Maeve (4 page)

Three faces blinked into being. Harskari looked a little impatient. “What is it?”

“Any of you mountain climbers?”

Swardheld grinned. “I was born in the mountains, Leyta. Remember? No damn rock I can't climb. Once …”

“Heaven forfend we hear another of your stories, old growler.” Shadith's voice was gently mocking.

Harskari turned cool, amber eyes on her companions and they quieted immediately. “Why, Aleytys?”

“Though I was born a mountain girl, I never climbed anything. Raqsidani women weren't allowed to. Now it looks like I'll have to go down a cliffside.”

As Gwynnor walked along waiting for his answer, he realized that the silence had gone on too long. He looked around. The star-woman was standing slumped against the side of the ravine, her eyes half shut, her mouth moving soundlessly. Talking? To someone? To something? He shivered in sudden, superstitious fear. Reluctantly, he edged closer.

She opened her eyes and smiled at him. “Yes.” Her voice was a warm contralto that he found gentle on his music-starved ears. “I can climb.” She pushed away from the wall of rock. “I was born in the mountains.”

She walked beside him, her stride long and free, one accustomed to walking, not like those feeble types from the city. More and more he felt confused by her. He couldn't fit her anywhere among those in his experience, not as enemy and certainly not as friend. And how could anyone be neutral about her? The wind blew over her and brought him her complex scent, a tart-sweet smell that disturbed … excited … She was taller than he was, had a look of completeness about her, of knowing who she was and what she was, needing no one, nothing. He envied her and distrusted her. Wanted her. Despaired. She seemed to point up all the things he found wrong in himself. Sunk in the melancholy gloom that was the curse of his temperament, he plodded wordlessly beside her.

“Any more of those devils about?”

He looked at her, startled to hear her break the silence. She smiled and the knot began dissolving inside him. Tentatively, he smiled back. “They have a kind of nest-clan arrangement. Several pairs together. So we'd better keep watch. Holy Maeve be blessed, they don't fly about after dark.”

“That's a relief.” She raised her hands high above her head, stretching and twisting to relieve muscles held too taut too long. “I wasn't looking forward to shivering under my blankets waiting for old big mouth to descend on me.” A sudden thought sent her eyes to his. “Or do you have worse mouths that inhabit the night?”

He grinned at her, obscurely pleased by this evidence of her mortality. “Only snakes. They like your body warmth and crawl under the blanket with you.”

“My god.” Shaking her head, the starwoman shortened her stride to match his and paced down the winding and deepening ravine toward the haunt of the rising sun.

Chapter III

The meager fire glowed red and gold in the blackness. Aleytys felt its gentle heat bathing her face as she stared at the constantly altering patterns of dark and light.

“There's no need to keep watch.”

She looked up. Gwynnor's eyes shone phosphorescent green in the firelight. She smiled. “Your night's too long for me. I need to do some thinking before I sleep.”

He lay down and pulled the blanket over his head, his feet pointing toward the fire. Almost between breaths he was asleep.

With a sigh, she tucked her blanket around her and hugged her knees, staring into the flames, hypnotized into mind blankness until she shrugged herself out of the haze. “Harskari,” she whispered.

Amber eyes opened, blinked, then the thin, clever face smiled out of the darkness in her mind. “Aleytys.”

“I've been remembering.”

“I know.”

“Why did you all stop talking to me?”

The wind was strengthening, whispering across the coals and blowing alternate gusts of warm and cold air past her face. Small pieces of grit pattered against the blanket.

Harskari shook her head, her white mane shifting like silk. “We didn't. You were so hurt by the nayid male's death that you couldn't handle it. You transferred the guilt you felt to us and took the only revenge you could by totally denying our existence. You forgot us and sealed us off from contact at the same time. I don't think you know your strength, Aleytys.”

Aleytys dropped her head on her arms, burying her face in the folds of the blanket, grieving because she was not grieving. But too much time had passed. Once there had been first affection, then a deep love shared. Now there was only a faded memory as if all that had happened to someone else. Was this all love came to? She tried to find a trace of that tumultuous warmth in herself, but there was nothing. Too much time. She sighed, brushed a hand over her face, and stared back into the glowing coals. “So when I was close to dying, you could get through again.”

“Yes. You needed us.”

