The Complete Morgaine (63 page)

But it was not, as the others had been, white brush-smoke; it spread darkly on the sky, and as they rode near enough to see the walls distinctly, they could see in that stain upon the heavens the wheeling flight of birds, that hovered above the hold.

 • • • 

The gates stood agape, battered from their hinges: they could see that clearly from the main road. A dead horse lay in the ravine beside the spur of road that diverged toward those gates; birds flapped up from it, disturbed in their feeding.

And curiously, across that empty gateway were cords, knotted with bits of white feather.

Morgaine reined in—suddenly turned off toward that gate; and Vanye protested, but no word did she speak, only rode warily, slowly toward that gateway, and he made haste to overtake her, falling in at her side the while she approached that strange barrier. The only sound was the ring of hooves on stone and the hollow echo off the walls—that, and the wind, that blew strongly at the cords.

Ruin lay inside. A cloud of black birds, startled, fluttered up from the stripped carcass of an ox that lay amid the court. On the steps of the keep sprawled a dead man; another lay in the shadow of the wall, prey to the birds. He had been
qujal.
His white hair proclaimed it.

And some three, hanged, twisted slowly on the fire-blackened tree that had grown in the center of the courtyard.

Morgaine reached for the lesser of her weapons, and fire parted the strands of the feathered cords. She urged Siptah slowly forward. The walls echoed to the sound of the horses and to the alarmed flutter of the carrion birds. Smoke still boiled up from the smoldering core of the central keep, from the wreckage of human shelters that had clustered about it.

Riders clattered up the stones outside. Morgaine wheeled Siptah about as Kithan's party came within the gates and reined to a dazed halt.

Kithan looked slowly about him, his thin face set in horror; there was horror too in the face of Jhirun, who arrived last within the gateway, her mare stepping skittishly past the blowing strands of cords and feathers. Jhirun held tightly to the charms about her neck and stopped just inside the gates.

“Let us leave this place,” Vanye said; and Morgaine took up the reins, about to heed him.

But Kithan suddenly hailed the place, a loud cry that echoed in the emptiness; and again he called, and finally turned his horse full circle to survey all the ruined keep, the dead that hung from the tree and that lay within the yard, while the two men with him looked about them too, their faces white and drawn.

“Sotharrn,” Kithan exclaimed in anguish. “There were better than seven hundred of our folk here, besides the Shiua.” He gestured at the fluttering cords. “Shiua belief. Those are for fear of you.”

“Would Hetharu have gathered forces here,” Morgaine asked him, “or lost them? Was this riot, or was it war?”

“He follows Roh,” Kithan said. “And Roh has promised him his heart's desires—as he doubtless would promise others, halfling and human.” He gazed about him at the shelters that had housed men, that were empty now, as—Vanye realized suddenly—the village in the night had lain silent, as the valleys and hills between had been vacant, with only the alarm fires to break the peace.

And of a sudden one of the guards reined about, and spurred through the gates. The other hesitated, his pale face a mask of anguish and indecision.

Then he too rode, whipping his tired horse in his frenzy, and vanished from sight, deserting his lord, seeking safety elsewhere.

“No!” cried Morgaine, checking Vanye's impulse to pursue them; and when he reined back: “No. There are already the fires: they are enough to have warned our enemies. Let them go.” And to Kithan, who sat his horse staring after his departed men: “Do you wish to follow them?”

“Shiuan is finished,” Kithan said in a trembling voice, and looked back at her. “If Sotharrn has fallen, then no other hold will stand long against Hetharu, against Chya Roh, against the rabble that they have stirred to arms. What you will do—do. Or let me stay with you.”

There was no arrogance left him. His voice broke, and he bowed his head,
leaning against the saddlebow. When he lifted his face again, the look of tears was in his eyes.

Morgaine regarded him long and narrowly.

Then without a word she rode past him, for the gate where the feathered cords fluttered uselessly in the wind. Vanye delayed, letting Jhirun turn, letting Kithan go before him. Constantly he felt a prickling between his own shoulders, a consciousness that there might well be watchers somewhere within the ruins—for someone had strung the cords and tried to seal the gate from harm, someone frightened, and human.

