Red Country (8 page)

The sun sank, the air cooled at last. An odd bird or animal crept back to the water, emboldened by our quiet. It was restful to lie beyond the fire's range and watch the last splendid reds and golds die from Eskan Helken, its domes turning rose-black before they vanished in the dark. Fifty miles away, I estimated, watching them under my heavy eyelids, and into weariness and wounded self-esteem crept a shadow of pride.

“Fifty-five,” he said from across the fire.

No doubt, I thought savagely before I could help myself, it would have been sixty-five but for me.

“No.” He sounded expressionless as ever. “I was hurrying to make Cruin Los. This waterhole. That was far enough.”

A jolt of indignation sat me up. He forestalled me.

“There was no point in talking till you felt better about it. And most of it didn't need to be said.”

“
Curse
you!” I had erupted before I could stop myself. “How dare you! Read my feelings—let me eat my words and then stew all day in my own juice—‘wait till I felt better'—sit there till you thought I wouldn't bite your head off and then patronize me like—like—oh, I could strangle you!”

He said resignedly, “I did wait, yes. It hasn't seemed to help.”

“Oh!” I could hardly think, I was so furious at succumbing to fury, and a fury that was unwarranted, unreasonable, when he had been attempting tact and I was in the wrong and it was my own fault and I could not even admit that.

He did not apologize, explain, try to appease me. He would not quarrel either. He simply got up and walked away.

* * * * * *

We rode mute all next day, I in deepest dudgeon, he probably aware of speech's futility, and we rode more slowly, so I seethed away, refusing to demean myself by shouting that I could go faster, that I would not be coddled, further enraged by the certainty that he knew what I felt. I could not even sulk in privacy.

In the same cold silence we camped, he apparently unaffected, I absorbed in trying to stop my thoughts. I was still engaged in this fruitless exercise when I realized he had risen to his feet beside the fire, staring toward a red glow in the south.

After quick deductions, quicker adjustments, and the decision to disparage Hethria, I said, “What in the Four's name is there to burn out here?”

“Hethox,” he replied cryptically. “Down on Xathan Syr. The big grass-belt. And a hunting fire. It will burn till it finishes the torjer—the spiny grass—and they have to shift their ground.”

“So?”

“So then there'll be tribes at odds. Skirmishes. People killed.” The tone remained passionless. “I've told them fifty times, and they never heed.”

I stoppered mental conjecture with verbal inanity. “What are you going to do?”

He took his time to answer. You would, I thought, stuffing speculations back into mental limbo. Hurry up!

“If there was rain about,” he said at last, “I could divert it there. Or if there was wind, I could blow the fire back on itself. What I should do is use a Command and make them beat it out themselves. But it only frightens them silly, and doesn't teach them anything.”

My mouth opened and shut. Swamped in wrath over his empathy, I had never thought to wonder if an aedr had other powers.

“Yes,” he said. “I can do any of those things.” I still could not speak. “Wrevurx, the weather words, give power over rain and wind. The Commands are lower level arts. They only affect minds. Wreviane, the fire art, isn't as easy for me as for Beryx, because he's Heagian. But I think I can manage this.”

My mind reeled under this barrage of gibberish, to recoil on stronger grievances.

“No.” He sounded a little weary. “You needn't wait while I ride over there to fight it, or go to muster help. You won't have to help me, either. Ruanbrarx, they're called. Mind acts. I'll put it out from here. With my mind.”

Before I had rallied to resent that speech's innuendo rather than its content, he had sat down with his back to me, head on hands, elbows on knees, and begun to breathe.

Breathe? In that dead hush of night-time Hethria it was like the approach of a storm; each successive breath was held longer, exhaled longer, developing a rasp, a choking roar that first alarmed, then cowed, then positively terrified me. A dozen times I thought he had had some sort of seizure and leapt up to run with vain but basic human instinct to his help. The most fantastic terrors assailed me. He would throw a fit, strangle himself, die, I should be left alone in the wild, or accused of murdering him, I should have to plead innocence to the Sathellin, to Beryx himself, who in this light became an ogre of legendary size. You must remember that I had never before seen an aedr use the Arts. Though they are called mind-acts, they involve more than the mind.

