The Bristling Wood Read online

  The Bristling Wood

  Deadly Information

  “You the silver dagger who was asking for Lord Perryn?”

  “I am, and what’s it to you?” Rhodry asked.

  “Naught, but I might have a bit of information for you for the right price.”

  Rhodry took two silver pieces from his pouch and held them between his fingers. The peddler grinned.

  “I stayed one night in a little village inn, oh, some thirty miles from here. I was trying to get my sleep when I heard someone yelling out in the stable yard. So I sticks my head out the window, and I see our Perryn arguing with this blond lass. Seems like she was leaving him, and he was yelling at her not to go.”

  Rhodry handed over the first silver.

  “‘I’m going to find no one,’ she says,” the peddler went on. “Seemed like a cursed strange thing to say, so it’s stuck in my mind, like.”

  “So it would. Did she say where ‘nev yn’ was?”

  “Not truly. But she did say to his lordship that if he tried to follow her to Cerrmor, she’d take his balls off with her silver dagger.”

  With a laugh, Rhodry handed him the second coin, then dug out a third for good measure.

  “My thanks, peddler.”

  When Rhodry left the stable, Merryc laughed quietly under his breath. It was a good jest, to make the silver dagger pay for the false rumors that were going to mean his doom.

  The boundless imagination of

  KATHARINE KERR

  Her novels of Deverry and the Westlands:

  THE BRISTLING WOOD

  THE DRAGON REVENANT

  A TIME OF EXILE

  A TIME OF OMENS

  DAGGERSPELL

  DAYS OF BLOOD AND FIRE

  DARKSPELL

  DAYS OF AIR AND DARKNESS

  THE RED WYVERN

  THE BLACK RAVEN

  THE FIRE DRAGON

  Available from Bantam Spectra Books

  In memoriam: Raymond Earle Kerr, Jr.,

  1917–87,

  an officer and a gentleman

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As usual, I owe many people many thanks:

  Pat LoBrutto, my editor and one of the best in the business, who keeps going to bat for me even as this project grows longer and longer.

  Elizabeth Pomada and Michael Larsen, my agents, who are friends far more than business acquaintances.

  Marta Grabien, who gave me invaluable help in acquiring my computer system.

  Nic and Deborah Grabien, who went beyond the call of friendship to install the new computer once acquired.

  Jon Jacobsen, my best critic and supporter, who no doubt would be a silver dagger himself did he live in Deverry.

  Alice Brahtin, my mother, who much to her surprise found she actually likes the peculiar things I write.

  And as always, Howard Kerr, my husband.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Pronunciation of Deverry Words

  Prologue - Spring, 1064

  Part One - Deverry and Pyrdon 833–845

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two - Summer, 1064

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Appendix

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION

  OF DEVERRY WORDS

  The language spoken in Deverry is a member of the P-Celtic family. Although closely related to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton, it is by no means identical to any of these actual languages and should never be taken as such.

  Vowels are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

  A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

  O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

  W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.

  Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

  E as in pen.

  I as in pin.

  U as in pun.

  Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

  Diphthongs generally have one consistent pronunciation.

  AE as the a in mane.

  AI as in aisle.

  AU as the ow in how.

  EO as a combination of eh and oh.

  EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

  IE as in pier.

  OE as the oy in boy.

  UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee. Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in carnoic (KAR-noh-ik).

  Consonants are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

  C is always hard as in cat.

  G is always hard as in get.

  DD is the voiced th as in thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in th or breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

  R is heavily rolled.

  RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

  DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

  Y is never a consonant.

  I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending-ion, pronounced yawn.

  Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike in English. Note, however, that DD is a single letter, not a doubled consonant.

  Accent is generally on the penultimate syllable, but compound words and place names are often an exception to this rule.

  I have used this system of transcription for the Bardekian and Elvish alphabets as well as the Deverrian, which is, of course, based on the Greek rather than the Roman model. On the whole, it works quite well for the Bardekian, at least. As for Elvish, in a work of this sort it would be ridiculous to resort to the elaborate apparatus by which scholars attempt to transcribe that most subtle and nuanced of tongues. Since the human ear cannot even distinguish between such sound pairings as B> and B
  A Note on Dating

  Year 1 of the Deverry calendar is the founding of the Holy City, or, to be more accurate, the year that King Bran saw the omen of the white sow that instructed him where to build his capital. It corresponds roughly to 76 C.E.

  For the profit of kings, well did he attack the hosts of the country, the bristling wood of spears, the grievous flood of the enemy.

  —The Gododdin of Aneirin, Stanza A84

  Prologue

  Spring, 1064

  Often those who study the dweomer complain that it speaks in riddles. There is a reason for this riddling. What is it? Well, that happens to be a riddle of its own.

