Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (24 page)

“That was what I couldn't endure,” she went on, her voice quiet, as if she spoke now of someone other than herself. “That I'd left my child to die. Until Ingold came to me, the night before last—until he brought Tir back to me—I never even knew if they'd survived or not. All the rest of it, the Dark Ones surging down on us over the torches, the—the touch of it, the grip of it, like an iron rope—the Icefalcon's face when he picked me up off the floor of the vaults—it doesn't even seem real. Only that I'd left my child, the one person, the one thing that remained out of everything else in my life… ”

Her hands and her voice had begun to shake again. Rudy came over to her in the halo of the candles, took her hands to still them, and felt the fragile bones in his own rough grip. His touch seemed to bring her back, for she smiled, half-apologetically, and looked down, away from his face.

“Alwir tells me I was delirious with shock,” she said softly. “I'm glad I don't remember leaving Gae. They tell me the city was ruined. Now I'll always remember it in its beauty.” She looked up at him again, that soft little smile of self-mockery reappearing in one corner of her sensitive mouth. “That's why most of the things here are Alwir's and not mine. They're not the things I would have brought with me if I'd left Gae under my own power.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“But last night,” Alde went on, “I think I would have killed you if you'd tried to stop me from going back for Tir. I wasn't going to leave him again. I'll always thank you for going with me, for staying with me through the vaults, for keeping us both safe. But I think I would have gone alone.”

“I still think you were crazy,” Rudy said gently.

She smiled. “I never said I wasn't.”

Outside, the rain had ceased entirely. Beside them the smooth, waxy glow of the candles lengthened into slim columns of yellow and white, the light growing stronger in the still deep silence. For a time the peace of the room surrounded them, bringing them a curious, isolated moment of happiness in the confusion and wreckage of all the world. Rudy was conscious, as he had seldom been so acutely conscious of anything in his life, of her fingers resting lightly in his. The smell of her hair came to him, a scent of sweetgrass and bay, and with it the soft tallow smell of the candles and the richness of cedar and lavender. Enclosed in the heart of a jewel-box of time they were alone and at rest with each other, her eyes gazing up at him, almost black in the shadows. Looking into them, Rudy knew—and knew then that she knew—what was inevitably going to be. The knowledge went through him like a bolt of lightning, but it was without any real surprise. It was as if he had always known.

They stood thus for an endless single moment of time, consumed by that shared knowledge. The only sound in the room was the soft swiftness of their breath. Then an opening door downstairs stirred the air, and the flame of the candles dipped, making the shadows bow and tremble. On that incoming cold draft, Alwir's voice echoed mellowly in the unnaturally servantless hall. “… ponies around to the courtyard. It will take most of the night to load them. Your things will go in the third cart.” And though no words were audible, they heard Bektis' light voice replying, a querulous interrogation from Medda, and the sharp, sudden jingle of sword belt and mail.

Alde made a move to go, and Rudy caught at her hands. Their eyes met again, puzzled, seeking some answer to why what had been between them had happened. The liking between them had changed—everything had changed and was colored by what had passed. In her face Rudy saw desire, fear of this terrible newfound intimacy, and the reflection of his own bewilderment at a feeling he had never known himself capable of possessing. Then her cheeks flamed suddenly pink in the candlelight, and she pulled her hands away, stammering, “I—I can't—” She turned to flee.

“Alde.” He called her softly back, and at the sound of his voice she stopped, her breath quick and uneven, as if she had run a long way. “I'll see you on the road tomorrow.”

She whispered, “All right,” and turned her eyes away. A moment later he heard her footsteps flying lightly down the hall.

A long time ago and perhaps in a previous incarnation, Rudy recalled seeing a movie called The Ten Commandments which, among other things, had contained a memorable scene of the Children of Israel getting their butts out of the Land of Egypt. Charlton Heston had lifted up his staff and they'd all been organized and ready to go, and the whole clear-out had taken about three minutes of screen time, goats and granddaddies and all, leaving not so much as a crumpled bread wrapper or a pile of dog droppings on the tidy streets of Thebes.

