Empire of the East (43 page)

The skirmish went about as he had expected, except that the Western arrows came down a little more thickly than he had hoped, so Abner left four men upon the slope. And when the crest was reached, the foe was gone, except for one who lay in the sand with the shaft of an Eastern arrow protruding from his head.

At any rate the country from here on was definitely flatter; the harassing enemy would have to remain at a greater distance. He could see the six riders on a distant rise, as if beckoning him to follow. Above them (at a safe altitude) many reptiles were cawing loudly and circling in the sky; but his wizard motioned in a slightly different direction, and in that way Abner directed his troops.

The hours of light remaining were still long, but inexorably growing shorter. Some of the reptiles sent to scout far ahead of the two fugitives began to return, saying they could find no settlements, no buildings, nothing that looked as if it might be the fugitives goal. Grass grew tall and thick in that land, the reptiles reported, and trees in ever-increasing numbers. There were many places where the two-legged beasts could go to earth once darkness had fallen, and finding them again in the morning might not be easy. How far ahead were the fugitives now? Several kilometers. It was hard to say exactly; the reptiles' horizontal-distance sense, like that of the birds, was poor.

Abner moved his troops at a hard pace, though both men and animals were weary. He had the feeling he was gaining. No more hills obtruded themselves to give the six skirmishers another place to make a stand. They kept half a kilometer ahead of Abner in the open country, and seemed for the time being powerless to do more.

Just when it seemed that the day was going reasonably well after all, there sprang up another wind from dead ahead, erecting another wall of dust whose sudden creation bespoke the working of more Western magic. But this wind brought little pain to sore Eastern faces; it was far weaker (or perhaps more subtle) than the desert-elemental had been. This had been born in the sea of grass that lay ahead, beyond the desert. It did not blind and abrade with particles or threaten to kill with heat.

Abner's wizard was hard at work in his saddle once more, gesturing with a talisman of some kind in each hand. Whether he was having any success was hard to judge; the wind appeared about the same, able to do no obvious harm. The Constable tried to recall the characteristics of prairie-elementals, which he assumed this was. He seemed to remember that bleakness and tangled grass and natural wind were three components, but there was something else too, something he could not quite remember. His schooling in this branch of magic had been sketchy, and was now far in the past.

They had left the desert behind them, and were struggling through the first of the grasslands, when he remembered the most pertinent characteristic of prairie-elementals: distance itself.

His eyes told him what was happening, now that he thought to look closely for it. Beneath the feet of his riding-beast, and those of the other animals in his troop, the grassy land was elongating in the direction of their travel, like an optical illusion in reverse. Three steps forward were required to cover the real distance normally contained in two.

With a shout the Constable called his magician to his side, dragged the wretch from his saddle, and beat him half a dozen vicious blows with the flat of his sword. “Blunderer! Traitor! Could you not tell me what was happening? Or are you too thick-witted to be aware of it yourself?” He yearned to strike with the working edge of the blade, but was not ready to leave himself effectively wizardless in the face of the enemy.

“Ah, mercy, Lord!” the beaten wizard cried. “There be powers against me here such as I have never faced before.”

Charmian had ridden forward from her place near the rear of the little column, and seeing that the Constable glanced at her but did not at once order her back, was emboldened to take part. To the unhappy wizard she said savagely: “One fat lout from the provinces opposes you, a man I have met before and know to be nearly devoid of skill, compared to what my Lord Constable's wizard should possess. My Lord Constable is ill-served indeed.”

“I tell you I am blameless,” the magician cried. He had fallen on his knees before the mounted Constable, while behind them the column halted.

“Who has defeated you? What mighty power?” the Constable demanded. “If you cannot tell me even that much, why should I not take you for a traitor, or an imbecile incompetent?”

“I know not what or who!” The magician's eyes were wild. “I knew not even that I was being beaten, until your mighty Lordship struck at me, as—as indeed I must be grateful for, that I was not slain out of hand.”

