In the Red Lord's Reach Read online

  In the Red

  Lord's Reach

  Phyllis Eisenstein

  A SIGNET BOOK

  Copyright © 1989 by Phyllis Eisenstein

  First Printing, July, 1989

  Portions of this novel appeared originally, in somewhat different form, in various issues of The Magazine of FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, Copyright © 1977, 1979, and 1988 by Phyllis Eisenstein.

  CONTENT

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Part One The Land Of Sorrow

  Part Two The Mountain Fastness

  Part Three The Nomads Of The North

  Part Four The Elixir Of Life

  Part Five The Arctic Waste

  Part Six The Cruel Winter

  Excerpt

  THE ICY BREATH OF DEATH—

  WHEN THE ICE opened to swallow Grem, Alaric knew he was the only one who could save him. But as the others lowered him by rope into the narrow opening, he wondered if he was already too late.

  "Grem!" he shouted, and the name echoed all around him.

  A moment later, a splash answered him, and Grem's head broke the surface. He grabbed for Grem, caught the man's fur wrapping, and pulled with all his strength. He locked his legs about the other man and shouted to be lifted upward. Slowly, jerkily, he rose from the water. And then, of a sudden, the weight on his legs was too much, and the loop of the rope could not hold him—he was ripped down through it, and he was in the water, deep, deep. He and Grem sank together, and dizziness assailed him, as he felt rather than saw the yawning darkness below.

  And a heartbeat later, the two of them were falling through air…

  Dedication

  For George R.R. Martin

  Part One

  The Land Of Sorrow

  IN SPRING, THE mountains were wild and windswept, the passes treacherous with meltwater, the human forage sparse. Beyond the heights, said the peasants of the southern foothills, was land unknown: perhaps a vast, frigid desert, or even the half-legendary Northern Sea, where perpetual ice floated over the graves of hapless sailors. Alaric's curiosity urged him across the peaks, and his talent for traveling to any place he could see with his eyes or his mind saved him from becoming one more pebble in many a landslide. He was careful to take his time, to scrutinize his surroundings with a mapmaker's concern for detail. His knapsack was full of compact—if uninteresting—food, a thousand mountain streams provided his drink, and the scrubby trees of the uplands offered fuel for his fire. When he saw lowland birds wheeling overhead, he knew that the worst was behind him.

  Through the final pass, he descended into a wide, fertile valley. Here, greenery was well sprouted, grasses cloaking the hillsides, flowers waving in the meadows. To the east, a series of cascades broke free of the mountains, glittering in the noon sunlight like ribbons of polished silver; below, they joined, settling into a river that flowed north and west until it broadened into a small lake. Beyond the lake lay more mountains, peak upon peak, a barrier to the north as effective as that to the south. During the winter, Alaric thought, the valley must be completely isolated from the rest of the world. He wondered if he were the first visitor of the year.

  Peasant cottages, bordered by the varying tints of kitchen gardens, were scattered across the landscape. Near the river stood the fortification—Alaric made that his destination. Now, with the possibility of human witnesses, he gave over the use of his power and worked his way downward with the slow care of an ordinary man. His eyes on the ground, on the two paces immediately before his feet, he did not notice the watching goatherd until he was suddenly surrounded by bleating goats.

  "Good day," said Alaric, dodging a few butting heads.

  The goatherd was a fair-haired boy of ten or eleven, dressed warmly in gray woolen shirt and breeches, with woolen wrappings round his legs and feet. He carried a staff, which he held out before him defensively. He barred Alaric's way.

  "Are you guarding the valley?" asked Alaric.

  "One of many guards," said the boy. "Stay where you are." From his sash hung a goat's horn; he put it to his lips and blew a long, thin note. From the west came a faint reply.

  "I assure you, I am a harmless minstrel," said Alaric, bowing deeply.

  "I am very good with this quarterstaff," the boy told him. "Do not move."

