The Hero And The Crown

 

TOR HAD WANTED to marry her as part of the celebration of his kingship, and have her acknowledged queen as he was acknowledged king, but Aerin insisted they wait.

"One might almost think you didn't want to be queen," Tor said glumly.

"One might almost be right," replied Aerin. "But it's more that I don't want anybody to have the opportunity to say that I slipped in the back door. That I was assuming everyone would be so preoccupied with you that no one would notice I was being declared official queen by the way."

"Mm," said Tor.

"It was Arlbeth who told me that once royalty commits itself it can't go back into hiding," Aerin said.

Tor nodded his head slowly. "Very well. But I think you're doing your people an injustice."

"Ha," said Aerin.

But Tor was right, although not for the reasons he would have preferred; it had little to do with her fighting in the last battle, and almost nothing to do with the Crown. By the time the three months' betrothal that Aerin demanded was up and the marriage was performed, thirteen weeks after what had come mysteriously to be called Maur's battle, most Damarians (all but a few hidebound courtiers) seemed to have more or less forgotten that they had ever held the last king's daughter in so lively an antipathy; and affectionately they called her Fire-hair, and Dragon-Killer. They even seemed to enjoy the prospect of Aerin as their new queen; certainly the wedding was a livelier meeting than Tor's crowning had been, and the crowd cheered when Tor declared Aerin his queen, which startled them both. But many things that had happened before the day Maur's head had been dragged into the City had faded from people's memory, and at the wedding they said comfortably to one another that it was true that the first sol's mother had been a commoner from some outlandish village in the North, and that Aerin-sol had always been an odd sort of child; but she had grown into her rank quite satisfactorily, and she had certainly helped turn the Northern tide with that funny foreign sword of hers and those wild animals that were so fond of her (there are worse spells than those that make wild animals tame).

Besides, while Tor had remained obstinately single, all the other sols of his generation had gotten themselves married off; and Aerin was, whatever her faults, a first sol.

And when Aerin understood at last what had happened, she laughed. So Maur did me a good turn after all, she thought. That's the finest victory of all.

It was called Maur's battle perhaps because it had been fought on what was now known as Maur's plain. While much else had been forgotten, or at least become a little blurry, of the events before the seasons the City had borne with Maur's head held in the king's castle like an enormous jewel, everyone well remembered that at the end of the battle the stretch of earth at the foot of the king's way was a destroyed forest, and that bodies of people and beasts, and of half-beasts and half-people, lay everywhere, with broken bits of war gear mixed with the broken landscape. And they remembered Maur's skull rushing down on them - flaming, they said, like a living dragon, its jaws open to spew fire - and spinning past them in the darkness.

And in the morning, when they awoke, instead of low rolling hills despoiled by war, they found a plain, flat as a table, stretching from the burnt-out fire where the survivors had slept huddled together to the feet of Vasth and Kar and the pass where Aerin had paused and seen what awaited her and gathered herself and her army together. It was a desert plain, and it remained a desert; nothing grew there, nor would grow, but a little low scrub. Desert creatures came to live there, and a new sort of hunting dog was bred to run by sight, and the City dwellers came to love the wild sweet song of the britti, the desert lark. They took to holding horse races on the plain after the first few years of staring at it nervously had worn off, and the uncanniness was lost in familiarity; and then various games of skill were pursued there, mock battles and sword-play, and it became a much better practice ground than the old cramped space behind the castle and the royal stables at the peak of the City. It was a handy spot for the drilling of cavalry, and Tor paid much attention to the rebuilding of his cavalry, for he, like his wife, if perhaps no one else in the City, remembered very clearly what had happened in the months preceding Maur's battle. The Laprun trials therefore grew in size and importance, which was all to the good; what was less good was the growing popularity of the churakak, the duel of honor, fought by those a little too proud of their ability to fight.

The first year's harvest after the battle was a scanty one, but Arlbeth had grain set aside for just such an occurrence, and as there were fewer Damarians to be fed than when he had built his warehouses, the winter was no harder than a winter after a good harvest, although everyone was thoroughly sick of porridge by the time spring came.

But spring did come, and people stirred themselves, and many of them felt quite like their old selves, and went out to dig in the ground or refurbish their shops or look to their stock and their holdings with good heart. Those who had remained in the City over the winter, to nurse their wounds and regain their strength, went home to their villages and began the long process of rebuilding, and most of the rebuilding went on cheerfully. Tor and Aerin sent aid where they could, and some of the new villages were handsomer (and better drained) than the old ones had been.

It was during the first winter that Aerin, wandering vaguely one day in the center-court garden of the castle, felt that there was something at the gate she had entered by. She frowned at it till she remembered what it was: the great oil green surka vine was gone. She stared round at all the gates to be sure she had not mistaken it, but it was not there; and she went in search of Tor, and asked what had happened to it.

Tor shook his head. "There isn't any surka any more - anywhere. One day - a fortnight, maybe, before Maur's battle, they all went. I saw this one; the smoke came from nowhere, but when it cleared, the surka was a charred skeleton. It was such a weird sort of thing, and everyone was preoccupied with weird sorts of things that always turned out to be unpleasant, that the remains were rooted out and buried.

