<Wait!> He caught me half off the bed. <Don’t let her yell.>
I clapped a summary hand over Callissa’s mouth. The orders came in a steady spate.
<When she’s calm, tell her to dress herself and the boys for the road. The servants—the cook, a maid? She must get them too. Any more?> The gardener, I recalled with dislike, lived out. <Math be praised, if you don’t like him he’ll be all right. Your neighbors? Just acquaintance?> I could hear the relief. <I’ll rouse the guards. Evis. You value him? I’ll wake him too. Fetch every living thing you ever felt a moment’s affection for out of that house. Tell your wife to hold them in the garden. As soon as you can, come down here.>
Leaving a disrupted household under the helliens I tore into the streets. The moon was low. It was third watch, civilian small hours, the wagons had come in, the revelers gone home, the peep-o’-day workers were not up. At the Treasury gate I recoiled from a shadow, and Evis confronted me across our naked swords.
“Can’t explain,” I hissed. “Guard this gate. Anyone doesn’t give the password Tingan, chop them. But quiet!”
Words on the boil, I fled down familiar steps. The sight of Beryx stopped them in my throat.
He was on his feet, facing into the wall. Coiled, immobile, the stillness of a wound-down catapult. The air pulsed, the vault seemed to be contracting round me, drawn by the suction of some gigantic mouth. I almost looked to see wind beat the gown about that tall, blade-thin shape.
Tighter and tighter grew the clench. I could not draw, let alone catch my breath. Then his body whipped, lash and recoil. With a blinding green-white flash, a horrendous screech and a shower of sparks, he stumbled backward and all four plated, riveted, deep-set fetter rings tore bodily from the stone.
<Blankets,> he commanded as I reached him. <Never mind me. Muffle these cursed things. No time to cut them now.>
Slashing up blankets I wadded the chains, draped them round him, helped him up, wrapped my cloak over all. We labored upstairs. Across the squeaky marble floors. As sweet fresh air welcomed us into silvered black immensity I heard him draw a long, long breath.
A knot of shadow hovered at the gate. <Thank the Four your guards are scallawags, Fylghjos. Know the tomcat roads.> I could hear the grin. <Send four of them with Evis to the post-house, he can throw rank, can’t he? We need fourteen mounts. Two spares back here, the rest to meet at your house. Come on.>
The familiar, groggy, bewildered voices dispersed. Eons later, hooves sounded shatteringly in the street.
Sivar jittered at the bridle while I helped Beryx up. Settling astride with the automatic ease of a cavalryman, he whispered, “Drop the reins on its neck. I can manage now.”
More eons later horses fidgeted by our wall. A breath of challenge came. Hissing, “Tingan,” I slid to earth, Beryx after me, whispering, “A spare uniform, Fylghjos? I’d better look the part.”
In black moontree cloak and surcoat he vaguely did so. Some outmoded caution made me pull the door to behind us. He had lumbered on into the faded hellien shadow, whence I heard his clear, calm, decisive whisper.
“I can’t explain now, but we all have to leave. Callissa, you can ride? Sivar’ll give you a horse. Yes, Rema, you and Zepha too. You can double up behind Krem and Zyr. Zam, you go with your father. Zem—will you come with me?” Zem’s ardent whisper, “ ’Course!” and he was propelling Callissa gently but irresistibly down the path.
Off at last, through still-empty streets, my lungs aching with suspense. <Fylghjos,> he said, <tell me at the last corner before the gate. Just think it. I’ll know.>
At the corner, feeling a zany, I told myself, This one.
Something like the Lady’s command closed on my mind. I found I had reined in, heard the others copy me.
<Six guards,> he observed. <Keep yours quiet, Fylghjos.> Then came the just audible, endless, feathery whistle of an indrawn breath.
Heartbeats ticked by. A horse shifted, tossed its bit. Zam was pushed, a small scared puppy, against my heart. The night rang with that seashell murmur of quiet deep enough to hear the blood in your own ears. Beryx breathed out, on and on.
<Go. Lead my horse.>
Fuddled, I reached for a rein. Hooves clopped into motion, loud as a charge. We rounded the corner, here was the empty breadth of the gate square, glow of the guardroom brazier, two surcoated figures, colorless in the moonlight, leaning negligently on the leaves of the open gate.
Evis gasped. I snarled voicelessly, “Shut up!” I could fairly hear the horror of the rest.
Our horses paced forward. One sentinel was propped with folded arms, one grasped a grounded spear. Their breasts moved, their eyes, black hollows in the pallid moonlight, gazed at us. Through us. My mind reeled. I thought, We are invisible. The Arts.
Horse noise unrolled under the arch. We were on the harbor road. Oblivious, unaware, behind us Zyphryr Coryan slept. An eygnor was in song, deluded by the moon. The road dipped. Beside me Beryx released another superhuman breath and leant forward on the withers of his horse. “Keep,” he said faintly, “going.”
In a minute or two his breathing eased. <You can let go the rein. I’ve got him now. Before you burst, it was Fengthir. A secret Command. We weren’t invisible, I just forbade them to see us. In the morning they’ll swear we never passed. Another check for the hounds. . . .>
Beyond Rastyr he swung us north, but not onto the great highway of Stirian Ven. Instead we took to the forest, committing ourselves to that hidden voice which chuckled, “I probably know Assharral better than any of you. Do you think I slept down there?”
