Ivory Lyre by Shirley Rousseau Murphy Read Free Book Online Page A

alleys,
in the fields. Sardira wants speaking animals for the stadium
games. A rag woman told of it; she saw them setting the traps.”
    “If I could have warned her . . .”
Kiri said. “You must have heard it after I left.”
    Gram nodded. “You’d gone. I was filling the
water jugs.” Gram often heard useful bits of information among
their neighbors. She talked little and listened carefully, and
people told her a good deal.
    Kiri made a silent prayer for Elmmira. But
Elmmira was wary. She could smell a trap—she said it smelled like
Sardira’s soldiers. Kiri shivered all the same. Maybe she could
learn where the traps were set, in which alleys, if she soft-talked
one of the stable grooms.
    Maybe she could spring those hidden snares
with a stick. That was what Papa would do.
    Where was Papa tonight?
    Perhaps in some secret cellar meeting with
others of the underground. Or maybe he was in a street tavern,
pretending to be drunk, listening to the loose talk of drunken
soldiers. Kiri closed her eyes and tried to see in the special way
she and her father had. She could imagine his face, his high,
angled cheekbones and square jaw, the laugh lines that made deep
curves to frame his mouth . . . that silent mouth bereft
of speech. She could see his face, but she could bring no real
presence of him this night.
    Sometimes if their powers were very strong,
and the powers of the dark relaxed, she could sense his thoughts
and give him of her own. That was next best to really being with
him, to riding together or practicing with bow and sword in the
privacy of the ruing as they used to do. That was before Sardira
branded her father a traitor and imprisoned and tortured him.
Sardira set her father free but mute, thinking he would serve as
example to others who fought for freedom. Thinking that Colewolf
would be useless, with the voice of the bard taken from him.
    They had tied him to a table—it had taken
seven men to do that—and cut the tongue from his mouth. He had come
home to lie white and shaken on his cot, spitting blood into a
basin. There was little Gram could do for him; make him broth,
grind salves. His mouth had healed eventually, but his spirit had
not. It was after this that he told Kiri, with messages he wrote on
a slate and with Gram’s help, the truth of her inheritance, that
they bore the blood of the dragonbards. He told her with a touching
sadness that there were no more dragons and perhaps no more bards
than the tiny handful in Dacia. He wrote with great care the
meaning that this inheritance had once held, when the dragons
lived. With the coming of the dark, then the disappearance of
dragons, man’s memory had been nearly destroyed, his experience
wiped away. Without memory and experience, one had no free choice,
for what was there to choose?
    Only a few people, strong enough to resist
the spells and drugs of the dark, retained their freedom and fought
back. But even their numbers were dwindling.
    “One day,” Gram said, “maybe the dragons
will return. Then the bards will sing with them; then the sleeping
peoples will awaken. Oh, it could happen.” The old woman never lost
hope. No evil was so terrible that Gram no longer had hope.
    Gram poured out the last of the tea and
added a dollop of honey, then put her arm around Kiri. Kiri leaned
her head on Gram’s bony shoulder. Gram’s shapeless linen gown
smelled of lye soap. Her thin brown-splotched hands were still.
    Kiri sighed. “I guess I miss Papa
tonight.”
    “He misses you. He’s proud of you, Kiri, and
of the work you do.” She held Kiri away and looked at her. “The
underground needs you, Kiri, just as it needs Colewolf. You are
together in this.”
    There were other spies, of course. Two in
the palace, and a dozen or so in the city.
    “Every spy is important, Kiri. But the
dragonbards—you and Colewolf are symbols of the power that once
linked us all.”
    Kiri nodded. Her tears came suddenly, and
she felt ashamed. Papa didn’t cry.