Samples from books that we have published at Eartherean Books.
This is another in a series from the fourth book in the 4-book series The Doom-Quest of Ara-Karn: Darkbridge.
© 2009 by A. Adam Corby
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
The Passing of the Queen
LATER, when the fires burned low and the voices fell still, the women sought their dimplaces. On the wide veranda overlooking the clearing Allissál stood alone.
The sleepy village was quiet at that hour. The wives, mothers and children of the men who had conquered all the South and North lay now alone on deep furs. Allissál had eaten of their food, but had neither bathed nor accepted the fine linens Hertha-Toll had offered her. She came out of the hut as she entered it. She leaned against one of the support-pillars. The rags slid down her arm and she saw the bruises on her wrist. After all these months she still bore his mark.
She had ridden upland from Tezmon, away from Elna’s Sea. The snows fell lightly on the stony highlands, revealing the tracks of the game she hunted. She had drifted with neither aim nor purpose, avoiding all towns and cities, meeting with no one, lost in these lands where she had never been before. Pure and purifying, the Goddess-filled blinding cold swirled around her, the lone traveler on the hills.
She broke the sword and her pony died, and so on foot, using only the bow, she wandered ever Northward, pursuing the game-tracks in the retreating snows. At length she came with the white desert to the skirts of a high wall of mountains running with the moon. This wall she followed and so, at length, reached a great gap in the mountains. By then the snow had retreated above her, where she had not the strength to go.
Wondering, she descended into the gap and walked among fields of stones and gray dead earth. Then she knew she stood in the Pass of Gerso, and that beyond her the gap opened upon the wild lands where once Elna had penned the barbarians. She had looked upon the Gray Oak and the Gray Priestess, and there did a thing she found so hard to believe, it now abode within her memory like a tale Emsha had told her when she was small. It was a memory she did not trust, for it bore within it the seed of a duty she would never accept. So she had fled from the gaping faces of the other pilgrims, she had hidden the sword away, and she had wandered far from the broad paths among the forests of the wilderness.
The trees were already greening on the far side, when she fell in with a band of merchants and asked the way to Gundoen’s tribe.
Now dark clouds gathered from the Ocean of the Dead. A storm was stirring, the last blow of winter. Lights sparked in the clouds in distant silence. It struck Allissál as somehow beautiful to know herself the sole spectator of that approaching fury.
Even now doubtless the buds broke like sores from the branches in the South, and the flowers opened like bright wounds, and the birds built black nests and sang the bloody praises of their land’s new master. All the world was one now, lying beneath him as sated as a well-paid whore. All but a small stone hive somewhere in the Desert, where a handful of crazed women sang their songs of fury and of hate.
Allissál ran her fingers through her ragged short hair. She felt dirty and ugly. She thought of him – of the stories Kiva had told her. He was alone now, in the dimness of his usurped Palace, sending men in search of her. She knew he was dying there, choking on his madness.
She looked into the storm. Its wind threw dust into her eyes, teasing out unfelt tears. She had escaped the armies of the Conqueror and evaded all his spies, but she had not crossed alone the back ways of the North. The spirits of the dead, of all those poisoned in the Citadel, still pursued her. They gathered over her even now, lashing up the storm. She felt their presence and their rage. They had been denied the world beyond, and there was no way she could appease them. They had been her people, their lives had rested in her care. She alone had known the danger, but she had done nothing to imprison him. Now their deaths weighed upon her. They could not cross the Ocean of Death without a guide.
She heard their whispers in the winds. The voices filled her with a weary weakness beyond all her power to shake. She did not hate him, did not love him, did not need him, did not fear him. All that had vanished with the snows. But this was his world now. What then was left for her?
Quietly she stepped down the wooden steps to the clearing. On the rail behind her she left a bag holding all the gold and riches that that red-haired couch-lady had given her in Tezmon. Hertha-Toll, the widow of the man Allissál’s orders had condemned, could leave them in her next basket-offering if she wished.
She walked through the village, touching the sand with her toes first at each step, soft as a maid gone to see her first lover. She liked the small rude huts, but did not look at the stone walls of his new buildings rising like vague threats.
The upturned fishing boats were weathering the winds well. The storm had not yet broken over the beach, but the distant lightning now had found its tongue. Allissál stood on the stony beach beneath the shrine, alone.
The Couple were vanished from the sky. Only the voices of the dead filled her ears, roaring in the wind and waves. The air pressed the rags against her body and stole the breath from her mouth. She felt a sudden weakness stab her, from the bent of her ribs through her belly and along her legs to the back of her knees. That was fear. For a moment she turned her face away. Then she turned back.
Her eyes were narrow against the winds as she drew the dagger.
The wind moaned in the roof tiles. Calmly and sternly she took the dagger and cut through the silk ropes that held the death-barge in place.
It was almost beyond her to drag it down the rocks. But when she reached the lapping mouths of water it was easy.
She turned back then to face the land, her feet cold in the turquoise water. The sense of fate was strong in her, and all her fear was gone. This was all the working out of destiny in a play whose author was centuries dead but whose words remained untouched. He had voyaged out of the ruins of his world, to make a ruin of hers. Now she would follow the same path, in the same barge. It was as it had to be.
‘Once you were everything to me,’ she murmured. The wind took her words and flung them across the hills. ‘But I will not live on as your slave or your prize, nor yet the actress in the play of your madness.’
So saying, the former queen put the barge out into the waves, toward the distant Goddess who awaited her behind the onrushing storm over the Ocean of the Dead.
§
FOR A FULL PASS the storm lashed the coast with rain and wind, fierce, pitiless; then scornfully it passed over the little huddled village, and with it went the last of winter in the far North. Goddess emerged again, and the women of the tribe looked warily out of doors, even as they had done after that other storm years before – the storm that brought him.
At the beach they beheld with wonder the rifled shrine and its silk lines cleanly cut. But Hertha-Toll stood in the grass above the beach, and nodded. She showed no wonder that the stranger had left behind the dark green hooded hunting-cloak and its blood-red opal brooch-pin cut in the likeness of a serpent’s egg. She only marveled when they found buried beneath the driftage and sand blown across the shrine, a great bright sword, with the hilt they all knew, which had been Tont-Ornoth’s, now brought back to them by some working even Hertha-Toll might not imagine.
Two thousands up the coast from the bay, the slaves found the wave-washed nude body of the blonde woman lying on the rocks, bleeding and still, with a few birds perched indifferently about it.
In a cart they bore it to the chief’s hall, before the chief’s wife. Hertha-Toll looked upon the body strangely. This she had not foreseen.
In her mind she saw Gundoen again as he had been in his youth, recalled how he had wooed her with flowers and the bodies of animals he had brought down in hunt. When he died, were there any healers about him? But for the others’ sake she felt the wounded torso and opened one salt-encrusted eye.
She went a few steps from the cart and stood a doubtfully. ‘Well,’ she muttered at length, ‘I will do what I know. But this one has passed beyond the shores of life already, and by her own choice. It will take a greater voice than mine to call her back.’
Curtly she bade them bear the cold, pallid body into the hut. She asked about the dagger, but it was not to be found.
‘One thing further,’ she said, bitterness like salt entering the sound of her voice. ‘Let none of you tell the King’s men of this. He has no right to hear of it, even if by some chance or grace she does return to life.’
