Red Country (21 page)

“Get rid of Kastir!”

I yelled it instantly. Then I caught myself. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know you won't—can't.” I could not bear to suggest another sandstorm, more illusion. “Are there any other arts?”

He made a one-handed throwaway gesture. Then his eye turned to the morrethans blowing on Fengthira's grave, and as he looked I saw his face gradually harden, till it had the structure of granite itself.

I did not ask. But after a moment, he answered me.

“Tomorrow they'll have the first dassyk.” His eyes grew remote. “This could never have happened if we hadn't built them. But the made can be unmade. Once it's back as it should be, Hethria can fight for itself.”

“You mean wreck the dassyx? All of them? But even an aedr—how?”

“Quite simple.” The bleakness in his eyes approached tragedy. “Axynbrarve. It's an Art. To act without hands. That's how the dam that waters the dassyx was built.”

I gasped. Then I said unsteadily, “You mean—if you smash the dam . . . there'll be no water for the channels. . . .”

“And the dassyx will be uninhabitable.”

“Beryx built it,” he went on at last, very softly. “He wanted to open the roads. Roads are for carrying ideas. But these are carrying Ammath.”

I too had a sense of desecration, strong as when I looked down on the Gebros with the pick in my hands. Then I came to reality. “But you'll kill the Sathellin! They can't live without water out there!”

He moved his head an inch. He sounded quite cool now.

“The cisterns will see them through until the storms begin. And most of the dassyx are watered from the little downstream barrages. Only the three westernmost stages use the primary dam.”

“The Estarians will use cisterns too.”

“I can break them open.”

Though he spoke with grim determination, it was a determination covering pain. He paused. Then he said passionately, “Breaking things to save things—they'll drive
me
to Ammath!”

Before I thought, I had laid my hand on his and said, “Don't. It has to be done. For Hethria's sake.”

He looked down on our joined hands in a way that made his skin burn against mine. In an access of embarrassment I tried to take rather than snatch my hand away. But whatever he felt, it had not been repulsion. He shook his head and said, “Yes. It's a Must.” Then he looked at me, eyes grave and steady. “I'm glad you reminded me. They do exist.”

“Good.” I strove for easiness. “Now?”

He squared his shoulders. Then he paused. “But for Beryx's sake . . . first—look here.”

I looked, and his eyes dilated, the irises woke, and the pupils flared open on another crystal, miniature world.

It was a Hethrian gorge, contorted gold and crimson rock, but with a most un-Hethrian growth of tree and plant-life in the defile's chasm, a cool, luxurious green welt, splashed with the staring white trunks of femaerel, the desert helliens, pieced by the jewel flicker of birds, the low, dappled passage of beasts. And at its heart ran a long, long, sinuous waterhole whose tourmaline opulence ended against the mossy old cords of giant tree trunks that composed a barrage dam.

Zam's voice said, literally in my ear,

But it has to be done.
I tried to make it as gentle as possible.
It's a Must.

I was back by the fire in Eskan Helken, those gray eyes fixed on me in a haunted, questioning stare.

“Not wanton,” I said. “And not waste.”

He hesitated a moment longer. Then he averted his face, changed his posture to sit cross-legged, and drew the prolonged opening breath.

Perhaps it came directly from his inner vision, perhaps not. But as I waited that picture seemed to reassemble, to draw closer, enveloping me, cool, tranquil, more lovely in the shadow of its imminent doom. I felt the kindness of the shade, smelt the water, the thick, rich scent of forest humus that I had never smelt in my life. I heard the medley of bird-calls, the lazy sough of foliage, I was looking closely at some species of hellien with an enormous lydsith fern in its lowest fork, silver-green paws of leaf shining faintly in the forest gloom—

I jerked as if shot, I know now Zam had jerked simultaneously. There was a flash of three giant tree-trunks bursting in a rain of splinters as their shattered ends leapt in the air amid the pent water's sudden, bestial roar. . . . Then a long, rending, ripping disintegration as the cords parted in one continuous shear and the dam front buckled outward with the sound of its fracture lost in the ear-shattering bellow of water on the loose.