Karst had been stirring since several hours before dawn. Rudy, standing by the cart in which the rations earmarked for the Guards would be hauled, had a good view of most of the square, and it didn't look to him as if anybody would be going anywhere until damn near noon, if then. It had begun to rain again, and the ground was like porridge. The cart wheels bogged in it; people running back and forth on aimless errands churned it to ever-deeper ooze. Mud and rain covered everything, soaked Rudy's cloak and his clothing underneath, and plastered the clumped, dirty agglomerations of depressed-looking refugees who stood or sat around that scene of sodden chaos. Even Alwir, storming his elegant way among them, was beginning to look shopworn and dirty.

By midmorning, the square was a total confusion of people, goods, and makeshift transport. Children wandered from their parents and got lost. Escaping pigs had to be chased through the standing carts, pack beasts, and little mounds of personal belongings, upsetting everything in their flying path. The larger families and groups, and the households of minor nobles, were engaged in last-minute problem-solving sessions, among much cursing and the waving of arms, arguing whether to go north to the Keep of the landchief Harl Kinghead, south to Renweth in the mountains, following Alwir and the Council of Regents, or beyond that, over Sarda Pass, to Gettlesand, to risk the threat of the White Raiders in the minor Keeps of the landchief Tomec Tirkenson. Rudy could see Tirkenson, big, scarred, and ugly, cursing his followers into line with a vocabulary that would have curled a bullwhacker's hair.

Rudy himself could have left town at a moment's notice. From the leavings of the dead, he'd collected himself an outfit of warm clothes—a brown tunic, shirt, breeches, and boots, a hooded cloak that was too large, and a pair of gauntlet gloves stitched with gold and emeralds. His California clothes he carried in his pack, along with shaving things scrounged, like everything else, from those who had not survived the coming of the Dark to Karst, his American-made buck-knife, a horn spoon, and his big blue plastic comb. The unfamiliar weight of a sword dragged at his hip.

Leaning his shoulders against the tall wheel of the cart, shivering in the wind that drove the rain and tossed the dark trees that were visible above the black, gabled roofs, he surveyed the milling chaos before him. Mud-slathered people negotiated for space in two carts, tied dirty little bundles onto muleback or into crude wheelbarrows or travois, and argued about what to take and what to leave. Watching them, his face stinging in the icy wind, he remembered California as if his whole life there had been something that had happened to someone else.

“There,” the cool, husky voice of the Icefalcon said at his elbow. He turned to see the tall captain pointing out to Gil the small train of wagons drawn up outside the Bishop's palace, adjacent to the Church on the opposite side of the square. Red-robed monks were loading two of them with chests that were obviously filled with something heavy, under the arrogant direction of the Bishop herself. “I find that typical,” the Guard went on. “They claim to work for the salvation of souls, but from all I've seen, they only collect the tithe, and keep records of how much is owed and what souls have been born and baptized and confessed and died, like a miser counting gold. Fleeing for their lives, they will carry paper rather than food.”

“They?” Gil echoed curiously, and glanced up at the tall young man with the incongruous pale braids lying rainslicked over his dark shoulders. “You're not of the Faith?”

A disdainful sniff was all the answer she got.

Past the Church wagons, Alwir's household and the remnants of the government of the Realm were holding what appeared to be a Chinese fire drill on the steps of the Town Hall. Rudy saw Alde seated in the front of one of the carts there, muffled in black fur, her eyes peeking from the shadows of her streaming hood. On her lap she cradled a great bundle of dark, trailing blankets, in which no round pink baby face was visible; but once he saw the blankets squirm. That would be Tir. Medda, her round face swollen with weeping, clambered up to take her place at the Queen's side. Alde turned her head, her gaze searching the crowd. Across the milling confusion she met Rudy's eyes, then quickly looked away, as if ashamed to be caught seeking sight of him. Beyond her, Bektis was climbing into another wagon, his narrow face framed in a great collar of expensive marten fur, looking down his elegant nose at the bedraggled mob in the square.

