“I will not only not punish you,” he said, “I will even thank you for the amusement. I may even use your unmagic spell one of these days when examining a witness!”
Later, on the road to the high steppes after the fair, Tonya said something of the sort to Driss.
“Do you love me greatly?” she said. “Beware Dragon’s unmagic horn before you answer!”
You’re a dream-singer, Andriu told himself. What you sing manifests itself as life. If you don’t want to cough, you won’t. But an instinct deeper than magic warned him that even a dream-singing bard, a renegade from two priesthoods, wasn’t immune to lung fever. Think of something else. That interminable ballad that the Rhos liked, the one with the refrain, “That passed; this will, too.” All the way upstream that refrain, manifested by his special gift, had eased the ship past snags, rapids, and bandits. Somewhere during the trip, as he was earning his passage with his dream-songs (and off duty, with songs a lot less holy), the unseasonably early frosts had sneaked into his lungs. He had known that that might happen, but he had wanted to get home to Ithkar more than he had wanted to fret about his health.
Another cough started to scratch its way up from beneath his ribs. He could tell that this was going to be one of the racking ones that made him spit up blood. Certainly he could go to one of the temple heal-alls, if he wanted to be identified straightaway as the boy who had run off fifteen years ago. He didn’t know what the punishment was for that.
Just a few more minutes and you can cough, he told himself. Just not now. Not during the Appeal to the Day spring, the most solemn moment of the Feast of the Comforter, the Lady and Mother among the Three Lordly Ones. As the high priestess abased herself before the Lady’s image, Lord Father Demetrios, most senior of Ithkar’s priests and a dream-singer himself, led the choir from the altar. He bore a fragrant torch and wore festival robes—silver gleaming beneath an open cope. No dream-singer, with his ability to shape reality from song, could preside at this rite. While transformation was involved in it, it was the faith of the worshippers that must transform the metal wreath of offering into something alive and fruitful.
Lord Xuthen, the temple’s chief patron this year, came forward to present the wreath. He was a lean, disdainful-looking man with black hair and a silvered beard, and wore gem-embroidered silk that shone green in some lights, gray in others. Though he had almost a scholar’s aloofness, he swept a glare across the congregation. His eyes paused at Andriu, swept on to a thin man and woman standing beside a child with a withered arm, past them, and over toward a girl dressed in the free-flowing fashion of Rhos women rather than in the stiff garments Ithkar ladies wore. Her wealth of blond hair was braided and fell against a massive necklace and earrings of amber only slightly less ruddy than the autumnal colors of her gown and surcoat.
Andriu had always had no respect for time and place. Now the bard in him awoke.
A girl stood in a scarlet gown.
Could you but touch it,
Its cloth made a whispering sound.
Eia!
You’re here to pray, not to hatch up verses. Won’t you ever learn? Andriu flushed with shame as well as fever. If he didn’t learn now, he would have little time left in which to do so. Gracious Lady, Comforter, I believe! Belief had never been his problem. He had believed, had trusted too wholly. And so, when he had seen that underpriest bribe the guard to the female students’ dorter, he had been too disillusioned to accuse the man. He’d had no belief left in him to think that Father Demetrios would listen to him. Instead, he’d run away. . . .
Now Andriu fixed his eyes on the magnificent wreath of offering in Lord Xuthen’s hands: stalks of carved malachite, grain-heads of topaz and amber that glistened with a dew of freshwater pearls. “Be it Thy will, Lady and Comforter, that our faith make this wreath blossom!” the lord prayed.
“Blossom, flourish, grow for us!” All the congregation’s hope and anguish were in that chant.
Tears formed in Andriu’s eyes. He had forsworn his own initiation as a novice priest in this temple. Probably he had broken the old dream-singer’s heart by running away into the west. And his behavior there had been worse. Since, like an imbecile, he’d assumed that he still ought to be a priest of some sort, he had joined the austere order of Cerdic Revived.
“Let the wreath blossom!” Lord Xuthen cried for the second time. The priestess moaned. The blond Rhos girl’s face was so pale it looked greenish. Like Andriu, she kept raising a kerchief to her lips. The father of the sick boy placed an arm about his shoulders. It wasn’t going to work this year. Only the noble’s exultation shone forth undimmed as he confronted the statue of the Comforter.