Charmian's expression had changed as she listened, and now she put out a hand to Abner. “Wait, my good Lord, if it please you. There may be something to what this man says. There is one among our enemies who is subtle and powerful enough to confound most wizards in this way.”

“So.” Abner's rage was quickly transformed into calculation. He knew by now that Charmian was intelligent, or rather that she could be when it suited her; and she had come close to Ardneh in the past. “What more can you tell me on this point?”

She looked at Abner with an apparent anxiety to please. “Little enough right now, my Lord. Let me talk with this fellow for a while, as we go on, and it may be I can learn something worth your hearing.”

“So be it.” With a savage gesture Abner got the stalled column moving again—two-thirds speed was better than none—and then, grimacing, he got paper from his saddlebag and reluctantly prepared to send a message asking Wood for help.

Charmian now had perfect reason for riding next to the wizard, and holding with him a lengthy whispered conversation of which no one else could hear a word.

“So, fellow,” she began, in a tone remote and commanding. “I have saved you from the punishment your clumsiness merits. If you wish me to remain your friend, there is a simple thing you can do for me in return.”

He looked at her with fear and calculation. “I am eternally in your debt, fair lady. What is there I can possibly do for you?”

“It might seem unimportant to my Lord the Constable, and I have not bothered him with it. But it is a meaningful matter to me.” She began to explain.

She had not said much before the wizard was shaking his head, and holding up a finger to stop her speech. “No, no. If it were possible to cast a spell and bring down some disabling woe on those two fleeing from us, I would have done so long ere this. It was one of the first things the Constable asked of me, before taking the field in pursuit of them. But it cannot be done so simply. Conditions are not right in many ways—”

“I care little or nothing about harming the man,” Charmian broke in. “It is the girl, Catherine, who betrayed me.” Her voice dropped lower still, hate tightening it like some rack-rope in a dungeon. “It was she who got them to manhandle me. I saw her smirking, gloating, over her little moment of revenge…well, I mean to have the last laugh over her. I must and I will. Find me a way to give me my revenge upon that girl, and I will reward you well.” She shifted her body in the saddle and saw his eyes go wandering over her, as if they had no choice but to do so when she willed it. “But fail to do so, and I will tell the Constable that which will bring his full wrath back upon you; it hangs balanced over your head already, and needs but a gentle touch to bring it down. I will say that it was not Ardneh at all who defeated you, but some trivial power.”

“It was Ardneh, or his equal. It must have been.”

Charmian did not appear to have heard.

The magician—he was using no name at all at present, a procedure not unheard of among those of his calling—rode on in silence for a little time, sizing up with sidelong looks the woman who rode beside him, taking her measure in more ways than one. “No, no,” he said again. “From here there is no way that I can visit on this fleeing servant girl the tortures that you have in mind. We have no hair of hers, or nail clippings, or even anything she owned—hey? I thought not. Even a comparatively mild curse would take—no, there is no way.”

But Charmian was quick to catch him up. “Would take what?”

The nameless magician evidently regretted starting to say whatever it was that he had left unfinished. How could he have made such a clumsy slip?

“Disagreeable fool, you are going to have to tell me sooner or later.”

Imagine a vast buried sea of power, into which a man might hope to sink a secret well, not in safety, but still with reasonable hope of not being caught in a disaster, because he and a few others had managed to do it successfully a few times in the past. The Nameless One pondered briefly and fatalistically the secret syllables of a Name forbidden to be spoken. Wood knew that name, and Ominor of course, and four or five others in the highest councils of the East. It was seldom even alluded to—the Nameless One had heard Wood do so only once, on the day of Ardneh's visit to the capital.

Charmian prodded him: “It would seem to be a worthless power, or whatever it is, if it cannot be used.” And again: “Remember, I meant what I said, both my promise and my threat.”

The Nameless One believed her. “All right, then. We will see. I will try what can be tried.”

 

Throughout the remainder of the day, the Constable gained upon his prey, but not enough. As sunset came, the wind abated and the prairie-elemental died; but the night belonged to the West, and Abner reluctantly gave orders to make camp and set a vigilant guard.

