The Ninth Talisman (2 page)

And now, three years after the Dark Lord's death, Sword sat in the pavilion talking with Younger Priestess, one of the three individuals in the town who could communicate with the spirits of land and life and thereby keep Mad Oak habitable. Without Priest, Elder Priestess, and Younger Priestess, there would be no one to coax the soil into yielding crops, no one to convince game to allow hunters to kill it, no one to keep the wild
ler
beyond the borders from encroaching on the town.

That sometimes meant that the priestesses had little time to spare to talk to other humans; talking to the
ler
kept them busy. For the moment,
though, on a cold night in early winter, after most of the town's inhabitants had gone home to huddle in their beds, Younger Priestess had found time to speak quietly with Sword in the town's deserted pavilion.

After all, human souls were
ler,
too, and sometimes needed a priestess's attention.

The two of them sat on the edge of the great stone hearth, the remains of a fire flickering amid the ashes behind them, keeping the worst of the winter's chill at bay. Most of the lanterns had gone out; a few still glimmered by the door, but most of the vast interior was dim and shadowed. The glowing sigil on the priestess's forehead, the sign of the
lefs
favor, shone vividly gold in the darkness.

They sat quietly for several minutes after the last other people had left, but eventually Younger Priestess broke the silence.

“You don't seem happy, Sword,” she said. “Your soul is clouded.”

He shrugged without looking directly at her. “I am well enough,” he said.

“Well enough? No more than that?”

He turned to face her directly. “Should I be more than that?”

“Why not? Your sisters are more than just well enough. I see Harp's soul shining like the dawn when her fingers are on the strings and the drums are beating, or when she thinks about the child she is to bear. Fidget's soul leaps like a flame when she watches the boys at play, and Spider's dances in delight when she runs through the streets with her playmates. Your mother is still weighed down by your father's death, and by your role among the Chosen, and the knowledge that you aren't happy, so hers is clouded as well. Time will help with her sorrows, but yours? I don't know what causes them, so I don't know if time will disperse or thicken them. I would like to dispel those clouds, if I can.”

“I doubt you can,” Sword said, turning away again. “After all, I killed a man; shouldn't my soul be darkened forever by such an act?”

“But he was a murderer and a madman, a Dark Lord who deserved nothing but death,” Younger Priestess said. “You played your role well.”

“A role I no longer believe should exist,” Sword said.

“Oh?” Younger Priestess frowned. “You think you should pass the role of Swordsman on to another?”

“No, I didn't say
I
shouldn't be the Swordsman; I said the role
shouldn't exist at all. I don't think there should
be
a Swordsman.”

Her frown deepened. “But then who would slay a new Dark Lord, should one arise? Do you think the Archer and the other Chosen could do as well without a Swordsman?”

“There shouldn't be any Chosen. There shouldn't be any Dark Lords. There shouldn't be any more Wizard Lords.”

“No Wizard Lord? But then who would keep the
other
wizards in check?”

“No one. The other wizards are no longer a threat. There hasn't been a rogue wizard in centuries.”

“Because we have the Wizard Lord to prevent them!”

“But there are so few wizards left, we don't
need
a Wizard Lord!”

She stared at him for a moment, then said, “You don't know what you're talking about.”

Startled, he turned and stared back.

“Haven't you learned your ballads?” she asked him. “ ‘The Siege of Blueflower'? ‘The Slaughter at Goln Vleys'?”

“I know the songs,” Sword replied, a trifle sullenly. “That was a long time ago. There were hundreds of wizards back then; there aren't even two dozen left today.”

“One is all it takes to cause trouble.”

“How much trouble can one ordinary wizard cause?”

Again, she stared at him in silence for a moment. Then she said, “Did you know that a wizard once came here, to what's now Mad Oak, intent on carrying off women for his harem? One wizard, and that was enough to cause havoc.”

Startled, Sword said, “A rogue wizard came here? Is there a song?”