Single file, eyes strained for a bob of the blur ahead that would signal a low bough, we serpentined through forest depths that should have been in uproar with the thump of startled lydwyr, lydyrs’ fff! and rattle in the undergrowth, birds roused to squawk and clatter broken leaves. None of it happened. As at the gates of Zyphryr Coryan we seemed invisible, a dream traversing a dream.
The moon died. Selionur, whitest of stars, blazed down on us as he raced in his brief winter course at the Hunter’s heel. The dew settled, the enchantment of all night journeys lapped us round. Valinhynga topped the horizon, a glittering aerial Well, the sky shallowed, the air assumed that piercing purity which heralds dawn; before a thick shadow copse Beryx said, “We’d best breathe the horses and sort ourselves out.”
* * * * *
After the dismount’s confusion settled I found Callissa pressed to my left side. I put an arm about her and recoiled from a furry third breast, only to realize it was the cat. Zem’s arm circled my right leg, Evis cleared his throat beyond, Sivar wheezed at my back. Further on, Rema was muttering the prelude to one of her formidable complaints.
Before me an invisible Beryx said mischievously, “This is what the military manuals call a strategic withdrawal. In other words, get the devil out of it while you can.” Fatigue lay close under the levity. “And if anyone still doesn’t know, the devil is a lady this time.”
Evis spoke up with the apologetic firmness which meant he would not be denied. “Sir, I can understand you might need to make a—a strategic withdrawal. But what am I doing here?”
“You’re here for the same reason as the rest. Because you mean something to Alkir or me, and I’ve just played a trick the Lady will repay in blood, or worse. I’m glad you brought that cat, ma’am. I wouldn’t like to think of an animal flayed or roasted alive just because it belonged to the family of a man who gave me help.”
There was a chorus of gasps.
“Oh, yes. Have you never heard of reprisals? If any of you had stayed in Zyphryr Coryan, you would have died. Tomorrow, or the next day—or the one after, if you were really unfortunate.” This time nobody gasped. “Now I’m out of reach, she’d mangle anyone even vaguely connected with me.” His voice grew somber. “She probably will.”
Sivar said in a tight, strange tone, “Sir, these fellers are all outlanders. But my family’s back there.”
After a moment Beryx asked, “Fisherman, is he? Your brother? Would that boat make Eakring Ithyrx?”
“Probably, sir, but—that’s overseas! Foreigners!”
“That’s the only chance. Just be quiet.”
Silence marched on his heavy, protracted breaths. They eased. Sounding tireder, he said, “I’ve woken them. They don’t understand, but they’ll sail on the morning tide.”
Sivar mumbled combined protest and thanks. Amver ventured, “Sir, once we helped with the fever, we reckoned we’d all have to run if it came to the worst, but—just what happened, sir?”
A horse behind us uprooted a tussock, mouthed and jingled its bit. I heard the muffled clank as Beryx leant back on a tree.
“The Lady and I,” he began, “are having a private war, over what she’s doing to herself and to Assharral. To me it’s evil, and I’m fighting to have it stopped. Unluckily,” it came with wry amusement, “there are many weapons I won’t use. I won’t lie, I won’t withhold truth, I won’t break faith or let others suffer for me or kill innocent men for my own ends. So I keep getting thrashed because she will. The Mistress of the Wardrobe told Alkir and me some of the Lady’s private affairs. She was so furious it wasn’t enough to behead Klyra. She brought Alkir down to me, and she would have made him put his hand in the fire.”
I heard men’s grunts, Rema’s guttural squawk.
“I tried to stop her in a wizard fight, and lost. So I said, I’ll burn mine instead. I don’t like torture better than anyone else, but it hurts me worse when someone suffers in my place. Call it crazy if you like.” That mischief teased me. “It’s part of—my beliefs. If I deny it, I’ve lost the war. That paid for Klyra, but she’d seen a flaw in my guard. Yesterday we upset her again, and I was worried, so I did some scouting, aedric style. Read her thoughts. It’s just an art.” His voice grew bleak. “She had plans, sure enough. This morning, she meant to torture Alkir’s wife and sons in front of me. And now she knows I’d rather suffer than let others do it, there would have been no substitutes.”
Callissa gave a throttled sob. Zem’s arm about my leg became a tentacle. Evis began thickly, “Love of—” and snapped it off.
“So I had to run,” Beryx went on tiredly, “and take you with me. It was what we call a Must.”
Dawn whitened behind the trees to reveal they were vyxians, scaly umber monsters lancing up sheer to a cloud of foliage. So that, I thought, as cold horror squeezed my heart, is a Must.
Beryx was staring south, with a haunted, wretched look. In disbelief close to exasperation I thought, He didn’t want to go!
A honey-eater gurgled in the scrub. A saeveryr responded, chickle, churr. Callissa’s small, high, hostile voice asked the question that was paramount to us.
“Where are you going?”
His face set. The crisis had arrived.
“Phaxia,” he said. “Nowhere else is far enough.”
He let them shout themselves out. Then he said, “Yes, it’s four hundred miles, yes, we have to cross the Stirsselian swamps, yes, we’ll be slow as a baggage train, yes, you’re technically at war with Phaxia. Yes, we’re not prepared for a journey, yes, it’s a huge wrench to step out of an entire life. I know. I’ve done it before. Is there any choice?”
