The City in the Lake (10 page)

Timou took his advice and, as they drew closer to the City, looked carefully both at the City that rose before them and into the Lake. It was different to see the City and its reflection herself than to listen to stories, and Timou stared, enthralled. Looking at both together, she saw that there was a greater contrast between the two Cities than she had expected.

The real City was old—battered and worn by time. It was all stone, butter-yellow and cream. She could see as they drew closer that the stones of the Bridge and the walls had once been intricately carved with leaves and flowers, blurred now with age.

In the Lake, the City was new and sharp-edged, bright as though it lay in a warmer light than the light that fell on the City above. Looking at the reflected City, Timou saw the carvings with all their delicacy intact, untouched by time. Looking up, she could see the echoes of the original forms, half hidden now by age and by encroaching mosses. “How strange,” Timou breathed. “How beautiful.”

“See the tigers?” said the young man.

Timou looked up at the great stone tigers frozen on their plinths, and then down quickly at the tigers in the Lake. The water moved, running up against the shore in little waves, seeming to suggest with its movement a possibility of echoing movement in the reflected tigers. Then the carriage was past, and slowing at last to a halt.

“This is your first time in the City, isn’t it?” said the young man, flinging open the carriage door and jumping down without waiting for the step to be placed. He held up a hand to Timou. “Tell me where you’re going, if you like, and I’ll escort you.”

Timou took the offered hand after a moment of hesitation, not wanting to appear rude, and stepped down from the carriage to the cobbles of the street, standing at last within the City at the heart of the Kingdom. She reclaimed her hand and looked off into the City. “I think . . .,” she said, “I think I am going to the Palace.”

C
HAPTER
6

or several days after Timou left the village, Jonas went about his life there with a kind of absentminded thoughtfulness. He thought of Timou, but wistfully. He would have gone with her if she had let him. But, well, she
was
Kapoen’s daughter. Probably she would find herself more suited to walk on strange roads through this land and into the City at its heart than he would have been himself. She would go to the City and find her father, and all would be well. Then she would come back. He mixed potions for the apothecary and repaired a gap in Raen’s fence and had a mug of bitter ale with Pol and Tair at noon. He did not let himself remember that Kapoen himself had not come back from the City.

Jonas had come to this village four years before from a town six days’ walk to the south—a town of nearly a thousand families, much larger than Timou’s village. But that had not been his home: Jonas had been born far away. He had come into this Kingdom entirely by accident from the lands beyond. This Kingdom was like a dream to a man from beyond its borders: warm and peaceful and quiet. He had been walking, exhausted and half blind with memory and grief, down a road like any other road. Jonas remembered that, from time to time, although he tried not to. He remembered the broken walls of Kanha at his back, and the black smoke rising up behind him into the ash-gray sky. He remembered the distant cries, the defeated and victorious indistinguishable at that distance. He remembered the refugees on the road, their shocked empty faces. They had kept out of his way.

He had not known he would walk away from his army, and his life, and ruined Kanha. He had not clearly known he
had
walked away until the sounds died behind him, until the black smoke faded from view in the dimming light. Then he had known. And then he wanted nothing but to walk away forever and never go back. He had walked through the night, and somehow, when the sun rose—which it did from an odd direction—he had been alone on the road, and it was not the same road.

Jonas had traded his second-best knife for a loaf of bread, three hard-cooked eggs, and a seat on a farmer’s wagon when the farmer took his beets and lettuces to town. In town—a town without walls, a town where no one had heard of Kanha or knew there was war—Jonas had sold his short heavy sword and had bought a bath, clothing such as people in the Kingdom wore, and a decent meal at a clean inn. Then he had started walking again. He had walked until he came to a small village, set amid pretty wooded hills and green pastures filled with peaceful sheep. He had found a room at a widow’s house to stay in, and work that had nothing to do with soldiering.

And he had drifted quietly through his days in this village, Jonas reflected, with hardly more thought in his head than a sheep might have had, until one day he had happened to notice that every drop of morning dew and every falling drop of rain, as they said in this country, reflected Timou’s face. . . .

He had been patient. It was abundantly clear that Timou would always back away from a man who coaxed and importuned and followed her about the countryside begging for her glance. No. Still very young, Timou was not yet certain she cared for the interest of men. What she wanted was to learn the arts of the mages . . . of which Jonas had only the vaguest idea, except magecraft in this country bore little resemblance to the violent sorcery of the land he had left behind.

