Moving Water (5 page)

The spokesman was still talking. “. . . nothing personal. But either we get rid of this—warlock—or else.”

“Else what?” My hand itched for a sword hilt.

“Or else,” he repeated, and evaded my eye.

“You fat louse.” I kept my voice down, for effect, and not to wake a man who would never have encountered mutiny. “You parade-ground parrot. You creeping belly-ache. Your orders are escort duty to Zyphryr Coryan. There's no ‘or else' for you.”

He had gone purple. Hopefully, I watched his sword-hand. But he was a guard.

“You're not fit,” I said, “to wash a surcoat, let be dirty one. A soldier wouldn't wipe his boots on you.” Still he did not bite. “Get away from me before you end where you belong. In the mud.”

More purple than ever, he persevered manfully, “Is that your last word?”

“No,” I snapped. “This is my last word.” I wrenched at my sword, he sprang away, and a yell of,
“ 'Ware backs!”
nearly burst my ears.

I spun as any fighter would and my feet shot from under me as the second man's point speared between my right arm and ribs, I rolled and kicked with the spokesman charging my other flank and my frantic whip-lash just cleared his thrust, they closed in, I heard shouts and running feet and prepared to end under the pack of them—then the one who had struck from ambush dropped his sword, clapped both hands to his eyes, and folded gently down beside me in the mud.

I sat up. Retrieved my sword. Got to my feet. Nine whey-faced muddy black posts confronted me, slack-jawed, paralyzed. My charge emerged from behind them in an equally bedraggled blue robe. I took one glance and jerked my head away. He had no face. His eyes obliterated it, a glare of blinding, white-shot green.

“Sorry,” he said curtly, “to interfere.”

When none of us managed a word he came over to the man in the mud. Bent to feel a wrist. Straightened up.

The changed expression told me before he spoke. “I'm truly sorry.” The voice had altered too. “He's dead, Alkir.”

“Sorry?” I was still airborne with rage. “For what?” I rounded on the rest. “Anyone else want to exercise ‘ranks' prerogative'?”

No one did. Sheathing the sword, I turned to my rescuer. And stopped.

After a moment I said, “Mutiny. Trying to kill an officer. The kindest he could hope for was to lose his head.” He did not look round. “One more barrack-rat. The Lady won't worry. She's more likely to string me up for negligence.”

He sat on his heels over the corpse. I found I had put a hand on his shoulder as with one of my own subordinates. I said, “There was nothing else you could have done.”

He might not have heard. He was staring, mute, deaf, as if nothing but the body existed. As if he had never seen a man die before.

I took the hand away. My skin crept. I heard myself say, too quietly, “Could you?”

There was a pause so deep I heard a foot squelch in the mud, drops spatter from the trees. Then, all of a piece, as a sliding boulder moves, he turned and looked at me.

I had taken a step back. But it was not me he saw. Those eyes looked past me, laughter all blown out. Dark and deep as a sunless forest pool. And blind, as if they had been stunned.

Then they shortened focus. That time, all of us stepped back.

“Could I not?” He barely whispered, but it cut like a whip. “Not knock the sword out of his hand? Stun him? Throw him a sarissa-length away? Stop him in his tracks . . . But no. I had to use A'sparre.” Suddenly he buried his face in his hand. “ ‘A brick-maker stitching silk.' . . . Oh, Four. Any brick-maker could have bettered that.”

With a degree of wounded dignity I said, “You did save my life. Or perhaps you'd rather have saved his?”

He just shook his head to and fro. Then, muffled in his arm, he said, “Fengthira was right.”

“About what?”

He ignored that. But something in the bow of his shoulders made me burst out, “Don't tell me you're scared of your poxy witch!”

In another moment he looked up. His eyes were still stunned, but the shock was changing. Now he looked nearer to despair. And oddly forlorn, as if I had deserted him.

“You don't understand,” he said. And it was not blame, but grief.

I stared. He looked back to the corpse.

