The Crow (29 page)

"Alas for Juriken, whom I loved as a brother," said Saliman. He looked up to the sky, and Hem saw that tears were running down his cheeks. "I cannot speak his loss: it goes deeper than words, deeper even than song. I have no words for Juriken, my friend and my master; Juriken of Turbansk, greatest of Bards; Juriken, whom I loved."

He bowed his head and Hem, filled with wonder and awe, did the same, his heart cold with the thought of what Juriken had done: its courage and its utter ruthlessness.

After a long silence, Saliman spoke again. "Alas, alas for Turbansk! Turbansk, the city of my birth, the city where first I walked as a child, where I grew into a man – city of memory and song, ancient and beautiful and forever young. I will never again walk through the covered streets of the markets to buy persimmons, nor gaze down from the Red Tower onto the beauty of the Jiela cedars; nor will I eat and laugh with my friends in its fragrant gardens. All is gone, gone, gone: as the green grass withers on the hill, as the winds of spring kiss our cheeks and never return, so my city is shivered into ruin and all its loveliness shattered, never to come again..."

And as the Bard-born will, Saliman spoke his grief, turning it into song; and amid the bird-haunted greenery the others listened to his lament, in awe and fear and sorrow.

N
AL-
A
K-
B
URAT

Before the shrine of Nyanar

Eribu bowed his head

And the Elidhu spoke to him:

Go forth from this city

Not in banishment but in hope.

Go forth though your tears stain your face.

Now I will go forth from this city, Said Eribu.

Not in banishment but in hope,

Though tears stain my face.

I fear I will never see again

The light-filled palaces of Nal-Ak-Burat.

I fear that I will never again stand

In the Temple of Dreams.

I fear I will never touch again

My sons and my daughters.

And Nyanar said: I will not say

Do not fear.

Fear is the other face of hope.

Fragment from
The Epic of Eribu,

Library of Turbansk

XII

T
HE
T
HREE
G
ATES

Saliman drew a map in the sand with his forefinger. "This is Turbansk," he said, making a dot. "This is the Lamarsan Sea. Last night we went south, underneath the sea itself, and then turned north. The II Dara Wall is twenty or so leagues northeast of here, and the Neera Marshes begin about a league hence. We are now in Savitir and we need to get here." He stabbed a point eastward on his makeshift map. "Near to Nazar, just past the Undara River."

"So we're in conquered land," said Zelika, leaning forward to see the rough diagram, frowning with concentration. "How can we go from here? Won't we be seen by the spies of the Black Army?"

"If we tried to move above ground, yes, we would almost certainly be seen," Saliman said.

"More caves?" Hem shuddered. "Ire won't be very pleased."

"Yes, more caves." Saliman grinned mirthlessly. "Not so wet nor so narrow as those we went through earlier, fortunately. And, I hope, far enough away that they have not collapsed."

It was some hours after the earthquake. The sky had gradually cleared of clouds, and as the day heated up, it had begun to get warm even in the shade of the gorge. Earlier, Hem and Zelika, followed by Ire, had cautiously made their way up the gorge, pushing through the shrubs of thyme and wormwood that grew under groves of wild almond and fig trees. Many of the larger trees had fallen, and the ground was littered with broken branches and leaves. A little farther on they found a pool of green water that was bordered on one side by flat, red rocks and on the other by a narrow shore of sand. It might have been designed for bathing.

They sent Ire back to tell Saliman and Soron where they were, and then stripped to their underclothes and jumped into the pool. The water was very cold, most likely because it was spring-fed, and they stayed in just long enough to wash off the mud and sweat of the previous days. The relief of having clean skin was inexpressible. Hem washed his dirty clothes, and stretched them out on the rocks to dry. Then he and Zelika lay down side by side and idly watched the sunlight dancing on the surface of the water. Occasionally a butterfly flew raggedly across their field of vision, but otherwise all was still: a low hum of insect life filled the air with soporific music. Before long they had both fallen fast asleep.

They were woken by Soron, and found that a meal was laid out on the rocks: dried dates and a hard honey-flavored biscuit and smoked meat. Saliman and Soron had also bathed, and they talked in low voices as they ate. By tacit consent, none of them mentioned Turbansk, nor the ordeals they had so recently undergone. After the strain of the past days, the past weeks, the peace of this little gorge seemed dreamlike, something beyond imagining even hours ago, and each of them was loathe to disturb it. Here, there was no trace of war; it was almost strange not to hear the throb of the drums and the bray of trumpets, which had underlain their every moment for weeks now.

When they finished eating, Soron, who had scarcely spoken during their meal, moved away. He sat very still on a rock on the other side of the pool, gazing into the water, his face averted from them. Hem looked at him with concern, and Saliman noticed the direction of Hem's gaze.

