Claudia J Edwards - [Forest King 02] Read online

  CLAUDIA J. EDWARDS

  POPULAR LIBRARY

  An Imprint of Warner Books, Inc.

  A Warner Communications Company

  Copyright © 1987 by Claudia J. Edwards All rights reserved.

  Popular Library®, the fanciful P design, and Questar® are registered trademarks of Warner Books, Inc.

  Cover design by Don Puckey Cover illustration by Kinuko Craft

  Popular Library books are published by Warner Books, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10103

  Q A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America First Printing: July, 1987 10 987654321

  Chapter 1

  An-Shai, hierarch of the Quadrate God, leaned on the railing of the balcony of the Bishop’s Palace and lusted with all his soul and being for the position and power of the man before him. The initiate Tsu-Linn was gazing peacefully out over the Vale of Misty Waters, a half-smile upon his lips. He did not have the appearance of a man to be envied; Bishop An-Shai, tall, elegant, with long, tapered fingers and fiery dark eyes was far more the picture of dread and power than the moon-faced little man quietly absorbing the beauty of the Vale.

  An-Shal had been filled with hope when he found out that one of the usually aloof initiates was coming to inspect his diocese. He had done well here and he knew it. His rise through the ranks of the priesthood had been meteoric. He had scrupulously adhered to the rules of dress, diet, and conduct appropriate to each level of attainment. Why, then, why was the summons to join the last and most exalted brotherhood denied him?

  “You’ve done well here, Bishop. The Vale is peaceful and productive, the peasants are docile, and the heresy that was spreading among the village priests when you came here has been eradicated.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The initiate turned back to the Vale, which lay spread before him like a delicate watercolor painting. “I think this Vale is the most beautiful spot in Godsland,” he said. “You are fortunate to have been allowed to stay here so long.”

  An-Shai just managed not to grind his teeth together in frustration. “Yes, indeed, sir.” It was true that the Vale was a lovely place, a misty green valley nestled among stark crags. The Hall of the Initiates was in a barren, forbidding place, so rumor said, where nothing could live and no color flourished. An-Shai longed to forsake the beauty for the harshness.

  “How many peasants and other laity are there in the Vale?”

  An-Shai told him. Keeping an exact and detailed census of his diocese was one of the most important functions of a bishop, just as keeping precise parish registers was the responsibility of the village priests. Only the clergy was literate; the written word was one of the most powerful tools the servants of the Quadrate God had for maintaining their absolute power over the populace of Godsland.

  “H’mm. And what percentage are productive workers?” “Sixteen percent work in the cloth industry. Twenty-nine percent are farmers.”

  “Forty-five percent productive—you must have a high percentage of aged and children.”

  “Yes, sir. Life is easier here than in some parts of Godsland. People live longer and more infants survive.”

  “You aren’t sending the food exports out of the Vale that you used to. Has productivity declined?”

  “No, sir, but it takes more to feed our own people. I have found that individual productivity increases when the workers are allowed a better diet. Cloth exports have increased.”

  Tsu-Linn ignored the cloth. “That food is needed. I will arrange for a raid of slavers after young girls. That will reduce the number of breeders. And I think... yes... night stalkers prey upon the young, the old and the weak. Is there a colony of them nearby?”

  “Yes, sir, in the hills,” said An-Shai, unenthusiastically. He disliked letting the cannibalistic semihumans in among the people he thought of as his own. They created a desolation of fear and suffering.

  “Good. They should cut down your excess population in just the right areas. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t like to let the night stalkers in, sir. They cause so much economic chaos.”

  “Would you rather I send a coven of Fire Priests?”

  An-Shai suppressed a shudder. The priests of the Fire God were worse than the night stalkers. They encouraged corruption and brutality, and their rites of human sacrifice and uncontrolled licentiousness left a stain of evil that sometimes lasted for generations.

  “Well, what then?” inquired the initiate, with some irritation.

  An-Shai hesitated. Was it this that kept the elusive summons from arriving, that he was too soft with his people? Would thinning them mercilessly impress the initiate? Yet death and suffering were distasteful to An-Shai. Once, long ago, he had joined the priesthood mainly because it was the only route to advancement for a village boy, but partly because it had seemed to the child he was then that die priesthood was a way to relieve human suffering. That, of course, was before he understood that it was actually to the benefit of the peasants to have their numbers managed and to weed out the unfit breeders. “Let me try to improve our agricultural production and to thin a little by less drastic methods first, sir. I can improve agricultural techniques and extend the land under cultivation.”

  Once again the initiate turned to gaze out over the Vale. Perched as it was upon an outjutting shoulder of the eastern cliff, the Bishop’s Palace afforded a magnificent view, although of course the northern and southern reaches were invisible in the distance and the western edge of the Vale was only a thin blue line. “There certainly seems to be plenty of water and many stretches of unused land. Very well, see what you can do. I’ll send the slave raiders along.” The initiate turned and peered keenly at An-Shai. “Tell me, Bishop, have you managed to overcome your crisis of faith?” he asked abruptly.

