04 Mother Of Winter d-4 Read online

  She could probably figure out which king this mean boy who shot at netted birds had grown up to be, and who his daddy was, and what politics exactly had caused his uncles to want to snuff the little bastard- - -no loss, by the sound of it. Except that if that boy had not grown up and married, he would not have passed down his memories with his bloodline and eventually have created the child Tir. And that would have been tragedy.

  The wizard in Rudy noted the details remembered about the palace, identifying flowers in the garden, birds and beasts glimpsed in the trees, picturing clearly the place that he himself had only seen in ruins.

  But mostly what fascinated him were the workings of that far-off child's life and family, how cruelty had meshed with cruelty, how anger had answered angers formed by fathers and grandfathers; how constant suspicion and unlimited power had resulted in a damn unpleasant little brat who quite clearly worked hard to make everyone around him as miserable as he possibly could. No wonder Tir's eyes were a thousand years old.

  "Rudy?" A tousled blond head appeared around the doorway after a perfunctory knock. "M'lord Rudy," the boy hastily amended, and added with a grin, "Hi, Tir. M' lord Rudy, Her Majesty asks if you'd come to the Doors, please. Fargin Graw's giving her a bad time," he added as Rudy reached for his staff and started to rise. "Oh, great." Fargin Graw was someone whose nose Rudy had considered breaking for years. "Thanks, Geppy." "May I go play with Geppy, Rudy?"

  "Yeah, go ahead, Ace. If I know Graw, this'll take a while." With Geppy and Tir pelting on ahead of him, Rudy walked down the broad main corridor of the royal enclave-one of the few wide halls in the Keep not to have been narrowed millennia ago by the owners of cells breaking walls to cadge space from the right of way-and down the Royal Stair.

  Someone had taken advantage of the draught on the stair and stretched a clothesline across the top of the high archway where the stair let into the Aisle, the black-walled cavern that ran more than three-quarters of the Keep's nearly half-mile length. Rudy ducked under the laundry, scarcely a wizardly figure in his deerskin breeches, rough wool shirt, and gaudily painted bison-hide vest, his dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders. Only his staff, pale wood worn with generations of hand grips and

  tipped by a metal crescent upon whose sharpened points burned blue St. Elmo's fire, marked him as mageborn.

  The Aisle's roof was lost in shadow above him, though pin lights of flame delineated the bridges that crossed it on the fourth and fifth levels. The glasslike hardness of the walls picked up the chatter of the launderers working in the basins and streams that meandered along the stone immensity of the open floor; some of them called greetings to him he passed.

  Fargin Graw's voice boomed above those homier echoes like flatulant thunder on a summer afternoon.

  "If we're supporting them, they'd damn well better earn their keep!" He was a big man-Rudy could identify his silhouette against the chilly light that streamed through the passageway between the two sets of open Doors while he was still crossing the last of the low stone bridges over the indoor streams.

  "And if they're not earning their keep, which I for one can't see 'em doing, then they better find themselves a useful trade or get out! Like some others I could name sitting around getting fat... There's not a man in the River Settlements who doesn't get out in the fields and pull his stint at guarding-"

  "And boy, after all day in the fields, they must be just sharp as razors on night-watch." Rudy hooked his free hand through the buckle of his belt as he came out to join the little group on the Keep's broad, shallow steps, blinking a little in the pallid brightness of the spring sun.

  Graw swung around angrily, a brick-faced man with the fair hair not often seen in the lands once called the Realm of Darwath, perhaps five years older than Rudy's thirty years. Janus of Weg, commander of the elite corps of the Keep Guards, hid a smile-he'd lost warriors twice due to the inefficiency of Graw's farmer militia-and the Lady Minalde, last High Queen of Darwath and Lady of the Keep, raised a hand for silence. "Rudy." Her low, sweet voice was pleasantly neutral in greeting, as if he had not spoken. "Master Graw rode up from the Settlements with the tribute sheep today, to hear from your own lips why there hasn't been further progress in eliminating slunch from the fields."

