Exile's Gate (34 page)

She
looked at him and reached out to his arm, a light touch which jolted
him like hot iron, drew him out of despair and absorbed his attention
so thoroughly a score of enemies could have ridden down on them and
come second in his mind.

No,
he
had wit to think, but not much beyond that. Her arms clenched about
him. Her mouth met his. There was precious little more to do,
surrounded by enemies, under arms, with no rest to be had and no
leisure to spend unwary.

There will never be a time,
he
thought, in a chill of panic, and held her the tighter, as she held
him, in an armored grip become harsh and desperate, with nothing of
gentleness about it.
Everyone else has failed her. Too much she has lost, too many dead
—
For
that reason she armed me more than herself, gave me her chiefest
weapon; and what did it win us but calamity to our friends, and rage at
each other?

They
slept finally, turn and turn about, on the sloping, stony ground where
the brush afforded them cover. He watched her as she slept. He
wished—but there was no hope.

Only they managed to heal what was torn, there was that much.

Morgaine
waked him toward dawn, a shadow between him and the day. He heard her
voice telling him there was breakfast and he murmured an answer, rolled
over and favored an aching arm, holding it across him.

"We should move," she said, "a little ways this morning."

"Oh, Heaven," he moaned, and bowed his head between his knees, arms over his neck.

She
did not stay to argue. She went back to sit on her saddle, where she
had laid out a cold breakfast on the leather wrappings they used for
foodstuffs, knowing matters would go her way.

He followed, and sat down on the grass, and ate in silence no different than other silences.

And did not give way to temper, or venture in headlong.

"Liyo,"
he
said when he was toward finishing: "Listen to me. This enemy of
yours—whoever he is. You think he will run. But a man will not run, who
thinks himself winning. No one can be that cautious."

She said nothing. It was not a frown on her face, only thought.

"Let
them lose us," he said. "Let this Skarrin marshal some defense against
us. Let him think he has turned us. A man in power—he will not want to
give up what he has. He will go nowhere at all. In the meanwhile we
will learn this land, we will go slowly—we will gather strength, rest,
find a way to him—am I not right?"

Her
lips made a taut line. There was warfare in her eyes, unbelief and
consideration. "Possibly. Possibly. But being wrong, Vanye—"

"What will a man do who is cornered? He is far more apt to use the gate at Mante and escape us."

He argued for their lives, for sanity and safety.

And she gathered that
thing
into her lap in silence, the sword, that weapon which was constantly beside her, day and night, and which gave them no peace.

"Liyo,
you
drive this man and you force this man, and what will he do? You will
unseat him: his own vassals will question his power; or you will make
him desperate—you always strike too hard,
liyo,
—listen
to me: you know no moderation with your enemies. You give them no
choices and while they have no warning, that serves you well—but you
have no subtlety in the field. You are the kind of lord who loses
lives—forgive me." His heart beat hard and he gazed up into her eyes in
a dread of the things he had to say with brutal force, that the
numbness of recent sleep let him say without stumbling, and the quiet
of the dawn let her hear without preventing him. "If it were an army
with us I should never question you: if you told me to go against any
odds, then, I would do that, and trust there was good cause. But you
have no army. You have one man. And he is bound,
liyo,
to
cover your back and your side, as long as he can; and he will do that.
But he is one man, all the same, and someday, if you keep on as you
are, you will lose him, because he will die before he lets you go down
first."

The
frown had deepened on her face. There was storm in her eyes. "I can
guard my own back. I need no fools to kill themselves, plague take you,
I have had enough of fools to fling themselves in my way—"

"It is your back I am talking about."

Her
breath came hard. His own did. "And I am talking about fools," she
said. "Bron's sort. Chei's sort. Arunden, for another." Her enemies saw
that look. It had been a long time since she had turned it on him. "Ten
thousand men at Irien, who would not hold where I told them to hold,
no, they must get to the fore of me, because I am there and their
damnable pride makes them do what no lord could order them to do in
cold blood, if it means charging a wide open gate—"

"That is what you are doing now. That is what I am objecting to,
liyo.
Do you not see it?"

There was shock in her eyes, and outrage, a shake of her head. "Thee is—"

"I am telling you that you are
wrong.
I
do not do that often. And you do not want to hear me because you
suppose I do not want the same thing that you want. But that is how
much I love you: I do not know enough to understand all the why of the
things you do, but I stake my soul that you are right; I have sworn to
go on with or without you,
liyo,
and if that is true, then listen to me, will you listen, if you do not think me an utter fool?"

"I am listening," she said in a different and milder voice.

"Be
the wind. Do not make our enemy afraid. If he hears reports what
happened south of here, he will use his power. He has men to send. He
has ten thousand things to try before he is out of resources. He will
not run at the first whisper of war. He will attack. And we will be the
wind again and go find him in his lair."

"So easily. Did thee ever take Myya?"

Heaven! she has a sharp edge when the swords are out.

"No,"
he said reasonably, quietly. It is tactic. Lord in Heaven, she knows
only the attack, never defense, even with me. "But then, I was one man.
They did not take me. And if I had aimed at the Myya-lord's life, I
would have taken him, do you doubt it?"

She thought on that point, long and long, with that worried line between her brow.

