The Human Dress

Chapter 1

I will not help you kill the King.

The speaker’s hand rises, and the man across from him subsides, words caught behind his teeth and held from their escape.

Less than that, shall I raise gold or name or word beside you in some wit-shredded loose-thumbed madness of desire to slay Galba in his pride or his bath or his treasure house.

Belmar’s voice is low, slow, and considered; heads turn from louder nearby conversations anyway. He is that sort of man, the sort who can wear silk tissue into a drinking house where the other patrons wear, with a draped ease, bearskins and nothing, and have no ill come of it. Moreover, he is the sort who can get a corner table by squinting at it. More, and darker, squinting got the host to bring him a hat stand, and the host did not know that the house had a hat stand.

Belmar’s hat needs a hat stand; he and Lugan have taken a table suitable for six large wide-elbowed men, and the hat covers a generous half of it. Men who hunt in marshes have hats that size, loose wide reed-weavings meant to shade from above the full stretch of their arms, and those they might risk to puddles of drink on a table without a qualm. Those hats face rather worse in the normal course of their business, and their owners are not careful of them; a neat hat is an obvious marker of a man among the reeds. Better to have reeds flopping loose, and to have some variety of new-plucked green vegetation on it, also.

Belmar’s hat is unquestionably clean, and could be new, for all the wear it shows. It is also doubtless esteemed by him as something unfortunate to place in puddles of drink, being made of some heavy leather that glistens with the colours that can be found in red earth. That red colour is made the richer by an undertone of nearly a metallic gold, though whether that is a character of the leather or a product of the tanning would be hard to say. It perches on the hat stand and the table both like a raptor mantling triumphant over its kill.

The crown of the hat may or may not be high; one would have to move the feathers to discover this, and that does not seem wise. They are near enough to four feet long, broad, coarse, thick-quilled and springing from the whole front of the crown to droop over the rear brim of the hat in an arch only half again as wide as it is high. They are each either red or yellow, these feathers, but even in the tavern’s dimness these words do them little justice. The red is that crimson got by heating pure copper in the dark, until it trembles, liquid and glowing, on the brink of a heat that will set it burning. The yellow is not so strong a colour as that, nothing that seems to glow of its own light; it is only that colour that gold might bleed if any knife were sharp enough to cut it so. Take the hat outside, into the bright day, and that yellow will flare and fume and fill with the trembling brilliance of a mirror of glass and gold turned to hold the sun.

It is perhaps a fault in Belmar that today the yellow matches his jacket, cuff to cuff and hem to collar, down to the burnished citrine buttons, forty to each sleeve and ninety to close the double placket front. His hose, which match the crimson, are less in evidence, safely hidden behind high dark grey boots that reach a hand span short of his jacket hem.

Lugan is not a man who cares much about clothes.

Why ever and forever not kill him? Galba taxes, Galba tariffs, Galba strangles trade and commerce, nullifies weddings, tears down buildings by his whim, prisoned a grove-spirit, and could well hope him to beat a hornface to death by butting ere the thickness of his skull bone broke.

Lugan’s voice is lighter, faster, flown on a gusting and errant wind that skirls it round his words in odd half-catching stumbles of inflection, a strong tenor voice in the way a strong man with both legs broken remains a strong man.

Lugan wears russet leather, scraped light and tanned supple. His quilted cap has stayed on his head. Neither coat nor cap adequately conceal the lumping bulk of his frame nor the asymmetry of his features, and coat and cap must both struggle with the sheer breadth and depth of him. The seams of a nearly new and tailored coat are half-started where his gestures have strained muscles at them, and a hat ten inches across its inside surfaces is gone lifted and tipped with lack of quite sufficient width to match Lugan across the ears when the muscles of his jaw rise beside his temples.

Belmar’s answer waits on a small pause, and comes in level, deep tones, as things of an old and impersonal history might them be spoken of. "Last news came to me, Galba had seven sons of his name and forty and three of his body, and doubtless by now one or two more have arrived or are on their way. Kill Galba, and one such of these shall rise, and be no change of betterment from Galba.

Grown great enough to kill all these, each and every, would be some conspiracy of note and breadth and competence, such as has not been in the world since ever it came to be. But do that by some miracle or untaught sorcery, and there are Galba’s cousins and Galba’s kin by breeding and Galba’s gold and gain for a prize most entirely worth some small quantity of devastation.

Then you counsel me to wear this insult, Cousin? To care nothing for Rain newly dead, nor for our child that might have been, dead under her heart?

Care for them? Aye, care for them, and tell me why you blame Galba for them. Secret murder is no way of Galba’s, and he could have set your marriage to nothing if he chose. Chose that, and chose with it a small battle or six over the matter, outside courts, but that too Galba-King could have done and thought to win his point.

The scarred men in bearskins have stopped pretending to talk to one another, and some in the further corners of the room are shifting forward over the hard packed earth of the floor so that they might them hear this conversation better. The host is not normally a nervous man; he looks less and less like one not normally nervous, passing out fist-sized glasses of strong drink and not checking carefully for those who might not have paid their house-fee at the door.

Belmar, half turned, puts out the full length of his arm for his drink, a reach that passes over the whole splendid width of his hat with stretch to spare. The host, who would have had to lean, lean with his weight up on his toes and his other hand on a pillar behind him to pass Belmar’s drink over the whole of hat and table, stops the start of his lean and puts the heavy tumbler into Belmar’s hand. Belmar’s hand appeared for the drink with a handkerchief folded in it, and it was the sight of that handkerchief that brought to the host’s mind what might have happened were he to have dripped or spilt strong drink on Belmar’s hat. The host swallows, visibly and audibly, and moves on, past a man whose bearskin gets a fore claw caught in his glass as he takes it up. This happens often, and the others tease him about wanting to keep the claws shiny, and he would rather endure such teasing than change how he wears the skin.

