Otherwise (4 page)

“A pattern.”

“Part of a pattern.”

Crowned men with red tears running from their eyes held hands as children’s cutouts do, but each twisted in a different attitude, of joy or pain he couldn’t tell, for of course they all smiled with teeth. Behind and around them, gripping them like lovers, were black figures, obscure, demons or ghosts. Each crown had burning within it a fire, and the grinning black things tore tongue and organs from this king and with them fed the fire burning in the crown of that one, tore that one’s body to feed the fire burning in this one’s crown, and so on around, demon and king, like a tortured circle dance.

3

“I
f Barnol wets the Drum with rain,” sang Caredd, the Protector Red-hand’s wife, “then Caermon brings the Downs the same; if Caermon wets the Downs with rain, the Hub will not be dry till Fain; if Barnol leaves the Drum dry still, then… then… I forget what then.”

“Each week has a name,” the Visitor said.

“Each week,” she said.

Barnol had wet the Drum with rain, and now, two weeks after, Caermon brought the same to Redsdown. Beyond the wide, open door of the bam, the hills, like folded hands, bare and wooded, marked with fence and harrow-cut, were curtained in silvery downpour. It whispered at the door, it ticked on the sloping roof, entered at chinks and holes, and tocked drop by drop into filling rain barrels. Safe from it in the wide, dim bam, Caredd searched for eggs in the hay that filled an old broken haywain. The Visitor followed, as he had almost continually since Fauconred had brought him there: always polite, even shy, but following anyway everywhere he was allowed, attending to her as a novice would to an ancient Gray.

“Why those names?” he asked. “What do the names mean?”

“I don’t know.” It was the answer she gave most often to the questions, but never impatiently. Where Fauconred would have thrown up his hands in red-faced exasperation, she merely answered, once again, “I don’t know.”

Caredd was more than ten years younger than her Protector husband, and seemingly as easy and fair as he was dark and troubled. Reds-down, his property, was her home, had been her father’s and his father’s father’s—he a minor Defender who had married in turn one neighbor’s widow and the other’s only daughter, and became thereby Protector of wide and lovely holdings. Caredd, riding as soon as she could walk, knew all its mossy woodlands and lakelets, stony uplands and wide grainfields, and loved them as she loved nothing else. She had been few other places, surely, but surely had seen nothing to compare; and she who loved the gray vacancies of the glum fortress-house caught chills in the gray vacancies of her husband’s town mansion.

For sure she loved Redhand too, in her fashion. Loved him in part because he had given her her home as a wedding gift when it seemed nearly lost. Her father and brother had been ambushed on a forest road by the Just, robbed and murdered; her weak-minded mother had flirted with one malcontent Red lord after another until she had been nearly tried for treason, and her estates—beloved Redsdown—had been declared forfeit to the King: thus to Black Harrah, in fact.

And then Redhand had come. Grave, dour almost, unfailingly polite, he had wooed the disoriented, frightened tomboy with rich gifts and impatient, one-sided interviews, explaining his power at court, her mother’s jeopardy—till, in a stroke of grownup wisdom, she had seen that her advantage—thus her heart—lay with him.

So there had been held in the rambling castle a grand Redhand wedding.

Of that day she remembered disjunct moments only, like tatters of a vivid dream; remembered waiting in the tiny dark vestibule before the great hall for their cue to enter, pressed tight against him, surrounded protectively by his mother, his brothers, his sweating father, how she had felt at once safe and frightened, implicated yet remote; how Mother Red-hand laughed, horns called from within, butlers whispered urgently from the narrow door, and how with a full rustle of many gowns the bright knot of them had unwound into the thronged hall hung with new red banners and filled with the resinous hum of many instruments.

She remembered how the guests had dusted them with salt and wound paper thorns around their wrists, and laughed though it meant suffering would come and must be endured; and how
the
country people gave them candied eggs for their pillow. And she remembered when later they had taken down her hair and taken away her cloudlike gown and she had stood shyly naked before him beneath a shadow of pale lace…

He had stayed long enough to meet and confuse the names and faces of his new tenants, Folk she knew as dearer than relatives; and he had ridden off, to court, to battle, to his other growing properties. Except for a fidgety week or two in summer, a politic ball at Yearend, he came to Redsdown little. Sometimes she felt it might be the better way. Sometimes.