Slowly, among the guards, I saw grim acceptance creep over each face. Evis still looked balky. Rema’s bottom lip stuck out like a shelf, Zepha was in tears, Callissa holding her fire. Beryx looked wretched too.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a cruel sort of joke. If you were evil, you wouldn’t have helped me, if I were evil, I wouldn’t care. But you did. And I do. Some of you weren’t even directly involved. It isn’t just.” Pain stirred in his look. “Life isn’t just. I suppose that’s why we aim for justice above all, and never fully accomplish it.”
“To the pits with your philosophy!” Callissa’s control snapped. “You’ve wrecked my husband’s career, you’ve outlawed us all, you’ve hauled us out here without a fendel or a loaf or a spare stitch between us, you want us to die as foreign beggars in Phaxia, and all you can do is talk philosophy! Well, I won’t! I want my house back! I want to be safe! I want my life—like it was!” And she burst into tears.
Rema’s grievance burst too, Zepha howled in sympathy, the men shifted and looked everywhere but at us. All except Beryx. He watched her weep, as if this were one more penalty he had no right to evade.
When her sobs eased at last, he said tiredly, “There’s no answer that will satisfy you, ma’am. The best I can say is—if you go to Phaxia, you may come back. If you stay here, it’s certain death.”
Evis had made his choice. Looking stark and resolute he squared his shoulders, said, without looking, “Sir, permission to carry on,” and went past me to Beryx. “Well then, sir. Do you have any plan? Route? Tactics? Provisions? Those fetters will have to go. And our surcoats. Have you considered disguise?”
“The Lady sees through it.” Beryx was regretful. “And every Assharran will be her hands. Haven’t you ever caught a ‘rebel’? How did you know he was? She told you, of course.”
Evis deflated. Beryx grinned. “Cheer up, there’s one thing in our favor. Me.”
Evis did not look reassured. Beryx said, “We’ll keep the surcoats a while.” He gestured north. “The highway’s just over that knoll. A post-house. You and Sivar could liberate some shoeing tools. Throw your badge around, spin a tale. Valuable beast, has to be re-shod on the spot. . . . A sledge and chisel would do.”
They did. With a good deal of trouble the manacles were chewed through on a convenient stump, the left one with blows that must have jarred his burnt hand to the bone. But though white and sweating, he rose with a spring. Shook his arm, sighed, “Math! That’s good.” Scanned the horses with a cavalryman’s eye, and turned to consider Rema, planted broad, bulging and balky on a fallen log, Zepha drooping in her arm. A twinkle dawned.
“We need speed. And if we’re not built to make it on horseback. . . .”
Rema said flatly, “I’m not going. You can turn me inside out with your magic, I’ll not budge.” She patted Zepha. “Nor will she. The poor child, walking out she is, they’d be wed next new moon. . . .”
The eddy in Beryx’s eyes was the image of the weighing, planning mind. Then he said, “Yes.”
As Rema’s jaw dropped he said, “I’ll give you a Ruanbraxe. A mind-shield. It may not block the Well, but you can stay in Assharral. Not in Zyphryr Coryan, do you understand? You must go under cover. A new name, a new past, a new place. If you contact anyone you know, it will kill you both.” He forestalled her despair. “It won’t be forever, Rema.” A pledge, for a dawn he could only hope to see. “I can’t explain, but . . . it’s the best I can do.”
Then he sat on his heels between them, eyes on the ground as he drew those huge straining breaths, until the sweat patched his surcoat and his muscles shuddered as they did in the throes of the other arts.
Rema too was horrified. When he relaxed, whispering, “There,” she burst out, hostility forgotten, “Eh, sir, you’ve near killed yourself! If I’d known—I didn’t mean to—”
“I’m used to it.” He rose, forcing a smile. “Off you go. I’m sorry to bring you so far out of your way.”
After the farewells he watched them leave with anxiety, concern, veritable tenderness, and the insight burst on me like a signal flare: there is the definition. Apologizing to a cook because you cared enough to save her life and it took her out of her way, still worried when she leaves the shelter of your care. That is the reality. Math.
* * * * *
We remounted with Callissa mutely recalcitrant and Zem now on my saddle-bow. From the knoll Stirian Ven showed beneath us, its walkers’ and horsemen’s lane set between the double-paven carriageways, dotted with traffic, shivery with mirage pools, leaping into the blue northern hazes like the image of unswerving thought.
“She’ll expect me to make for Hethria,” Beryx said. “We need speed. Traffic’s light. Come on. I can use Fengthir to handle that.”
Before the noon change of horses I had held his rein a score of times while his eyes went blank and he put forth the fearful effort needed to send carts, carriages, wagons, traveling herds, groups and solitary pedestrians or riders past as if we did not exist. If we trusted the magic by then, we still found it eerie. And none of us was reconciled to its cost.
“Sir,” Evis urged as the post-house came in view. “I know we have to change, but I can make up a story. Love of—sir, you’ll kill yourself!”
Beryx forced his back straight. Wiped his face. “Story’s no good,” he muttered. “Got to cover tracks.”
We rode in unquestioned. In the same dreamy blindness of ostlers, post-master, pay-scribe, changed our beasts. Mounted. Rode out. I led his horse away down the empty road, while he flogged himself to fulfill the last terrible demands of the art.
When it ended Evis determinedly rammed his mount in and held Beryx up until the worst was over. Though his eyes remained shut, a hint of pleasure showed in his face.
“Did it,” he murmured. “Forgotten us. The whole lot.” A workman’s pride in the conquest of a supremely difficult technical task.
