Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword of Avalon (15 page)

“How long has your mother been ill?”

“Three days now,” came Badger’s reply. “When the moon was new, a man comes up from the coast with cloth to trade, says people sick down there ever since traders came from the Middle Sea. He was fine when he comes, a little fevered when he goes away. Willow Woman told him stay till he’s better—likely he’s dead in the marshes somewhere by now. Guess he didn’t go soon enough—a few days after, my mother starts feeling tired, has a fever, can’t swallow food.”

“Has anyone else fallen ill?” Kiri asked.

“Beaver, Sallow’s son—he was always hanging around the stranger, asking questions. He throws up a lot, and now his neck swells like a bull.”

It was a contagion, then, thought Anderle with a sinking of the heart, not some nameless illness that attacked the old. The raised platforms that supported the houses of the Village were looming up out of the mist. Soon they would know. The dugout rocked and she held on to the side as Badger brought it alongside the ladder and made it fast.

The look on Badger’s face as they gathered around the sick woman’s bed told the priestess that Willow Woman must have gotten worse even in the time he had been gone. The sound of her breathing was loud in the quiet room.

“She fades in and out—” said Badger’s wife. “Says it’s hard to move.”

The headman nodded. “Mother—here’s the Lady of Avalon. Won’t you say hello?”

Willow Woman had always been active, out in all weather and brown as a nut with exposure to wind and sun. Now she was deathly pale. Anderle knelt beside the bed and grasped the thin hand, her apprehension increasing as she felt the pulse in the woman’s wrist racing like the heart of a frightened bird.

“The blessing of the Goddess be with you, my dear one,” she said softly.

Willow Woman’s eyelids fluttered open and her lips twitched in what might have been a smile. “Night Lady . . . takes me . . . soon. . . .” she got out between labored breaths. “Watch over . . . the . . . boy. . . .”

“Kiri, she is in pain! Is there something you can do?”

The older priestess gripped Anderle’s shoulders and moved her aside. “Let me see to her now. Go out and purify yourself. There are evil spirits here.”

“You have seen this before?” Anderle got to her feet, blinking back tears.

“I have.” Kiri’s face was grim. She had always been a big woman. Now,as she interposed herself between the high priestess and the dying woman, she seemed to have the enduring solidity of one of the great standing stones. “The throat swells and becomes like leather until the sufferer cannot breathe. Unless she has great strength to resist, she will not survive, and she will not be the only one.”

 

 

 

WOODPECKER STOOD WITH THE other students in the Hall of the Sun, trying to ignore the apprehension that coiled in his gut. This plague that had struck the Lake Village was like some terror in a nightmare, the faceless, voiceless kind that could be resisted neither by strength nor by magic. Willow Woman had died from it, and his old playmate Beaver, and then Redfern, whom Woodpecker had thought of as his mother until a year ago. Even old Kiri’s legendary strength had failed. She had sickened and died, and Vole, who had been her student in healing, had succumbed as well.

He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that Tirilan was still healthy, and Lady Anderle must be all right, for she had ordered them to meet her here, and she would not have done so if she were sickening. But the early summer sunshine that filtered in through the openings between the lower part of the roof and the upper canopy that let out the smoke from the central hearth had little power to dispel the fear that chilled his soul.

Had someone else died? Since Vole fell ill, the students had been kept isolated from the rest of the community.
Waiting to see if anyone else was going to get sick,
the boy thought dismally. Each morning, food had been left for them at the dormitory doors.
Perhaps the danger is over, and she will assign us roles in some great ceremony to mourn those who are gone.

But he knew this was not how such news would have been given. And Anderle’s face, when she appeared in the doorway, was gaunt and grim. Woodpecker saw with shock the first threads of silver glinting in her dark hair.

