Everran's Bane (19 page)

* * * * *

In truth, it is easier than you might think to travel in Hethria. Direction is easy, you go from where you are to where the next water is. We had one thing in our favor, that it was autumn, and the storms might have raised some herbage and left some transient pools. We took a pack-horse with a little food and two enormous cow-hide waterskins, bows, our swords, and Gebrian desert robes, voluminous blue things falling from neck to toe, which the true desert-marcher tops with a black turban of fine wool cloth swathed over nose and mouth and neck and head: the sun's worst peril is the way it sucks moisture from any naked skin. In fact, it is easier to cross than to enter Hethria, for the Gebros nowadays is gateless, and we first had to ask the garrison commander for men to open the walled-up arch.

Phengis had no fixed plan. “Just follow the waters, and hope to meet some Hethox. They should be hunting this country now. And if the spring's real, they're the only ones who'll know.”

I knew Beryx had grinned at him from the dance of his eyes, so vivid above the dull black wool. “Lead on,” he said. “It should be an interesting ride.”

Interesting it was: at our crossing point the Gebros marches with a twenty-mile width of sand-hills, and autumn had brought them alive with quick-shooting grass, runners of sappy green weed, grasshoppers and locusts and birds and exotic, unknown flowers. Nor is all Hethria sand. There were ranges beyond the first of it, long and low, rarely making peaks, slanted chines of rock that run in slabs like a stone dragon's mail, muted indigo, rusty red, reddish purple, purplish blue, crouched above the land like the last eroded capes of a vanished sea. Which they were: we found shells at some of our camps, and once Phengis nodded up at a gorge side and said, “A Hethox told me his ‘father-long-time-gone' used to sit fishing up there.” The ranges fascinated me far more than the spectacular mirages, for they have a savor of antiquity, of half-forgotten lore, and a self-awareness as well.

Through the ranges run dry river-beds that must have carried mighty streams, for their gorges make a jest of Bryve Kemreswash. They are like Air's own axe-clefts, rents in the stuff of earth, like dropped lava settled into crazy shapes, and their colors eclipse any maerian: lambent copper, molten gold, flaming orange, red as the inside of a fire, all set off by the staring white desert helliens. Femaerel, Gebrians call them: ghost-trees. The key is eminently true.

In these gorges were rock pools from the rain, or so large they rarely go dry, or fed by some secret, inexhaustible spring, and to them comes all the life of Hethria. I spent many enchanted evenings watching the tiny thorn-head lizards, the spotted log-lizards, the big dragonish yellow wyresparyx, the hopping lydyrs of a dozen kinds, and the birds coming to drink. I never saw such birds: gray birds with pink bellies like flying apple-flower, white birds with sulphur yellow crests above their snowy heads, small birds like rainbow bits, black birds with breath-taking crimson under their satin breasts. Phengis laughed at my wonder. “Oh,” he said, “there's plenty of life in Hethria.”

Its human life took us by surprise. Riding along a gorge we rounded a bend upon a waterhole in a little bay of grass, and from the grass rose copper-black naked men with stick-like legs, pot-bellies, strings about their loins and foreheads, and hair that rose like a bramble-bush. They confronted us, silent, with empty hands.

Phengis reined up hard. “Don't move,” he whispered tautly. “They're not happy. They've got the spears between their toes in the grass.”

Dropping the reins, he lifted both hands, then called something in a harsh gibberish. When there was no reply, he muttered over his shoulder, “Hold out your hands.”

Dutifully, we held them out. There was an endless pause. Then, one by one, the Hethox lifted a foot and the spear came with it, ten feet long, wicked shovel-nose blade gleaming in the sun. They took off the spear-throwers and leant on the hafts with a foot tucked on the other knee, while a gray-haired patriarch as naked as the rest but considerably fatter waddled up to Phengis's horse.

When they had talked awhile in the guttural tongue, Phengis swung down, grinning now. “He remembers me,” he said. “Three pieces of iron and some salt, and we can join their camp.”

