The Starthorn Tree Page 3

  The bell-crier’s house was one of the tall, white houses lining the high end of the square. Apple trees in pots on either side of the steps sweetened the air with the scent of their blossom.

  Just as Pedrin and Durrik were climbing the steps to the front door, it swung open. A man stepped out, a large brass bell in one hand. He was well-dressed in a long green coat with brass buttons and a tricorne hat, with his breeches fastened at the knee with little black rosettes. He was a stout man, with grey hair very neatly secured at the back of his head with a black ribbon. Just now his kindly face looked troubled, a roll of parchment tightly clenched in his other hand.

  He saw the boys and gave a little gesture of his hand, so that they stepped back without a word. The stout man raised his bell and began to ring it vigorously. It had a beautiful tone, very deep and strong, that rang out across the town square, drowning the murmur of voices and the clink of ceramic mugs. Everyone stopped and turned to look up at the bell-crier. By the look on his face, Durrik’s father was not announcing the birth of a new baby.

  ‘The Regent of Estelliana declares the work on his stargazing tower goes too slowly,’ the bell-crier announced in his sonorous voice. Although he did not shout, his words rang in every corner of the town square. ‘The people of Levanna do not work with willing hands or hearts. They dawdle and drag their heels. They sabotage the building, so that glass panes fall and shatter. They mutter against the necessary raising of taxes to pay for the glass-blowing. Many have been seen picking up stones and weighing them in their hands, as if they wish to cast these stones against this tower, this marvel of science and engineering, that is the only hope of saving the young Count of Estelliana’s life.

  ‘Do you not understand the starkin do not raise this tower to their glory? In twenty-two days it’ll be the summer solstice, when the power of the daystar is at its most potent. Lord Zavion, our illustrious and esteemed Regent, shall seek to harness the daystar’s power, to break the curse that holds Zygmunt ziv Estaria, the Count of Estelliana, in this unnatural sleep, closer to death than life. In twenty-two days the Regent’s tower must be complete.

  ‘To ensure this is so, the Regent commands, in the name of his young kin the Count of Estelliana, that all males above the age of fifteen must present themselves to the Hall of Mirrors in the morning, to labour for the next twenty-one days and nights in the raising of the tower so that all shall be ready for the summer solstice. Any defiance shall be punished by a fine of five gold crowns, to be paid immediately.’

  The bell-crier’s proclamation had caused a slow, sullen muttering that swelled in volume until it almost drowned out his deep voice. At the last words this sullen mutter burst into a roar of outrage.

  ‘Five crowns! Who among us has five crowns?’

  ‘The old count would never have taken us from the fields at sowing time!’

  ‘How are we to pay the taxes if we can’t set the crops a-growing?’

  ‘What are we t’eat come winter?’

  ‘I have orders to fulfil,’ the coppersmith shouted. ‘I shall lose me customers if I don’t meet their orders!’

  ‘Me boy is sick,’ one woman cried, wringing her hands. ‘The Regent doesn’t expect him to work when he’s a-shaking with fever, surely?’

  ‘The only property I own is the shirt on me back, and he’s welcome t’it, ragged and worn as it is!’

  At the foot of the steps Pedrin and Durrik glanced at each other in dismay. Both had recently celebrated their fifteenth birthdays.

  ‘There goes our summer,’ Pedrin said grimly. ‘Twenty-one days! How is Ma to manage without me?’

  The town-crier had not answered any of the crowd’s shouts, carefully holding the clapper of his bell with his big white hand and climbing back up the steps. He said in a firm yet gentle voice, ‘Get along home, Pedrin. The town’s no place for a boy tonight. There’ll be trouble now, I warrant you. Come, Durrik. ’Tis not unknown for an angry crowd to take out their displeasure on the bell-crier. We’ll keep our doors locked and windows shuttered tonight.’

  ‘Do we really have to go work on the tower?’ Pedrin said indignantly. ‘I’m the only man in me family, you know that. Who’s to tend the goats or draw the water or gather the firewood if I’m off working for the blasted Regent?’

