Red Country (28 page)

* * * * * *

For a long time after they opened, his eyes were still blank as a baby's. The dawn had risen, in huge sweeps of gold and copper and jubilant crimson, when I saw them focus. He was tracking the silver leaves on a morrethan twig that sawed to and fro on the light morning wind, six inches from his nose.

I said very softly, “Zam.”

He blinked. After a pause, his eyes moved. Failing from that angle to see more than a piece of my skirt, he rolled laboriously on one side. And then he stared with a blankness that harrowingly, unnervingly recalled the eyes of the Dead, stared till I could bear it no more.

I put a hand on his shoulder. It was reassuringly solid and warm. He said in blurred, slurry mindspeech,

The joy was overtaking me. I could not restrain an idiotic, involuntary smile. “I've been here all the time.”

His eyes narrowed as he struggled with some unmanageable fact. At last he put out a hand and felt timidly, fearfully, at the earth under him, the morrethan stalk, the cloth of his robe. Then he said, stunned beyond amazement, “I'm alive.”

The smile kept bursting out of control. I said, “Yes.”

His eyes had been leaden, inert. Slowly they thawed to their true limpid gray. The irises began to weave. There was a long silence while his mind presumably resumed function. Then he evidently gave up hope of reasoning it out, for he turned on his back and said helplessly, “How? Why?”

“I made them give you back,” I said.

He blinked. I stood up, to find my muscles stiffened almost rigid. “Can you sit up?” He tried, but his limbs were rigored worse than mine. “Stay there. I'll go and make some tea.”

It may be impossible to fly while doing so, but that was the sensation. I even found myself singing, or at least humming Harran's catch for the saeveryrs, and down by the well they churred saucily in reply. When I brought the tea Zam had sat up, but he still looked so befuddled I decided to let explanations wait.

The tea warmed his muscles, so when I asked “Can you stand up?” he managed with only one pull on his wrists. “Set,” he said vaguely, examining his arms and shoulders. “Like iron.” I got my own shoulder in his armpit and we tottered over to the fire.

When I glanced up from the flourcakes he was studying the kettle, with solemn wonder, with a fearful, tender reverence. Then he looked slowly round him, and what showed on his face made me avert my eyes.

The sun's arc had just tipped the horizon, whitening the dawn tints into day, but the sky was full of thunderpacks that kept their colors, masses of radiant coral, apricot, tangerine, cyclamen, edged in a dazzle of gold, picked out by shadows of darker flame. The towers of Eskan Helken echoed them with dusky crimsons and sheets of golden cornelian intensified by the pocket's freshened grass. And out beyond lay Hethria, cleansed of dust by the storm, its mottle of rust-red and jade-green sharply contrasted in the foreground, softening and merging into the distance, widening open and endless to the washed blue of the horizon sky.

Stealing a look at Zam, I saw with shock that his cheeks were wet with tears.

I had hardly taken it in when without the slightest embarrassment he turned to me and said, “I gave it up, you see.”

Then I understood. The commonest kettle becomes precious when it is part of a reality your mind has surrendered, preparing itself for a sure, contracted death. How much more precious would Hethria have been to him?

“Eat this,” I said somewhat gruffly, “before it's cold.”

The jaws' exercise must improve mental circulation, for he finished looking tired and slow but no longer numb, and almost at once asked, “You made them give me back? How? What did you mean?”

“Threw a tantrum,” I said gaily, “and bullied them into it.”

He puzzled over this. Then a deep cleft formed between his brows and his face firmed to a familiar cast, hard as granite, more inflexible than iron.

“That,” he said, “was wrong.”

My mouth flew open and I snapped it shut. I had boiled over far too often. Mildly, I asked, “Why?”

“It was a bargain. A just bargain. It would be better if I'd stayed dead. I used a Black Art. I've become Ammath.”

This time I merely left my mouth open while disbelief bludgeoned me speechless, then shut it to lock in the greatest fit of sheer screaming infuriation he had ever provoked. Such blind, willful stubbornness, such asinine deafness to reason, such utter disregard for reality, such stupendous, stupefying ingratitude, such pigheaded adherence to a pointless scruple never blotted the history of minds. With a heroic effort I mastered the urge to scream all that at him in one rabid shriek. And then I understood Fengthira's message, and why she had given it to me.

