Part 4 (2/2)

”Hey! You!” yelled a man in a red cloak in the center of the front rank. ”Move!”

The sorcerer's heart sped with instant rage; no one commanded him thus, like a lackey, a peasant. He half-turned toward the mounted men.

”Get your b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.s off that bridge,” shouted the red-cloaked man.

”You find something objectionable in other travellers using a public bridge?” retorted the sorcerer, drawing force up through his staff, flexing his hand around it.

”Captain,” said a slight rider beside Red, ”there's no need to quarrel-”

46.'EtizaBetA ”We're wasting precious time, your ladys.h.i.+p. Get moving, tourist, or be over-ridden!”

The sorcerer's eyes hardened. He s.h.i.+fted his grip on his staff and muttered quickly as he brought it down hard on the bridge, stepping back from the center toward the bank.

The piers s.h.i.+vered. The stones of which they were built tumbled down into the stream, and the thick wooden planks fell with them. The rumbling and cras.h.i.+ng of the wood buried the outraged shout of the commander and the growls of his men.

The sorcerer stood on a small platform of wood remaining on the opposite bank, three planks still fixed to the first stone pier of the bridge. The stream's banks were sheer and the water deep, turbulent around the boulders. It would be difficult to cross without the bridge.

”Shocking that the Emperor's gold buys such shoddy work,” he observed, the fires of anger and power still in him. His staff hummed in his hand, a note only he could hear through his palm.

The hors.e.m.e.n were tense and silent.

The red-cloaked man urged his horse forward a couple of steps, moving, trying to see under the traveller's dark-grey hat. He raised his right hand.

The other lifted his staff, waved negligently, and scattered the rocks up- and downstream with splashes and cracking sounds. For good measure, the sorcerer threw a geas of repulsion on the debris of the stream for as far as he could in each direction. It would be impossible to stack them now. Any new bridge must be built of other stones.

The red-cloaked captain swallowed. He stared across at the man in the sea-colored winter cloak, who chuckled and turned and walked quickly away into the wood.

”Otto,” whispered the woman.

”Son of a b.i.t.c.h!” Otto lowered his hand, realizing he had nearly exposed himself to great awkwardness, a fool's mistake, in his anger. He chided himself. It wasn't time for that. Too many explanations.

”Who could that have been?” she asked.

”We'll have to ford here.” He sat staring at the stones for Sorcerer and a (jentCeman 47.three breaths, then turned and called the order to move ahead, adding, ”Watch your footing!”

They didn't see the man on the road after picking their way across the stream, which at once relieved and worried Otto. He had simultaneous urges to kill him for wrecking the bridge and delaying them (though it was some comfort to think that Ocher too would be delayed by the missing bridge) and to grab him and ask how the h.e.l.l he'd done it. On the third hand, if there could be one, Otto thought he could live the rest of his life happily without running into him because he'd challenge the b.a.s.t.a.r.d if he did- ”Otto,” the lady said.

”Thinking.”

”Ocher will believe you destroyed the bridge.”

”Let him. It'll occupy his six brain cells with something new.”

”But he'll file a complaint against you. On the Emperor's road, that's a crime against the Crown.” She was genuinely worried.

”Well, in that case I have a lot of witnesses to say 1 didn't do it. Including you, my lovely abductee.” He grinned rea.s.suringly.

She laughed. Ottaviano laughed with her, but not long nor hard. It was a bad start to the day.

The summer had been dry, after a dry spring and a warm, snowless winter. Prospero had left the weather to itself, for in the preceding seven years he had done much weather-working, and it was tasking to constrain the natural patterns for very long. He had other things to occupy him, drilling and instructing his army of men, taking them step by step through formations and maneuvers. The drought was no great inconvenience; the river still ran, and his folk got from it their drinking water without difficulty. Nonetheless, he used the occasion to have teams of men sink wells, pounding through the soil and rock, in certain auspicious locations where he divined that water would be easily reached. They toiled unwillingly until their first bubbling water-strike, which delighted and heartened them so that 48.'Etizabetfi 'Wittey Sorcerer and a (jentteman 49.Prospero was hard-put to dissuade them from driving holes all through the forest and the cleared fields.

