The Fell Sword (82 page)

Mogon laughed. ‘Ash has no rivals, but he perceives all of us – every sentient being – as an enemy because he understands the potential in every thinking thing to rise to power. Ash desires to be a god. Or perhaps to be God.’ Her laugh was bitter. ‘I am accounted old at half a thousand years, and I have seen enough to know that the showdown with Ash has been long and long in the making. My father believed—’ She looked at Tapio.

Geraaargkh shook himself and hunkered over. ‘We were promised!’ he said. ‘Promised a king. A leader.’

Tapio’s smile grew cynical. ‘
A messiah – isn’t that what we were expecting?
’

‘Half the Wild thinks it is you,’ Geraaargkh said.

‘It is said,’ Tekkismark spat. ‘You are the one. The one who will free us from the wheel and make the gears turn any way they will.’ He clashed his forearms together, and they made the same sound, Redmede thought, that a peasant made as he sharpened a scythe.

Tapio looked disgusted. ‘
I am not your messiah. We need to come down from the clouds and solve this ourselves.
’

Mogon sat back heavily and her big oak chair gave a momentous creak, almost a groan. ‘We were promised. By the Lady Tar.’

Nita Qwan nodded. ‘Tar is a name I know, even among my people in Ifraqu’ya. But we call her Tara. The Great She-Wolf.’

Mogon’s crest was almost a bristle brush – every spine seemed to strain for the beamed ceiling. ‘Tar is no wolf, man-who-cooks. Tar is another of the great serpents. A dragon.’

Geraaargkh said, ‘Bears call her “The First”.’

Tapio sipped his wine and sang a lilting song in an irk language. The pace was slow and steady, and the tuning was alien to human ears, but had a stately dignity that transcended melody.

‘
First who slipped through dappled glades

First who danced among the blades.
’

Nita Qwan cleared his throat in the momentary silence that followed the irk’s song. ‘So – Tar is good? And Ash is evil?’

Tapio grinned so that all his fangs showed. ‘
Out in the hall many folk are dancing in the Yule, proclaiming the light against the dark. And despite my love’s passion for cleaning, there are small creatures that live in the hall – mice, rats, even some beetles. When the flashing heels of a dancer slay one such, was the dancer good, or evil? While proclaiming the triumph of light, they may slay a dozen mice and a hundred beetles
.’

Mogon extended a long, taloned arm. ‘And if the mice and the beetles were to band together and form an army against the dancers would they understand what they were fighting? Would the dancers?’

Redmede felt thick and stupid. He stood up. ‘What are we to do, then?’ he asked.

Tapio laughed. ‘
Oh, we’ll fight, alongside the mice and the beetles,
’ he said. ‘
Just don’t imagine we’re the heroes. For all I know, Ash is locked in a valiant struggle with the very soul of evil, and we will provide the tiny distraction that leads to the ultimate triumph of darkness.
’

Redmede grabbed the table. ‘Really?’

Tapio shook his head. ‘
Nay, brother. I am in a foul mood. Listen: west of the Inner Sea everything is moving. Hordes are coming – greater than armies. This is just one tiny part of whatever is going on. We – the mice and the beetles – can only go by what we see. Some dancers avoid us on the floor – some even pick us up and move us tenderly to the wall. Others stomp on us whenever they can
.’ He sighed, raised an eyebrow, and looked at Redmede from under it. ‘
But aren’t you Jacks suspicious any time someone tells you that they represent the side of good and right?
’

Redmede nodded. ‘That’d be the Church.’

Mogon shook her head. ‘No – that’s everyone. Once the dispute turns to war, every side claims the others are demons.’ She turned to Tapio. ‘Can we not approach this Thorn and offer a deal? Or simply make an alliance and use it as a shield?’ She nodded. ‘And I agree about the west. Someone has kicked all the anthills there.’

‘
We can piss on that fire when the flames lick us. As for Thorn.
’ Tapio shrugged. ‘
It is probably worth a try.
’

Geraaargkh said, ‘Too late for us. He attacked us. Even now, the cubs of my people are hunted in the woods.’

Mogon was watching Tapio. ‘You want this,’ she said.

