The Ivory Lyre

Chapter 9

Roderica watched the party depart the stable yard dressed to the teeth, Accacia in her lavender satins, the king’s soldiers turned out in full uniform. From her high bedroom window behind the stable she could see them leave the main road and disappear over the crest of the first hill leading down into the city. Such a lot of fuss for a simple ride through the streets. Accacia’s idea, she thought, amused. Accacia found the visiting prince more than handsome. Well, let her. He was too involved with those horses to be really interesting. Accacia herself said he was not a very amusing conversationalist at the state meals. All looks and no fun, so why bother? Besides, it was more interesting to watch Accacia make a fool of herself. The queen would be amused at how she overdressed for a simple ride through the city, at how she threw herself at the prince.

Roderica lived as much on gossip as did the shut-in queen, the two of them chewing over other people’s lives but not involved in them. Why get tangled in stupid conflicts? Most of the passions that drove folk were pointless, she agreed fully with the queen.

Roderica couldn’t figure out what it was lately that made the queen act so strangely. Certainly it was not the secret she carried, at least it had never made her act peculiar before. Roderica had always known the queen’s secret, ever since she came to her as a small child. It meant little to her except it was a secret to be kept, a degree of loyalty she reserved for the queen alone. Besides, such a condition had no practical use. She watched the last soldiers disappear over the hill. The four foot pages at the head of the procession emerged farther down where the lane rose between ruined buildings. There was a scuffle, as if someone had attacked the pages; then they moved on. Roderica smiled at Accacia’s manipulation of little Kiri. How degrading to have to walk on foot, through mud and dung, before a line of mounted royalty and troops.

Accacia had taken Kiri to the stadium games several times, to wait on her where she sat in the royal box. The games always made the child deathly pale. Well, Kiri took such things far too seriously. She’d always had this weakness about animals. The queen had it, too. The old lady was getting worse lately, had taken to talking sentimentally about animals. That was bad enough, but now the queen had begun letting a fox slip into her chambers, thinking she was keeping it secret from Roderica. The dirty little fox came in through a hole in the stone wall that led to an old inner cistern. Roderica had seen it fleeing one night, then later had found its white fur caught on the stone.

She couldn’t imagine why the queen would suddenly allow such a thing, a dirty fox slipping in. What could a stupid speaking animal possibly have to say of interest? And why would the queen want to listen? The queen was her friend, should want to talk to her, not to a fox. Roderica hadn’t much liked Prince Tebmund going there, but at least he was a prince. But a fox—a common animal taking her place as confidant to the queen was quite another matter. Oh, it had been there often. Roderica had no doubt they exchanged confidences, from the look on the queen’s face sometimes, smug and secret. Roderica sighed. It wasn’t fair that she spend her whole life serving the queen, then be shoved aside for a fox.

She thought of trapping it and presenting it to the king for his stadium games, but that idea made her strangely uncomfortable. Well, she could trap it, pay a bargeman to carry the creature across the strait to Ekthuma or Igness—anywhere where it would not return to the queen.

When she left the window to find a suitable box trap, the procession was halfway down the hills into the crowded center of the city.

The royal party moved through the streets with precision, its green uniforms bright, Accacia’s lavender satin brighter, the horses clean, sharply groomed, and stepping at a measured pace. Ahead of the double line, the four pages cleared the way of chickens and pigs and small children. Teb watched Kiri, still consumed with curiosity about her.

She walked lightly with a lithe dignity, while the other three pages, all boys, marched with rigid precision, knowing the king’s soldiers observed them. Kiri had brushed her green tunic and cap very clean and bound up her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck. She wore her sword with grace, as if used to it. She led the party, on foot, with much more dignity than Accacia showed riding surrounded by soldiers.

They were a party of twenty-six. First came Prince Abisha and a captain of Sardira’s army, a broad-waisted man who sat his horse heavily. Then four more captains, two and two—the king had not accompanied them—then Teb and Accacia, and behind them the remaining soldiers. Accacia rode a sorrel gelding that matched exactly her tawny hair, a hard-mouthed horse, as she seemed to require, for she spent a good deal of effort spurring him up into the bit and jerking him, to make him prance. It was all Teb could do not to snatch the reins from those unfeeling hands and give the horse his head. Its neck was already white with foaming sweat, though the other horses were dry. Accacia was looking at the four marching pages with smug satisfaction.