“I am happy to see you all in good health,” she said as she took her seat in the carved chair, and as Woodpecker and the others made the formal obeisance, they knew the sentiment was no empty formality. “This disease seems to strike first at the young and the old. Belkacem has died, and Damarr is stricken.” Without giving them a chance to respond to the loss of a teacher who, if not beloved, had seemed as eternal as the distant hills, she went on.

“But we have lost only one of you children, and we mean to keep it that way. Avalon is no longer a safe haven. To continue to expose you to this danger would be to betray the trust of those who sent you here. I am sending you all back to your tribes.”

“On foot?” asked Rouikhed.

“Alone?” echoed Analina. “What if the plague is at Belerion too?”

“So far the illness seems confined to the south coast.” Lady Anderle answered the last question first. “I have gone out upon the spirit roads and spoken with the Ti-Sahharin. You will follow the old trackway through the marshes to the east until you come to the hill of the Winding One’s spring. Some of you, at least, know how to follow the flow of power that goes that way, even if you lose the path. Your tribes will send men to meet you there and take you home.”

Woodpecker reached out to grip Grebe’s shoulder as the others began to ask questions. The Lake Village was the only home they had ever known.

“Tirilan, you will go to Nuya at Carn Ava,” the high priestess said then. “Woodpecker and Grebe, you will be taken westward to dwell with the shepherds on the high moors.”

Woodpecker let go of his foster brother and took a step toward Tirilan. Why couldn’t Anderle have sent them off together? But a look at the Lady’s face told him that it would be useless to protest. He did not think he had ever seen anyone who looked so desperately tired. She probably had not even been trying to separate him from her daughter, only to find safe nests for all the chicks she had gathered here.

Will I ever see you again?
his gaze asked Tirilan.

I will not forget you—
hers replied.

 

 

 

SUMMER PASSED INTO FALL, and the plague ran its course. A messenger was sent to take Grebe back to the Lake Village, but Woodpecker was given a new name and ordered to spend the winter with Lady Leka in the Dales instead of returning to Avalon. As spring approached he saw swans flying eastward and wished he was seeing them on the marshes once more, descending in such numbers their white backs covered the pools. But when the priest Larel came to the Ai-Akhsi lands, it was to escort him to stay for a time with the family of Analina, in a coastal village in Belerion.

“I don’t understand,” the boy said as they made their way southward. “The Lady talked so much about all the training I must have, but the plague is over, and still I am being herded from one place to another like a one-horned goat that nobody wants in his herd. Is Tirilan back at Avalon?”

Has she changed?
He bit back the question.
Have I?
He knew that he was growing when his tunic sleeves got too short and tight across the shoulders, and he, who had always been graceful, found himself stumbling over feet suddenly too large and legs too long. He supposed that was to be expected now that he was fifteen. A glimpse of his face in a woodland pool showed him serious brown eyes and a beak of a nose beneath a shock of dark red hair.

They were crossing a long valley between two lines of rolling downs. On the slope to the south someone had cut the stylized figure of a horse into the chalk. Every year the people of the Vale scoured the encroaching grass from its outlines as part of a great festival. As they followed the shaded land across the valley, the image of the horse appeared and disappeared through the trees.

Larel laughed. “The Lady said that you would ask. Tiri came home again at Midwinter, and we all wish that you could be there as well. I am to tell you that there are two reasons for keeping you away. The first is that a leader needs to understand the lives of his people. By living in different regions you will learn things that cannot be taught on Avalon.”

Woodpecker sighed. It was true that the windswept rocky moors of the northern Ai-Utu were a world away from the close marshes that protected the Tor. For the first few moons he had been dreadfully homesick, but in time he had learned to love the great sweep of open sky and the way the green turf clung to the bones of the land.

“And the second reason?” he asked then.

“It would appear that your secret has not been kept as well as we believed. One of the other students, no doubt quite innocently, must have said something about the bronze-haired boy who was so good at games, and set your enemies to wondering. Galid has been making inquiries. He fears that if you live to manhood, one day you will come after him.”