As he said, “Can let go, Alkir,” Zam gathered up the bridle and announced in a small but determined voice, “Sir Scarface, you do the magic. I’ll manage the horse.” And with a tiny, tickled grin, Beryx murmured, “All right.”
By late afternoon I had had enough. Over a rise one of Morrya’s swift coastal rivers appeared, sparkling khaki and olive under its high-arched bridge, and I said belligerently, “There’s cover down there. We’ll halt.”
He did not demur. Merely whispered, with the sketch of a smile, “Headstrong as a general. And only a captain of guards.”
In the upstream shrubs and canebrakes a little glade opened on the bank. While we watered the horses Beryx, like Callissa and the twins, lay flat and immobile on the grass, but as I came over he began to sit up. I cut him off. “We’re going to forage. Don’t worry. We may not be aedryx, but no one’ll see us to forget.”
The forage was motley. Two hens, corn-cobs, a helmetful of eggs, a burst waterskin which Sivar, with astonishing resource, had knotted up for Uster to fill, with more surprising skill, from an unsuspecting she-goat. Beryx hiccupped over the story. “Milked . . . upside down!”
He eyed the hens. I said, “I’ve savaged more of these with a dagger than you’ve got arts. We’ll spit roast them—oh.”
“Oh,” he returned smugly. “At least you’ll have to let me light the fire.”
“Flint and tinder,” Evis ruminated over a drumstick. “Spoons—pot—cups—salt—mint-tea would be good.” He was his old provident self. He eyed Beryx’s bandaged hand. Few of us had yet outgrown the fascination of watching him eat with Axynbrarve, fowl fragments flicked deftly into his mouth.
“Good practice,” he informed us. “Just needs delicacy. Which I lack.” Now he followed Evis’ eye to the grubby linen, and shook his head.
“We’ll do all that in Frimmor.” He lay back, head rubbed sensuously into the grass. “How I wish I didn’t need sleep. I want to look at the sky.”
At sunset, to our unbelief, he woke fresher than we did. “You bounce back fast,” he explained, “when you’re used to Ruanbrarx.” And night travel was easier, with only the post-house people to demand his arts.
I soon grew anxious about Callissa instead. The boys were all right, dozing in our arms at the walk, bouncing grimly stoical at the trot, but she was still taciturn, the cat clutched in her arm, her face growing more pinched with every mile. Such a ride was arduous enough for fit, healthy men. For a woman, used to the house. . . .
Second watch came and went. The traffic had vanished. I had grown jaded myself. When I glanced back, Sivar was shadowing Callissa’s beast. Beryx slowed his horse on her other side, and I heard his almost humble, “Ma’am, will you let me help?”
“How can you?” Fatigue. Unflagging antipathy.
“If you let me, I can give you a Command.”
“Do something to my mind?”
“Ma’am . . . I won’t read your thoughts. I won’t—do anything you’d dislike.”
After a moment she said ungraciously, “If I must do this, I may as well save trouble for the rest.”
There was silence, while we all listened fearfully for another of his magic’s punishing variants. But Callissa just asked fretfully, “Is that all?” And he returned with a smile in his voice, “Until it finishes, and you fall apart.”
When Valinhynga rose he called a halt. Too weary for talk we followed him from the road, crawled off our horses, picketed them and collapsed.
I woke with the sun in my face and a root in my back. Having remedied both, I found myself in a green-and-gold precinct, a clump of huge old kymman trees gone wild, their low-slung branches and thick ferny foliage completely hiding us from the road. I could hear it, though, within bowshot. Grind of wheels, bellowing calves, herdsmen’s shouts. The low sun struck under the trees to catch a bit, a horse’s eye, a dewy spider web, silver on a mounded back. I lay luxuriating in rest as you do only when very tired, idly counting the kymman’s brown peanut-shaped fruit, feeling Callissa curled behind me, still asleep. The twins, I saw, somewhat startled, had burrowed into Beryx’s cloak, into his very sides, I should think. He himself was awake, and looking past me. I rolled over, at the feeling in his eyes.
All over Frimmor and Morrya lythians grow wild. Acquainted with them from childhood, I hardly noticed. Now it seemed I had never seen one before.
It was a big bush, man high, twice as wide. The thin sappy stems and glossy serrated dark-green leaves were lost against other foliage, but the blossoms were staring bright, shaggy crowns that spread from the curly upper tips to the broad daggers of the petals’ foundation, splashes of jagged vermilion, indescribably brilliant in sunlight upon a blue dawn sky.
Unplanted, I thought. Untended. Unwished for, undesired. And undeterred. I turned to Beryx, feeling for myself the joy and wonder and gratitude for earth’s off-hand magnificence that had made his eyes glisten with tears.
After a moment he spoke. Even in mindspeech it was hushed. One word, but now I knew a fraction of what it meant.
He said, <Math.>
* * * * *
We breakfasted, fully if not fillingly, in somebody’s ferroth grove. The head-sized, green-and-orange-streaked fruit with their rich yellow pulp and black, loose, jelly-coated seeds, should really be eaten with a spoon, and the twins emerged daubed from head to foot, but much refreshed by the delightful task of assisting Beryx, the worst off of all, since he could not even grasp the piece he tried to bite. But hilarity faded swiftly on the march.
