“My apologies,” he said, when we sat, as usual, over supper in one of the inn's better rooms. “I've really upset them now.”
I felt it the most masterly understatement I had been privileged to hear. I did not say so. With surprise, I found I had accepted speech was unnecessary.
He nodded, at the agreement or the realization or both. “I forget you're not used to aedryx. And I've used Axynbrarve so much it's easier than hands. Especially,” a somewhat rueful look, “for me.”
I looked at his arm, and asked instead, “Axynbrarve?”
“Another art.” His eyes shot a green flash. The beer jar slid to my elbow, and he chuckled at my recoil. “Easy, after you've spent whole days knocking over trees. Oh, yes. You can do almost anything with it, if you're strong enough. And I usually am.”
With his turban down in coils about his neck and the scar hidden by warm human laughter in those extraordinary eyes, he looked like a disheveled, impudent boy, and I succumbed to the spell behind the powers.
“Trees and beer jars,” I said. “Just make an exception for me.”
“Sir.” He parodied a salute, and for the first time we shared a laugh.
But when we rode into Bhassan he did not laugh at all.
* * * * *
It was a normal high day. The magistrates had already sacrificed in the temple, which was palatial for a province, granite portico, high-relief frieze, gilt columns, solid gold image inside. A pleasant smell of burnt meat and incense wafted over the colorful crowd, there was a medley of sacrifice vendors in the forecourt, a babble of greeting and chaffering and noise from the doves and cocks and lambs on sale, and for once he questioned me outright. “What's all this?” he said.
“High day.” I was surprised. “They're offering sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?” For once the tables were turned. I had startled him.
“Animals. Or incense, if you're rich enough. In thanks, or a petition.” It was on the tip of my tongue to add, How on earth do you worship in Hethria? His eyes silenced me.
“You mean . . . you kill things? For the Four?”
“The Four?” Surprise was back with me. “We worship the Lady. I don't understand what you mean.”
“The Lady? What Lady?”
“The Lady Moriana,” I said patiently. “What other could there be?”
He turned full round. Though he rarely met your glance, from him it did not seem shiftiness. But now his eyes were wide open, and I pulled mine away, for those irises were no longer green but pure black, and his horror was solid as a blow.
“You worship your ruler? She lets you treat her like aâaâSky-lord? Another human being?”
More insulted than shocked I said indignantly, “She is our Lady. And you may be long-lived, but she is immortal. Why should we not worship her?”
He let out his breath. Very low, utterly appalled, he said, “Imsar . . . Math.”
“Do you”âI was still in armsâ“behave differently?”
He tore his eyes from the beasts.
“Sacrifice? To the . . . the Four ?” He sought for words. “We fly kites for Air. Light fires for Fire. Plant trees for Earth. Give wine and flowers to Water.” His eyes returned to the animals, as to some indelible obscenity. “But those are Sky-lords. Not aâaâ”
“No wonder,” I snapped, “you made a desert of Hethria.”
Shock nearly made him laugh. “Oh, I'm the Four's only follower in Hethria. Fengthira just believes in Math. The Good. I can't explain, it's too complicated. But she doesn't give it anything at all.”
He jerked his eyes free and clicked to the mare. We had changed horses and were a mile outside Bhassan before he spoke again.
“Your Lady. You call her undying?”
Still stiff, I retorted, “I am the tenth Captain of her Guard. And she is still a girl.”
He caught his breath. Shot a glance at my surcoat. “Moontree,” he muttered. For a second his eyes went vacant. Then he said bleakly, “I see.”
“See what?” I snapped.
“Thisâimmortality. Does it touch others too?”
I recalled my predecessor's fifty-year reign, my minute-long day beside Los Morryan. “You might share some of it, if you were close to her often enough.”
“I see,” he repeated, with another sort of glance, and I said furiously, “I don't want to live forever. I have a family to feed!”
“Of course,” he agreed mildly. Provoked, I charged on.