And if I live, I will. He will be right to fear. . . .
“Are you moving me now because they know I was in the Dales?” he said aloud.

“That is what we have heard,” the priest replied.

“What story will you tell to explain my presence this time?” On the moors, he had been an orphaned cousin needing a home. By the time he was moved to the Dales, he had learned enough about sheep to be taken on as a herdboy. But he did not think there would be many sheep by the sea.

“Analina’s father needs another clerk. The port where the tin traders put in is a busy place, where people from all over the island come to trade. Your northern accent will not seem too strange. You will be known as Kanto there.”

Woodpecker sighed. This would be the third name they had given him, and none of them was his own. Until they let him settle down somewhere, he would never learn who
Mikantor
might be.

“It’s not my accent, but my counting that will sink me,” he said when the silence had gone on too long. “If you want sheep counted, I’m your man, but I don’t know about anything more complicated than that.”

“When we camp for the night we shall practice.” The priest grinned. “I have brought slates along for that very purpose. You were quick at your sums, as I recall. We’ll have you calculating higher numbers in no time at all.”

Woodpecker groaned. He had been very glad to leave the sheep behind, but suddenly he missed them.

 

 

 

ANALINA’S FAMILY LIVED IN a village that bordered the curve of a bay that faced south. When Woodpecker looked through the open door of the store shed, he could see across the thatched roofs of the houses to the water, blue today, with a ruffling of whitecaps fluffed up by a light breeze, to the pointed island that guarded the bay. After the windy silences of the moors and the Dales, to share the busy life of a community again had been a shock. The clustered houses reminded Woodpecker of the Lake Village. Whether raised in argument or laughter, you could always hear human voices in Belerion. Although at first he had started at every sound, people, however noisy, were much more interesting than sheep. The sea breeze made the blood race in his veins. He fancied that beneath the briny scent of the ocean he could smell more exotic odors from lands whose names he was just beginning to learn.

Or perhaps it was the things in Master Anaterve’s store shed that he was smelling, he thought as he picked up his lump of chalk and his slate and turned back to the pile of fleeces he was tallying. Logs of a wood called cedar lay across the rafters, and bags of aromatic herbs hung from the walls, brought by the winged ships that everyone said would be returning as soon as the season of storms was past. Until now, it had never occurred to him to wonder where the traders who brought oxcarts full of goods to the great festivals got their wares.

Master Anaterve was a dealer who collected anything he thought might sell, but especially the bun-shaped ingots of tin he got from the miners who scraped the ore from the “tin streams” on the moors and smelted it in rude furnaces. In the world of the great, bronze was more valuable than gold, and since the gods in their wisdom had chosen to place the sources of copper and tin in such widely divergent regions, to create bronze required trade.

But the relative value of the ingots in relation to a hundred other commodities was a constantly shifting calculation. How much was a fleece worth, or a golden earring, or an ingot of tin, when the basic unit of value was a cow? Within a few days Woodpecker had realized why the merchant required the services of a servant who could count a pile of ingots more than once and get the same total each time.

And after half a year with the merchant he thought he understood why the Lady of Avalon had sent him here. A sheepherder worried about taking care of his family. A king had to care for a whole tribe, and the key to getting all those things a family could not make for itself was trade. To acquire those things, and to make the weapons to defend his people, a king must have bronze. If the Great Land needed tin from Belerion, no less did the Isle of the Mighty need the copper with which it must be combined, and the supply of accessible ore in the mines from which the Ai-Ushen had derived their wealth was coming to an end.

He cast an indulgent glance at Master Anaterve, who was examining the latest load of tin to come down from the hills. The merchant was a good man, who drove a hard bargain but an honest one, and believed that men would always act rationally if they understood where their best interest lay. But two years with the tribes had shown Woodpecker another side of humanity. When times became too dire, he thought unhappily, men gorged like starving wolves. That was not really greed, but the desperation of those who grabbed what they could because there was no predicting what they might need.