A Song for Arbonne

In the meantime, the celebrated southern spring came to Arbonne, with many-coloured wildflowers appearing almost overnight in the meadows and the high slopes about Castle Baude. The snows were reported to be receding from the mountain pass to Arimonda. As the poet’s verses grew in heat and passion with the quickening season, so did the throbbing voices of the joglars who had begun arriving in Baude as well, knowing a good thing when they saw one. More than one of the corans and castle servants had private cause to thank the troubadour and the singers and the erotic atmosphere they’d induced for amorous interludes in kitchen and meadow and hall.

Unfortunately for him, Evrard’s own cause was not aided by the all-too-evident reality that he was short, yellow-toothed and prematurely losing what thin hair he’d once had. Still, according to the great tradition, troubadours were supposed to be loved by the high ladies of culture and grace for their art and their fierce dedication, not for their height or hair.

Trouble was, Soresina de Baude didn’t seem to care much for the great tradition, or that part of it, at any rate. She liked her men to look like the warlike corans of the great days past. Indeed, she’d made a point of telling Blaise as much shortly after he’d arrived, looking artlessly up at his tall, muscled form and then glancing down and away in transparently feigned shyness. Blaise, somewhat used to this sort of thing, had been neither surprised nor tempted. He was being paid by Mallin and had shaped his own code in such matters.

What Evrard of Lussan shaped, later that spring, was something else. In brief, the little troubadour, having downed a considerable quantity of unmixed Miraval red wine with the corans one night, finally elected to translate his fiercely impassioned verses into modestly passionate action.

Inflamed by a joglar’s fervid rendition of one of his own ballads earlier that evening, the troubadour had left his sleeping place late at night and stumbled along dark and silent corridors and stairways to Soresina’s door, which happened, unfortunately for all concerned, to be unlocked: Mallin, young, healthy, tall enough, and rather urgently seeking heirs, had but lately left his wife for his own chamber nearby.

The intoxicated, verse-enraptured poet had entered the pitch-black chamber, felt his way over to the canopied bed and planted a lover’s kiss upon the lips of the satiated, sleeping woman he was busily making famous throughout Arbonne that spring.

There were a good many schools of thought evolving, in the aftermath of the event, as to what Soresina should have done. Ariane de Carenzu, queen of the Court of Love since the countess, her aunt, had passed the title to her, had proclaimed a session to rule on the matter later in the year. In the meantime, every man and woman Blaise encountered in the castle or outside it seemed to have an opinion on what he himself regarded as an entirely predictable, utterly trivial event.

What Soresina had done—quite naturally, or very unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective—was scream. Roused from post-coital dreaming, then realizing who was in her chamber, she cursed her stunned, besotted admirer, in a voice heard by half the castle, as a rude, ill-bred peasant who deserved a public whipping.

What Evrard of Lussan, wounded to the core of his all-too-sensitive soul, had done in turn was leave Baude Castle before sunrise, proceed directly to the nearest sanctuary of the goddess, receive benediction and consecration and, making his way to the coast, cross by boat to Rian’s Island in a retreat from the harsh, ungrateful society of women and castles that could so abuse the unstinting generosity of his art.

Safely on the island, away from the terrible storm and strife of the world beyond, he had begun soothing and diverting himself by composing hymns to the goddess, along with some undeniably witty satires on Soresina de Baude. Not by name, of course—rules were rules—but since the name he used now was the same one he’d coined to exalt the long-limbed elegance of her form and the dark fire of her eyes, no one in Arbonne was left even slightly in ignorance on this particular point. The students in Tavernel, Blaise had been given to understand by a seriously distressed Mallin, had taken up the songs and were amplifying them, adding verses of their own.

After a number of weeks of this, En Mallin de Baude—his wife an increasing object of amusement, his castle on the verge of becoming a byword for rustic bad manners, his conciliatory letters to Evrard on the island pointedly unanswered—elected to do something drastic.

For his own part, Blaise would probably have arranged to kill the poet. Mallin de Baude was a lord, if a minor one; Evrard of Lussan was no more than a travelling parasite in Blaise’s view. A feud, even a dispute between two such men, would have been unthinkable in Gorhaut. But this, of course, was woman-ruled Arbonne, where the troubadours had a power in society they could never have dreamt of anywhere else.

