity, and another nameless thing.

  Kevin Laine had never been able to hide his emotions well, and that summary execution, so casually effected, had disturbed him very deeply. He had not spoken a word through a day’s hard riding, and the twilight found him still pale with undischarged anger. In the gathering dark the company passed through more heavily wooded country, slanting gradually downhill towards the south. The road went past a thick copse of trees and revealed, half a mile beyond, the towers of a small fortress.

  Diarmuid pulled to a halt. He seemed fresh still, unaffected by the day on horseback, and Kevin, whose bones and muscles ached ferociously, fixed the Prince with a cold stare.

  He was, however, ignored. “Rothe,” said Diarmuid to a compact, brown-bearded rider, “you go in. Speak to Averren and no one else. I am not here. Coll is leading a number of you on a reconnaissance. No details. He won’t ask anyway. Find out, discreetly, if a stranger has been seen in the area, then join us by the Dael Slope.” Rothe spun h
is horse and galloped towards the tower.

  “That’s South Keep,” Carde murmured to Kevin and Paul. “Our watchtower down here. Not too big—but there’s little danger of anything crossing the river, so we don’t need much. The big garrison’s down river, west by the sea. Cathal’s invaded twice that way, so there’s a castle at Seresh to keep watch.”

  “Why can’t they cross the river?” Paul asked. Kevin maintained his self-imposed silence.

  Carde’s smile in the gathering dark was mirthless. “That you’ll see, soon enough, when we go down to try.”

  Diarmuid, throwing a cloak over his shoulders, waited until the keep gates had swung open for Rothe; then he led them west off the road along a narrow path that began to curve south through the woods.

  They rode for perhaps an hour, quietly now, though no order had been given. These, Kevin realized, were highly trained men, for all the roughness of their garb and speech when compared to the dandies they’d met in the palace.

  The moon, a thinning crescent, swung into sight behind them as they wound out of the trees. Diarmuid halted at the edge of the sloping plain, a hand up for silence. And after a moment Kevin heard it, too: the deep sound of water, swift-flowing.

  Under the waning moon and the emerging stars he dismounted with the others. Gazing south he could see the land fall sheer away in a cliff only a few hundred yards from where they stood. But he could not see anything at all on the far side; it was as if the world ended just in front of them.

  “There’s a land fault here,” a light voice said close to his ear. Kevin stiffened, but Diarmuid went on casually. “Cathal lies about a hundred feet lower than us; you’ll see when we go forward. And,” said the Prince, his voice still light, “it is a mistake to make judgements too soon. That man had to die—had he not, word would be in the palace by now that I was encouraging treasonous talk. And there are those who would like to spread that word. His life was forfeit from the time he spoke, and the arrow was a kinder death than Gorlaes would have granted him. We’ll wait for Rothe here. I’ve told Carde to rub you both down; you’ll not make it across with muscles that won’t move.” He walked away and sat on the ground, leaning against the trunk of a tree. After a moment, Kevin Laine, who was neither a petty man nor a stupid one, smiled to himself.