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The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Patricia A. McKillip

For my parents, with thanks

ONE

The wizard Heald coupled with a poor woman once, in the king’s city of Mondor, and she bore a son with one green eye and one black eye. Heald, who had two eyes black as the black marshes of Fyrbolg, came and went like a wind out of the woman’s life, but the child Myk stayed in Mondor until he was fifteen. Big-shouldered and strong, he was apprenticed to a smith, and men who came to have their carts mended or horses shod were inclined to curse his slowness and his sullenness, until something would stir in him, sluggish as a marsh beast waking beneath murk. Then he would turn his head and look at them out of his black eye, and they would fall silent, shift away from him. There was a streak of wizardry in him, like the streak of fire in damp, smoldering wood. He spoke rarely to men with his brief, rough voice, but when he touched a horse, a hungry dog or a dove in a cage on market day, the fire would surface in his black eye, and his voice would run sweet as a daydreaming voice of the Slinoon River.

One day he left Mondor and went to Eld Mountain. Eld was the highest mountain in Eldwold, rising behind Mondor and casting its black shadow over the city at twilight when the sun slipped, lost, into its mists. From the fringe of the mists, shepherds or young boys hunting could see beyond Mondor, west to the flat Plain of Terbrec, land of the Sirle Lords, north to Fallow Field, where the third King of Eldwold’s ghost brooded still on his last battle, and where no living thing grew beneath his restless, silent steps. There, in the rich, dark forests of Eld Mountain, in the white silence, Myk began a collection of wondrous, legendary animals.

From the wild lake country of North Eldwold, he called to him the Black Swan of Tirlith, the great-winged, golden-eyed bird that had carried the third daughter of King Merroc on its back away from the stone tower where she was held captive. He sent the powerful, silent thread of his call into the deep, thick forests on the other side of Eld, where no man had ever gone and returned, and caught like a salmon the red-eyed, white-tusked Boar Cyrin, who could sing ballads like a harpist, and who knew the answers to all riddles save one. From the dark, silent heart of the Mountain itself, Myk brought Gyld, the green-winged dragon, whose mind, dreaming for centuries over the cold fire of gold, woke sleepily, pleasurably, to the sound of its name in the half-forgotten song Myk sent crooning into the darkness. Coaxing a handful of ancient jewels from the dragon, Myk built a house of white, polished stone among the tall pines, and a great garden for the animals enclosed within the ring of stone wall and iron-wrought gates. Into that house he took eventually a fountain girl with few words and no fear either of animals or their keeper. She was of poor family, with tangled hair and muscled arms, and she saw in Myk’s household things that others saw perhaps once in their lives in a line of old poetry or in a harpist’s tale.

She bore Myk a son with two black eyes who learned to stand silent as a dead tree while Myk called. Myk taught him to read the ancient ballads and legends in the books he collected, taught him to send the call of a half-forgotten name across the whole of Eldwold and the lands beyond, taught him to wait in silence, in patience for weeks, months or years until the moment when the shock of the call would flame in the strange, powerful, startled mind of the animal that owned the name. When Myk went out of himself forever, sitting silent in the moonlight, his son Ogam continued the collection.

Ogam coaxed out of the Southern Deserts behind Eld Mountain the Lyon Gules, who with a pelt the color of a king’s treasury had seduced many an imprudent man into unwanted adventure. He stole from the hearth of a witch beyond Eldwold the huge black Cat Moriah, whose knowledge of spells and secret charms had once been legendary in Eldwold. The blue-eyed Falcon Ter, who had torn to pieces the seven murderers of the wizard Aer, shot like a thunderbolt out of the blue sky onto Ogam’s shoulder. After a brief, furious struggle, blue eyes staring into black, the hot grip of talons loosened; the Falcon gave his name and yielded to Ogam’s great power.

With the crook of an ungentle smile inherited from Myk, Ogam called also to him the oldest daughter of the Lord Horst of Hilt as she rode one day too close to the Mountain. She was a frail, beautiful child-woman, frightened of the silence and the strange, gorgeous animals that reminded her of things on the old tapestry in her father’s house. She was afraid also of Ogam, with his sheathed, still power and his inscrutable eyes. She bore him one child, and died. The child, unaccountably, was a girl. Ogam recovered from his surprise eventually and named her Sybel.

She grew tall and strong in the Mountain wildness, with her mother’s slender bones and ivory hair and her father’s black, fearless eyes. She cared for the animals, tended the garden, and learned early how to hold a restless animal against its will, how to send an ancient name out of the silence of her mind, to probe into hidden, forgotten places. Ogam, proud of her quickness, built a room for her with a great dome of crystal, thin as glass, hard as stone, where she could sit beneath the colors of the night world and call in peace. He died when she was sixteen, leaving her alone with the beautiful white house, a vast library of heavy, iron-bound books, a collection of animals beyond all dreaming, and the power to hold them.

She read one night not long afterward, in one of his oldest books, of a great white bird with wings that glided like snowy pennants unfurled in the wind, a bird that had carried the only Queen of Eldwold on its back in days long before. She spoke its name softly to herself: Liralen; and, seated on the floor beneath the dome, with the book still open in her lap, she sent a first call forth into the vast Eldwold night for the bird whose name no one had spoken for centuries. The call was broken abruptly by someone shouting at her locked gates.

She woke the Lyon, asleep in the garden, with a touch of her mind, and sent it padding to the gates to cast a golden, warning eye at the intruder. But the shouting continued, urgent, incoherent. She sighed, exasperated, and sent the Falcon Ter instructions to lift the intrudes and drop him off the top of Eld Mountain. The shouting ceased suddenly, a moment later, but a baby’s thin, uncomforted voice wailed into the silence, startling her. She rose finally, walked through the marble hall in her bare feet, out into the garden where the animals stirred restlessly in the darkness about her. She reached the gates, of thin iron bars and gold joints, and looked out.

An armed man stood with a baby in his arms and Ter Falcon on his shoulder. The man was silent, frozen motionless under the play of Ter’s grip; the child in his mailed arms cried, oblivious. Sybel’s eyes moved from the still, half-shadowed face to the Falcon’s eyes.

I told you, she said privately, to drop him off the top of Eld Mountain.

The blue, unwavering eyes looked down into hers. You are young, Ter said, but you are without doubt powerful, and I will obey you if you tell me a second time. But I will tell you first, having known men for countless years, that if you begin killing them, one day they will grow frightened, come in great numbers, tear down your house and loose your animals. So the Master Ogam told us many times.

Sybel’s bare foot tapped a moment on the earth. She moved her eyes to the man’s face and said,

“Who are you? Why are you shouting at my gates?”

“Lady,” the man said carefully, for the ruffled feathers of Ter’s wing brushed his face, “are you the daughter of Laran, daughter of Horst, Lord of Hilt?”

“Laran was my mother,” Sybel said, shifting from one foot to another impatiently. “Who are you?”

“Coren of Sirle. My brother had a child by your aunt—your mother’s youngest sister.” He stopped with a sudden click of breath between his teeth, and Sybel waved a hand at the Falcon.