“That . . . he . . . was unique.” He said it very softly. The grief remained, as if he were speaking some great hero's eulogy.

“There never was, there never will be another of him. It took all time, and everything that ever was, to put him here. And I destroyed him. Blew him out, Phut! Not because I had to.” His head went back in his arm. “From sheer . . . blind . . . criminal . . . incompetence.”

I could not fathom the technical terms, I was uncomfortable at the depth of his remorse, baffled by this extravagant metaphysical breast-beating over a scurvy back-stabber who had got his deserts, and it gave me an odd sense of falling short, of lacking some value I could not even define. That, like all awareness of deficiency, made me angrier.

“He's still dead,” I said brutally. “And that's all there is to it.”

There was a long pause. Then he took his hand down and stood up, and when I saw his face I knew there would never be words I would wish so bitterly to have left unsaid.

“Yes,” he said.

* * * * *

I beat a thankful retreat to the practical. The other curs were well to heel. They saddled up with speed, and I had just ordered, “Dakis, Krem, tie that crowbait on with his stirrup leathers,” when a voice behind me said, “Alkir, wait.”

He seemed to have recovered a little or, at least, to have begun to think. “This was my fault,” he said. “All of it.” An echo of that grief ran across his face and I wanted to look away. But he went on at once, “There'd have been no trouble if you weren't escorting me.”

That I could not agree made me no more amiable.

“So . . . he could have drowned yesterday. We could bury him here. And”—he swept a glance round the ten of us—“finish it.”

Was I to clap or swear? Conspiring with your men to falsify a death and conceal an aborted mutiny, entrusting your career to a pack of toy-shop heroes' malice or drunkenness—if they did not read his mercy as weakness and kill us both. Nothing is so rancorous as pardoned crime. Before taking the chance he did I would have struck the mare. But perhaps such gambles, or an insight that makes a surety of them, are the mark of high command.

Before anyone produced a word or, I daresay, a thought, he said in open relief, “Thank the Four.” Then he looked surprised and, almost under his breath, amended it to an equally fervent, if more cryptic “Imsar Math.”

* * * * *

“In the name of Math,”
what?
I wondered irritably, as with no sound but blundering horses we rode into the ravine; through the girth-deep, neglected ford. Back to the road. Silence held as we dipped and climbed amid a forest wet and glittering as new-polished shields. A Thangrian timber jinker passed, fourteen horses, a giant of a log, skill and power joined. An orchid collector, a pack of rainbow exotica on his back, his tree-boy running ahead. I was still unsure of the guards, he noticed none of it. No one would ask about those moments over the corpse. But finally my confusion marshaled on a single idea.

“I don't see why it was . . . incompetent.”

The forest shook to the roar of a falling giant. I heard the clap of another axe beyond. Still staring between the mare's ears he said, “It's not a snub. Will you give me time to think?”

We had reached an inn, breakfasted, and set out again before he said a word. Then, as our horses breasted the first rise, slowly, all but fumblingly, he began to speak.

“You think what I did was justified. Self-defense. For act or worth, he—Gevos—deserved no better.” I nodded. “But everyone's stupid when they're afraid. Nor was that all his fault. So much for him.”

My neck told me the curs had grown six inches extra ear.

“And for me?” A wry smile. “It was about as fair as a mouse against a tiger-cat. I needn't have killed him. Why I should not is the heart of it.”'

He was still staring ahead, almost back in that morning's somberness.

“Fengthira told me, when I left. Warned me. ‘Tha'st been safe, in Hethria. T'will not be so easy, among the temptations of men.' ”

I did not have to find a prompt. His mouth tightened and he said too quietly, “ ‘I'm usually strong enough.' I actually said that. I'd forgotten—after trees, and rocks, I'd forgotten how fragile it is—flesh and blood.” He looked up into the dew-starred forest canopy and added, yet more quietly, “And I'd forgotten Math.”

I let the silence ask, Math?

“I follow the Four, I said to you. I thought Math was—an idea. A theory. Fengthira's business . . . something I just had to hear about. I know now, it's not.”

