A Song for Arbonne

It was a bluff, Blaise thought fiercely. All the clergy did this sort of thing, even Corannos’s priests at home. All of them sought control with such arcane incantations.

‘That last, then,’ he dared say, even here, his voice rough. ‘Tell me that last.’

She did not hesitate. ‘Three months ago. Your brother’s wife, in the ancient home of your family. Late at night, your own bed. You left before dawn on the journey that has brought you to Rian.’

Blaise heard himself make a queer grunting sound as if he’d been punched. He could not help himself. He felt suddenly dizzy, blood rushing from his head as if in flight from the inexorable precision of what he had just heard.

‘Shall I go on?’ she asked, smiling thinly, the illuminating torch held up for him to see her. There was a new note in her voice, a kind of pitiless pleasure in her power. ‘You do not love her. You only hate your brother and your father. Your mother for dying. Yourself a little, perhaps. Would you hear more? Shall I tell your future for you now, like an old crone at the Autumn Fair?’

She was not old. She was tall and handsome, if no longer young, with grey in her dark hair. She knew things no one on earth should ever have known.

‘No!’ Blaise managed to say, forcing the word out. ‘Do not!’

He feared her laughter, her mocking voice, but she was silent and so was the forest around them. Even the torch was burning without sound, Blaise realized belatedly. The owl lifted its wings suddenly as if to fly, but only settled itself again on her shoulder.

‘Go then,’ Rian’s High Priestess said, not without gentleness. ‘We have allowed you the man for whom you came. Take him and go.’

He should turn now, Blaise knew. He should do exactly as she said. There were things at work here far beyond his understanding. But he had led seven men to this place.

‘Luth,’ he said sturdily, ‘what will be done to him?’

There was a strange, whistling sound; he realized it had come from the bird. The priestess said, ‘His heart will be cut out while he lives. It will be eaten.’ Her voice was flat, without intonation. ‘His body will be boiled in a vat of very great age and his skin peeled from his bones. His flesh will be cut into pieces and used for divination.’

Blaise felt his gorge rising, his skin crawled with horror and loathing. He took an involuntary step backwards. And heard her laughter. There was genuine amusement, something young, almost girlish in the sound.

‘Really,’ the priestess said, ‘I hadn’t thought I was so convincing as all that.’ She shook her head. ‘How savage do you think we are? You have taken a living man, we take a living man from you. He will be consecrated as a servant of Rian and set to serve the goddess on her Island in redress for his transgression and yours. This one is more a cleric than a coran in any case, I think you know as much. It is as I told you, Northerner: you have been permitted to do this. It would have been different, I assure you, had we chosen to make it so.’

Relief washing over him like a stream of water, Blaise fought a sudden, uncharacteristic impulse to kneel before this woman, this incarnated voice of a goddess his countrymen did not worship.

‘Thank you,’ he said, his voice rough and awkward in his own ears.

‘You are welcome,’ she said, almost casually. There was a pause, as if she were weighing something. The owl was motionless on her shoulder, unblinking, gazing at him. ‘Blaise, do not overvalue this power of ours. What has happened tonight.’

He blinked in astonishment. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You are standing at the very heart of our strength here on this island. We grow weaker and weaker the further we are from here, or from the other isle in the lake inland. Rian has no limits, but her mortal servants do. I do. And the goddess cannot be compelled, ever.’

She had built up a veil of power and magic and mystery, and now she was lifting it for him to see behind. And she had called him by his name.

‘Why?’ he asked, wonderingly. ‘Why do you tell me this?’

She smiled, almost ruefully. ‘Something in my own family, I suspect. My father was a man prone to take chances with trust. I seem to have inherited that from him. We might need each other, in a time not far from tonight.’

Struggling to absorb all of this, Blaise asked the only question he could think to ask. ‘Who was he? Your father?’

She shook her head, amused again. ‘Northerner, you seek to lead men in Arbonne. You will have to grow less bitter and more curious, I think, though it might be a long road for you. You should have known who was High Priestess on Rian’s Island before you came. I am Beatritz de Barbentain, my father was Guibor, count of Arbonne, my mother is Signe, who rules us now. I am the last of their children yet alive.’

Blaise was actually beginning to feel as if he might fall down, so buffeted did he feel by all of this. The skiff, he thought. The mainland. He urgently needed to be away from here.

‘Go,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts again. She raised her hand very slightly and the torch instantly went out. In the suddenly enveloping darkness, Blaise heard her say in her earlier voice—the sound of a priestess, speaking with power: ‘One last thing, Blaise of Gorhaut. A lesson for you to learn if you can: anger and hatred have limits that are reached too soon. Rian exacts a price for everything, but love is hers as well, in one of her oldest incarnations.’

Blaise turned then, stumbling over a root in the close night shadows. He left the wood, feeling moonlight as a blessing. He crossed the plateau and remembered, somehow, to untie Maffour’s rope and loop it about himself. Finding handholds in the rock face, he descended the cliff to the sea. The skiff was still there, waiting some distance away from shore. They saw him by the light of the high, pale moon. He was going to swim out, almost prepared to welcome the cold shock of the water again, but then he saw them rowing back for him and he waited. They came in to the edge of the rocks and Blaise stepped into the boat helped by Maffour and Giresse. He saw that Evrard of Lussan was still unconscious, slumped at the back of the skiff. Vanne was sitting up, though, at the front. He looked a little dazed. Blaise was not surprised.

‘They have kept Luth,’ he said briefly as they looked at him. ‘One man for one man. But they will do him no harm. I will tell you more on land, but in Corannos’s name, let’s go. I need a drink very badly, and we’ve a long way to row.’

He stepped over to his own bench and unwrapped the rope from his body. Maffour came and sat beside him again. They took their oars, and with no other words spoken, backed quietly out of the inlet Hirnan had found and turned the skiff towards land, towards Arbonne, rowing steadily in the calm, still night.

To the east, not long afterwards, well before they reached the shore, the waning crescent of the blue moon rose out of the sea to balance the silver one setting westward now, changing the light in the sky and on the water and on the rocks and trees of the island they were leaving behind.

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