  "Not so much as a finger," said the minstrel. Briefly, he debated vanishing, but that would mean returning the way he had come, and he was in no mood for retreat. He could hardly blame the folk of the valley for their vigilance. If any people lived in the mountains, they must be bandits, for no man could scratch an honest living in those heights; therefore, any stranger entering the valley must be suspect.

  Alaric smiled at the boy, who did not smile back—he took his guardianship very seriously, that one, and his goats wandered where they would while he held to his post. Soon, a man arrived, and then another, both armed with long knives. They looked at Alaric and then up at the mountainside behind him, shading their eyes against the high sun.

  "Who are you? Where do you come from?" they demanded. "Who follows you, and what weapons have they?"

  "No one follows me," Alaric replied, trying to smile as ingratiatingly as possible. "I am a minstrel, traveling the world, viewing its wonders. The mountains tantalized me, and I crossed them in search of the Northern Sea or some other marvel. I find myself in your lovely valley—a welcome rest stop, a source of fresh bread and meat perhaps, and lively company. I will play for you to prove the truth of my words." Very slowly, he unslung his lute and brought it forward under his arm. He tested the strings lightly, found them well in tune, and when no one made any move to stop him, he sang of mountain climbing, spring, and a fair damsel waiting on a nigh-inaccessible peak. The men's arms hung limp at their sides while they listened, their knives pointing to the ground, but the boy did not alter his guardian stance; his goats wandered far up the steep incline, nibbling the fresh young shoots of grass, but he paid them no heed, all his attention on Alaric.

  Alaric smiled sadly, in sympathy with the song, with its forlorn youth who could not summon enough courage to dare the heights and win his love. His listeners, however, showed no emotion; unlike the ground, they had not thawed with the arrival of warm weather—winter lay in their souls and on their faces. Alaric was sure of his talent. He had wrung tears from common men, from kings and warriors, from peasants reaping grain under the blazing sun. Yet here was nothing, no reaction, no back of the hand dashing wetness from a cheek, not even a face half-turned away to hide a pitying sigh. Stony silence greeted his song, and he realized with dismay that though he had thought he understood the hearts of men, he was still young in wisdom as in years. Not yet eighteen summers old, he finished the song with a discord and stood uncertain before his listeners.

  "I come in peace," he said. "Elsewhere, I have been welcomed."

  The men's mouths turned down, and their lips tightened, wrinkling like apricots left too long in the hot sun. Their eyes swung sidewise in their heads as they tried to look at each other while still observing him. They had wispy, fair hair, parted in the middle, and their cheeks were hollowed, fringed with pale beard.

  "Many a lord has set me at his table of an evening," Alaric said, yearning mightily that they would leave off this silent scrutiny and make some gesture, whether for good or ill. "I was thinking to journey to yonder castle," he told them, indicating the distant fortification with a movement of his lute.

  One of the men rubbed at his jaw with his free hand. Then he said, "Come along," and he gestured with the knife as with a naked, beckoning hand.

  Alaric followed him, and the other man fell in line behind them. The boy remained, standing on the rough track and watching till the three wer
e well away, and only then did he turn to his goats, flailing with his staff and bawling them into order. Glancing over his shoulder, Alaric saw him scrambling among the rocks like his animals. Well, with practice enough, I, too, would be so agile, he thought. He wondered if the goats grazed the very peaks in high summer.

  Where valley met mountainside, Alaric could not tell. Gradually, the grass grew thicker and smoother, the rocks less numerous, the incline less extreme, until the three men strode along a level path well beaten by human and animal feet, a path that wound among sparse trees and between fields tilled dark by the plow and spangled with fresh growth of beans and barley. It looked a prosperous valley, low stone walls shielding the crops from wandering grazers, houses neatly tended, apple and pear and cherry trees crowding out most other kinds. The men guided Alaric to a house that stood in the shade of an ancient, sprawling apple, and they bade him enter. After his journey down the mountainside, and the briefer stroll through cultivated grounds, Alaric was grateful for the chance to rest his weary feet.

