The Black Beast Read Online Free Page A

by their own fair, white hands.’
    â€œâ€˜Nonsense,’ she said frostily. ‘The goddess weds and remains. It is only men who come and go like mayflies.’
    â€œâ€˜The wheel turns,’ said Aftalun with a look locked on rage. Then he went to prepare his doom. With his own great hands he raised the altar upon this Hill of Vision, chiseled the stones from the dragon’s teeth, folk say. Now twenty men could not move one of the slabs. How the Sacred Kings have dwindled since those days.”
    Tirell and I glanced at each other, smiling, for we knew that Grandfather was baiting us. But he went on without a sign that he had noticed.
    â€œHe lay down and let himself be tied to the altar and died under the knives of the priestesses, lay there a night with his blood drying on the stones. Then he stirred, burst his bonds, rose and left the altar in one great leap. He stalked off to the mountains in the east, the King’s Range, thus called in his honor. The Luoni made way for him, folk say, and some claim that he lives there yet. He was never seen again, but to this day the tallest mountain, that towers over Coire Adalis, is called Aftalun, the Hero, in his name.”
    â€œA peculiar sort of hero,” Tirell growled, “who left a bloody altar as his legacy.” True enough, but he had never said so before. Somehow, listening to the story, I found that even the altar seemed beautiful.
    â€œPerhaps he thought you could all bounce off it as he did,” Daymon remarked. “Kings earned their immortality at a great rate in the early days, if lore tells true. The Sacred King was needed only long enough to lie with the goddess and get her with child; he was slain on his wedding night. But the observance soon eased. The span of kingship was lengthened to a year, and later to seven years, and still later to an even twenty years. Wives follow their husbands to that grim end now, as Aftalun foretold, for custom decrees that they should slay themselves in sorrow. And folk complain that, so gentle have the priestesses become, the souls of the Kings fly away, these days, as mere hawks.”
    â€œI’ll be a moth, and gladly,” Tirell snapped. I looked at him worriedly. We had heard the tale many times, and it had never bothered him so.
    â€œFor the matter of that,” Daymon told him, “you’re likely to make your own legend, to be laid like a fate on some poor heir of yours many years hence.”
    â€œI plan to make an end of that altar,” he said quietly. Perhaps he expected consternation, but Grandfather only nodded.
    â€œIt was raised in hatred and it has been fed with envy. Men say that crops and prosperity depend on the sacrifice of a Sacred King, but better truth would be that the many hope to place their own suffering on the body of one. I agree with you wholly, Grandson. Yet, within the verity of the story, I say: no man has been as great as Aftalun who was god and became god again.” He bent a keen gaze on Tirell. “Can you understand that?”
    Tirell did not answer. I stirred and spoke in his place. “Grandfather,” I asked abruptly, “what lies beyond the mountains?”
    My old nurse would have said, “Fear, only fear!” and shut her mouth with a snap. But Grandfather replied mildly, “Why, the endless water, Frain, if the legends be true.”
    â€œSome folk say differently. Have you ever seen, Grandfather?”
    â€œNo. I cannot see beyond the mountains. I know folk claim to have seen dragons to the north, bright shapes flying over the white-crested mountains in early sunlight. And to the south men speak of a great expanse of dry and lifeless sand. To the east, some say, there are storm serpents and thunder giants, a savage race with claws and tails like animals. But fear speaks in all those tales, and truth may not be in them. Men have gone to the mountains from time to time—heroes, on a dare—but none