He was tall, taller than I, and even in Assharral I am no dwarf. I could see only the shape of robe and turban, but two things struck me at once. His right shoulder was somehow mis-held, and he showed no surprise.
“Yes?” he said. The lurking gaiety persisted. “Were you looking for me?”
“If you own a gray horse,” I answered, “yes.”
“Fengsaeva?” A low chuckle. “Oh, she owns me.”
My wits must have been quickened by something in the air: the Sathel strangeness, the freakish search. Or some infection from him. I am not usually witty. Nor, usually, am I recklessly cordial. “Then perhaps,” I said, “she would permit you to eat with me?”
The amusement had deepened. “Why not eat here? Then you can inspect us both at once.”
I should have been startled. Later, I was, and not merely by the idea of dining with a horse. At the time I replied as if it were commonplace, “A pleasure. But I fear I'm not an owl.”
With another half-chuckle he turned on his heel. “Move up, madam.” His shape vanished. There was a flash, a flare, I was still wondering how he could be so quick with flint and tinder when the door filled with lamplight, and he called, “Come in.”
The mare's quarters nearly filled the door. His voice said, “She won't kick.”
Nettled, I stepped by. A tiny traveling kettle sat on a clay brazier. Saddlecloth and saddlebags had been tossed out on the floor, a vague heap of belongings lay beyond. As any soldier would, I looked for his weapons. And could not find a knife, let alone a sword.
“I don't carry one.” He was stooped over a saddlebag, the amusement open now. He tweaked out a cup. Left-handed, I noted as my wits rallied. The mare blew gently on my elbow, distracting, reviving me.
“A self-invited guest,” I said, “should add something to the board. And at his host's behest.”
“Very good.” He turned around. I had the most curious idea it was not the offer he meant. “Then in honor of Assharral, we might pass up mint-tea for once. You'll favor me, Captain, if you relieve that old rogue Langis of a measure of wine.” The laughter flickered. “Tell him Thorgan Fenglos asked for it.”
I retreated, in ostensible good order. The wine-seller, in a way that had my complete sympathy, gave me the measure without a word, a demand for payment, a glance at my face. At the time it seemed quite reasonable.
“This,” said my host, “should come after eating. Let's begin.”
I forget what we ate, though I have the clearest vision of the mud-walled room, the mingled smell of horse and burning tallow and traveler's distance from his gear, the mare's big black liquid eyes and shimmering face poised over us, the lamplight that made everything mysterious, indistinct. We ate in silence. Then he filled the cups, left-handed, as he had done everything else, poured a drop on the floor, drank, and let out a long breath.
“From Stiriand,” he said. “Gesarre valley, I should think.”
“You know where this wine is made?” I could not help myself.
He nodded. For once the underlying laughter was quite gone. “Yes,” he said softly. “I know.”
I was still deploying words when he supplanted them.
“It comes from Everran. A kingdom west of Hethria. The mare's not for sale, she belongs to a friend. But then, you didn't really want to buy her, did you? And I'm Thorgan Fenglos because of this.”
He had loosed a fold of turban to eat. Now he pulled it all off in a tangle and lifted his face to the lamp, revealing the huge scar that darkened his right cheek. It also, for the first time, showed me his eyes. They were narrow, almond-shaped, alive as sun on running water. Deep, vivid green.
“How did I get it?” He raised his brows at my dumbstruck face. “The same way I got that.” He slapped his right arm, still swathed in the robe, and the swing told me it was limp. Paralyzed. “Hotheadedness.” His eye-corners crinkled. “Military hotheadedness. But then, you knew I was a soldier when you heard me speak.”
Whatever my face said made him grin. “A friend of mine once did the same to me. âToo full of How and Why to choose a First. I'll tell then, and save all our tongues.' So now you've found what you were looking for, why were you looking for it?”
I must have swallowed nothing at least five times. He had turned to the mare. When I did not answer, he went on easily, “The only reason I came to Assharral is . . . to see the sea.”
“The. . . .” I croaked.
