Tad Williams - The Burning Man

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2024-11-23 0 0 74.8KB 22 页 5.9玖币

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Years and years later, I still start in the deepest part of night with his agonized face

before me. And always, in these helpless dreams, I am helpless to ease his suffering.

I will tell the tale then, in hope the last ghosts may be put to rest, if such a thing can ever

happen in this place where there are more ghosts than living souls. But you will have to listen

closely - this is a tale that the teller herself does not fully understand.

I will tell you of Lord Sulis, my famous stepfather.

I will tell you what the witch foretold to me.

I will tell you of the love that I had and I lost.

I will tell you of the night I saw the burning man.

Tellarin gifted me with small things, but they were not small to me. My lover brought me

sweetmeats, and laughed to see me eat them so greedily.

'Ah, little Breda,' he told me. 'It is strange and wonderful that a mere soldier should have to

smuggle honeyed figs to a king's daughter. And then he kissed me, put his rough face against me

and kissed me and that was a sweeter thing than any fig that God ever made.

But Sulis was not truly a king, nor was I his true daughter.

Tellarin was not wrong about everything. The gladness I felt when I saw my soldier or heard him

whistling below the window was strange and wonderful indeed.

My true father, the man from whose loins I sprang, died in the cold waters of the Kingslake when I

was very small. His companions said that a great pikefish became caught in the nets and dragged my

father Ricwald to a drowning death, but others whispered that it was his companions themselves who

murdered him, then weighted his body with stones. Everyone knew that my father would have been

gifted with the standard and spear of Great Thane when all the thanes of the Lake People next met.

His father and uncle had both been Great Thane before him, so some whispered that God had struck

down my poor father because one family should not hold power so long. Others believed that my

father's companions on the boat had simply been paid shame-gold to drown him, to satisfy the

ambition of one of the other families.

I know these things only from my mother Cynethrith's stories. She was young when my father died,

and had two small children - me, not yet five years old, and my brother Aelfric, two years my

elder. Together we went to live in the house of my father's father because we were the last of his

line, and among the Lake People of Erkynland it was blood of high renown. But it was not a happy

house. Godric, my grandfather, had himself been Great Thane for twice ten years before illness

ended his rule, and he had high hopes that my father would follow him, but after my father died,

Godric had to watch a man from one of the other families chosen to carry the spear and standard

instead. From that moment, everything that happened in the world only seemed to prove to my

grandfather that the best days of Erkynland and the Lake People had passed.

Godric died before I reached seven years, but he made those years between my father's death and

his own very unhappy ones for my mother, with many complaints and sharp rebukes at how she managed

the household and how she raised Aelfric and me, his dead son's only children. My grandfather

spent much time with Aelfric, trying to make him the kind of man who would bring the spear and

standard back to our family, but my brother was small and timid - it must have been clear he would

never rule more than his own household. This Godric blamed on my mother, saying she had taught the

boy womanish ways.

Grandfather was less interested in me. He was never cruel to me, only fierce and short-spoken, but

he was such a frightening figure, with bristling white beard, growling voice, and several missing

fingers, that I could never do anything but shrink from him. If that was another reason he found

little savour in life, then I am sorry for it now.

In any case, my mother's widowhood was a sad, bitter time for her. From mistress of her own house,

and prospective wife of the Great Thane, she now became only one of three grown daughters in the

house of a sour old man, for one of my father's sisters had also lost her husband, and the

youngest had been kept at home, unmarried, to care for her father in his dotage.

I believe that had even the humblest of fishermen courted my mother, she would have looked upon

him kindly, as long as he had a house of his own and no living relatives. But instead a man who

has made the entire age tremble came to call.

'What is he like?' Tellarin once asked me. 'Tell me about your stepfather.'

'He is your lord and commander' I smiled. 'What can I tell you that you do not know?'

Tell me what he says when he is in his house, at his table, what he does.' Tellarin looked at me

then, his long face suddenly boyish and surprised. 'Hah! It feels like sacrilege even to wonder!'

'He is just a man', I told him, and rolled my eyes. Such silly things men feel about other men -

that this one is so large and important, while they themselves are so small! 'He eats, he sleeps,

he breaks wind. When my mother was alive, she used to say that he took up more room in a bed than

any three others might, because he thrashed so, and talked aloud in his sleep.' I made my

stepfather sound ordinary on purpose, because I did not like it when Tellarin seemed as interested

in him as he was in me.