  —The Secret Book of

  Cadwallon the Druid

  Out in the grasslands to the west of the kingdom of Deverry, the concepts of “day” and “month” had no meaning. The years flowed by, slowly, on the ebb and swell of the seasons: the harsh rains of winter, when the grass turned a bluish green and the gray
sky hung close to the earth; the spring floods, when the streams overflowed their banks and pooled around the willows and hazels, pale green with first leaves; the parching summer, when the grass lay pale gold and all fires were treacherous; the first soft rains of fall, when wildflowers bloomed briefly in purple and gold. Driving their herds of horses and flocks of sheep, the People drifted north in the summer’s heat and south in the winter’s cold, and as they rode, they marked only the little things: the first stag to lose his antlers, the last strawberries. Since the gods were always present, traveling with their folk in the long wandering, they needed no high holidays or special feasts in their honor. When two or three alarli, the loosely organized traveling groups, happened to meet, then there was a festival to celebrate the company of friends.

  Yet there was one day of the year marked out from all the others: the spring equinox, which usually signaled the start of the floods. In the high mountains of the far north, the snows were melting, sending a tide down through the grasslands, just as another tide, this one of blood, had once swept over them from the north in the far past. Even though individuals of their race lived some five hundred years on the average, by now there were none left who’d been present in those dark years, but the People remembered. They made sure that their children would always remember on the day of the equinox, when the alarli gathered in groups of ten or twelve for the Day of Commemoration.

  Even though he was eager to ride east to Deverry, Ebañy Salomonderiel would never have left the elven lands until he’d celebrated this most holy and terrifying of days. In the company of his father, Devaberiel Silverhand the bard, he rode up from the seacoast to the joining of the rivers Corapan and Delonderiel, near the stretch of primeval forest that marked the border of the grasslands. There, as they’d expected, they found an alardan, or clan meet. Scattered in the tall grass were two hundred painted tents, red and purple and blue, while the flocks and herds grazed peacefully a little distance away. A little apart from the rest stood ten unpainted tents, crudely stitched together from poorly tanned hides.

  “By the Dark Sun herself,” Devaberiel remarked. “It looks like some of the Forest Folk have come to join us.”

  “Good. It’s time they got over their fear of their own kind.”

  Devaberiel nodded in agreement. He was an exceptionally handsome man, with hair pale as moonlight, deep-set dark blue eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s, and gracefully long pointed ears. Although Ebañy had inherited the pale hair, in other ways he took after his mother’s human folk; his smoky gray eyes had round irises, and his ears, while slightly sharp, passed unnoticed in the lands of men. They rode on, leading their eight horses, two of which dragged travois, loaded with everything they owned. Since Devaberiel was a bard and Ebañy, a gerthddyn—that is, a storyteller and minstrel—they didn’t need large herds to support themselves. As they rode up to the tents, the People ran out to greet them, hailing the bard and vying for the honor of feeding him and his son.

  They chose to pitch the ruby-red tent near that of Tanidario, a woman who was an old friend of the bard’s. Although she’d often given his father advice and help as he raised his half-breed son alone, Ebañy found it hard to think of her as a mother. Unlike his own mother back in Eldidd, whom he vaguely remembered as soft, pale, and cuddly, Tanidario was a hunter, a hard-muscled woman who stood six feet tall and arrow-straight, with jet-black hair that hung in one tight braid to her waist. Yet when she greeted him, she kissed his cheek, caught his shoulders, and held him a bit away while she smiled as if to say how much he’d grown.

  “I’ll wager you’re looking forward to the spring hunt,” he said.

  “I certainly am, little one. I’ve been making friends with the Forest Folk, and they’ve offered to show me how to hunt with a spear in the deep woods. I’m looking forward to the challenge.”

  Ebañy merely smiled.

  “I know you,” Tanidario said with a laugh. “Your idea of hunting is finding a soft bed with a pretty lass in it. Well, maybe when you’re fully grown, you’ll see things more clearly.”

  “I happen to be seventy-four this spring.”

  “A mere child.” She tousled his hair with a callused hand. “Well, come along. The gathering’s already beginning. Where’s your father gotten himself to?”

  “He went with the other bards. He’ll be singing right after the Retelling.”

  Down by the river, some of the People had lashed together a rough platform out of travois poles, where Devaberiel stood conferring with four other bards. All around it the crowd spread out, the adults sitting cross-legged in the grass while restless children wandered around. Ebañy and Tanidario sat on the edge near a little group of Forest Folk. Although they looked like the other elves, they were dressed in rough leather clothes, and each man carried a small notched stick, bound with feathers and colored thread, which were considered magical among their kind. Although they normally lived in the dense forests to the north, at times they drifted south to trade with the rest of the People. Since they had never been truly civilized, the events that they were gathered to remember had spared them.