“Sometimes,” she said, “people throw things at a royal entourage. It is good to have pages walking in front, to catch the mud and dung. Their swords can drive off troublemakers, too.” Then, glancing along the street ahead, she said casually, “Well, I see we have some new beasts of burden. Brought in yesterday’s shipping, most likely.”

Teb stared at the two blinded, maimed wolves pulling a heavy cart. They were speaking wolves, scarred and thin under the cruel chains, their proud manes cut to a ragged stubble. They walked hesitantly, heads down, blind eyes staring at nothing. Teb was sick with fury and felt Seastrider’s revulsion in her rigid walk. Maybe he could find a way to release them, find power to break the chains.

Yet blinded wolves could not survive easily, alone among hostile men. He must wait. He made a silent promise to the pitiful creatures. Soon they passed another speaking wolf, a great male hitched to a wagon of ale barrels. That animal turned his blind face to follow Seastrider’s progress, sensing her, sensing Teb, perhaps. Accacia spurred her tired horse into its perpetual prance as, ahead, two men in wrinkled, muddy clothes emerged from a tavern, arguing loudly, walking unsteadily. The pages pushed them aside with the flat of their swords, quick and skilled; the drunks faded into another doorway. The city still dropped toward the sea. To their left a long arm of crowded buildings stretched out along the river, ending at the curved bay tangled with docks and small barges and fishing boats. The wind from the river was heavy with fish and the stink of tanneries.

There were more ruins here from the ancient times, their stone walls describing generous courtyards, cluttered now with shacks. It had been a graceful city once. Teb saw it in inner vision as it had been long ago. Below the sea cliff, covered now by ocean, had once rolled green, rich hills descending to the Valley of Igness and its orchards and farms, its fields of wheat and rye that had made Dacia wealthy. As the sea had flowed up to cover the land, people had moved up, too, constructing hasty shacks and lean-tos, and digging insufficient drains that were now filled with refuse. The picture was clear in his bard memory, the frantic movement of shops and animals, the confusion, though the sea had risen slowly enough to allow that untidy emigration.

Thakkur, the white otter, had spoken of such things. That was before Teb’s bard memory came alive in his mind. Thakkur had stood tall in his cave, his dark eyes filled with ancient knowledge, his voice caught in sadness for the wonders that were all but forgotten. “Humans don’t remember . . . the long-shadowed tale of this world, or even that there was a time before the small island countries existed. They don’t remember the five huge continents,” Thakkur said sadly. They did not remember, Teb thought, the wonders of Tirror before the dark came.

Teb stroked Seastrider’s neck, seeing in vision with her the small city nations where each person pursued his own talent in craft or farming, seeing again the wonderful things that were made and grown with the help of the magic Tirror then knew. Seeing the intent bartering and trading as craftsmen traveled from city to city, and children traveled to learn their chosen trades, living with the animals, often, in the old sanctuaries, or with the mining dwarfs in the far mountains. Teb saw how folks’ vision of the world, and of themselves, flowed through time, from the very birth of Tirror, all linked in a continuity that had meaning for each person, all kept alive through the song of dragons. The dark had not been strong yet to cast its pall on the world.

Folk did not remember now, as they did then with dragon song, a vision of Tirror’s birth. “A ball of gases,” Thakkur had said, “formed by a hand of such power that no creature can know its true nature, the power of the Graven Light. But,” Thakkur said, “from the very beginning, the fire and bareness and the promise of life lured the dark that always exists in black space. The dark crept through crevices into the molten stone, and it lay dormant. Even the power that made Tirror could not rout it.” So the dark had come to the young world, so the dark had waited and grown stronger. It had driven the dragons out at last, and killed or captured the bards. Memory was at last destroyed. Then into Tirror from other worlds came dark beings to join it—came the unliving, came Quazelzeg and his kind.

Ahead, the pages slowed where six men were circled around two women fighting with sticks. The onlookers stared up at the soldiers. The women stopped fighting and stared, too, but no one moved out of the way until the pages drove them back. One staggering man threw up at Kiri’s feet. Two more hit out at the pages suddenly, knocking one to the ground, then fled. Pigs wallowed in a mudhole where cobbles had been removed. A little ragged girl came out of a shop carrying a screaming baby and stood staring as they passed. As the pages turned a corner, Kiri glanced back at the entourage. Her eyes met Teb’s in an instant of shared disgust; then she looked quickly away.

“It is a city of contrasts,” he said diplomatically, when Accacia turned to him. “I thank you for bringing me to see it.” He smiled. “Someone has taken the time to grow beautiful roses.” He indicated a tiny garden wedged between a cow pen and a closed shop, where a yellow rose vine bloomed.