The iron was arrowheads, since we were not sacrificing our swords. The salt was much appreciated. Dinner in return was not what I appreciated. Faced with a wooden dish of cold, cooked, white three-inch grubs, charred locusts, some pounded grass seed, and a lizard's leg, I nearly had no dinner at all. However, the Hethox had quite as much trouble being polite about our dried cheese and flour cakes.

They were very hospitable: they told us interminable tales and then thumped our backs and roared with laughter, showing perfect white teeth, they offered us a bag of grass-seed flour, and tried to teach me music blown on a six-foot hollow log. They were delighted by my harp, and made me play it over and over, in the midst of which I looked round to see two or three young gallants doing a perfect mime.

I imitated a Hethox trying to eat dried cheese. They rolled on the ground. One of them mimicked me stalking a lizard, crawling on hands and knees, treading on my gown, trying to rewind my turban, throwing my hands up and saying, “Four take you, you little pest!” They had the intonation pat. Beryx glanced at Phengis, who merely nodded. “They always watch you,” he said, “a good while first.”

Finally, when we were all replete with food and fellowship, Phengis turned to the Ruand and said something that ended in, “femaere—chxgos?”

Every smile went out, phut! The Ruand's reply was short and definite, with a chop of the hand. Waving at Beryx, Phengis embarked on a long and complicated speech which broke down as he tried to describe Hawge. At last he said to the blank stares, “Wyresparyx, ah?” Nods. “Wyresparyx... wyre.” He turned to Beryx. “How long is Hawge?” He paced it out across the camp. Eyes popped. He pointed to the fire, opened his mouth and roared,
Hawge!

The children stampeded. The Ruand looked perturbed. Phengis pointed west and harangued him again. The Ruand retorted with vehemence, “Femaere” and chops of the hand. Phengis sat down and said slowly, “They know about it. It's a very bad spirit place. They like us. They don't want us to go.”

I saw Beryx's hand clench. “Can you persuade them?”

Phengis looked awkward. “They want... rather a high price. Magic. To protect them if we wake the femaere. They want,” he nodded to my harp, “that.”

Beryx sighed. At last he said, “We might find others.”

I sat staring into the sand. He had given me a great deal. He had given me everything. But everything has its price.

I turned my harp over. My father had given it to me when I left Vethmel: his own harp, his heart's core, laid casually in my hands. Its syrel-wood sounding board was rubbed bare of varnish but still sweet and true, keys and strings renewed more often than I have years. They could not play it. They would ruin it. Its voice would die forever. It would never be heard again.

I heard myself say, sounding miles away, “I can always get another harp. We may never get another chance.”

* * * * *

The Ruand drew us a map, building tiny sandhills, making U-shaped hollows which mean “sit-downs”: a day's march. There were five. At the end, he gestured south-east and made an emphatic sign that needed no interpretation. He clapped both hands over his eyes.

As our morning mint-tea boiled Beryx said, “Phengis, this should be simple enough. A big red rock, three waters on, bearing south-east?” The Gebrian nodded. “Then I want you to go back. No, listen. This will be a dangerous meeting, if there is a meeting at all. I don't want to leave Everran wondering if it has a king. I don't want to risk more lives than I must. You have a family. Harran and I don't.”

“And,” said Phengis flatly, “I don't like leaving things half done.”

In the end they compromised. At sight of the rock, Phengis would return to this camp until news came, or until new moon. They fixed a code of smoke-signals, and we saddled up.

A Hethox march is little shorter than a rider's day, but before we found the second water the rock was in sight.

It was actually a cluster of rocks. First they looked like giant red mushrooms, then misshapen domes, then they climbed above the desert like some Hethrian fantasy of Earth itself. There is no range. They rise sheer from level sands, big as hills but solid stone, a cluster of piled, smoothed, rounded monoliths that change color with distance and the day's passing marks. Sunlit bubbles of delicate lavender, misty blue tinged with pink, deepening to red, steeped in gold at dawn, paling at noon to a cross between blood and rust, darkening to vermilion, lambent blood-red at sunset, dying in wonderful old golds and rose-black shadows as they take the dark. For three days we watched them play this silent diapason of light. Once Beryx said quietly, “If we never come back, it was worth it. Just for this.”