In the event, what Mallin did was order Blaise and his corans to cross to the goddess’s Island secretly by night and bring Evrard back. The baron, of course, couldn’t lead the expedition himself, though Blaise had enough respect for the man to believe he would have preferred to. Mallin would need some distance from the escapade, though, in the event that they failed. He had to be able to say his corans had conceived the scheme without his knowledge or consent, and then hasten to a temple of Rian and make appropriate gestures of contrition. It was all made particularly neat, Blaise had thought, by the fact that the leader of the corans of Baude that season just happened to be a hired mercenary from Gorhaut who didn’t, of course, worship Rian at all and might be expected to perpetrate such a sacrilege. Blaise didn’t mention this thought to anyone. It didn’t even really bother him; this was simply the way of things at a certain level of the world’s affairs, and he had more than a little familiarity with it.

Soresina, languishing and aghast at what an instinctive scream and outburst had wrought, had been energetically primed by a succession of visiting neighbouring ladies, rather more experienced in the ways of poets, as to how to deal with Evrard on his return.

If Blaise and the corans got to the island. If they found him. If he chose to return. If the sea monsters of Luth’s dark dreams chose not to rise up above their skiff, towering and dreadful in the pale moonlight, and drag them all down to death in the watery blackness.

‘Towards those pines,’ Hirnan, who was navigating, muttered from the front of the skiff. He glanced back over his broad shoulder at the looming shadow of the island. ‘And for the love of Corannos, keep silent now!’

‘Luth,’ Blaise added softly, ‘if I hear a sound from you, any kind of sound from now until we’re back on the mainland, I will slit your throat and slide you overboard.’

Luth gulped, quite noisily. Blaise elected not to kill him for that. How such a man had ever been consecrated a warrior in the Order of Corannos he could not understand. The man could handle a bow well enough, and a sword and a horse, but surely, even here in Arbonne, they had to know that there was more to being a coran of the god than those skills. Were there no standards any more? No pride left in a corrupt and degenerate world?

He looked back over his shoulder again. They had rowed very close now. The pines were around towards the western side of the island, away from the sandy northern beaches and the glowing lights beyond that marked the three temples and the residences. Hirnan, who had been here before—he hadn’t said why and Blaise hadn’t pushed him—had said there was no chance of landing undetected on any of those northern beaches. The servants of Rian guarded their island; in the past they had had cause to fear more than a single skiff of corans searching for a poet.

They were going to have to try to get ashore in a harder place, where the forest pines gave way, not to sand, but to rocky cliffs and boulders in the sea. They had rope with them, and each of the corans, even Luth, knew how to handle himself on a rock face. Castle Baude was perched high in the wild country of the south-west. Men who served there would not be unfamiliar with cliffs or crags.

The sea was another matter. Hirnan and Blaise himself were the only ones entirely at ease on the water, and on Hirnan’s shoulders now rested the burden of getting them close enough, amid sharp and shadowed rocks, to make it possible to come ashore. Privately, Blaise had told him that if the best they could find was a sheer cliff face, they didn’t really have a chance. Not at night and with the need for absolute silence and with a poet to bring back down. In addition to which—

‘Couch oars!’ he hissed. In the same instant Maffour, beside him, snarled the same words. Eight rowers swiftly lifted their oars from the water and sat rigidly still, the skiff gliding silently towards the island. The sound came again, nearer now. Motionless, bent low for concealment, Blaise strained his eyes into the night, searching by moonlight for the boat he’d heard.

Then it was there, a single dark sail against the starry sky, skimming through the waves around the island. In the skiff eight men held their breath. They were inside the circling path of the sailboat, though, very near—dangerously near, in fact—to the rocky coast. Someone looking towards them in this faint light would almost certainly see nothing against the dark bulk of the island; and the guards, Blaise knew, would probably be looking outward in any case. He relaxed his fingers on his oar as the small boat continued past them, cutting across the wind, a beautiful thing in the moonlight.

‘The goddess be praised!’ Luth murmured with reflexive piety from up front beside Hirnan.

Cursing himself for not having sat the man next to him, Blaise flung a furious look over his shoulder in time to see Hirnan’s hand shoot out and grip his benchmate fiercely on the arm in a belated effort to silence him.

‘Ouch!’ Luth said. Not quietly. At sea. In a very calm night.