“I've just about got straight in my head what happened since I left Jaydugar. What about you?”

“To see your world, we look through your eyes. But there are other worlds and other ways of looking.”

“Oh.” Aleytys glanced briefly at Gwynnor's sleeping form, then lifted her eyes to the brilliantly lit sky. A huge pale moon thrust up over the eastern horizon, filling half the sky with its milky glow. The air was cold, thin and sharp and invigorating, biting the fog out of her mind. “That doesn't really answer my question.”

Harskari chuckled. “Yes, young Aleytys, we know what you've been doing.”

Abruptly, Aleytys felt very good, her body ticking like a fine watch. She laughed and patted her mouth as the laugh turned into a yawn. “Harskari?”

“What is it?”

“On Jaydugar, we made a mess of the nomad clan. On Lamarchos, I got involved with Loahn and the Horde, Kale and his complicated plots, until the whole damn world was crushed under dead bodies. On Irsud, I stuck my nose into the hiiri's fight with the nayids, though the nayids asked for it. The outcome was that I destroyed a large part of the nayid population. So here we are on Maeve, in the company of a cerdd who is helping wage an undeclared war. Makes you think.”

“It does, indeed,” Harskari chuckled, a gentle affectionate sound, “considering past performance.”

“Damn.” Aleytys yawned again. “I'll probably have nightmares.”

Chapter IV

“How the hell are we supposed to get down that?” Aleytys muttered. Stomach pressed against the rock, she lay with her head over the cliff edge, looking down, down, dizzyingly down to a mossy green carpet marking the tops of trees far below. Warm updrafts sweeping up the face of the slope brought scent loads slipping past her face, a complex melange of smells that tickled her nose and intrigued her mind, surprising her with its strength here, so far above the forest below.

The face of the stone slanted outward. Rough and craggy with plenty of hand and foot holds, it didn't look especially hard to climb, but it went so far down. Aleytys closed her eyes. “Swardheld, you weren't just bragging, I hope. You better be able to manage that.”

Swardheld's face laughed out of the darkness at her. “That? Freyka, that little slope's almost flat ground compared to some mountain faces I've climbed. Look over the edge again.”

Aleytys opened her eyes. The ground below looked farther away each time she glanced that way. “Blessed Madar!”

The black eyes narrowed in shrewd appraisal. “No problem at all, not if you've got any spring left in your legs, Leyta.”

“Oh, fine.” Scrambling to her feet she met Gwynnor's puzzled gaze. Flicking a hand at the cliff, she said, “You sure this is necessary?”

He dropped the coil of rope and held out the waterskin. “Drink.”

She lifted the bag and caught the last stale drops on her dry tongue. She slapped the stopper home and handed the limp skin back to him. “You make your point.”

He nodded briefly and picked up the rope. “Do you know the climbing knots?”

Gwynnor had watched the starwoman look toward the distant western horizon, eyes unfocused, face slack. Talking to her spirits again, he thought, and felt a tightness in his chest.

“I'm afraid of her,” he whispered, the soft words hidden in the soughing of the wind.

As he handed the rope to her, her body straightened, altered its posture slightly with a new way of holding her head. Eyebrows lowered over the narrowed green-blue eyes, mouth hardened, her voice was deeper than usual when she spoke. “The knots?”

He watched as her fingers moved with sure knowledge, making a knot that held firm but could be jerked loose in an emergency. The knot was done with enough mastery to reassure him. “Good. Who goes first?”

“I do.” The words were sharp, clipped, with a weight of authority unlike her usual friendly, offhand style. It was as if another personality inhabited the familiar flesh. Gwynnor felt a squeezing of his stomach as he contemplated that terrifying idea. Then the starwoman spoke again. “You climbed this spot before?”

“No.”

She stepped briskly to the cliff edge. “Then we go over here. Follow that crack down to there.” She pointed to a place where the stone broke into a deeply weathered washboard. “How friable is this rock?”

“Your eyes seem as good as mine.” He shrugged.

She nodded briskly. “I see.” Knotting the rope around her waist she waited for Gwynnor to follow her example. “Don't kick rocks on my head.” She grinned at his indignant exclamation. “Let's go!”

Aleytys stamped her feet briskly, putting her body back on like a pair of too-tight boots. Looking back at the stony slope, she wrinkled her nose and shook her head.

