“Kreesh,” answered the whelt, and came, swooping upon the way to snatch a ripe peona melon from the pile at the memnis’ foot.
Deilcrit started to shake his head, gasped in pain, and turned cautiously to face the whelt that alighted at his side.
He looked from it, to the glossy black oval of the peona, then back.
“Kirelli,” he ventued, trying what he thought to be the whelt’s name for the first time. “You are a wehr, are you not?”
The green eyes regarded him soberly, unblinking. “What does Wehrdom want with me?”
The whelt pushed the melon toward him, butting it with his cruelly curved beak. Then it stretched out its neck, as if with a message.
“No!” he exploded, throwing himself backward, forgetful of his wound.
It was a time before the pain left and vision returned. The soft sobbing sound he had been hearing ceased when he realized his own throat was its source.
The whelt was perched upon the melon, wings half-unfurled.
He pushed himself up awkwardly. “Go away. Wehr! I ...”
And the soft touch within his mind stopped him witless. Not all whelts are wehrs. Nor are all of any species. Not until Wehrdom scythes through the forest, leaving all manner of beast dead in its wake, is it known which are wehrs and which are not. Then ptaiss turns upon ptaiss and campt upon campt, and all the wehr beasts drink the forest’s blood. And when it is over, and the forest is calm once more, they graze and nest and burrow beside their prey of only days before. Those wehrs that are known are shown deference in the way of their species, according to the members’ society. In man, as in beast, the wehr rules. And it is either death to taste of Wehrdom, or something most unthinkable, more awesome perhaps than death itself: Wehrs speak only to other wehrs and their chosen. This latter possibility was one of which he strove not to think at all.
“Wehr, I will be certainly dead by morning. Go tell your mistress—”
The whelt let out an ear-splitting squawk and pumped its wings.
“Pardon,” he said automatically. “I assumed ... You do wear Mahrlys’ band.” Most whelts are not wehrs at all; these can still carry such a picture as messaging requires. None of his whelts had ever been wehrs. He supposed dully that wehrs, even be they whelts, might well be touchy as to rank. But he knew nothing of Wehrdom. He said this.
The whelt responded by hopping off the melon, neck extended. It did a wing-flapping dance in his direction. This time he had not the will to rid it. And then he understood more than he cared to of Wehrdom. Kirelli, prince of wehrs, had chosen him. Against all odds and until his death (privately Deilcrit thought that this would not be too long, so the whelt princeling risked little), Kirelli would succor and protect him: he was wehr-chosen. He interpreted this from a flood of flashing pictures as awash in his mind, from the touch of myriad other minds behind the whelt’s, minds that sent homage and welcome incomprehensible to him. So spake the whelt? In substance, though Deilcrit saw and felt emotion with the seeing, rather than hearing language. And then he did hear language, perfect, multitonal, a liquid sound that seemed to come from the exact center of the back of his head: “Allow me to guide you; when that is past, to accompany you; when that time too is gone, to follow. And but recall, in future, that I was first to aid you.”
Deilcrit awkwardly dragged his feet from the pool, thinking that he would not much longer recall anything. “Let me be,” he mumbled blurrily, and heard: “I will.”
The wehr Kirelli seldom again spoke to him in this fashion, and for a time he tried to believe he had imagined the incident; he was too much a Beneguan to think otherwise, to repudiate all he had been. He would not believe until it was forced on him, much later. He said: “Let me be, whelt!”
Accepting the command, the wehr burst into flight, and alighted on that same tree branch where Deilcrit had first seen him waiting.
Somewhere within him he was glad that the wehr was not going to kill him. But it had not told him why it was not going to kill him, and this bothered him: he had killed a number of wehrs. Surely Wehrdom would strike him down, not just, as was so obviously the case here, monitor him until his death. So he spoke to himself, insistent, as if no wehr had just proclaimed fealty.
He decided to eat the fruit, and ignore the whelt. After he had eaten the fruit he began to wonder what he would do if he lived. First he considered living the day, then the night, then what he might do if indeed he survived the wehrs and his wound.
He tossed off the whelt’s presence: he had always had a way with whelts.