When I looked at Zam he had regained his breath. He was staring into nothing, a lost, stricken deadness in his eyes. Then he said under his breath, “Math . . .” and buried his face in his hands.

I let him be, aware it was the sympathy he preferred, and after a while he sat up and finished the thing by breaking the cisterns. This time, a watcher from outside, as it were, I saw the strange, fearful whiplash of his torso as each blow expelled his breath on a ferocious grunt, as it must have when he broke the dam. In both action and expense, I thought, Axynbrarve was as fearsome as the other Arts.

Afterwards he sat in silence for a long time. Then he got up and said dully, “Let's take the horses and go somewhere.”

* * * * * *

That it was the hottest part of the day in the hottest part of the hottest season in the hottest land available did not seem to worry him at all. Fenglis and I plodded along behind, she with head adroop, I feeling the dingy skirts of a once-smart green habit grow irremediably thick, damp and gritty with her sweat, while the dust-devils pirouetted and the heat-haze shuddered on the horizon and the sun kicked up off the stones in palpable blasts of furnace heat, and Eskan Helken reeled like some fantastic red umbrella cluster in the mirage. But however absently Zam rode, he kept his direction. Presently I found we had described a huge circle and were headed back to the grass bay, a low green scallop at Eskan Helken's foot.

Fenglis mended her pace. Zam did not glance round as we drew abreast, but a moment later he said suddenly, “If you must destroy things, it's better to destroy a dam than a man. It's not a living part of Math.”

“It fed a lot of living things. And it was made by men. It was a—a great achievement.” I strove to express what I had felt for the Gebros: respect for men's works that are greater than their makers, that outlast the maker's life.

“Yes.” He sounded unhappy, even guilty. “But Beryx will understand.”

I did not ask,
Are you sure?
since he patently was not. He lifted his head. Then he repeated my own words back to me.

“In any case, it had to be done. It was a Must.”

The towers of Eskan Helken loomed over us, eliciting my perennial response of wonder at their colors, their bizarre shapes, the sheer surprise of their presence, stuck up like stone mushrooms from the level sands. Their folds were suave, rose-black red now, their prominences glaring Helkent cornelian, ready to change for evening as they changed the day around, yet never changed at all. How old were they? I wondered. Old enough to dwarf the spans of men, to dwarf life's very span on earth.

For once I did not resent this survival of the past. It was comforting to think they would outlast me, as they had outlasted the dam, as they would probably outlast all humanity's puny works, that if Kastir ruined all Hethria he would be unable to alter them.

I glanced at Zam, confidently expecting to find my thoughts had been shared. But he had checked his mare, and was staring at the ground just by her near hoof.

As I followed his glance he sprang off, bent quickly, and with infinite care gathered something up. He cupped it in his hands a moment before he turned to me, saying, “Look.”

I jerked back instinctively before I realized that the monstrous beetle thing with its goggle-eyed head and thick jointed legs and carapace was only a shell, ash-pale, translucent, split from head to tail along the top.

“A vannor skin.” His eyes were alight with something akin to joy. “Singing wings. You hear them in summer, everywhere. They only live one season. Just sing and lay their eggs and die. But the eggs hatch into this.” He turned the shell in his palm. “And it lives underground for years and years, waiting the right time to come out.” His voice had softened. “Years and years. Then out, one season flying, and p'ff!”

Blankly, I stared from him to the skin and back.

“Like the dam.” He was puzzled to find I had not shared his vision's leap. “All that time waiting. Being something. Just to turn into something else that was its life's real purpose. And then die.”

Though I did not want to mar his consolation, the parallel seemed inexact. “But . . . this laid eggs. Before it died.”

“Mm.” He was quite cheerful. “What I mean is, we thought the dam was made to water the dassyx. But that was just the underground stage. Now it's finished the real one. It didn't lay eggs.” The shimmer in his eyes was actually teasing. “It was broken to stop the Estarians. That's why it was really built.”

