Icefalcon’s Quest

Then, knowing he was going to live east of the wall for some time, he set himself to observe the mud-diggers who lived in the Vale. It became obvious to him at once that these were a war party of some sort, though he could not determine who their enemy was and where they lay. They had neither flocks nor herds (except for their horses), nor did they plant fields of the corn, cotton, and beans that grew in the mud-diggers’ settlements in the South. They had a few dooic as slaves-the slumped, hairy semihumans that the Talking Stars People would have killed out of hand – but he did not see children among them, or old people, though that could have been accounted for by famine or plague.

The men and women of the Keep, back in that far summer, wore either black clothing marked with a small white four-petaled flower or red with one or three black stars. There was a tall man who wore red much of the time and sported a chain of blue gems around his neck and a long black cloak that spread about him like wings when he walked, and he seemed to be in command of the men and women in red. It was a day or so before the Icefalcon realized that another man – equally tall but thin, clothed no differently from all the other wearers of black, save that the emblem on his breast was an eagle worked in gold – was commander over them all.

This man was the one they called Eldor, or Lord Eldor, and this was the man who, the Icefalcon realized on his second day in the Vale, was stalking him.

“It only needed that!” stormed Blue Jewels on that second day, when the two horses were reported missing. He made a great expansive angry gesture that would have startled game and drawn enemies for miles around, and Eldor folded his long arms and regarded him in self-contained quiet, his head a little on one side.

“Bandits in the Vale! I told you how it would be did you reopen Dare’s Keep, Lord Eldor. It dominates all the valley for miles. Instead of expending effort and supplies to make it fit for a larger garrison – which I understand, with the depredations of the bandits growing in the West – you would do better to leave it locked and expand the fortifications at the western foot of the pass.”

His deep, melodious voice carried easily to where the Icefalcon lay along the limb of the great pine tree that still grew between the Keep and the stream. It was the custom of the Talking Stars People periodically to send warriors south to kidnap men from the settlements, whom they kept as prisoners for a winter to teach the children the tongue of the Wathe. These men they usually initiated into one or another of the families so that when the time of the spring sacrifices came nobody who had actually been born into the families had to be tortured to death, though the hair of such men usually wasn’t long enough to make good bowstrings.

“As sure as the Ice in the North,” Blue Jewels went on, “if you leave the Keep open, either bandits will take it as a hold or some troublemaker landchief will.”

“If it was bandits.” The tall Lord Eldor followed the offending sentry back to the horse lines, speaking to Blue Jewels as they walked. “Tomec Tirkenson tells me bandits as a rule are too greedy for their own good. They’ll lift the whole herd, not two out of the middle where they wouldn’t be noticed until the count.”

After a little more bluster, Blue Jewels – whom the Icefalcon later knew as Alwir of the House of Bes, one of the wealthiest and most powerful lords of the Realm – ordered out a party of his red-clothed warriors to search the Vale, and the Icefalcon made his leisurely way back to his camp near the standing-stones, to move it before they got there.

He later came to know both Eldor and Alwir well, but it sometimes seemed to him that all the years of acquaintance only deepened, rather than altered, his initial impression of them: Alwir declaiming and jumping to an incorrect conclusion, Eldor standing a little distance from him, withholding judgment, an expression of observation and a detached amusement in his steel-colored eyes.

Winter still held the land below the pass. The Real World that stretched between the Snowy Mountains and the Seaward was an unforgiving land, a land of little water in most places and few trees, a land of hard, steady winds punctuated by summer tornadoes and, so he had heard, of winter ice storms these past ten years that tore man and beast to shreds and froze them where they fell.

Herds of bison and antelope wandered the open miles of grassland, and as the winters lengthened and deepened, mammoth, yak, reindeer, and rhinoceri joined them, followed by the great killers: dire wolves, saber-teeth, horrible-birds. Since the Summerless Year slunch had spread, the wrinkled, rubbery, faintly glowing sheets of it swallowing the ground for miles, sucking the life from any plant it engulfed. The slunch in its turn put forth a kind of life, strange creatures that wandered abroad but did not appear to either eat, or seed, or excrete. These things died and rotted with a strange, mild, sweetish stench and left patches of slunch where they lay.

The Icefalcon’s hackles raised like a dog’s to see how the slunch and the cold had altered the land. Many of the groves that dotted the western foothills were now dead, buried under the whitish masses. As he followed the westward road that first day, the stuff stretched on both sides, in patches or in sheets miles broad, and neither rabbits, nor lemmings, nor antelope moved over the dying grass that lay between.

