The Blue Sword (14 page)

She squinted up at the sky. The Hills were black with shadows, but the sky was hard blue and she could feel the heat beating up again from underfoot. In the quiet—for, as it had been this morning, no one spoke and even the horses seemed to step softly—the heat seemed almost audible. She set Tsornin to walk himself as cool as possible. She patted his neck and dismounted, that they might walk together; he was sweating but not distressed, and he shook his head at her. She reclaimed her sword from the kysin, who saluted her. He had not saluted the laprun rider just before her.

Mathin reappeared and told her she could rest awhile. His cheek was washed clean and a bit of white cloth bound over his eyebrow. “The individual matches will go on all afternoon; you will be called late.”

They found a spot of shade at the edge of the plain and pulled the saddles off the horses. Mathin gave her some bread and some wet white tasteless cheese. She sucked it slowly and let it trickle down her dry throat. She felt quite calm, and wondered what was the matter with her. “Mathin, are all the trials the same? Did you gallop and bash people with a wooden stick at your trials?”

“No and yes. They test your horsemanship in different ways; those who watch always have some chance to help—or hinder; and weapons of wood are safer. But the afternoon’s matches are always the same, one rider against another, each with his own sword. If a kysin declares that a trials rider did badly in the general trials, he will not be permitted to ride in the individual sets.”

They watched the dust clouds from the matches and the bright notches of color spinning in them; but Mathin made no move to return to that end of the plain, and Harry waited beside him, leaning on her elbows in spite of her sore shoulder.

The sun was halfway down the sky when they mounted again. Sungold, for the first time since she’d known him, refused to walk, and jigged along sideways, tossing his head. “Stop that, idiot,” she hissed at him in Homelander, and he halted in surprise. Mathin turned his head and looked at her impassively.

They stood at the edge of the crowd now, and watched the combatants. There were five pairs, each the center of a private war; the red man had divided into ten red men on grey or black horses. There were two red men for each pair of fighters, and one man of each pair carried a small brass bell; when the bell rang out, that conflict was ended, and the horses fell apart, and riders and mounts panted the hot air. All the laprun riders were dressed in bright colors; there was very little white and no dreary dun or grey; with the scarlet kysin, it was a very vivid scene.

A bell sang out, a long gay peal, and she looked over at the finished pair. One of the riders held his sword up and shook it so the sunlight flickered on it. The other rider sat quietly, his sword on the ground at his horse’s forefeet and, she noticed with a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach, his sash neatly sliced from around his waist and lying, part on his horse’s croup and part on the ground.

Mathin said: “It is best to take your opponent’s sash. The kysin mark each blow dealt, but to cut off the other rider’s sash is best. This you will do.”

“Oh,” said Harry.

“You may, if you wish, unhorse him first,” Mathin added as an afterthought.

“Thanks,” said Harry.

“But you must not draw blood, for this is a sign of clumsiness. Baga, we call one who cuts his opponent during the laprun—baga, butcher. It is skill we look for. This is why no armor is allowed in the individual matches.”

“Of course,” said Harry.

Mathin grinned at her. “Of course. Is this not what I have been teaching you?” He watched the next pair of riders salute each other; and another bell from another pair rang; each of the five bells spoke a different note. “The trials go back many generations—once they were held every year, but there are no longer enough of us in the Hills to make up the number; we have them every three years now, since Corlath’s father’s day.

“The sash-cutting—churakak—is a duel of honor that is as old as Damar; far older than the laprun trials themselves, although few meet the churakak outside the trials any more.

“Aerin,” he added thoughtfully, “met the churakak several times. Her red hair no doubt made her quick-tempered.”

“Harimad,” barked a kysin; and Tsornin jolted forward before Harry had registered her name. She was set facing a boy in a green robe and yellow sash; the kysin said, “Begin,” and Harry feinted Tsornin to the left, back, forward, and the boy’s sword fell to the ground, and his yellow sash fluttered down to cover it. A bell rang.

