PROLOGUE (25 page)

It was hard to believe that he was alive now, even standing up to his hips in the cold river as the tug of the current tried to drag him downstream. It was easier to believe that he was dead, even if the fish in the baskets up on the shore churned and slithered, bright sunlight flashing on their scales. His companion, Urtan, clapped him on the shoulder and spoke words, none of which meant anything but which sounded cheerful enough. Maybe death J

wouldn't prove onerous as long as God granted him such good company.

The other men, Tosti and Kel, had started splashing each other as soon as the last weir had been hauled into the shallows and emptied of its bounty. Now Kel stoppered up the weir with a plug of sodden wood and flung it back into the river, and they swam a little, laughing and talking and with gestures making him welcome to join them.

He let the current jostle him off his feet as he lay back into its pull. Didn't death claim its victims in exactly this manner? Perhaps he was only streaming upward on the River of Heaven, making his way toward the Chamber of Light through a series of way stations. But as the water closed over his face, he heard the hounds barking. Just as he heaved himself over and stood, Sorrow bounded out into the river, paddling madly, while Rage yipped anxiously from the shore.

"Nay, nay, friend," he said, hauling Sorrow by his forelegs back
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to the shallows, "I'll bide here in this place for a while yet, if God so will it." His companions swam closer, unsure of his intent. They smiled cautiously as he shook out his wet hair, then laughed when Sorrow let fly a spray of mist as the hound shook himself off.

The village lay just beyond the river. Towering behind sod-and-timber houses rose the huge tumulus with its freshly raised earthworks and the gaunt circle of giant stones at the flat summit. In many ways, the tumulus reminded him of the battlefield where he had fallen, but the river had run on a different course there, and the forest hadn't grown as thickly to the north and west, and the tumulus itself had been so very ancient. Nor had there been a village lying in its shadow. This couldn't be the same place where he had died.

"But it's a good place," he assured Sorrow, who regarded him reprovingly. Rage padded over for a pat and a scratch.” Yet doesn't it seem strange to you that there should be no iron in the afterlife? They carry daggers of flint, and their ploughs are nothing but the stout fork of a tree shaped so that one length of it can turn the soil. It seems strange to me that God would punish common folk by making their day-to-day work harder in the other world."

So Aunt Bel would have said. But of course, she wasn't his aunt any longer; he had no family, orphaned child of a dead whore.

"Alain." Urtan gestured toward the baskets, which needed two men each to hoist.

Perhaps he had no family, but in this land they needed him, even if only for as humble a task as carrying a basket of fish up to the village. Hadn't he given everything else to the centaur woman? Maybe at this way station of the journey toward the Chamber of Light, he had to learn to forget the life he had once lived.

They hauled the baskets up the slope. Children shrieked and exclaimed over the fish, and after much good-natured jesting he realized that it wasn't so hard after all to learn a few words: "fish," "basket," "knife," and a word that meant "child," applied equally to boys and girls.

It was a good idea to learn as much as he could, since he didn't know how long he would bide here, or where he would end up next.

By the gates he saw Adica. Without the gold antlers and spiral waistband that had made her presence awe-inspiring up among the stones, she looked like any young woman, except for the lurid burn scar on her cheek. She watched them as they hauled the baskets through the gate, and he smiled, unaccountably pleased to see her, but the spark of pleasure reminded him of last night, when she had gestured toward the bed in her house. Her movement as she smiled in response made her corded skirt sway, revealing the length of her bare thighs.

He flushed and looked away. He had made vows to Tallia, hadn't he? If he must abjure them, if he must admit that he and Tallia were no longer husband and wife, then hadn't he long before that been promised to the church? He ought not to be admiring any woman.

Yet as they came to the big house that stood at the center of the village, he glanced back toward the gates, lying below them. Adica still stood there beside the elderly headwoman, called Orla. Hadn't he given up all the vows and the promises, the lies and the secrets? Hadn't the centaur woman taken his old life and left him as naked as a newborn child in a new world?