She left one speckled egg from her basketful in a dark corner for the bam elf she knew lived there. She plucked a bit of straw from her autumn-auburn hair and let the Visitor take her basket. Stone steps worn to smooth curves took them out an arched side door into a breezeway that led to the kitchen; the leaves of its black vines were already gone purple with autumn, and the rain swept across its flagged path in gusts, sticking Caredd’s billowing trousers to her flank. The Visitor tried clumsily to cover her with the old cloak he still wore, but she shook him off, ran tiptoe laughing through the puddles and up the kitchen stairs, brushing the clean rain from her cheeks, laughing at the Visitor making his careful, intent way toward her.

There were great rooms at Redsdown, chill halls lined with stiff-backed benches, tree-pillared places with fireplaces large as cottages, formal rooms hung with rugs and smelling of mildew. But when there was no one to entertain, nothing to uphold, Caredd and the rest stayed in the long, smoke-blackened kitchen with the Folk. There, there were four fireplaces hung with spits, hooks and potchains, with high-backed settles near and chimney corners always warm; there were thick tables worn so the smooth grain stood out, piled high with autumn roots to be strung or netted and hung from the black beams above. The rain tapped and cried at the deep small windows but couldn’t come in.

Two ancient widows sat making thread in a corner, one of them meanwhile rocking ever with her naked foot a bagcradle hung there in the warmth. “If Barnol wets the Drum with rain,” they sang, “then Caermon brings the Downs the same…”

“Rain indeed,” said the Defender Fauconred from within his settle. He dipped a wooden ladle into a kettle steaming on the hob and refreshed his cup. “And when will it stop, ladies?”

“Could be tonight, Defender,” said one, turning her distaff.

“Could be tomorrow,” said the other, turning hers.

“Could turn to snow.”

“Could continue wet.”

Fauconred grunted and filled the cup of Mother Caredd, who took it with a slow, abstracted graciousness, set it on the settle-arm, and began to put up her cloudy white hair with many bone pins. It seemed that Mother Caredd’s hair always needed putting up; Caredd rarely saw her but she was piling up, endlessly, patiently, its never-cut length.

“Now you see, Visitor,” she said absently, “those are rainy-sounding names for weeks, is all; Barnol and Caermon, Haspen and Shen… as Doth is dry and Finn is cold…”

“I wondered about their origin,” the Visitor said. He sat next to Caredd, looking from one speaker to the next as though in a schoolroom, teacher or pupil or both. Mother Caredd had no more lesson to say, and shrugged and smiled. The unhappy end of her playing at politics had left her vaguer even than she had always been, but also somehow calmer, more lovely, and gently accepting; where the Visitor disturbed and perplexed Fauconred, and fascinated Caredd, Mother Caredd just smiled at him, as though his dropping from heaven were the most natural of things.

“For any real answers,” Caredd said, “you’ll have to go to the Grays, in the end. For all old knowledge.”

“They know?”

“They say they know. Help me here.” She was trying with her long patient fingers to restring an old carved instrument.

“They say,” Mother Caredd went on as though to herself, “that all the Just have names for their names. Is that so? Naming their names, and why… Their Guns have names too, all of them, don’t they? I wonder if the Guns’ names have names, and so on and on…”

“I don’t know, Mother,” Caredd said, laughing. “Could they remember all that?”

“I couldn’t. But I wouldn’t want to, would I?”

Caredd loved her mother fiercely, and though she allowed herself to smile at her rambling chatter, she let none mock her, and would die to keep her from being hurt again.

“The Just,” the Visitor said, nodding; these he knew; but after a moment asked: “Who are they? How would I know them?”

“Murderers,” Caredd answered simply. “These keys are warped.”

“Bandits, as I told you,” Fauconred said, frowning into his cup. “The men without law or honor; the women whores.”

“Madmen,” said Mother Caredd.

“Why Just, then?” the Visitor asked Caredd.

“A name from longer ago than anyone remembers. Perhaps once the name had a meaning. It’s said they’re dreamers.” She plucked a dampened note. “Nightmare dreamers.”

