The Mountain Queen

Chapter Four: The Hills

We made for the first farmstead we came to, tucked away behind a hillock, but easily identified by the piney scent of its cookfire.  At the door, we met a cragged, bearded face, cloaked in suspicion—until the sight of Grandfather's token eased its fears and bathed it in the warmth of memory.  We were ushered swiftly into a dark little hovel with a domed ceiling, all built of earth and clay, where the smoke from the fire hung so thickly that our eyes smarted and our lungs burned.  The farmer's wife was as weatherworn as he; were it not for his beard, she might have been his double.  Both were stooped creatures, bent as though permanently ducking through a doorway, and wearing the cares and trials of a hundred winters in the lines of their cheeks and brows.  They spoke few words, but a glow of welcome radiated from their faces, and the stew that was set before us was thick and nourishing.  I began to like the hills.

When supper was over, and we all sat around the small fire with mugs of tea, it came into my mind to inquire about Father's father, and how his token had come to mean so much in these lonesome hills.  The farmer and his wife exchanged glances, and mumbled a few words about Grandfather's many travels, and what a fine man he had been.  At first I thought their memories had failed them—which is perhaps what they wished me to believe.  But as their vague, half-stifled answers were repeated again and again, I began to understand that they were guarding a secret.  Whatever Grandfather had traveled for, it was not a thing to be bandied about in conversation.  The loyalty of these hard old souls was unshakeable.  If Grandfather had been dead a thousand years, it would have made no difference.  They would never tell what they knew.

We slept that night in the glow of the smoking fire, huddled up on the earthen floor with the farmer's ancient dog for company.  In spite of the hard floor, I slept well and gratefully.  The world was suddenly large and miraculous, and for the first time I was a part of it.

In this fashion we made our way through the half-wild hill country—fed and welcomed wherever we showed the token, and met with silence or evasion whenever we tried to learn its meaning.  I began to feel that Grandfather was a kind of living myth to these people—a myth more vibrant and urgent than any moldy story of long-vanished gods.

Nor did our many hosts give any sign of curiosity on their own part.  Even Cressock, this ragged stranger with graceful limbs and piercing eyes, traveling with a girl and two youths from the Gloaming Valley up north toward the Chasm, seemed to be accepted by the farmers as a matter of course.  No one asked where he had come from, or what his business was.  In time, I came to see that this was the way of the hill people.  Their incurious habits were a matter of politeness, a matter of pride—and, I suspected, a matter of survival.  These were not the fertile lands along the riverbank where my brothers and I had been reared.  No one made a home in this hard place who had not at some time fled from something worse.

And I found myself imitating the hillfolk's taciturn habits.  I burned to know what Cressock's world was like—the mountain castle, and the family of godbloods, and the murderous rivalry that had sprung up with the news of the woman who was one-eighth god.  But I could not bring these questions to my lips.  Somehow, I didn't dare to.  The lives of the Drymanders seemed cloaked in a sacredness that I feared I would defile with a single incautious word.

  It was Cressock, at last, who spared me the asking.  An unexpectedly warm night had fallen on our latest farmstead, and the two of us had slipped out into it after dinner to gaze at the stars.  I lay on my back on a little knoll that rose up from the hillside; Cressock was seated nearby, on a smooth round rock, his legs folded under him, his eyes devouring the light-spattered sky.

After a long and pleasant silence, his soft, musing voice drifted over to me in the dark.

"I live in a castle with guards and servants.  Ancient walls coated in tapestries.  Rich meals, and sumptuous bedchambers, and all the riches and comforts that power can yield."