He found it relatively easy to edge his way around the bank to the pile of fruit on the memnis’ root. When he had eaten his fill, he slept. He admitted to himself, just before dreams took him, as he shifted the makeshift scabbard tied around his waist and gently positioned his left arm with his right, that the whelt was a wehr. The wehr might be lying. Then he thought that it did not really matter, unless he awoke. His last thought, that of having been unable all day to walk more than a few steps at a time without rest, led him into dreams of interminable trekking.
When he seized consciousness once more, the rain was falling, the midday sky sagging with its weight. Through the gentle screen of the steady drizzle he could see only a short distance, but he saw well enough to know that there was no whelt, wehr or otherwise. He rubbed his forehead. Even slick with rain, he could feel his fever. He pushed himself to a sitting position, and with the strangers’ knife slit the twine around his memnis-bandaged arm, peeled back the softened bark very slowly, biting his lip until it bled. At last, with a rip that took half the new scab away with the bark, he stripped it off, washed the wound, and examined it.
His critical facility knew that the wound in its present state would drain. But he was shivering uncontrollably when he finished.
He retrieved the masticated vabillia from his cave, applied it to the round hole in the wound’s center, cut new memnis bark, and repeated the binding process. He did it more to keep moving, to still his teeth from chattering, to gather his wits, than for hygiene. It was, in the end, a sloppier bandage than the first. He shrugged, and winced.
Whelt, no whelt, he cared not. No more than he cared about those creatures whose weapons he bore upon his person. He would live if he kept moving, this he knew. And he
would
live. He would seek out Mahrlys on his own, and she would see the artifacts he carried, and listen, and perhaps give him answers for these events and seemings that taxed his mind. The wound was real enough, and the food he ate. And if the whelt that was a wehr had not really spoken to him, then at least it had not clawed out his eyes. Nor had any other in the night.
He threw down the last rind of the whelt’s gift, and looked once full around the clearing, that he might spy Kirelli in hiding. Though he barked in pleasure when he determined that no whelt spied on him, it was a false pleasure, and he heard it so. Disappointed, he rose up and moved from the dappled surface of the pool. Without a backward glance, faster than was prudent, he set off down a slight trail he followed without thought, from long familiarity. The whelt’s disappearance followed after him; its image cawed derisively; he had believed, he had wanted to believe, that he was wehr-chosen. He had taken up arms against them, and now he wanted absolution. A great host of fears dogged his steps, spreading wide and closing like pincers about him in the rain-misted thickets. Somehow, the exertion upstepped his disquiet and he fled a phantom Wehrdom through the greenlit wood, until, lungs pumping, he stumbled once too often.
It was where the trail intersected the Dey-Ceilneeth road that he stumbled. He knelt there a long time, gaining breath, supported on his good arm, his bad one hanging limp.
It was a sound that forewarned him. He raised his head and peered into the abating sun-dazzled drizzle, down the rainbow-arched way that stretched wide and straight deep into the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth. He could have risen. He could conceivably have staggered an hour or so more through the worsening tangle, or fled back the way he had come.
They approached slowly, with infinite majesty over the steaming turves of the great way: a multitude of ptaiss, milk-white, churning. Or so it seemed at first, until his vision focused. Then he simply sat in the middle of the road with his left hand in his lap and waited.
Toward him came a score of ptaiss, flowing like a single drop of water down the road’s middle. In their center, robed in white, walked a tall figure with long, loose hair black as midnight.
His head lowered, he awaited the priestess of Mnemaat.
Waiting, he became aware that he could not have run farther. He began to doubt whether or not he could run at all. By the time he could pick out the ptaiss coughs, pad-clicks, low growls from the sounds around him, he was concentrating on maintaining a sitting position. His body was free from pain, but numb.
He heard: “Rise up.”
He did that, without distress. Without any feeling. He stood as if on another’s feet. He focused his eyes on her face, which loomed close, much closer than the ground, much more comforting. Her eyes were green, and all colors danced therein. They widened when she spoke:
“Feeling better, my fallen iyl? I would venture to hope so.”
His, peripheral vision was aware of the ptaiss parting, of her stepping down the aisle they made, ever closer, but his direct sight was only of her eyes, whose size did not vary even as she approached.