Well, Lugan? Is this rage of yours a thing of words, or the mute fury of a beast? A deep collective chuckle rolls through the audience, a dark mirth chasing the words to the smoke-smudged eaves of the house.

Lugan takes his glass very delicately between thumb and finger, and sets it down like some small and inconveniently dead furred thing, for all that he paid for himself and Belmar. It takes more gold than a handful to really get Lugan’s notice with money, and a half-eighth of silver each might cross his palm but would never cross his mind. He looks up, finally, meeting the eyes of his cousin, and Lugan’s answer drags out of him, trips on his teeth, catches in the unevenness of his breath, and comes out loud anyway.

"Rain was powdered with our house. Blown to nothing, a blast that left no pieces and scarce paste, a blast that lifted the roof of our house and broke it and let if fall again within the riven walls.

Who but Galba could have that done, Belmar?

Almost anyone with five of silver, or thrice an eighth of gold. Belmar’s voice is light, his eyes distant, his hand round his drinking-tumbler loose and relaxed. Wreakings that destroy things are easy; the great skill lies in being skilled enough to not share in the destruction. That is not common skillfulness, but there are those who can, and will do so for a fee. Some of them even take their fees in material goods, and not inconvenient favours.

Or some sludge-stirrer has found something other than powder or fumed fluff or fast wax useful to such purpose; you kept your house well, but no charm can prevent the action of some substance of which the chanter was ignorant.

Lugan looks up again at that, from where he stared at his drink like he might drink it and be done with life.

There were four charms against fire, Cousin, three of the usual kind against fire and spark and tinder-stuffs, and one meant to keep soot-stuff from lifebreath, come what may. No scorching touched the walls, and there was no soot nor mark of burning to find after. It was power, and not powder, did this thing.

Eyebrows rise round the ring of listeners, and even Belmar looks briefly impressed. Such a general wreaking would not come cheaply, even by the standards of Lugan’s wealth.

In the quiet, there is a faint sound of scritching. It is not likely that more than a few of the folk in the long room hear it.

Excuse me, Cousin; I shall be back most directly.

Belmar rises, donning his hat, which is neither a whisker more nor a whisker less wide than the width of his broad shoulders, and walks briskly into the kitchen, ducking far down under the low door lintel with no sign of either discomfort nor indignity.

A murmur of his voice comes, a clattering, and a slam. Hard behind the slam comes the sound of a heavy wooden door opening, and being shut with gentleness.

Some minutes pass; everyone in a bearskin is on their next glass, and Lugan has made it half way down his first and called for water, when Belmar returns by the front door.

He stops by his place and grants the host a hard look. Who was it, whom you hired to wash glasses and decant the drink?

The host looks from side to side, at his boot-toes, everywhere but Belmar. A man of the town. The Queen’s town, Braemor, ten miles to the west and maybe five miles more southerly than this place, that is either a tavern, or a temple, or the lodge of a mystic brotherhood, depending on the day and season of one’s arrival.

You will need another one. Belmar’s voice is offhand, light, and he is picking up his glass after setting his hat back on the stand that waited for it, forlorn sticks upon the table’s surface.

Lugan looks either amused or appalled; the men in bearskins look amused.

What did you do to him, Cousin?

I set his face in the fork of a tree, in the hopes that it will cure him of making notes while listening to the conversations of gentlemen.

A small fright, a man in a bearskin says, quietly enough.

The grin that comes over Belmar’s face shows his teeth, strong and white and square, down to their roots. His face will stay there until he decides if he will leave his ears; those I nailed to the forks of the bole.

The host’s eyes go wide, in a room full of grinning. For truth?

Belmar’s head snaps round, eyes narrowed.

For truth? Of course for truth. Think you I said to that man ‘Fie, you have angered me so that I should in this fit of wrothfullness nail your ears to a tree, and have done,’ and did not that thing and walked away, or gave him a blow or two and left?

Belmar’s voice stays low, and still, and soft, it comes out of him not faster, and still it is a harder thing than it was. I tell you now, he is still nailed to a dwelling-tree to wait full night and the grove’s uses. By well-clinched silver nails through the thick of his ears I nailed him, and the wretch, he struggled so, I smote my thumb.

Lugan snorts, just a little, as the host scuttles off. The host most often strides, but just now, that pride does not call itself to his attention.

The clutchfeet are like to have him long before any spirit wakes to find him, Cousin; it is yet four hours of dark.

Belmar shrugs, an expansive rolling. He can stand fully upright, here, between the rafters, though he must set his hat back on the hat stand to do it. He is some distance up the tree.

Facing out? Lugan’s voice has something in it like the memory of how to chortle.

From one side of the tree. Belmar sits down, picking up his glass, and draining it neatly. Less struggle would have served him better; he is fastened somewhat high.

Belmar looks contemplative, for a moment, and then irritated, at his empty drink glass, then contemplative again.

If his toes slip, it will be well for him to have thick ears.

If the man’s feet do slip, off a branch not over-wide and wet which he must strain to stand with his toes upon, the weight of the fall will go on his chin before his ears, which will only choke him a little. It would not do to deny the hungry grove spirits their sacrifice, torn off its ears and fallen to the earth, where the children of giants will have out its guts and what life the fall has left, and Belmar is in such things a careful man.

