The Song of Andiene

CHAPTER 10



As Ilbran entered the forest the next morning, he looked from side to side in fear and awe, though it gave no outward sign of the terrible legends. He had seen trees and groves aplenty, blessed lanara, tall kingswood, dainty spicewood, and the lesser trees that give man nothing but shade.

He had never seen ones to match these. They were huge and gray-trunked, with blue-gray fingered leaves, woven together with dense underbrush, tall ferns, and vines.

They stretched their arms to the sky. Though the path he traveled was wide enough for three men to ride abreast, the dark branches met overhead, so that he walked down a gloomy tunnel.

Little trails led off through the brush, paths beaten by animals or others. Ilbran knew better than to take those. Forestlings might chance them, but only the main roads were charmed and safe for the stranger, and those only safe while the sun shone.

The silence was unnerving, unlike the peaceful stillness of the meadows, filled with the tiny sounds of insects. This was a watchful quietness, that made him glance over his shoulder and quicken his step. People lived here, he knew, but how? He could see no fruit, no grain, no signs of the Gifts that are given to men.

He saw tiny flickers of motion in the undergrowth. They stilled when he looked directly at them. As in any place, more creatures lived here than could be seen. The path was rutted and pocked with holes from some burrowing animal.

Ilbran stared up through the branches to see the sun. Well after noon. He quickened his steps as much as his aching muscles would allow. This strange silent wood was no place to be alone at night, even if he had never heard the tales of terror.

The path curved its way through the trees. The forest remained silent, no birds, no little animals, none of the rustlings and singings that would have told Ilbran that he was walking through a living world. Ahead of him, a clearing opened out, a meadow of stunted blaggorn and other plants of the open plains, growing thicker and higher in the far corner where a stream cut through the clearing.

Ilbran walked into the clearing. In its center, wide shallow steps led up to a shelter of dark stone, but his attention was all for the man that lay at the foot of those steps.

He was dead, for certain, though the animals had not yet begun their work. Ilbran looked at him in grief. For all the death he had seen in these last weeks, it had not lost its power to move him.

There was no sign to show how the stranger had died. The sword in his outstretched hand had no speck of blood on it. His face was peaceful, as that of all the dead is, unless they die of some poisons; he stared at the sky blankly enough. But his teeth had bitten through his lower lip; his fingernails had left crescents of blood on his palms, signs of an uneasy passing.

He was a man like any other, beak-nosed and wide-lipped, his pale hair cut short to fit under his metal cap, of an age that could have made him Ilbran’s father, perhaps. He wore soldier’s mail, a long leather shirt sewn close with iron rings. The badge he wore was green and silver, the colors of some far-off king.

Ilbran looked at him and grieved for him, and at last stooped and took the sword from his hand. “Forgive me for this,” he said. “Your sword did not save you, but I take it not for greed or for power, but to guard me against your enemies, and maybe avenge you.”

He unbuckled the sword belt, with its sheath and dagger, and put it on. Strange and awkward seeming, as if he were a child playing soldier. It was not to his liking. Though he had grown tall and strong, he had never thought of taking the colors of the king.

He spoke again and asked the dead man’s pardon. Little courtesies can help appease the spirits of the dead.

Then he looked up the wide, shallow, rough-shaped steps to the platform where three great slabs of rock leaned against each other to form the sides of a pyramid, and another slab of rock balanced on top of them, overhanging the sides and forming the roof. The wide cracks in the sides were filled in with smaller stones and masonry. In the front, the tall triangular doorway was left open.

It was a strange rough building, like some child’s toy. Still it would give shelter from the rain, and other things as well, he hoped. This was a safehold that the songs told of, built to give travelers protection from the evil of the forest.

From the eastern corners of the platform walls of stone stretched out, crudely shaped, but reminding Ilbran of something he had seen, something much larger. Then he saw the slashes cut into the end of the stones, scoring them like claws. The makers of this place had had the same grim humor as the builders of the city. The traveler who would shelter for the night must walk in between the dragon’s paws.