My panic has left no idea of how long it went on. Unconsciously I had crept closer, the Four know why, to his back. It was there I found myself, mouth dry, bathed in sweat, heart pounding like a hammer-mill, when the dreadful breathing slowed, diminished, and he seemed to fall apart, slumping and then rolling sideways to lie limply in the sand.

In a pang of pure horror I snatched his wrist. But the pulse was there, hammering fast and thunderously as my own. I sprang up to run for the kettle, already filled for breakfast, water to dash in his face—but before I could reach my feet he said faintly, rather flatly, And I had neither time nor inclination to dispute.

By the time the fire roused he had sat up, groggily wiping his face. The new flames showed me the trembling wrists, the slick streams of sweat on his jaw, the great black patches on his robe, the sag of limbs and trunk that denote a man stripped of physical strength. I shot back to his side, pushed him flat, and snapped, “Lie down, idiot!”

He went down with a thump, unable to help himself, and I yanked the closest saddlebag to push under his head. Sounding a little plaintive, he said,

I was looking full in his face when he spoke, and the hair lifted on my neck. For his lips had not moved.

he said.

And I suddenly found I had been inching back as if my limbs had assumed a life of their own, that my fingers had stiffened, by some age-old reflex, into the evil sign.

For a moment those gray eyes were no longer opaque, and what they revealed was grief. Simple human hurt. Then he spoke aloud, just audible, with such effort I understood why he had not done so before.

“I am not a . . . sorcerer.”

A pell-mell surge of thought recalled the full implications of his empathy, constructed from that brief reaction how he must feel about all the distrust, fear, outright terror that ordinary people must inflict on him, showed me an aedr's power was equal fortune and curse. And I understood that here, if nowhere else, he was vulnerable. To have him at my mercy, I need only continue showing fear.

Even at thought's speed the realization hardly formed before it spawned refusal, and the refusal its corollary of pity that I hid more swiftly than I had ever thought in my life.

“I know that,” I said.

* * * * * *

We did not speak again until the tea was drunk, we had eaten, and he was sitting up, apparently recovered and safe inside his usual impassivity. I had been looking into the south, now lit only by stars, reflecting that he was a better ruler than I judged. He could have lost his temper with the Hethox. With those powers he could have meted out some fearful punishment. Yet he had mended their damage, and withheld so much as their just deserts. It must take a great capacity for patience and kindness, I thought, not only to pardon the crime but to right the damage yourself, and at such a fearful cost. . . .

“I'm afraid you have it wrong,” he said. “It's Hethria I really care about.”

I goggled anew as I envisaged that vast, useless, hostile waste which surrounded us, merely waiting in its unforgiving way for our one mistake which would offer it its revenge.

“The Hethox can take care of themselves,” he said. “They've done it for thousands of years. But a fire like that isn't just inefficient, wasteful, killing far more game than they can eat. It destroys the land for a decade or more. This has been a wet autumn.” I gulped again. “Plants had come up down there that don't shoot in forty years; it would have been a good breeding season for birds and animals; even the waterbag frogs would have woken up. Now that's ruined. Not to mention that, if a sandstorm comes through before the torjer recovers, that part of Hethria will just lift up and blow away. Destruction. Wanton waste.” His quiet tone made it a blasphemy. “Hethria would be a beautiful country, without men.”

I thought of the Sathellin.

“Roads. Caravans. Farms. Water from Kemreswash. Salt. My father taught us how to check it. Now that it's stopped, Zem and I are taking care they don't expand. Roads, yes. Settlement, no.”

Puzzled, I wondered,
Why?

He said flatly, “It would be too much. There are roads because Beryx wants them, but they strain the natural balance already. More farms would mean more irrigation, more salt, too many ignorant farmers to compensate. The ruin of what soil Hethria does have. A real desert, where nothing could grow. It shan't happen. Not if I can help it.” And, said that hint of steel, I will.