The host has scurried back, with a drink pitcher, and makes to fill Belmar’s held-forth glass again.

Belmar’s left hand thumb is indeed going black in the nail bed, where it is wrapped around one side of the glass, held up before eyes that widen further, roll, and vanish with the fall of the fainting head of their host.

Belmar catches the drink pitcher.

Chapter 2

The room is long and bright and wide, half the top of one wing of a great broad house. The windows are open to the spring air, letting in birdsong and the smell of warm earth and new growth with the light.

Much of the smooth wood of the floor is covered in cushions, the smallest some four feet square and a resilient foot thick. The larger ones might be three yards on an edge and seem little more resilient than the maple wood of the floor, for all that they are stuffed with something soft. Most of them are cased in linen, though some wear silk, and all of them are plain and unembroidered. A dozen of them have linen sheets on them, and quilts or blankets, variously rumpled, and some fading memory of a dent in them, where someone was once, but the hour is well after dawn, and all of these are empty.

Aside from the main extent of such cushions, where the pillows are heaped highest, there is also a strew of richer quilts, and from that strew emerge, at different angles, two heads that are very blond.

One of these persons stretches, yawning, and the other groans.

Galba grins at her; Narial scowls back, and staggers to her feet, dumping blankets and cushions. She is tall, strong-shouldered, full-, high-, and heavy-breasted, deep hipped, and thoroughly pregnant. It is her pregnancy’s advanced state that saves Galba-King from being kicked; Queen Narial doesn’t trust her balance enough to stand on one foot.

Galba smiles wider; Narial scowls darker, throws her hair back, and stretches in her turn, the ends of her hair brushing the backs of her knees.

Someday, there will be justice, and it will be you who gets pregnant.

Galba’s look goes to a real kindness. In another life, perhaps.

Narial snorts at this, and stalks for the door and the stairs. She turns to look over her shoulder at Galba in the doorway, if not smiling then not scowling anymore either.

Shall I send someone up to chivvy you out of bed, O Lord of the Wide Earth?

Galba frowns. One, perhaps.

Narial stops, turns full around. Are you entirely well? Her voice does not quite manage to put a jest to the question.

Galba shrugs, and rolls on one side to pummel a pillow into a shape more to his liking before resting his head on it again. As well as anyone with a full mind.

Narial’s look could be indulgent in one light, or arch in another. With what might it be said that your mind is overfull with this fair morning?

Lugan.

Lugan has no heir, and until he gets one, cannot be held any manner of threat to anyone’s rule. Left unspoken is the thought that Lugan couldn’t lead a starving man to a laid feast on the kingliest day of his life.

Lugan’s heir is blown up with Rain.

Well, surely, and Lugan will in time find out, or at least decide, who powdered his house. Her eyes narrow, dangerously. That was not your doing?

I — Galba’s look is angry, but not with Narial — "I spent a half of gold, to be sure it would be a daughter."

Narial nods. A child of Lugan and Rain would have had excellent claim to a royal state, and they have eight sons born to them and one under her heart. Marriage is not always cheaper than war, but good to have the choice.

Lugan thinks it was you?

Lugan does not on the evidence think at all, save as you ask him about timber or springer.

Narial stops leaning on the door post. Well, there is nought to be done about it now, and I am little minded to stand here. Which one would you have me send up?

Galba’s brow creases for a moment. The one from Cold Harbour, if she’s there. Galba knows perfectly well that her name is Helle, but long and affectionate custom between Narial and he has it that names are not used.

Narial smirks at him. "The very ripe and comely one, who says often that she will do anything she’s asked so long as she never has to eat stockfish or penguin, ever again? That one?"

Galba nods and smiles. That one.

As Narial walks with slow care down the stairs, her voice floats up behind her in cheerful tones. The one who claims she’s fond of being very stretched, which likes your esteem …

Chapter 3

The wind shifts, and Lugan stops his beast, then goads it round through an eighth turn behind Belmar, to take the more nearly upwind side of the trail.

Belmar’s face doesn’t change expression, but does change from being turned slightly to his left to being turned slightly to his right.

However do you comport yourself to riding beasts, Belmar? Horatio here — a gloved hand lands affectionately on the top of the domed and furry forehead — will face a holg, even springer, without a qualm, but near enough to panicked when he got scent of you. Did you offer to pierce his ears for him? Horatio’s large ears are held cocked forward, and the well furred breadth between them spans at their tips a distance twice the width of Lugan’s torso. Hearing himself talked about, Horatio uproots a small bush of blueberries and begins to munch on it as he walks.

Belmar’s voice stays in its usual slow cadences, although he knows when he is being teased. It may be he disregards my preference for going on my own feet. A preference plain enough, for Belmar seems as he walks to be going more slowly than he might, no small thing to do for all his length of leg.

Few have heard of a beast that will face springer; fewer of one more tall than broad. Belmar’s tone is entirely contemplative. Wrought is the river-dweller into an over-nicety of nose?

Lugan purses his lips at this; Horatio’s harness and seating pad are of the very finest work, with fittings and even foot-hooks of the new soft silver, which is not soft at all when mixed with a little copper, but even great skill in wreaking will not prevent the clothes of a man riding on a riding beast from picking up some of the smell.

It is possible that Belmar smiles, as he strides along; it would take sharp eyes to see, in the depth of shadow cast by his hat.

