The Wraeththu Chronicles (43 page)

"No," Moswell insisted patiently. "Men are crude, often ugly beings. The ones in the photographs are nothing to go by. Most of them are not half as attractive."

Physical ugliness was another new concept for me to ponder. Of course, I wanted to see it, but it was a few minutes' walk back to the library, and Moswell didn't want to go.

"Another time," he said.

"But what is ugly?" I wanted to know.

"Your questions are tiresome and mostly irrelevant!" Moswell said.

In the afternoons, Swithe took over as my mentor. He was a shy and introverted person, uneasy in my presence, but his head, like mine, was full of dreams. I could see that, no matter how hard he tried to conceal it. The first time we met he said, "What do you know, Swift?" with a shaky smile.

"Oh, lots of things," I answered airily. "I know the names of all the plants on the estate, the secret names that is, and I know where the spirit lives in the lake (it's near the drooping tree), and how to call him up to grant you wishes. I haven't tried it yet, but Cobweb told me how."

Swithe had difficulty maintaining a smile. He always looked as if someone was after him and I wondered if he had done something terrible somewhere else. Perhaps hara or even (with a shiver of delight) men would come looking for him some day. Perhaps he was a sorcerer. He had sorcerer's eyes. They changed color with the weather and Cobweb said that was always a way you could tell. I don't know what he was supposed to teach me, but mostly we spent our time together discussing the ponderous statements Moswell came out with in the morning. That was how I came to memorize what Moswell taught me. I needed to know just so that I could tell Swithe about it later. Swithe never actually criticized his colleague, but I could tell he did not like Moswell.

"You, and others your age, are the first pure Wraeththu," he told me, and I asked what he meant.

"Well, some time ago, but not that long, only men lived on the Earth. They had lived here for a long, long time and they changed gradually over the years. Not all of them were bad."

"I'm glad," I said. "Have they all gone?"

Swithe made a noise of amusement. "Well, hara like your father would like to think so, but no, they haven't."

"What happened to them?"

"To be honest with you, Swift, I don't know for sure. When it happened, and I became Wraeththu, I was too young and too interested in the newness of being har to take much notice of exactly what went on. It was important that I should have done; I can see that now. One moment, we were living

in cities, hiding from men and killing them when we could and then suddenly ... I realized. There were more hara than humans. The cities had died around us. It happened . . . silently."

"You were once a man then, like Cobweb?"

Swithe nodded. "Like everyone. Everyone but for our children,"

As time went on, I began to learn more quickly, more from my interest in knowledge than any natural aptitude for study. Like all Varrish harlings, I had been taught to read and write at a very early age. It surprised me to learn that human children were not developed enough to understand these things until they were much, much older, nearly adult, I thought. Then came another surprise. Humans were not considered adult until they were about eighteen years old! How sluggish their brains must be. No wonder Wraeththu had taken their world away from them.

I had had little contact with harlings of my own age. Once, in a moment of outstanding bravado, I had mentioned it to my father and he had murmured obliquely that some day he hoped I would have brothers. He could not specify when. I wanted to go into the town because on those rare occasions Cobweb went there and took me with him, I had seen other harlings playing in the sun, laughing, running barefoot over grass. They had seemed so free and I could never join them.

"Swift," Terzian said to me, "the harlings in the town are . . . well, they do not have your breeding. You would gain nothing from mixing with them." Happiness, laughter; to my father these things were apparently nothing. "Anyway," he said with a smile, ruffling my hair, "you have Limba to play with."

This was true, of course. Limba was a good companion and fond of fun, but I couldn't talk to him, could I? If I did, he would just smile at me with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, but I don't believe he understood what I had said.

"All hara belong to different tribes," Moswell told me and then went on to explain what a tribe was. "Your tribe is the Varrs. You are a Varr, Swift."

Of course, I had heard this word before, but now it took on new meaning for me. I belonged to something, a great something. I was one of many. Swithe expanded on this for me later.

"All tribes live in different ways," he said. "They have different cultures. (Write that down, Swift.) Some of them live in deserts in the south and they do not look at things in the same way that we do. They are influenced by the desert. They are sort of dry, like snakes; deadly and quick. Some tribes cure a great deal about magic (like Cobweb does). I'm afraid the Varrs are not one of them. Varrs have no religion, they shun the gifts that have bloomed within us, following man's path of fighting and greed." He remembered hastily where he was and whom he was speaking to and smothered the glaze of fervor in his eyes.

Swithe's often barbed remarks about my tribe and my father did not pass completely over my head. Terzian would of course have been furious if he had known. I said to Swithe, "You do not completely like the Varrs, do you?"

I could see from his face that he longed to tell me why, and I wanted him to tell me, but all he said was, "It is not my place to tell you about your father, Swift."

This did not frighten me as it should. It only added to Terzian's mystique. I never told Cobweb what Swithe said.

Naturally I was curious about Swithe's old home, where he and Moswell had come from. Swithe seemed reluctant to tell me, but I gathered they had sprung from a minor branch of the Unneah (who I later learned were allied to the Varrs only through prudence—or fear). Terzian had ears everywhere. He had heard of my tutors' reputation and had whisked them from under the nose of their tribe leader, whose sons would doubtless suffer from inferior education because of it.

All through the long, hazy summer, I stored knowledge from Moswell and then got Swithe to explain what it meant. Moswell neatened up my writing and polished up my ability to read. I could tell that he considered the tuition Cobweb had previously given me in these directions to be sloppy and undisciplined. Swithe said that my scrawly, illegible writing cheered Moswell up, because it gave him something to moan about. In the afternoons, we would sit in the garden and Swithe would tell me what to write in my notebook. Once, he recited a rhyme he had made up and I learned it by heart and then wrote it down.