Sword in hand, Ilbran stepped softly as he climbed the nine steps and entered the shelter. Movement? A person standing in the corner? He whirled to face it. No person, but a statue so real that she seemed ready to move and speak if he would once look away. The sculptor had carved her naked and serene and beautiful. Necklaces and bracelets of thornfruit flowers and strands of blaggorn were all she wore. Her eyes were inlaid dark and light with bits of stone—strange eyes that seemed to follow him as he moved.

Ilbran looked out to the forest again. The trees were tall, their branches were wide. A safer shelter, it might seem, than this place. But he was not so foolish in the ways of the forest. Besides, he had the warning of the other man who had reached this place—his pack of travel food lay in the corner—and had gone out from it and died, away from shelter.

He looked again at the statue, so clean and finely shaped. He looked at the rough walls, as crude as any cave of the hills. Two minds had been at work here.

It was the work of those long gone. He wondered, with a passionate and sorrowful curiosity, who they had been. The city where he had spent his life had been built also by alien hands, but it had never touched his imagination so. He had been too busy, too set in the knowledge of what he must do, to wonder about unnecessary things.

The stones of this shelter were a blue-black like the night sky, veined in creamy cobwebbing, star-trails. Though the houses in the city were built of many kinds and colors of stone, he had never seen ones like this.

But there were many things he had not seen in his short life. He took food from the dead man’s pack, muttering his apologies once again to the spirit of the dead. He was careful also to break off bits of the stale blaggorn cakes and sprinkle them in front of the statue. Half-shamefacedly, he muttered, “At least, they will serve to feed the mice.”

Night came slowly. The twilight filtered through the trees for a long time. Ilbran stepped outside the shelter and stood on the top step of the platform, looking up at the stars. He was no grizane, to read their meaning. His only guide was dead and turned to dust.

He shivered as the night air grew colder. Was there wind blowing in the distance, roaring through the trees, or was it the ocean, closer than he could have dreamed? No, the leaves were still; the sea was far away. But there were sounds moving in the forest, or inside his own head, that would drive a man to madness.

Hardly knowing what he did, he ran back into the shelter, his back set to the wall, holding the sword out before him as though it could save him from what hunted in the night.

The howling grew, fiercer than wild coursers or wolves of the high mountains. It became stronger, ecstatic, and he knew that they, whatever they were, had found his scent.

They were creatures formed of darkness, the ones who flowed from the shadows and ringed his refuge. As he stared straight ahead, he could see nothing, but his side vision caught glimpses of motion, creatures darker than the shadows. They did not sit quietly and bay their quarry, but wove a ring of motion like a school of fish boiling in a fisherman’s net. And their deadly joy sang itself to the treetops, to the stars.

Perhaps their weapon is fear alone, he thought, as their song went on, and they did not venture within two paces of the steps. Then the howling died away to silence, but a silence full of great terror. Their masters came.

They were tall, and robed in black, but their faces and hands shone with light. It was not the pure light of sun or starlight, torch or lamp or candle even, but the phosphorescence of rotten wood. A score of them gathered, stepping slowly from the forest. At last one came forward.

If it were not for that deathly glow of face and hands, he might have been a lord of the city. His accent was harsh, though he tried to speak sweetly; he spoke the common tongue as if it were foreign to him.

“Greetings, good friend. Though our hounds brought you to bay, they would do you no harm. They hunt smaller game than men. You have the look of one who has traveled far and hard, on scanty rations. Come down and greet us and tell us the news from your land.”

Of all possible things, Ilbran was least prepared for such fair words. “What manner of men are you?” he called down.

“Men such as you,” the leader replied. “We paint our faces with light so that our fellows will not shoot at us mistaking us for forest creatures as we go our separate ways on the hunt.” There was a ripple of agreeing laughter from the crowd of ghostly-faced men standing behind him.

Who would trust such fair words? Only the desperately weary, who almost longed for death.

Ilbran watched and waited. If these were human, the enchantments would not hold them back. They would climb up the steps to meet him; they would not stay and parley at the foot of the stairs. They were many, and he was one. Swords hung at their sides, and heavy hunting bows across their backs. If they were nobles of a city in the forest—and he had never heard stories of such—they would know how to use their weapons. They would not fear him.

