Yorath the Wolf Read online

  Yorath the Wolf

  Rulers of Hylor trilogy Book 2

  Cherry Wilder

  I heard shouting and the clash of arms . . .

  . . . as I came up to the smithy. Four swordsmen had attacked a tall shieldman in full armor. I looked about for Finn, the smith, and saw him where he had been caught and held at the open doorway of the forge.

  I circled the smaller boxes and came up on the blind side of the man who held Finn. I flung him across the yard into the door of an empty loose box. Finn slid me the first weapon he could find, a metal-bound crescent of wood, trailing chains. I circled behind the swordsmen and let out a roar and went in waving my makeshift weapon. As one of the attackers turned, the chains clipped at his ears and he struck at me, fought me high and low with his thin, bright blade, but his reach was not long enough. He slipped, I poked him in the wind, a chain wrapped round his sword arm, and I pulled until his sword dropped.

  The place was a battlefield. The smith’s man lay where he had fallen; the injured leader had cast aside his sword and was binding up his leg wound. He looked afraid, and I saw that he feared his own red blood, which might be taking his life with it.

  “I cannot stop the bleeding,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I will die unless the wound is stitched. Mercy. Have mercy . . .”

  “If I help you,” I said, “you must tell all . . .”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  After a labor of four days and nights the fair young Princess Elvédegran of Lien, wife of Gol, the prince of Mel’Nir, gave birth to a monster. It was myself. The prince, my father, a handsome man, turned aside from my mother’s blood-stained bed and vomited. He rinsed his mouth out with wine, turned back and cursed my mother. She was in no condition to reply, but her old nurse, Caco, who feared neither men nor demons, cursed him back. Gol kicked the old woman; he fell into that raging frenzy that it pleases the men of Mel’Nir to call god-rage. Half a dozen nobles who were packed into the tower room watching the birth restrained him. Hagnild, the physician, had the place cleared at last. The prince was dragged out struggling followed by the rout of his court. Women screamed; dwarfs and greddles were trodden underfoot.

  Outside, the chronicles will tell you, a black heap of storm clouds rolled up over the Dannermere and bolts of godlight tore at the doomed land of Mel’Nir. The winds howled, and I, the misshapen harbinger of the Great King’s fall, writhed and shrieked upon the blood-stained bed. In fact it was not so; I cried feebly, the day was misty and dank. There were portents, and Hagnild knew them, but his present concern was the health of his patients. He let Caco bind up my faint princess mother, and meanwhile he examined me. I was, he has assured me, a revolting sight; but when he had wiped me clean and removed my caul, he found me healthy if not straight. One shoulder was twisted. I had a line of hair down my back and a rudimentary tail, which he removed at once, sealing the small wound. A deformed male child.

  There was a precedent to be followed in such cases. I would be presently displayed to the Great King himself, then slain. Ghanor had had four grandchildren put down already, as casually as puppies. He struck in vain, Hagnild believed, at an hereditary defect that lay in the blood of the Duarings, the royal house of Mel’Nir. A crook-back king, a poor wry-necked princess, these things had been known to occur in every generation. There were other accidents—a skull moulded strangely at birth, a blood-colored mark—that were not hereditary. Of the four unfortunates, the children of the Great King’s daughters, Merse and Fadola, Hagnild had sadly approved the death of two, one a birth injury, the other a serious case of the family crookedness, a hunchback. The others, superficially marked, might have lived healthy and sound, but he had no power against the combined unreason of Ghanor and the chroniclers.

  The curse of the royal house and a wish to be free of their tyrannical masters had brought the scribes who worked upon the Scroll of Vill, the Dathsa and the Book of the Farfarers to agree firmly on one point. The Great King would lie in jeopardy from a marked child of his own house. It was not difficult to find a mark on any newborn child. Only the insistence of the seers and chroniclers that the danger lay in the second generation had protected the Great King’s daughters and Gol, his son. Now here I lay, Gol’s first-born, marked beyond hope; I should follow my hapless cousins to the steps of the throne. The creature Drey who lived in the folds of the King’s robe crept out with a stinging knife to dispatch such victims.