Perhaps, like the infant yesterday, he needed to learn how to breathe again. Perhaps that was the secret of the journey, that each way station taught you a new lesson before you were swept again downstream toward the obliterating light of God.

At the big house, children of varying ages swarmed up and, by some pattern he couldn't quite discern, Urtan doled out the fish until a small portion was left for Tosti and Kel.

"Come, come," said Kel, who had evidently been stung at birth by the bee of impatience. He and Tosti were close in age, very alike except in temperament. They led Alain through the village to the only other big house. It had a stone foundation, wood pillars and beams, a thatched roof, and pungent stables attached at one end, now empty except for the lingering aroma of cattle. Inside, Kel showed him a variety of furs and sleeping mats woven of reeds rolled up on wooden platforms ranged under the sloping walls. The young man showed him a place, mimed sleeping, and made Alain repeat five times the word which perhaps meant "sleep" or else "bed." Satisfied, he led Alain outside. Setting the guts aside for the stew pot, they lay the cleaned fish out to dry on a platform plaited out of willow branches. It took Alain a few tries to get the hang of using a flint knife, but he persevered, and Tosti, at least, was patient enough to leave him alone to get the hang of it.

There were other chores to be done. As Aunt Bel used to say. | "work never ceases, only our brief lives do." Work helped him forget. He set to willingly, whether it was gutting fish or, as today, felling trees for a palisade. He learned to use a stone ax, which didn't cut nearly as well as the iron he was used to and, after a number of false starts, got the hang of using a flint adze.

Could it be that God wished humankind to recall that war had no place in the Chamber of Light? War sprang from iron, out of which weapons were made. After all, it was with an iron sword that-the Lady of Battles had dealt the killing blow.

Yet if these people didn't know war, then why were they fortifying their village?

Kel got impatient with the speed at which Alain trimmed bark from the fallen tree, and by gestures showed him that he should go back to felling trees while Kel did the trimming. Tosti scolded Kel, but Alain good-naturedly exchanged adze for ax. He and Urtan examined a goodly stand of young beech and marked four particularly strong, straight trees for felling.

Alain measured falling distance and angle, and started chopping. His first swing got off wrong, and he merely nicked the tree and had to skip back to avoid hitting his own legs. A man appeared suddenly from behind and with a curse gave a hard strike to the tree. Chips flew and the ax sank deep.

Startled, Alain hesitated. The man turned, looking him over with an expression of disgust and challenge. It was the man who had threatened him yesterday, who went by the name Beor. He was as tall as Alain and half again as broad, with the kind of hands that looked able to crush rocks.

The men around grew quiet; two more, whose faces he recognized, had appeared from out of the forest. Everyone waited and watched. No one moved to interfere. Once, with senses sharpened by his blood link to Fifth Son, who had taken the name Stronghand, he would have heard each least crease of loam crushed under Beor's weight as the other man shifted, readying to strike, and he would have tasted Beor's anger and envy as though it were an actual flavor. But now he could not feel Stronghand's presence woven into his thoughts; the lack of it made his heart feel strangely empty, distended, and limp. Had he given that blood link to the centaur sorcerer, too, or had he only lost the link to Stronghand because blood could not in fact transcend death?

Yet envy and anger are easy enough to read in a man's stance and in his expression. Rage padded forward to sit beside Alain. She growled softly.

Alain stepped forward and jerked the ax out of the tree. He offered it to Beor who, after a moment's hesitation, took it roughly out of his hands.” You've great skill with that ax," Alain said with defiant congeniality, "and I've little enough with a tool I'm unaccustomed to, but I mean to fell this tree, so I will do so and thank you to stand aside."

He deliberately turned his back on the man. The weight of the other workers' stares made his first strokes clumsy, but he stubbornly kept on even when Beor began to make what were obviously insulting comments about his lack of skill with the ax. Why did Beor hate him?