Ahead of them, there is a bellowing and a crashing, something plunging at speed through the young lifetree. Lugan’s left hand drops to the hilt of the sword on his left hip, checking how it lies; his right does not move on the lance haft that rests in its cup in front of his right foot. That twelve feet of white ash supports a broad blade, a thick spine and mostly thin razor edge below a point formed on a wide angle. That point is three inches across, not quite twice the width of one of Lugan’s thumbs; the base of the blade twenty inches below the point is five inches wide, and still rather narrower than the width of one of Lugan’s hands. A yard below the base of the blade is a cloverleaf of bent steel rod, the final end of the socket and a stop to anything that might hope to proceed up the lance shaft toward its wielder.

Belmar’s hands do not stray from their steady swinging past his thighs; he knows where either sword hilt is, without having to feel for them, and the stockbow slung across his back isn’t going anywhere.

The crashing fades swiftly away. It’s the feathers, Cousin. Some browsing beast is scarce minded to be lunch, and less minded to make careful second checks as to just what approaches.

Lugan snorts, his hand moving back to rest in his lap. I have grown enough used to that hat, to forget what was used as the model.

That is gentle news to me, Cousin. Belmar’s voice is ever so slightly dry.

The continue along silently for a time, Belmar showing no slightest difficulty maintaining Horatio’s comfortable rolling walking speed. They are neither of them in any kind of hurry, going not to Braemor on its five islands but southwards instead. The land to their left is green and rising, tall groves of white pine sticking up a hundred feet higher than the more numerous spruce growing where the soil is not deep enough for the big trees. Scattered through the spruce are birch and poplar, just leafing out, the new leaves still the pale and delicate greens of their first days on the twig.

The land to their right is very brief, ten or twenty yards of struggling grass and scrub and then a long sheer fall of shattered granite blocks that lean out over the slow waves of the Soft Sea where it rolls green to the western horizon. Closer to that horizon than to the two riders, a curlneck’s long neck waves and hoots above the waves, cheerful with spring and the sunshine.

South of them perhaps a mile, a little smoke shows; the hearth-fires of the hunting lodge that is all the house Lugan still has to live in.

The hunting lodge is set inside a deep, dry moat, and the swing bridge that crosses it swings vertically, pivoting over a high centre pier to tip flat and then slowly down again with its outside end as high in the air as its inside end started. Horatio plods over it warily, snorting an irregular and displeased rhythm. It is resonant, more so than the fall of heavy feet on the bridge timber. Horatio does not like this at all, but he has done it many times before.

The outside end is cranked back down for Belmar — Horatio likes turning cranks, at least those that don’t break or catch on his tusks — who shows no sign of nervousness at standing alone in the wild.

Have you got one of these at home?

I might recall to my mind a plank cast over a log, that the children played balance games upon, but no other thing in like case have I seen. Howsoever did the builder convince you?

This is the second; the first, he built himself, to bridge a stream, and made it only so large as would pass one well-thewed man or three untaught children. It worked, and works faster than the usual sort of bridge. He considered it only a minor benefit that if something does find it down and gets on it, one can leave the ropes fixed so that it goes no more than level; I count that a better benefit, being minded to ride out and know the door home is open behind me.

The moat is twenty feet deep, a sheer drop on the outside, palisaded edge of the moat, and a smooth grassed slope on the inside, to an earthwork wall whose top is ten feet higher and fifty feet inside the outer edge of the ditch. The bark of the palisade poles has some toothmarks in it, even so. Desultory, enquiring sorts of tooth mark, that decided that yes, these were the dead trees they looked like, and not worth more than a nibble to see how much juice was left in the bark.

The lodge inside the walls is one hall, twenty feet by fifty, with a separate bakehouse and smokehouse to the west of the north-south long axis of the hall. At the four cardinal compass points around the inner wall are machines of wood and metal, hunkering in dugout revetments with roofs of sod over thick planks. The backs of the dugouts are ramped, and there are ropes between the machines and deeply driven posts behind the ramps. To the east of the house, a big beast shed, forty feet square and almost three storied; glazed windows show in the gabled dormers of the high pitched roof. Horatio heads for the shed of his own accord; he wants more than a bush or two of blueberries for dinner, and he wants it soon.

A man comes around the side of the beast shed, gives Horatio a pat, one which does not slow Horatio at all. Knowing that the food itself is elsewhere, Horatio is wise enough not to stop for a man whose hands smell like food, like a heap of fresh cut birch twigs and soft green river rushes.

The inside of the hall is undivided, with a cold fieldstone fireplace at one end, several fat leather chairs scattered around it, and a head or a skull between most pairs of windows down the long walls, twelve windows and eight heads full of fangs. Over the fireplace rests a ninth head, the bone still green, scarcely three feet long, huge eyed, peg-toothed, with the whole rear of the skull curved and furled to match with a neck joint that was wider than the skull itself is. The top of the skull is cracked and crazed, and has been lovingly pieced back together with glue.

Killed a big whiptail? Belmar’s voice has an undeniable note of surprise in it.

Big old bull, off by himself. Lugan’s voice is proud. He was making a grand great nuisance of himself, mostly by stepping on things, and some folk hereabouts asked me if I could handle him. Waited half the night and a whole day sixty feet up a spruce tree three times before I noticed he didn’t much care for spruce and tried a pine. Got the Hunter’s own luck and a clean shot at his neck with a broad-axe when he stuck his face in for a nibble. Took him three hours to really finish dying, head off or no. That did the trees around no good at all. Nearly did for me, too, but he only cracked mine, whiptails scramble sideways by reflex. I was four days after, getting the scent of pine oil off of myself, and had to argue with some small fry over possession of his head.

There is a substantial pause after this news is recounted.