  And yet . . . Hagnild carried me to the window, searching for a sign. It was autumn, early in the Thornmoon. He looked out over the hunting preserves of the king that lay about the Palace Fortress and over a bay of the inland sea, the Dannermere. In a patch of clear water a last swan sailed into view and took to the air. Hagnild saw that it had one black wing. It was enough. He knew that I must live.

  He had not much time to do his working. My mother, Elvédegran, whispered from the bed, “Show me the child . . .”

  Hagnild met Caco’s burning gaze, but he stepped up and laid me for the first and last time in my mother’s arms. She was brave; the torments she had suffered since she left the warmth and security of her mother’s house had not dimmed her spirit. She was the youngest of the three lovely swans of Lien and, some said, the most beautiful. The Markgrafin Guenna of Lien had striven passionately to protect her daughters: two she had saved . . . they were given in marriage to the Daindru, the rulers of the Chameln lands, good but ill-fated men. The third swan she could not save. Intrigue and stupidity, this time in the persons of Rosmer, the vizier, and Kelen, the young markgraf, had triumphed, as they often did in the glittering realm of Lien. When Guenna was broken and disgraced, Kelen ruled; he gave his youngest sister, at seventeen, into the tender keeping of Prince Gol of Mel’Nir.

  Elvédegran knew well that at this moment her life was ebbing away. If she did not die from the ordeal of the birth, then Ghanor might have her killed. She examined my body, wrapped me again in the princely cloth that had been waiting to receive me, and said a prayer to the Goddess. With Caco’s help she placed around my neck the silver swan, token of the house of Lien.

  “He could grow,” she whispered.

  “No doubt,” said Hagnild.

  “Does my word have any power?” she asked.

  “As a princess . . .?” asked the magician sadly.

  “By no means,” she said, “though I am one. My power might come from the fact that I am dying.”

  She lay back upon the bed, pale as the mist that swirled up to the ramparts of the Palace Fortress. Hagnild was impressed. Death might assist his working, even though time was short. The word had been brought by now to the Great King himself, and Drey was sharpening his sting. Hagnild made his decision and swept about the chamber repeating a simple fastening upon the doors and windows. Then he placed me, wrapped as I was, in Caco’s arms.

  “Bid farewell to your mistress,” he said. “She is for the Halls of the Goddess. Swear fealty to the child!”

  Caco did as she was bid, and Hagnild said impatiently to my mother:

  “Name the child!”

  “Yorath,” whispered the princess. “Call him Yorath.”

  It is the name of a king’s son who was hidden in a wolf’s skin. Hagnild signed the name on my breast and gave Caco instructions:

  “Go down the little stair to the second postern gate. The guards will not be able to see you. Take my mare, Selmis, tethered by the horse trough just beyond the gate. Ride with the child to the crossroads by the dolmen and stay my coming. If I am not there by nightfall, go on into the marsh and find out Finn’s smithy. Wait with the smith and his goodwife until I come.”

  Heavy footsteps sounded in the passage, and there was a pounding at the door of the tower room. Hagnild shouted, “Stay clear! We are bewitched!
”

  He spoke to my mother, giving her certain words of power. He unfastened the door to the little stair and recited the spell for the guards at the second postern gate.

  “Wait . . .” he said.

  He stripped off the old woman’s grey shawl and replaced it with a velvet cloak belonging to the princess.

  “Now go!”

  Caco held me tightly, bobbed one last time to her poor young mistress and went down the stair. Hagnild made fast the door and hurried on with his ritual. The hammering on the main door of the tower room began again.

  “Master Hagnild!”

  It was the voice of Pulk, the Captain of the Guard.

  “Open up! We must have the newborn creature!”

  Hagnild took my mother’s limp white hand and kissed it.

  “Now!”

  He gestured, and the door flew open. The room was lit with snapping darts of blue fire; the men at arms staggered in with a roaring in their ears. Elvédegran gave a thin, high scream, and they saw it: A scaly creature perched upon the bed, a twisted body that glowed dull green, murderous eyes glittering above a horny beak. The air in the chamber was foetid with the demon’s breath.

  Hagnild, backed against the wall, cried out, “Be gone!”

