There was no sparkle in that night’s ride. Oddly enough, Krem’s absence depressed me most of all. Odd in such a peril, odder because he had been a purebred Gjerven, black to the whites of his eyes, so the one time I should not have missed him was at night. . . . I berated my mind back where it belonged, with my horse. If Beryx had been “getting along” before, he was now in downright haste.
Long before dawn we were installed in a tumbledown abandoned milking shed. Blundering over the debris of bails to feel through the acrid scent of ancient manure for each salt-caked shoulder, steamy back, drooping neck, I thought grimly, If this keeps up. . . .
“It can’t,” Beryx said at my elbow. “We must have fresh horses tomorrow. It’s still sixty miles to Gjerven as the morval flies.”
“Sixty! It can’t be!”
“We veered west tonight; tomorrow we’ll go east. Try to lose her.” The cloud lifted a moment. “You’d never think, would you, that the one thing to foil an aedr, even with the Well, would be simple dark?”
I could not share his frivolity. “But the horses—”
“Alkir, do you know where we are? Five miles west of Vendring. What’s a mile to its east?”
I thought, remembered, was deprived of breath. I sat down precipitately on a broken bail. “You wouldn’t—you couldn’t—even you wouldn’t—not the imperial stud!”
“Oh?” He was snickering like an urchin. “Why not?”
“Why not?” Then it got the better of me. I let out a guffaw. “You madman, if the Lady doesn’t crucify you, Zabek will!”
“Then,” he said solemnly, “we should get the fastest possible beasts.” And we both folded up.
* * * * *
Every soul in Assharral knew the imperial stud, the light of the Lady’s heart. Its stallions were the cream of field and track, its mares sprang from an old pure line that was every other breeder’s despair, its cast fillies went to the knackers, its cast colts sold as geldings for an outrageous price. Its champions carried the Lady’s colors, its other progeny were the pride of the cavalry, which was the pride of Zabek. Once, back from a posting in Gjerven, I rode past, just to look. The huge immaculate stables, the lush green white-railed paddocks, the gloss of a farm free of an empire’s purse, all paled before the stock. Mares with foals at foot, playful yearlings, two-year-olds walking out for the breakers, stallions bugling from their pens. And for any single one a horseman would sell his soul.
“We go in,” Beryx squatted under the fallen door-beam, “about middle of first watch. After night round, before they check the heavy mares. You, me, Zyr, Evis. We’re in luck. The cavalry draft goes next week.” I practically heard Zyr’s mouth water. Like all Axairans, his true god is a horse.
“Er—” Evis cleared his throat.
“Evis,” Beryx reproached him. “Have you never lifted a horse? Blanket boots. We’ll make them today.” He twitched his cloak. The crowning insult, to hide the theft of the Lady’s treasure in her own guard’s gear, blazoned with her crest. “I know the way. And I think I can still control a horse or two. Someone will see us? Evis, you positively wound me. Don’t you think I’m a wizard at all?”
The four of us left the rest at the brood pasture end, under a huge kymman clump, horses solemnly commanded to “Keep it quiet.” Snaking up the pasture, Beryx clicked and murmured to shadows that snorted or leapt, then stood with spellbound serenity in our wake. Past the exercise yards. The stables snorted and rustled and sighed, the human quarters shone with blithely ignorant lamps. Beryx strode down the long aisle as if he owned it, lightning selections, a low “Stand, child,” and we slid in to the sniff, the shine of a liquid, curious, tranquil eye, the still more amazing docility with which they let us tie on the blanket boots, lead them out. Twelve colts we lifted, and never a one so much as jibbed.
Quite speechless, we slithered outside. Back across the pasture, never a nicker heard. Trembling with tension and unbelief we saddled up, the colts steady as old cavalry mounts. Swung up. “Come on,” Beryx bade beasts and men. Our old mounts fell in like dogs. An owl called in praiseful derision as we rode away from the most brazen, impossible horse-theft ever perpetrated in Assharral. Ho-ho-o-oke! Ho-ho-o-oke!
* * * * *
Three miles east Beryx called a halt. “Good lad,” he murmured, bandaged hand rubbing behind his old mount’s ears. “You did so very well. Off you go.” They all melted away. “And now,” he bubbled into gaiety, “let’s get out of here.”
“You do know,” I cantered beside him, reveling in the colt’s effortless rake of a stride, “that if all Assharral wasn’t hunting us before, by the pits, they will be now!”
“Might as well annoy her,” he answered blithely. “You know the saw: Lost temper, lost fight.”