“Fengthira,” I said, “told me to tell you. What you did was a Must.”

His head whipped round. He positively goggled. “Fengthira? Fengthira said it was a—she—how—what—”

Dolt, I berated myself. Will you never grasp what Aedr implies? “Use Phathire,” I suggested. “See for yourself.”

He stared. Then his irises swirled and his physical vision blanked out.

The saeveryrs chattered, the fire clucked. With chasteningly total inattention I thought, I must do something with those morrethans . . . and pulled my mind guiltily back to Zam.

He was looking stunned, amazed, but I saw with intense thankfulness that the granite expression had gone. He turned to me almost with wondering respect.

“How did you dare?” he said.

To be honest I should have answered, Because it was for you. But I crushed that thought at its very inception and answered cheerfully, “I was so furious I didn't have time to be scared.”

He said something under his breath. “And Th'Iahn. Imsar Math . . . I'd have curled up like a play-dead spider, just looking at him.” He eyed me with a suggestion of awe. “Furious isn't the word.”

“Oh,” I said with the blitheness of distance and ignorance, “he wasn't so bad. Just a bit testy. Who was he, anyway?”

Zam opened and shut his mouth a couple of times. Then he said “Th'Iahn. Founder of the Flametree. The Heagians. He dreamed of Math in Los Velandryxe Thira. The aedric heirloom. The Well of Wisdom's Light. Then he tried to make Math real. Then he tried to destroy it when his daughter ran away with his arch-enemy's son. He tried to take her head off with a battle-axe first. Then he started a feud that killed half the aedryx of Rihannar, including both his sons. The story is that he throttled Vorn—his enemy—as well. You saw Vorn. The black-haired one with the twisted neck.” He had more than returned to normal, he had achieved an abnormal loquacity. “When I was a prentice, my worst temptation was to use Ruagesthyn and see if there really were fingermarks on Vorn's neck.” He gazed reflectively into the fire. “And when the chance came, I never thought to look.”

I tried not to shiver. “If Th'Iahn got at him, there probably were.”

“Mm,” said Zam. “But you see, when Vorn died, Th'Iahn had been buried three whole years.”

In my silence he went on, rather wryly, “Not—exactly—the one among the Asthyn I would choose to try conclusions with.”

“Then it's as well I didn't know,” I retorted briskly, braving it out, “or I would have curled up too.” Then a giggle surprised me. No wonder he had called me a hussy. Dead or alive, such insolence could rarely have come his way.

Zam was looking offended. “And it's just as well,” he said stiffly, “that he dreamt of Math, or neither of us would be here.”

“No,” I agreed rather hollowly, “we would not.”

When I looked up his frown was back. “But to take Kastir. . . .”

Oh, no, I thought. No. Please, don't let him judge
this
Ammath. Not now. . . .

“It doesn't seem just.” The argument was internal. “It must have been. . . .” He shivered and did not go on.

In a hurried attempt to tip the scales, I said, “This life and that, Fengthira said. I think she meant it was for—Zem. As well as you.”

“Mm.” He did not sound wholly convinced.

“And Th'Iahn . . . Th'Iahn agreed.”

“Mm.” It still sounded dubious. I bit my tongue rather than blurt out, He invented it, if it wasn't Math, surely he would know!

“And—and Fengthira said, ‘Is not justice the keystone of Math?'”

“Hmm.” That sounded more than dubious. But then he paused again, and finally, shrugged. “Well, 'Thira always was a law unto herself. Even as flesh and blood.”

He did not mean to jib, after all. I hid my relief.

“I suppose. . . .” He sighed. Climbed effortfully to his feet. And paused, an odd expression on his face. “Sellithar?”

“Yes?” There was some sort of blockage in my lungs.

“I—I'm—not much good with words. And this is—not something for thanks, it—I don't know how to say it, words just aren't—”

He had grown positively harassed. There was an awful pause, from which I took refuge for us both by jumping up and saying, “Then forget them, I know what you mean. Just be glad I'm a shrewish bitch, and help me fix Fengthira's morrethans.”