Certainly Kapoen was nothing like the sorcerers of that land. When Jonas had first come to this village, Kapoen had given him one thoughtful, summing look that seemed to pierce him through. Then the mage had said, in his deep voice, “Time is the best cure for deep wounds. Go speak to the apothecary. I believe he could find work for a careful man.”

This easy knowledge had shaken Jonas, who had thought he had learned to keep his private thoughts private. He had avoided the mage after that, as best he could in a small village. But Kapoen, a private man himself, had not seemed inclined to intrude; Jonas had eventually learned to trust that he would not.

Jonas could not guess whether the mage had known when he had begun to see Timou’s face reflected in the rain. He had avoided Kapoen even more assiduously, and the mage had not seemed inclined to seek him out. So Jonas had waited, saying as little as he could manage. And Timou went quietly on through her days, apparently oblivious, learning magecraft from her father and that men were fools from the one or two who thought they ought to catch her eye. Jonas had hoped he might persuade her otherwise. He’d been willing to face Kapoen for that chance: Timou’s father might have a cool way about him, but Jonas knew Kapoen loved his daughter, and thought the mage might eventually learn to approve of a man who did the same.

And then the spring failed, a spring Jonas had looked to with hope. Kapoen left the village, and then Timou after him. It had hurt her when Kapoen left her, Jonas suspected. She was not as cool of heart as she thought herself. He’d seen the way she was with other girls’ mothers, with Taene’s mother. He suspected that the absence of her own mother, accepted so matter-of-factly by the villagers who’d known her all her life, had been harder on Timou than anyone understood—than Timou understood herself. And then Kapoen had left her behind as well. . . . No wonder Timou had followed her father. And no wonder she had refused all his offers of companionship, no matter how carefully offered: of course she was afraid to let herself grow close to anyone who might leave her. Jonas regretted now that he’d let her go away on her own, that he hadn’t insisted on accompanying her, or followed her.

On the sixth night after Timou’s departure, Jonas dreamed of a savage wind that came down from the heights and whipped massive dark clouds into froth that streamed past the moon. Great trees as old as the world broke and crashed around him. High above, something that was not the wind wailed, urgent and predatory.

Timou ran past him, down a path that twisted through the forest. She was all in white and her white hair flew behind her: in the wind-torn dark she seemed to shine with a light of her own. There were spots of blood in the tracks her bare feet left. Jonas, stunned, reached his hands out to her, but she was past before he could catch hold of her. She did not see him. He tried to go after her, but in his dream he could not move. She ran past and was gone.

After Timou came the wild hounds of the storm. Lean white hounds, each the size of a pony, they coursed Timou like a hare: their eyes were the wild yellow eyes of birds of prey, and as they ran they gave tongue with the high cries of hunting eagles. Behind the hounds rode the Hunter on his white horse. He seemed to fill the whole world. A tangle of black antlers crossed the sky far above him, or perhaps he wore the branches of a great spreading oak as a crown. His horse shone like the moon. It was shod with lightning; thunder crashed when its hooves touched the ground.

Jonas tried to cry out, but he was voiceless and made no sound. The Hunter turned his great antlered head and met Jonas’s eyes with his own: frosted golden eyes, expressionless and terrible, eyes that saw him clearly, though everyone knew the Hunter was blind when he rode through the land outside his own dark Kingdom. Then he was past, rain lashing down in his wake, piercingly cold, like arrows out of the night, and Jonas knew that he drove Timou to a dark destination, but he could not imagine what that might be.

He woke shaking.

That day was hard. Jonas went on with small tasks about Raen’s house, loading the loft in her barn with hay and repairing a hole in her poultry shed before a fox worried it big enough to get in. But through these tasks he several times found himself standing for minutes at a time looking at nothing, the hammer forgotten in his hands, listening for the high wild cry of hounds running before the storm.

He went, out of habit, to the inn for his noon meal, but when he got there, he found he did not want to go inside. He stood for a moment listening to the voices within—cheerful, ordinary, everyday voices, with an undertone of worry that no one wanted to acknowledge openly—and felt suddenly that he could not bear to pretend to be one of them when he was not. To pretend to be well when he was not well, when nothing was well—when he felt nothing might ever be well again. He went back to Raen’s house and took bread and cold meat out to the fields to eat under a tree. The tree was butter-yellow with autumn. It made him feel the pressure of time at his back, as though this was the first year he had ever watched move toward its end. When a long line of geese went by overhead, Jonas flinched at their voices.