  ‘I don’t know, my boy,’ the bell-crier replied. ‘I shall do my best for us all in the morning but the proclamation from the castle was mighty clear. I fear you shall just have to do your best, like all else here tonight.’

  With those words he guided his son through the door and closed it smartly behind him. Pedrin heard the key turn in the lock and the bolts being slammed home, then the shutters on one side were crisply pulled closed and locked. He turned to go, aware of the angry murmuring of the crowd behind him, like a hive of bees ready to swarm.

  Just then he heard a whisper from the window yet to be shuttered. Durrik was leaning out. ‘Tomorrow! I’ll see you tomorrow at the Hall of Mirrors!’

  Then his face disappeared abruptly. The bell-crier pulled the shutters closed and locked them. Only then did Pedrin realise he still had all five fish. He raised a hand involuntarily, and then dropped it, turning and running down into the milling crowd, the basket clasped close to his chest.

  THREE

  The next morning saw a long procession winding its way up the hill to the castle. There were two hundred or more hearthkin men and boys, from all the towns and villages up and down the river as well as from Levanna-On-The-Lake. Escorting them were the tall figures of starkin soldiers, all clad in silver armour, their fusilliers thrust out threateningly.

  Overhead flew a spearhead of great white birds, their heads and breasts protected with beaten silver, ornate saddles upon their backs. Seated astride the sisikas were starkin lords carrying long-range fusilliers, with glass tanks of high-octane fuel strapped to their backs. The air was filled with the sound of the birds’ harsh screeching and the beating of their immense wings. As they swooped low over the road, their shadows darkening the sun, the hearthkin all ducked involuntarily. The sisikas shrieked with mocking laughter.

  Most of the hearthkin were pale and red-eyed, having sat up half the night drinking apple-ale and declaring that nothing could make them go up to the castle in the morn. Their bravado had drained away with the darkness, for the dawn had brought a battalion of hard-eyed soldiers in helmets and breast-plates, their fusilliers at the ready. It had been many a long year since a fusillier was last fired in Estelliana, but the hearthkin had long memories. Even the youngest child knew bolts of blue lightning zigzagged from the little black mouths of fusilliers, sizzling you where you stood till nothing was left but a smoking pile of ashes. It gave them an almost pleasurable shiver of horror to hear the tales of the first great battle with the starkin, when six hundred men and women were incinerated mid-charge, leaving behind a wasteland of dust and cinders.

  It may have been a long time since the starkin had felt a need to fire their fusilliers in Estelliana, but all knew that it was only three years since the king had ordered his battalions to fire upon a rabble of hearthkin attempting to march upon Zarissa. One hundred and sixty-four men, women and children had been incinerated that day, their remains drifting away in the wind. None of the men and boys of Estelliana doubted that Lord Zavion would be any less ruthless than his cousin, the king. Even the youngest of the boys was grim-faced and silent.

  Johan walked at the head of the procession, carrying the largest of his bells, the one with the deepest and most authoritative voice. Pedrin and Durrik followed close behind, the crippled boy finding it difficult to manage his crutch on the worn cobblestones. As they walked into the shadow of the castle walls, Pedrin glanced back down the hill, to where the wives and mothers of Levanna-On-The-Lake stood white and rigid with anxiety. He could see the tall, spare figure of his mother, Mina pressed close to her side, and raised a hand. She waved back wildly and Mina waved too, jumping up and down, one hand twined in her mother’s apron. Then he was pushed forw
ard roughly by one of the soldiers, passing under the sharp, downcurving spikes of the portcullis.

  The hearthkin all filed in through a long, cold, stone tunnel and into the castle courtyard within. Ahead soared the tall towers and pointed roofs of the castle, with the lower buildings extending on either side like embracing arms. On one side was the kitchen wing and servants’ quarters, on the other the stables, kennels and guards’ quarters.

  ‘Jumping Jimjinny, look at this place!’ Pedrin cried.

  ‘’Tis beautiful,’ Durrik said in a stifled voice.

