Everran's Bane (28 page)

The third morning we saddled up. By then the morvallin had made sizeable inroads even on that mighty carcass, and Beryx looked longingly at a half-picked rib-bone thick as a ship's. But then he shrugged, and turned his horse, and did not glance back.

Six days later we rode across the Gebasterne road upon a mirror-signal unit and four frustrated needle-eyed boys who were Morran's idea of a dragon watch and had trailed their quarry clean from Tirs, only to be baulked by Gebria's wastes. At sight of them Beryx pulled up his horse. “Tell them, Harran,” he said, rather awkwardly. “I'll wait here.”

It was difficult to tell them, and harder to win belief. When they did flash out a signal to Lynglos I think they were still inclined to put, “Unconfirmed,” on the end. But when one of them nodded to Beryx, asking, “Who's he?” and I said, “The king,” his face cleared in a flash.

“The king! King-slain! It must be right!” He was a wiry, freckly, carroty young Tiriann with as much bounce as his unruly hair, and he promptly went rushing up to Beryx's horse. “Lord! Lord! You did it, you killed it! Tell me, show me, it was the weapon, wasn't it?” Evidently Phengis' message had traveled as far as Tirs. “Where is it? What is it? Ouh, it must be, must be...”

His eye took the empty scabbard, and filled with disbelief. It lifted, and Beryx looked silently down from his horse.

With his sheepskin jacket, the filthy sling, battered trousers, and what remained of his black turban, he did not look a king. He might have been an outlaw, a desert vagabond. But one glance into those fathomless, steadfast, yet constantly fluxing green eyes would teach you your mistake.

I saw the boy's own eyes widen. His jaw sank. His jubilation died in uncomprehending fear that went deep as consciousness itself. Then, still mute, still staring, he began to back away.

Beryx smiled a little, sad, tired smile. “That's the weapon, Skith.” Now I listened, I could hear the aedric intonation, the soft, impersonal, menacing sound of dormant power. “To kill a dragon, that's all you need.”

* * * * *

Lynglos took the quick way to verify the signal by coming out to meet us on the road. When we topped the last long ridge and saw its untidy outskirts spreading their vegetable patches and stunted trees and clotheslines about the seething human mass, Beryx pulled off his turban, observing, Our youthful honor guard, all personal qualms lost in the glory of their role, were already chanting, “It's the king! The dragon's dead! It's the king!”

Lynglos was not so sure. It is a Gebrian town, and Gebrians are as skeptical as they are dour. I saw a large man with the stomach of office reserving judgment, a band with instruments tucked under their arms, a banner not yet unrolled. Then a broad lame person with Phalanx written all over him reached the front. I heard him grunt, “That's Beryx all right!” He hobbled forward, demanding “You've done it, sir? It's dead?”

When Beryx nodded, he drew a long, long breath. Then he flung back his head and let out an ear-splitting triumph yell.

Next moment the band was thumping, the banner waving, the stomach had surged forward with an effulgent smile, and Lynglos had lined the road, laughing, weeping, cheering, patting our knees or feet or horses' shoulders, shouting whatever came into their heads. I heard two ancients disputing fiercely over what weapon would suit a one-handed man. A girl threw me the keerphar flower from behind her ear, the veteran was fighting the stomach for the honor of housing us. Ahead of me all was tearful rapture: behind me, I could hear the moment when Beryx passed.

He had been looking straight ahead, but no king like Beryx could bear to greet such a welcome with indifference. I knew he would begin to smile, to glance about in search of known faces or in answer to some particularly pressing call, and I knew what happened when he did. I had seen it with Skith. My heart bled for him as the wave of silence passed and the valiant, uncertain rejoicing broke out again in its wake.

The veteran won the battle of the beds on condition that the stomach, who was council Ruand, had us to dine with them. It was a poor meal, for if Lynglos had escaped Hawge's personal attentions it was still part of Everran, and worsted the stomach's eagerness to give us what we deserved. When the watered wine stood alone on the table, he said, “And now, lord, tell us. How was it done?”