The fields by the riverside (where a few years before trees had reached over the water) were brown early in the season; crops must be irrigated by hand and with quickly-built pumps, and Prospero released men from laboring on the first stone building of the town to aid the women and children in watering the sapling orchards and the fields of grain.

Seven years had his people dwelt by the riverside; seven years of changes had they wreaked under his command, and seven years of change had worked on them. There were long-houses now, communal places where the folk lived together; in the beginning Prospero had tried to segregate the s.e.xes and had given it up, though men and women labored at different tasks in different places. He was amused by his own dismay at the easy manners of his people, for they coupled without inhibition when the notion struck, and that was often. Though some were pair-bonded from the beginning, the idea of matrimony made little headway here. They had not even a word for it in their rippling, lilting, Spring-born tongue. They all appeared to be mostly free of jealousy, which was well, because few were inclined to fidelity and none to chast.i.ty.

The first child was born less than a year after Prospero's night of Spring-fed sorcery, and so many others hard after that Prospero could not recall which of the many it had been, nor who the mother was. The place had teemed with smug, big-bellied women and then with squalling infants. This occasioned delay in Prospero's plans; he ruefully adjusted them to accommodate the nurturing of a sizable population of children. The men who were not paired to women were largely uninterested in the infants, although many of them were visibly annoyed by rebuffs from the preoccupied mothers.

Prospero had not expected a sudden crop of brats, but indeed that was the natural consequence of the vigorous amorous activity. After the initial explosion, births came in a more even scattering, most frequently in autumn. None of the children wanted for sustenance or attention, and the score or so whose mothers had died in childbed and soon after-for with births came the first deaths-were adopted and nursed by foster-mothers, without need of Prospero urging it.

In the third year, Prospero became aware that many of the women had formed into close, clan-like a.s.sociations, based around the farms, and that some of these groups mostly spurned the company of men-though not all, for the women bore children still. The men lived in a military structure Prospero had shaped, gradually imposing more and more organization on them as he taught them the use of weapons and supervised them in the heavy clearing work of preparing land for the women to farm. Yet some of the women's clan-groups included men who worked the fields and gathered wild food with the women, and Prospero gave up trying to comprehend the s.h.i.+fts among the settling population.

He cared not, Prospero decided, what their s.e.xual customs were, so long as they did his bidding in more important things; their nature was still half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l, and so he glanced over the grappling in furrow and forest without censure. As long as they avoided violence and none were forced, as long as they accepted his rule and served his plan, they might a.s.sociate in whatever ways pleased them. Prospero's only qualm was for what Freia's reaction might be when she returned and was exposed to the cooing and rutting. Surely such unbridled and flagrant activity would stir her own covert desires. Though he had no ready plans for her marriage, he would not have her make her own. She was his own blood, after all, of n.o.ble and particular genesis, not to be squandered on the first lubber who might catch her eye and tumble her. Therefore he spoke of her to them as different and other, an object of reverence as Prospero himself was, aloof and untouchable; no playfellow, but a mistress, a lady.

For himself, his attention was focused on other matters- although he sought without success for the woman who had been his last-made creature. She had gone wandering, as some of the folk had; she returned briefly in the third year, SO -=>.

in the arms of another woman, and Prospero shrugged to himself wryly and pushed her from his thoughts. A voluptuous blonde called Dazhur, his first-shaped female creature, made no secret of her interest in bedding Prospero; his courteous refusal piqued her vanity and heated her desire, and she displayed herself invitingly to him whenever possible. But Prospero was cautious of such entanglements, and Dazhur's l.u.s.t came to naught though she sought year in and year out to slake it.

Seven years had pa.s.sed, and Freia had not returned from her hunt. On full-moon nights Prospero Summoned visions of her in a golden basin full of the Spring's water, to watch her as she cooked her meat, paddled in dark waters, or slept curled beneath sky or bough, all unaware of his spying. Healthy and solitary, she roamed through mountains and in thick, saturated tropical forest: far north of the Spring. She would return. Prospero could wait. She had bolted before when their opinions diverged and, drawn back to him by her own nature, she had always returned, had always reconciled herself to his will.

