Chains of Gold (27 page)

Arlen's eyes widened with astonishment, and then his sense of the ludicrous got the better of him and he put his head back and shouted with laughter. Even Lonn had to smile.

“But that must have galled you!” Arlen cried.

Lonn said nothing, but got up to go outside for a while, and Arlen sobered and went after him, stopping him at the door.

“But all that is past,” he said to Lonn gently. “You do not hate me any longer?”

“No. How could I?” Lonn spoke with lowered head, like a penitent. “I hated myself for it, even then.… I am better now, but any time it could return.”

“I think not.”

“You don't know—how cruel—Arl, we must do something.”

“But what? I can scarcely slay you again.”

Lonn's head came up and he stared, wide-eyed and frightened, then ran out the door, making toward a copse of alders. Arlen stood looking dismayed.

“Me and my stupid tongue!” he said forcefully, and he would have gone after Lonn, but I took hold of him.

“He will not want you right now. He has to fight it off again.”

And Arlen also went away in another direction, to brood.

He would have liked to have kept Lonn with us, I knew he would. It was as if an unspoken wish had been granted to him, an impossible wish, to have his friend with him, returned from the dead, his brother, his rival—Lonn, in mortal flesh. It was going to grieve Arlen anew to part from him again. But I knew that Lonn's unhappiness would not let it be otherwise. Once they had talked.…

“You slew me,” Lonn said to him another day, as if it were a new thought, a discovery. There was nothing of accusation in his tone, but all the same Arlen's head came up in protest.

“I had to! You told me to.”

“I know it! Do I have to make sense? There is no sense in any of this.”

“And the thought of it has nearly killed me since,” Arlen added in a low voice.

They sat as if each were in a separate trance, speaking out of different circles in the same circling dance. They did not look at each other.

“Hanging there on that horrible tree, my blood feeding the roots, my life draining away—”

“I danced, I danced around the fires, I leaped high and lashed the frenzy. Else I could not have borne it.”

“I could not remember why I was there, what I had done to deserve such punishment.”

“I threw the spear with all my force—”

“I could not see, but I knew it was you. Wild-eyed—”

“For your sake, straight and true, so that you would go quickly.”

“First the pain, the horrible pain, and then the sickness, weak, pitiful. Long, it all lasted so long—”

“You had given me my life, my love, my bride, everything.”

“Why? Why were they killing me? The death blow, and I knew they expected me to go away, but I stayed, watching.”

“The steed, saddled for us and waiting—”

“They had even taken my horse. How was I to go?”

“That also was your gift. Heroes would welcome you into the blessed realm—”

“They expected me to take passage to the land of the dead. They were mistaken.”

“Heroes would welcome you as the greatest of heroes.”

“No one wept for me.”

“I wept.”

“No one wept for me. They—”

Lonn's voice stopped as if choked off by a giant grip at his throat. He got up so hastily that he knocked over his stool, ran outside and away. Arlen sat numbly, watching him go. After a while I went and touched Arl, and he looked at me, put his arms around my waist, and buried his face in the cloth of my skirt. There was no need for words; we both knew I was a prize hard won.

“Bucca was for him,” I said after a long moment.

“The dead need horses?” Arlen muttered, his voice thickened by cloth.

“No, Arl, think.” I sat beside him. “There was no time after you two exchanged places—no time for him to ready a horse for us. It had been done earlier. His horse, not yours.”

Arlen looked at me, then at his hands.

“He meant it for himself, to escape the ceremonials. So that he would not have to see you die, or strike you.”

Arl sat silent for a while. “Now this time,” he said finally, “I am going to him.” And he strode out in search of Lonn, and the two of them did not return until after nightfall.

What they talked about I do not know. But it must have cleared a way, somehow, for the next day Lonn's rage came plain, with him in control and in ordinary form it came out, and our answer with it.

“I was willing enough to die,” Lonn said abruptly after the noonday meal. “I wanted to die rather than let them kill you—I thought. Only—”

“Only what?” Arlen prompted.

“No one wept for me.”

“I wept.”