Thirty-five miles later we found the outbuildings of a disused inn. “How,” I wondered, “do you ferret out such. . . .” and he laughed. “I had ample time to look.”
It dawned on me then that every step of this journey had been minutely, meticulously planned. The horses were still willing to go, but he shook his head. “Save them. Tonight we’ll need every ounce of it.” He grew grim. “If not before.”
No one asked his meaning. Nor did anyone cavil at clambering in turn to the musty hayloft where we stood to crane through a skylight at the four dusty roads that converged upon the inn, while the others slept amid our splendid loot. Zyr would rather have used the day to worship his tall lean yellow-dun colt. “Magic!” he said over and over. “If this is magic I’ll—I’ll turn wizard myself!”
Beryx grinned and retorted, “Partnership?” But his sleeping face, slack, stripped and spent, revealed the foray’s cost. Wreve-lan’x on not one but twelve horses, first at the stud, then over forty fast-ridden lightless miles, had exacted a price beyond even the value of the prize.
I plunged awake to Sivar tearing at my shoulder with awful urgency in his face. “Sir, cap’n, save us, there’s dogs ’n hoes ’n pitchforks ’n I dunno what ’n half the country headed this way!”
Up the ladder I shot. He was right. All four roads bore a turbulent cloud of closing dust, too irregular for troops. My eye made out the gleam of domestic weaponry, the uniform of farmer, cowman, roadman, cook, Krem’s purposeful dream-like advance. Not an enraged but an enlisted mob.
We fled forthwith, straight north between two roads at flat gallop to outstrip the pincers instantly thrust from each flanking crowd. As we drew clear I glanced back. The vanguards had slowed to a stop. Spilt aimlessly. Were gaping at each other, at their weapons, clumped in bewildered groups, scratching their heads.
Beryx laughed aloud. “It’ll be the riddle of the century,” he called. He steadied his horse. “Hang on, ma’am.” His bay rose to a sagging gate, I heard Callissa squeak as hers sailed over in his wake, and wondered how she was holding him. I was hard put to do that myself.
Across a cow pasture we poured, Beryx slowed, and with prideful expert’s riskiness Zem leant far out to slip the gate chain. Beryx glanced at the sky. An hour after noon. Flushed out, I thought, and the hounds running on sight.
It was a harrowing afternoon. We ducked and dodged erratically to avoid farms and mask our route, pursued with vain zeal from Kenath and Imarval, with three gallops to evade those menacing puppet crowds which sprang up full in our path. It cost time and distance and horse-flesh, yet I could see we were still making what could be called a dash. And that however zigzag, our general progress was north.
The inn, I judged, had been twenty miles from Gjerven as a morval flies. We must have ridden more like thirty, but in third watch the horizon bulged, and my heart leapt. Every soldier back from Phaxia hails them as homecoming’s seal, the rank of crooked, thumb-like pinnacles which line the Frimman glacis. The Fallers, they call them, though they remain upright. The Gazzath.
* * * * *
By then we were deep in Gazzarien district, which grows the rhonur whose white bolls spin a finer thread than wool. In every direction rank upon arrow-straight rank of chest-high bushes marched off to clash across the next farm’s ranks, the sun weltering down on their humid greenery while the Gazzath swam in a blue murk of heat. Somewhere to the left was Veth Gammas, the best and chief way down the two-thousand-foot drop known as Gazzal, the Fall. I was still squinting for it when Evis, the tail-scout, let out a yell of dismay. “Sir! There’s cavalry behind!”
No mistaking them. At least three troops, the flicker of armor, the geometric formation so different from civilian riders however purposeful, retained even at the gallop. As these were.
Beryx checked, Callissa went white. Zyr’s eye flashed. Amver groaned. Evis shouted, “Sir, we can’t waste a moment, we have to reach the road, we’ll be pincered on that cliff—” Beryx rapped, “Quiet!” in a voice that shut us all up like traps.
“Math,” he said, wheeling for one quick scan. “I didn’t want to do this.” He licked a finger. The wind was vigorous, from the north. “Waste. Wanton waste. . . . Hold your horses. I said hold them, not put them in leading strings!”
Quelled, we each took an iron grasp of the bit. He drew one protracted stertorous breath. Then his eyes spat green fire and the length of the rhonur rank behind us went up simultaneously, a half mile of tinder-dry white bolls that exploded in fusillades of eager flame.