  Three times he conjured the evil thing, and at last it unfurled leathern wings. A whirlwind tore at the hangings, the room was plunged into darkness, the round window was shattered: the demon was gone.

  When the mists cleared, Pulk and his shaken men at arms found no sign of the monstrous child. Caco, the old woman, had also been spirited away, leaving only a shawl half burnt to ashes. Hagnild the Thaumaturge still reeled against the wall, pale from his ordeal. Clearly, Pulk explained to the king, he had rid the palace of a changeling, a monstrous demon sent to work ill on the royal house of Mel’Nir.

  The Princess Elvédegran, innocent vessel of misfortune, lay dead upon her charred and bloodstained bed. Women came and removed her body while Hagnild instructed the house servants in the purification of the chamber.

  The princess was borne on a flowered bier into the great hall of the Palace Fortress. Prince Gol, sobered and guilty, walked by her side. He could not take his eyes from her pale face; there was something in her death smile that mocked him and struck terror to his heart. She was borne to the steps of the high throne, called Azure; a single trumpet sounded her own fanfare, a call of the house of Lien. Gol looked up in the torchlight at the Great King, his father, Ghanor of Mel’Nir, Lord of the High Plateau, conqueror of the Danmark and the Westland, scourge of the war lords.

  The king sat brooding, his iron-tipped staff resting across his massive knees. The folds of his robe were encrusted with rough rubies in filigree, thick as blood. His bearded face in the torchlight shone red and black, the carved face of a savage god. His old eyes, always bloodshot, were hooded like the eyes of a huge bird. Hagnild was in attendance, easing back through the silent ranks of warriors and courtiers, anxious to take his leave. Outside the palace a storm rolled up at last and broke in sudden fury over the dark waters of the Dannermere.

  I lay safe and warm in Finn’s smithy; Caco warmed her hands at the fire in the smith’s house among the cooking smells and tumbling brown children. I took my first meal, I am told, at the breast of Erda, Finn’s wife, who was nursing her ninth child. Beyond the house lay the marsh and beyond that the reaches of Nightwood. A light shone out from the smithy where Finn still worked, hammering with great art at horseshoes and at weapons.

  I grew in Nightwood. Hagnild knew, and now I know, the ways that penetrate that forest’s awful shade. There is a clearing in the very midst of the wood where the trees advance or retreat at a word, where the sky is visible, where the weather can be a matter of craft. There Hagnild had a secret house, a brown house with low walls and a towering conical thatched roof. I grew there on goats’ milk and Caco’s devotion and long evenings with Hagnild over the books. My earliest memories are firelight on the hearth; a huge book bound in smooth brown fur; snow falling. Did Hagnild draw down snow for me one winter’s day?

  At three years old I was lost for a day and brought home by two hunters of the Kelshin, the pygmy race who live in Nightwood. I do not remember these patient hunters, guiding the stout lump of a child, taller than themselves, but I have one memory from this time. A tiny little woman in a leather apron is scolding me. I can see her hood, her white hair in intricate braids, her sharp features and black eyes.

  I grew in Nightwood. Those who live thereabouts, in the marsh or the forest, enter into a conspiracy with the place: they preserve its legend and do not dispel the fears of outsiders. Nightwood is much feared and sometimes with good reason. Its ways can be dark and treacherous; in a hard winter the wolf packs range beyond the marsh and ford the river Kress to hunt the King’s game. Ribur, the last of the great grey bears in the wood, lives in a rocky chasm topped by a hazel grove. He is old and almost toothless but still a danger to men.

  Those who fear Nightwood think of dark magic, not of swift-flowing rivers, impassable thickets, the morass or the wild beasts. The magic I saw in the wood was mainly that imposed by Hagnild, therefore benign or designed to scare off intruders. The paraphernalia of clutching trees, shifting darkness, howling or whispering of the wind, these are mostly his doing. Yet there are ancient districts of the wood where all mortals feel like trespassers. Worse still, there are haunted places where even I would not go willingly. There is a certain ash tree that bears strange gallows fruit. In a grove far to the east, down by the shore of the Dannermere, a pale fetch comes hopping, hopping through the long grass, eyeless, with a carrion stink.