  Rudy said, "What?" In three years, slunch in the fields and in huge areas of meadow and woods, both here in Renweth Vale and down by the River Settlements-had become an endemic nuisance, indestructible by any means he or Ingold or anyone else had yet been able to contrive.

  It would burn after a fashion but grew back within days, even if the dirt it had grown upon were sown with salt, soaked with oil of vitriol at any strength Ingold could contrive, or dug out and heaped elsewhere, the slunch grew back both in the dirt heap and in the hole. It simply ignored magic. It grew. And it spread, sometimes slowly, sometimes with alarming speed.

  "How about asking me something simple, like why don't we get rid of rats in the Keep? Or ragweed pollen in the spring?"

  "Don't you get smart with me, boy," Graw snapped in his flat, deaf man's voice. "You think because you sit around reading books and nobody makes you do a hand's turn of work you can give back answers to a man of the land, but..." Rudy opened his mouth to retort that until the rising of the Dark, Graw had been a man of the paint-mixing pots in Gae-his wife and sons did most of the work on his acres down in the River Settlements, by all accounts, as they'd done here in the Vale before the nine hundred or so colonists had moved down to the river valleys to found settlements three years ago.

  But Alde said, still in resolutely friendly, uninflected tones, "I think what Rudy is trying to say is that there are some problems, not amenable to any remedy we know,

  which have been with us for thousands of years, and that slunch may turn out to be one of them." The glass-thin breeze from the higher mountain peaks stirred tendrils of her long black hair, fluttering the new leaves of the aspen and mountain laurel that rimmed the woods, a hundred yards from the Keep on its little mound. "We don't know."

  "The stuff's only been around for three years," pointed out Rudy, upon whose toe Alde had inconspicuously trodden.

  "And in those three years," Graw retorted, "it's cut into fields we've sweated and bled to plant, it's killed the wheat and the trees on which our lives and the lives of our children depend." One heavy arm swept toward the farms downslope from the Keep, the fields with their lines of withe separating one plot holder's land from the next. Like puruIent sores, white spots of slunch blotched the green of young wheat in three or four places, the wrinkled white fungus surrounded by broad rings of brown where the grain was dying.

  Graw's mouth clamped into a settled line, and his pale tan eyes, like cheap beads, sliced resentfully between the slim black-haired woman beside him, the young wizard in his painted vest, and the heavy-shouldered, black-clothed shape of the Commander of the Guards, as if he suspected them of somehow colluding to withhold from him the secret of comfort and survival.

  "It's sickening the crops, and if the River Settlements are sending wheat and milk and beasts for slaughter up here to the Keep every year, we're entitled to something for our sweat."

  "Something more than us risking our necks to patrol your perimeter, you mean?" Janus asked thinly, and Graw scoffed.

  "My men can do their own patrolling! What the hell good is it to know about saber-teeth or some bunch of scroungy dooic ten miles from the nearest fields?" He conveniently neglected to mention the warning the Guards had brought him of the White Raiders last winter, or the battle they and the small force of nobles and men-at-arms had fought with a bandit company the autumn before. "But if our labor and our strength are going out to support a bunch of people up here at the Keep who do nothing or next to nothing..." His glance slid back to Rudy, and from him to Alde's belly, rounded under the green wool of her faded gown.

  The Lady of the Keep met his eye. "Are you saying then that the Settlements Council has voted to dispense with sending foodstuffs to the Keep in return for patr
ols by the Guards and advice from the mages who live here?"

  "Dammit, we haven't voted on anything!" snapped Graw, who, as far as Rudy knew, wasn't even on the Settlements Council. "But as a man of the land whose labor is supporting you, I have the right to know what's being done! Not one of your wizards has come down to have a look at my fields." "The slunch is different down there?"

  "Thank you very much for coming to us, Master Graw." Minalde's voice warmed as she inclined her head. As Graw made a move to stride toward the Keep, she added, with impeccably artless timing, "And I bid you welcome to the Keep, you and your riders, and make you free of it."