Had that man in the clearing—they had not spared a glance for him, and that was strange enough—gone down to meet such a crowd of friends as these? He lay at the base of the steps, and though his sword had been out, it had not drawn blood, nor had there been any mark on him.

Their leader spoke again, less sweetness in his tone. “Are you some outlaw, a kinslayer that fears all men, that you will not come down and greet us honestly? We do not wish to make war on you, but if we are forced to, we will—to the death!”

“To which of the Nine Kingdoms do you owe allegiance?” asked Ilbran.

“None,” replied the leader of the ghostly crowd. “We are our own lords, in our own land, and no stranger has reason to fear us, if he is an honest man.”

For all the fair words, his speech seemed strange. His mouth moved like the mouth of a puppet worked by clumsy hands. It did not move in true step with his voice.

Or was that an illusion, a terror born of the night? Ilbran found the courage to speak to them boldly. “Go about your hunt. I would not delay you. When it comes daylight, I will join you.”

It was a promise he did not fear to make. In daylight, he thought, the paths are shielded from evil, and if they stay and speak to me then, they are true men, and not demons.

Harsh laughter echoed from the mouths of all that death-faced troop. “One of the wise ones, are you?” the leader said. “You will join us before daylight.” His men turned and walked into the forest, but the dark hounds remained and wove their circle of shadows, and the leader stayed, watching Ilbran and laughing.

One motion of his hand, and the circle of hounds divided and let him through to the foot of the steps, where the dead man lay. “A comrade of yours?” he asked.

“No kin, nor comrade,” Ilbran said.

The stranger’s laughter was louder and more hollow. “More kin and comrade than you think!”

He knelt beside the body, handling it roughly as he stripped off the mail coat, the iron cap and threw them aside. His laughter was louder than the death-song of the hounds. His nails were long and strong to tear off strips of flesh. His teeth were strong, stronger than man or beast, to break and grind the bones. His hands had giant’s strength, to crush the skull between his palms so he could lap out what it contained. Ilbran watched in sick horror, not able to look away.

The others returned, bowed under loads of green branches and dry ones. They threw their burdens down and came to join the feast.

These wore the likenesses of men, but they were no men. Ilbran remembered what the grizane had said. They became the evil in the world. We imprisoned them in the forest.

When the forest lords were done with their feast, they turned to their bonfire. It was the leader who touched the wood with his fingertips, and made the kindling spring to life. The red glow of the fire turned their faces more deathlike yet.

Ilbran did not understand their purpose until the drugging clouds of smoke billowed out toward him, until the chanting began, in a harsh foreign tongue.

He tore a strip from the bandage that still wrapped his shoulder. Soaked with water, it helped to mask his nose and mouth. He could not stop his ears, to drown their voices. He heard the leader say again, “You will join us before dawn.”

And when was dawn? The night was endless. All things were forgotten but the need to keep his mind his own. At one time, he took the dead man’s sword and scored his own arms. That helped him for a little time, as the salt sweat poured into the stinging cuts. His blood ran down and dripped on the threshold, joining old dark stains already there.

When he looked down at the ghostly crowd, he saw a familiar face among them, glowing and evil—the beak-nosed stranger who had died on the forest path—and then he thought the drugging smoke had truly mazed his mind.

He shouted defiances at the creatures of the night; he screamed curses at them to drown their voices; their laughter was the only reply. He was at war with himself, for a part of him desired to go down the steps to meet the dark ones and their death. And that part grew stronger as the night went on.

Still, he endured. Day came without warning, and before his eyes, the ghostly crowd thinned and vanished like the stars. Ilbran waited till the sun was bright before descending the steps. Even then, he walked in fear, almost expecting to feel a touch on his shoulder from a creature invisible but still present.

The smoke still rose from the bonfire, dizzying him. The discarded green branches were from no tree that he had seen before, one with a narrow green leaf and reddish bark. There were bloodstains at the base of the steps where the man had lain, but if he had not known, he would have passed by without a thought or glance.

He turned his face toward the meadows from which he had come. So quickly had his fear of the kingsmen, and his dread of the city of the dead, become trivial. He would not spend another night within the forest, though all the kings of the earth might bribe, and all the lovely ladies of the world might beg.