He gave her a wry smile, full of humour and sorrow with a spice of self-knowledge. ‘
I’m no messiah,
’ he said. ‘
But I’m a pretty fair general. Go to war with Ash? No one will ever forget us!
’

Geraaargkh growled. ‘You and your songs will not save the life of one cub, or provide winter food for a starving bear.’

Tekkismark made the scythe sound again. ‘Always, my kind are the fodder in the wars of the powers. It would be different to fight on a side we had chosen ourselves.’

Tapio seemed fascinated by his moccasins. ‘
I’m sure your kind always imagine that they choose their sides.
’

Tekkismark’s mouth opened – sideways – and his purple-ichor tonguebeak shot out for a moment. ‘No!’ he scratched out. ‘That delusion is for men. We are slaves to our message breeze, and nothing else.’ He snapped the chitinous claws on one delicate hand. ‘Coming here, I was against war with Thorn. Meeting you, I war will make. When the spring turns and the hard water softens, then my people will come.’

Geraaargkh snarled. ‘My people are at war, although many do not yet know it. But we will have lost the Adnacrags by spring. Where will we make a stand? And how? Thorn’s power increases every day, and he gathers men and creatures from many lands.’

Tapio scratched under his chin, a gesture curiously at odds with his languorous elfin dignity. ‘
Thorn – what a pleasure to say his name aloud – Thorn will have to make war on men to seize the Adnacrags, and men, as we all know, can be brilliant at making war.
’

‘The only thing at which they have skill,’ Tekkismark said drily.

‘They build snug dens,’ Geraaargkh said.

‘
At any rate, he will have to fight several great battles to take your mountains. We need not hurry. It will take him a long time to reach us
,’ Tapio said. He wobbled his head from side to side – not a human gesture. ‘
A year for him, or perhaps two. And three – at least – before the rising tide out of the West crests and overruns us
.’

Mogon shook her crested head. ‘Every victory will make him stronger,’ she insisted. ‘Even now, Ash has sent him something abominable. When it grows to maturity, it will be mighty indeed.’ She paused. ‘Is Ash behind the rise of the West?’

‘
It flatters me, Duchess, that you ask me about Ash as if he and I were peers. I have no idea what Ash intends. Nor what has happened in the West, where there are powers with whom I, thanks be to Tara, have never contended.
’ Tapio nodded thoughtfully. ‘
But what you say of men and war is fully true, my friends, and perhaps it would suit us to fight like men. And like the Wild, too. Will you have me as your High Constable?
’

Mogon smiled. ‘If only my brother had lived. But yes.’

One by one, the others nodded. Tekkismark made an odd sound, and a scent like almonds washed over them.

‘He makes the breeze of agreement,’ Mogon said.

‘
Well
,’ Tapio said slowly. ‘
If Thorn insists on tying himself to an army of men – we can always use the mountains against him.
’

‘We could ally ourselves with the men he fights,’ Nita Qwan said.

Every head turned.

Mogon’s head bobbed up and down, and there was a sound like a strong pair of men using a two-man saw. The Duchess was laughing.

‘We could go to war, and ally with men,’ she said softly. ‘We, the last free peoples in the West, could ally with our oppressors to fight off one of our own.’

Tapio met her eye. ‘
Yes
,’ he said. ‘
Yes, we could
.’ He laid a hand on Mogon. ‘
Victory in war is usually the result of compromising what you want and behaving like those you despise.
’

Later, Bill Redmede couldn’t remember a vote, or a show of hands, or even further discussion. Merely that Tamsin came to the door and seemed to bring a scent of peppermint and cinnamon with her, and then they were all in the hall, dancing – men, and irks, and bears, and Wardens and one boglin wight.

All the females formed a circle in the middle, and began to dance widdershins, turning first outward to the males and then inwards to each other, with many a gesture and a twist, while the males circled them like hungry wolves dancing the other way around, clapping and turning as the music rose. Redmede found himself with Bess again, and she grinned at him and he loved her – reached out and took her hand, and she pressed his tight and then swept past as the music swept higher and faster – left to Mogon, nimble on her feet, and right to Lady Tamsin and her entrancing smile.

The males left the great circle, and they formed smaller circles of their own, so that the central figure of women was surrounded by a dozen small circles of men. Redmede found himself behind a short, dark-haired man he didn’t know, who was speaking to Tapio, who was next in the progression. The circles dissolved into a promenade, and Redmede caught Bess’s hands again as Tamsin laughed behind him.