  He halted, his jaw tightening, but he could do no more than mutter, "I thank you, lady. Majesty," he added, under the cool pressure of that morning-glory gaze. He glared at Rudy, then jerked his hand at the small band of riders who'd accompanied the herd of tribute sheep up the pass. They fell in behind him, bowing awkward thanks to Alde as they followed him up the shallow black stone steps and vanished into the dark tunnel of the Doors. Rudy set his jaw, willing the man's hostility to slide off him like rain.

  In a sweet voice trained by a childhood spent with relentless deportment masters, Minalde said, "One of these days I'm going to break that man's nose." "Y' want lessons?" Janus asked promptly, and they all laughed. "Why is it," Minalde asked with a sigh, later, as she and Rudy walked down the muddy path toward the Keep farms, "that one always hears of spells that will turn people into trees and frogs and mongrel dogs, but never one that will turn a... a lout like that into a good man?"

  Rudy shrugged. "Maybe because if I said, 'Abracadabra, turn that jerk into a good man,' there'd be no change." He shook his head. "Sheesh. I've been around Ingold too long."

  She laughed and touched his hand. His fingers fitted with hers as if designed to do so at the beginning of time. The farms-which, contrary to Graw's assertions, were in fact the chief business of the Keep, and always had been-were far enough from the walls that wizard and lady could walk handfast without exacerbating the sensibilities of the conservative.

  Everyone knew that the Keep wizard's pupil was the lady's lover and the father of the child she carried, but it was a matter seldom mentioned; the religious teachings of a less desperate age died hard.

  "You're going to have to go down there, you know," Alde said in time. "Now?"

  Their eyes met, and she rested her free hand briefly on the swell beneath her gown. "I think so," she said matter-of- factly. "It's the second or third time he's been up here, demanding that something be done about slunch. He has a lot of influence in the Settlements, not with the nobles, but with the hunters, and some of the farmers. If he broke away from Keep rule, he'd probably turn bandit himself. The child isn't due for another two months, you know."

  Rudy knew. Though he'd helped to birth dozens of babies in the five years he'd been Ingold's pupil, the thought of Alde being brought to bed while the master wizard was still on the road somewhere terrified him. With Alde, it was different.

  The Lady of the Keep. The widow of the last High King. Tir's mother. The mother of the child that would be his.

  The thought made him shiver inside, with longing and joy and a strange disbelief. He'd be a father. That child inside her-inside the person he most loved in the whole of his life, the whole of two universes-was a part of him.

  Involuntarily-half kiddingly, but half not-he thought, Poor kid. Some gene pool. And yet...

  Under the all-enveloping bulk of her quilted silk coat she barely showed, even this far along. But she had the glowing beauty he'd seen in those of his sisters who'd married happily and carried children by the men who brought them joy. Ingold had early taught him the spells that wizards lay upon their consorts to keep them from conceiving, but she had pleaded with him not to use them. Nobody in the Keep talked about their lady carrying a wizard's child, but even Bishop Maia, usually tolerant despite the Church's official rulings, had his misgivings. "It can't wait till Ingold gets back?"

  "It's only a day's journey." He could hear the uneasiness in her voice, see it in the set of her shoulders and the way she released his hand to fold her arms around herself as she walked.

  "Much as I hate to agree with anything that man says, he's right about slunch destroying crops. Unless the harvest is better this year than last, our stores will barely get us through next winter."

  "It was a bad year." Rudy shifted his grip uneasily on the hand-worn smoothness of his staff. "Last winter was rough, and if Gil was right about the world getting colder, we're in for a lot more of them."

  Beyond the shaggy curtain of pines, the Snowy Mountains lifted to the west, towering above the narrow valley, the glittering cliff of the Sarda Glacier overhanging the black rock. Far up the valley, St. Prathhes' Glacier had moved down from the peaks of the spur range called the Ramparts, a tsunami of frozen diamond above the high pastures.