Four! I thought. I could almost hear Fengthira's, “Dost not know what tha askst.” Then I glanced at the council, leaning forward with every appearance of avidity and not an eye on his face, and thought, How can he tell you, when you dare not even admit what he is?

Beryx too had mostly kept his eyes on his plate. Now he smiled quickly, a man not wanting to seem aloof and unable to be otherwise. A mere shadow of his old charm, but enough.

“Harran's making a song,” he said. “If I steal his audience, I dread to think what he'll do.” He told the tale of our slander-bout in Estar, and rose on the laugh. “I beg your pardon, Tarmel, but after so much Hethrian water I daren't tackle a night on our own wine.”

The veteran made a better fist of meeting his eyes, but I could feel the effort in every glance. When the abbreviated reminiscences were over and we were left in the tiny best bedroom, with horses feeding under the window and Everran's helliens masking a star, Beryx sank down on the nearer bed. And when I saw the way his shoulders bent, the pain became too much.

“Dost thou wish,” I said, “thee”ing him for the first time, partly out of love, partly from my own distress, “that I had never carried thee from a field?”

After a moment he shook his head.

“No,” he said. It came with conviction. He was looking eastward through the hellien, and I knew he saw those half-stripped bones in the desert sun. “It was worth it. All of it. Even this.”

* * * * *

It was the same all the way west, through ever more elaborate, better prepared welcomes, more hectic rejoicing, more determined attempts to confront him normally. But always that silence would run along the crowds as they sought for a weapon and found it, always there was that reluctance to meet or too-quick aversion from his eyes.

Or not always. What was worse was the ones who looked and then stood entranced, who would sometimes follow us to the next town and beyond, and when asked why, would answer in bewilderment, “I don't know. I just... had to come.”

The people of Saphar had been returning before Phengis's message arrived. We rode up on a wet gray winter morning to a city with sodden banners strung across gaps whence rubble had been cleared, with a wall of fully furbished Guardsmen restraining a thin, patched but spirited populace, and to my infuriated amazement, a Regent posted at the bridgehead under an umbrella to protect his official robes.

Beryx's eyes slitted. “My uncle,” he murmured, with that new, fearful intonation, “never learns.” Then he choked. “And,” the gurgle was suppressed laughter, “he'll be
so
happy with this!”

The Regent, however, had evidently been warned, for if his welcome was forced it did not break. “We've worked on the palace for you, m'boy... Ah, here's Kyvan—” And out popped Kyvan, complete with prayers and crimson cloak, which had to be girded on then and there. Beryx submitted, with the first softening of his braced composure since Lynglos: but as he walked forward into the roar of cheering it became a smile of genuine delight.

“Morran!” he said. “Well done!”

I saw the young face under the helmet flush. I also saw he was one of the rare few who could manage, quite naturally, to hold Beryx's eye. “Sir,” he said stiffly. Then, more easily, “I've left a terrible lot for you.”

* * * * *

For the next three weeks Beryx did it, at more than his old pace. This I can vouch for, since I had to share the task. It was, “Harran, what do you think of this? Harran, what shall we do about that? Harran, will you see so-and-so, fix something-or-other, decide such-and-such,” so in those three weeks I never touched a harp. I thought he wanted to keep out of view, I feared a loss of his inherent decisiveness, and was too busy to ponder the cause. I was finding a new Treasurer, blazoning Everran's redemption round the Confederacy, even arranging a new audience hall and rooms for Sellithar.

It was raining hard that morning, so we had drawn the panels at the roofed end of the old hall, lit the fire, put hangings for the drafts and buckets under the drips. There was little business. More and more often it was, “Harran, will you ask the king this? See if he wants that?” It hurt me, if I understood why. But at the very end a thin, furtive man with an Estarian face and fixed, blank eye emerged from the departing crowd. He did not speak. He merely stood before the high seat and looked up at the king.

That disquieting aedric smile began to weave in Beryx's eyes. He held out his hand.

Still with a tranced stare, the man slid his own hand into his cloak, and Beryx's palm filled with the cataracted, golden-shot white fire of Maerdrigg's maerian.