From ashes stumbled, whitened by the crumbled stone

Of all Man's fears and exclamations

Wraeththu rise and take the sword.

Though we are red-pawed,

Still panting from the kill,

We say: "This is not ain but justice,

This is neither shame nor pride."

Where then the darkness

Whose shadows we present as light?

Must it not be buried with the debris,

The earth stamped down in triumph.

Ignored then, this black-hot cone,

Suppressed beneath a grin of victory,

But always pulsing, hidden: The lights within the tomb, Visible only to those who pass Its granite door, at dusk, alone.

Cobweb was not impressed by this. I chanted it to him in the evening and when I had finished, he threw down his book and turned on the light.

"God, Swift, that's horrible!" he said. "Don't ever say it to me again, especially after dark!" He was not very pleasant to Swithe the next morning at breakfast. I insisted that the poem had only sounded horrible because of the way I had said it. "It is vile and unfit for harlings to hear and that's that!" my hostling declared vehemently.

After this Cobweb often used to sit with us in the garden, a somewhat icy presence which was unusual for him. Swithe would stare at him and he would throw back his head, gaze at Swithe haughtily and then go back to his reading, never turning the page. Blind I was to the implication of this behavior. It was part of a ritual dance I was yet to discover in life.

Near the end of the summer, my father had to go away for some weeks and Forever breathed a sigh of relief and happily sagged in its foundations, liven Moswell became more likeable. The four of us, my tutors, Cobweb and myself, took to spending the evenings together downstairs in the house. We played games with cards and dice and talked. Moswell liked to steer the conversation in adult directions. Once he said, "No doubt Terzian has heard the whisper of Gelaming activity in the south." He wanted to appear clever and politically minded to Cobweb.

My hostling had been idly juggling a couple of dice in his hand. Now he threw them at

the wall.

"In this house," he said darkly, "we shall have no talk of Gelaming!"

I could not understand why the atmosphere in the room became so cold after that. I knew that the Gelaming were another Wraeththu tribe for I had once heard Ithiel talking about them in the kitchen. Why the mere mention of them should anger Cobweb so, I could not guess. Moswell muttered an excuse to go to bed early and left the room. Cobweb sighed and rubbed his eyes. Swithe was hunched precariously on the edge of the sofa; Cobweb sat near his feet on the floor.

"I'm sorry," Cobweb said to the fireplace.

1 had a feeling that one of those times was approaching when I would be reminded that it was time I went upstairs, so I tried to make myself invisible in a corner of the room. Swithe reached out gingerly and put his hand on Cobweb's shoulder, sensing what he thought was distress. Only I knew it was rage. Cobweb leaned his cheek upon Swithe's hand and said, "Terzian is my life."

"Terzian is not here," Swithe suggested and Cobweb smiled. That, of course, was when

they noticed me.

"Go to bed now, Swift," Cobweb said.

W hen my father returned, when the leaves had begun to change their colors on the trees, Swithe's behavior became most eccentric. Several times I had to upbraid him, "Swithe, you are not listening to me!" and he would smile wistfully. I once went to his room and found it littered with scrunched-up pieces of paper, scrawled with verse which he would not let me read. I could not understand, for it was beyond me to work out the connection between my father's return and Swithe's behavior; beyond me to see the similarity between the discarded, savaged balls of poetry and Swithe himself. For Cobweb, the incident was over; his lord had come home.

Terzian had sustained a nasty wound in his thigh and had to rest. Cobweb never left his side, and Moswell and Swithe did not come to sit with us in the evening again for quite some time. One night, as I was lingering over my hot drink before bedtime,

Terzian said, in a low faraway voice, "Cobweb, do you remember . . . ?" and Cobweb had interrupted him.

"Please . . . don't!"

My father sighed, touching his thigh. "It's just the leg ... this wound, like yours ..."

"I know." Cobweb went over to where Terzian lay on the couch and stroked his brow. "If it's any comfort, mine was a lot worse than that."

I was longing to scream, "What? What?!" sensing something agonizingly interesting.

"You've changed so much since then," Terzian said, taking a lock of my hostling's hair in his fingers.

"Perhaps we both have."

"Do you blame me for what happened?"

Cobweb shook his head. "You thought I was dead."

"Not just that ... the other thing. It still makes you angry . . ."

"Not really. I think I was more angry for you than for myself." I recognized immediately an outright lie on my hostling's part.

There was a moment's silence, which gradually filled with tension.

"Cobweb, you know so many things. Do you know if ... ?"

"It's unfair of you to ask!" Cobweb answered sharply and my father sighed and nodded.

The next day, I just had to question Cobweb about this conversation. He pulled a face and looked at me hard, deciding whether or not to answer me.

"You might not remember, you were so young," he said.

"Remember what?" I asked impatiently.

"When the Strangers came here; two of them. They stayed here in the house. Pellaz and . . . the other one."

It was one of my earliest memories. People had been either hot or cold to me then, young as I was, and I vaguely remembered the dark-haired Pellaz and his golden warmth. I remembered also his companion, who had had yellow hair and the feeling of ice and who had not liked me.

"I remember them," I said and Cobweb nodded.

"In a way, we were talking of them last night," he said.

"I don't suppose you're going to explain it all," I said hopelessly, weary with the experience of someone who is always too young to be told things.

"The one with yellow hair (I cannot speak his name), he caused your father grief," Cobweb said, making the sign of the cross of power on his brow, his lips, his heart.