  Pedrin looked at him quickly. There was an expression of wistful longing on his face, overshadowed by something darker, a bitter envy or unhappiness. Pedrin had never seen Durrik look so sombre and it made him uneasy.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be the one having to clean it,’ he said pragmatically. Pedrin thought of how hard his mother laboured to keep the two small rooms of their cottage spick and span, with two children tracking in river mud and goat hairs all day. ‘It’d be mighty fine for hide-and-seek, though! You could be seeking for a week and still not find me! I bet it has secret passages.’

  ‘And dungeons,’ Durrik said with a little shudder.

  In the centre of the courtyard was a wide pool, encircled by a stone ledge. A great tree raised a puzzle of black thorny branches against the blue arc of sky above. The water at its foot reflected the intricate pattern of its thorns, bare now of any leaf or flower. The tree looked as if it was forged of iron, not wood, shaped like some cruel weapon of war. The bareness of its branches was uncanny, when all the trees out in the countryside were bright and green with the first leaves of summer.

  Pedrin and Durrik glanced at the starthorn tree uneasily and quickly looked away. It was said the starkin had brought the seeds of the tree with them from their own world and the tree still bloomed and fruited in response to the seasons of that world. In summer it was as bare as if feeling the first frosts of winter. In autumn its thorns were hung with great clusters of sweet-scented, snowy-white blossom. In winter great globes of golden fruit hung heavy on its leafy branches, even though the pond at its foot was white with ice and snow. This fruit was called the star-apple for, when sliced in half, its core showed the perfect shape of a six-pointed star. It was said one bite of the star-apple made you feel more alive than ever before. Three bites would keep you dancing all night. If you ate a whole star-apple, you would dance until you died.

  The procession of hearthkin passed by the tree and climbed the wide sweep of stairs into the Hall of Mirrors. At once Pedrin blinked and rubbed his eyes with one hand. He had never before been within the great hall of the castle and, although he had heard it described many times, he was still not prepared for its splendour.

  ‘Jumping Jimjinny!’ he cried.

  The hall was very long and very high. Instead of a ceiling it had a great dome of cut crystal that caught the light and refracted it around the room in arcs of rainbows. Huge windows lined the room, and the walls in between were covered with mirrors. Everywhere Pedrin looked he saw himself reflected back, many times over.

  Pedrin had never looked in a mirror before. The hearthkin could not afford such idle luxuries. He gazed and gazed, and felt a little prickle of embarrassment at the back of his neck. He had never before realised what a grubby, shabby figure he made in his rough clothes and bare feet, with his shaggy mop of brown hair. He tugged at his tunic self-consciously and then realised that all the men around him were smoothing down their hair, fingering their tangled beards, dusting off their clothes. He made a face at Durrik, who was staring at his own thin, twisted form unhappily, and reluctantly his friend smiled back. It occurred to Pedrin that even Durrik looked plain and shabby in the shining world of the mirror, and he was a boy often teased for his girlish good looks.

  ‘Don’t think much of mirrors,’ he whispered. ‘Who wants to know what they look like anyways?’

  There were no seats so the hearthkin gathered together in a great crowd below the dais, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Few had ever been in the Hall of Mirrors before, such privileges being reserved for the reeve, the constable, the guild-masters and the more affluent of the merchants. It was very disconcerting to see your face everywhere you looked.

  A silvery flourish of trumpets made them all look up. A herald held open the great doors at the end of the hall and a procession of starkin slowly glided up the aisle. Grandly dressed in pale shimmering silks that swept the floor behind them, the starkin were all very tall and slender, with high-boned aristocratic faces. The men wore their golden hair in long smooth curls and were clean-shaven, so that they looked like young boys. Their robes were as ornately decorated as the women’s, with long sleeves all embroidered with silver thread and diamonds. Only the women’s headdresses marked them differently. Most were very high and conical, made of silver filigree with long trailing veils of gauze. Their cornsilk hair had been coiled and plaited within to form a high cone that gleamed within the scrolls and arabesques of their silver cornets.

  The starkin moved as slowly and gracefully as swans gliding across a lake. Their carriage was very tall and proud, their heads held high, their hands folded at their breasts. All had long nails painted in shimmering silver or violet or blue. The nails of a few were even longer than their fingers, and Pedrin knew these were the most noble. It was a sign of high birth and prestige to be able to grow your fingernails so long. It meant you never had to brush your own hair, button your own clothes, or cut up your own meals, let alone scrub a floor or labour in the fields.