I just managed not to blurt, “Eh?”

“It isn't a theory.” Now I could hardly hear him at all. “For an aedr. . . . It's inside you, part of you. When you damage that, or break it. . . .” He made a little sound that was poles from a laugh. “Then you find what it means, to say, This'll hurt me more than it hurts you.”

I must have twitched or somehow else betrayed myself. His eyes came right round and he said it for me. “I'm sorry. You don't understand. You don't know anything about Math.”

I tried to make it sound neither pressing nor accusing. “No.”

He frowned. “I don't think I can explain this very well, because it's Math, to begin with. And I'm new to it. And I was never very good with words. But I think . . . ‘Math' is twofold. The—vision. And the rule. For the vision, Math means, Reality. That-which-is. For the rule . . . Fengthira says, the simplest is, Respect that-which-is. Trees, beasts, men. Because every single one is the sum of Math, and you can alter or destroy them, but to make them is beyond us all. It takes the whole world and all of time, it was never done before, and will never be done again.”

It was almost, I remembered, what he had said over the dead man.

“And the more power you have over that-which-is, the more reluctant you should be to exercise it. A little fire won't temper a sword-blade, but nor will it turn a master-sculptor's marble into lime.” I nodded. “I am an aedr. I can damage that-which-is more than—just about any living thing. I can misuse power. The way I did this morning. What's worse, I could come to enjoy misusing it.” He looked down at his crippled hand. “When I learnt the arts, Fengthira gave me a lesson on that I'll never forget. But the temptation lasts. Power can rot you. It can make you”—his voice grew careful—“destroy yourself.”

“Go on,” I said.

He shot me a glance, and looked away. Perhaps, I thought, he changed what he would have said.

“Um . . . so, the greater the power, the greater the obligation to respect Math. Be good, so to speak, to keep goodness good.” I wondered what the ears would make of that. “So when I kill a man by incompetence, I'm not only a bungler at my trade. I am a destroyer of Math. And because my power's the greater—so much the worse is my default.”

“You mean,” I was floundering, “if I step on a grasshopper, deliberately, it's still better than if you do—what you did—by mistake?”

He answered bleakly, “Yes.”

I stared. I had never dreamt of such a power, nor one which could so implacably condemn itself under a statute only its own consent could enforce.

“We are all responsible for Math”—he stared ahead of him—“according to our power. I'm an aedr. I used to think I had problems when I was just a king.”

His vague and enigmatic Math went straight out of my head. But the somber set of the mouth, the eyes still dark as malachite, warned all too clearly, Don't ask. Not now.

* * * * *

His mood had not lightened by our midday halt, though he was hardly quieter than the guards. Girthing up again, I wondered what might distract him, when he had ridden unseeing in the trenchant upland air under the mightiest trees in Thangar, past traffic that a day ago would have rotated off his head. Then a bend showed me the closest skyline. I eased my horse back a little behind the mare, and waited on events.

The hoof-noise told me the rest had closed up on us both. The mare flicked her ears, but he paid no heed. Then the light changed, and as you would expect his head came up.

He shot upright on the mare. His mouth fell wide. Then he cried, “Alkir, you louse!” and fairly flew from the mare's back to the highway edge.

If it is a whim of the Lady or her engineer I cannot say, but whoever built it had a craft to match the sheer audacity of the design. The Horned Gate lies on the very range brink, at the end of a long rising ridge that sweeps round from south to east; but at the bend-head the road diverges to spring clean across that bight of valley almost as deep as the range, rising on the gentlest of gradients to Vallin Taskar's port, upheld by pylons that elongate in center valley until the trees are green cauliflowers beneath each dizzily perpendicular stone jet, and the crowning span bears you across the sky like a spider on a giant's thread. While under the parapet the range falls in tiny, defeated folds to eighty miles of Morryan coastland and the knuckle of the Morhyrne and the tenuous, unending, aquamarine circumference of the sea.