Andriu had to admit that his career as a priest of Cerdic Revived had been conspicuous, albeit brief. Privately, he was of the opinion that Cerdic had been a dream-singer. Look at that one tale of the bannocks and flatfish. Who else but a dream-singer could manifest so much food with but a chanted blessing? When Andriu, in an excess of devotion as he assisted the almoner, had tried it, he had earned a reprimand and a long fast. Faint with hunger, he had attempted to lighten his mood with a song. He had been too dizzy to remember not to use the special resonances that distinguished dream-singing from ordinary music. And during a highly impassioned version of “Corisande Storm-lover,” the lady had revealed herself—literally, except for a few cloudy veils and a sultry haze of lightning—before the entire community. That episode had set him on his way as a bard, ribald ballads in taverns a specialty.
He still had a fondness for the absurd, the inappropriate, or the doomed to failure. It made him chuckle now, though this was no time for laughter, and provoked a cough.
“So be Thy will,” intoned Lord Xuthen. The priestess began a lament, and the congregation sobbed. Xuthen set the wreath down at the statue’s base. He didn’t look especially distraught.
As the kerchief over Andriu’s mouth grew warm and wet from his coughing, he darted for the courtyard. The cool air and river smells shocked him back to alertness. Near as the temple court was to the river, there was a fountain in it. Andriu dipped a cleanish corner of his ragged cloth into the rippling water and dabbed at his face. That was when he heard the gagging and heaving of someone vomiting. He was surprised to see that it was the woman who wore Rhos dress. She leaned against a pillar and shook with her spasms.
When she wasn’t so ill, Andriu decided, she was probably lovely. Her complexion was clear, her features (what he had seen of them in the temple) well marked, her mouth generous. Unlike the Corisandes and Melusines of his ballads, she was but of medium height and her body, as much of it as he could discern beneath her long garments, was pleasingly rounded. The way her braids tumbled down her back made him think of fields at harvesttime.
Seeing Andriu, the woman started. But the lure of clean water was too tempting and she approached the fountain. Andriu took the cup chained nearby, filled it, and poured the Three Libations. He held it out to her in silence. She wiped her mouth again, then drank thirstily.
“There’s blood on your face,” she observed. She held out her kerchief. Andriu leaned over to look at himself in the water. Like many natives of Ithkar, he was pale, except for the hectic, unhealthy color flaming above his hollow cheeks. His eyes were gray and too bright. His dark hair was straggling onto his shoulders again because he could not spare a half-silver for the barber.
When the woman shook her head at his attempt to return her kerchief, he smiled. He was about to ask her name when she rose and turned in alarm. “I must go back inside. . . . Sweet Lady, what if they missed me!”
“Vassilika!”
Apparently someone had missed her. Two women wearing the dress of well-off maidens of the city, one blue-green, the other brown and cream, came toward her. Their closely pinned hair under tiny caps, their dark eyes, and their pointed chins characterized them as natives of Ithkar, the daughters, possibly, of a well-off merchant. A certain stubbornness about the mouths of all three women marked them out as close kin.
“Were you just sick again, sister?”
“The fish I ate this morning was spoiled, I think,” said the blond woman.
“Father sent you to market to buy it. Why would you buy bad fish?” accused the girl in blue-green.
“You’re always the one who gets to go. It’s not fair. And Mother says that no good will come out of Father’s letting you keep to your Rhos mother’s free and easy ways—”
“I think it already has,” the woman in blue-green cut in slyly.
Andriu dodged behind the fountain. Quickly, as he’d learned to during his life as a strolling bard, he was adding up the clues. It sounded like a ballad, didn’t it? A marriage between an Ithkar merchant and the daughter of one of the Rhos traders . . . Perhaps this Vassilika was all that survived of a first, youthful marriage. Then a second marriage to a lady of Ithkar, who envied her stepdaughter’s freedom. . . .
Well, this Vassilika looked quite capable of giving a fine accounting of herself. Andriu settled down for an enjoyable harangue. He was surprised and disappointed when Vassilika seemed to wilt.
“Cyntha, Dorastrea, please, tell no one.” She held out her hands for theirs, but both girls clasped their own hands almost tauntingly behind their backs.
“This year, Lord Xuthen said he wanted the temple laws— all the laws—strictly enforced,” said Cyntha, in the brown and cream.
Vassilika recoiled. “Do you know what some of those laws do to women?”