Belmar finally shakes his head wonderingly, unbuckles his sword belt, and drops himself into one of the overstuffed chairs, swords beside him on the floor. Did you tell that story to Rain?

Lugan’s face wells over with sorrow, very briefly, before the sorrow is gone to sadness. No. She was pregnant, and some of the back hide is being soft tanned, enough to make a good thick mattress, and I was going to surprise her with it, after the child was born. Whiptails have back skin eight inches thick, and the inner layers are markedly spongy, once you get scale and scute off of them. Since grown whiptails also start at thirty tons in adult weight, with some kinds going up to a hundred twenty, and react aggressively to threats by stomping upon them, stampeding over them, or repeatedly striking them with the bone rod composing the furthest third or quarter of their long, lithe, and strong tails, their hides are expensive things in all their particulars. The eight other skulls Lugan has on his walls, full of the knife-teeth of flesh-devouring giants weighing many tons, those are much the lesser trophies than this blunt-toothed head, smaller than the others.

Who have you offended unto enmity, Cousin? Belmar’s voice is, not weary, but the voice of one who expects he shall be weary by and by.

Lugan, settling into his own chair almost gingerly, shrugs. None I know of; what wealth I have is father’s doing, and if I keep it, I do not me much increase its scope, there is only so much business in the making of ships.

Of which business, you have nearly all.

Lugan shrugs again. It is a better charm than the old plain keel working. I charge fair prices, and leave the shipwrights to their own choice and argument of styles with my customers. I do, indeed, very little but say the charm in its secret parts, and there are those who would envy me that, or wealth they call unfairly got.

There is a sort of contemplative pause.

Art one of them, cousin? Lugan is not an especially perceptive man; he would have to be quite blind to have never noticed that his character annoys Belmar rather often.

Belmar’s smile is wide. I am, I think, as rich as you. Tooth and hide have been good business for me, these five years past, and one of ivory is as much as a half of silver.

Lugan’s look goes almost focused. You do no harm to your business?

The children can manage the most part of it. I have good ships with good captains and good crews to ship it for me, on the river and the ocean, and understandings in Ashkes and Wirthane. Belmar’s smile saying understandings can only be called predatory. It will prosper well enough for a time.

You have never said quite how you came by children.

It is true that I never have. The tone of this is quelling; someone more readily curious than Lugan might also wonder how a man of twenty five years can have children able to handle his business for him.

The man from the shed comes in, inquirers of Lugan if there is anything he or his guest need. Lugan looks the question over to Belmar, who shakes his head.

I think we shall be fine as we are, then … Lugan pauses, tongue caught on a gap in his memory.

Tida, says Belmar, and the brief intention of a smile passes over the man’s face. Lugan finishes his sentence with the name, and the man goes out again.

No enemies, truly, Lugan?

Lugan shrugs again, a high movement of his heavy shoulders, and looks exasperated. "How could I make any? I hunt, I keep half an eye on business, once a year when Father died I hold a feast, and the same people are invited as went to the funeral, and they always compliment me on the quality of the food, and that’s that. There was a wedding feast, and an anniversary feast, and the guest list was the same for each and both of those were merry. No one else seriously courted Rain, she proposed to me, and I cannot imagine that she was not happy. Not, you understand, always and in everything, but she was one daughter among three married sons her brothers, and glad to be out of their households and mistress of her own, and Thunderer witness, I loved but her and was glad of it."

Have I your leave, then, to search your house in Braemor? Belmar’s voice is still, and slow, and deep even for him. His hat is over his left knee, hiding him from ribs to ankle, and in the slanting light from the window behind him, his hair seems as spun gold, curling down from his shoulders. No sign shows on his face that he has seen Lugan’s slow tears.

For one day. For one day, cousin, you have my leave for that, and never after, for the good brown earth will go over it, and the broad green grass will cover it, and it will be no house for the living evermore.

Chapter 4

Its sky and its cliff-tops sheered off by Belmar’s hat brim, Braemor Town approaches him on the deck of the broad-beamed, flat decked, shallow draft boat. The boat struggles so across and against the current that the illusion is very strong, of a boat standing still as the whole world heaves and turns and moves around it. Far, the royal island and actually out into the Soft Sea, is not an easy task of boating, the strong current of the Short River mixing and swirling with the waters of the Soft Sea and doing rather many unexpected things with its own force and direction in the process.

Braemor Town is built on five islands in a river; the river is a mile and a half wide, and about ten miles long. This is a true description, but it misses some important nuances.

The Old Rock Country is made from the roots of mountains, old ones that flowed up out of the heart of the world before ever anything lived on the world; there are no bones in those rocks, and they have been bent and broken many times, water has flowed over them, the Ice has walked on them, and younger rock has come to them, pebble by pebble and grain by grain, dragged down hills and pushed by rivers, until it was rock again, and rose up, and was riven back into mud and sand by the prying fingers of the water.

When men came to the Old Rock Country, the Waking Ice covered it over, high and white and glittering, and the small skin boats had pressed on southward, swiftly out of the dearth and the cold, down a Soft Sea that had begun to fill as the Waking Ice melted back into ocean and the seas rose.

Even under the burden of the Ice, the Old Rock Country was as it now is; higher to the west and south, lower to the east, lowest in the north, and that is where the Ice lasted longest, blocking the way to the sea of the water that had been Ice, water that spread as a skirt to the Ice nearly from ocean to ocean across the wide land.