"Arlbeth said it was a sign too clear to be ignored, even if we didn't know what it meant, and so we carried no standard during the final days of the siege of the City." He frowned. "The surka seems to be something I want to remind people of; we're probably better off without it. No more Merths." He smiled at her.

"And no more Aerins," said Aerin feelingly.

Some who had lost too much stayed on in the City when spring came; Katah had lost her husband, and she and her six children asked to stay on in the king's castle, where she had grown up. Tor and Aerin were glad to say yes, for the castle was a little too empty; not only Perlith was gone, but Thurny and Gebeth and Orin, and many others. And Aerin found the reliable and practical Katah invaluable in sorting out which petitions and complaints to bend her royal judgment on, and which to ignore. "I have found my calling," said poor Katah, who missed her husband: "I was meant to be a royal secretary."

"You were meant to be the power behind the throne," said Aerin. "I shall cover you with a velvet drape and you can whisper to me what to tell the people as they come." Katah laughed, as she was supposed to.

Katah was not the only one that the passing of time did not heal. Galanna's hair had gone grey during that first winter, and was white by the time the second spring after the battle came. She was quieter, and slower, and while she looked with no love upon Damar's new queen, she caused, and wished to cause, no more trouble.

As Katah was a hard and honest worker, Aerin could contrive to steal a little time to chase dragons - whose numbers had greatly fallen off since the Northerners' defeat - and to teach a suddenly considerable number of interested young men and women what she knew about dragon-hunting. Among other things, she found out what she had known all along, that she had a superior horse. No horse liked wearing kenet, and most of them were much nastier about it than Talat had ever been; and then there was the fact that Aerin had no idea what to tell her students to do with their reins while they were trying to pin a dragon with their spears. Somehow or other Aerin's dragon-hunting lessons began to spill into horsemanship lessons, and she taught her pupils first about riding without stirrups, and later without reins. By trial and error she trained a few young horses to go as Talat had gone for her - to prove to herself as much as to anyone else that it could be done with other horses - and she learned to have an eye for the horses who could learn what she wished to teach them, and those who could not. Soon the queen of Damar was rumored to be an uncanny judge of horseflesh, and her opinion on this colt or that mare was frequently sought.

Hornmar had taken a bad wound in his side, and he was older than the king he had served, and Arlbeth's death weakened him almost as much as his own hurt. He had to retire from his post as the head of the sofor; but he lived in the castle still, and at his request he was permitted to have the care of his old friend Talat. Aerin was forced to be grateful for this, for she had too much work, now, to be able to attend to Talat as frequently as she had been accustomed to do, and was yet jealous of who tended him in her place. She would not have wished to leave him to any ordinary groom, however skilled and worthy.

Talat himself was as vain and cheerful as ever after a few weeks' holiday, and had as bottomless a hunger for mik-bars, but he was beginning to feel his age at last, and Aerin or Hornmar had to chase him around with a stick to make him exercise his weak leg on the days Aerin did not have time to ride. But the leg was strong enough that when a few mares were cautiously introduced to him in his pasture, desirable results were born eleven months later. His foals were all bright-eyed and bouncy from their first breath, and Hornmar and Aerin were very careful about who had the handling of them; and all of them grew up to go bridleless like their sire, and many of them had his courage.

The royal kennels were expanded, and the yerig and folstza who chose to stay near their lady were given their own quarters, although the door to the back stairs that led to Aerin's old rooms was always left open. It was observed, though the thotor kennel-masters were at first too timid to do any crossbreeding deliberately, that some of the royal bitches gave birth to taller and hairier puppies than any official royal bloodlines could explain; and it was from these crosses that the long-legged desert dogs eventually came. And after a few generations of kittens grew up and had more kittens, the folstza began to accept more human masters than Aerin, and to hunt on command, at least mostly. Even tamed cats have minds of their own.

Having her own quarters did not stop the yerig queen, now Kala, from bearing her first City litter in the middle of Aerin and Tor's bed. "Oh, gods," said Aerin, who found her, or them: five excellent puppies, and a very proud Kala. "Teka will flay you alive." Teka, so far from flaying anyone alive, adopted one of the puppies, named it Ursha after a small pink wild flower, and it grew up to be a great hulking beast, bigger than its mother, with a singularly wicked look, and a disposition as gentle as a featherbed.

Tor had been king less than three years when he was first called the Just, for the even-handedness of his wisdom; a wisdom, they said, that was never cold, and that sat strangely in the eyes of a man not yet forty. Aerin knew where some of that old wisdom came from, for she had first seen it the afternoon that he had told her she should be queen, had asked her to marry him; the same afternoon that he had not asked her about Luthe. She hoped that she might never be careless of Tor's feelings: Tor, who had been her best friend all her life, and sometimes her only friend. Perhaps the memory of the reek of Maur's despair made her a little forgetful too, for she began to think of the wide silver lake as a place she had visited only in dreams, and of the tall blond man she had once known as a creature of those dreams; for the not quite mortal part of her did sleep, that she might love her country and her husband.