My Nabbanai soldier became serious then. 'How it must have grieved him when your mother died. He

must have loved her very much.'

As if it had not grieved me! I resisted the temptation to roll my eyes again, and instead told

him, with all the certainty of youth, 'I do not think he loved her at all.'

My mother once said that when my stepfather and his household first appeared across the

meadowlands, riding north towards the Kingslake, it was as though the heavenly host itself had

descended to earth. Trumpets heralded their approach, drawing people from every town as though to

witness a pilgrimage passing, or the procession of a saint's relic. The knights' armour and lances

were polished to a sparkle, and their lord's heron crest gleamed in gold thread on all the tall

banners. Even the horses of the Nabban-men were larger and prouder than our poor Erkynlandish

ponies. The small army was followed by sheep and cattle in herds, and by dozens and dozens of

wagons and oxcarts, a train so vast that their rutted path is still visible on the face of the

land threescore years later.

I was a child, though, and saw none of it - not then. Within my grandfather's hall, I heard only

rumours, things whispered by my aunts and my mother over their sewing. The powerful lord who had

come was a Nabbanai nobleman, they reported, called by many Sulis the Apostate. He claimed that he

came in peace, and wanted only to make a home for himself here beside the Kingslake. He was an

exile from his own country - a heretic, some claimed, driven forth by the Lector under threat of

excommunication because of his impertinent questions about the life of Usires Aedon, our blessed

Ransomer. No, he had been forced from his home by the conniving of the escritors, said others.

Angering a churchman is like treading on a serpent, they said.

Mother Church still had an unsolid grip on Erkynland in those days, and even though most had been

baptized into the Aedonite faith, very few of the Lake People trusted the Sancellan Aedonitis.

Many called it 'that hive of priests', and said that its chief aim was not God's work, but

increasing its own power.

Many still think so, but they no longer speak ill of the church where strangers can hear them.

I know far more of these things today than I did when they happened. I understand much and much,

now that I am old and everyone in my story is dead. Of course, I am not the first to have

travelled this particular sad path. Understanding always comes too late, I think.

Lord Sulis had indeed fallen out with the church, and in Nabban the church and the state were so

closely tied, he had made an enemy of the Imperator in the Sancellan Mahistrevis as well, but so

powerful and important was the family of my stepfather-to-be that he was not imprisoned or

executed, but instead strongly encouraged to leave Nabban. His countrymen thought he took his

household to Erkynland because any nobleman could be king in that backward country - my country -

but Sulis had his own reasons, darker and stranger than anyone could guess. So it was that he had

brought his entire household, his knights and kerns and all their women and children, a small

city's worth of folk, to the shores of the Kingslake.

For all the sharpness of their swords and strength of their armour, the Nabbanai treated the Lake

People with surprising courtesy, and for the first weeks there was trade and much good fellowship

between their camp and our towns. It was only when Lord Sulis announced to the thanes of the Lake

People that he meant to settle in the High Keep, the deserted castle on the headlands, that the

Erkynlanders became uneasy.

Huge and empty, the domain only of wind and shadows, the High Keep had looked down on our lands

since the beginnings of the oldest tales. No one remembered who had built it - some said giants,

but some swore the fairy-folk had built it themselves. The Northmen from Rimmersgard were said to

have held it for a while, but they were long gone, driven out by a dragon from the fortress the

Rimmersmen had stolen from the Peaceful Ones. So many tales surrounded that castle! When I was

small, one of my mother's bondwomen told me that it was now the haunt of frost-witches and

restless ghosts. Many a night I had thought of it standing deserted on the windy clifftop, only a

half-day's ride away, and frightened myself so that I could not sleep.

The idea of someone rebuilding the ruined fortress made the thanes uneasy, but not only for fear

of waking its spirits. The High Keep held a powerful position, perhaps an impregnable one - even

in their crumbling condition, the walls would be almost impossible to storm if armed men held

them. But the thanes were in a difficult spot. Though the men of the Lake People might outnumber

those of Sulis, the heron knights were better armed, and the discipline of Nabbanai fighting men

was well-known - a half-legion of the Imperator's Sea Wolves had slaughtered ten times that number

of Thrithings-men in a battle just a few years before. And Osweard, the new Great Thane, was young

and untested as a war leader. The lesser thanes asked my grandfather Godric to lend his wisdom, to

speak to this Nabbanai lord and see what he could grasp of the man's true intention.

