The Complete Morgaine (12 page)

Liell was upon him then, wresting his hand from the hilt, close to overpowering him, dazed as he was; but the thought of being taken by Leth animated him to frenzy. He twisted, not even trying to defend himself, only to tear free, to reach Morgaine's side and keep his oath for his soul's sake. Mai was out of reach; the black was at hand. He sprang for that saddle and laid heels to him before he was even sure of the reins, gathering them up and settling low in the saddle from his precarious balance. Black legs flashed long in the dark, muscles reached and gathered, bounding obstacles, splashing over inlets of the lake, surging up rises of the shore.

The black at last had run all he chose to run, beyond the shore and far upon the trail: Vanye laid heel to him again, merciless in his fear. The animal gathered himself and plunged forward again.

Morgaine's pale form was ahead. At last she looked around, seeming to hear him; she whipped up Siptah, and he cried out to her in despair, urging the black to further effort.

And she held back, pulling up, weapon in hand until he had come closer.

“Vanye,” she exclaimed softly as he drew alongside. “Is thee thief too? What came of Liell?”

He reached behind his head, felt a tenderness at the back of his head despite the leather coif. Dizziness assailed him, whether of the blow or of the fever, he did not know.

“Liell is no friend of yours,” he said.

“Did you kill him?”

“No,” he breathed, and was content to hang over the saddlebow a moment until his sight cleared. Then he urged the black into a gentle pace, Siptah keeping with him: no horses that had run all the distance from Ra-leth could overtake them now.

“Is thee much hurt?” she asked.

“No.”

“What did he? Did he lift weapon against you?”

“Tried to hold me—tried to persuade me to break oath.”

And the other thing he would not tell her, the urging and then the vile feeling he had had of the look in Liell's eyes, a feverish anxiousness that had wanted something of him, a touch that had twice sunk cruelly into his arm, an avarice matching the hunger in his eyes.

It was not a thing he could tell anyone: he did not know what to name it, or why he had provoked it, or what it aimed at, only that he would die before he fell into the hands of Leth, and most especially those of Liell.

His back had been turned: the man could easily have cut him across the backs of the knees, quickest way to disable a man elsewhere armored, slain him out of hand; instead he had fetched him a crack across the skull, had risked greatly taking him hand to hand when he could have killed him safely: he had wanted him alive.

He could not remember it without shuddering. He wanted nothing of the man. It filled him with loathing to possess the gear and the horse that he had stolen: the black beast with its ill temper was a creature more splendid and less honest than his little Mai, and leaving his little mare in those hands grieved him.

Deep forest closed about them, straight and proper trees now, and they walked the horses until there was no sky overhead, only the interlacing branches. The horses were spent and they themselves were blind with weariness.

“This is no place to stop,” he protested when Morgaine reined in. “Lady, let us sleep in the saddle tonight, walk the horses while they may. This is Koriswood, and it may have been different in your day, but this is the thick of it. Please.”

She sighed in misery, but for once she looked at him and listened, and consented with a nod of her head. He dismounted and took the reins of both horses, both too weary to contest each other, and led them.

She rested a time, then leaned down and bade him stop, offered to take the reins and walk and lead the horses; he looked at her, tired as he was, and had not wit to argue with her. He only turned his back and kept walking, to which she consented by silence.

And eventually she slept, Kurshin-wise, in the saddle.

He walked so far as he could, long hours, until he was stumbling with exhaustion. He stopped then and put his hand on Siptah's neck.

“Lady,” he said softly, not to break the hush of the listening wood. “Lady, now you must wake because I must sleep. Things are quiet.”

“Well enough,” she agreed, and slid down. “I know the road, although this land was tamer then.”

“I must tell you,” he continued hoarsely, “I think Chya Liell will follow when he can gather the forces. I think he lied to us in much,
liyo.
”

“What was it happened back there, Vanye?”

He sought to tell her. He gathered the words, still could not. “He is a strange man,” he said, “and he was anxious that I desert you. He attempted twice to persuade me—this last time in plain words.”

