Otherwise (15 page)

At first Redhand started at every noise; but then the fire began to melt the chill of the Drum from him, and loosen too something tight that had held him. He sighed, inhaling the dark odor of the cottage.

There was a sentiment, among court poets, that this little life, cottage life, was the only true and happy one; filled up with small cares but without real burdens, and rich with the immortality of changelessness. Redhand had never felt so, had never envied the poor, surely not the peat-cutters and cottagers. No, there were no young people here, and Redhand knew why—they had escaped, probably to take up some untenanted farm, glad enough to get a piece of land, a share of the world, and to see their children then buy or inherit more, become owners, and their grandchildren perhaps Defenders, and so on and on till the descendants of these women singing the seasons entered the topmost spiral of the world and were flung Outward into pride, and war, and the Guns.

Two parents, Learned had said, four grandparents, eight great-grand-parents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred and twenty-eight… We three, he had said, are part of it. Redhand, Learned, Younger.

Brothers. Well, that was easy, then; not every man needed all those ancestors, he shared them with others. Was that the solution? It wasn’t sufficient; still the number of ancestors must be multiplied as you stepped back through the generations, how many thousands of them, each doubling the last, till the vast population needed to begin the world spilled over its edges into the Deep. It was mad…

It came to him as a sounding clarity, a benign understanding that made the close cottage order itself before his eyes and smile.

All those millions were dead; and when the Fifty-two began the world, the millions weren’t yet born.

Yes, their shades crowded the edges of the world; yes, there were uncountable numbers of them. But they weren’t alive, had never been alive all at once; they were simply all the people that had ever been, added up as though a farmer were to reckon his harvest by counting all the grain from all the seed he had ever sowed. Absurd that he could have been tricked into thinking that they needed all to live at once. Gratefully, the world closed up within him to a little place, a place of few; a handful at a time, who must give way to those who would come after.

Give way…

The structure of the burning peat was like a thousand tiny cities in flames. It held him; he watched ramparts crumble, towers fall, maddened populaces. Hung above the fire was a fat black kettle he hadn’t noticed before. It had begun to boil; thick coils of steam rose from it. Now and again, the younger of the women took from within her clothes a handful of something, seeds or spices, and threw them in. The pot boiled more furiously each time she did so, frothing to its edges. The old one was anxious, cried out each time the pot began to seethe.

“Protector,” she said, “help us here, or the pot will overflow.”

“Why does she do that?” Redhand asked. “Let it subside.”

“I must, I must,” the younger said, and threw in more; a trickle of the froth this time ran over the kettle’s edge and sizzled with an acrid odor. The old one gasped as though in pain. “Protector,” she said, “remember your vows. Help the Folk.”

He got up, not certain what he must do. Within the kettle a mass of stuff seethed and roiled; the younger woman flung in her seed, the stuff rose as though in helpless rage. Calmly then, with their eyes on him, he bent his head to the kettle to drink the boiling excess.

He started awake.

There was a horse in the courtyard. A man was dismounting. Fauconred threw open the door. “Sennred,” he said. “Alone.”

There was no kettle… The two women hurried away timidly into the other room when Sennred came in. His face, never youthful, looked old in the firelight. “I would have come sooner,” he said, “only I wanted not to be followed.” He held out his hand to Redhand, who hesitated, still addled with his dream. He got up slowly and took Sennred’s hand.

“Does the King,” he said, “know of this meeting?”

Almost imperceptibly, Sennred shook his head.

“Has he forgiven you?”

“I hope he has.”

“He released you from prison.”

“I broke from prison.” He undid the cloak he wore, let it fall. He touched Redhand, gently, to pass by him, and sat heavily in the single chair. “I broke from prison with little Black.”

“With him?”

“He showed me the way out. We became… great friends in prison.” A faint smile faded quickly; he cradled his pale forehead in his hand and went on, not looking at Redhand. “We climbed to the roof of our prison. And then down. At a certain point… at a certain point, Black fell…”

“Lies.” With a sudden fierce anger, Redhand saw the story. “Lies.”

“I grasped his cloak as he fell,” Sennred went on, in the same tone, as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “But the cloak wouldn’t hold. He fell. I saw it.”

“Who wrote this tale?” Redhand growled. “One of the King’s urnings? And did you practice it then?”

“Redhand…”

“No. Sennred. It’s a poor trick.” But his neck thrilled; Sennred’s look was steady, with an eerie tenderness; he didn’t go on—it seemed inconsequential to him whether Redhand believed him or not. “Why,” Redhand said, and swallowed, “why is the King not here then? Why is this done in secret? Shout it out to my army, to the Queen…”

“No. The Blacks would think their King was murdered…”

“Was he not?”