So it was that Lord Sulis came to my grandfather's steading, and saw my mother for the first time.

When I was a little girl, I liked to believe that Sulis fell in love with my mother Cynethrith the

moment he saw her, as she stood quietly behind her father-in-law's chair in Godric's great hall.

She was beautiful, that I know - before my father died, all the people of the household used to

call her Ricwald's Swan, because of her long neck and white shoulders. Her hair was a pale, pale

gold, her eyes as green as the summer Kingslake. Any ordinary man would have loved her on sight.

But 'ordinary' must be the least likely of all the words that could be used to describe my

stepfather.

When I was a young woman, and falling in love myself for the first time, I knew for certain that

Sulis could not have loved her. How could anyone who loved have been as cold and distant as he

was? As heavily polite? Aching then at the mere thought of Tellarin, my secret beloved, I knew

that a man who acted as my stepfather had acted towards my mother could not feel anything like

love.

Now I am not so sure. So many things are different when I look at them now. In this extremity of

age, I am farther away, as though I looked at my own life from a high hilltop, but in some ways it

seems I see things much more closely.

Sulis was a clever man, and could not have failed to notice how my grandfather Godric hated the

new Great Thane - it was in everything my grandfather said. He could not speak of the weather

without mentioning how the summers had been warmer and the winters shorter in the days when he

himself had been Great Thane, and had his son been allowed to succeed him, he as much as declared,

every day would have been the first day of Maia-month. Seeing this, Sulis made compact with the

bitter old man, first by the gifts and subtle compliments he gave him but soon in the courting of

Godric's daughter-in-law as well.

While my grandfather became more and more impressed by this foreign nobleman's good sense, Sulis

made his master stroke. Not only did he offer a bride price for my mother - for a widow! - that

was greater than would have been paid even for the virgin daughter of a ruling Great Thane, a

sizable fortune of swords and proud Nabban horses and gold plate, but Sulis told Godric that he

would even leave my brother and myself to be raised in our grandfather's house.

Godric had still not given up all hope of Aelfric, and this idea delighted him, but he had no

particular use for me. My mother would be happier, both men eventually decided, if she were

allowed to bring at least one of her children to her new home on the headlands.

Thus it was settled, and the powerful foreign lord married into the household of the old Great

Thane. Godric told the rest of the thanes that Sulis meant only good, that by this gesture he had

proved his honest wish to live in peace with the Lake People. There were priests in Sulis' company

who would cleanse the High Keep of any unquiet spirits, Godric explained to the thanes - as Sulis

himself had assured my grandfather - and thus, he argued, letting Sulis take the ancient keep for

his own would bring our folk a double blessing.

What Osweard and the lesser thanes thought of this, I do not know. Faced with Godric's enthusiasm,

with the power of the Nabbanai lord, and perhaps even with their own secret shame in the matter of

my father's death, they chose to give in. Lord Sulis and his new bride were gifted with the

deserted High Keep, with its broken walls and its ghosts.

Did my mother love her second husband? I cannot answer that any better than I can say what Sulis

felt, and they are both so long dead that I am now the only living person who knew them both. When

she first saw him in the doorway at Godric's house, he would certainly have been the light of

every eye. He was not young - like my mother, he had already lost a spouse, although a decade had

passed since his widowing, while hers was still fresh - but he was a great man from the greatest

city of all. He wore a mantle of pure white over his armour, held at the shoulder by a lapis badge

of his family's heron crest. He had tucked his heimet under his arm when he entered the hall and

my mother could see that he had very little hair, only a fringe of curls at the back of his head

and over his ears, so that his forehead gleamed in the firelight. He was tall and strongly-made,

his unwhiskered jaw square, his nose wide and prominent. His strong, heavy features had a deep and

contemplative look, but also a trace of sadness -almost, my mother once told me, the sort of face

she thought God Himself might show on the Day of Weighing-Out.

He frightened her and he excited her - both of these things I know from the way she spoke of that

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Tad Williams - The Burning Man

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