“I did not see it. You were gone. There was no—”

“No what?”

“No honor. No mourning.” Lonn got up as if to leave. “I sound so petty.”

“It does not matter.” Arlen took him by the arm and urged him back to his stool again. “Go on,” he coaxed with that irreverent perverseness of his. “Tell me what it is like to be dead and cut in pieces.”

Lonn went rigid, and Arlen looked up in instant remorse, wanting to swallow his words. But Lonn did not flee this time, or turn into a shining horror.

“It is—it was—they feasted! They laughed and made merry.” Anger edging out of those words. “And when they were done—”

He could not speak, sat gasping for breath as if he were strangling, but he did not again offer to leave. I stood watching, waiting, and Arlen leaned forward, waiting, gazing at Lonn. And then the hurtful secret burst from him.

“They threw me in the river like so much offal!”

He sprang up, but not to run, only to stand there with fists curled in wrath, and he shouted at us as if it were somehow our fault.

“No honor, mine, no marker, no tomb. They did not even give me burial. What remained of me, they—they threw it in the river! Like filth! Do you know what folk send to death on the Naga? Suicides, and corpses of the murdered and of murderers, and women who have died screaming in childbirth. All those who have gone to a bad death. All whom they want rid of, far, far rid of, whom they want not to think of after they are gone.…”

He stood panting, an ordinary mortal in a godlike rage, and then the fury left him, his body sagged, and he wept. Arlen went to him and took him into a tight embrace, clasping him and rocking him as if he were a babe. “You deserved better,” he said softly, “far better. You were a hero, a sacrifice, the most generous—”

“Stop it.” Lonn freed himself gently, wiped the tears from his face with a grimace. “I felt very sorry for myself,” he said in wry tones. “As I still do.”

“Yours was a winterking's suffering without the reward,” I put in.

He turned to me; they both turned to me as if they had forgotten I was there, staring at me.

“Yes. The bride.” Lonn said it with some small struggle, but he said it. “I felt that I should at least have had the bride. Rae, I am sorry.”

“No need.” I went and sat down at the table, and they sat across from me.

“But—I had given the gift freely, and I should not have thought of—taking it back.”

“The gift you gave was so great, you could not encompass it, being only flesh, after all, and no god. Lonn, it was well thought of and well done. Say no more of it.”

Indeed, there was no more to be said. He was emptied, and he sighed in assent.

“I think,” I told the two of them, “that I know what we must do.”

TWENTY-ONE

Within a few days we set out, well provisioned, with Lonn on Bucca and me on Teague behind Arlen. I wished we had yet another horse, for there was a great deal of baggage, but as we did not, we managed. We rode steadily but not overly hard, for we had time enough before the solstice day of the ceremonials. And we journeyed for the most part in silence, and Lonn in particular was silent.

“I only hope that I can do it,” he muttered once, as we wended our way through the Forever Forest.

“Are you determined to do it?” Arlen asked. “Bound?”

“Mighty Mother, yes. Bound as by chains of gold. I have brought you and Rae nothing but misery by cleaving to you. I will take the passage this time; I have sworn it.”

“Then you will do it,” Arlen said.

After we came out on the moorlands, Lonn left us for two days. He wanted to see Briony and beg his advice. I would not go to the soddy, for my going there would only cause Briony pain and make me uneasy on his account. I said as much, and Arlen and I passed the place a day's journey away. We were to wait for Lonn at the next bend of the esker. We spent the night in warmth and comfort at a friendly homestead and found that the folk had made great fires and were burning beans and elderberries; it was the eve of the festival of the dead. A year, a full year since the babe had been named.

The next day, as we rode, hoofbeats sounded and Lonn rode up behind us.

“So,” Arlen greeted him, “did you see Briony?”

“He was not there, nor had he been there for some time. The soddy was all shut up and deserted.”

“How can that be?” Arlen scowled, puzzled. “Are you sure you found the right place?”

“Quite sure,” Lonn retorted with more spirit than he had shown of late. “I have been there before, might I remind you.”