Thankfully he abandoned expressions of gratitude along with qualms about his ransom, and said, almost his old self, “Yes, we'll do them now.”

* * * * * *

That was not the end of it, of course. He woke that night in a terror that left him utterly speechless, making such noises I thought he was in convulsions and in desperation banged his head on the cave wall to bring him round, after which we had three brews of tea, and neither of us slept till dawn.

Next night he moved under the finlythes, but that was no better, and we fell into the habit of sleeping in our places by the fire, so I could wake him when the first symptoms showed. After a night or two I developed quite maternal reflexes, and would come wide-awake at a single choke. It was in one of these night watches that he told me what had happened to him, and, by implication, to Kastir.

“It's an art called Yazthir. It's outlawed too. Mind stealing. It begins like Letharthir, the beguiling, except you don't see anything. It's like falling asleep. But,” he swallowed, “it isn't peaceful and you don't assent. It was probably better for me, I wasn't trying to fight—at least, I was trying not to fight. You seem to sink. In black water. Your senses go. You can't think in words. But you're still—aware. That was when the Asthyn came. I could feel them.” He was shuddering all over. “Fastened on to me like—like ticks. And I was trying to keep still. . . . Oh, poor fool, he wouldn't have known what was happening, let alone tried not to fight, he would have gone crazy—I think I hope he did.”

I opened my mouth to snap, He wouldn't have pitied
you,
and shut it hard. Even now, I could not truly pity Kastir himself. He had wreaked too much damage, too much hurt, on too much I cared about. My sense of justice kept insisting, he deserved it, as implacably as the verdict of the Dead. But I could keep such Ammath from burdening Zam.

“After that I don't know what happens,” he went on at last. “A living aedr brings you back, some times. The Asthyn. . . .” He shrugged.

I said in a small voice, “You never come back.”

“Perhaps.” He shivered again. “Unless someone wakes you—” He broke off, then added violently, “Imsar Math, I hope no one ever wakens me.”

* * * * * *

But next day he strode up from the finlythes with a shimmer in his eyes more brilliant than laughter, the picture of a mischievous small boy, biting his lips to subdue a grin.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Guess,” he returned smugly.

“I'll use Scarthe,” I threatened.

“It's too complicated, you'd never get it. No, I have to tell you. An Estarian Assembly meeting. Estar was misled by a vile unscrupulous capitalist who distorted the facts to enrich himself. In view of the unjustifiable loss of life and extravagant, irretrievable expenditure, for a palpable current loss and dubious future gain, ‘Project Hethria' can no longer be considered tenable.”

I goggled up at him. Then I threw six yams in the air and jumped up to fling my arms after them. “It's really over.
You've won!”

He nodded, lips compressed, but the laughter effervesced in his eyes. Of a sudden their fluid gray changed; imps danced there as they once had in Zem's. Next moment my hair, done in plaits out of the heat and flour dust, stood straight up like two rods beside my head.

“Zam!” I shrieked. “You wretch! Let them down! I must look like a—a—stop it, you rat!”

He was shaking with silent mirth.
“Let them down!”
he mimicked. “Now do you say aedryx can't do anything?”

“Fiend! Wizard! Monster! I'll prod you to death with the cake-stick—”

“And look like a Hazghend helmet for the rest of your life?”

“I'll throttle you, I'll—I'll—”

“I've wanted to do that for months,” he said smugly. “It seemed a suitable time.”

I shook my fist. The scintillation brightened, turning those gray irises diamond white. Then my hair collapsed against my cheeks.

“And some other news. The Hazghend tyrant . . . Lyve, is it? Mm. Is billing and cooing with Quarred. Love at fifteenth sight.”

“So that's why Estar dropped Hethria! If you'd told me the right way round instead of beating your chest and playing heroes—” I eyed him suspiciously. “You still look like a lydyr in a lettuce-bed. What's the rest?”

“Rest?”

“Zam, imitate a balloon any longer and I'll puncture you with the cake-stick. Tell me the rest.”

“Oh,” he said airily, “the Assembly also discussed Everran. It seems a dependency costs an unconscionable amount of money, especially when the ulfann are howling at the other door. It's felt that with Estar's guidance, Everran should now be able to govern itself. They will be granted ‘independence' next month.”