Behind him, the other men moved away to their own tasks. Beor's presence remained, massive and hostile. With one blow, he could strike Alain down from behind, smash his head in, or cripple him with a well-placed chop to the back.

It didn't matter. Alain just kept on, fell into the pattern of it finally as the wedge widened and the tree, at last, creaked, groaned, and fell. Beor had been so intent on glowering that he had to leap back, and Urtan made a tart comment, but no one laughed. They were either too afraid or too respectful of Beor to laugh at him.

It was well to know the measure of one's opponents. That was why he had lost Lavas county to Geoffrey: he hadn't understood the depth of Geoffrey's envy and hatred. Could he have kept the county and won over Tallia if he had acted differently?

Yet what use in rubbing the wound raw instead of giving it a chance to heal? Lavas county belonged to Geoffrey's daughter now. Tallia had left him of her own free will. He had to let it go.

Kel began trimming the newly fallen beech, and Alain started in on the next tree. Eventually, Beor faded back to work elsewhere, although at intervals Alain felt his glance like a poisoned arrow glancing off his back. But he never dignified Beor's jealousy with an answer. He just kept working.

In the late afternoon, they hitched up oxen to drag the trimmed and finished poles back toward the village. Sweat dried on his back as he walked. The other men wore simple breechclouts, fashioned of cloth or leather. The tunic Adica had given him looked nothing like their clothing. It had a finer weave and a shaped form that was easy to work and move in, even when he dropped it off his shoulders and tied it at his hips with a belt of bast rope. The men of the village had stocky bodies, well muscled and quite hairy. They had keen, bright faces and were quick to laughter, mostly, but they didn't really resemble any of the people he knew or had ever seen, as if here in the afterlife God had chosen to shape humankind a little differently.

Unlike his kinsman Kel, Urtan had the gift of patience, and he fell back to walk beside Alain to teach him new words: the names of trees, the parts of the body, the different tools and the type of stone they were made of. Beor strode at the front with various companions walking beside him. Now and again he shot an irate glance back toward Alain. But unlike an arrow, a glance could not prick unless you let it. Beor might hurt and even kill in a fit of jealous rage, but he could never do any other harm because he hadn't any subtlety.

The village feasted that evening on fish, venison, and a potage of barley mush flavored with herbs and leaves from the forest, sweetened by berries. Urtan ate with his family, his wife Abidi and his children Urta and a toddler who didn't seem to have an intelligible name, leaving Alain to eat with the unmarried men, all of them except Beor little more than youths. Adica ate by herself, off to one side, without companionship, but when Alain made to get up to go over to her, Kel grabbed him and jerked him back, gesturing that it wasn't permitted. Adica had been watching him, and now she smiled slightly and looked away. The burn scar along her cheek looked rather like a congealed spider's web, running from her right ear down around the curve of the jawline to fade almost at her throat. The tip of her right ear was missing, so cleanly healed that it merely looked misshapen.

Beor rose abruptly and began declaiming as twilight fell. Like a man telling a war story, he went on at length. Was he boasting? Kel and Tosti started to yawn, and Adica rose suddenly in the middle of the story and walked right out, away into the village. Alain wanted to follow her, but he wasn't sure if such a thing was permitted. At last, Beor finished his tale. It was time for bed. Alain's friends had given him a place to sleep beside them but at the opposite end of the men's house from Beor. He was tired enough to welcome sleep, but when he rolled himself up in the furs allotted him, stones pressed into his side. He groped and found the offending pebbles, but they weren't stones at all but some kind of necklace. It hadn't been there earlier.

At dawn, when he woke, he hurried outside to get enough light to see: someone had given him a necklace of amber. Kel, stumbling out sleepily behind him, whistled in admiration for the handsome gift, and called out to the others, and they teased Alain cheerfully, all but Beor, who stalked off.