  “Yes, sir,” An-Shai replied promptly, striving to the utmost to put every last bit of sincerity he could muster into the reply, without seeming to be too eager. “I have come through the experience cleansed of doubt and rededicated to the Fourfold God more strongly than ever before.” How had

  the old busybody found out about that? An-Shai wondered.

  And then it occurred to him that perhaps the old busybody had not known about it and had been fishing for a response.

  His eyes flickered; the initiate must have noticed. Even a hierarch was trained to see such physical reflections of the internal mental climate. An-Shai cursed to himself.

  “You’re an intelligent man, Bishop An-Shai. Surely the thought has occurred to you that if the animistic spirits we teach the peasants about are a fraud, and if God the Father that we teach the upper classes about is a construct, that perhaps the Fourfold God is equally false and just a tool that we initiates use to control the hierarchs?”

  By a sheer effort of will, An-Shai kept himself from squirming. The thought had occurred to him, often and with increasing conviction. What answer would satisfy the initiate, who was looking at him with the intensity of a cat about to pounce on a bird? “I prefer to think of the spirits and God the Father as a simpler form of truth, more suited to the primitive and unschooled minds of the laity and the village priests. If I am ever summoned to join the initiates, and I find that the Fourfold God is a simpler truth than the reality,

  I’m prepared to accept that. For now, I am content in the strength lent me by my simple faith in the power of the |

  Fourfold God.” There, he thought, that ought to either satisfy you or at least confuse you enough to get by.

  “Well put, Bishop,” Tsu-Linn said, but there was no real approbation in his tone.

  An-Shai spe
nt the night in his private chapel, praying— trying to pray—before the four-branched tree that was the visible symbol of the Fourfold God. “Please, Unseen One, let the summons come,” he repeated a thousand times that night. “Should I be harsher to my people? Would that please your initiates?” But no answer came, either to supplication or question. Not for the first time, An-Shai wondered in his despair if his prayers were heard. And not for the first time, he struggled to banish the heretical thoughts from his mind.

  The next morning, having seen the initiate off, An-Shai ordered his chariot hitched. His driver whipped up the onagers that drew the chariot. “North,” An-Shai told him tersely. He intended to look at the fields and see what might

  be improved as he traveled. He found himself wondering, though, as he stared at the onagers’ mousy backsides, if he had agreed to the night stalkers and the Fire Priests, if he might not have received the summons. The hard part about attaining elevation to initiate was that no one in the lower ranks had any idea what the requirements for admission were. The summons arrived or it didn’t, and no pattern or reason was apparent.

  It was the season for preparing the fields and gardens for planting. An-Shai halted in the fields which surrounded Bishopstown, the nearest of the fourteen villages of the Vale to his palace. He walked through the fields and among the workers, causing considerable disruption of the work. The village priest of Bishopstown was not far behind his bishop, panting, since he was not entitled to a chariot.

  “Put your workers back to work, Father Neh-tu. I want to see what they’re doing.”

  After the deference he had had to show Tsu-Linn, the eagerness these laymen and the humble priest showed to please him was a draft of fresh air, refreshing and invigorating. An-Sh&i watched as the peasants picked up their spades and forks and began to prepare the earth for planting. Clod by clod they turned over the rich dark soil, crumbling it up and mixing it with rotted goat droppings. They followed the long furrows made by the plow pulled by two patient and elderly donkeys, but progress was slow. An-Shai watched for an hour, and in that time only a few yards of soil were made ready for seed.

  “What these people need is a bigger plow, one that covers more area and breaks the clod up better,” said An-Shai suddenly.

  Neh-tu jumped. “The donkeys couldn’t pull a larger plow, Your Grace.”

  “I can see that. They also need larger and stronger draft animals.” An-Shai returned to his chariot, much to the relief of the peasants and the worried priest.

  In the afternoon he returned to his palace and went to his library, a pleasant, shaded room where he spent much of his time. After pulling out several of the scroll-books from the cubbyholes on the wall, he went to his desk. The germ of an

  idea was beginning to take form in his mind, but he needed to refresh his memory on a few points before making a decision.

  The scrolls he had taken down were the journals of a bishop of the Vale of Misty Waters from nearly a century ago. An-Shai liked to read, and he had plenty of time on his hands. He had read all the journals of his predecessors from the library for nearly a thousand years back, until the bark paper was so brittle with age that opening the scroll would cause it to disintegrate. And even some of these he had caused to be carefully flattened and glued upon a backing of the fine soft cloth for which the Vale was famous throughout Godsland.

  But of all the journals he had read, this one was the most interesting. That long-dead bishop had had a way with words, and apparently had enjoyed writing in his journals; far more than the usual facts and reports was included. Especially vivid were the anecdotes of unusual happenings that had occurred during the sixty years the man had served as Bishop of the Vale. He had died in office—An-Shai shook off that thought and opened the scroll.

  There it was, the watercolor that had stuck in his memory. An-Shai wondered if the man had been a gifted artist as well as a writer of rare talent, for the scrolls he had filled during his life were lavishly and vividly illustrated. There before him was a painting of a man, dressed in strange and ragged clothing, fair in coloring where all the people Al-Shai had ever seen were dark. But the man himself, singular though he might be, was not what the bishop wanted to look at. The man was holding three horses.