Evis had pressed for a wait till dark. Beryx replied, “No time.” We were in the Cessala, the unbroken thirty miles of caissyn farms that produce the spear-high purple sweet-grass whose stalks are crushed for sugar juice, and it was harvest, every farmer cutting or carting or burning off. Billows of black smoke severed Stirian Ven, the roadside fields were going up to heaven in red and yellow ranks of flame, or full of sooty harvesters who swung long hooked knives in the van of numberless pickers-up, stackers, and haystack-high bullock carts. The road itself was one long stream of them. The fires’ heat distressed us all, but for Beryx they must have been purgatory itself.
After five miles I saw a lane that offered cover and veered my horse. He snarled, <Curse you, get on!>
In another mile Sivar had annexed Zem. In a second Evis was holding Beryx on the horse. After another two a post-house came in sight. Evis began, “Sir, we must tell a story this time, you can’t—” and got a savaging of his own, a straightforward, brutal, <Shut up!>
How he managed it I do not know. But he did, drawing one breath of triumph rather than torment before we were back in the flood.
That day if ever I profaned Math, for I cursed those bullock-drivers’ simple existence, and they were innocent men. The sun climbed, reinforcing the fires, we were all awash with sweat, and still they came, one after another without so much as a breathing space as they plodded along beside their tall white teams, plenty of time to look about. Whistling, some of them, the final maddening iniquity. Blithely unaware that they were putting Beryx through a torture that would make kindness of the rack.
Around noon we found a farm track that ran into an unburnt field. This time I simply swung the troop aside and ignored his furious, <Alkir! Curse you, stop!>
Round the first bend we halted, Amver and Dakis leaping off to catch and lower him, still impotently spluttering, into the meager shadow of his horse. The tall ranks of caissyn rustled overhead, the sun weltered in the narrow track, while we stood over him and mutely paid our dues to Math in the knowledge that this was borne for us.
For a good five minutes he simply lay there, every muscle limp, the scar staring purple in a bloodless face. Zyr clumsily wiped his forehead. Evis beat off flies. At last his eyes opened, dull black, drained dry.
Fraction by fraction, the green returned. His breathing crept up to the audible. He blinked. Then the thunder burst upon our heads.
If you ever doubted he had led an army, you would have known then. At the mere preamble every drillmaster I ever knew would have wept and confessed himself hopelessly outclassed. For range and scope and unfaltering flow of invective I never heard its equal, but it was the tone that put it far beyond a drillmaster’s scope. Sheer awful authority, descending to annihilate us in god-like wrath.
When the pulverizing finished, he had finally got his breath. Then his face changed. With ludicrous horror he exclaimed, “Oh, dear! Oh, drat! I’ve done it again!”
The contrast was too much. We held our ribs and fell about. With tears of laughter in his eyes Evis gasped, “Oh no, sir! Don’t regret it—just hope I can remember a bit!” I could feel the grin stretch my own face as I added, “No, sir, I’m grateful to be taught my place. I’ll never call myself fit to chew out a defaulter again.”
“But,” he wailed, “I’m not supposed to do that anymore!” At which Evis patted his shoulder, saying kindly, “Never mind, sir. It was an education. Now you just relax and get your wind.”
It was all he would delay for, and afternoon was worse. Never have I been so thankful as when the carts thinned and the caissyn fields tailed off into the foothills of the Frimmor range.
There is an inn at the pass foot. Since he fainted clean away after the final cart, Sivar was free to dart into its kitchen and annex a fistful of cups and a mighty kettle of mint-tea, from which we all recruited our strength. As we rode off I glanced back to see a sooty child, clearly a scullion, gaping after us. I glanced at Beryx, and kept quiet. One child could hardly prove dangerous, and he had driven himself hard enough.
Frimmor range is just a winding climb among the tawny coastal hills, and traffic was blessedly light. Beryx reached the crest with strength in hand for a last view of Morrya, patches of opulent black soil, lush cultivation and lusher natural greenery spread into the smoke haze, steaming under the humid sun.
“So rich,” he said under his breath. “So much potential. How could you want Ammath, when you owned a province like that?”
“Isn’t Everran,” I asked, “like that?”
He came to himself. “Everran was poor land,” he answered. “A lot of it desert, most only fit for hethel trees and grapevines. Nothing like this.”
“Was,” I thought. Everran, supreme happiness, had been deliberately, irrevocably put behind him. A sacrifice. At least two of the Phathos’ cards had spoken truth.
We changed horses at the post-house on the crest. This time he wobbled out in the yard and personally chose every horse, the selections of a cavalryman. And chosen, I noted with foreboding, for stamina above all else.
<Yes,> he agreed without looking at me. <We won’t be changing these for a long, long time.>
* * * * *
Frimmor is just high and dry enough for grain, chiefly fed to the ubiquitous milking herds and more ubiquitous pigs. Most of Assharral’s cheese and bacon come from us. The crops patch into the rolling red-and-yellow-green landscape with its dirt tracks to each whitewashed farm, the earth tank and cultivation and selected groves of shade-trees, the paddocks grazed by phalanxes of red or roan milking cows. A quiet, prosperous, mellow land. I had never coveted its kindness, till I saw it through Beryx’s eyes.
Sunset, fading golden to prettify our stubbly faces and mistreated clothes, found us at the bypass for Tengorial. Stirian Ven makes no concession to towns. In its path, it goes through, otherwise it goes past. Callissa eyed the faded sign with her first show of life. Evis eyed it too. Hungrily.
“Sir,” he suggested, “if we asked for dinner at a farm . . . couldn’t you make them forget?” Evis is not one to let weapons, however unusual, rust in his hand.