She frowned at him. “Indeed. What form did this proposal take?”

“That I should forget my oath and go with him.”

“To what?”

“I do not know.” The remembering made his voice shake; he thought that she might detect the tremor, and quickly gathered up the black's reins and flung himself into the saddle. “The first time—I almost went. The second—somehow I preferred your company.”

Her odd pale face stared up at him in the starlight. “Many of the house of Leth have drowned in that lake. Or have at least vanished there. I did not know that you were in difficulty. I would not gladly have left you. I did judge that there was some connivance between you and Liell: so when you did not follow—I dared not delay there between two who might be enemies.”

“I was reared Nhi,” he said. “We do not oath-break. We do not oath-break,
liyo.
”

“I beg pardon,” she said, which
liyo
was never obliged to say to
ilin,
no matter how aggrieved. “I failed to understand.”

And at that moment the horses shied, exhausted as they were, heads back
and nostrils flaring, whites of the eyes showing in the dim light. Something reptilian slithered on four legs, whipping serpentwise into the thicker brush. It had been large and pale,-leprous in color. They could still hear it skittering away.

Vanye swore, his stomach still threatening him, his hands managing without his mind, to calm the panicked horse.

“Idiocy,” Morgaine exclaimed softly. “Thiye does not know what he is doing. Are there many such abroad?”

“The woods are full of beasts of his making,” Vanye said. “Some are shy and harm no one. Others are terrible things, beyond belief. They say the Koris-wolves were made, that they were never so fierce and never man-killers before—” He had almost said, before Irien, but did not, in respect of her. “That is why we must not sleep here, lady. They are made things, and hard to kill.”

“They are not made,” she said, “but brought through. But you are right that this is no good place to rest. These beasts—some will die, like infants thrust prematurely into too chill or too warm a place: some will be harmless; but some will thrive and breed. Ivrel must be sweeping a wide field. Ah, Vanye, Thiye is an ignorant man. He is loosing things—he knows not what. Either that or he enjoys the wasteland he is creating.”

“Where do they come from, such things as that?”

“From places where such things are natural. From other
tonights,
and other Gates, and places where
that
was fair and proper. And there will be no native beasts to survive this onslaught if it is not checked. It is not man that such an attack wars on—it is nature. The whole of Andur-Kursh will find such things straying into its meadows. Come. Come.”

But he had lost his inclination to sleep, and kept the reins in his own hand. He closed his eyes as Morgaine set them on their way again, still saw the pale lizard form, large as a man, running across the open space. That was one of the witless nonsensities in Koriswood, more ugly than dangerous.

Reports told of worse. Sometimes, legend said, carcasses were found near Irien, things impossible, abortions of Thiye's art, some almost formless and baneful to the touch, and others of forms so fantastical that none would imagine what aspect the living beast had had.

His only comfort in this place was that Morgaine herself was horrified; she had that much at least of human senses to her. Then he remembered her coming to him, out of the place she called
between,
washed up, she said,
on this shore.

He began to have dim suspicion what she was, although he could not say it in words: that Morgaine and the pale horror had reached Andur-Kursh in the same way, only she had come by no accident, had come with purpose.

Aimed at Gates, at Thiye's power.

Aimed at dislocating all that lay on this shore, as these unnatural things had come. Standing where the Hjemur-lord stood, she would be no less perilous. She shared nothing with Andur-Kursh, not even birth, if his fears were true, and owed them nothing.
This
he served.

And Liell had said she lied. One of the twain lied: that was certain. He wondered in an agony of mind how it should be if he learned of a certainty, that it was Morgaine.

Something else fluttered in the dark—honest owl, or something sinister; it passed close overhead. He tautened his grip upon his nerves and patted the nervous black's neck.