‘It is like the old days,’ she said. ‘All the barriers are down, and anyone can dance.’

She laughed, and the man with her – the short man – laughed as well, and a trace of smoke came out his nostrils.

Harndon – The Queen

Sometimes, things can be saved by nothing more than custom. The King’s indifference – she couldn’t call it more than that – might have ripened into something worse, except that it
was
Christmas and he was a great knight, a good king, and a good husband. The habit of being a good husband at Christmas stopped him from taking any terrible action and so the day itself came.

The Queen had sent a dozen notes to her allies. As the war between her servants and those of the Galles at court was nigh on open, she took precautions learned in her father’s court to the south, and her training stood up to the test. It began with mass and she attended with Lady Almspend, Lady Emota and ten more of her ladies, all in dark red velvet and ermine as warm as the spirit of fire.

Mass was held in the great cathedral of Harndon, built by six generations of wool merchants, goldsmiths, knights and kings. Its spire towered over even the royal palace; the central window of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas was accounted one of the fairest in Christendom, and with the first light of a winter day shining through the east wall’s magnificent depiction of Christ’s birth, men might be forgiven for thinking that they were watching the selfsame event as it happened.

A dozen Gallish squires and twenty more Albans who aped their style were waiting in the square outside the cathedral door with buckets of slush and truncheons. They loitered around the Queen’s cross, built by the King’s grandmother to celebrate the birth of his father.

They thought themselves hidden by the press of the crowd, and for a little while, the mob shouted, ‘The Queen is a foreign whore!’ and other epithets.

The leader of the squires was disturbed to see a dozen men on black horses, in matching black surcoats, ride down the Cheapside. They filled the mouth of the Cheap from shop front to shop front, their massive horses breathing plumes of vapour like so many equine dragons.

He pointed them out to another squire.

‘Time to go!’ shouted the second man. ‘The bitch has friends!’

But the mouth of Saint Thomas Street was suddenly filled with apprentices, and every man and boy of them had a wooden club. They came right up to the edge of the mob and halted, very well disciplined.

The mob stopped shouting cries against the Queen.

The trained men came marching down Saint Mary Magdelene towards the square, and the rattle of their drums cleared the mob as fast as boiling water clears ice from a pump handle. There was only one way for them to go, past the King’s Arms tavern and along Dragon Street, and so they went. Or rather, some did, and others edged towards the knights of Saint Thomas and away from the noisy squires by the cross.

The square was empty when the Queen passed through. Two hundred shop boys and apprentices bowed deeply as she came, and when she turned and smiled at the trained men, Edmund thought he might die on the spot.

But the Queen herself knew full well that she had not won a victory, but merely set back the day of reckoning.

The King didn’t seem to think anything of it, although he did, at the end of mass, comment on the number of militia in the streets. ‘A nice demonstration of loyalty,’ he said.

The Queen couldn’t see whether the Captal was discomfited by it or not.

Later, at the palace, teams of minstrels and jongleurs arrived, and the Queen and her ladies changed hurriedly – although an outsider might have been forgiven for mistaking their speed for something other than hurry. And then, in a long procession led by the Queen, nearly every woman in the palace not actively involved in cooking or laying the Christmas table walked down into the yard with torches and were met there by the King and as many gentlemen, pages, servants and hangers-on, and the whole multitude went out into the streets by torchlight. There was a fair snow falling, and the air was brisk and cold, and the King kissed his wife a dozen times.

‘Will we dance?’ he asked.

The Queen smiled. ‘My lord, if it is your will, we may dance while we carol.’

The King’s eye was drawn to something at the edge of the torchlight. ‘When I was a boy,’ he said, and his voice was far away, ‘adventures would come to us at Christmas – giants, and wild men, and once, the Fairy Knight himself, riding on a unicorn, challenging my father’s knights to a tournament on the frozen river.’

‘Oh!’ said the Queen, in delight. ‘What happened then?’

‘The showy bastard dropped a dozen of my father’s best on their arses and we all drank wine and felt like the lesser men. But he gave us the most beautiful gifts, and it was like living a chanson.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard – I’ve heard some evil things recently.’ His eyes met hers. ‘About you. I don’t think I believe them.’