That night he dreamed the same dream, and woke with tears cold as rain on his face. It was raining when he got up and went to the window. There was thunder in the distance. Jonas listened to the thunder with foreboding, as though it were an omen. He had never thought of omens before in his life.

He went through the whole of that day as though he were still half asleep, which might have been true, since he had spent half the night staring out the window and listening to the distant thunder. After he drove the hammer down on his thumb twice, Jonas put his tools away and went instead for a long walk through the fields. He took his small rabbit-bow so he could pretend to be hunting. He did not even string the bow. It was too easy to imagine the feelings of the rabbit. He thought he might never go hunting again. He came back at dusk, walking with long strides to beat the night to Raen’s door. He had never feared the night before. He feared it now.

He lay awake for a long time. Then he got up and paced. Weariness drove him to lie down again near dawn. The first pale hints of coming light were in the window before he felt safe enough to close his eyes. He should not have felt safe: it seemed he had no more shut his eyes than the dream had him. For the third time, the storm hounds ran before the Hunter, pursuing Timou through his dreams. This time, when he woke, he was muffling a scream behind his hands, as though he was afraid even to make a sound.

“What is it?” the widow asked gently when Jonas sat at her table that morning stirring the breakfast porridge without tasting it. He had been late to the table, but Raen had said nothing. He had thought she had not noticed his trouble. He had not meant her to notice. When he only looked at her wordlessly, she said, “I don’t mean to intrude. But I bore five children, and raised them through all the troubles and joys and heartbreaks of their youths. If some difficulty has found you, my dear, you might do worse than tell me.”

Jonas told her his dream.

The widow leaned her chin in her hand and listened quietly while he told her, her eyes, wise with her years, on his face. Then she said, “Well, Jonas, you are going to have to go after her, aren’t you?”

“Do you think I should?” Jonas stood up restlessly and went to the window. The day was dawning fair and cloudless. There was not a hint of stormy weather anywhere about, and yet he thought he might feel thunder in the earth, right through the floor of the widow’s small neat house. “She didn’t want me to go with her.”

“Do you think you will be able to stay here, waiting and blind?”

Once the question was asked, the answer was obvious. “No,” Jonas admitted.

“Then you’ll have to go. Once you find her, I think she will manage to cope somehow with your presence.”

“If I find her,” said Jonas.

“Oh,” said the widow calmly, “I think you’ll find her. I’ve known young men in love before, once or twice. I think you’ll find her.”

Jonas had given Timou his leather knapsack. He was not sorry he had given it to her, but he was sorry he did not have another. He borrowed a satchel from Raen.

“Nerril and his family will be sorry to see you go,” Raen observed. Nerril was the apothecary.

“I know,” said Jonas.

“He will fear for you.”

Jonas shrugged. “Many people travel between the City and the outlying lands. Most of them arrive safely where they want to go.”

“Not all.”

“I’ve been on the road before.”

“Not
that
road,” said Raen. “I came that way, once. I walked that road once, from the City, where I was born. I came here and lived here and was happy. I never went back to the City, but I remember the road that lies between.”

Jonas’s hands had stilled on the table, where he had been sorting out the best candlelighter and candles from the assortment the old woman had dropped in front of him. He said, surprised, “You’re from the City?”

“When you’ve lived somewhere sixty-two years, people forget you ever lived anywhere else. But I did once. Does it seem amazing to you that I should stay here, so far from the great City, where I lived as a child?”

Jonas made a little gesture of negation. Nothing seemed more likely or more reasonable. He thought about living in one tiny village for sixty-two years, never going more than a day’s travel from its quiet and peace. He thought it sounded a really fine idea, if he could do it with Timou. He said, “What is it like? The great forest?”

“Haunted,” the widow said tersely. “Hunted.”

“Hunted. By what?”

“Who knows? The blind Hunter, I suppose, and his storm hounds. Or maybe by something else, something quieter.” Raen was quiet for a moment. “You have to go, of course, my dear. You should go. But be careful. Never leave the road.”