My eyes returned to that horizontal horizon, blackness unbroken by any hill, building, natural or man-made resource, and the thought burst up: But what a loss, what a waste, a life devoted to shepherding nomads and restraining savages, denied all the grace and comfort of civilization, the mere pleasure of running water and green grass!

And with an aedr, it's not merely a waste, it's criminal. Those powers could make him a general, a great engineer, a city builder, a ruler, a nation-founder. He could have wealth, rank, power, his choice of human felicity—

He clicked his tongue. The Sathel idiom retained from Gebria, which expresses denial, contradiction, disdain. “Did all that bring such happiness to you?”

Having recovered, I came back, “I'm not an aedr. You would never have my problems. You could have whatever you want—”

“I already have what I want.”

In the shadow of the wilderness I saw those endless days riding in its empty heat, patiently curbing its ignorant denizens, balancing, tending, with endless vigilance, in endless loneliness. And for what? An unforgiving desert not improved, but simply preserved. Still unable to forgive.

The words sprang without consideration from my thoughts. “You must be . . . very fond of Hethria.”

His face was tilted up to the sharp, close desert stars. He answered softly, with perfect certainty.

“I belong to it.”

This time I stared in wonder. I had endowed him with my own emotions for Everran, a deep, possessive protectiveness. For its sake I would probably have suffered death as well as banishment, yet I had never seen myself as belonging to Everran. It was Everran that belonged to me.

If we still traveled at the limit of my endurance, the next few days were better, for every morning Zam punctiliously outlined the day's march before lapsing into his customary taciturnity. I did not mind. I was studying Hethria, in search of whatever it was about this endless desert with its hot harsh landscape, its paucity of dull vegetation, its shy, strange, ugly animals, that had bound him in such willing servitude.

We seldom saw a Sathel road. He took his own way, by waters I doubt Sathellin had ever seen, bypassing dassyx, but not, I found, ignoring them. When we veered abruptly to a covered irrigation channel where I spent a sweaty strenuous hour bringing stones for him to repair a fall in the roof, he solved three of my puzzles at once by saying, “Pharaone. Farsight. Another art. I use it to check the channels as I go. It saves riding. But it does keep me too busy to talk.”

It was the closest he had ever approached to an apology. I answered politely, “My head's not so empty I have to entertain myself with my mouth.”

That made him glance up, and he was amused at last. Those gray eyes sparkled like light on a crystalline sea, and I hurriedly suppressed the thought: Four above, I've actually got a laugh out of him.

We crossed sandhill belts, gibber plains, levels strewn with muted gray-green istarel bushes or green with thick spiny torjer grass; we threaded low, abraded ranges, and once or twice we crossed a salt lake whose blinding white reaches taught me the point of a black turban in Hethria. It cuts ground-glare as well as the sky's.

“These are small ones,” Zam said in rare response as I silently groaned before another day's grill on searing white. “Kerym Iswyre, where Kemreswash ends, is nearly as big as Assharral. Only one in the last five Hethox generations have seen it fill.”

“A fine sort of lake,” I retorted pettishly.

He shrugged. “The birds come from all over Rihannar. It's—something to see.”

Squinting into that white sterility, I tried to envisage an inland sea shadowed, dotted, rimmed with birds, bedded in desert greenery, smiling with water's opulence to the harsh blue sky.

For a moment the image's image took my breath. Then it was gone. In unwarranted, inexplicable disappointment I said crossly, “I can't imagine how you live out here.”

He slanted a look at me. Then he said slowly, “When it happens . . . the wait's worthwhile.”

“It doesn't happen anywhere near often enough for me.”

“That,” he answered on a note of finality, “is how Hethria is.”

* * * * * *

Having crossed a tiresomely wide gibber plain called Rienzar we did visit a dassyk, to find the horses a new set of shoes, and again I saw that reaction to him, the Sathel closeness exaggerated to a kind of wary dread. The horses were shod by mid-afternoon. Rather than stay the night he made another short march, remarking, “It's only five miles to Tirien Neth. The southern channel of Kemreswash.”