Wrestling my colt, I saw his eyes’ second flash. Another rank went up to the left. Traverse. Flash. Another on the right. Two, three miles of fire took hold and swept enthusiastically away before the wind, pouncing on the uppermost bolls and hurdling to the next rank as if the six-foot intervals did not exist.
Beryx’s breath escaped on a single concussive sob. He collapsed on the bay’s wither, it spun and reared and in horror I slammed my own beast in to back up Zem’s brave snap on the bit.
The colt dropped and stood, Wreve-lan’x restored. Beryx straightened, as if crippled, face dripping sweat. Croaked at Zem, “Good lad.” Took a last look at the fire. Three long-drawn breaths. Then he wheeled his horse. “Now,” he said with that general’s intonation, “sit down and ride!”
We parted the rhonur bushes like a stampede, rushing them breast-deep, cramming the colts to prevent a balk, we jumped whatever divided their formations, gate, ditch or fence, we took gullies as they came, we scattered a division of rhonur pickers and a hundred frantic dogs. Nursing my green and fiery steed to keep rank and survive obstacles, I wondered if Veth Gammas were garrisoned, what we would do if the cavalry overcame the fire in time to cut us off, how we could stop them following us down. Glanced at Beryx, and did not ask. The flared eyes, blind to all but the land ahead and poised for lightning-swift choice or change of course, the taut face warned me. You do not distract the pathfinder of a cross-country cavalry charge.
The rhonurs ended at a fence, a road-ditch, and we right-wheeled thunderously onto paven carriageway, Beryx roaring, “Whoa!”
Plunging, foaming, protesting colts cavorted everywhere, my chestnut passaged uncontrollably into a vertical yellow flank, Zyr still crooning “Oh, you beauty, you dream, you pearl. . . .” We looked back on a boiling black wall laced with red twinkles of flame, a diagonal swathe that bisected twenty rhonur fields, and a mob of farmers coming pell-mell with bawls of honest murderous rage.
Sivar let out a cracked laugh, but Beryx looked ashamed. “Didn’t want to do it. Such a good crop. And ripe for harvest, too. But we can’t explain. Come on. At the trot!”
Under the flank of the gnarled thumb nicknamed One-up, every soldier knows why, and Gjerven lay two thousand feet below us, a motley green of rice field and yam patch and pig wallow and swamp, broken by clusters of stilt-legged conical grass huts. Down to the left went the road at a steady one-in-four gradient, and Beryx pulled up.
“That’ll do.” He fore-armed sweat from a white and purple face our career had not flushed. His eye was on a cluster of granite boulders that overhung the road. “If I can . . . just manage it.” And for the first time there was a flaw of doubt.
As Zyr and Karis whooped I thrust my colt against his bay and ordered, “Give me the bridle. Evis, carry on. Don’t let them trot, they’ll kill themselves!”
The clatter faded. Bloodthirsty shouts echoed from above. With an air of near desperation, Beryx shut his eyes and propped his wrist on the withers of the dancing colt.
Abruptly, it stopped. They are trained to halt at a double leg-squeeze. His torso had gone rigid, if his leg muscles spasmed the same way he must have near cut the colt’s barrel in half. His face pulled out of shape. Then his eyes flew open, he gave a tremendous jerk and his lungs emptied in one explosive grunt.
The boulder clump disintegrated. Four small supports opened like an orange, the topmost monster tilted, tipped, slid, landed with a sonorous crunch that sank it a foot deep amid splintered paving stones. The road was completely blocked.
“Axyn . . . brarve.” It came on a long-drawn sob. “Not . . . unusual. ’Cept . . . the precision. Easier . . . tip it right down hill.” I jerked the bit viciously to still the skirmishing colt. He lay with his left arm on my shoulder a moment longer before he straightened up, and said on a breath of relief, “No hurry . . . for a while.”
There was no garrison, there was not a shadow of traffic on the road. Half an hour later we walked sedately out into Gjerven’s steamy, marsh-rank atmosphere, and as he slapped off the first mosquito Beryx observed, “That’s a good-looking swamp. We’ll spell the colts.”
* * * * *
Walked, cooled, watered and caressed, they fell eagerly on Deve Gaz’s famous earnn grass, we fell hungrily on the last Frimman provisions, and the mosquitoes fell ravenously upon us. Beryx grinned as he caught my eye. “Feel at home?” Then Evis produced Xhen leaves from his bottomless pack, and Zem and Zam lost the worshipful stupor that had lasted since the fire and burst out in chorus, “Sir Scarface, I’ll do your hand!”