Without Phengis, the silence of Hethria seemed to rise up over us, a vast unbroken listening where bird and beast and our intrusive passage were no more than the scurry of ants. We talked little. Nor did we scout. As Beryx said, “If there is an aedr here, he's seen us coming. If he doesn't want us, he'll make us stop.”

It was an unpleasant thought. I rode in to the rock towers' feet with a tingle down my back.

On the north-west side a series of huge red headlands embayed desert herbage and spindly trees, and nothing else. Beryx said, “Sun-wise is lucky.” We rode right-handed round the towers' base.

Noon came and went and still we crawled under those majestic fronts, marveling at their height, the colors' subtlety, the sculpturing of Earth. The water-skins were low; the horses were looking for their daily drink. A small frown had gathered between Beryx's brows. Then we doubled another great bulging red flank, and reined sharply up.

Before us a new bay sloped gently down from the towers' lap, half a mile wide, a quarter long, but this was not a patchwork of sand and herbage. This was unbroken green, the green of desert grass in full season, thick and tall and showing a silken sheen as the wind moved upon acres of seeds, rippling, swaying like a harvest in that arid place. Close beside us a bare sheet of rock was filmed with seepage, the watery blue of reflected sky with a great red spire trembling and shivering across its width.

We stared in wonder. Then Beryx released a long, slow breath.

I glanced round. He had been quartering the valley like a soldier, but now he shook his head. Then he gave me a small dry grin and remarked, “Let's hope trespassers can argue first.”

We rode into the valley, our horses snatching greedily at the fresh new feed. Nothing woke, nothing moved but wind and light. But then came a dull thunder, and up over a hidden rise poured a cloud of shining shimmering dappled gray and floating white.

As our horses whinnied, Beryx let out a grunt. “Not phantoms, at least.”

In a moment they were all around, nickering, sniffing and play-nipping at our beasts: all grays, tall, beautifully made, sleek and superb as moonlight, a score of mares, foals, and yearlings, with a big stallion circling warily at the rear. Wondering if aedryx could change shape like werewolves, I looked warily back. Beryx grinned and clicked to his horse.

The grays circled us, then angled off to vanish in another fold of grass. The valley remained empty. A hundred yards from the cliff we looked at each other, not daring to speak. Then we heard the noise.

Somewhere ahead of us someone was whistling lustily and hammering rock on rock.

It was a strange tune, a jaunty teasing wagtail of a thing that would have suited a harp. I was already storing it in my head.
Chirrup, chirr, chirr!
went the whistler.
What! What!
went the stones.
What! What!

Beryx jerked his chin and said, “There.”

Just ahead and above us a narrow gut ran into the cliffs at such an angle that we had not previously noticed it. At its mouth a figure in a gray robe and black desert turban sat on its heels in a bare place, striking a long narrow flint over a block. The chips flew with echoing cracks. The striker whistled on, oblivious,
chirrup, chirr, what, what!

Beryx's eyes became green chips of mirth. He rode up in shouting distance and called, “Hello! I am looking for the master of the house!”

The figure broke off its hammering and looked sidelong down at us. As from Hawge's stare, I had an instinctive urge to duck.

But down the line of arm looked a pair of almost rectangular gray eyes as clear as rainwater and no more threatening, with dark rims of lash and fine deep crowsfeet sunk in dark-bronzed skin. A clear, resonant, unmistakably feminine voice said with equally unmistakable acerbity, “Well, Everran. Hast ta'en tha time over that.”

Beryx recovered first. Perhaps he had expected such things, perhaps not. His eyes danced. He swung down from his horse and answered politely, “Well, ma'am, your directions were hardly... direct.”

She struck the stone again. It was rusty-yellow, steel blue where freshly chipped, not a local piece. It was bedded on a patch of old hide while she struck it with some kind of chisel, perhaps bone, and a rock hammer. Her precise, expert blows at opposite angles were making a thing like a saw, with several teeth.