  In the centre of the procession walked the dowager countess and her daughter, dressed all in dark wine-red. The colour was shocking amidst all that white and silver and amethyst. The dowager countess’s headdress was made of iron filigree, very black against the coils of pale golden hair. Her beautiful pale face was haggard with grief, her eyelids all swollen from weeping. Although her fingernails were so long they looked like ten slim rapiers, they were without colour and very white against the rich hue of her gown.

  Her daughter was a slim, pale-faced girl with downcast eyes. Although she would have been the same age as Pedrin and Durrik, she was much taller. Her hair was unbound, as befitted her age, and flowed down her back to the floor in smooth shining ripples of pale gold. She had the same high-boned beauty as her mother, though softened and rounded still with youth. Pedrin could not help staring at her as she passed by, and when the starkin were all seated on their glass and velvet chairs, his eyes again sought her out.

  ‘That’s Lady Ginerva, the dowager countess, there in the red,’ Johan whispered. ‘That’s the starkin’s colour of mourning, you know. And that’s the count’s young sister, Lady Lisandre.’

  ‘Which one’s the Regent?’ Durrik asked.

  His father nodded at the man seated on the dowager countess’s right. He was even taller and more handsome than the rest of the starkin, and was dressed in white silk embroidered all over with strange symbols in silver thread. On his right hand he wore a great spherical diamond which glittered with sharp rainbow fire. A smile lingered on his finely cut lips but his light blue eyes looked cold and disdainful.

  The herald stood at the front of the dais and Durrik’s father moved through the crowd to stand at the foot of the steps. Most of the hearthkin had only a rudimentary knowledge of the starkin’s elaborate, lilting language and it was the bell-crier’s job to translate for those who may not understand. Few of the starkin could speak the hearthkin’s language, of course.

  Although Pedrin was nothing but a goatherd and had never had anything to do with the castle or its noble inhabitants, he could understand the herald quite well, having badgered Durrik to teach him what he knew of Ziverian, the starkin’s language. Pedrin had a deep love of music and most of the most beautiful songs sung by the minstrels were written in Ziverian.

  The two boys had spent many a long, dark winter’s day with the bell-crier in his music-room, learning to play his beautiful, deep-bellied lute, his zither,
his clavichord, his flute and his sweet-voiced silver piccolo. Johan had once been a musician at the royal court in Zarissa, playing to the king himself and teaching music to the prince and princesses. Pedrin was fascinated and envious. He could not understand why Johan had left the glittering life of the Zarissan court to come all the way out to Estelliana, at the very back of beyond. As curious and tactless as one of his goats, Pedrin had of course asked why. Johan had just smiled rather sadly and replied in his quiet way, ‘It seemed best.’

  Johan had a wonderful, deep, strong voice and knew hundreds of songs, from sweet love laments to stirring war marches. He taught them all to Pedrin, who was tense and quivering with eagerness at this new world opening up before him. The hearthkin liked a jolly tune to dance to on feast-days, but otherwise were not much interested in music. Before meeting the bell-crier, Pedrin had only known that the heart-piercingly sweet song of the nightingale made him stand still, shivering, some unnamable yearning rising up till it threatened to engulf him. It made the hairs stand up on his arms, a tingle run up his spine, his jaw ache with tension. He tried his best to whistle its song, as he mimicked all the birds of the forest. Always his skill failed his intentions so that he was filled with frustration that made him glower and grunt and punch out at the other boys.

  All this rage dissipated once Johan began to teach him music. It was worth spending hours whittling bits of wood until he managed to make himself his own little flute. It was worth struggling with the difficult cadences of Ziverian to learn to sing the gorgeous, thrilling songs of the starkin.

  So, although Pedrin could only speak stumblingly and with a truly atrocious accent, he could understand most of what the herald proclaimed. Listening to first the herald and then the bell-crier, Pedrin was struck forcibly by Johan’s tact. Where the herald demanded, in the most arrogant and supercilious way possible, the bell-crier requested, with many soft words and expressions of regret.