“Oh.” Arlen mused on that. “So you were.”

“Also, I went to inquire of the neighbors.”

“Oh?” Arlen turned to face him more attentively.

“And they said the witch has gone away for good. He told them he was going to apprentice with the masters beyond the burning sea.”

Arlen gave me a searching glance. I said nothing.

“I spent the night by a small campfire on the open moor,” Lonn said.

In the open, on that night of all nights. It was a deed to be accounted brave, or foolish, or perhaps insane.

“Did you not know—” Arlen started.

“Not until the dance crowded round. But then, there ought to be no reason for a dead man to fear the dead.” He wore an air of satisfaction, of mischief even, which I had not seen in him before. “I think I gave a good accounting of myself,” he added.

He did not tell us the whole tale of that night. But he held his head higher thereafter, and rode with more command, and Arlen watched him with pleasure tinged with sadness.

“This is the Lonn I remember,” he told me privately.

When we came to the Naga the cavalcades were riding along the bank, upstream toward the Sacred Isle to attend the sacral rites of the winterking. My father and his retinue rode close by us; he glared at us and passed on.

At the edge of the mist, beyond the dark water, lay the Island of Passages. We stopped at the closest point of the shore, looking over.

“Is that Ophid?” Arlen muttered.

I thought I could see a dark stumpy shape, like a leafless pollard, a figure the same color as the winter tree trunks around it. If we had not known what to look for we would never have noted it, and even so we could not be sure, it stood so still.

“Ophid!” Arlen shouted, and he signaled it.

The dark shape stirred and moved to the island shore. Presently another dark shape appeared around the downstream point, a swimming shape, long-necked and graceful, a cormorant boat. In it Ophid came over the water to speak with us.

“It goes well for you?” I asked him.

“It goes well.” He nodded gravely to me, and though he wore his all-masking mantle I could tell that fear had indeed left him, for he carried himself as erect as the sacral ash on the Island of Fugitives.

He and Arlen went aside to talk. They spoke for a long while, their voices a low murmur, and I saw Ophid nod; he had agreed to help us. Presently he rode his cormorant back to his island again, and Lonn and Arlen and I went on.

The Sacred Isle. Low and dark it lay on the dark water in the dusk. Odd, very odd and unnatural, it felt, to be camped on the river shore looking across at it, just three more seculars among the crowd of those come to honor the morrow's rites. Arlen hardly spoke that eve at all, and as for Lonn, he looked taut, as if he were gathering himself. An ordeal lay ahead of him, a passage, the greatest and most final of all passages.

We slept only lightly, uneasily, and by turns. Before dawn, when only the stirrings of the winter birds spoke of dawn, before anyone else of the vast encampment was about, we got up and slipped down to the shore, waiting, watching the faint sheen of starlight on the black water. Presently there came a shadow and a lapping sound, and the cormorant slid up to us. By the time the sky had turned from velvet black to a dark silken gray, Ophid had ferried us all across to the island, to the southern tip of it where the willows grew most thickly. Then he went away to tend our horses and gear for us. Arlen and Lonn and I settled ourselves amongst the willows and waited.

There was all to be said and nothing to say, and we did not speak, all the long day through. And though we had brought food with us, none of us could eat it, and though we had brought blankets and sat or lay on them and wrapped ourselves in them, we shivered. The day crept slowly, terribly slowly, from dawn to morning, from morning to a noon undiscerned in the white winter sky, from noon to afternoon and early evening. Lonn stirred restlessly, threw off his blanket, and came over to sit closer to Arlen and me. Dusk deepened—

Sound of a scream, distant, chill on the chill air.

Lonn shuddered; we all huddled together. “Poor devil,” Lonn muttered. “They have built the fires and tied him in the fivefold bond, and the scourging has begun.”

Praise be, we could not hear much, neither the grim song of the whips nor the chanting of the dancers. But we knew, all too well we knew what was happening. And the winterking screamed again. Lonn winced.

“Did I scream?” he asked, a wild light beginning in his eyes, edge of panic. “I—don't remember screaming.”