But toward noonday, his dread grew again. Where was the honest sunlight, the wide and light-filled meadows? Morning turned to afternoon, and the forest paths stretched before him and behind him the same. What did the songs say? The roads are not as roads in the wide world. He turned his steps back toward the only safety he knew in this strange world, hurrying at first, and then running, as the sun moved to the west.

Twilight was dimming when he caught sight of the clearing. Half-staggering with exhaustion, he climbed up the safehold steps. Though it were the safety of a dungeon cell, he would have welcomed it, with his blood smeared across the doorstep from his fight of the night before.

With nightfall came the dark hounds, and after them, their masters. They taunted and threatened. They burned their incense, but it had less mind-numbing power than it had had the night before.

Drunk with weariness, Ilbran mocked them in turn. “You filth, you scum, carrion feeders. You have bows slung at your sides. If you are such fine hunters, why do you not use them?”

They made no move to attack. His guess had been good. This place sheltered him from such things.

Daybreak came, and Ilbran slept, and did not wake till the hounds returned at nightfall. Again he had to fight off their masters, but their powers of fear were even less. He looked at the safehold walls, the watchful beautiful statue, with love and gratitude. They had guarded him well.

At first light, once the sun had truly risen, and the hunters gone, he set out, back along the same path. Refreshed by his day of sleep, he was confident that he could hurry, and be out of the forest perhaps by noon.

But at midmorning, he stopped perplexed. Two paths branched before him, plain and clear. He had no remembrance of the one that turned off squarely to his left, a fine clear path. Could his memory have failed him so much? Maybe it was the one on which he had entered, the one that led out onto the wide free meadows.

He blazed markers on the trees edging the path he had taken. This time, at least, he would not be led astray by his memory, or by some magic in the woods. He hurried on his new way, though he seemed to hear, or feel, a rushing of wind deep in the forest.

Toward noon, he halted in bewilderment, as he saw a clearing ahead, but another one, a strange one. At no time had he come this way.

A field of blaggorn stretched half-harvested, and thornfruit grew in scattered clumps. There was no rough shelter in the center of this clearing, but a cottage built of the same night-blue and cream-laced stone. A score or more of white-trunked trees grew in an ever-widening golden-leaved spiral out from the cottage, like the coils of a snake.

On paths and clearings is no danger—in the daytime. No danger from magic, that is. But danger from other living things could be anywhere. A viper coiled in the path in front of him, unblinking eyes, and wedge-shaped head, and earth-dark body. Ilbran stepped aside. It watched him as he passed, turning its head on the mass of heavy coils.

But that was a danger of the earth, to be met at any time. On paths and clearings is no danger. And the woman who picked thornfruit in the clearing—she was of humankind. Ilbran had not realized how much joy there could be in seeing one of his own kind, even one with the coloring of the southerners. She was dressed in animal skins patched together to make a many-colored sleeveless tabard and a short skirt to her knees. Ilbran watched her as she worked with experienced ease, plucking the thornfruit from their daggered branches, and dropping them in a woven basket.

Then she turned and saw him, and came to him quickly, showing no fear. She stripped the heavy leather picking gloves from her hands and cast them aside. “Welcome … Welcome … My lord … you are weary.” Her hands were warm, tiny but strong. She had a slow and hesitant voice, as though she did not speak much.

“What manner of land is this?” he demanded. “It has hunted me in circles, I think. I made a half-day’s journey into the forest, and have been wandering in a maze ever since.”

“Who twined your map?” she asked. “Where were you going?”

“Indeed, I had no map, lady, nor any guide nor destination. I had been told that they of the forest welcomed strangers.”

“We do,” she said. “Come … Come … You are tired and thirsty.”

She led him into her home and fed him well—dried thornfruit and blaggorn bread, and stew with strange but tasty herbs and spices. The afternoon grew to evening as they sat beside the fire and talked.

As the evening went on, she spoke more fluently, the habit of speech returning to her. Her name was Malesa. She had been born in the forest and had lived there all her life. “My mother and father came from some other land,” she said. “But they never spoke of it. They found this cottage empty. I do not know why it was.”