“The sea. They always said there was another east of Hethria. I didn't want to spoil it by looking. I wanted to see with eyes.”
Some basic inconsistency in this eluded me. I still felt as if the entire Morhyrne had hit me in the wind.
He went on, not quite gravely, “You'll grow used to it. Getting answers before you speak, I mean. And now, why were you looking for me?”
Finally I managed to assemble something resembling wits. “I have”âorders was too tactlessâ“an invitation from the Lady Moriana. She wishes you to . . . visit her.”
Those eyes danced, making me perfectly sure he knew just how I had paraphrased.
“I shall be delighted,” he said gravely, “to visit the Lady Moriana. Whoever she is. So long as she lives near the sea.”
* * * * *
With that same alarming clairvoyance he forestalled awkwardness by saying, “You can leave me here overnight. I won't decamp. But I hope you don't need to travel post-haste, because I can't leave the mare. She's unbroken, you see.” I did not see at all, and could find no way of saying so. “So we'll meet,” he finished crisply, “at the town gate tomorrow morning.” And finding I had answered, “Sir,” without the slightest hesitation, I knew that if he had been a soldier, it was in the highest rank.
I was glad we did not travel post, because in those weeks' escort duty I rediscovered Assharral. The Kemrestani herds of long-tailed sheep and flamboyant black and white goats, I learnt through his eyes the splendor of their vivid splashes on the dun and tawny wilderness. The Darrian watermen drawing with a yoke of tall red bow-horned oxen backing to and from the well, I had never noticed their ingenuity. Nor had I appreciated the iron-miners who pump water by some kind of screw and use their spill to reshape the countryside. The Climbrian dancers, fifteen-year-old living candelabra in cloth of gold, ruby and emerald tinsel, with headdresses high as themselves, I had never plumbed the beauty in their swaying mime of Assharral's legends, Langu the snake that ate the Ocean, Fengela the Moon-mother who stopped a flood in the River of Heaven with a net of her branching hair. The make of a Climbrian stump-jumping plough, the ram-headed Kemrestani cups, the style of a Thangar axeman's cut, the blue-spotted Darrian cattle-dogs, he showed me it all. At first I was uneasy. But I soon understood, with the perception beyond reason, that this was not the scrutiny of a spy. It was more like that insatiable innocent curiosity of a boy on holiday.
Finally he caught my sidelong look as he watched a pair of herd-boys wrestle a fractious calf, and grinned. “I've been so long in Hethria. Everything's new.”
I revolved openings on that topic. Then, as by Los Morryan, an image formed in my mind. A wide, barren, hard, hot, red and golden country, beautiful in its savage way, scattered with staging point farms and nomad savages. And thrusting from its heart a cluster of rock domes, bubbles of rusty vermilion against a harsh blue sky.
“Eskan Helken. Someone else does live there, but she's not a witch. Aedr is the proper name. Just as it is for me.”
I concentrated hurriedly between my horse's ears.
“Yes, we did dam a river and run the water south into Hethria. It was a femaere's own job.” In old Assharran it means an evil spirit. Catching my look, he grinned. “First to get her interested, then to build the thing. I was never my own engineer before. It's a cursed sight easier to say, âBuild me such-and-such,' than to go out and do it yourself. That's what kept me so long in Hethria. But it was worth it. If only to open the road for the âSathellin.' ”
My mouth opened too. Two generations they've been coming. . . . It danced in my head. Yet the lamp had revealed a man of seeming early middle age, forty, no more, deep-lined face, gray in coal-black hair.
“Don't worry.” I could hear the smile. “Aedryx live longer than ordinary people, that's all.”
I should have followed that up. A mysterious, powerfulâwizardâled like a pony into the heart of Assharral? It would sound Alarm to the merest ranker, let be Captain of the Guard. But I never even paused to wonder why, instead, I thought about the Sathellin.
“No, they don't come to spy,” he said. “Or to drain gold from Assharral. They do take some things. Seeds, new animals. Your silk. But that's not why the road was built.”