"Liyo,
they
are all about us. They are watching the road. All we need do is stay
quiet, and I do not think, I cannot believe that the rumor of a rumor
will send this qhal-lord running with his tail tucked. No. Being a man
used to power, he will likeliest strike first at his own folk, to
subdue any disloyalty, and only then think of us; and when he hears we
are only two—"

"With a gate-weapon.
That
is what we may well face if he has time to marshal his strength. Whatever he has, he will use."

"He might use it by the time we could get there. We can
not
go there with enough speed. And we would be spent. So let him lay his plans. We can turn them."

She let go her breath, and slid
Changeling
between her knees, hands on the quillons that were the dragon's arms, resting her head against the hilt.

Very, very long she rested there—thinking, he knew, thinking and thinking.

He
rested too, arm on knee and chin on arm, wondering where her thoughts
were going, into what nooks that she would report to him, unraveling
all his arguments, going far beyond him, telling him new and terrible
things.

Then she lifted her head. "Aye," she said. "But it is a fearful risk, Vanye."

All
along, he had used argument like weapons in drill—one tactic, the next,
the next in despair that any would suffice: only now he heard what she
was saying and realized it was agreement.

Then,
as always when he had won some lesser point, the doubts came to him.
What he truly, at the depth of his heart, yearned for, was for his
liege to bring up some miracle, some assurance that she knew precisely
how to get into Mante and overcome their enemy.

Knowing
that she had no such resource, and that she surrendered her instincts
for berserker attack, to his for stealth and stalking, against an enemy
of her own kind—

It
was as if a weight had come down on him, of the sort that he was not
accustomed to bear. And perhaps some of it had left her shoulders. She
gazed at him with an expression he could not read, but a less anguished
one—perhaps thinking, perhaps planning again, at a range still beyond
him.

He earnestly hoped so. For when it came to qhal, he had no idea at all of their limits.

Chapter Twelve

The
riders gathered again in a place near the road, and Chei leaned on the
saddle of the big roan, weary, and feeling the weight of the mail on
his shoulders, in a dizziness in which his very body seemed diminished,
the light dimmed, the voices about him become strange, calling him "my
lord" and speaking to him with courtesies. The qhal who served him were
not confused. Certainly a few of the humans with him measured the
difference in his stature and saw his apparent youth and thought
treasonous thoughts, but had they lifted daggers against him, there
were enough of his own folk about him to protect him, and there was the
captain of Skarrin's warders, who was bound, under present and ironical
circumstance, to protect him.

They
were a few more than twoscore—of all that company that had left
Morund-keep, of the levies; and ten—those men of Skarrin's who had
joined them at Tejhos-gate. The rest were dead or scattered or wounded
too severely to continue; and it had needed at least half a score men
to leave in charge of the wounded, but he had left six and bidden them
stay camped where they were for fear the hillmen might hit them on the
way back to Morund. That was how desperate things had become.

This open sky is madness,
Chei
thought. The open blue above them, the land laid open to any witness,
shivered through his nerves as if he lay naked to his enemies, though
he remembered fighting in such land before, in times that humans had
come deep within the plains. Something deep as instinct pulled him in
two directions, and feared nameless things.

Most
of all, the one he would have turned to for advice was not there, and
whenever he turned and looked about him he missed that face, which
shifted and changed from silver-haired to red to palest gold like some
reflection in troubled water: Pyverrn. Jestryn. Bron. The void ached in
him, in a place where the voices could not reach, a point at which all
memory found anchor. Qhiverin-Gault-Chei, all alone among the men who
followed him, longed for a familiar haven, even if the nature of it
confounded itself between stone walls and the closeness of forest—

But
his enemy, the enemy which lay hidden somewhere in this place, did not
shift like sun on water: of him, of her, of the man he was and the man
who pursued, he could not think clearly at all: it was like trying to
look at the sun itself, a glare in which no shape was distinguishable.

"The
troops from Mante are coming south to meet us," he told his followers,
as he paced the red horse along the roadside, where they formed up.
"The captain affirms that. We will have reinforcements. And we will not
close with our enemy, now we know what we face." The red horse shifted
under him and he curbed it, riding it back and forth past his
listeners, silver-haired and dark, qhal and human. "But there are other
ways. Those of you who have been loyal to me—I will reward after this.
Count on it. Those of you who are human I will gift with land. Do you
hear me? For those of you who follow me, I will give you the holdings
of every man who fled. I will have it known how I pay loyalty—and
deserters. We will settle this business, we will settle it on our
terms, and give Mante's troops the leavings. Our enemies have gone into
the land, that is what they have done; but they do not know their
way—and we do. I want this pair.
I want them.
Need I say how much?"

"I
have found a place," Vanye said, when they found each other after
scouting afoot up and down the area, the gray horse and the white left
in hiding the other side of the hill.

"Good," Morgaine said, wiping her brow, "because there is nothing in the other direction."

It
was a place they rode to then, where the rains had washed beneath a
sandstone cap, and where still a little water ran in a sandy bed,
folded on either side by hills and closed round by thorn and a
scattered few trees.

And no better place to hide indeed had they found.

It
was cold rations and not so much as fire to boil water, but it was
rest; it was respite from the pace they had set, and it was a chance
for the horses to recover their strength, if it meant walking afield
and bringing grass to them to keep them hidden.

So
he did, and curried them both till their coats shone, did a bit of work
with Siptah's left hind shoe, and afterward lay in the sun and slept,
while Morgaine worked at the horses' trail-worn gear. Then it was turn
about while she slept, and after that a leisurely supper of cold
sausage and cheese and waybread.