To the east, the land was as high as to the west, the west being still pressed down with the weight of the Ice, and between them was the long scoured shallow curve of the central Old Rock Country; to the south, where the Ice never came, the land was higher still, and to the north, the Ice remained. The lake waters grew deep, and heavy, and pried at the reft in the broken rock with wet trickling fingers where long before the heaving fingers of ice had been that formed and melted and formed again with the turning seasons.

One of those rifts ran west, through the hard hearts of the rolling hills that were born as the deep roots of mountains, and the water followed it, pressing and creeping through the way nowhere very wide.

Twenty miles inland of the refilling Soft Sea, the meltwaters seeping down the reft met a place where they could go no further; a wall of hard rock ran through the dead fault and slid a wall of undisturbed impermeable stone across their path, and so the waters rose from their igneous confines under the rubble and soft sedimentary stone, filling an old river valley. That water was barely a trickle, a thin seeping thing, but it rose to the surface, and began to flow away, and behind it, the water went from seeping to flowing. It began slow, that flow of cold meltwater, but did not stay so. The waters in the rift had twenty five thousand cubic miles of lake and a seven hundred fifty foot change in elevation behind them.

Five thousand years later, the old valley is clean of rubble and new stone out to the Soft Sea, back to its ancient walls, and down deeper than its ancient floor, and the Fountain still rises half a thousand feet into the air from the centre of its pool.

The back wall of that pool was carved from beneath, out of the lead-rich grey fleckstone of the Old Rock, and falls two hundred vertical feet to the water. The rough angled facets of it jam themselves together to make two fifths of the rim of a battered circle; that high northern arc is the amphitheatre of the fountain’s ceaseless voice, flinging the voice of the water west to bounce off the fleckstone hills and pass out through the flooded valley.

Around the old river’s last remaining bend, four islands rise above the water, as they did in the old river and do now again, hard, smooth stone that shrugs off soil. Far, the fifth island, is a fan of rubble and river-rocks, the first of which must have caught on something on the very edge of the Soft Sea, and which have now built up into a broad low island highest on the downstream end that will grow whatever is dropped on it.

On these five islands, Near, Split, Rolled, Green, and Far, was built Braemor Town, Braemor of the Fountain, and the thundering voice of the five- (or six-, or eight-, or a wider turning eight-, or eleven-) mile-distant fountain is with them always, ceaselessly, until the sound of it works into the wood of their houses and docks and working houses, their flesh and their blood and their bones.

It is working back into Belmar’s bones, though it has been seven years since he has been here, and it is very nearly at the precise moment when the ferry has docked, and Belmar has taken his first step off it and onto dry land, that Small Omund’s mill and working house and stores sheds on Split powder so utterly and with such cataclysm that the sound, when it reaches them on Far, blots out all voice of the Fountain from their hearing for a short and rumbling time, as the sound of the cataclysm rolling over the town has obliterated all sound of the Fountain from the other islands of Braemor.

Galba and Narial’s ninth child, a son with the others, is born on the fourteenth day of Strandwalker’s Summer, the first of the three summer seasons, in the late afternoon, at near enough the precise moment the sound rattles the windows and the eaves of the Queen’s House.

It is for this reason that Belmar, delayed as he is by a slow ferry and the need to convince the ferryman of the wisdom of such a course, reaches Split before Galba, who if he has a king’s swift boat, has also little willingness to leave Narial’s side and his newborn son before all is done as it should be done.

Chapter 5

Belmar? The King’s voice is uncertain; this person looks like Belmar, stands like Belmar, but is made to a mightier scale than Belmar he remembers from seven years ago. The small voice that speaks to Seed Kings says this is a son of Rindal, and still Galba-King feels doubt.

Today, Belmar’s jacket has an outer layer of organdy, oddly gathered to the seam lines of the garment and whatever lies behind. The full gathering makes the organdy swoop and billow, an effect which enhances a blue that makes those who see it think of snow blindness. The square white ivory buttons edged with silver do not help this impression.

Aye. He also talks as Belmar did, if with a deeper tone, whatever has become of his taste in clothes.

You seem to have grown taller. A gain of five hands’ height, twenty inches, with a corresponding increase in depth and breadth is large, but clearly not impossible, out of the several ways that a man might change his shape in flesh.

It could be that Belmar smiles, ever so slightly, in the shadow of his hat. A good diet and frequent exercise can do that for a man.

Galba chuckles, in the way of a man who knows that a joke has been told but who has no very clear idea what joke it was.

He has very little else to chuckle about; the line of mills built over the split on Split, the narrow channel where the water rises high between smooth walls and runs faster even than the swift current of the Short River, is missing its western end. Omund’s Mill is gone utterly; the next mill building, a cutlery owned by its workers and called Edge House, is not gone, but it no longer stands any kind of square and has a roof only in courtesy. Its windows have flown through it, and that only five are dead of twenty two who stood before them at the time is small comfort to the living and none at all to the dead. The next two roofs are there as the most of their planks on this side, if few shingles, and the cursing still rises from beneath them. Folk with bits of window glass, shingles, nails, and shattered oaken planking rained without warning on the cloth covered tops of their beer vats or through the mass of wool feeding into their carding machines might be expected to curse for some time. Much of it hit them; one was splashed by a tipped wort kettle, and scalded near to death with near beer.

A young, dark haired man in solid working clothes wet to the knee is standing, staring down past the place where the empty sockets for the long timbers that held house-roof are still cut clean in the rock, and no part of any timber remains.

Seeing the king, he walks down to meet him; walking is not difficult, there being nothing left of the mill in the way of nearby debris. It has gone into the water, or other buildings, even to the guides and posts and tackle of the timber-slide, the wet path of which the man is walking.