Blaise closed his eyes. There was a moment of straining silence, then:

‘Who is there! In Rian’s name, declare yourselves!’ A grim male voice rang out from the sailboat.

His brain racing furiously, Blaise looked over and saw the other boat already beginning to swing about. They had two choices now. They could retreat, rowing frantically, and hope to lose the guards in the darkness of the sea. No one knew who they were; they might not be seen or identified. But the mainland was a long way off, and eight men rowing had little chance of outracing sails if they were pursued. And this one sailboat could have others with it very soon, Blaise knew.

He hated retreating anyhow.

‘Only fisherfolk, your grace,’ he called out in a wavering, high-pitched voice. ‘Only my brothers and myself trawling for lampfish. We’re terrible sorry to have wandered out so far.’

He lowered his voice to a snarled whisper. ‘Get three of the ropes over the side, quickly! Hold them as if you were fishing. Hirnan, you and I are going into the water.’ Even as he spoke he was removing his boots and sword. Hirnan, without a question asked, began doing the same.

‘It is interdicted to come so near the goddess’s Island without leave. You are subject to Rian’s curse for what you have done.’ The deep voice across the water was hostile and assured. The boat was still turning; it would begin bearing down upon them in a moment.

‘We are not to kill,’ Maffour whispered anxiously from beside Blaise.

‘I know that,’ Blaise hissed back. ‘Do what I told you. Offer them a tithe. Hirnan, let’s go.’

With the last words he swung his feet across the low railing and slipped silently over the side of the skiff. On the other side, balancing his motion exactly, Hirnan did the same. The water was shockingly cold. It was night, and early yet in the spring.

‘Truly, your graces, as my brother says, we had no intention to transgress.’ Maffour’s apologetic voice carried across the darkness. ‘We will gladly offer a tithe of our catch for the holy servants of blessed Rian.’

There was a silence from the other boat, very much as if someone were weighing a sudden temptation. That, Blaise had not expected. To his right he spotted Hirnan’s dark head bobbing towards him. He motioned, and the two of them began swimming quietly towards the other boat.

‘Are you fools?’ The second voice from the sailboat was a woman’s, and cold as the ocean waters. ‘Do you think you can make redress for trespass in the waters of the goddess by offering a load of fish?’

Blaise grimaced. The priestesses of the goddess were always harsher than the priests; even a short time in Arbonne had taught him that much. He heard the sound of flint being struck, and a moment later, cursing silently, saw a lamp lit in the sailboat. A glow of orange light fell upon the water but offered only slight illumination. Praying that the six corans in the skiff would have the sense to keep their heads down and faces hidden, he gestured for Hirnan to move closer. Then, treading silently in the sea, he put his mouth to the other man’s ear and told him what they had to try to do.

HOLDING THE LAMP HIGH while Maritte guided their craft, Roche the priest peered ahead into the night. Even with the flame, even by the light of the waxing pale moon, it was difficult to see clearly. Certainly the skiff they were approaching was one such as the fisherfolk of the shore used, and he could make out the lines of the trawling nets over the side, but there was still something odd about this encounter. For one thing, there seemed to be too many men in the skiff. He counted at least five. Where were they going to put their catch with so many men on board? Roche had grown up by the sea; he knew more than a little about trawling for lampfish. He also loved—more than a little—the taste of the succulent, hard-to-find delicacy, which is why he’d been shamefully tempted by the offered tithe. Maritte, mountain-born, had no such weaknesses to tempt her. Sometimes he wondered if Maritte had any weaknesses at all. He would not be particularly unhappy when their shared tour of duties ended next week, though he couldn’t claim to regret the three obligatory nights in bed together. He wondered if she had conceived by him, what a child born of the two of them would be like.

It really did seem to be a fishing boat. Manned by too many men most likely because they were afraid, venturing so near the island. It happened more often than it should, Roche knew. The deep waters around Rian’s Island were a known ground for lampfish. A pity, he sometimes thought—aware that this was perilously near to heresy—that all fish and fauna on or about the island were sacred to the goddess in her incarnation as Huntress, and so not to be pursued in any way by mortal man or woman.