Harry was a bit taken aback. The kysin waved her aside. Tsornin flattened his ears; he was not interested in boys who did not know what they were doing. Next Harry removed a dark orange sash from around a sky-blue robe; and then a white sash from a purple robe. Harry began to feel as irritable as her horse, and with each cry of “Harimad” the two of them turned and stood and attacked and wondered when the real thing would begin. Harry began unhorsing her opponents before lopping off their sashes just to give herself something to do.

The Hills’ shadows began to creep toward the feet of the charging dancing horses, and the lowering sun flicked dangerous gleams from the shining sides of swords and into opponents’ eyes. Tsornin was dark with sweat, and foam streaked his sides, but he slowed not a whit, and it seemed to Harry that they were galloping down a long hall of statues with swords held stiffly in raised hands, waiting for her to lean languidly over Sungold’s neck and knock their loose sashes off.

All five bells rang at once as the green sash fell off the point of Harry’s sword to the ground, and she looked around and realized that she and her latest opponent were the last to finish. It was nearly twilight, and she was surprised that they had gone on so long. Now that she stopped to think about it, it was rather hard to see; it was as though dusk had fallen on them as soon as they stood still. Tsornin’s nostrils were wide and red as he turned his head. She looked where he was looking. A big dark horse stood as if waiting for them. Harry blinked and stared; the other horse tossed its head. Was he bay or black? There seemed to be something wrong with her eyes; she raised one arm and rubbed them against her grimy sleeve, and looked again, but the horse and rider still shimmered in her sight, a shimmer of darkness instead of light. The tall rider was muffled in a shadowy cloak that fell over his mount’s shoulders and past his boot tops; he shrugged it back to show a white tunic and a red sash. The horse fidgeted sideways, and a bay glint showed along its dark flank.

The lapruni and the audience moved to form a ring around them, the shadowy bay and Tsornin. The silence after the pounding hooves, the grunts and thumps and crashes, was unearthly; and the sun sank farther behind the Hills. The first breath of the evening wind crept out of the Hills; its cool finger tapped Harry’s cheek, and it felt like fear.

A torch appeared, held aloft by one of the ring, someone on horseback. Then another torch burst into fire, and another, and another. The beaten ground between Harry and the silent rider at the other end of the circle swam in the flickering light. Then the brass bells rang again, like the sound of Outlander cannon in Harry’s ears, and Sungold came to life, and neighed, and the bay answered.

Harry did not know if the match lasted a long time or a short time. She knew at once that this swordsman, behind the scarf wrapped around his head and face so that only his eyes showed, could have dismembered her whenever he liked. Instead he drew her to attack him, opening his defense to attract each of the many moves Mathin had taught her, as if he were a schoolmaster hearing her lessons. It was so easy for him that Harry began to feel angry, began to clear a tiny space in her mind to think of some plan of her own; and her anger rose, and gave her a headache till the torchlight was red with it, but she did not care, for she knew by now that it gave her strength. Strength she needed, for she was tired, and her horse was tired, and she could see that the bay was fresh, and could feel up her arm as the swords met that the rider did not exert himself to resist her. But her rising anger lifted her and invigorated Sungold, and she began to harass the bay stallion’s rider—if only a little, still a little. She pressed forward and the bay gave way a step or two, and the crowd gasped; and with a quick and merry slash the tip of her sword caught the scarf bound round the rider’s face and tore it up from the chin. She misjudged by the fraction of a hair; a single drop of blood welled up from the corner of his mouth. She stared at it, fascinated, as she felt her sash slip down her legs in two pieces and lie huddled on the ground, for the face belonged to Corlath.

S
he felt caught as she stared at the dark Hill-king astride his red horse, caught by the sky, by the stars winking into the new-fallen darkness, by the sand and encircling Hills; they seized her and held her down. She was a figure in some story other than her own, an embroidered shape in a Hill tapestry, a representation of something that did not exist in her Homeland. Then the crowd gave a roar and surged inward; she closed her eyes. But they were patting her ankles, her legs, her back, making her human again, with human bewilderment and human luck. She began to distinguish words in the roar: they were shouting, “Harimad-sol! Laprun minta! Minta—musti! Harimad-sol!” Tsornin and Isfahel were driven together, and they stood patiently while the crowd rose and foamed around them. Isfahel turned his head and Tsornin turned his, till their flared nostrils touched briefly in a salute.