Galba takes a deep breath, and tips his head up to look the tall young man in the eye. Where is Omund?

Father? I expect father is around town somewhere. The voice is nearly cheerful, the sound of someone with work to do and no time for either questions or discourtesy. Someone who could only hear Tyl, and not see him, might well believe the form real, and grief in truth disdained.

Belmar smiles at this, a wide unfeigned smile full of gleaming teeth. Anywhere around town, yes?

A nod. His mill also, a quite sudden change of address.

Galba’s shoulders have lowered with the news, and the ends of his moustache curl downward. Tyl, isn’t it? Small Omund has, or had, four sons, all much like him in build and countenance. This one, also, partakes of the smallness of Omund, which lay in being twenty hands tall, and with it broad through the shoulders and deep through the chest.

The young man nods again. Tyl the Lucky from this day after. I was on South Shore by the bend, counting board feet of timber in logs on the water.

Around them, folk are coming with blankets and drink for those pulled out of the water aboard Belmar’s commandeered ferry; six or seven boats were flipped and sunk, and from three of them there were survivors. Past them, the king’s sword-thanes are passing with peavy poles and heavy planks and axes, to get the trapped out of Edge House and let the eirlings at the wounded. Two of those keep going, to see what state the brewers and weavers are in; three of them stay by Edge House and start saying their prayers as they unpack bandages and surgeon’s knives.

Galba turns to face Belmar more squarely. Behind the King, a pair of bandsmen tense, hands tight on their spears. Is there a particular reason for your return to Braemor?

Belmar pauses. It is a long pause, a full breath pause, and it might mean that Belmar is picking his words carefully. It might also mean that Belmar had to decide whether to answer or not; it can be hard to tell with Belmar. Lugan’s misfortune brought me, to see what good I could be to my kin in such a time.

So you will be taking over his affairs? Galba’s tone is doubtful. Tyl’s face is politely still, save where it pinches in around his eyes. The set of Tyl’s shoulders says rage to Old Orm, and the prowchief moves a little, to be more before the King.

I will not; Lugan has none of those so pressing that he must attend them while he passes through his grief and his anger. That the same people who run most of the actual business of Lugan’s businesses will do what they do in any case goes unsaid, but not unheard.

I will make my own judgement of what is needful. This is said in a firm voice, as something beyond the possibility of dispute or argument.

Another breath, taken slow in the expectation of uninterrupted speech. What Lugan holds needful in his grief, I will not account a wise thing, for the sake of his name and the family’s; to what he says in his wits I may give a wider scope.

Galba nods, not precisely reassured but certainly answered.

Belmar’s head shakes briskly twice a very little distance from side to side, and the feathers rustle. I should also congratulate you on the birth of a son, Galba-King. May there be many more.

Galba blinks. The guards behind him look at each other; one swallows.

We will name him Alred. Galba’s voice has perhaps an element of challenge in it. After eight sons whose wits woke in them without trouble as they grew head enough to house them, admitting to picking a name is not the unchancy thing it would be held with a first child, but that knowledge does not oblige one hearing the name not to comment.

A good name for a King’s son. Belmar’s voice has nothing in it but approval.

A good name in a bad time. This is two in a twelve days.

There was — Tyl says this politely, but with no diffidence in it — some hope with the first one that whosoever caused it had undone themselves with that causing. The most part of us held it another attempt to draw from the Fountain, gone more distantly awry than is usual.

I do not think that to be the case; such results as these require them a sudden release of accumulated energies, which is scarce to be put down twice to accident, and even less to be ascribed to some addled wight fiddling with the Fountain.

Tyl looks a long pause at Belmar, then. He is younger than Belmar, but not by overmuch, and the story of how Belmar left his training is still told, and what sort of training it was.

I think we have a similar errand, son of Rindal; might I hope to see the place where lately your cousin dwelt with his wife? Tyl is looking Belmar in the eyes to say this, not having to look as far up as most, and saying it without doubt of his right.

Belmar nods. You may indeed, but only save as you do it today. Lugan has given me this day, and then the house is to be mounded over.

Galba’s face does not move, but he is less than pleased to hear that. Nothing he can quite forbid under the law, nor Narial either, but it is not a good thing for a rich house among rich houses on Green, the only one of the four granite founded islands to hold any topsoil at all, to be given over to a grave mound for the unavenged dead. The land-rights on Green are not owned, precisely, but they are held valuable, and pass by hereditary means and no other. For Lugan to give that house to the dead is to give his townsman’s name away, for with the land-right goes the right of habitation in Braemor.

Chapter 6

Does Galba dislike you?

He has me told not so.

Then why his peculiar caution? Forgive me if I ask of a delicate matter, but your notoriety is in no wise specific.

Belmar strides on a little time, near enough to time enough to bring them to the shattered shell of Lugan’s House, stone built in the new and costly fashion. His voice is low when he speaks, audible in its softness only because it is so deep.

My voice changed.

Tyl’s brows crease; he has had to work, to stay even with Belmar’s long strides, but not so much as to be out of breath to think with.

I had not thought being late come to a man’s stature would be any cause of wide concern. Although Tyl knows well enough that being unable to sing in tune afterwards has done ill things to an apprentice enchanter’s prospects and career, he has heard no such thing of Belmar, and even were it true that there was no voice in him, that would not itself be enough to explain what has looked so much like exile or outlawry.

Belmar’s shoulders lift, and his eyes do not move from their fixed gaze on the doorway of Lugan’s house, that has floorboards leaning down, across, and through it like a thicket. One’s voice changing twice is by some thought worthy of comment.