Gwynnor wound the rope between hand and elbow while the straightening twist sent the free end leaping about. “You came down fast.”

“Sooner off the rock, the better.” She sniffed at the soup of smells slopping about her on the edge of the forest. “What a stink.”

The soil under her boots was heavy and black, damp enough so that she sank inches into it. There was a waiting quality in the heavy humid air that hung so still and quiet around her. Not a sound, no insect noises, no birdsong, not even a rustle of leaves. Only the scent, strong enough to start her head aching. She scuffed her feet in the soggy earth, reluctant to get mud on her clothing. The waiting silence tugged at her nerves, reminding her that she needed to make her peace with the elementals of this world. “Is there some water around here?”

The tip of Gwynnor's longish nose twitched fitfully as he watched her. “I saw a shine of water that way,” he pointed.

The rusty sun sparked orange glints from the narrow stream. Aleytys leaned against a tree and pulled her boots off. The scent from the tree was almost overpowering, cloyingly sweet with dusty undertones, though where dust would come from in this saturated atmosphere Aleytys couldn't begin to guess. She glanced at the silent cerdd, shrugged, and broke the magnetic closure on her trousers. Tiredly, she stripped, and tossed the worn clothing over a low-hanging limb. Then she picked up the boots and carried them to the water. Kneeling on a half-buried rock, she ran her hands over the mud-crusted leather, washing them clean. She looked up and met Gwynnor's astonished eyes. A grin on her face, she shook her head. “I haven't lost my mind.” She splashed her hand in the water. “And I'm not trying to seduce you. Ride with it and be patient. I'll be finished in a minute.”

She knelt on the damp earth, resting her hands on her knees. Closing her eyes to slits that let light in but screened out distraction, she began the breathing discipline that slowed her body and let her mind reach out and out to touch the places where the world's elementals rested. “Gweledi dayar,” she murmured. “World spirits, I cross in peace, seeking nothing more than passage from one place to another.”

She felt a stirring, a formless flow in the earth beneath her. Bending forward, she placed her hands on the ground, fingers splayed out like pale five-pointed stars. Tendrils of warmth tickled along her veins. Momentarily the scents around her increased a thousand-fold in strength so that she nearly fainted under the burden on her senses. Through the bombardment she felt a sluggish curiosity, a measure of interest, a question, then acceptance as the tendrils withdrew.

Sighing, she sat back on her heels and grimaced at her muddy hands. Around her, the tension was gone from the air. Small, homey sounds filled the gaping silence so that the world under the trees hummed with life once more.

Gwynnor stood on a boulder in the center of the stream where the sun trickled through the leaves, feeling more comfortable when he could still see fragments of sky. Briefly and repeatedly he glanced at the pale body of the woman crouched on hands and knees on the black earth.

When the normal forest sounds began, he started and nearly fell off the rock. He felt the forest reach out and enfold them and he shivered, clamped his teeth onto his lower lip, fighting fear that nibbled at him like a hungry rat. Silently, she came back to the stream and knelt on the stone, washing the mud off her body.

The heavy smells around him bothered him a little. It was too much. And there was too much life here. He couldn't sort out the complexes as he was used to doing on the maes. Not yet, anyway. Sweat oozed down his scalp under the clustering gray curls. He didn't like the forest. He wanted to leave it. Now. Or as fast as possible.

The starwoman dressed briskly. She brushed back wispy red-gold curls that escaped from her braids and formed a fragile halo about her face. A relaxed, smiling face.

She turned to him. “Where do we go now, Gwynnor?”

He glanced around uneasily, not liking to hear his name spoken aloud in this place.

She sensed his unease and laughed, a warm sound that poured like honey over his quivering nerves. “Your name is not you, my friend,” she said gently. “Besides, you're with me.”

Growing calmer, he dug in his mind for a logical answer to her question. “Three days to the north … three days on kaffa back, I mean … I don't know how long it might take in that.” He swung a hand at the forest. “There's a river, the regular trade route from the maes. It leads to the sea where you wanted to go.” He pointed up at the sun then brought his hand down, moving fingers to indicate the flow of the stream. “This stream seems to be moving toward the river. We could follow it. On the other hand, the sea is straight east from here. But I've never been over the ground between here and there.”