  An-Shai knew what horses were; the troops of the military arm of the hierarchy used horses to pull the war chariots, because they were faster and more biddable than either onagers or donkeys. They were too rare and expensive for anyone else to own, and they were really no larger than a big onager, certainly too small to be ridden as was sometimes done with donkeys. They were dun creatures with a blackish stripe down their spines and short, upstanding manes.

  But these horses! They were truly enormous! The reddish one’s back was as tall as the man’s shoulder. It was saddled

  and bridled. In the painting, it nuzzled the hand of the man. An-Shai wished the long-gone bishop had seen fit to paint, or have painted, the man mounted upon his strange steed. One of the other horses was obviously a young one, gangly and long-legged, though it was nearly as tall as the reddish horse. But the third one, that was amazing! Its back was higher than the heads of the men around it. It was a shining black color, which the artist had cleverly highlighted in pale blue. Its huge head towered over the people around it. Its legs were like trees, its buttocks like hills. It wore a docile expression, and seemed to incline its ear toward the man who held its halter.

  An-Shai turned to the text, reading the slightly archaic syllabic symbols again. “The man came, he said, from a continent to the east, to which he longed to return, so that he stayed in the Vale for only a few days, whilst recovering from the clawing he had gotten from a tiger. He said that in the land he came from there were many of the giant horses, if I understood him rightly, for his speech was barbaric and strangely accented. He had given the one he rode a name as if it were a National being, a word that he said meant ‘friend’ in the language of his own land. He said that he had crossed from the Eastern Continent by ship, far to the north, and was now intending to travel down the coast, hoping that the land would curve around to the east and join with his home continent. I did not tell him that I thought such was not possible, for I was glad to have him gone. He was not a follower of either the spirits nor God the Father and denied the priests and myself any right to guide his life as is proper. I feared that his example would infect the peasants.”

  There was no more. An-Shai wished that the bishop had questioned the man a little more closely about his origins, although he thought he knew where the man must have been from. He took up a second scroll, this one new and fresh, its syllabary the modem, gracefully accented kind that An-Shai himself wrote so well. This was “Accounts of Explorations of the Eastern Seas,” copied that year from an original only a few months old at the time. In it was mentioned a great city placed upon the delta of a mighty river, the capital of a large kingdom. The hierarch who led the expedition had felt

  that there must be some commerce that could be opened with these people, and he had mentioned that they had a fast and convenient means of hauling freight over the land.

  That had to be the giant horses, An-Shai thought. Some peoples used oxen for the purpose, he knew, but they could by no means be described as fast. If he could only bring some of the giant horses here, as well as some of the people who knew how to raise and train them, not only could he solve the problem of increasing production, but he could improve the freighting of the Vale’s wonderful cloth, perhaps even ultimately the commerce of all of Godsland. Then, surely the summons would arrive at long last and he would be called to join the mysterious rulers of the land, those servants of the Quadrate God who had been initiated in the final and most secret rites. His plans spun themselves into daydreams of power and respect.

  While the hierarch An-Shai planned and dreamed in his lovely Vale, far away upon the eastern continent another dreamed. It has been said that a stranger is only a friend we haven’t met, and often it is true. But sometimes a stranger ca
n be a bitter enemy with whom we have not yet crossed daggers.

  Adelinda rested her chin on the forearms which were crossed on the rail of the arena and watched the young stallion kick his heels into the air with the exuberance of his youth and sex. Squealing, the bay wheeled on his quarters and reared, tossing his mane into the air.

  “You’ll never win with him,” her brother’s cool voice came from behind her.

  Adelinda, jerked abruptly out of her dream of trophies and admiring crowds, jumped. “I know,” she snapped. “The judges aren’t looking for anything but warmbloods. It’s not right.”

  Felim shrugged, careless of the hang of his elegant suit. “Right or not, no stallion of the old pure blood is even going to get a second glance. You might as well geld him and sell him for a pony. It isn’t any sort of a hobby for a lady anyway, breeding horses.”

  Adelinda turned away from the arena. Kinship was very

  clear in the sandy blond hair, the height, the gray eyes of brother and sister. “I thought you were glad when I took up a hobby.”

  “I was glad when you quit chasing—and catching— every male from here to the Black Mountain. I didn’t expect you to take up horse-breeding. Mother gets one of her attacks whenever it’s mentioned in her presence.”

  “She’ll get used to it.” Adelinda scrubbed her hands through her heavy hair. “I have to have something to do.” Felim snorted. “Great wealth does have its disadvantages, doesn’t it? If you were a woman of the farmer folk, you’d have seven or eight children to take care of.”

  Adelinda shuddered. “It’s boring enough being rich without being trapped. Anyway, horse-breeding is a fine old tradition in our family. If the first Mara hadn’t been a horse breeder and the first one to discover the greathorses, we wouldn’t be rich today.”

  “Yes, but then it was a necessary occupation. They had to get out and get all grubby. You don’t.” Felim wrinkled his nose. “You smell like a horse.”