  Edged wind brought the scent of sterile ice and scraped rock with the spice of the spruce and new grass. It wailed a little in the trees, counterpoint to the squeak of Alde's sheepskin boots in the mud and the purl of the stream that bordered the fields. The mountains may have been safer from the Dark, Rudy thought, but they sure didn't make good farmland.

  Cows regarding them over the pasture fences moved aside at Rudy's wave. He clambered over the split rails and helped Alde after, not liking the lightness of her frame within its faded patchwork of quilting and fur. Spring was a time of short rations.

  Even with last year's stored grain and the small surplus sent up from the Settlements, everyone in the Keep had been on short commons for months.

  Crypt after crypt of hydroponics tanks lay in the foundations deep beneath the Keep, but Rudy didn't have to be a technician to know they weren't operating as effectively as they could be. In any case, grain and corn had to be grown outdoors, and in the thin soil of the mountain valley, good arable was short.

  The withy fences around the slunch in the west pasture had been moved again. The stuff had almost reached the stream. Past the line of the fences the grass was dying; the fences would have to be moved farther still.

  Three years ago, when slunch first started growing near the Keep, he and Ingold had agreed that neither humans nor animals should be allowed to eat it until they knew exactly what it was.

  And that was something neither of them had figured out yet.

  Short meadow grasses stirred around his feet, speckled bright with cow-lilies and lupine. There were fewer snakes this year, he noted, and almost no frogs. The herdkids waved to him from the other side of the pasture fence and chased the Settlements' tribute sheep into the main flock.

  He spotted Tir's bright blue cap among them, beside Geppy Nool's blond curls. Geppy's promotion to herdkid-with the privilege of sleeping in the byres and smelling permanently of dung-had consumed the smaller boy's soul with envy, and for several days Tir seriously considered abdicating as High King of Darwath in favor of a career in livestock supervision.

  "Damn crazy stuff." Rudy waved back, then ducked through the hurdles that made up the fence. Alde followed more clumsily, but kept pace with him as he walked the perimeter of the rolling, thick, wrinkled plant-if plant it was. Sometimes Rudy wasn't sure. He'd never found anything that looked like seeds, spores, roots, or shoots. Slunch didn't appear to require either water or light to grow. It just spread, some six inches high in the middle of the bed, down to an inch or so at the edges, where wormlike whitish fingers projected into the soil bared by the dying grass.

  Rudy knelt and pulled up one of the tendrils, like a very fat ribbon stood on its edge.

  He hated the touch of it, cold and dry, like a mushroom. By the tracks all around it there were animals that ate it, and so far neither the Guards nor the Keep hunters had reported finding dead critters in the woods...

  But Rudy's instincts shrank from the touch of it. Deep inside he knew the stuff was dangerous. He just didn't know how. He squeezed it, flinching a little at the rubbery pop it gave before it crumbled, then wiped h
is hands on his soft deerhide trousers. With great effort Ingold had acquired enough sulfur from a dyer's works in Gae to manufacture oil of vitriol-sulfuric acid-and had tried pouring that on slunch. It killed it but rendered the ground unfit for further use. And the slunch grew back within three or four weeks. It was scarcely worth the risk and hardship of another trip to the ruins of Gae for that.

  "Do you think that thing Maia described to Ingold-the Cylinder he found in the vaults at Penambra- might hold some clue about the slunch?"

  Alde kept her distance. The dark fur of her collar riffled gently around her face, and the tail of her hair made a thick sable streak in the colors of old gowns, old curtains, and old hangings that had gone into her coat.

  "It might." Rudy came back to her, uneasily dusting the sides of his breeches and boots. "Ingold and Gil haven't found zip about slunch in any archive they've searched so far, but for all we know it may have been common as daisies back before the first rising of the Dark. One day Pugsley's going to look up at me and say, 'Oh, we always dumped apple juice on it-shriveled it right up.' And that'll be that." Alde laughed, and Rudy glanced back at the cold, thick mass behind them, inert and flaccid and yet not dead. He said, "But we better not count on it."

  The sun had slipped behind the three great peaks that loured over Sarda Pass, Anthir, the Mammoth, and the Hammerking. The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees; a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.