“They would fight. Redhand. Listen to me now. I want to begin with no war. This was never my quarrel. The King said to me:
burn Redhand’s house, his fields; let nothing live.
I won’t. It hurts me, Redhand, not to do what he asked. But I can’t.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m asking you to desert the Queen. Take your army away. Decamp, by night. There will be no reprisals. I swear it.”

A weird apprehension rose in Redhand’s throat like spittle. “And who are you?” he said, almost whispered. “Who are you, Sennred, to swear such a thing?”

“Heir. Heir to it all: Black and Red. There’s no other. Redhand, the King Red Senlin’s Son is dead.”

With a sudden whirr all Redhand’s tense suspicions, doubts, plans took flight, left him for a moment blindly empty. Why had he not realized…? With sickening certainty, he knew he was about to weep.

Give way, give way…

Toward dawn, Sennred rode away. Fauconred handed him up, and he and Redhand watched till he was gone.

“Go on, then,” Redhand said. “We shouldn’t return together.”

“No.” The old man mounted with clumsy grace and pulled his cloak around him. “The sun won’t shine today.”

“No. Fog, I think. A Drumskin fog.”

“It will be easier then.”

“Yes. Go now.”

Fauconred stood his horse a moment; a cock crowed. He thought he knew what it was his cousin felt, but knew nothing to say to it. He saluted, and spurred his heavy horse.

Redhand stood a long time in the little yard, watching the air thicken around him. It was utterly still. A red dawn Inward was being extinguished as fast as it grew; Dreaded was thick with fog.

What if he was wrong?

All those boys and men, their loins rich with descendants, would escape death tomorrow. Perhaps it was wrong that they should live, perhaps their children’s children, that might not be, would boil over the edges of the little world… He shrugged it all away. The truth he had glimpsed had grown tenuous and thin; he vowed not to touch it again. He was not one for notions; he was only grateful for what he felt now: calm, peaceful almost, for the first time in many weeks.

Behind him, sudden in the stillness, the shutters of the cottage banged shut. He turned, saw a frightened face look out before the last one closed. When he turned back, someone was coming toward him, out of the fog, from Dreaded.

As the figure condensed out of the whiteness, he saw with a rush of joy that it was his lost Secretary, of whom he had not thought in weeks. But then, no, the figure came closer, changed; it wasn’t him.

It was the blond boy who had brought him Sennred’s message.

Redhand stepped toward him, was about to speak to him, tell him what had come of his mission. Then he saw the Gun in the boy’s hands.

They stood for a moment not far apart.

The boy’s only thought was a hope that the old Gun not misfire in the wet. Redhand felt only a faint resentment that the boy had told him he couldn’t read.

The shot made Fauconred’s horse start, and Fauconred cry out. It echoed long, rolling through the low country, almost reaching the place of two armies before the fog drowned it at last.

There were two Endwives, a young girl named Norin, an old woman named Ser, who had come several miles through the fog with a hospital wagon, not sure of the way, getting down now and again to lead the horses, who were afraid to go on; sure then that they had lost the way in the fog. Toward night, though, which was a thickening of the fog only, they came to high ground. There were lights, watchfires, dull gobbets of flame in the wetness: their sisters.

Through the night, others arrived, fog-delayed; they prepared themselves, listening to the faint sounds of a multitude on the plain below them, moving, stirring—arming themselves, probably. They talked little, saying only what was necessary to their craft; hoping, without speaking it, that the fog would hold, and there would be no battle.

Before dawn, a wind came up. They could feel it cold on their Outward cheeks; it began to tear at the fog. Their watchfires brightened; as day came on, their wagons assembled there began to appear to them, gradually clearer, as though they awoke from a drug.

When the sun rose the fog was in flight. Long bars of sunlight fell across the plain where the battle was to be.

But there was no battle there.

There was one army of men, vast, chaotic, the largest army anyone had ever seen. There was a royal tent in its center, and a Dog banner above it; and there was a flag near it that bore a red palm. It was quiet; no war viols played; the Endwives thought they could hear faint laughter.

Opposite, where the other army should have been, there were a hundred guttering campfires. There were some tents of black, half dismantled. Soldiers, too, scattered contingents late in realizing what had happened in the night, but not many; the many were away over the Drum, a long raggedy crowd, no army, going Outward, not having planned on it, quickly.

By noon there was no one at all facing the world’s largest army. All who had not joined it had fled it.

Only a single closed carriage remained. Beside it, a man in a wide black hat stood with his hands behind his back, the freshening breeze teasing the hem of his black coat. The carriage’s dappled gelding quietly cropped the sparkling, sunlit grass.

E
PILOGUE

W
hen the snows came, the Neither-nor hibernated.

Deep in a rug-hung cave, in a bed piled with covers, pillows, furs, It dozed through week on week of storm that stifled Its forest, locked the Door.