Beryx looked into the man's eyes. Slowly they woke, showed bewilderment, panic; he gave a wild start. Beryx shook his head. The man stood still.

Beryx said softly, “For the nerve, I admire you. For what you cost Everran, I should roast you alive. I won't. But if I were you, I should be in Quarred tomorrow night.”

The man fled like a lydyr with ulfann on its track. Beryx tilted the great maerian. Then he said without looking up, “Harran, will you ride with me, one more time?”

* * * * *

We wore our old traveler's clothes and took the horses we had ridden so very far. As they led up Beryx's big dark-brown, one of the blood horses he had so loved in earlier days, he slapped its neck lightly and clicked his tongue. And did not tighten the reins, I noticed, when he swung up.

We rode south into the dark winter rain that would heal Everran's scars, always cold, more often wet than dry. I wondered why Beryx did not use wryvurx to shield us, and he shook his head at me. “It's better not to meddle,” he said, “unless you must.”

Before we reached Saphar I had noticed how little he used a bridle to manage his horse. That night, as we sat in an upstairs room of the inn at Asleax, I watched him reach over the wine jug without moving a hand. A shamefaced grin came as he caught my eye.

“Well,” he said, “it is easier.” And thinking it little enough compensation for all the sorrow his arts had brought, I nodded and reached for my new harp.

Next day we struck off from the Azilien into central Tirs, traveling now as Inyx had once led us, as the morvallin fly. That night Beryx found a huge old burnt-out khanel to shelter us. Next day we were high in the hills, the Helkent looming over us, slashed white with waterfalls, dark meat-red from the rain. Beryx murmured, “It will be a good season this year.”

I did not ask our destination. I had already guessed. We found it next day, a narrow black valley running up into the mountains' gut, stony, deserted, pathless, oddly eerie in the unbroken rain. At the mouth Beryx reined in, narrowed his eyes, and nodded. “Ker Eygjafell,” he said. “Shadows' Home.”

We rode in, our horses slipping and stumbling on the stones. The valley turned, showing its true head was still some way off, a black cliff with the blind mouth of a cave at its base. Something in the very atmosphere made me half rein in, and Beryx gave me a quick, warm smile. “You'll be with me,” he said.

The horses would not enter the cave, even in the rain, and we did not force them. We walked through what had once been a tall double doorway, into a black, dank, echoing space whose frigid air made me gasp.

“I suppose,” Beryx remarked absently, “he expects me to see in the dark. But I can't. Harran, did we put any wood in those saddlebags?”

I brought him a piece of twine and five or six sticks, and he lit the torch with one quick flash. “May as well announce ourselves,” he said. “Now. The Ilam.” It is the old Everran word for a high chamber. “It'll be up here.”

We climbed some broken, hollowed steps, Beryx walking steadily, me treading on his heels. The high chamber was empty and cheerless as the rest. I saw Beryx's eye alter, and knew that at some time he had seen it differently.

“There should have been a coffer,” he said, “but I suppose that's gone with the rest. We'll have to do the best we can.”

He slid a hand into his sheepskin jacket. The maerian answered the torch with a royal crimson meteor, and on its flare, in the darkness beyond us, shone two white, glowing, phantom gems.

My blood curdled. Beryx, unperturbed, looked at the Dead and asked simply, “Where?”

Maerdrigg retreated, or rather receded. Beryx followed. On the far side of the chamber a niche had been delved, high in the stone. He slid the maerian in. With a last flare it vanished, and Maerdrigg vanished with it. Beryx stood a moment looking into the dark, before he murmured, in pity and sadness, “Sleep well.”

I left the Ilam backward, and the cave the same way. Only when we were clear of the valley did Beryx's shoulders relax and he let out a long, heartfelt, “Whew!”

“No wonder the horses wouldn't go in,” he said, when I looked at him. “They're all there. Darrhan, Maersal, Maerond, Darven. The whole Maerheage clan. Worse than the Quarred Tingrith. Ugh!” Then he began to whistle, my catch for the Eskan Helken saeveryr, and we rode off thankfully through the rain.