Freia was seldom iri his thoughts, but occasionally, as today, everything brought her to mind and he wished she would return; seven years was as long as her longest journey before this, surely long enough. The weather was oppressive. Her abandoned gardens withered in the drought. He had neglected to have them weeded or watered: the folk did not come to the isle unless he bid them.

Prospero walked through crumpled plants and flaccid leaves in a searing red dawn, uneasily sniffing a hot, dry wind. It was a wild wind, none of his calling, and it smelled of cinders and smoke. There had been great numbers of wood-elk about for the past few days, other beasts too, and bloated corpses had floated by in the river. Prospero suspected fire, struck by one of the hail-throwing thunderstorms in the mountains and borne through the wood on the wind, high Elements allied against the lowest.

The wind sucked the moisture from his lips and eyes. He wiped them. Perhaps he should raise a storm of his own to Sorcerer and a (jentkman 51.batter the wild ones down, to counter them before they reached here. Such raisings had frightened Freia, and he recalled with melancholy fondness how she would rush to his arms for comfort when he returned to the cave from the Spring's hilltop, having stirred a fine storm to blast and blow. Then he must hold her, but he would stand in the open doorway, mentally critiquing the storm's thunders and lightnings whilst soothing her terror.

Prospero reached the stones at the upstream end of the island and sat on one. Someday he would have a proper boathouse here, with proper boats, not this clutter of crude canoes and coracles; proper civilized gardens, too, green and groomed, not the wilderness resulting from Freia's desire to plant some of everything and her inability to keep it all tidy. Coo! shade he'd have, and fountains; grapes and roses on arbors, and soft lawns.

Prospero mopped his neck; he wore only a thin s.h.i.+rt on his back, but he was sweltering. The water was busy this morning. As he sat, a quartet of the native spotted otters came out of the water nearby, looked insouciantly at him, and poured their long bodies into some hiding-place among the stones. Logs had piled up at this end of the island and were snagging flotsam in their limbs and roots. Prospero saw a tree-trunk, its roots wrenched from the earth, floating silently past in the hot morning light, and another, and dark shapes he knew to be animal corpses. Yes, there must have been fire, far upriver, and now the river bore the debris to the sea.

”Papa,” he heard, a panting voice at the water's edge where the otters had been, accompanied by a splash and a slosh.

”Freia?” Prospero jumped to his feet, some part of him unsurprised.

”Papa,” she said again. Freia it was, dripping wet and sagging onto the ground. She wore only her scant hunting tunic, no leggings, not even an arm-brace, and she was barefoot; and as Prospero made his way to her he saw that she was bone-tired and somewhat singed. There were blis- 52.'Elizabeth ters on her left arm and a long angry burn on her left thigh, and her legs were laced with scratches. Her hair was burnt unevenly on the left and back.

”How now, Puss,” was all he said, and he bent over her, half-lifted her to her feet. She nodded, wobble-kneed, and let him lead her from the water. He patted her shoulder. ”Wert caught in the fire?”

”I couldn't get away. I ran and ran. It's horrible. Papa, Papa, it's ali flames, all the wood, and the animals run, and the poor little Satyrs, and the birds cannot fly fast enough - ” She coughed, shaking her head. ”The river is full of death,” she said. ”I thought I could float with the logs, but the flames falling, and the animals - ” Freia sat down again, on a long rock this time, s.h.i.+vering in spite of the heat.

Prospero sat beside her. ” Tis a dry season,” he said, ”and some lightning-strike in the mountains hath sparked the blaze. It will devour until it meeteth its own flank, and there die, self-poisoned.” An infelicitous metaphor: he thought of Panurgus, of the flash of fire and blood as he was wounded, dismissed the thought.

”Please, Papa, please, 'make it stop?”

” Twere best I not tamper overmuch with it,” Prospero said. ”There's a natural rhythm to these things best left unchallenged. Such fires are not unknown; they've come beforetimes, though thou hast never seen them, and they serve to scour the forest of deadwood and choking brush, making place for new growth. I'll not hinder it, Freia. I know it pains thee, but I'll not stop the fire 'less it threatens us here.”

She stared at him. ”Why won't you stop it? How can you let it burn all the forest away?” and she coughed again.

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