“All through the land are homes and land lying empty,” Ilbran said. “They who lived here before us were many more than we are.”

“That may be true,” she said indifferently. “My mother and father died when I was yet young, some four summers and four winters ago.”

“Why do you stay here alone?”

She looked at him in wonder. “It is a part of me. I can call every plant and tree by name. I know every stone, every turn in the paths, the lesser and the greater ones. I am a part of it, as it is a part of me. It feeds me well, blaggorn and thornfruit, and a hundred plants and herbs that you do not know. I set snares for the little animals of the forest—they feed and clothe me. I can gather honey from the black bees and they will not sting me. Besides, it is not as easy to leave as you think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I will show you.” She gathered up a skein of threads, and began working on them, knotting a web.

Ilbran watched her. Her skin was pale, like a new-bloomed thornfruit flower, and her hair was night-colored, her eyes as dark as her hair. He had seen some such as her, southerners, stared at and mistrusted as they passed through the city.

Besides that strangeness of coloring, she was not truly beautiful. Her face was broad, her eyes set strangely in it. But her hair was beautiful, hanging to her knees in wrist-thick braids, swinging gently as she bent her head. If she were naked, that hair would cover her like a cloak.

Malesa glanced up from her work. “Why do you stare at me?”

“I am sorry.” He looked away.

She bent her head over her work again. Ilbran marveled at what she had done. Like him, she had fended for herself. She had been orphaned young, had lived alone. She had fed herself, had kept her sanity, had learned well the ways of the world into which she had come.

Anything that she had, she had made for herself. Yet this home was better than the one he had lived in for all his life. They were not sitting on straw mats, but on cushions stuffed with dried grass. They had eaten and drunk out of carved wooden bowls. The candles on the table were sweet wax, fit to light a lord’s chamber. Though she lived alone, she had hung a curtain to screen off another room in the small house, where she slept. Crude branch-shelves were fastened to the walls and stacked with wooden jars, filled with all she had gathered from forest and field.

She had spoken truly; she lived as richly as a princess in her own domain.

Malesa looked up from her netting. “Tell what has happened to you. What led you into the forest? What led you here?”

Ilbran told her how he had lost his family; he had escaped; the kingsmen had hunted him, so he had entered the forest; the creatures of the forest had hunted him in turn. “And the paths were not the same. I could find no way out.”

She shook her head slowly, wonderingly. “How could you have gone so far astray? I did not know it was possible to make so many mistakes. Do you learn nothing in that world of yours?”

“What did I do wrong? I knew that the paths were not safe at night, that I must find a safehold or be lost. They told me that much.”

“Look,” she said, and she spread out the net she had knotted. “This is a map of what I know. The strands are the paths of the forest and the knots are places of safety, like the one that you found, and like this one where I live. The paths of the forest shift like the shifting patterns of the sky. The distance between the safeholds will change with the rising of the sun each day.

“On one day, a man might walk from one to another in half a morning’s loitering. On another day, a horseman might set out at sunrise, riding as fast as his horse would carry him, and still be lost in the forest at nightfall. I think you know what would become of him then.”

Ilbran shuddered. The girl looked at him gravely, then continued. “So when you travel, if you have not reached a place of safety by noontime, you must turn back. And when you pass one, you take your knife and leave a drop of your blood on the doorstep as a sacrifice and as a talisman that will hold the path open for you to return, if your way forward is not clear.

“You did that by accident, and it preserved you. But it was barely enough. What possessed you to speak to those uncanny ones? They are creatures of air. A sword will not touch them, and though they eat flesh, they do not need it to live. If you do not speak to them, or meet their eyes, they cannot reach you, for all their chanting and their drugged smoke.”

Ilbran thought of the three nights of terror spent fighting them, and shuddered. Malesa went on. “But if you had marked your entrance into the forest with your blood, the way would have been shortened for you, and you could have left the forest safely.”

She smiled suddenly. “I am glad that you did not, since you have no great errands. It has been long since any wayfarers visited here.”

She held out her netting map once again. “See, this knot is my home, and this strand is the path that leads to it. You see, it does not join firmly to the main path, but lies across it. Sometimes, it is there to be traveled on. Most of the time, it is not.”