  The two-room house was empty of humans, though there was a very young lamb swaddled in homespun, sleeping in a cradle by the hearth. Alaric assumed it was sickly and being fed by hand—in an isolated valley, all domestic animals were far more valuable than in the wide world.

  "Will you have a bowl of porridge after your journey?" asked one of the men.

  "I thank you for your kind hospitality, sir," said Alaric, and he accepted the bowl and spoon that were proffered. The porridge was cold and crusty, but not without flavor, for it contained more than a little honey. He had eaten worse fare in his life.

  "You'll stay the night with us," said his host, "and in the morn go on to the Red Lord's castle." His friend nodded soberly, as if in agreement with sage advice. "We will go with you and present you to the Red Lord. He will be most generous."

  "Very well," said Alaric. "If you wish, I shall sing for my supper here and then sleep well and long before presuming upon his generosity."

  The men inclined their heads. "You may stay within," said his host, "and rest upon the straw if you will, while we work our fields. My wife will be home soon, and no doubt she will be able to find one or two small tasks you may turn your hands to."

  "No doubt," Alaric said dryly, and then he shrugged. He often happened upon cotters who felt that no song could pay for food, who provided him with an ax for splitting rails or a churn for making butter. Only in the great houses were his skills respected as honest recompense for room and board. He resigned himself to these petty cotters and their petty values; upon occasion, he felt guilty enough to agree with them. Just now, he was too tired to trek the final leagues to the fortification; as soon as the men had left, he stretched out upon the straw for a nap. Later, he would pay, with a song or with the strength of his arms—what mattered one single day of labor, he thought, in return for the good will of his host, when tomorrow he would rest in luxury?

  He drifted on the edge of sleep, and the voices of toiling men and calling crows and barking dogs intruded pleasantly into his dreams. At last, the soft sound of a woman's long skirt sweeping the floor nearby buoyed him into wakefulness. Without moving, he opened one eye the merest slit. In the late-afternoon sunlight that streamed through the room's two windows and open door, he saw a woman moving quietly. She was stoking the fire with split logs, a pot slung over her left arm, ready to set above the flames. Heat had reddened her face and brought forth beads of sweat to dampen her white cap and collar. She was a middle-aged woman, coarse-featured, big-boned, and fleshy. Damp tendrils of graying hair straggled out from under her cap, and she swept them aside from time to time with one plump forearm. After she finished with the fire, she lifted the sleeping lamb from the cradle and, cuddling it close to her ample bosom, began to rock it and croon a wordless lullaby. The lamb woke and struggled, but the woman held it tight and paced the room, swaying from side to side, as if she soothed a colicky child. She bent her head and nuzzled the lamb's forelock, kissing its curly-haired muzzle and whispering half-audible endearments between snatches of melody.

  Alaric stretched, yawning loudly, and he sat up in the straw and scrubbed at his face with both hands. "Good evening," he said to the woman.

  "Good evening, minstrel," she replied, and then she returned to her one-sided conversation with the lamb.

  "Your husband said you might have some small work for me. I would be most happy to perform whatever task you might set."

  She looked at him speculatively and then, placing the lamb gently in its cradle and tucking the covers round it tightly, she said, "Sing a lullaby for the little one."

  He glanced around the room to make certain that there was no human child she might be referring to. No, there was only the cradle by the hearth and the little creature that lay there, bleating feebly now and then but making no attempt to escape its bed.

  "If you wish, goodwife, a lullaby." He lay the lute across his knees and strummed softly, feeling a bit foolish. But he sang a lullaby. It was easier than churning butter.

  She prepared supper swiftly and laid four places at the table, four bowls, four cups, four pewter spoons. She took a long loaf of bread from a cabinet behind the table and set it in the center of the board. Then she drew an earthen jug from a dark corner in the back of the room, and she placed that on the table, too, and then she began to weep, leaning over the jug, fondling it with her hands; she wept as though her heart would break.