"Palindi and Soron were very great friends," said Saliman softly. "Palindi too came to Turbansk from Til Amon. And Jerika – she planned to come with Soron because she loved him. Now he does not know if she is dead or alive."

Hem nodded slowly. He had seen many people mourning in the past few weeks, but repetition didn't make it any easier. If anything, it made it worse; he understood something now about the dreadful isolation of grief. He stirred restlessly, plucking some grass and twisting it around his fingers. Was Maerad still alive? How could he know? And yet he felt that she was...

"So do we go straight north to Annar?" asked Hem at last. "Is there a way across the marshes?"

"The marsh people know how to cross the Neera," said Saliman. "And they have shown me some of their paths. But if we went that way we would have to cross the East Road, and it is too dangerous: I doubt now that even a hare could do so unseen. We will have to journey to Annar by more circuitous routes."

Hem looked down to conceal his disappointment. He had hoped that they might begin to search for Maerad straight away.

Saliman gave him a sympathetic glance, as if he understood what passed through Hem's mind. "There are some people I am hoping to meet who will help us, and some tasks to do before we make our way north, which have been long planned," he said. "And I do not know what is happening in Annar now; there has been no news in Turbansk for weeks. I do not like the idea of walking into the fire without at least some foreknowledge of what to expect."

"And we have to find Maerad." Hem spoke as if this were the most straightforward of tasks, and despite himself Saliman smiled.

"Yes, we must. Though you do realize, Hem, that to find Maerad is the whole desire of the Nameless One: and if Maerad and Cadvan are in Annar, they will be in hiding. Annar is a very big place, you know. In any case, when we last spoke, she and Cadvan were planning to go north, to Zmarkan."

Hem's heart sank slightly at Saliman's words.

"But we will still look for them? I know we can find them."

Saliman hesitated, and then nodded. "Yes, Hem. There are many things that we must do, and that is one of them. And we have business in Annar."

"What other things do we have to do?" Hem looked at Saliman reproachfully. "Isn't finding Maerad more important than anything else?"

"More important for you, maybe," said Zelika, who had been listening impatiently. "What I want to know is, what do we do
now?"

"Well, that is easy to answer," said Saliman. "For the moment we can rest and recover our strength a little. We'll wait until nightfall before we move. The caves we must find are a couple of leagues northeast of here."

"More caves," Hem said again, glumly.

"It's not so bad," said Saliman. "We could be flitting from bush to bush, terrified that at any moment we would be spotted by some spy of Imank's. Be grateful. The land around here is like a honeycomb, and even with its best efforts the Dark has not been able to find all of our hiding places. The caves may be cold and uncomfortable, but we will be safer there than anywhere else in the whole Suderain."

Hem stared gloomily at the ground. "All the same, I don't know if I can persuade Ire back underground. He told me he never wanted to go back there again."

"There's no choice," said Saliman. "If he wishes to stay with you, he will have to."

When dusk began to fall, Hem moodily gathered up his dried clothes from the rocks and called Ire back from the trees, where he had spent his time boasting to the local birds. Remembering how cold he had been the previous night, Hem put on an extra layer. He was still very tired; more than anything, he would have liked a long sleep in a comfortable bed. But, as Saliman said, it was not a question of choice.

They set off down the gorge. There was no path, and the ground was rocky and uneven with the tumbled detritus of the earthquake, so their going was slow. A smell of crushed thyme rose as the air cooled in the evening, and through the branches of the trees above, Hem could see the twinkle of white stars.

Hem felt as if he were drinking in the peace through his skin. He remembered his journey with Saliman through the tranquil mountains of the Osidh Am. That seemed so long ago now; when he thought of himself then, it was like thinking about a stranger. So many things had happened to him since: he had found Ire; he had met Oslar, and had found that he was himself a healer; he had spoken to the King of the Birds and driven off the deathcrows from Turbansk; he had seen Har-Ytan, the Ernani of the city; and someone had written a song about him. And he had seen more death and suffering than he wanted to think about.

He felt as if he didn't know the edges of himself anymore. He was taller, maybe a hand taller, than he had been when he arrived in Turbansk, which had made him uncharacteristically clumsy, knocking things over because he couldn't judge anymore how long his arms and legs were. He no longer felt like a boy of twelve years. His voice was breaking, and he had noticed also that the hair on his body was getting thicker and darker. All this was disconcerting enough, but on the inside, it was even worse: all the unseen parts of him had changed out of recognition. His time in the Healing Houses had taught him more than how to bind limbs and mend torn skin; he had learned how to be patient with those in pain, how to read another person's needs without speaking. But the changes inside him were more than those skills could account for.