“No, no song. No story. Just a memory, from long ago, before there was any Wizard Lord to protect us.”

“What? A memory? But there have been Wizard Lords for seven hundred years.”

“And this happened perhaps eight hundred years ago, before the Council of Immortals chose the first Wizard Lord, centuries before the Mad Oak first grew, when the village here had no name of its own.”

“Then how can there be a memory? No one lives eight hundred years.”

“No person does, but
ler
can, and
ler
can be made to pass along memories, from one priestess to another. One of my ancestors, the one who defeated that wizard, thought it was important that the story should be passed along, and she had no faith in human storytellers. She feared they would clutter the truth up with dashing heroics and grand speeches, so instead she gave her memories to the
ler
of the hearthstone in the village shrine, and each priestess since has received them from the stone in her turn.”

“So this lone priestess defeated a rogue wizard? That hardly makes it seem as if he was much of a threat. What happened?”

“I told you my ancestor did not trust human storytellers; I will not betray her trust by playing the part of one. If you would like to know what it was like, what she did and thought and felt, then come with me now, down to the shrine, and I will let you remember it for yourself.”

“You can
do
that?”

“I think so, yes. Perhaps not for just anyone, but you are one of the Chosen, bound to
ler,
so I think the hearthstone will let you receive it.”

Sword tried to look into her eyes, to read the expression there, but the surrounding darkness and the glow of the mark on her brow made it impossible to see anything there but blackness.

“All right,” he said. “Show me, then.”

Fifteen minutes later he knelt before the shrine, his forehead touching the bitterly cold stone of the unlit hearth, as Younger Priestess spoke quietly in a tongue not meant for human ears. He was beginning to regret agreeing to this when suddenly the cold vanished, the winter night disappeared, and he was walking between trees, walking in daylight, walking with an unfamiliar gait, with hips not his own, hips that swung in a way a man's did not. His shoulders were suddenly narrower, his arms weaker, his chest pulled forward.

He was a young woman, returning from a ritual placating the game spirits in the forest northeast of town. He was a priestess named Tala. . . .

 

Tala brushed the dirt from her skirt as she walked out of the grove, and straightened the bow on her shoulder. Then she looked up at the village,
squinting slightly—her eyes were unaccustomed to the bright sunlight after so long in the shade of the trees. A strong breeze stirred her hair, but she paid it no attention.

Something looked odd—or perhaps merely
felt
odd; she could never be entirely sure where her own perceptions ended and the influence of the local spirits began. She shaded her eyes and peered, and opened herself to the
ler,
but even then it took her a moment to realize what was wrong.

All the men were gone. There were women working in the fields, and children running about, but the men of the village were nowhere to be seen.

“Oh, now what?” she asked no one in particular.

The men are gone,
something replied. She was unsure which
ler,
which spirit, had spoken, but she didn't particularly care. They were all connected in any case.

“I can see that,” she said. “
Why
are they gone?”

To defend the village.

The “voice” came from the earth itself, she realized, rather than any lesser spirit. The essence of the village's soil knew everything that happened within its bounds, a broad oval stretching from the far ridgetop to a point a little over half a mile into the forest she had just left, but it wasn't an especially bright being by human standards—or perhaps it simply didn't understand humans well enough to apply whatever intelligence it might have. Tala was fairly certain it was not going to volunteer any further explanations. Getting useful information from it was possible, but required asking exactly the right questions.

Tala did not have the patience to properly interrogate the earth-spirits just now, after spending three days and nights in the wood dealing with the stubborn forest
ler.
She was tired and hungry and her back was sore from sleeping on the hard ground, and once she got home she could ask Mama or Broom or Tanner what was happening. She did not ask any more questions, but began trotting toward the village.

She did say, “I thank you, spirits of my homeland, for your aid and answers,” as she took her first steps. She wasn't about to forget the necessities in her hurry.