Out of the corner of her eye Harry saw Corlath blot the drop of blood at his mouth with the back of his hand.

The crowd fell away from its center, breaking into smaller eddies that laughed and swung each other by arms and hands and shoulders. Sungold and Fireheart edged away from each other, their riders silent and motionless. Harry could not look at Corlath. He reached out one hand toward her, perhaps to touch her, but Tsornin sidled just one step farther and Corlath’s hand dropped away.

Mathin appeared on Harry’s far side and touched her elbow, and Harry smiled gratefully at his familiar face. Mathin did not speak to her, but turned away, and she slid off Sungold and the two of them followed him, walking slowly, permitted their due of weariness at last. Mathin stopped where two taris were already set up, and knelt down to build a fire, companionably ignoring his two pupils; and Harry was glad to lay aside the glory of laprun-minta. The headache haze and sense of displacement began to ebb as she mechanically stripped off Sungold’s saddle and rubbed him down. The smell of Mathin’s cooking crept to greet her and cheer her, and remind her who she was, or who she had become. She was the Daughter of the Riders.

Harry ate too much that night. She ate till her stomach hurt—Mathin had kept them on strict rations during training—but she was only half aware of what she was eating. Many of the lapruni she had faced today came to her, to touch her hand and offer what seemed a sort of fealty; they materialized at the edge of the firelight, as indistinct as they had seemed to her that afternoon: they wore red robes and blue robes and brown robes and black, for none wore a sash, and their swords hung in scabbards by their sides instead of drawn against her. And they called her Harimad-sol, and laprun-minta, and their voices were hushed and reverent. Harry ate too much because it made her feel more real.

As the evening progressed other taris were set up nearby: she had noticed that Mathin was using a pot larger than the one for the two of them she had seen every night for six weeks. Soon she found they were sharing their fire and supper with Innath and Faran and Forloy and Dapsim, and others of the king’s Riders. They watched without comment as the lapruni came to show themselves to the Daughter of the Riders, who kept putting more food on her plate as they appeared and vanished. Once when Harry looked up she saw Mathin handing Corlath a plate. The king slouched down, cross-legged, and began to eat. Harry would have liked to ask why the lapruni were saluting her, for it seemed beyond a simple acknowledgment of the loser to the victor, but she did not ask. Mathin had taught her patience, and she had known all her life how to be stubborn.

It seemed a bit unfair to complain, she thought, as it—or as I—have turned out; but couldn’t I have been told a little more beforehand? She looked into the eyes of those who sought her and called her Harimad-sol, and tried to think of them as individuals, and not as robes and tunics and fallen sashes. The lapruni all went away without her having to speak to them, for they did not seem to expect her to answer them with anything but her presence. This was both restful and unnerving.

One laprun was a woman. For her Harry did have a question. “What is your name?”

The girl’s robe was blue, and Harry suddenly recognized her as the rider on the bay mare. “Senay,” she replied.

“Where is your home?”

Senay turned to face northwest. “Shpardith,” she said. “It is there,” and she pointed into the blackness. “Twelve days on a fleet horse.”

Harry nodded, and the girl left to return to her own fire, and others came to speak to the laprun-minta who sat with the Riders and the king. When she looked around again she realized that there were eighteen dark figures besides herself and the king; all the Riders, from wherever they had been, had returned.

And Narknon reappeared, and Harry hugged her eagerly, for she felt in need of something to hug. She offered her bits of meat, which Narknon graciously accepted, although she attempted to nose through Harry’s plate herself, to make sure Harry wasn’t keeping back any of the best bits for herself.

Harry slept dreamlessly, her hand on the hilt of her sword; when she awoke and found this so, she stared at her hand as if it did not belong to her.

