Daughter of Lir (30 page)

Completely without thought, she flung herself from the
mare’s back. She landed rolling, somersaulted to her feet, and ran headlong
back the way she had come. She had no sword or spear, no blade but the knife
she used for cutting meat, but she had a bow and a full quiver. She strung the
bow as she ran.

Battle was a milling, scrambling, untidy thing. Surprised
and unhorsed the tribesmen might be, giddy with wine or dazed with sleep, but
they fought as they had been bred and trained to fight.

The men from Lir had been wise, had divided them from each
other, each choosing his own target, but Rhian saw a thing that made her heart
sink. The men of Lir struck to stun or wound. The men of the tribe struck to
kill.

She nocked arrow to string. She was on a rise of ground,
which was well; she had a great advantage. Her mind was clear. The world seemed
to slow. She had ample time to think, to choose her target.

Too much time, maybe. One of them killed Conn. She saw the
blow, saw it begin, saw it fall. The copper sword hacked his head half off his
shoulders. The tribesman who wielded it was familiar—they all were. He laughed
as he wrenched the blade out of the still-twitching body and whirled on Mabon.

She aimed for the heart. The wind was treacherous, gusting,
whirling bits of dust and dried grasses, tangling the men’s hair in their
faces. It whipped a streamer of hair across her eyes just as she loosed.

The arrow flew straight and true. Just as with a deer in the
wood. Just so. It pierced the boy’s narrow breast with force enough to whirl
him half about. His expression was incredulous.

Rhian had no time to waste in reflecting that she had taken
a life—that she had killed. She nocked again. Another wild-haired boy, another
bloody blade—spear this time. She could not see whom he had killed. It did not
matter. She shot him in the throat, not intending that, but the wind had a mind
of its own.

They had all seen her now. They called to one another,
drawing together, beating off the men of Lir with ease that was almost
contemptuous. They laughed at wounds. Only death won their respect.

She had given them death. Two of them stayed behind to hold
off her kinsmen. The rest dropped flat in the grass and slithered up the hill
toward her. They were as fast as snakes, and their eyes were fully as cold. She
saw in them the death she had given, returned in full measure.

Thunder rumbled. Lightning cracked. The wind rose to a gale.
There was no shooting of arrows in that. Rhian drew her bronze dagger. She had
no thought of running.

These tribesmen must not escape. They must die, or she must.
Otherwise they would bring down the whole of their tribe on the caravan, and
then on Lir.

With a sound like a wolf’s howl, Mabon cut down one of the
men who blocked his way, and fell on the rearmost of those who stalked Rhian.

As if that had roused the rest, they surged in his wake.
Their blood was up at last. They had remembered what they were trained for.
They were defending the mare’s servant, the Mother’s daughter of Lir.

Dal was dead with a spear in his heart, and Gwion who had
been Emry’s cousin. And Conn—Conn was dead on the steppe that had become his
home. The others were wounded in varying degrees. Rodry might not live out the
night.

But all the men of the steppe had fallen, every one. Their
horses, their chariots were safe. All the harness, the weapons, half a dozen
skins of kumiss, had fallen to the victors. Rhian must think of that, must see
it as a victory, even though the man she had long thought of as her father had
died for her whim.

They gathered all their plunder together in the teeth of the
wind. Lightning danced from cloud to cloud. Sometimes they saw it strike—not
always afar off. There was no rain. The air was grittily dry. Rhian’s skin
prickled. When she reached to scrape her hair out of her face, it snapped at
her fingers, clinging to them, tangling worse than before.

“We can’t linger here!” Hoel bellowed in her ear, fighting
to be heard above the wind. “But we can’t go on, either. This is the wind of
the gods below, the wind of fire. If it kindles the grass . . .”

The grass was dry. The women of the tribe had been using
twists of it for tinder. If fire began on the steppe, with this wind to drive
it, it would burn with a terrible swift flame.

“We’ll hitch up the chariots,” Rhian shouted back at Hoel.
“We’ll take the dead with us—all of them—and take every vestige of the camp,
and leave the rest to the wind. We’ll get the wind at our backs—see, it’s
blowing westward. We’ll take shelter past yonder ridge. Doesn’t it dip down
into a valley?”