  As a child I hid from strangers. I played and fought with my milk-brother Arn, ninth child of Finn, the Smith, and was welcome in the smith’s house. I throve on barefoot summers, climbing those slippery customers the forest trees, trolling for fish in the Kress and in the channels of the marsh. Arn and I had a favorite tree, an oak, on the forest side of the river, where we sat hidden, watching the courtiers and soldiers of the king ride to hunt in the broad acres of parkland on the far bank.

  The Palace Fortress enveloped its squat hill a little way to the west. Further off was the neglected town of Lort, struggling to become a city, the capital of Mel’Nir. There were traces in the masonry of the fortress and the town of a former race of builders in stone, neither the men of Mel’Nir nor the darker, sturdier race they had displaced in the land.

  I had been saved by Hagnild, but I was kept alive and succored by Caco. She “licked me into shape” as she-wolves and bears were supposed to do with their cubs. By this I mean that she moulded and massaged my twisted body so that I grew up straighter than might have been expected.

  I have often thought of Caco’s strange fate. She was a farmer’s wife of Lien, taken into the service of the Markgrafin Guenna on her country estate, beautiful Alldene. She was wet nurse to the royal children and raised six children of her own. When she was widowed, at an age when she might have settled down to being a grandmother, she elected to stay with the youngest princess. Elvédegran went from the silken captivity of her brother’s palace in Balufir to the Palace Fortress of Mel’Nir and the rough embraces of Prince Gol.

  When Caco was eight and fifty years, she found herself bereaved of her young mistress, alone, among strangers, with a newborn child to rear. She did this without faltering; Nightwood and the marsh became her territory, just as they were mine. She made friends: Erda, the smith’s wife; an old woman, Uraly, the reed-gatherer.

  Caco had developed a boundless contempt for the so-called high estates, for royal personages and nobles. Palaces were for her places of discomfort and misery; princes were by nature cruel, stupid and unreliable; courtiers were vicious and self-serving. She had no difficulty in concealing from me the circumstances of my birth. I was the child, she said, of Vida, a lady of Lien, and Nils, a soldier of Mel’Nir, both dead. She had a deep hatred for my true father, Prince Gol, and she invented in Nils a father who resembled her eldest son, a member
of the palace guard in faraway Balufir. If any asked, she told me as soon as I could speak, I must say that I lived with my grandam in the marsh; but I knew from the first that she was not my blood kin.

  So I was Yorath Nilson, and when I was grown, and if I was good—if I wore my shoes, came in for supper, went to bed without fuss, let myself be scrubbed clean and did the exercises in reading, writing, ciphering that Master Hagnild had set—then one day I might make something of myself. I might become a merchant, or a scholar, or, yes, with a sigh Caco must admit it, a soldier.

  I was born in the year 305 of the Farfaring, in the twenty-first year of the reign of Ghanor, the Great King, and in the third year of the Long Peace, also called the King’s Peace. Yet the whole purpose of life as it appeared in the chronicles and sagas and in the life of palace and town was the making of war and the practice of arms. The men of Mel’Nir are tall and strong; in the chronicles of the other lands of Hylor, they are very often described not only as giants but as “giant warriors.” The cult of size and strength, of steely temper, aptness to command, courage in the face of pain and death, is drummed into all the children of Mel’Nir and pursues them beyond the frost fields . . . to an adopted heaven. . . . Not one but a whole troop of White Warriors usher them into the Halls of Victory, the dwelling of the Goddess. Even with my curious upbringing, between Nightwood and the books and scrolls, I had very little chance of being anything else but a soldier, and Hagnild must have known it.

  Nevertheless he tried to put off the evil day . . . and so did other parents and guardians. The threat of soldiering made me an outlaw for the first time when I was twelve years old.

  The season was high summer. Arn and I went down to fish in the Dannermere and watched a barge being laden with men and horses at the king’s wharf by Kressmouth, a sleepy watchpost that was likely to turn into a harbor village, since Mel’Nir had made a protectorate of the Chameln lands. Then we wandered through the woods along our bank of the river. A man sat fishing in the curve of the Kress with a basket of apples by his side. We watched him from the trees: he reached out now and then and ate an apple in two or three bites. They sounded wonderfully crisp.