Exile's Gate (14 page)

Chei's mouth stayed open an
instant. There was a wild flicker in his eyes, only the briefest of
moments. Then his glance settled from him onto Morgaine and back again.
"The same as I," he said. "They will kill us all, you on sight, me when
they recognize me for one of Ichandren's men. Prisoners do not come
back. But if we go back to the Old Road, they will take us for Gault's
and kill us just the same."

It was wretched enough to be the truth.

"And where are they?" Morgaine asked. "Close enough to cause that band of Gault's to ride at night? What are we going into?"

"War," Chei said, "war,
lady, beginning with that fire down there and eight men dead. If things
had settled to any truce before—Gault will lay that fire to the account
of human folk, and human folk will know that when they see the fire. Up
there in the hills they will know it, and they will move down to strike
while they can, while Gault's men are occupied putting it out—Gault
knows
that
too; and he will throw every man he
can spare out toward the hills to prevent it. That is the way things
are. We must go up, by the remote trails, we must keep moving by night,
and hope we do not have to give account of ourselves—there will be
ambushes laid on every road Gault's men will take."

It seemed like the truth. It seemed very much like the truth, after so much of deception and mistake.

"Should we believe you?" Morgaine asked. "You are twice
wrong,
Chei."

"I do not want to die."
Chei's voice trembled. He leaned forward in the saddle, shirt-clad
shoulders taut in the chill wind. "Before God, lady—if we go the way
you want we will run head-on into ambush. I know that I have been
wrong. I have no excuse, except I hoped we could go faster, except—I
lied—how well I knew the land down there. Here, truly, here is the
place I know. I have lived to get here. And I will not, on my life, be
wrong again. I swear it to you."

"We dare not tire the horses," Vanye muttered.
"Liyo
—whatever we meet, we cannot push them now."

Morgaine looked at him. For
a moment there was that look in her eyes he knew and dreaded—that
impatience that would kill them. Then reason returned.

"I know a place," Chei said very quietly, "not far from here, to camp."

It was a place well-hidden
among the trees, where a spring broke from the rocks of the hill—not a
great deal of water, Vanye saw as they rode in, but sufficient. He
climbed down from the saddle, finding suddenly that his very bones
ached, and that the mail weighed far more on his shoulders than it had
when he had put it on two days ago. "Let me," he said, catching up
Siptah's reins while Morgaine dismounted: the gray stud had decided on
war with the stolen bay gelding, and his ears were back and his
movements full of equine cunning—not outright challenge, but going
toward it, in little increments of aggression that meant all three of
their horses unsettled.

"He hates that horse,"
Morgaine said, and reached and jerked at the gray's chin-strap, turned
his attention and rubbed the nose the stallion offered her like a
maid's fat pony. "I will take him in hand, no mind. It is Arrhan has
him disturbed."

A heat came to his face. It was as close to reproach on that score as she had come, and it flew straight to a sore spot.

While Chei, wisely, drew
his horse well off out of reach in the little clearing among the
pines—for pines they were, at last a tree like trees of Andur-Kursh;
and a little scraggle of grass among the rocks.

But the while he unsaddled
the mare, Vanye shot glances Chei's way, past Arrhan's shoulder—"Heaven
knows," he said to Morgaine, "what is in that gear he has gotten along
with the horse."

"We will find out,"
Morgaine said quietly, the while she took down Chei's armor, which
Siptah had carried this far. "He will have his own gear to carry when
we ride on, that much I know.—Hush, hush." She reached and smothered a
nicker from the gray stud, and gave several sharp tugs at the
halter-strap. "Do not thee make us trouble, thou."

The Baien gray muttered and
shook his head and Arrhan fretted beside him. "It is the fighting,"
Vanye said. "Among other things."

"It is the other things,"
Morgaine said, and looked at him in a way that, vexed as she was, said
that nature was what it was—the which stung twice over.

"I will be rid of her."

"I did not ask."

More than Chei's horse was
inconvenient. He clenched his jaw and took off the mare's saddle and
rubbed her down from head to foot, the while Morgaine did the same for
the gray and put him in better humor.

Then Chei came walking over, bringing the saddlebags which belonged to the bay.

And with a harness-knife in his hand.

Chei lifted that hand and
held it out hilt-foremost, letting the saddlebags to the ground. "I do
not think you want me to have this," he said; and as Vanye reached out
and took it: "Search the bags if you like. Or myself."

Vanye stood staring at him. It was a point of honor Chei put in question.

"Do that," Morgaine said, having no compunction in such things.

Or because her liegeman hesitated.

"Come with me," Vanye said
to Chei. That much courtesy he returned, not to shame the man. He took
him aside, against the rocks, and ascertained, to their mutual
discomfort, that there was no second knife.

"I would like," Chei said,
staring past him while he searched, "to borrow a razor. I would like to
shave. I would like to have a knife to defend myself. I would like to
have the blanket that came with this gear. I lost yours in the woods. I
am freezing."

"Take the blanket," he
said; and, finding nothing: "As for the razor—" He thought more of the
man's suicide with it, and discarded the idea. It was not the choice of
a man so determined to live. Nor was the choice which had brought him
back to them—mere cowardice, in a man who had survived what this one
had. "I will lend you mine.—I will search the rest of the gear,
understand."

"I did not doubt it," Chei said.

Smoke drifted up in a
general haze about the hills; Vanye perched low on the rocks to see
what he could of the direction of the fire, and climbed down again to
Morgaine's side, where she worked. "Our cookfire will draw no notice,"
he said.

"Is it burning east?"

"East and quickly east.
There is a great deal of undergrowth. I do not think they will be able
to stop it till it comes to open fields." It still troubled him, about
the burning; and most, the thought of the horses haunted him. "They may
not get
through
those roads if the wind shifts. Nothing may."