The burn had filled in and was drying. Soon it would be fit to meet the air. Gingerly flexing the wrist, he remarked, “I’ll be glad to have this back.” He glanced at Callissa, stonily packing cups. Then he asked suddenly, “Ma’am, does that brown horse pull too hard?”
I saw surprise, a fleeting softness in her eyes. Then they hardened. Chilly courteous, she replied, “I can manage, thanks.”
With a silent sigh Beryx turned his eye on the colts. When he said, “We’ll give them a bit longer,” my heart sank, for I knew we would go on that night.
He lay back in the grass. A series of shuffles edged the right arm under his head. The twins moved closer, rancor woke in Callissa’s eye. Parceling up his medical kit, Evis glanced at those drowsy green eyes, still open, absently content. Paused. With sudden decision put by his pack and hunkered closer too.
“Sir,” he began. “Krem—why—did it upset you so much?”
I closed a mouth open to call him off. An aedr’s resilience is more wonderful than his arts, and I had seen those green eyes wake. Resigning myself to the mosquitoes, I lay down and drifted off to Evis’ first steps on the road I was traveling myself.
* * * * *
If that night’s going was safe, it was woefully slow. Gjerven is far wilder than Frimmor, and most of its cultivation is rice, which means paddy fields, which mean irrigation channels and mud. Which is hard on any horse. Moreover, we had ridden hard on a half-day’s sleep, and we were flagging ourselves. I doubt we managed ten miles’ actual advance before Beryx called a halt.
“No use overdoing it,” he said softly, while I waited to see the current lair. “Yet.” Despite full night vision I could find only the vaguest blur ahead. He clicked to his horse. We waded one more slushy channel, mounted an earthen dyke. Grass cones bulked against the stars, I caught the cluck of sleepy hens, a pig’s grunt, hissed in horror, “It’s a village, we can’t—” and he cut me off. “It belongs to the ferryman. He’s sleeping on the other bank.”
“For the love—you mean there’s a river here? What if the Lady finds us? If we’re caught against that—”
“Alkir, Alkir.” He was laughing under his breath. “You just magic up fodder and stabling for these colts.”
It was actually a Gjerven farmstead, five or six huts in a stockaded compound, hens and pigs loose on the bare-trodden earth, even that rarity, a Gjerven cow, which we instantly milked. The horses were dispersed in a couple of lean-tos with liberal helpings of the ferryman’s doubtless precious earnn hay. We climbed into a hut, lit the usual Gjerven mosquito repellent of two dung-cakes on a clay saucer, and after staring fixedly across the sluggish brown ribbon beyond the stockade, Beryx came in and remarked casually, “The punt just broke its tow pulley. No crossings today.”
Despite his confidence mine was an uneasy sleep, ended near sunset amid the bustle as the others ate, packed or went off to saddle up. “Have a kanna,” said Beryx, cross-legged beside me, and took another bite at the creamy crescent of peeled fruit hovering before his mouth. “All we could find.”
Then the physicians descended. As Zem untied the bandage and Zam opened a Xhen leaf, Callissa materialized to snap, “That bandage wants changing. Isn’t there another one somewhere?”
Evis gulped and delved hastily in his pack. Callissa tied it on, cut short Beryx’s thanks, and stalked away, just as Karis tumbled up the steps.
“Sir, sir, she’s found us! There’s half a hundred savages out there with nothing on but their hats!”
Beryx’s face showed a hint of vexation. “Drat,” he said, as I bounded up. He let the kanna drop and strode to the door. Then his shoulders shook. Strung for instant perilous action I was enraged to hear him remark, as if at a parade, “I love those Gjerven helmets.” Pure mischief entered his look. “I wonder if. . . .”
His eyes fluxed, crystalline green and white. Reaching the door, I was in time to see the enemy breast the stockade, an unexaggerated fifty Gjerven warriors, complete with wooden spears and warpaint and towering white and crimson headdresses, a most impressive battlefront. Before the forehead band of every headdress snapped.
“Best battle I ever won,” he chortled, as the phalanx disintegrated into a yelling gesticulating wreck. “Come along. It now behooves us to depart.”
We cantered with expedition east along the river bank, back into the mud and the enveloping dark, unlawfully requisitioned another ferry punt somewhere downstream, and again turned north. “I like Gjerven,” Beryx announced into the splashy, mosquito-ridden dark, and laughter tinged his voice at my grunt of disgust. “Zyr, if that pearl of yours really can outrun the wind, you might try to catch a pig before we camp.”