She crept out of the tari and looked around. The sky was light; yet most of the taris still had bodies in them, and there were more blanket-swathed figures motionless around banked or burned-out fires. Mathin’s lips moved as he rebuilt their fire. She turned to look behind her. Corlath was gone; there was only a small ripple in the sand where he had lain, or it might be only the wind. Mathin handed her a cup of malak. It was reheated from last night, and bitter. Harry shrugged into her stiff grimy surcoat, hoping there would be bathing sometime today, and thinking wistfully of the little valley behind her, and its green pool. Her split sash lay beside her, where she had stuffed it through the tari’s open flap the night before. She picked it up and, after a moment’s thought, wrapped it around her waist again, tucking torn edges underneath till it would stay fixed. She did not do it very well, and she thought of asking Mathin for help, but chose not to.

After the wildness of the night before, this morning everyone went quietly about the business of packing up and returning, it seemed, to where they had come from. A few lingered: Harry and several of the Riders, for many of them had vanished with Corlath, and perhaps a dozen riders she did not recognize, and a few of the lapruni. She looked for Senay hopefully, but did not see her. The wind whispered over the bare land. But for the black hollows of dead fires, there was nothing to show that several hundred people had spent the last three days here.

Mathin turned Windrider east, east where the City lay just beyond one of the enigmatic rockfaces before them. Tsornin fell into step beside Windrider; Viki came along behind them, still grumbling to himself; and the others, some thirty riders, strung out behind them. Harry peered over her shoulder several times, watching the procession winding behind her, till she caught Mathin’s expression of restrained amusement when he glanced over at her. After that she looked only straight ahead. Narknon padded softly among them all. There was another big hunting-cat with them, a handsome spotted-mahogany male an inch or two taller than Narknon; but she scorned him.

Tsornin strode out like a yearling having his first sight of the world beyond his paddock. Harry tried to keep her back straight and her legs quiet. Yesterday she had been glad of her perfectly fitted saddle, for it gave her suppleness and security; today she was glad of it because it told her where her legs were supposed to be even when they felt like blocks of wood. Her shoulder hurt, and her head felt woolly, and her right wrist was as weak as water, and she had a great purple bruise on her left calf. My horse is ignoring me, Harry thought. Or maybe he’s trying to cheer me up. She had gone over him with great care the evening before, and again this morning, and applied salve to the few small scrapes he had collected. He had no suspicious swellings, no lameness, and his eyes were bright and his step buoyant. He made her feel woollier. “Are you trying to cheer me up?” she said to his mane, and he cocked a merry ear at her and strutted.

They had just begun to step upward off the plain into the Hills when they rounded another abrupt shoulder of rock like the one she and Mathin had passed for her first view of the laprun fields; and here was a wide highway mounting steeply to massive gates not far away. There lay the City.

They passed through the gates, borne beneath an arch two horse-lengths thick, their horses’ hooves echoing hollowly. There was a cold grey smell, as if of caves, although the gates had stood for a thousand years. They walked down a broad avenue where six horsemen might walk abreast. It was stone-paved, laid out in huge flat cobbles, some grey or white or red-veined black; it had edges of earth where slender grey trees grew. Behind them were stone walkways where children played; and beyond them were stone houses and shops and stables and warehouses; stone flower-pots stood in doorways and on window ledges. The green-and-blue parrots Harry had seen in the traveling camp were perched on many shoulders, and some of them joined, gay and noisy, in the children’s games. Often with a flirt of wings one would carry off the stone counter or mark a group of children was using, while the children shrieked at them, and occasionally threw pebbles at them, but only very small ones.

“Is there
no
wood?” said Harry. “Nothing but stone?” She looked up at the roof and walls and gables mounting up the hillside behind the gates, tiers of stone, multi-colored stone, no shingles or slats or carved wooden cornices, or shutters or window frames.

“There is wood here,” said Mathin, “but there is more stone.”