  Gradually the crowd quieted, and the children sat down by their parents. On the platform four bards, Devaberiel among them, took their places at the back, arms crossed over their chests, legs braced a little apart, a solemn honor guard for the storyteller. Manaver Contariel’s son, the eldest of them all, came forward and raised his arms high in the air. With a shock, Ebañy realized that this would be the last year that this bard would retell the story. He was starting to show his age, his hair white and thin, his face pouched and wrinkled. When one of the People aged, it meant death was near.

  “His father was there at the Burning,” Tanidario whispered.

  Ebañy merely nodded his acknowledgment, because Manaver was lowering his arms.

  “We are here to remember.” His highly trained voice seemed to boom out in the warm stillness.

  “To remember,” the crowd sighed back. “To remember the west.”

  “We are here to remember the cities, Rinbaladelan of the Fair Towers, Tanbalapalim of the Wide River, Bravelmelim of the Rainbow Bridges, yea, to remember the cities, and the towns, and all the marvels of the far, far west. They have been taken from us, they lie in ruins, where the owls and the foxes prowl, and weeds and thistles crack the courtyards of the palaces of the Seven Kings.”

  The crowd sighed wordlessly, then settled in to listen to the tale that some had heard five hundred times or more. Even though he was half a Deverry man, Ebañy felt tears rise in his throat for the lost splendor and the years of peace, when in the hills and well-watered plains of the far west, the People lived in cities full of marvels and practiced every art and craft until their works were so perfect that some claimed them dweomer.

  Over a thousand years ago, so long that some doubted when the Burning had begun, whether it was a thousand and two hundred years or only a thousand and one, several millions of the People lived under the rule of the Seven Kings in a long age of peace. Then the omens began. For five winters the snows fell high; for five springs, floods swept down the river. In the sixth winter, farmers in the northern province reported that the wolves seemed to have gone mad, hunting in big packs and attacking travelers along the road. The sages agreed that the wolves must have been desperate and starving, and this coupled with the weather meant famine in the mountains, perhaps even some sort of blight or plague that might move south. In council the Seven Kings made plans: a fair method of stockpiling food and distributing it to those in need, a small military levy to deal with the wolf packs. They also gathered dweomerfolk and sages around them to combat the threats and to lend their lore to farmers in need. In the sixth spring, squadrons of royal archers went forth to guard the north, but they thought they were only hunting wolves.

  When the attack came, it broke like an avalanche and buried the archers in corpses. No one truly knew who the enemies were; they were neither human nor elvish, but a squat breed like enormous dwarve
s, dressed in skins, and armed only with crude spears and axes. For all their poor weapons, their warriors fought with such enraged ferocity that they seemed not to care whether they lived or died. There were also thousands of them, and they traveled mounted. When the sages rushed north with the first reinforcements, they reported that the language of the Hordes was utterly unknown to them. Half-starved, desperately fleeing some catastrophe in their homeland, they burned and ravaged and looted as they came. Since the People had never seen horses before, the attackers had a real advantage, first of surprise, then of mobility once the elves grew used to the horrifying beasts. By the time that they realized that horses were even more vulnerable to arrows than men, the north was lost, and Tanbalapalim a heap of smoking timbers and cracked stone.

  The kings rallied the People and led them to war. After every man and woman who could loose a bow marched north, for a time the battles held even. Although the corpse fires burned day and night along the roads, still the invaders marched in under the smoke. Since he pitied their desperation, King Elamanderiel Sun-Sworn tried to parley with the leaders and offered them the eastern grasslands for their own. In answer, they slew his honor guard and ran his head onto a long spear, which they paraded in front of their men for days. After that, no mercy was offered. Children marched north with bows to take the places of their fallen parents, yet still the Hordes came.

  By autumn the middle provinces were swept away in a tide of blood. Although many of the People fell back in a last desperate attempt to hold Rinbaladelan on the coast, most fled, taking their livestock, rounding up the horses that had given the invaders such an edge, loading wagons and trekking east to the grasslands that the Hordes despised. Rinbaladelan fought out the winter, then fell in the spring. More refugees came east, carrying tales the more horrible because so common. Every clan had had its women raped, its children killed and eaten, its houses burned down around those too weak to flee. Everyone had seen a temple defiled, an aqueduct mindlessly toppled, a farm looted then burned instead of appropriated for some good use. All summer, refugees trickled in—and starved. They were settled folk, unused to hunting except for sport. When they tried to plant their hoarded seed grains, the harsh grasslands gave them only stunted crops. Yet in a way few cared whether they lived another winter or not, because they were expecting that the enemy would soon follow them east. Some fled into the forests to seek refuge among the primitive tribes; a few reached what later became Eldidd; most stayed, waiting for the end.