It was long until the morning, until in a clear place upon the trail they dared stop and let sleep take them by turns. Morgaine's was the first sleep, and he paced to keep himself awake, or chose an uncomfortable place to sit, when he must sit, and at last fell to meddling with the black horse's gear, that the horse still bore, for in such place they dared not unsaddle, only loosened the girths. It shamed him, to have stolen a second time; and he felt the keeping of more than he needed of the theft was not honorable, but all the same it was not sense to cast things away. He searched the saddlebags and kit to learn what he had possessed and, it was in the back of his thoughts, to learn something of the man Liell.

He found an object which answered the question, such that set his stomach over.

It was a medal, gold, set in the hilt of a saddle knife, the sort many a man bore beneath the skirt of his saddle; and on it was a symbol of the blockish, ugly look he had seen graven on the Stones. It was
qujalin.
Whenever any strange and long-ago things were found, folk called them
qujalin
and avoided them, or burned them, or cast them into deeps and tried to lose them. Most such were likely only forgotten oddities, Kurshin and harmless. Somehow he did not think this was such as that.

He showed it to Morgaine when she wakened to take her turn at watch.

“It is an
irrhn,
” she said to him. “A luck-piece. It has no other significance.” But she turned it over and over in her hands, examining it.

“It is no luck,” said Vanye, “to a human man.”

“There is
qujalin
blood mixed in Leth,” she said, “and Liell is its tutor. Tutors have ruled there nigh a hundred years. Each of the heirs of Leth has produced a son and drowned within the year. If Kasedre is capable of siring a son, he will most probably join his ancestors, and Liell will still be tutor to the son. I wonder,” she added irrelevantly, looking at the blade, “who sired Hshi and Tlin.”

“And on what,” Vanye muttered sourly. “Keep the blade,
liyo.
I do not want to carry it, and perhaps it may bring luck to you.”

“I am not
qujal,
” she said.

That assertion, he reflected, might have filled him with either doubt or relief
some days ago, at their meeting; now it fitted uncomfortably well with the thing he had begun to suspect of her.

“Whatever you are,” he said, “spare me the knowing of it.”

She nodded, accepting his attitude without apparent offense. She slipped the knife within her belt and rose.

A green-feathered arrow hit the ground between her feet.

She reached to her back, hand to weapon, quick as the arrow itself. And as quick, Vanye seized her and pushed her, heedless of hurting: Chya warning, that arrow. If she fired, they would both be green-feathered in an instant.

“Do not,” he appealed to her, and turned, both arms wide, toward their unseen observers. “Hai, Chya! Chya! will you put kin-slaying on your souls? We are clan-welcome with you, cousins.”

Brush rustled. He watched the fair, tall men of his own mother's kindred slip out of the shadows, where surely a few more kept arrows trained upon their hearts; and he set himself deliberately between them and Morgaine's own arrogance, which was like a Myya's for persistence, and likely to be the death of her.

They did not even ask names of them, but stood there waiting for them to speak and identify themselves. Looking at the living person of one who had been minutely described in ballads a century ago, wondering perhaps if they were not mad—he could estimate what passed in their minds. They only stared at Morgaine, and she at them, furiously, in her hand a weapon that could deal death faster than their arrows.

They would kill her of course, if she could die; but she would have done considerable damage: and her
ilin
who was her shield would be quite dead. He had heard of a certain Myya who strayed the border and was found with three Chya arrows lodged in his heart, all touching. Clan Chya lived in a hard land. They were impressed by few threats. It was typical of them that they had not yielded and begged shelter from the encroaching beasts, as had other folk; or died, as had two others. They used Hjemur's vile beasts for game, and harried the border of Hjemur and kept Thiye contained out of sheer Chya effrontery.

Vanye placed hands on thighs and made a respectful bow, which Morgaine did not: she did not move, and it was possible that the Chya did not know that they were in danger.

“I am Nhi Vanye, i Chya,” he said, “
ilin
to this lady, who is clan-welcome with Chya.”

The leader, a smallish man with the simple braid of a second-
uyo,
cousin-kin to the main clan, grounded his longbow and set both hands upon it, eyes upon him. “Nhi Vanye, cousin to Chya Roh. You are i Chya, that is true, but I thought it was understood that you are not clan-welcome here.”