Innath rode up on Harry’s other side. “Mathin cannot see the strangeness of this place,” he said; “his village is just as stony as the City, only smaller. Where I come from we cut down trees and plane them smooth and slot them together, our houses and barns are warm and weathered, and do not last forever and haunt you with the ghosts of a thousand years.”

“We use wood,” said Mathin.

Innath made a dismissive gesture. “The grand receiving-rooms here have wooden paneling—you’ll see some of them at the castle—and parlors, where people really live, often have wooden screens as ornaments.”

“There are wooden chairs and tables and cupboards,” said Mathin.

“There are more stone chairs and tables and cupboards,” said Innath. “They don’t often rearrange the furniture here.”

Harry looked around. She saw doors so well hung on their hinges that they were opened and closed by a child’s touch, yet made of stone slabs so heavy she wondered how they had been wrestled into their places to begin with. Free-standing walls, she saw, were often as wide as the reach of her two arms; yet often too the inner wall facing on a courtyard encircled by tall houses was so fine and delicate, cut into filigree work so complex, it looked as though it must tremble in the lightest breeze; as if one might roll it up like a bolt of silk and store it on a shelf.

“To be either a stonemason or a carpenter is to be respected,” Mathin said. “The best of them are greatly honored.”

“Hear the horse-breaker,” said Innath.

Mathin smiled.

The children began calling: “The lapruni are here! And the Riders—and the laprun-minta!”

“Harimad-sol,” Innath called to them, and Harry blushed.

“Harimad-sol,” agreed the children; and people came out from the houses and down the narrower ways off the wide central way to look. Harry tried to look around her without catching anyone’s eye, but many of the onlookers sought hers; and when one succeeded, he—or she—would touch right wrist to forehead and then hold the flat empty palm out toward her. “Harimad-sol,” she heard, and eagerly they added, “Damalur-sol.” The children danced in front of Tsornin’s feet to make her look at them, and clapped their hands; and she smiled and waved shyly at them, and Tsornin was very careful with his hooves.

They rode on. At first the Hills rose up behind the low buildings, but as they went farther in, the buildings grew taller and taller and seemed part of the Hills themselves; and the trees that lined the way grew larger, till the shade of them could be felt as one passed beneath. Then another gate rose up before them, the wall around it running into the flanks of the mountains as if wall and gate had been formed with the mountains at the beginning of time. They went through this gate too, and entered a wide flat courtyard of polished stone. This stone was mirror-white, and it blazed up fiercely in the morning sunlight, and Harry felt as if she had emerged from underground. She blinked.

Before her stood Corlath’s castle; no one had to explain to her what this huge stone edifice must be. She tipped her head back to see the sharp points of the turrets, brilliant as diamonds. It was itself a mountain, proudly peaked, seated among its brothers; its faces glittered dangerously. The shadows it threw were abrupt and absolute; one wall reflected white, another black. The central mass was taller than the Hill crests here; the road they had climbed had reached near the summit of the dark Hills, and like an island in the crater lake of an extinct volcano, the castle stood in its stone yard that shone as bright as water in the sun.

Harry sighed.

Men of the horse were approaching them in the swift but unhurried way she remembered from the days on the desert in the traveling camp; and she felt a sudden sharp stab of memory, as if that were a time many years past, and the present were sad and weary. She slipped down from Tsornin’s back and he suffered himself to be led away when one of the brown men spoke to him gently by name and laid a hand in front of his withers. Narknon sat down neatly at Harry’s feet; Harry could feel her tail twitching at her ankles.

Those who had ridden with her began now to go purposefully in their own individual directions. Mathin said to her, ‘“It is here I am to leave you. Perhaps it may be permitted that we ride against each other again and you may practice your skills upon me, Daughter of the Riders.” He smiled. “We will meet again at the king’s table, here in the City.”

Harry looked up toward the castle when Mathin left her, feeling a little forlorn; and it was Corlath himself who walked to meet her. She swallowed rather hard, and blessed the sunburn that would prevent her fierce blush from showing as clearly as it would on an Outlander’s pale skin.