“She's a good ruler! Assharral is safe, wealthy, orderly, strong. What more could you ask?”
“And nobody,” he retorted softly, “sings.”
“Nonsense!” I was thoroughly enraged now. “I'm not afraid of her! Nobody is!”
He gave me one brief inexpressive look and words died on my lips.
“Very well,” I said, half a mile later. “So people . . . disappear. They are rebels. Troublemakers.” He did not reply. “It's a small price to pay!” He still did not answer. “What ruler is different?” I found myself near shouting, and hastily dropped my voice. “What if she does have moods? Play cat-and-mouse? Get rid ofâofâbad elements? If you think that's cruel, you should go to Phaxia!”
He glanced round then. His eyes were still and sad and gave an odd impression of grief not only suffered but relived.
“You needn't defend her, Captain.” He sounded almost tired. “I understand. I probably understand far better than you.”
He did not mention it again. Only he looked away from the next Assharran fendel whose pure gold and beautifully minted moontree had formerly delighted him, and some of his pleasure in the land itself was marred. Between what he did and what he made me do and his effect on the men, it is small wonder I grew distracted, and was careless with the weather, as no commander ought to be.
It was the second day in Thangar that I bypassed an over-early halt, then compounded the error by misreading a Thangrian storm. We were in the high cold broken country that lifts sharply to the range crest, and we had watched the storm march from left to right across our front, veiling the black crags and thick emerald rucks of forest about Vallin Taskar, the Horned Gate. Having picked those irregular swaybacked jambs from the skyline I judged we would evade the storm, but I reckoned without the lie of the land. West of Vallin Taskar the waters run back to Kerym Scaur's fathomless blue pit, and they run with the pace of a bolting horse. The storm was still on our flank when we found a ravine that held a tangle of rent timber, undermined piers, and a brown torrent coming down like a Phaxian cavalry charge, more than wither deep. Worse still, a glance told me the storm had veered. It was going to clinch its attack with a frontal assault.
Too risky to advance, pointless to retreat. The men were muttering. “Kestis'd never've done it. . . . Should've known. . . . What'd you expect?” I bit my lip. The worst of a parade unit is that you have no chance to blood yourself in with them, and precedent dies very, very hard.
The storm trumpeted in the crags. The one fault worse than negligence is vanity, and I was guilty of that too. At the last change, perhaps in some unadmitted rivalry with the gray mare's rider, I had let them saddle us with four or five green colts. My own flattened his ears and spun tail to the wind, another began to plunge. The light became the gloom of a storm's skirmish line, the narrow gorge resounded to its advance, the beetling cliff vanished in a boil of white. Furiously I yelled at the guards, “Shut up and hang on to your horse!”
Our sole mercy was that no one drowned. It was a ferocious storm, bad lightning that struck with shattering, numbing cracks, earsplitting thunder, water coming off the ravine-side knee deep, vision lost in a white murk lit by fitful whiter flashes that showed me horses standing on their heads in rain fit to wash away your skin. When it passed I was wet under my very helmet crown. To make it worse, we were nearly in the dark. The stream was impassable. A bitter wind had got up. We were stuck on the mountain, tentless, rationless, shivering drowned rats.
The sole choice was to make the best of it. “You and you,” I said, still too angry to give them names, “go and scout. Cover. Dry wood.” It was asking the impossible, and I did not care. “The rest of you get the horses back in the lee of the hill.”
By then we were all shivering, horse and man, the gray mare and her rider by far the worst. Probably, I thought, they never had storms in Hethria. In the uproar I had had no time for more than a glimpse of the mare braced head down and quarters humped into the rain with a crouched shape on her back, and halfway through, an odd sense that the colt was easier to handle, which I somehow connected with him. But it was time to pay attention now.
I got off my played-out beast and sloshed over, trying not to sound as mortified as I felt. “I beg your pardon, sir. I've not found you much of a camp.”