One really couldn’t entirely blame the fisherfolk of Arbonne for occasionally yielding to the lure of that rare and delicate taste and once in a while venturing perhaps a little nearer the island than they ought. He wondered if he dared turn to Maritte and offer that thought, in the spirit of compassionate Rian. He forebore to do so. He could guess what she would say, mountain-born, hard as mountain rock. Though not so much so in the dark, mind you, surprisingly softened by passion and its aftermath. The three nights had been worth it, he decided, whatever she’d have said now to his suggestion.

What Maritte did in fact say in that moment, her voice suddenly harsh, was: ‘Roche, these are not fisherfolk. Those are only ropes, not nets! We must—’

That was all, lamentably, that Roche heard. Even as he leaned quickly forward to peer more closely at the skiff, Roche of the Island felt himself pulled bodily out of their small boat, the lantern flying from his hand to douse itself hissing in the sea.

He tried to cry out, but he hit the water with a smack that knocked the wind from his lungs. Then, as he desperately sucked for air, he went under an advancing wave, swallowed a mouthful of salt sea water and began retching and coughing. There was a hand holding him from behind in a grip like a blacksmith’s. Roche coughed and gasped and coughed, and finally cleared his lungs of water.

He drew one normal breath and then, as if that had been a patiently awaited signal, received a blow from the haft of a knife on the side of his head that rendered him oblivious to the icy chill of the water or the beauty of moonlight on the sea. He did have an instant to realize, just before all went black, that he hadn’t heard a sound from Maritte.

BLAISE WAS BRIEFLY AFRAID, as he manoeuvred the unconscious priest back into the sailboat with Hirnan’s help, that the other man, anxious not to err, might have killed the woman with his blow. After he had clambered with some difficulty into the boat he reassured himself. She would have a lump like a corfe egg on her temple for a few days, but Hirnan had done well. He spared a moment to grip the other man briefly on the shoulder in approbation; such things mattered to the men one led. He had some experience of that, too—on both sides of the equation.

The sailboat was neat and trim and well equipped, which meant plenty of rope. There were also blankets against the night chill and an amount of food that might have been surprising had the priest not been so plump. He stripped the unconscious man of his sodden shirt, then swaddled him in one of the blankets. They bound and gagged both the man and the woman, though not so tightly as to cripple them, and then steered the boat towards their own skiff.

‘Maffour,’ he said, keeping his voice low, ‘take charge there. Follow us in. We’re going up to find a landing place. Luth, if you prefer, you can kill yourself now before I get to you. It might be more pleasant.’ With some satisfaction he heard Luth moan in distress. The man believed him. Beside Blaise in the sailboat Hirnan grunted with a sour, chilled amusement. With a degree of surprise Blaise recognized within himself the once-familiar sensation of sharing competence and respect with another man on a task of some danger.

Danger, yes, rather more evidently now, given what they had just done to two of Rian’s anointed. But tonight’s was still a quest of sheerest stupidity—as to that Blaise’s opinion was not about to change simply because they had dealt neatly with their first obstacle. Shivering and wet, rubbing his arms in an effort to generate necessary warmth, he realized, though, almost against his will, that he had enjoyed the moments just past.

And, as so often seemed to happen, the surmounting of a crisis seemed to incline chance or fate or Corannos the god—one or all of them—to show favour in the next stage of a difficult enterprise. Hirnan grunted again a few minutes later, this time with a note of satisfaction, and a second afterwards Blaise saw why. Gliding westward, as close to shore as he dared, Hirnan had brought them abreast of a small inlet among the rocks. Blaise saw trees above, their tops silvered by the high moon, and a gently sloping plateau beneath them giving way to a short cliff down to the sea. An almost perfect place for a landing, given that the beaches were barred to them. The inlet would offer shelter and concealment for the two boats and the climb to the plateau was unlikely to be difficult for men used to the steepness of the goat runs above the olive trees near Baude.

Hirnan guided the two craft carefully into the cove. In the boat he quickly lowered sail and set about dropping anchor. In the skiff, Maffour, without a word spoken, looped one of the ropes about his shoulders and, leaping to the nearest of the rocks, adroitly scrambled up the short face of the cliff to the plateau. He tied the rope to one of the pines above and dropped it over for the rest of them. Two good men here, Blaise thought, realizing that he really hadn’t given much thought at all, in the time he’d been here, to taking the measure of the corans of Mallin de Baude. He acknowledged inwardly that Mallin had been right in at least one thing: the truest test of a man’s mettle was a task where the danger was real.