Then someone was calling out orders, Commander Janus' harsh, braying battle voice rising above the sluicing drum of the rain and the clamor of argument and preparation. Alwir appeared from around the corner of the Town Hall, mounted on a slim-legged sorrel mare. His great cloak flapped in the wind as he bent from the saddle to exchange last-minute instructions with someone on the ground. The Guards moved into line, a ragged double file on either side of the Chancellor's wagons. Like a kettleful of oatmeal coming at last to a boil, the people in the square, alone or by couples, families, or clans, caught up their few possessions and jostled for a place within that doubled line, or, failing that, as close to its protection as they could get. Those who weren't ready to go yet redoubled their preparations, hastening in the hope of catching up on the road. Whatever their ultimate goal, the north or Gettlesand or Renweth, sticking with an armed convoy was far preferable to taking that long road alone.

Rudy was a little surprised at what a mob there was, once they got out on the road. They moved almost without order, a vast confusion of provision wagons, transport carts for the furniture of Alwir's household and the records of the government of the Realm, small herds of cattle and sheep, here and there coveys of spare horses for those fortunate enough to be riding to Renweth, the shambling rabble of household servants, and the few remaining dooic slaves that an occasional wealthy family had brought out of the ruin of their world. Families straggled behind and around the main body of the royal wagons, with their crated chickens and barking dogs, their pigs and their milk goats; it was astonishing how many families had actually succeeded in holding together through the chaos of the last few weeks, though many of them, Rudy knew, were missing members. Fathers and mothers were carrying the bulk of the load, older children carrying those too young to walk, others leading or driving such livestock as they'd been able to save or acquire. There were not a few grannies and grandpas of startlingly venerable years, too—Rudy wondered how some of those old people had managed to run fast enough to escape the Dark. But they were there, leaning on walking sticks or on the shoulders of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, chirping to one another with the equable calm of those who have long since ceased being surprised by fate. And as they departed from Karst, that great straggling mob passed an infinitely greater number of half-assembled households, still loading the last of their belongings onto donkey back or dog travois, or trying to sort out the least essential essentials, arguing and watching with apprehensive eyes as the convoy slopped past in the driving gray rain. By the looks of it, Rudy calculated, people would be drifting out of Karst all day.

A mud-spattered old man with a shabby bundle and a stout walking stick fell into step with Rudy as they passed the last outskirts of the town. The path dipped steeply in a treacherous slide of black muck. Rudy's feet slithered on it, and a strong hand grasped his elbow. “Cut yourself a staff from the woods,” a familiar scratchy voice advised. “The roads aren't going to get any easier, once we reach the mountains around Renweth.”

“We're leaving the mountains, though,” Rudy said, picking his way more carefully in the wizard's tracks. “Are these the same mountains we're heading for, or different?”

“Different,” Ingold said. “We're picking up the Great South Road outside Gae and following it down the valley of the Brown
River, which runs through the heartlands of the Realm. The road up to Sarda
Pass crosses it, and we'll take that up into the Big Snowies, the great wall of mountains that cuts the Realm, the lands of the Wath, in two, dividing the river valleys from the plains and the desert of Gettlesand. Renweth stands above Sarda
Pass.
Watch the ground.”

Rudy scrambled over slippery autumn-yellow grasses around a noxious patch of black quicksand. The road from Gae up to Karst had been graded and cut so as to be easily negotiable in good weather, but the constant coming and going of the refugees, combined with the rains and the steady departures that had been taking place from the town since dawn, had reduced the way to a treacherous river of slop. Those refugees who waited until the afternoon to quit Karst would have to wade all the way to the plain. Rudy looked around at the darkness of the misty gray woods and pictured what the land would be like for those who got bogged in the road when night began to fall. He shivered.

“How far is it?” he asked suddenly. “How many nights are we going to have to spend in the open?”

“Close to a hundred and seventy miles,” Ingold replied, making his way through the wet brush on the firmer ground at the edge of the roadbed. “Eight or ten nights, if the weather stays good and the Arrow
River isn't too high to cross when we get there.”

“You call this good?” Rudy grumbled. “I've been freezing my tail off since I came here. I don't think I'll ever dry out.”

Ingold held out his hand, and the rain collected, a tiny lake, in his calloused palm. “It could be far worse,” he said mildly. “We've had harsh winters these last ten years, with killing snows on the plains beyond the mountains driving the White Raiders, the barbarians of the plains, to attack the settlements out of pure famine. This winter promises to be the worst yet—”