He straightened. Slowly. With surprise I saw his left wrist was shaking under the sodden robe, then identified the note of exhaustion in his voice. But he said quite calmly, “Never mind, Alkir. I've guessed worse.” I might have known he would divine it all. “Owf!” he shook himself. “I haven't seen a storm like that since Hethria. And it's warmer there.”
A wet bivouac is everyday to Phaxian veterans, but now I had horrid visions of reporting to the Lady that I had let her gift die of lung-fever from a night of Thangrian cold. “We'll start a fire,” I said hastily, and he nodded as he slid to earth. “Good.” He glanced at the mare. “If this one takes a chill I'll have explaining of my own to do.”
The scouts had naturally found neither fuel nor shelter, and were sullenly ready for rebuke. I set them all to collect wet timber, and someone reluctantly ceded tinder and flint, but it was beyond a spark. The heap of sodden boughs sat dourly in our midst, and I could hear the internal grumblings.
The ringleader muttered, “Oughta ride back to Mallerstang.” The stars shone coldly crystal, the ravine rumbled to the flood. A wet branch emptied down my neck. With cold fury I said, “A night out won't kill you. Get the horses head to tail and make them lie. We'll shelter behind them.”
But a post-horse is not a warhorse. Never a one could we get down. We were still wrestling them when a crisp voice demanded, “What in the Four's name are you doing with that fire?”
“I'm sorry, sir.” I could not help my stiffness. “It's a little difficult.”
There was a growl around me, just under the level of punishable insolence. Someone said, louder, “No flint. 'N the wood's all wet.” Unspoken behind it hung, And what'll you do about that?
I heard him give a quick sigh. “Stand away,” he ordered. In a much kinder tone, “Turn around, girl. Stand away, I said!”
They obeyed that peremptory ring. He drew a breath that seemed endless. Then there was a vivid green flash, a crack, and the entire wood-heap burst into steaming, bubbling, green and blue-shot flame.
“Make two or three more off it and we'll get between,” he said into the hush. “The way Hethox nomads do. Much warmer. Well, man, what are you waiting for?”
They fairly fled. Daring neither comment nor query, I busied myself with my horse, watching from an eye-corner as he used his turban to rough the mare's wet hide. When four fires were alight we crowded men and beasts between them, and in time grew warmer. But not more comfortable.
“Look,” he said, kicking a stick into the fire where he and the mare stood all alone. “That was an art. A, a mind-act. Wreviane. Fire-mastery. You can learn it. I did. If you have the aptitude, it's no more mysterious thanâthan water-seeking. Don't you have diviners over here?”
Nobody replied, but I saw one or two make the horn sign with their offside hands.
“It isn't witchcraft.” He was pleading, I had the sense, with far more than ten sulky frightened men, pleading a case he had lost before. “I am flesh and blood, just like you. I don't eat babies, or call up demons. It's just a skill. Would you rather have done without the fire?”
When there was still no reply he turned away, clicking to the mare. She folded herself down in the mud, he scrambled in among her legs with a fine disregard for hooves, curled against her belly, and in ten breaths was asleep. Which, I reflected, as I sent off the first wood-party, had done his case no good at all.
* * * * *
In morning watch I snatched a doze against a leaky tree, and woke to full dawn: a limpid, piercing day, the sky freshly blue, the wet forest silver and emerald, birds rejoicing everywhere. I, on the contrary, was wet, cold, stiff, hungry and sour. Eyeing the muddy square with its charcoal-heap outposts, the limp horses, the limper men, my charge still blissfully slumbering, I wished heartily that I had never set eyes on him. Then two guards bracketed me, and I knew real trouble had arrived.
“Ranks' prerogative,” the first said curtly, with no attempt to salute. It is a euphemism. It means, accept our ultimatum or face a mutiny.
What, I thought, have I done to merit this? With a bitter pang I saw my dismounted troopers battling through the Stirsselian swamps, rotten with fever, riddled with ulcers, rife with dysentery, fighting, dying, abusing me at every turn and deserting me at none. And these fat flawns curled up after a single open bivouac.