In Rathsweek, pale and weak as an invalid, the Neither-nor crept out from bed, to the cave-mouth, to look out. The forest glinted, dripped, sparkled with melting snow; the rock walls of the glen were ruined ice palaces where they were not nude and black.

It was a day, by Its reckoning, sacred to Rizna, a day when Birth stirs faintly below the frost, deep in the womb of Death. Not a day to look out, alone, on a winter forest, spy on its nakedness. But the Neither-nor was not afraid of powers; It owned too many for that; and when the figure in red appeared far off, like blood on the snow, the Neither-nor awaited it calmly, shivering only in the cold.

But when it came close, stumbling, knee-deep in snow, near enough to be recognized, the Neither-nor gasped. “I thought you were dead.”

The girl’s eyes stared, but didn’t seem to see. Except for the shivers that racked her awful thinness, and the raggedy red cloak, real enough, the Neither-nor might have still thought her dead.

On feet bound in rags, Nod struggled toward It. Overcome with pity, the Neither-nor began to make Its way toward her, but Nod held up an arm; she would come alone.

When she stood before the Neither-nor she drew out Suddenly, and with all the little strength left her, struck the Gun against the rock wall, cracking its stock. “No,” the Neither-nor said, taking Nod’s shoulders in the Two Hands. “You haven’t failed. You haven’t. The task is done. Red-hand is dead.”

She stood, the broken Gun in her hands, a negation frozen on her dirty face, and the Neither-nor released her, frightened, of what It could not tell. And Nod began to speak.

He had not his brother’s enthusiasm for works and words, but he had loved his brother deeply, and in his kingship the works would go forward. In that winter the Harran Stone was completed; there his brother lay, with Harrah, their flawed love made so perfect in their tomb that even in the darkest of winter days, shut up in the Citadel, Sennred had not sensed his brother’s ghost was restless.

He had turned an old prison into a theater. A scheme for making books without writing them out by hand, that Sennred little understood or cared about, he had fostered anyway.

He looked after these things, and his peace, patiently through the winter of his mourning. And hers.

It had been easy to confirm her in sole possession, in perpetuity, of Redsdown; he had with pleasure expunged every lien, attachment, attainder on the old fortress and its green hills. To console her further was impossible, he knew; with grownup wisdom he had let time do that.

When spring, though, with agonizing delays began to creep forth, he sent gifts, letters impeccably proper, so tight-reined she laughed to read them.

And on a day when even in the cold old Citadel perfumey breaths of a shouting spring day outside wandered lost, he prepared to go himself.

There were seven windows in the chamber he sat in. Against six of them the towers of the castle and the City heights held up hands to block the light. The seventh, though, looked out across the lake and the mountains; its broad sill was warm where he laid his hand.

Out there, in those greening mountains, somewhere, the Woman in Red held her councils.

She was not Just, they said, though like the Just she spoke of the old gods—but when she spoke she cursed them. What else she spoke of the King couldn’t tell; his informants were contradictory, their abstracts bizarre. Of the woman herself they said only that she wore always a ragged red domino, and that she was a waterman’s daughter with cropped blond hair. The Grays thought her dangerous; the old ones’ eyes narrowed as they glossed for him one or another fragment of her thought. The King said nothing.

People were stirred, in motion, that was certain. He gathered she spoke to all classes—Just, Defenders, Folk. Some he sent to hear her strange tale listened—and didn’t return.

A spring madness. Well, he knew about that… almost, it seemed, he might have brought it forth himself, out of the indecipherable longings that swept him on these mornings: he felt himself melt, crumble within like winter-rotten earthworks before new rivulets. Sometimes he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Down on the floor of the old Rotunda as the King and his retinue went through, the patient Grays were still at their cleaning work. They had accomplished much since Sennred had first noticed them, that day Red Senlin had come to the City to be King. The tortured circle dance of kings he had seen them uncover then had proved to be not a circle but part of a spiral, part of a History they thought, emanating from a beginning in the center to an end—where?

You must learn to pretend,
dead Redhand had said when they stood here together,
if you would live here long.
Well, he was learning: would learn so well, would live here so long that he could perhaps begin to lead that spiral out of its terrible dance, lead it… where?

In the center of the floor, the Grays had begun to uncover bizarre images—a thing with vast sails; stars, or suns; creatures of the Deep.

Didn’t the Woman in Red talk too of suns, and sails, and the Deep? She had for sure talked of bringing her news to the King. Did he dare stop, on his way Outward, to speak to her, listen to her? They had all advised him against it. A spring madness, they said, people in motion.

He stepped carefully past the grinning kings to the door Defensible, newly widened that winter. His laughing servant held a brand-new traveling cloak for him.

And what if it was not madness at all, not ephemeral? What if Time had indeed burst out of his old accustomed round, gone adventuring on some new path? Would he know? And would it matter if he did?

He took the cloak from his servant. He would see Caredd soon, and that did matter, very much.