By the debris left where Bektis and his party stopped to rest, the Icefalcon learned that in addition to what Bektis and Hethya had carried on their two donkeys they’d helped themselves to the Keep’s stores of dried meat, cheese, and potatoes. With his sling he killed two kites that came down after the cheese rinds and potato parings and added their meat to his satchel, and the rinds and parings as well. With slunch growing abroad in the lands food would be even more difficult to find, and he knew he could waste none. Only in the camps did he see Tir’s tracks and guessed by the marks in the thin dust that they were keeping the boy’s hands tied.

In a way it was just as well, he thought. Whatever Gil might say, the boy might have tried to escape while the mountains still loomed in the east, and his chances of survival would be nil in these desolate lands.

After black-cloaked Alwir with his blue jewels had declared him to be a bandit, hunting parties went out to search the Vale of Renweth for the Icefalcon for three days running. The Icefalcon had been more amused than anything else, patiently moving his camp every few hours – the invisible camp of the peoples of the North, which left no sign on the land – and watching them. He watched, too, the trains of mules that came up the gorge of the Arrow River through the smaller range of peaks west of the Vale, food and seed and saplings; watched the training of the black-clothed Guards under the tutelage of a little bald-headed man with a hoarse voice; watched Alwir and Eldor walk around the walls of the Keep and the edges of the woods that surrounded its knoll, talking and making notes on tablets wrought of wood and wax.

Alwir continued to complain of the size of the Keep and its uselessness as a garrison against the Gettlesand bandits. “In times of siege it’s a jail!” he declared, striding up and down the shallow steps that led to its single pair of dark metal Doors. “To be sure, no one can get in, but the defenders are trapped! Unless there’s a secret way out? A tunnel for sorties, perhaps, or a hidden door?”

His blue eyes glinted eagerly. He was a man who loved secrets, thought the Icefalcon, lying in the long grass beside the stream. Himself, he would never have entrusted any secret to this Alwir, who seemed to consider himself above the laws of common men by virtue of his descent from the lordly House of Bes.

“None that I know of,” replied Eldor calmly and went on with his surveying, knee-deep in the long meadow grass.

This Eldor was a man of thirty-five, as tall as Alwir and just slightly taller than the Icefalcon himself, who at seventeen was an inch or so short of his final growth. Eldor wore his brown hair cut off about his shoulders, as was the fashion of civilized people, and had an air of lean strength. Sometimes he would fight practice bouts with his warriors, either the black-clothed or the red.

Observing them in the light of the fires and torches – which illuminated the whole western face of the Keep and would have made them an easy target for the arrows of any foe on earth – or in the twilight before full dark, the Icefalcon saw with approval the hard stringency of the teaching. The lithe bald man in charge corrected and explained and shouted criticism as if the combatants were stupid children barely able to bat one another with clubs, or put them through endless drills with weighted weapons that the Icefalcon quickly saw were designed to most quickly and efficiently increase their strength and speed. It was a method of teaching he had never encountered among his own people, and it fascinated him. He would go down to the camp by the black walls every evening, after the work of planting and clearing had been done and after the stupid patrols had been called in, and he would watch them for hours. In his own camp he whittled a sword of the length they were using, with a two-handed hilt, balanced differently from the short stabbing-swords used on the plain and made for a different sort of warfare. He practiced everything he had seen the previous night, timing himself against the calls of the night-birds or striking against a tree trunk.

Then he would go back and listen, and heard for the first time the music these people made, with harps and pipes, different from the simple reed flutes of his people, intricate and beautiful if completely useless.

They would also tell tales, of valor and violence and love, and it was some time before he realized that these were made up and had never really happened to anyone. It was an art with them, he learned later – and also among Gil’s people, evidently – to make such fictions sound as if they were true. The tales of civilized people were beautiful and fascinated the Icefalcon in spite of himself, but he told himself they were useless.

Then one night the Icefalcon had returned to his camp to find Wind and Little Dancer gone.

That Eldor hadn’t taken all three animals, as one would do to an enemy, outraged him. I think you’ll need a horse, it implied. That he had left Brown Girl, the worst of the three, was a slap, given teasingly, as a man might slap a boy in jest. And he knew it was Eldor who had taken them. While he was watching the sparring in the evening, he thought, annoyed, as he searched the place the next morning for tracks.

He found them, but it was difficult. The man had covered his traces well. Eldor had distracted him with the large search parties while making solitary reconnaissance of his own.

The Icefalcon guessed they were expecting him to try to steal back Little Dancer, at least, from the cavvy. They always tethered her and Wind in the middle. He noticed the Guards were now more numerous. So he waited and watched, until one evening Eldor rode forth from the Keep alone on Wind, a tall black stallion that the Icefalcon had seen was a favorite of his. He followed him up the meadows to the rising ground above the Keep and shot him in the back with an arrow.

The Icefalcon smiled again, thinking about it now as he made a cold camp in the ditch beside the west-leading road.