“Old names persist,” Fauconred said. “Like Protector, Defender. Protectors and Defenders of the Folk, anciently.”

“Protectors of the Folk against…”

Fauconred knitted his gray brows. “Why, against the Just, I suppose.”

Caredd strummed a tuneless tune and put down the ancient instrument. The two widows went on spinning their eternal thread. “If it snows on Yearend Day,” they sang, “then, snow and rain will fall till Fain/Brings the New Year round again…”

By evening, the rain had blown away toward the City, leaving only a rent sash of clouds for the sun to color as it set. To watch, Caredd had climbed a hundred stairs to the long, fanged battlement that guarded Redsdown’s Outward side, and then up between two broken castellations to where she knew of a flat, private place to sit. On the tower behind her, two forked banners, sunset-red, snapped tirelessly in rhythm with her own heavy cloak’s blowing. She pulled it tighter around her, drew her knees up, wondered what Redhand was about tonight… There was a polite, introductory sort of noise on the battlement below. Caredd smiled down at the tireless Visitor.

“Even here?” she asked. “Those steps are long.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Visitor. “I’ll go back.”

“No. Stay. Better to talk to you than… Stay.”

“I was wondering,” he began, and Caredd laughed. He put his head down and went on carefully. “Wondering why no one of the Folk will talk with me.” He had gone about the farms with Caredd, watching her stop everywhere to hug and talk and fondle babies, be cooed over herself by old ones who treated her as something between a cherished pet and a princess. But their happy chatter had ceased before him, turned to a cool reserve; he had never had any yield him anything but a nod and a wary, almost frightened smile.

“They think you are a creature of the Grays,” Caredd said simply.

“A… creature?”

“Of old, the Grays could make combatants against the Seven Possessors. Creatures not anything but one of the Seven Strengths. The Folk have a thousand stories about such things, battles of the Seven Possessors against the Seven Strengths. Moral stories, you know; Gray knowledge or teaching made into a story about a battle. The Folk take them for real, the Sevens, real enough to see with eyes and touch.”

“But the Gray in the village—he’s just as afraid of me.”

Caredd laughed again. “Old Driggory? He’s afraid that you might have been sent to do battle against his own Possessor, the one named Blem.” The Visitor looked puzzled. “Drunkenness. A good old man Driggory is, but a simple country clerk; he’d hardly know what the great Grays are capable of. Because it’s from him, you see, and all his cousins, the village clerks and little Grays, that the Folk have learned their tales of the Sevens, from long ago.”

The Visitor shook his head. “I wanted to talk with them. How can I explain I am no creature of the Grays?”

Caredd looked down at the strange personage below her, who looked up with his infinite blank eyes. Indeed, if there were Gray champions of the Right, they might look like this: or then Demons too. “Whose creature are you?” she asked.

The Deep had drunk the sun once more, and though the clouds Outward weren’t yet drained of all color, the sky above had been swept clean of cloud, and on that blue-black ceiling already burned three of the Wanderers, pink, gold and red, all decrescent. “I can’t remember,” the Visitor said, as though for the first time.

“Perhaps,” said Caredd, “you are no Strength, but Possessed; and the Possessor has eaten your memory and made your hair fall out. The Possessor Blem can do that; they show it in the pageants at Yearend.” She was a wind-blown silhouette in the crack of battlement, and the Visitor couldn’t see her little mocking smile.

“And if I am?” said the Visitor. “I don’t think I am, but if I am?”

“If you are,” Caredd said thoughtfully. “Well. I wouldn’t know what then, and neither would Driggory. You’d have to go to Inviolable and ask.”

“Inviolable?”

“The Grays’ house in the mountains. Or”—a sudden thought that made her smile again—“wait till Fauconred takes you to my husband. His brother is a great Gray, oh very high.” She would like to see Learned’s unstirrable face, when this creature asked wisdom of him.

The Visitor turned his bald face to the deep sky he knew had made him. Had made him for—somewhere within him some formed thing tried to coalesce: a reason, a direction, the proper question, the name uncoded. He stood stock-still and watched it light up fitfully the structured regularity of his manufacture… and then dissolve as quickly into blank unknowing again.