Beryx weighed it. Then he said, “The next useful cover, two of you can go and ask a farm for whatever they’ll give. If it’s not enough, don’t press them. We’ll try somewhere else.”
On or off the road, Frimmor has little cover. We ended under a stand of tall silvery hisgal whose boughs offered little more than midday shade, and the very grass beneath had gone for travelers’ fires. Beryx slid off and lay flat, leaving it to us. When Karis and Krem brought back a bucket of milk, a cooked ham and a wheel-sized cheese, he roused to blot their tracks, but then he lay back again, a shadow in the dusk. And we were so hungry it was a shameful time before we remembered him.
“No,” he murmured, waving away Evis’ fist-thick wedge of ham and cheese. “Later, perhaps. Not yet.”
In consternation we coaxed and begged. To no avail. Evis gave up in patent distress. Callissa had been supervising the twins, with brittle severity. Now she muttered, “I’ve had enough of this!” snatched the disdained food and bore down on him.
“Sit up!” There was no kindness in her voice. “You have to eat, and you will, if I push it down your neck.” She cut off his answer in her no-appeals nursery voice. “Don’t say, Can’t, to me.” She broke a piece of cheese and prepared to make good her threat. “Open your mouth!”
“Oh, Math!” he lamented. Then he struggled onto an elbow. “All right, ma’am. I know when to do as I’m told.”
We were still resting on our stomachs when he said apologetically, “I know you’re all very tired. But . . . tonight may be the last time we can use the road.”
The silence was more eloquent than words. Then Zyr said grimly, “If you c’n do it, sir, so c’n we.”
Few Frimmans travel at night. After a time we adapted the long-distance cavalry mode, half an hour ahorse, five minutes afoot, while Beryx nursed us with the skill of the born cavalry commander, who senses just how much beast and man can bear before he must slacken the rein. Once I recall gazing up at the constellations learnt from so many campaign watches, drowsily telling him the Assharran names. Tirstang, its five stars rolled over by the passage of the night, the sparkle of the two bright Ethryn pointing in to it. Firkemmon, its crooked scourge sweeping across Ven Selloth, the stars’ own highway, the golden eye of Heshyr shepherding us from the west. And at last Selionur, as he rose at the Hunter’s heel to bring the morning watch.
I woke with my head on a curb and dew on my cloak in what resembled a battle’s aftermath. Loose horses browsed in the ditch, men lay with an arm through the reins, propped on each other, on curb or gatepost, oblivious. Sivar was actually upright, his horse’s neck in an affectionate embrace. At my back Callissa’s arm pinned a restive cat. Beyond her the twins had been laid out straight and rolled in a cloak. Beryx sat over them, fine-drawn and pale, watching in the sun.
Looking past him, I started to see a gate known all my life. With a dogged grin he asked, “Think they’ll feed their wandering boy?”
“We had to hurry,” he said as the rutted track led us past the five black-butted morgars where I cantered my first pony after truant cows, past the sorghum patch, the milking yard, the orange orchard fence. The dairy rose ahead, the red house-roof, I could hear the squeal of dining pigs. Then his last words caught up. “. . . take them a while to pack.”
Reason was sluggish. We topped the last rise. I said, “They won’t go.”
“What!” he sounded alarmed.
“My father’s been here from birth. Like my grandfather. And his father. Even for . . . the Lady . . . I doubt he’ll go.”
Callissa struck in vengefully, “They won’t. They’re pharraz. Like my people. They don’t leave their land for flood or fire or drought, or any trouble on earth.”
Beryx shut his eyes. I saw that until now I had only thought him tired.
Callissa pressed on with rising triumph. “And if they would, Alkir has three brothers and two sisters, I have two of each. They’re all married. With families. Are you going to uproot them all—not to mention fifteen or twenty uncles and aunts?”
Beryx said with unutterable weariness, “Let’s have breakfast first.”
He did his best. After my father had kicked a dozen truculent dogs, tilted back his ancient hat, drawled, “Ah, Alkir. You back?” After my mother kissed me, and we had devoured an entire milking, a side of bacon, three days’ eggs and a week’s sorghum porridge, when Callissa had fallen asleep on her plate, the twins had been borne out and the rest succumbed on any vacant floor, Beryx argued with conviction, urgency, unflagging energy, and unfailing respect.
My father, a little thinner and more stooped than I remembered him, sucked a sorghum stalk and said, “Ah,” in the right places. At the end, he announced, “That’s all as may be. But this is my land. Whatever comes, I’d as lief it found me here.” While my mother smiled at Beryx and said, “I’ll warrant that’s made you dry, young man. You’d best have another drop of tea.”
Then I did my part. They listened with slightly more interest, exclaiming, “Well, well!” and, “Fancy that!” Then my mother enquired mildly, “But, son, what on earth would the Lady want with us?”
Beryx put down his cup. He did no worse, till an unlucky mention of his wizardry woke my father up.
“Are you, by’rLady! Then just you come and look at this cow. Two heifers the goodwife had from me, and she’s drier than when I asked. . . .” Beryx was swept off, to return still protesting his ignorance of cows, and so seal his rout. My father retired on the sorghum. Beryx sat on the doorstep, head in arm, shoulder to a jamb. I propped the other side, taking and I hoped giving comfort in defeat.