Morgaine said nothing for the moment, as she stirred a little salt into the meal. Then: "Would we could assure that."

Vanye dropped down to his
heels and rested his arms on his knees, thinking of that map Chei had
drawn for them, how far they had come and how far there was yet to go,
northward to a place called Tejhos, where a gate stood, and into a land
utterly qhal.

And never quite did Chei leave his attention, as he was under Morgaine's observation from where she sat working.

It was a stranger that
emerged from under that blond thatch of hair and straggling beard. With
one of their cooking-pans full of water from the trickle of a stream
that served them, with the borrowed razor, the lump of soap, and
Morgaine's tortoise-shell comb, Chei had washed his hair and braided
the sides of it and the crown of it, which the sun was drying to its
straw color; and sat thereafter leaning forward and doggedly scraping
the lathered beard off.

It was a lean face,
sun-darkened above and a little paler where the beard had covered it.
It was a well-favored face, and unexpectedly young—hardly more than two
score years, if that: nothing of madness about it, nothing but a young
man of whom no one would expect an older man's experience, and who
showed a meticulous if oddly timed determination to present a better
appearance to them. Chei was shivering the while, wrapped in his
blanket as far as his waist, in the thin shirt above, and scraping his
skin raw with a keen razor and cold water, his wet braids dripping
water onto his shoulders and adding to his chill.

Perhaps it was his new freedom, given a horse, given the wind of his own hills blowing on his face.

A man of Andur-Kursh could
understand such a feeling . . . who knew he would never come to his own
highlands again; who found something familiar in the chill of the wind
and the smell of pines and the manner of a young man who for some
reason had recovered his pride again—and perhaps his truthfulness.

Chei came back to them, to
return the razor and the pan and the comb, bringing his blanket with
him and settling with a shiver at the tiny fire.

"Here," Vanye said, and
offered him his own cup of tea—receiving a look of earnest gratitude in
return, so natural an expression, of a face so changed and eyes so
strangely shy of them now Chei had restored what must be his proper
self—

—A golden meadow ... a parting. His cousin riding away, last friend, save his liege.

And there was something so
like himself in this young man who attached himself to them, whose
glances toward him were earnest and worried and wanting—perhaps nothing
more than friendliness. A man could grow that desperate.

He remembered—remembered
his house, and his brothers, and being the bastard son, gotten on a
Chya prisoner in a Nhi house and lodged under the same roof as his
father's heirs. Generally both his brothers had tormented him. More
rarely his middle brother had mitigated that. And to him, in those
days, that had seemed some sign that brother secretly loved him.

Strangely—in their last meeting, there had been something of that left, small as it had always been.

Now it was that desperate
gesture Chei had made, that glance directed at him, which touched that
recollection: see, this is myself, this is Chei, am I not better than
what you thought of me?

It ached, deep as an old
wound. On so small a thing, his heart turned around and found the man
no threat at all—which was foolish, perhaps; he told himself so. He was
always too forgiving; he knew that of himself, that his brothers had
set that habit in him—a foolish conviction that there was always the
hope of a hope of something changing, a misguided faith which had kept
him in misery all those years.

And helped him survive all they had done to him.

He ventured a dark and
one-sided smile Chei's direction, a gesture, a reassurance on the side
Morgaine might not see; and saw that little shift of hope in Chei's
eyes—ah, it was the same pool and the same poor desperate fish come to
the bait: poor boy, he thought, Heaven help you, Heaven help us both,
it was Morgaine who pulled me out. Who will save
you?
God, is it
me
you look to?

He passed Chei the cake Morgaine passed him, cut a bit of cheese and passed that too, then a bit for Morgaine and for himself.

It was a small thing, the
precedence of a guest, but it was not lost on Chei. His eyes lightened.
He settled easier and adjusted the blanket about himself so he could
lay his meal in his lap; it was a healthy appetite he had gained, too.

There had been food in the
saddlebags Chei had appropriated: that went into common stores. It was
rough-ground grain and a flask of oil and a bit of salt, all welcome. A
sort of jerky along with it. A change of linen. And a pan and a cup, a
whetstone, a rasp and blunt scraping blade, oddments of rope and
leather, with a harness ring—valuable, all; a packet of doubtful herbs,
the which Morgaine spread out beside her now, and asked Chei the name
and properties of each.

"That is yellowroot," he
said of one twisted, dry sliver. "A purgative." And of others:
"Lady's-cap, for the fever. Bleeding-root, for wounds."

It had value, then. So had the blanket, since Chei had lost one of their two in the fire.

"The riders did not come from very far, or intend to stay long," Vanye said, "reckoning what they carried with them."

"No," said Chei, "they were
a patrol, that was all. A few days and back to Morund land." He
swallowed a mouthful of cake, and waved the back of his hand toward the
hills. "There is always trouble."

"But now more of it," Morgaine said. "Very much more."

The hand fell. Chei's
ebullience vanished as he looked at Morgaine. For a moment the fear was
back, and what thoughts went through his head there was no knowing.

"I mean no harm to your folk," Morgaine said. "I will tell you something, Chei:
what
I
am I will not argue with you; but by what you have told me, there is no
harm I will do you . . . unless you have some reason to love the lord
in Mante."

"No," Chei said softly.

"Nothing I intend will harm
your folk in these hills," Morgaine said. "Perhaps it will do you a
great deal of good. Qhal have reason to fear me. You do not."

"Why—" Chei's face had gone still and pale. "Why should they?"

"Because I will be sure
there are no more Gaults—no more comings and goings through the gates.
No more of what gives them their power over you. Humankind has only to
draw back and wait. In time, you will outnumber them. And of that—they
know the end.
That
is why they war against you."