  Alaric put the lute aside, not knowing what to do, not knowing what had caused her sudden sorrow. He walked toward her, stopping with the table between them, and he reached out to touch her arm lightly. "May I be of some service, goodwife?" he asked in a low voice.

  She looked up, but she did not see him; her eyes were focused on some inner vision, or on nothing at all. Her fingers gripped the jug convulsively, trying to knead the hard clay, or to gouge it. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she lifted the jug in both hands, wrenched herself away from the table, and stumbled toward the door. At the threshold, she lifted the jug high, as if consecrating it to some deity, and then she flung it from her, screaming curses. Striking the hard-packed path, the earthenware cracked into several pieces, and the pale fluid within splashed the ground.

  The woman sagged against the doorjamb then, as if all the strength had drained from her body with that toss, and Alaric hurried to her side to support her, to help her back to the hearth and a stool. She leaned upon him heavily and would have fallen had he not been her crutch. She slumped forward on the stool, almost falling into the fire, and she wept, she wept, as if the world were coming to an end and she saw her loved ones tumbling into the pit. Alaric fanned her with one hand and held her upright with the other.

  The men came in soon after—they must have heard her cries—and the one who had acted as host took her in his arms and shook her, calling her name over and over again: "Aramea, Aramea." The other man tended dinner, stirring the pot with a long spoon and tasting the contents frequently. At last the husband took his wife into the rear room of the cottage, and then he returned for the lamb, delivered it into her care, and closed the door between her and the men.

  They ate in silence, a stew rich in vegetables, huge chunks of dark bread; they drank water. Afterward, the men asked Alaric to sing, but they seemed hardly to notice his music, lively though it was. He tried to cheer them with bawdy rhymes and gay melody, but they were cheerless, moody, seemed to find the flames in the hearth more interesting than the minstrel. In the back room, he could hear the lamb bleat occasionally.

  At full dark, Alaric begged their leave for a stroll around the house, for his digestion's sake, and for the privacy that nature's processes required. The broken jug still lay in the path—full moonlight revealed a sparkle of liquid remaining in its curved bottom. He picked it up, sniffed the contents: wine, a fruity, aromatic wine. He set the earthenware fragment back on the ground. He wondered what it meant. He thought it might make a fine song.

  The boy arrived shortly, and he pen
ned his goats in a wooden enclosure behind the house before claiming his own late supper. He eyed the lute while he ate, and Alaric smiled and picked the instrument up and sang for him. Of all the household, only he paid heed to the minstrel's performance, and his foot wagged in time to the music.

  Here is an acolyte, thought Alaric. He is like myself at the same age. "Can you sing, lad?" he asked.

  "I can whistle," said the boy. He pursed his lips and blew a brief, lilting tune that Alaric did not recognize.

  "Can you whistle this?" the minstrel inquired, and he plucked a melody on the lute. The boy imitated it without difficulty, and Alaric repeated the notes, adding chords and weaving counterpoint among them and finally singing softly, and thus these two amused themselves for quite some time while the two older men huddled together by the fire and said nothing. The boy frowned his concentration as the music waxed complex, and sometimes he closed his eyes as if visualizing his own part, shutting out the distractions of the quiet cottage; he moved his foot, tapped his fingers on his knee, even nodded his head to keep the rhythm as he whistled.

  At last the master of the house—Alaric presumed him the goatherd's father—rose from his stool, and poking at the dying embers with a long stick, he said, "Dawn comes early tomorrow."

  The boy hung his head a moment, his whistling stilled abruptly in mid-tune, and he sighed. But then he nodded slowly, not to anyone in particular, and he left his place near the minstrel to fling himself down upon the thick straw in the corner. His father's companion did likewise, and the father himself broke the stick he had used as a poker, cast it into the flames, and went into the other room, closing the door firmly behind him. No one bid Alaric good night, but the boy and the older man left him ample room in the straw, so he settled himself and his lute and soon passed into sleep.