Of course Eldor had been wearing armor, steel plate sandwiching a core of cane and overlaid with spells of durability and deflection. If it hadn’t been twilight, blue shade filling the long trough of Renweth Vale like a lake of clear dark water, he’d have seen the awkward fit of the man’s surcoat or wondered why in summer he’d worn a cloak. Eldor had carried a pig’s bladder of blood, too, and smashed it as he fell from Wind’s back, so the Icefalcon smelled blood from where he hid in the trees. He’d thought it sheer bad luck that his victim had fallen on the reins, holding the horse near. The “corpse” had hooked his feet out from under him and put a knife to his throat. The Icefalcon never believed in bad luck again.

“Alwir thinks you’re a scout from a bandit gang,” Eldor said, without relaxing his grip. “But you’re alone, aren’t you?”

The Icefalcon said nothing. He supposed if he had to die at least this was better than the fate he left among the Talking Stars People, but his own stupidity filled him with anger.

“I’ve heard you people don’t ride with bandits.”

Still nothing. It was true that none of the people of the Real World had much use for bandits, not wanting the possessions that lawless folk so stupidly craved, but it was not the way of his people to speak with enemies.

“I don’t want to kill you,” said Eldor, though he didn’t relax his grip or move the knife. “It would be a waste of a good warrior, and I need good warriors. I saw the practice posts you’ve made at your camps, to go over for yourself what Gnift has been teaching the Guards lately. Would you like to learn?”

The Icefalcon considered the matter and pointed out, “I am your enemy.”

Eldor released him then and got up very quickly, stepping clear even as the Icefalcon rolled to his feet. “why?” he asked.

The Icefalcon thought about the reasons that he had left the Talking Stars People and about where he might go, and what he might do, now that it was impossible for him to go back. He found that he did not have any reply to Eldor’s question.

Eldor Endorion.

The Icefalcon drank a little water and settled himself in the bayberry that grew in the ditch. The silence of the prairie drifted over him. He listened, identifying the crying of the coyotes and the greater voices of wolves farther off, the susurration of the ceaseless wind and the smell of dust and growing needlegrass.

The world of his childhood reassembling itself, scent by scent and sound by sound in the darkness.

He was home.

Eldor Endorion.

He hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that the man who had overpowered him, the man who had put himself in danger in order to trap a possible spy, was in fact the High King of the Wathe. Even when he learned the size of the Realm, and the rich complexity of the world Eldor ruled, he had felt no surprise at the acts.

They were typical of the man.

Eldor remained an extra week in Renweth Vale with the men and women he had sent to regarrison and reprovision the Keep, in order to train with the Icefalcon, to get to know him, to test him as leaders test warriors whom they seek to win to their sides. The Icefalcon had trained hawks. He knew what Eldor was doing.

He never felt toward the King the reverence that the other Guards did or stood in awe of that darkly blazing personality. But he knew the man was trustworthy and respectworthy to the core of his being. He was content to attach himself to the Guards.

He spent four years in the city of Gae, training with the Guards. He exchanged his wolf-hide and mammoth-wool clothing for the fine dense sheep-wool uniforms, black with their white quatrefoil flowers; wore the hard-soled boots of civilized men (though they were less comfortable than moccasins and left more visible tracks). When his beard came in the following year, he shaved, as civilized men did, though he never cut his hair. He learned to use a long killing-sword and to fight in groups rather than alone.

In Gae he met Ingold, Eldor’s old tutor, unobtrusively mad and – he quickly learned – probably the finest swordsman in the west of the world. He saw him first sparring on Gnift’s training floor and took him for some shabby old swordmaster down on his luck, which was what he invariably looked like. Later, after he trounced the Icefalcon roundly, they’d have long discussions about animal tracks, the habits of bees, and where grass grew. Just to watch the High King spar with the Wise One was an education. Now and then he would see Alwir’s sister about the palace compound, a pretty, quiet schoolgirl who read romances and never left her governess’ side and had not a word to say for herself. Three years after his arrival in Gae she was married to Eldor, for the benefit of both their houses. Their child was Tir.

Though no one knew it, time was running out for civilized folk, like water from a cracked jar.

It was during this time, too, that he became acquainted with Bektis, who was much more a fixture at court than Ingold. Ingold was in and out of the city, but Bektis had a suite of chambers in Alwir’s palace in the district of the city called the Water Park – less crowded and smelly than the rest of Gae, which had taken the Icefalcon years to get used to. Bektis scried the future and the past (he said) and learned through magic of things far away, and he also worked the weather for court fetes and advised Alwir about shipping ventures, something that made the Wise Ones mistrusted by merchants and farmers throughout the civilized realms. Shamans among the Icefalcon’s people also worked the weather, insofar as they would avert the worst of the storms from the winter settlements and the horse herds, but such workings were known to be dangerous. Besides, working the weather might let enemies guess where you camped.