No attack came, nothing but the panic flight of birds, a whispering of wind through the ruins. They passed the gate on the downward road, riding slowly, listening.

And Vanye watched the
qujal
-lord, who rode before him, pale head bowed, yielding to the motion of the horse. Without choices, Kithan—without skill to survive in the wilderness that Shiuan had become, helpless without his servants to attend him and his peasants to feed him . . . and now without refuge to shelter him.

Better the sword's edge,
Vanye thought, echoing something that Roh had said to him, and then dismayed to remember who had said it, and that it had been true.

At the road's joining, Morgaine increased the pace. “Move!” Vanye shouted at the halfling, spurring forward, and struck Kithan's horse with the flat of his blade, startling it into a brief burst of speed. They turned northward onto the main road, slowing again as they came beyond arrowflight of the walls.

On sudden impulse Vanye looked back, saw on the walls of Sotharrn a brown, bent figure, and another and another—ragged, furtive watchers that vanished the instant they realized they had been seen.

Old ones, deserted, while the young had been carried away with the tide that swept toward Abarais: the young, who looked to live, who would kill to live, like the horde that followed still behind them.

 • • • 

The land beyond Sotharrn bore more signs of violence, fields and land along the roadway churned to mire, as if the road itself could no longer contain what poured toward the north. Tracks of men and horses were sharply defined beside the road and in mud yet unwashed from the paving stones.

“They passed,” Vanye said to Morgaine, as they rode knee to knee behind Jhirun and Kithan, “since the rain stopped.”

He tried to lend her hope; she frowned over it, shook her head.

“Hetharu delayed here, perhaps,” she said in a low voice. “He would be enough to deal with Sotharrn. But were I Roh, I would not have delayed for such an untidy matter if there were a choice: I would have gone for Abarais.
And once there, then no hold will stand. I would be glad to know where Hetharu's force is; but I fear I know where Roh is.”

Vanye considered that; it was not good to think on. He turned his mind instead to forces that he understood. “Hetharu's force,” he said, “looks to have gathered considerable number; perhaps two, three thousand by now.”

“There are also the outlying villages,” she said. “—Kithan.”

The halfling reined back somewhat, and Jhirun's mare, never one to take the lead, lagged too, coming alongside so that they were four abreast on the road. Kithan regarded them placidly, his eyes again vague and hazed.

“He is only half sensible,” Vanye said in disgust. “Perhaps he and that store of his were best parted.”

“No,” said Kithan at once, straightening in his saddle. He made effort to look at them directly, and his eyes were possessed of a distant, tearless sadness. “I have listened to your reckoning; I hear you well . . . Leave me my consolation, Man. I shall answer your questions.”

“Then say,” said Morgaine, “what we must expect. Will Hetharu gain the support of the other holds? Will they move to join him?”

“Hetharu—” Kithan's mouth twisted in a grimace of contempt. “Sotharrn always feared him . . . that did he succeed to power in Ohtij-in, then attack would come. And they were right, of course. Some of our fields flooded this season; and more would have gone the next; and the next. It was inevitable that the more ambitious of us would reach across the Suvoj.”

“Will the other holds follow him or fight him now?”

Kithan shrugged. “What difference to the Shiua; and to us—Even we bowed and kissed his hand in Ohtij-in. We who wanted nothing but to live undisturbed . . . have no power against whoever does not. Yes, most will be with him: to what purpose anything else? My guards have gone over to him: that is where they are going. There is no question of it. They saw my prospects, and they know defeat when they smell it. So they went to him. The lesser holds will flock to do the same.”

“You may go too if you like,” Morgaine said.

Kithan regarded her, disturbed.

“Be quite free to do so,” she said.

The horses walked along together some little distance; and Kithan looked at Morgaine with less and less assurance, as if she and the drug together confused him. He looked at Jhirun, whose regard of him was hard; and at Vanye, who stared back at him expressionless, giving him nothing, neither of hatred nor of comfort. Once more he glanced the circuit of them, and last of all at Vanye, as if he expected that some terrible game were being made of him.