“No closed places,” Hoel said. “No traps. If the grass
catches fire, we’ll burn like rats in a kiln.”

“The ridge will block the wind,” Rhian said, “and maybe the
fire too, if it comes.”

“It will come,” Hoel said. But he did not try to stop her.

She had only memory to go by, and two dozen fretting, anxious
horses to bind with the tangle of lines and fastenings that made up their
harness; and night was falling fast. But Bran’s eye was quick and his memory
good, and he had studied the chariots more carefully than she had. He
instructed the others, such as were not too badly hurt to walk. They managed,
if not well, then at least adequately. The lightning was nearly constant,
granting flashes of vision. It was enough, just.

Rhian took the reins of the first team, a pair of
long-legged blacks.

There were not enough men, wounded or hale, to drive all the
chariots, but their teams would follow the mare, she hoped, and the lead of
their own herdmates, as did the remounts and the guards’ own horses.

She could barely see the team behind her. The mare was a
white glimmer ahead. She followed the mare from flash to flash of lightning,
through the by now incessant growl of thunder, with the wind buffeting her
back. She did not pretend even to herself that she was driving the chariot.
None of them was. The mare led, and the stallions followed. She wound the reins
about the pole and clutched the sides and let herself be carried wherever the
Goddess willed.

Rodry died in the chariot that carried him to such refuge
as there was. They did indeed find shelter below the ridge, up against a sudden
steep slope. The wind swooped and howled above them, but the air below was
still. There was no water here, nothing to drink but what they had brought with
them from the charioteers’ camp.

They buried the dead under the loom of the cliff, in the
sand and scree that was at least easier to dig through than the matted grass of
the steppe. They laid the charioteers together, with respect, for they had died
in honorable battle, and their own they laid side by side and a little apart.
Then they built a cairn over them all, no very great or high one, but enough to
keep wild beasts from digging up the bones.

There were no words to say over them that could be heard
above the wind, but they all prayed silently, gathered in a circle. No one
wept, not even Rhian. That would come later, when there was time.

They snatched what sleep they could, with men taking turns
on guard, hour by grueling hour. It seemed a long time until dawn. The wind
never slackened. The lightning did not cease its lashing of the steppe.

Somewhere in that endless night, Rhian began to smell smoke.
She might be dreaming it. Lightning had its own sharp reek, and the air was
full of it.

Bran was on guard just then, sitting on the edge of their
makeshift camp, beyond the circle of chariots that enclosed both men and
horses. He had his back to one of the chariots, his face toward the shrieking
dark.

She crouched beside him in the flicker of the lightning, and
bent toward his ear. “There’s smoke in the wind.”

He nodded. “The grass is burning behind us.”

“That will destroy whatever traces we left behind,” she
observed.

He nodded again. He did not say what he must be thinking, as
she was. That the caravan was still up there, moving slowly, at donkey-speed.

And that Minas was with it, the prize they had won at the
cost of Emry’s body and perhaps his life, and the lives of Conn and Dal, Gwion
and Rodry.

“At dawn,” she said, “I’ll take the mare. I’ll find them.”

“You can’t risk that,” he said. “Send someone else.”

“No,” said Rhian. “No one else can ride the mare. You go on.
Make for the river. If we don’t catch you before then, we’ll find you in
World’s End.”

“We can’t leave you behind,” he said. “The steppe will burn.
If you go back—”

“We need the prince of chariots,” she said. “But if we lose
him, at least we have the chariots themselves, and the horses. It’s a better
outcome than we ever hoped for.”

“Not if we lose you.”

She laid her hand on his cheek. It was rough with grit, his
beard caked with it. “Dear friend. You know what welcome I can expect in Lir.
Maybe it’s best if I not come back. And if I do—I’ll bring their master
chariot-maker, their tamer of horses, their charioteer. That’s worth my life,
yes?”

“No.”

“I am going, Bran,” she said. “As soon as it’s light, I’ll
take the mare and one of the stallions and go back for him. I’ll bring the
caravan if I can—but that I can’t promise.”