Hirnan finished with the anchor and turned to Blaise with an arched eyebrow of inquiry. Blaise glanced down at the two tied-up clerics in the boat. Both were unconscious and would likely be so for awhile. ‘We’ll leave them here,’ he said. ‘They’ll be all right.’

The men in the skiff were already proceeding up Maffour’s rope towards the plateau. They watched the last one climb, then Hirnan stepped carefully from the boat to one slippery boulder and then another before reaching the rope and smoothly pulling himself up the rock face. Behind him, Blaise did the same. The salt of the wet rope stung his palms.

On the plateau he set his feet squarely on solid ground for the first time since leaving the mainland. The sensation was odd, as if there were a tremor in the earth beneath him. They were standing on Rian’s Island, and illicitly consecrated, Blaise thought unexpectedly. None of the others seemed to have reacted, though, and a moment later he grinned with wry amusement at himself: he was from Gorhaut, in the god’s name—they didn’t even worship Rian in the north. This was hardly a useful time to be yielding to the superstitions that had afflicted Luth all night.

Young Giresse, without a word, handed him his boots and sword, and Thiers did the same for Hirnan. Blaise leaned against a tree to pull on the boots and buckled his sword belt again, thinking quickly. When he looked up he saw seven tense men looking at him, waiting for orders. Deliberately he smiled.

‘Luth, I have decided to let you live to trouble the world a little longer yet,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll guard the two boats here with Vanne. If those two down below show signs of rousing I want them rendered unconscious again. But conceal your faces if you have to go down to do it. If we are very lucky none of us will have been recognized when this is over. Do you understand?’

They seemed to. Luth looked almost comically relieved at the assignment. Vanne’s expression by moonlight showed a struggle to conceal disappointment—a good sign actually, if he was sorry to be missing the next stage of their journey. But Blaise was not about to leave Luth alone now with any task, however simple. He turned away from them.

‘Hirnan, I take it you can find the guest quarters once we reach the temple complex?’ The red-headed coran nodded briefly. ‘You lead then,’ Blaise said. ‘I’m behind you, Maffour’s rear guard. We go in single file. No words unless vital. Touch each other for warnings rather than speak. Understood?’

‘One question: how do we find Evrard when we get there?’ Maffour asked quietly. ‘There must be a great many dwellings in the complex.’

‘There are,’ Hirnan murmured.

Blaise had been privately worrying about the same thing. He shrugged though; his men weren’t to know what was concerning him. ‘I’m assuming he’ll have one of the larger ones. We’ll head for those.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Then Maffour can walk in and wake him with a kiss.’ There was a ripple of laughter. Behind him, Luth giggled loudly but controlled himself before Blaise could turn.

Blaise let the tension-easing amusement subside. He looked at Hirnan. Without another word spoken the coran turned and stepped into the forest of the holy Island of the goddess. Blaise followed and heard the others fall into line behind. He didn’t look back.

It was very dark in the woods. There were sounds all around them: wind in the leaves, the chitter of small animals, the quick, unsettling flap of wings alighting from a branch above. The pines and the oak trees blocked the moon except in the occasional place where a slant of pale silver fell across their path, strangely beautiful, intensifying the blackness as soon as they had moved on. Blaise checked his blade in its scabbard. It would be close and awkward ground here if anything large chose to attack. He wondered if any of the big hunting cats made their home on Rian’s Island; he had a feeling they did, which was not reassuring.

Hirnan, threading his way around roots and under branches, finally struck a rough east-west track in the wood and Blaise drew a calmer breath again. He was surprisingly conscious of where they were. Not that he had any real superstition in him, but there was something about this forest that, even more than the thought of tawncat or boar, would make him very happy when they left. In fact, that same truth applied to all of this island, he realized: the sooner they left the more pleased he would be. Just then a bird of some sort—owl or corfe almost certainly—landed with a slight, rushing sound of wings in air in the tree directly above him. Luth, Blaise thought, would have soiled his clothing. Refusing to look up, he moved on, following Hirnan’s shadowy form eastward towards the temples of the goddess worshipped here in the south as a huntress and a mother, as a lover and a bride, and as a dark and final gatherer and layer-out, by moonlight, of the dead. If we’re luckier than we deserve, Blaise of Gorhaut thought grimly, more unsettled than he really wanted to acknowledge, even to himself, maybe he’ll be outside singing at the moon.