For a moment Vanye thought that he would go; his body was tense in the saddle, his eyes, through their haze, distracted.

“No,” Kithan said then, and his shoulders fell. He rode beside them sunk in his own misery.

None spoke, Vanye rode content enough in Morgaine's presence by him, a nearness of mind in which words were needless; he knew her, that had they been alone she would have had nothing to say. Her eyes scanned the trail as they rode, but her mind was elsewhere, desperately occupied.

At last she drew from her boot top a folded and age-yellowed bit of parchment, a map cut from a book; and silently, leaning from the saddle, she indicated to him the road. It wound up from the Suvoj, that great rift clearly recognizable; but the lands of Ohtij-in were shown as wide, plotted fields, that no longer existed. There were fields mapped on this side also, along the road and within the hills; and holds besides that which seemed to be Sotharrn, scattered here and there about the central mountains.

And amid those mountains, a circular mark, lay Abarais: Vanye could not read the runes, but her finger indicated it, and she named it aloud.

He lifted his eyes from the brown ink and yellowed page to the mountains that now loomed before them. Greenish-black evergreen covered their flanks. Their rounded peaks were bald and smooth and their slopes were a tumble of great stones, aged, weather-worn—a ruin of mountains in a dying land.

Above them passed the Broken Moon, in a clear sky; the weather held for them, warm as the sun reached its zenith; but when the sun declined toward afternoon, the hills seemed overlain with a foul haze.

It was not cloud; none wreathed these low hills. It was the smoke of fires, from some far place within the mountains, where other holds had been marked on the map.

“I think that would be Domen,” said Kithan, when they questioned him on it. “That is next, after Sotharrn. On the far side of the mountains lie Marom and Arisith; and Hetharu's forces will have reached for those also.”

“Still increasing in number,” said Morgaine.

“Yes,” said Kithan. “The whole of Shiuan is within his hands—or will be, within days. He is burning the shelters, I would judge: that is the way to move the humanfolk, to draw them with him. And perhaps he burns the holds themselves. He may want no lords to rival him.”

Morgaine said nothing.

“It will do him no good,” Vanye said, to dispossess Kithan of any hopes he might still hold. “Hetharu may have Shiuan—but Roh has Hetharu, whether or not Hetharu has yet realized it.”

 • • • 

Stones rose beside the road, Standing Stones, that called to mind that cluster beside the road in Hiuaj, near the marsh; but these stood straight and powerful in the evening light.

And beyond those Stones moved a white-haired figure, leaning on a staff, who struggled to walk the road.

They gained upon that man rapidly; and surely by now the traveler must have heard them coming, and might have looked around; but he did not. He moved at the same steady pace, painfully awkward.

There was an eeriness about that deaf persistence; Vanye laid his sword across the saddlebow as they came alongside the man, fearing some plan concealed in this bizarre attitude—a ruse to put a man near Morgaine. He moved his horse between, reining back to match his pace.

Still the man did not look up at them, but walked with eyes downcast, step by agonized step with the staff to support him. He was young, wearing hall-garments; he bore a knife at his belt, and the staff on which he leaned was the broken remnant of a pike. His white hair was tangled, his cheek cut and bruised, blood soaked the rough bandages on his leg. Vanye hailed him, and yet the youth kept walking; he cursed, and thrust his sheathed sword across the youth's chest.

The
qujal
stopped, downcast eyes fixed on something other and elsewhere; but when Vanye let fall the sword, he began to walk again, struggling in his lameness.

“He is mad,” Jhirun said.

“No,” said Kithan. “He does not wish to see you.”

Their horses moved along with the youth, slowly, by halting paces; and softly Kithan began to question him, in his own tongue—received an anguished glance of him, and an answer, spoken on hard-drawn breaths, the while he walked. Names were named that touched keenly Vanye's interest, but no other word of it could he grasp. The youth exhausted his supply of breath and fell silent, walked on, as he had been before.

Morgaine touched Siptah and moved on. Vanye at her side; and Jhirun with them. Kithan followed. Vanye looked back, at the youth who still doggedly, painfully, struggled behind them.