Somehow, his consternation never reached his nervous system. He viewed it from a distance, coldly; as he noted the whelt which somehow swooped into his sight, its green eyes becoming one with the woman’s face, until it was a great whelt’s visage that stared at him, looming ever closer upon a woman’s body robed in white. He recorded this occult event without bias, sparing it no emotion.
“Come, then, we will help you. When justice is desired by all, it is quickly done.” And he took her arm and she assisted him, softly but with infinite strength. He saw that the ptaiss closed around them. Their backs swayed rhythmically on all sides. He felt no surprise, not in that or in the fact that he was able to keep the pace the priestess set: when he faltered she would lay her hands upon him and his legs would lighten, his left arm would issue only muted screams, his mind would float above, alert, impassive. And he would walk on.
She fed him and watered him and allowed him to look upon her without her robe. She tended his wound, and the line of her long throat, swooping, gilded his sleep. The ptaiss hunted and she fed him from their kill, tiny strips of raw meat daintily carved. She boiled herbs in an empty gourd over a rock that seemed to heat at her low command. She touched his forehead in the night and laid soothing cloths upon it. In the morning the ptaiss would form once more around them and she would touch him lightly and they would go on. And she would smile sometimes; but not until the third day did she again speak.
“Deilcrit,” she murmured, “whatever possessed you not to die?”
“Ipheri?” he managed, for he did not know her name, and that honorific would do for the its herself.
“Try not to be afraid. In Dey-Ceilneeth, I will not be with you. If you waste your energy in fear, you will heal slowly, and all will be held up just that much more.”
Just then the whelt alighted between them, and her face paled, and her eyes widened until they consumed the sky.
But the whelt beat its wings and screeched its war cry, and seemed almost to dive at her. There was a blur of arms and wings, and the whelt shot into the treetops.
The priestess’s white robe was torn at the seam where sleeve met shoulder. The shoulder, striped with a thin red line, held his eyes. He felt, as before with his fear, only a distant, intellectual realization that something was amiss.
“So, you are other than you appear. Let me apologize,” she whispered.
His arm suddenly began to broadcast its protests, his feet were their own bed of hot coals, his stomach turned to eating itself.
She traced the scratch with her forefinger. The nail was long, shapely.
“Deilcrit, ignorance is your only salvation.
Be
ignorant. If you are any part of this incursion, even my pity will be insufficient to the plight that must befall you in recompense. Be, by all means, a foolish adolescent, made iyl too soon by circumstance ....” She seemed to want to say more.
He peered attentively at her, waiting.
“Call that whelt,” she commanded, and before he realized it, he had done so.
It screeched from its perch, but, did not move. “It will not come.”
“Because of me. Yet it seems to have answered you. How can you, a guerm-tender, command such a creature?”
He realized then, what she was saying, and bent his head. For a long time he was alone with his pain.
When she chose, she lifted it once more from him.
In the exquisite cessation of discomfort, she asked him for the alien swords he wore about his waist. He would have given her anything, his heart, his life, whatever she asked. He plucked ineffectually at the hastily tied thong, and she slid toward him, and with her own tiny dagger slit the cord. He did not then think to wonder why she did not just take them. Instead, he wondered at the fragrance of her hair. He looked upon the part in her hair, lost in the sheen of the thick smooth strands.
But when the weight was gone from about his waist, when she stepped back from him with a tiny smile of triumph lighting her lips, he was distantly aware that something was very wrong, that more had transpired here than he understood, or would have agreed to had he been ... otherwise. Then he came to it, what he had known but could not feel: that he was in some odd way entrapped; that he must remember this above all things. He wished to feel determination, felt instead confused.
Having acquired the swords, she retreated to the side of one of the larger ptaiss, curling up against the prostrate beast’s belly. Her robe fell in folds around her, riding the line of her turned hip.
He thought fiercely that she had not totally bested him, that he had retained the knife, also of the strange metal. But a part of him dryly bespoke the truth: she did not want the knife. He knew he was going to go to her, but had no idea what he was going to do. He never did recall it. She did not wish him to recall it. Nor, which is more to the point, did she wish him to forget it: he recalled rising, his, detatched concern for his arm as he knelt before her—then nothing but a sense of shame, an uneasy wondering, and an indebtedness that crouched in his very soul.