Tyl blinks at that. One can imagine how that might be. Yet it scarce seems due grounds for a king to speak so warily to any thane of his land.

Lugan has a thane’s taxes; I do not.

You wear the sword. Two swords, one long and straight with a curve-guarded hilt, the mark of a man who can be called to the king’s service in war, worn on his left hip, and another short and heavy with a smashing pommel, slung across the small of his back, hilt to the right, that anyone might have.

A thane’s name comes from a right to land, as easily as from a king, and my own land is wide, that keeps me, and I go then armed as any gentleman might do. Men who had thus land of their own were called kings three or five centuries ago; in these days, it is held that a man must have the rule of more than his own house and land, be those ever so wide, to have a king’s name with them.

Belmar starts walking again, a slow striding to the right and west to go around the house, looking for a window that is not blocked by shattered timber. None of them have their shutters on the north side, though they are all full choked with planking.

How soft sits that sword in your hand? The question is sharp and sudden, under a west window clear enough for passage, about the sword in the same long style on Tyl’s left hip. It is not Tyl’s sword — that is in the river somewhere — but he did not argue when Galba handed it to him with a jest about the duties of kings.

Tyl shrugs. Grandfather paid the taxes; father learnt little of it himself, but said his sons should know, Mill-thanes or no.

Belmar nods, brusque, the hat-feathers nodding down his back with the motion.

Loose in the sheath is either good advice, or folly. Choose as you will.

With that, one of Belmar’s long legs lifts, and he puts his foot on the sill, and is gone into the shadows of the shattered house.

Tyl follows him a little later, having heard neither crash nor cursing, and having reasoned that what will support Belmar will surely support him.

The walls inside leak a jumbled light from the jammed lower windows, a brighter light, shadow crossed, from the second story, and only a long slanting shadow comes down westerly from the place where once the roof had been, the afternoon sun below the top course of the wall.

Belmar’s left hand is running a gloved thumb and forefinger over the length of his goatee, and twisting the point. His right hand rests over the heavy pommel of the short sword, and his right toe taps in his boot, a rise in the leather showing over it and falling, showing and falling, though the boot sole doesn’t shift. It is good that the sole does not shift; there is little but some portion of the floor joists left to stand on, above a cellar full of shattered wood and things that were once them furniture.

Tyl gags on his first full breath inside.

The dead are swift to rot who might be poured. Belmar’s voice is the same level tone it has been.

Tyl gets breath and bearings back, looks around him, at the line of missing mortar running around the walls at the height of the window tops, the floor beams bent up to break them from their sockets in the walls, the way the rafters spread before they fell.

It went up. The whole house went up. Tyl’s voice is full of a slow surprise and a wonder, at what could lift whole the many tons of rock and wood and roofing tile.

Belmar steps along a joist, coming so close to the wall as he can and keep wearing his hat. Rose, and fell, and then there was a full bright light.

Belmar’s voice is half disgusted; his right hand finds a dinner knife in his belt, and runs it, dull back edge first, along the inside face of a cracked wall stone, and powder falls away from the blunt side of the point.

Tyl is staring at him from the wall he stands beside, feet carefully each above a joist of the floor. Those seem for the most part solid, though the planks of the floor are shattered, split, and cracked off their nails and their joins, and where they have not fallen, prone to slide.

Well, Mill-thane’s son?

Tyl’s head shakes. There would have had to have been some object, a lamp, a table, something that could be set in the midst of the house and not regarded, and the song sent to it from far away.

It need not. Consider a dry wheel and wet wheel, and what happens if the runes are cut one of them backward on the dry.

It would spin not so fast as it ought when the wet wheel turned; the backwards rune would push against it, not for it.

Aye. Now consider one dry wheel, with the runes cut alternate, left and right around the whole rim of it, and two wet wheels dropped in to the river’s current. Drop them at the same time, mind, and so they each are matched with half the dry wheel’s runes.

Tyl’s face furrows with thinking. It wouldn’t work; the wet wheels would turn the same way, and the dry wheel would go slow with the river. If you used one or the other wet wheel in turn, you could make the dry wheel reverse, but that’s easier to do with gears.

Belmar’s smile is altogether humourless.

Think of a small dry wheel, much smaller than the wet, and think that the house went up before the blast.

As most of the mill went up, or the neighbours would be in worse case. Tyl’s voice is very thoughtful.

Belmar is nodding, a rustle of plumes and a bobbing shadow on the wall. Someone is throwing things in the Fountain, and they have less skill than it needs to answer their desire.

Yet, says Tyl.

Chapter 7

Cast into the river current from under the grey and green walls, the long flanks of the ship turn from side to side, gaining portions of the current’s speed each in their turn as the ship rocks forward. At the sternward end of the benches, a greybeard man takes the waxed wood cover off a drum.

The wide stretched honk hide drum, ringing a low slow note over the mist-laced water, starts a singing, forty voices from their sea-chest seats singing one chant to the time of the drum beat. The thirty prowsmen wrap their cloaks tighter, and turn forward, their faces looking over and beside the bare blades of great axes and of long spears. The steel shines fitfully, sun-caught greased-gleam and fire-blue in their hands against the blank white wall of mist in the West. The ship’s speed rises above the current’s gift, a wave hissing white and away from the carved curved stem of the king’s ship, Galba’s ship the ROWED OX. The runes on the neck of the carved prow are newly wet with blood, and as the singing settles into sustained, lasting notes and rhythms, the blood is misted wetter than it was with the rising spray.

Behind them, Sunna struggles higher in