“You’re the one who reads,” Dorastrea reminded her in the high, discontented tones of a child bringing up an old grievance.
“Father would have taught you. Or
I
would. ...”
“You’re too busy being sick in the mornings now.”
Andriu winced. If Xuthen (who had always been somewhat of a scholar) had revived the laws of Priest Draco II, called the Vindictive, Vassilika was right to shudder. Half-mad and a confirmed woman-hater, Draco had decreed that a woman found pregnant without husband or suitor should be exposed, branded publicly, have her head shaved, and be cast out in her shift, just as if she had used evil magic to assassinate someone!
“I’m not . . . not what you’re implying,” Vassilika protested earnestly. “You couldn’t accuse me. Think of how our father would feel, learning that one of his own girls had turned on me. It would break his heart. You criticize my behavior, but I ask you, is breaking a father’s pride and heart proper conduct?”
Seeing the other two exchange sidelong glances, Vassilika smiled. “Look, Dorastrea,” she said, her fingers caressing her amber necklace. “You’ve always loved my necklace. When you were little, you used to beg me to let you wear it. And you, Cyntha, with your long neck and white skin, don’t you think that my ear-bobs would suit you? Come now. Take the trinkets, please do—and not a word to anyone. I’ve just been a little sick, and I hate fuss. You know how I hate fuss when I don’t feel well.”
“Girls!” All three women turned toward the begowned and becoiffed matron whose assured voice summoned them. The two younger immediately walked off, their heads close together as they talked excitedly.
“In a moment!” cried Vassilika. “Please.” The “please,” Andriu noted, sounded like an afterthought. As her sisters disappeared, she sighed.
Andriu knew little enough of girls of this class. But he had seen quite enough of the women in taverns to know that greed would only chase spite out of their heads for so long.
Well, what was it to him? A rich girl got caught: it probably happened all the time. Then his cough tore free. If his muscles hadn’t been those of a singer and active man, he might have broken something.
“Still here!” Vassilika cried. She looked frightened and annoyed. Nevertheless, she fished in her belt-pouch and offered him one of the sweet candies women used to soothe children or sweeten their breath. “This should ease your throat,” she said. “You must see a heal-all.”
“I can’t,” Andriu whispered painfully. The candy tasted good. “Why don’t you?”
Her eyes grew round, and a smile trembled on her lips. Andriu wanted to smile, too. So she had caught his stray thought, that they both could hardly be avoiding the heal-alls for the same reason! Most people never understood his jokes, much less anticipated them. “Sweet Dayspring,” he said, chuckling, “what a wonder that would be, wouldn’t it? I can’t see a heal-all because I used to be a novice at the temple. My name’s Andriu, by the way.”
What an imbecile he was to tell her! She sank down onto the rim of the fountain beside him, and he was glad.
“Tell me, freelady Vassilika, what will you use to bribe your sisters with next?”
Vassilika laughed a little wryly. “I’d been wondering that, too. Do you have any suggestions?”
Her courage brought more warmth to his heart than a mug of spiced wine. For fifteen years he had been running away, living only for himself, day to day, as the birds—who sang, too—lived. He was near the end of the race. Perhaps before he died, he could do something for someone besides singing. Why not for this lady?
“Where’s the father?” he whispered, wincing at the blunt way the question came out. The great gong rang; services would be ending shortly.
Vassilika’s face twisted. How could any man in his right mind abandon someone like her?
“I want to help you, freelady,” he said quickly, “but ...” Fair-wards and worshippers were emerging from the temple.
“I can’t tell you now. Meet me at Sohrab’s cookshop at twilight,” she hissed.
Andriu forced himself to nod casually and then to saunter off, the very image of a considerate man who had stopped to assist a lady. The fair-wards barely glanced at him. If only he weren’t a renegade! He could offer her an honorable escape.
As he left the temple precincts, a chill quivered across his shadow on the polished flagstones and sped up from it into his vitals. Only the sweet Vassilika had given him prevented him from coughing. He glanced about wildly. Within a nearby scribe’s booth . . . someone wished him ill, had sensed his pain and confusion and reveled in it. His enemy . . . there stood Lord Xuthen, watching him. He bowed and offered an assiduously practiced innocent look to the noble. At first Xuthen’s eyes swept over him the way icy water drenches a man who falls overboard. Then Andriu felt as if every last frailty and pain in his body had been cataloged and savored.