“They have to come,” he said into his arm. “They’re the first ones she’ll—and we’ve killed ourselves getting the head start to—it can’t be much longer. Alkir, can’t you—”
“I stopped arguing with my father at fourteen,” I said, “and joined the army to find someone I could beat.”
Evis, who had vanquished sleep, came up demanding, “Sir, can’t you make them? Give them a—a Command?”
Beryx lifted his head. He was red-eyed, with that strung air of a man functioning on pure will. “It would not,” he said flatly, “be right.”
I said, “Not even as a Must?”
“No.”
Evis fell quiet. I looked at the filthy bandage and said, “We should do something about that.”
My mother was helpful, though palpably shocked by the wound. But when she said, “However did you do this, young man?” and he retorted, “Put my hand in the fire to save Alkir burning his,” her eyes merely rounded, before she said, “Very kind of you, I’m sure.” Frimmor is too far from Zyphryr Coryan to credit city barbarities.
As she tied off the bandage Beryx gave a jaw-breaking yawn. Then he said, “We’ll wait for dark,” rolled himself in his cloak and the cloak in a corner, and plummeted into sleep.
* * * * *
At Rise-and-shine I caught a maternal reprimand for dragging Callissa about the country like a thief—“what would her people say?” Callissa, scrubbing viciously at the boys’ noxious coats, supplied the rebuttal in a toneless voice. “He won’t leave the wizard. The boys won’t leave him. And I can’t leave the boys.” I withdrew before I said something to regret.
Evis was assembling his commissariat, while Beryx checked hooves and backs. After one glance at his brisk bright eye I asked, “What have you planned?”
“Magic,” he said cheerfully. “Phatrexe and Pellathir.”
“Translate.”
“Phatrexe. To write a message, on a gem, a chair, a horse, a man, keyed to the right receiver’s mind. Yes, it would be the cipher of the world. I’m going to write on this whole farm.” I gasped. “A big job, yes. I don’t think it’s been done before. I’ll write in Pellathir.” His eyes danced. “If anyone comes here meaning harm, they’ll trigger what I write.”
I gulped, gasped. Rallied. “But will a—an illusion . . . ?”
“Imagine if you ride up here bent on mayhem and lightning strikes in front of you—darres wriggle out—demons charge your flank—” He was chortling. “Then a wizard materializes overhead and says ‘Get the blazes out!’ You think that won’t work?”
“Uh—uh—I suppose it might! But—can you do it?”
“Oh, yes. It might take a little time.”
The understatement of all time. It took perhaps half an hour and cost him more than the whole day in Cessala suffered at once. I was quite sure he had killed himself. I could not hear a breath, find a pulse, I held a drenched, boneless corpse. Then his lips parted on a single silent breath.
<Saddle—up.> The very mindspeech was a thread. <Ready . . . by then.>
He was. Erect, revived, saying with patient emphasis, “Yes, sir, but if anyone offers harm to your or Callissa’s family, you must bring them all out here. I can’t guarantee it, but I think the magic will protect you. It’s important, sir.”
“Keep the weevils off the sorghum?”
“No, but—”
“Urrhum. Thought magic’d at least do that.”
Beryx cast his eyes up, then retorted with restraint, “I’m not a weevil-master, I work with minds. Point taken, Alkir. Let’s go.”
Of the two hundred miles from Frimmor range to Gjerven we covered forty that night. Cross-country, zigzagging to farm gates, skirting dog-ridden homesteads and towns, off and on secondary roads, cantering more often than not, swift and unseen as ghosts. “I always did like,” Beryx remarked, “to get along. And this is easy. Just have to find the way.”
“Oh, yes,” I said politely. It was barely starlight, we were in a maze of ploughland, I had no idea where, how we had got in, or how we would get out. “You can see in the dark?”
“No need. I’m using Phathire. And I scouted in the light.”
His high spirits were infectious. Valinhynga rose as we bivouacked in someone’s old hay-shed, and while we watered the horses I heard Sivar emitting noises that could only be an attempt at song.
We dined palatially with mint-tea in cups and hot porridge spooned from a pot. That night was dark of the moon. “Lovely,” said Beryx. “Black as a morval’s heart. No need for cover. And the Lady’s still waiting for a nibble on her Hethrian lines.”
* * * * *
That night saw off another thirty miles. Amid general satisfaction we halted in what must have been Frimmor’s last uncleared tarsal scrub, and set a watch on the horses, knee-hobbled to graze. Uster woke me at noon. Couched in the maze of shadow, silver leaves, subtle gray boughs and boles and fallen timber, bathed in the warm broken light, idly scanning the horses’ abnormal blotches of color and the sleepers in their artful tangle of boughs, I watched a ploughman snail up and down his chocolate-red ridge, not half a mile away, oblivious.
When I woke again, shadows at every possible angle barred the golden light of evening which flooded the scrub. Beside me Beryx and Zem, unbreathing, watched a lydwyr buck, his doe and a youngster feeding up to us. A patch of fallow red, a black nose, a long dragging tail, melted and reformed in the sun’s windows, only movement flawing their superb camouflage.
The wind yawed. The buck jerked up. The doe bounced. All three bounded away, jiggering wildly as the horses blocked their path. Beryx and Zem shared a silent laugh. A moment later the camp was astir to what was already routine: gather firewood, assemble food, saddle up. The easy efficiency of a seasoned patrol early in the campaign. Before the battles and the losses start.
Sometimes a mere thought can tempt bad luck. I was still feeling complacent when I noticed Krem.