Rolf was saying: “You told me yourself that your Offshore man is likely wedded by now to someone else. What does it matter, then, if you should come and sit by me?”

It was morning again, the second since their flight had begun. The bird had gone into hiding for the day in a nearby tree, where he—or she, Rolf was not sure—was now practically invisible. Since talking with the bird, Catherine and Rolf had slept a little, and had drunk their fill of fresh running water.

She looked at him now with what was almost a smile. “Is it some military matter you wish to discuss?” Catherine had been kneeling on the stream's grassy bank trying to see her face in the water below. The swelling on her cheekbone had gone down, but the discoloration was if anything worse than before, mottling from purple into green.

“Well…” He spread his hands. “We could begin with military secrets. You are at least four meters away, and to shout them across such a space would put them in danger of being overheard by the enemy.” He looked up and around him with a great show of wariness. Catherine almost laughed.

They were in a little grove cut through by the stream. Looking out of the shade of the trees Rolf could see in all directions, fields and gentle hills of grass dotted here and there with other copses or single trees. It might be the patchy remnants of a receding forest or the struggling outposts of a new one.

Rolf sat with his back against a fallen trunk, facing across the stream, which was here only six or eight meters wide, and very shallow. With his right hand he patted the smooth grass beside him, indicating to Catherine where she was invited to sit.

She had given up trying to study her face in the water, but as yet she came no closer. “I do not know, sir, whether I should. Still, I suppose you are now my commanding officer, and if I flout your orders I am liable to find myself in some military court.”

A cloud of irritation passed over his face. “No, don't joke about that. Giving orders, I mean.” She sat back with her feet tucked under her, looking at him steadily. “I mean, I have seen people I knew executed by military courts. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to squelch a joke. You must have had few chances for them, since…when were you taken by the East?”

“A lifetime ago.” No longer close to laughing, she got up slowly, and with her hands rubbed her bare arms as if she were peeling, scraping, something off. “But let's not talk about that now. I wish this stream were deep enough to swim and soak in it.” Her servant's dress was stained, as were Rolf's clothes, with travel and hard usage, and her bound-up brown hair was dull with dust. But she looked less tired by far than she had before their flight.

“We could look for a deeper place,” he said. “I would enjoy a swim myself, I think.” He felt a little pulse begin, inside his head.

“Leave these trees, in daylight?”

“I meant tonight. At dusk.”

She came nearer then, though not quite as near as his patting hand had indicated, and sat down. Her eyes flicked at him, unreadably; at nineteen he had long since given up trying to understand women.

He said: “I should never have mentioned that man you were to wed.”

“No. I am thinking only of the girl I was, and how I have been changed. How when I was young I flirted and laughed and teased.”

“When you were young? What are you now, about seventeen?”

“Two years ago I was fifteen, I think. But now I am no longer young.”

“So, you are really such an old woman.” Now his voice was growing more soft and tender. “Then you must be a fit companion for an old man like myself.” And somehow he had traversed the little distance that had been between them, and his fingers had begun a gentle stroking of her bare arm, up to the coarse slave's-cloth at the shoulder.

Her look seemed to say to him that his behavior was far from being unendurable; that, perhaps, if it went on a little longer it might begin to give her pleasure. His arm would have needed less encouragement than that to start unhurriedly going around her. It had always seemed to Rolf something of a wonder how this hard and angular limb of his always managed to adapt itself so neatly and exactly to the soft job of girl-holding. This one was certainly a soft girl now, regardless of how lean and strong she had appeared only a little while ago. Now in response to a firm pressure of his fingers on her cheek (safely below the blackened eye) her face turned round to his more fully. He found her lips.

Her smooth face rubbed willingly under his straggly beard. Time passed, then seemed about to be forgotten. Now he would kiss tenderly the swelling on her cheekbone, before he began a line of kisses moving down her throat.

Now, what was this upon her skin?