The path seemed straight and true before her, despite the wind rippling
the barley in the fields, so she knew the
ler
had accepted her thanks and were not offended that she had not bothered to kneel. The earth-spirit was usually reasonable about that—not like the haughty, demanding spirits in her father's metal that only the smith's hammer could beat into submission, or the foul-tempered
ler
of the riverbank.

She saw her mother, up on the hillside with Tala's younger sisters, and waved, but her path did not lead in that direction. She could have turned aside, but the village was closer, and there would be someone there who could explain.

She could feel the
ler
around her with every step; something had disturbed them, she knew, though she could not guess its nature.

A moment later she passed the marker shrine into the village proper, hurried past the Carver family's house, and found a clump of half a dozen women talking quietly in the sunlit meeting common, their arms wrapped around themselves to protect them from the warm wind.

(Somewhere, Sword marveled at the sight of what he recognized as the town square, but without a single building he knew around it. There was no pavilion on the ridge, none of the houses he had grown up among—but then he realized that he could see the village shrine, and the hearthstone he now lay against, in the correct spot, though exposed to the elements, without their familiar shelter.)

“What's happening?” Tala called as she approached.

Her voice was almost lost in the murmur of the wind, but six worried faces turned toward her, her aunt Tanner among them.

“Priestess!” Tanner said. “There you are! We were beginning to worry.”

Tala glanced up at the sun. “I'm not late,” she said. “It's not yet noon.”

“But . . . well, we thought you might have heard and cut your ritual short.”

Tala ignored the foolishness of suggesting the ritual could be shortened; if she had been so disrespectful as that, the forest would have allowed the village no venison, no coney, no walnuts, not so much as a mushroom for the next year. “Heard
what
?” she asked. “Where are the men?”

“They're at the border,” Tanner replied, gesturing in the general direction of the ridgetop.

“An attack is coming,” Redlocks added.

“An attack? What kind of attack?”

“Armed men. From another place.”

That made no sense. Armed men could not simply walk through the wilderness to attack the town. “But nobody would . . . But how? Why? How do they know these men are coming?”

“Priest said so. He was walking the bounds, and the spirits warned him. He came and got all the men, and they left about an hour ago to meet the enemy at the border, just over the ridge.”

Tala was still puzzled. She had never heard of such a thing. No one had ever threatened the village before. “Who's attacking us?”

“We don't know,” Tanner said. “Priest said the warning just said it was many men.”

“
Ler
generally can't count very well,” Tala commented.

“He said he had asked if there were more men than we had in the village, and the spirits said there were about that many, maybe a few more or a few less.”

“So all the men went out to fight them off?”

The women nodded. “That way,” Tanner said, pointing. “Across the ridge.”

“They took spears,” Greeneye said.

“And bows,” Redlocks added. “Smith wanted to bring one, but of course you had his with you.”

Tala tugged at the bow slung on her shoulder. She had been showing it to the game spirits in the forest, so they would know what would strike down their creatures. “My father couldn't hit anything with an arrow anyway.” That was due as much to his occupation as anything else; something of the fire and iron clung to him and disturbed the
ler
of bow and arrow, making it reluctant to do his will. Tala had tried to teach him a little of the archery spirit's true name, so that he might force its cooperation, but he had laughed and said he saw no need. The village had enough hunters without him, and no other smiths.

“But it would look that much more fearsome, a big man like that with a bow,” Chitchat said.

“They want to frighten the attackers off, not kill anyone,” Tanner offered. “It wouldn't matter whether he could hit anything.”

“Priest said he would arrange some surprises,” Redlocks added.

And of course, Tala knew, he would. He would talk to the
ler
and make sure that every sharp pebble found its way under an invader's foot, that muddy earth would be more slippery than it looked, that birds and rabbits would startle at just the right moment, that sawgrass would cut at the foe's ankles and branches would whip at their eyes. The defenders would be untouched by these hazards, perhaps protected behind cooperative bushes or friendly trees. All the local spirits would come to the aid of their own people, and help drive away the intruders. The village, human and
ler
together, was a single community.