Prince of Dogs

Page 108

Someone this man does not wish to speak of. Bored by the storm, irritated by the delay, since no ship can brave the seas in such conditions, he forces the slave to go on. “Do you have a family as, I think, is common among your kind?”
“No, master.” Here, finally, the slave lost his fear and let his hate take wing. “Your people murdered them, all of my kin: my wife, my sisters, even my poor innocent children.”
“Yet you serve me.” This human interests him. He has fire, perhaps even some stubborn strength of earth in him. The penned slaves who have lived among the RockChildren for many generations are more like dogs than people, but these new slaves to whom he has given sticks for weapons, better food, and decent clothing all come from the southern lands, and they think before they bark. That is why he believes they will be useful.
“I have no choice but to serve you,” replies the slave.
“You have the choice to die.”
The slave shakes his head. “You wear the Circle, but you do not know God. The Lady weaves and the Lord cuts the thread when our time has come. It is not for us to choose to die. Death comes to us by Their will.”
He examines the other slaves, who hunker down. One, at the limit of the canvas, shaking in the raw wind, turns and turns about until another slave, closer in, sees her plight and changes places with her, there at the edge of the shelter where the fire’s warmth scarcely reaches and the wind’s breath bites with killing cold. After a bit, yet a third slave takes the worst place. They help each other live. Is this the mercy that Alain Henrisson spoke of?
“Do you have a name?” he asks.
The slave hesitates. He does not want to offer his name. The other slaves stare, watching, surprised out of their pretense of mute stupidity. None of these, to whom he has given favor, are mute or stupid; he has studied his slaves carefully, just as he studies his livestock.
Still the slave does not speak.
He lifts a hand and unsheathes his claws.
“My name is Otto,” the slave says at last and reluctantly.
The others whisper and then silence themselves. He can smell their nervousness beneath the hot pitch smoke of the fire and the cold blast of the storm.
“Do you all have names?” he asks.
To his surprise, they do all have names. They speak them, one by one, a sound drawn out of each one as an arrow is pulled from a wound, carefully, with respect.
Are they all enchanters, then? No, he reminds himself, they are merely different. They are not RockChildren. They are weak, and yet, in their weakness, they survive by helping each other.
He sheathes his claws and shifts backward far enough that he can stand outside the shelter of the canvas awning roped down and angled to give them shelter at the cliff face. The canvas flaps and moans in the tearing wind.
He steps out from its sheltering angle into the full fury of the storm. The icy wind drives into his face, its touch like that of thousands upon thousands of knives flung from the wind’s hand into the wild air.
He listens as the wind pounds him and the ice stings his face. Dimly he can see the ships drawn up on a rocky beach, five ships now, since two new ships came with him out of Hakonin’s fleet. He sees his soldiers hunkered down, waiting out the storm with the patience of stone, and the dogs lying in jumbled heaps like fallen boulders.
He listens. It is said among his people that on this far western shore in the wintertide, when storm wracks sea and land, one can hear the keening of dragons—the FirstMothers—who in ancient days bred with the living spirits of earth and gave birth to his kind.
But all he hears is the wind.
PART THREE
THE ORNAMENT OF WISDOM
IX
THE WINTER SKY
1
ON bitterly clear nights he saw stars through certain sections of unpainted glass windows whose patterns themselves formed the shapes of stars, some with five and some with six points. On this night he watched the moon’s light ease across the gulf of darkness that was night in the cathedral, its glow a wavering dim light as illusive as a will-o’-the-wisp.
There came to him in an instant the searing memory of Count Hildegard and her retinue fleeing to the gates. It had all been a trick, an illusion. He had seen what he wanted to see, what Bloodheart wanted them all to see, the count and her ragged army in flight, when in fact Bloodheart had cast a glamour over his own Eika troops to make them appear human. In that way the Eika had gained entry into the city, and stalemate had turned to slaughter.
Only Liath had been clear-sighted enough to see through the illusion. If only he had such sight as that, he could make out a way to escape his captivity. But his gifts from his mother did not include sight beyond that common to humankind. And in any case the chains, and the dogs, were no illusion.