What had happened—

What
—

With an outcry Rolf sprang to his feet and backed away, stumbling and almost falling in his haste. He grabbed up his sword and half-drew it from its sheath before he was aware of doing so, and when he became aware he scarce knew whether to finish pulling out the blade or push it back.

Before him now, and lately enfolded most tenderly in his arms, was one of the most hideous human shapes it had ever been his ill fortune to behold. What had been Catherine's healthy young face had altered while he kissed it to the visage of a withered, snaggle-toothed, misshapen crone. Even where he now stood, some meters distant, he thought he could still taste the pestilent breath. Under stiff, dirt-colored hair, tied up just as the young girl's had been, were the face and neck of an unrecognizable old woman, skin wrinkled as a rag, dotted with warts and here and there a whisker. The strong smooth arms that Rolf had felt about his neck were shrunken now to quivers of loose skin in which bones slid like crooked arrows. The breathing that had moved young breasts against him now had altered to a scraping wheeze, coming from a body as shapeless as the dress that covered it.

The old woman staggered to her feet, groping before her with fingers gnarled like roots. Her features worked, but her face was so distorted by age and disease that Rolf could not for a moment guess whether it was terror, anger, or laughter that moved her now.

Moving like some crippled sleepwalker, she tottered toward him on the brink of the grassy bank. “Rolf?” she cawed out the one word, in something like a reptile's voice, and then her figure seemed to blur, and down she fell on hands and knees.

Later he could not estimate how long he had stood there, rubbing his eyes, trying to see the figure before him clearly once again. In time he discovered that the blurring was not in his eyes, but in the female shape before them. Then all at once she was as she had been before he took her in his arms; healthy and young, the purplish-green bruise upon her cheek, vital brown hair struggling to escape the tie that bound it up. It was Catherine on her hands and knees, her face convulsed in terror. “Rolf?” she cried out once again, this time in her own voice, and he threw down his sword and fell on his knees beside her.

She covered her face with her hands, until he pulled them away gently. Her whisper was still terrified: “How do you see me now?”

He put out a hand to caress her, but sudden suspicion made him draw it back. “As a girl. As you were when we first met.”

“Thank all the powers of the West. Then she could not make it permanent…why do you still look at me so? What
do
you see?”

Shaken, he blurted clumsily: “I see a girl. But how do I know which is your true shape, this one or the other? What kind of magic is this?”

“What kind of magic?
Hers,
the evil woman's…she has found some way to do this foul thing to me. I know it.” Now the first immensity of Catherine's terror was gone, but tears were standing in her eyes. “I heard it from her and others, that never in my life should I escape her. The Lady Demon, Charmian.”

Gazing at the young form before him, Rolf suddenly could no longer believe that it might be a lie, the product of some Eastern enchantment. Catherine had none of Charmian's glamor; her youth and health was marked with human awkwardness and imperfection. She was too complete and varied to be unreal. He said, reassuringly: “There are Western wizards who can deal with any spell.”

“Hold me,” she whispered, and he took her in his arms again. For a while he comforted, he soothed, and all was well. Once more he kissed the bruised cheekbone, which this time did not change. And then, as his caresses ceased to be meant as comforting, he saw the first sagging wrinkle appear upon her cheek.

This time he did not retreat so rapidly or so far, but still he let her go. This time he watched the progress of the cycle with compassion, as Catherine passed through decrepit ugliness and back to youth again. Then they were silent for a little while, looking at each other like grave children.

“It is when I embrace you as a man with a woman that it happens,” he said at last. And she nodded, but made no other move. A long time passed before she spoke at all.

Near sundown, as Rolf awoke from a fitful sleep and began to prepare for another night of travel, he saw a great swarm of reptiles taking shelter for the night in a grove about a kilometer to the southeast. Rolf could see no Eastern ground forces, but they must be near; the reptiles would need at least a few human defenders to survive the night if they were discovered by the Feathered Folk.