Accacia sniffed. “Some of them keep flowers—but what is the use of it? They are only peasants. They would do better to grow beans in that space.”

It was then, as they turned a corner approaching the harbor, that Teb saw the slave children. A straggling line of ragged children hardly more than babies, carrying heavy bundles on their shoulders, in from the barges at the quay. Five children pulled a wheelless sledge piled with packets of cloth and long bundles that might have held spears. Teb could see chain marks on the children’s ankles. He supposed they slept chained at night, as he once had. Tattered tunics covered their backs, likely hiding scars from the lash. He wanted to leap down and cut them loose, and fight whoever would stop him. As he passed close to a line of straining children, he saw the blank, mindless stares that told him the rest of the story.

Beside him Accacia kicked her horse around a pile of barrels and seemed hardly to notice that her gelding nearly trampled three small children struggling with a hamper of clay jugs.

Seastrider had begun to tremble, shivering, so he leaned to rub her neck. She spoke to him with pain, not in words but with the same fury he felt. Seastrider, like every singing dragon, knew clearly all the sins and pain of Tirror’s long past. Yet she was driven to fury at the sight of the small slave children.

The four pages stopped at the foot of the cobbled street where it met the quay, and Kiri turned to look back. Their eyes met again for a moment; then he saw Accacia watching, and looked away. If this girl was Accacia’s scapegoat, it had not seemed to quell her spirit.

They took a different route returning to the palace, through a nearly abandoned part of the city where a few rag people camped between the broken walls in rooms without roofs. They circled the huge, stonewalled gaming stadium, flanked by a tangle of paintless cottages pushing so close to one another there was no room for animal pens. Accacia had begun a monologue about the intricacies of her family background, to which Teb hardly listened, when suddenly ahead a door opened, and a man with red hair and red beard threw a bucketful of dirty water into the gutter. Teb jerked Seastrider’s halter and stared. Garit. It was Garit. He swallowed back a shout and looked away. It was all he could do not to gallop ahead, leap down, and fling his arms around Garit.

Garit stood filling the doorway with his broad shoulders, his red hair and beard like flame, his eyes following the four pages. He hardly looked at Teb as he passed, surely did not recognize him, grown up. Memories flooded back, Garit teaching him to ride when he was five, holding his horse while he mounted, Garit saddling his mother’s mare and bringing a newly broken colt for her to ride. Garit’s reassuring voice, the night he helped Teb escape from Sivich’s army.

Teb leaned down to adjust his boot so he could look back. Garit returned his look seemingly without recognition. Yet was there a spark deep in his eyes? Teb could not be sure.

It had been four years. Teb had been only a child when he escaped from Sivich that night. He had grown, filled out, his face changed maybe more than he guessed. Teb stared ahead, filled with excitement. Garit was here in Dacia. Then maybe Camery was, too.

He made note of where he was in the city. When the entourage turned up a side street, Accacia was still talking, as if her pedigree was infinitely fascinating to him.

“. . . and her mother was my aunt Rhemia, so of course that makes me cousin to Abisha and in direct line of the throne in my own right, even if I were not to marry him.” She stopped speaking long enough to smile. Teb thought her vanity served her in one way. It had helped her retain her own history, even though her view of it was narrow and dull. Prince Abisha, riding ahead, did not turn to look back, though he must have heard her remarks. Accacia prattled on, seemingly unaware of her tastelessness. “That is on my father’s side, of course. I lived with my mother’s sister after my own parents died—with my aunt and cousin, the little page up there, Kiri. When my aunt died I saw to it, of course, that Kiri. . .”

Teb had ceased to listen and was watching Kiri. She was walking with a tighter gait, as if held by some new tension, as if she wanted to break away running and kept herself steady with effort. As the horses stepped out faster, heading for home, she swung out ahead of them as if relieved.

Had he seen her turn to look at Garit as she passed him? Garit’s hand had come up just then to stroke his beard, and Teb’s mind had been filled with his presence, so he was really not aware of Kiri.

Now tension filled Teb as the possibilities teased at him. Could there be a connection between them? He thought of the way the dragons responded to Kiri, of seeing her in the candle shop that he thought could be a rebel meeting place. He thought of seeing her return to her cottage late one night, despite the dangers of the city. He watched her striding ahead, his mind filled with possibilities. He meant to find out about Kiri. Just as surely as he meant to return to Garit.