As I stared, the shimmer vanished. He was waiting anxiously for me to understand, to share the vision that transformed flat destruction to part of a natural progress, unbroken, right.

I looked up at Eskan Helken's towers, trying not just to hear but to believe. He said with quiet insistence, “What was made once can be re-made. But only if what it was made for is still here.”

I understood then. Like the insect, the dam had not been made to endure, and paradoxically, like the insect, its death would ensure its rebirth. Unbroken, it would have been abused to destroy the land for which it was built. But now, perhaps, Hethria would survive, and those who belonged in it would rebuild the dam to fulfill its proper use.

Zam, of course, knew I understood before I had hammered clear the thoughts. He did not bother to affirm it aloud. He just set the shell down, very gently, and vaulted back on his mare.

“Now,” he said. “Let's go home.” And this time as he looked at Eskan Helken, there was a profound serenity in his face.

* * * * * *

Next day the Estarians won their hollow victory, but we had underestimated their resources, their ingenuity, and their stubbornness. Working on minimal water rations, they set up mirror-signal relays to Everran, and water came out, first on oxcarts which established depots and leapfrogged forward to establish more, then by a chain of horsemen carrying single waterskins to supply the dassyx till the carts should arrive. Within a week water was moving along a chain of relay stations, the first dassyx had become Kastir's front line, and a fresh stream of raiders had started down the Kemreswash itself.

Zam said, “They know something happened to the dam.” But when I said, “Turn them back,” he shook his head.

Hectic mirror signals brought a party of surveyors hotfoot to the dam-site. They pitched camp. Signals flew to and fro. Then a major operation began, demolition crews loading carts with Gebros blocks while a horde of carters pointed their teams down Kemreswash, and every kind of construction worker swarmed ahead.

When I shouted, “You have to do something!” Zam shrugged. “Let him put up his dam. It will keep him happy, and it's no use till storms come on the Helkent. Before then I'll have knocked it down.”

The dam went up with magical speed, being only a temporary blockage in Zam's breach. He waited till it was all but complete, then leveled it in one bout of Axynbrarve, and when he had recovered, observed, “Let's see how he deals with that.”

We were perched on the pocket's high northern wall to make the most of a non-existent wind. It was a stifling day, hot as only Hethria can be, but with an element of humidity that made the heat unbearable. I wiped my face yet again. Then I looked down the sheer, smooth bulge of flaring red rock beneath us, and asked, “Why wait till he does something? Why not do something yourself?”

“Because,” he answered flatly, “I am not fighting a war. I am defending Hethria.”

“If you don't take the initiative you'll never win.”

“I don't want to ‘win.'”

“Anyone will tell you that's the surest way to lose.”

He turned round on the rock. “I am not fighting,” he said patiently. “I am defending. I follow Math. So I act only when I must.”

“Well, Must in the end will boil down to fight or die!”

“Then I shall die.”

“Oh, be my guest! And Kastir take Hethria as well!”

“You—” He bit it off. But the end came through clear as if he had spoken. < . . . stupid, stubborn, shrewish bitch!>

“I am not!” I spun and screamed it at him. He had never before spoken to me like that. I had traded, I realized now, on his unfailing forbearance, his ingrained courtesy. “How dare you? I am not!!”

He was completely stunned, and showed it. He actually stammered when he spoke.

“I—I—you—you heard?”

“Of course I heard, when you use mindspeech what do you expect? And if that's what you think of me then you and your precious Hethria can die as soon as you like!”

I plunged off the rock and shot away along the hillside, hardly able to see my way for tears, hearing him call out and ignoring it. Next time he shouted in my head.

When I ignored that he used a Command to haul me to a stop. I was still thrashing like a webbed fly when he ran up to catch my arm, whereupon I instantly, with a venomous pleasure at finding I had the liberty, slapped his face. “How dare you? This as well! Oh, you, you—rat!”

He stood back out of range, while the mark rose red on his cheek, eyes full of confusion, perplexity, helplessness. “I only wanted to talk to you—”