With the first true darkness, the bird awoke, and came to perch briefly on Rolf's hospitably leveled forearm, settling with a surprising spread of soft, balancing wings; it weighed no more than a small child. Pointing south with his free hand, Rolf said: “It is good we did not rest in that grove instead, for there the trees have just filled up with leather.”

“Hooo! Then I must go quickly and gather my people here.”

“I have some words for you to carry to Duncan, also. Some Eastern magic has been worked upon us.” While Catherine stood by listening, he told the bird in brief what had happened.

“Carry word also,” Catherine added, “that our riding-beasts are failing. One is too far gone to be ridden, I think, and the other not much better.”

Rolf went to inspect the animals himself, but had to agree that Catherine was right. The bird took thought, and then offered: “Let them gooo free. I will send birds tonight to ride and goad them far from here, so if the East should find them tomorrow they will be misled.”

The few belongings they had, weapons and cloaks and a small store of food, made no great burden. With compact bundles on their backs, Rolf and Catherine waved goodby to the bird and stepped off once more to the northwest, at first following the stream closely. There would be no looking for bathing-spots tonight, not with the enemy only a kilometer away. He and Catherine managed to cover about fifteen kilometers before dawn. During the night they saw no more birds; probably all who could fly had been mustered for an attack on the roosting reptile horde.

There was no difficulty on the next morning—or on the next, after another uneventful night of walking—about finding places in which to hide. The country through which they traveled was gradually becoming more thickly wooded, though still the long grass was dominant. The land also grew hillier, and was threaded at frequent intervals with small streams which ended any remaining concern about finding water. Catherine got her bath at last, in privacy.

“You can take a little walk now, Rolf. I'll catch up when I'm through.”

“What's the matter? Hey, why pull away?”

She looked at him steadily and pulled away even a little farther. “How can you ask that?”

“Well, but the curse may have expired by this time.”

“Or it may have grown more powerful. I'll not risk it again. It was easy enough for you, you didn't have to feel your own body…changing. Don't try to touch me.”

And he had to admit, with an unwilling sigh, that she was right.

Several more nights of travel passed without notable incident. Nightly a bird came to them, bringing news of how the rival armies had maneuvered the day before. Duncan, the birds reported, was receiving from his wizards ever-stronger omens of the importance of Ardneh to the West, and of Rolf's mission for Ardneh. The Prince had dispatched a cavalry force to overtake Rolf and act as his escort to wherever Ardneh wanted him to go. But the Western cavalry detailed for the job had been intercepted by strong Eastern patrols, who were also converging upon the area, and forced to fight. John Ominor was now thought to have taken direct command of the main Eastern army in the field, though if so he was careful to stay hidden in his tent at night, out of sight of birds.

On another night, one of drizzling rain, Rolf and Catherine came to a stream wider than any they had met so far. Squinting into the murky dark, Rolf found he could not tell if the far bank was thirty meters distant or three hundred. At the moment no bird was with them to act as guide. The river flowed roughly to the north, but as soon as Rolf began to follow its bank in that direction a sudden hard feeling of wrongness, almost a sickness, came over him. When he stopped, the malaise subsided, only to return full force when he would have gone on again. Catherine felt nothing, but he could scarcely walk. Only when he reversed himself and followed the stream south did the sensation leave him. His puzzlement ended a hundred meters upstream, where what he first took to be a very odd-shaped stone in his path revealed itself on examination to be one end of a large metal object, almost completely buried.

Since Ardneh had apparently led them to it, he and Catherine set to work with knife and hatchet to dig the thing out of the hardened earth. They had not got far before they realized they were uncovering a small boat, made of Old World metal, uncorrupted by whatever ages it had lain under the ground. In an hour or so they had the craft dug out; it proved to be practically undamaged and perfectly usable, of a handy size for two passengers. Oars or paddles there were none, but a little groping in the dark turned up a couple of branches suitable for poles if the water were not too deep. Rolf took it for granted that his proper course was still to the north, downstream. They loaded their little gear into the boat and put out into the river, finding it fairly swift and shallow. Before dawn they had made, while resting their feet, several more kilometers toward their still unknown goal.