“Just come back,” he said. His voice was thick. “Just come
back alive.”

It was not wise, maybe, but she slid arms about him and laid
her head against his broad familiar breast. He did not thrust her away. There
was no passion in it, only the comfort of body to body and spirit to spirit in
this night like the wrath of all the gods below.

o0o

She left in the first grudging glimmer of dawn. The wind
had abated somewhat, but was still blowing strong. The lightning had moved off
to the westward. There was a flicker of ruddy light in the sky to the east, but
it was not the light of the sun. The steppe was burning.

She caught the acrid tang of it as she ascended the slope of
the ridge. The mare clambered stoically upward, but Emry’s grey stallion shook
his head and snorted.

As she rode onward, the line of fire lengthened. It had
begun somewhat to the north, and was running south and west. From the angle of
it, she reckoned that the camp of the Windriders was on the other side—a wall
of fire to bar any pursuit.

Indeed the Goddess was protecting her own. Rhian could only
pray that that protection would extend to her as she went back for the caravan.

It was not easy in this featureless country to know where
she had been or where she should go. Yet again she had to trust the mare. She
recognized the charioteers’ camp, at least, as she rode past it. It was a
trampled circle in the grass, dark stains of blood, gouges of hooves and
chariot-wheels. A blind tracker could tell what had happened there.

The fire would scour it. The wind whipped her face. The
smoke was stronger. She coughed. There was a brown haze over the world, dimming
what morning light there was.

The caravan must be somewhere close by the broken camp. She
had to trust the mare. She was a tracker of sorts, but not in this country, nor
in this wind, or in this veil of smoke.

She was beyond exhaustion. She clung to the mare’s back and
to the stallion’s lead. She saw without understanding, how much closer the fire
was than it had been a little while ago. The wind was driving it. It was
coming, she thought without emotion, faster than a horse could gallop.

She was the bird of flame. Fire was her element. She flew
free in it. If she escaped the cage of her body—what matter? Nothing would ever
bind her again.

She all but fell into the caravan. It had taken such refuge
as it could in a fold of the earth, by a wide shallow pool. The donkeys were
covered in mud. Their masters had wet down the leather of their tents and taken
shelter beneath. There was no grass in a broad circle about them—they had
stripped the earth bare.

Wise men. They greeted her as if she had been an apparition
of the dead. “Mount,” she said, “and ride. Ride for all you’re worth. The fire
comes.”

Hoel shook his head. “No, lady. We can’t outrun it. We’ll
pray that it runs past us.”

She opened her mouth to protest, but shut it again with the
words unspoken. What he had said was manifestly true. There was no way a
company of men on foot, with donkeys, was going to outrun a wildfire. They were
as safe in this place as it was possible for them to be.

“I’ll take the prisoner,” she said at length. “He has to
come to Lir. If he stays here—if the tribe comes upon you before you can escape
westward—”

If Hoel thought her a fool, he did not say so. Two of his
men slung the limp burden of the prince over the grey stallion’s back and bound
him securely. They covered him with a dampened cloak, and gave Rhian another.
“Goddess keep you,” Hoel said for them all.

“And you,” she said. “May she hold you in the hollow of her
hand. Look for us in Lir, caravan-master.”

He bowed to her, even to the ground, and all his men with
him. Long before they rose, the mare had turned away, and the stallion in her
wake.

o0o

They raced the wind and the storm of fire. They paused
only to drink from the little rivers. Smoke engulfed them. Rhian, taking Hoel’s
lesson, tore her shirt asunder and wetted it in each stream they passed, and
bound the halves of it to the bridles of the horses, to protect their noses and
shield them from the smoke.

Rhian could feel the fire’s heat searing her back, crisping
the tiny hairs. Flames reared up in a wall behind her. Their roaring filled the
world.

She was going to die. Even she, the bird of flame, had no
power against this. And yet, because she was Rhian, she could not surrender.
She must fly.

The mare bore her. The stallion, brave heart, forged on in
her wake. Westward on the wind’s back. Westward to the river of souls; to
death, or to Lir.