“At the last, I was wise, and blazed a trail to guide me back,” Ilbran said, only half understanding what she had been saying.

Malesa turned pale. “You fool! You utter fool! What you call wisdom is folly so great … so great … You did not only endanger yourself, but me and all travelers. The forest will be at war with all of us, and it had almost grown to be my friend. You would get your just reward if I gave you to them!”

Then she sighed, seeing his bewilderment, and sat down beside him, leaning close, speaking more gently. “The graywood trees are alive, but they are as indifferent to us as they are to the dark ones, as long as we step softly in their domain. But to cut a living tree is an act of war. They do not easily forgive.”

Ilbran shook his head. Outside, he could hear the baying of the hunters, but far away. They followed some other man’s trail tonight. He was too dazed with fatigue to think clearly. “I am sorry for the wrongs I have done you, but I have not lived here. I never learned your laws. I am very weary. May I claim guest-right for tonight before I leave you tomorrow?”

“It seems some laws are the same in your land and mine,” she said with a smile. She would have said more, but he was asleep even as she spoke, lying on the floor beside the hearth.

Late into the night, she sat watching him in the dimming light of the fire. At last, she laughed and said a few words to herself, so softly that he would not have understood, even if he had been awake.

She rose, went to her shelves, and lifted down a row of carved wooden jars from the highest shelf. She took out tiny sprigs of dried herbs, and other things that she had gotten, powdered them between her fingers, mixed them well, and tossed pinches of them into the fire.

Ilbran slept soundly. When the smoke flowed out into the room, he coughed in his sleep, but did not wake. She watched him till the fire died. Then she went to her own bed, to lie alone and listen to the howling of the forest.

Ilbran woke late the next morning and broke his fast on blaggorn cakes sweetened with honey. Malesa did not ask him to stay, but she spoke often of her loneliness. Before he left her, he cut his wrist and stained the threshold with his blood.

“Now you will have a safe place to return to, if the paths play tricks on you again,” she said. Then she laughed, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips.

For a moment, he wondered why he was leaving. Gentle and trusting, she had taken in a ragged stranger, had fed and sheltered him. Then Ilbran thought: My father was wise. He could not bear to live under the shadow of the trees, even in a place full of joy such as this could be.

But the paths of the forest had no end. Ilbran walked till noon, and an hour after noon, on the same path. No other joined it; no clearing or safehold lay in his way. He did not see any place where he had blazed the trees, though he had marked them every ten paces on the day before. When at last he looked up at the sun, through the graywood branches, and knew that he could safely go no further, it was with a kind of pleasure that he retraced his steps. The clearing, the white-trunked coil of golden trees, was a welcome sight.

Malesa ran to greet him and grasped his hands. The meal she had prepared was well enough for two. “It seems you expected me to return,” he said with a smile.

She glanced sideways at him out of her strange-set eyes. “The trees are angry at you for the outrage you did to them, and so they have shut off the path. Stay with me, and wait. In time they will forget.”

As she walked back and forth, preparing their meal, she brushed against him. Though the room was large, it seemed too small for the two of them.

“How old are you, Malesa?” he asked. Her name seemed to burn on his lips and tongue.

“Fifteen,” she said. “Seven winters and eight summers.”

“A year younger than I am.” He laughed with pleasure. “We have led much the same sort of lives, too.” The candle flames on the table bent low, though there was no draught in the room. Perhaps it was the gusty breath of his laughter.

Malesa laughed also, after a moment’s silence. She poured him thornfruit wine, flavored with honey and bitter herbs. It lay in the cup as dark and thick as blood. Her face was in shadow, her dark eyes more shadowy yet. The firelight turned her pale arms and legs to the color of new honey. She loosened her hair and let it fall in black smothering waves, almost to her feet.

Ilbran raised the cup to his lips. Here I am, here I will stay, he vowed to himself. The sobbing of the forest creatures was distant in his ears as Malesa smiled at him, and blew out the candles. Though it was close-shuttered night in the room, he thought that the sound of her soft breath and heartbeat would have been enough to lead him to where she waited. That night she did not sleep alone.