He had been bringing an armful of wood. Slowly, deliberately, yet with a weird unnaturalness, he came to a halt. His arm opened. The wood fell out. He drew his sword. Then he about-turned to advance on Beryx, perched on a nearby log, blank eyes turned south in his own reconnaissance.
Instinct forced my shout, caution throttled it. But Beryx had already spun to hurdle the log with one hand flying out as his eyes shot a green flash and he hissed, “Stop!”
The bustle shattered as everyone woke up. Some ran in, some back, Callissa gagged her own shriek to snatch the twins behind the fire, horses snorted in contagious fright. Krem was still walking, sleep-slow, arrow-straight. Beryx dodged wildly in the timber so for one corrosive instant I thought he was in flight. Then a sun-patch caught his eyes, jade laced with lightning, and I changed my mind.
The chase went on, a nightmare pursuit, Krem angling through the obstacles while Beryx circled and zigzagged in wild jerky motions that resembled abject rout. I saw Karis’ and Evis’ faces move to disbelief, rising contempt, and wanted to bawl, You’re wrong!
Then Beryx’s eyes shot a gout of pale green fire that dulled the sun. He whipped upright and froze, muscles set like adamant. I heard the first huge intaken breath.
Krem was still coming. Fifteen feet. Ten. An automaton, a puppet’s mechanical, mindless advance. Beryx was gasping, heavy cough-like grunts jerked out by an exchange of blows dealt with all his aedr’s might.
They were five feet apart. Krem waded, as in thigh-deep mud. Beryx’s eyes brightened intolerably, his body arched to some stupendous stress. As Krem’s arm began to swing Evis ran in behind him and swept his sword two-handed in a swipe that all but took the head clean off.
As the body spun with head flopping sidelong from that thick red jet and the limbs flailed in their hideous dance I lunged at Callissa and whirled her into the twins, roaring, “Behind the horses! Till I call!” I had no mind to afflict my sons with the memory of such a death.
Krem finished on the rim of the fire. Sivar gulped, “Thank the—” We all stood shaking at the supernatural’s assault, the escape. Only Beryx was still locked in his fight.
The fulcrum must have been a shaven second before Evis struck. Now he was shuddering, jerking, with a barbaric grin of triumph slamming home blows to seal the enemy’s rout. His shoulders arched up, he laughed aloud as you do in the field upon the killing stroke. Stepped back, gasping, a raw jubilance in his sweat-drenched face. And saw Krem’s corpse.
I had time to think: I saw Gevos die. I should have warned Evis.
“B-but sir,” he was stammering. “He would have killed you! I couldn’t . . . Sir, I didn’t mean—I only thought—I didn’t understand!”
Beryx’s eyes were still on the body. I saw the anguish become that quiet, desolate despair he had shown over Gevos. The words burnt in my mind: Velandryxe. The ultimate wisdom is not to act at all.
Evis cried, “Sir, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—please don’t look like that!” He too had sufficient Math to suffer for a mistake.
The desolation faded, willed into abeyance by greater imperatives. Math demanded that he console the destroyer, not mourn the destruction of another part of Math.
“Don’t worry, Evis.” He said it gently, no touch of sarcasm. “I know you did it for the best.”
The burial party returned, wiping earthy swords, just as I finished kicking dirt round by the fire. Callissa crept back. I felt two small arms lock round my legs, and sat on a log to embrace them instead. Beryx dragged his eyes round the hushed, daunted group.
“She’s found us,” he said.
He sank slowly on his heels. With a stab of guilt I wondered if my scullion had shown the trail.
“That was the Well. I might—not have broken her Command in time.” I knew he had changed his words to spare Evis. “So to be sure of ourselves now, if of nothing else—I’ll free every one of you.” A brief glimmer of amusement. “From the spell, you might say. Zem, will you come here?”
Like Thephor, when my turn came I wondered, Is that all? Just looking into his eyes, into that incandescent green that burnt furiously, magnetically, while he put forth another gigantic effort, and I felt nothing at all.
He sat back, wheezing, and retorted, <I hope nothing’s enough.>
Evis flapped, saying, “Sir, you must rest—” He shook his head and looked at Callissa, the only one left.
Callissa backed around the fire with a sharp, panicky “You’re not touching me.”
My forbearance failed. I addressed her like a ranker for the first time in my life. “Come here and do as you’re told!”
“No!” She backed faster, in a moment she would run, at full stretch I just caught her elbow and yanked her round with a harshness wrung from my own taut nerves. “Come here!”
She struggled, I subdued her, one hand over her mouth, she fought in a frenzy as Beryx struggled up and approached. Yet there was only concern and shame and affliction in his look.
“Ma’am”—it was entreaty—“please don’t distress yourself.” I sensed her fear had opened an old wound. “I don’t want to harm you. You mean as much to me as Alkir.” He lifted his left hand. “If I did this for him, how can you think I’d mean ill to you? Please think a moment. If I leave this, you’re open to the Lady. Like Krem. And she won’t turn you against me. She’ll use you against Alkir. Or the twins.”
He waited, a suppliant. Once more I thought bitterly how powerless is power that binds itself in goodness’ chains.
Callissa’s muscles loosened. I let go her mouth. With a different sharpness she said, “The twins?”
“What it can’t best,” he said, “Ammath will do its utmost to hurt.”
Another pause. Then, steeling herself, she said sourly, “If I must.”