This time, I had to ask. “For what, then?”
He was gazing ahead, though not at the wide lands of Kemrestan. “Roads,” he said softly, “are for carrying ideas.”
What sort of ideas? I wondered warily.
“Oh,” he said, “nothing dangerous.”
This has to stop, I thought furiously. I can't call my thoughts my own!
“Forgive me,” he said. “It's so simple, and saves so much time. And living withâFengthiraâI've grown used to it. It's just Scarthe, you know, reading your verbal thoughts. But if it worries you,” contritely, “I won't do it again.”
After two or three swallows I managed to ask, “Scarthe?”
“One of the Mind-Acts. Ruanbrarx. The aedric arts.”
He watched a red kite plane across the road. You are, I told myself, Captain of the Lady's Guard. You should be equal to this.
“We call them rienglis,” I said. “Morglis is the other sort, with sharper wings.”
Not at all startled, he glanced round, giving me a rare look full in his eyes, which were bright with interest, and oddly pleased. And seemed again to have a life of their own, a motion as if the very irises were awake.
“Morglis? That's Black-nose, to me. A southern cape.” Then he nodded at my sword-belt. “Do your smiths use tempered or laminated steel?” And next moment we were deep in military technicalities.
More than technicalities. Presently I found myself saying, “Of course, the Guard's mostly a parade unit. But you have to pass up the real stuff, when you're a married manâ”
I broke off, more shaken than by anything he had done. Even to myself I had never admitted how I saw the Guard, or what had put me there. But he only nodded, with sympathy, understanding, and a strange touch of envy in his voice as he said, “Everything has its price.”
* * * * *
That made me wariest of all the surprises he handed me, and those began with our first bivouac. It was a post-house, whence the usual swarm of ostlers rushed at sight of the livery, to be taken aback on finding a desert Sathel in our midst. And more than taken aback when he said as he slid to earth, “Thanks, I'll see to the mare myself.”
I opened my mouth. Shut it. Bade my senior file-leader, “Carry on, Zyr,” and followed the mare and her rider and the inn's protesting rank and file stableward.
“Water,” he told them. “A loose box. Hay. Handful of oats. That's all.” He bedded her down. Then he beckoned the head groom and said sternly, “For your own sakes, see nobody fools with her.”
The mare was gazing placidly over the stall door, looking sweet-tempered as an apple and mild as any clumper that ever hauled a cart. His eyes flickered at me. “You're as bad as the rest. I'll give you all a demonstration. You, Captain. Walk up to her.”
At ten paces her ears went back. At five, she showed the whites of her eyes and jerked her head. Not fear, but the challenge of the man-eater, proclaiming readiness to savage you.
“Whoa,” I said, trying to sound soothing. “What's the matter? You know me.”
She bared her teeth. I took another pace. She did not snort or squeal or rear, she hit the door with her full weight and a wicked scything snatch of the jaw that plucked my surcoat sleeve before I shot out of range.
“You see?” her rider asked the thunderstruck yard. “So don't go meddling.”
“Wreve-lan'x,” he said as we walked off. “Beast mastery. Another art. She's never been broken in the proper sense. But it's hard to make people believe she's only safe when I'm around.”
“Safe!” I exclaimed, and he chuckled. “At least that hatchet-faced red lad of yours won't go trying to play horse-tamer behind my back.”
My guardsmen were too well trained to think much, but that episode began to change their view of him from lofty disdain to rank distrust. Isolation is part of command. We were not battle-knit, even old enough rankmates to overstep rank, so I could neither share their speculations nor air my own; and I was naggingly aware my thoughts might be shared elsewhere, unbeknownst. But you need not know men to gauge their mood.
Theirs grew bad enough to distract me from the riddle in our midst, and was not bettered by the evening in Darrior when his saddlebag fell open halfway across the yard. He said, “Oh, drat!” and kept walking, while cups, spare girth, bootlaces, kettle and knife and salt-box whirled up in his wake and popped back into the bag like autumn leaves on a backward wind.