Zyr did not catch a pig. He did find Vyrlase, the end of Stirian Ven, whence the highway fans in a score of tracks to the border forts. “Excellent,” approved Beryx, headed for the easternmost path. “Now we can get along a bit.”
At that I found my voice. “But surely we should go west? The further east the wider Stirsselian gets, and the worse—”
I stopped. The guards had never crossed Stirsselian, but barrack-tales would have painted it luridly enough.
“Alkir,” he chided, “you’re getting old. How did you last go to Phaxia?”
My jaw dropped. Evis muttered, “I’ll be—” Obsessed with crossing at the narrowest possible part, I had forgotten the Taven, the engineers’ marvel whose creation Mavash decreed when we invaded Phaxia: fifty miles of timber-cord causeways and pontoon bridges set just where Stirsselian turns salt, spanning tidal channels and clethra sloughs and evil black mud in one bold slash. The road that had borne an army into Phaxia, supported and provisioned it and brought its survivors back.
Evis asked eagerly, “Sir, will it be safe? It’s been a good six years—”
Beryx replied calmly, “It looked all right last week.” Evis, recovering, burst out, “Then all we have to do is ride!” With a chuckle, Beryx agreed. Adding a silent parenthesis, <I hope.>
Sometime in third watch it began to rain, a steady Gjerven downpour that would probably persist for days. While I thanked providence we were off Frimmor’s open uplands, Beryx said, “Good cover,” and Sivar grumbled, “Wish I’d kept me cloak.” But it had no bite. Recalling that night in Thangar, I almost managed to find a smile myself.
* * * * *
Chafed, sodden, chilled, we finally stowed the horses and snugged down in the thick Gjerven regrowth to wait for dawn. We were on the edge of the Astyros, the stringently maintained mile of cleared land that provides a glacis for the border forts. I said in Beryx’s ear, “If I remember right, Salasterne’s about three bowshots to the left. The next’s Colne Clethra, about five miles west. Three-hundred man garrisons. Watch-towers every half mile.” I felt him nod. “The Taven began about halfway between those two forts. There was a big heagar tree just by the first causeway.” I could see it still, a glossy green hulk that shaded a hundred yards of ground, bastion-thick trunk supported by secondary roots dropped from the boughs, wounded or resting soldiers in their nooks, trunk aflutter with hundreds of votive rags. “We’d stick a trophy there when we got leave, to be sure of getting it again.”
The gray light was broadening now, creeping horizontally across a shrunken world under a low weeping sky. As Stirsselian itself hove into view I felt a familiar sourness in my mouth.
You could not see much. The curse of Stirsselian is that you never can. There are no landmarks, no lookout heights, nothing to raise you above the swamp miasma for so much as the illusory relief of a view. From where we lay, the Astyros’ tumbled stretch of stump holes, dug-out roots, newly slashed or uprooted regrowth, ran head on into an olive-green and jungle-gray wall. Clethra trees, so uniform in height that not a head topped the rest to give you some estimate of their depth, so thick no light picked out the groves, straight-ranked and impenetrable as a close-order phalanx front. It does not show hostility. It has no need. It rests upon its strength.
Beryx blew a mosquito off his nose. Evis parted more leaves. Then he twitched, showering us all. “Sir . . . sir, you did say watch-towers? Then what in heaven’s name are those?”
A trumpet had called in Salasterne, lowering dark and idle behind its lofty stockade under the moontree’s limp black dangle of rag. At the sound, the desolation before us came to life.
“Ten . . . fifteen . . . twenty.” Imperturbably, Beryx tallied them up. “Must be cursed uncomfortable, roosting out there.”
He was not looking at the watch-towers. He was studying the troop-cordon, posted in pentarchies less than twenty yards apart, right along the Astyros. They had been masked by the rubbish. Now they rose, beating hands, huddled into drenched brown and green field cloaks, cursing the weather, the fire, the orders and each other with the fine munificence of disgruntled soldiery as they struggled to make their breakfast fires. When they moved I could see the tent-like protuberance above each left shoulder. They were archers, and they had slept with their bows.
Facing calamity, Evis was mute. Beryx blew another mosquito away and gazed on, eyes unreadable. My stomach was a cold, flat pit.
“No wonder,” I said at last, “she didn’t worry about pursuit.”
“Mm.” That sounded cryptic too. He squirmed back into the scrub. “No point in rousing that yet. We’ll post sentries and wait for dark.”
I drew some comfort from the thought that sentries would conserve his own strength. We huddled under the trees while the rain poured down to seal our wretchedness. Callissa, mercifully, said nothing. The twins were big-eyed and mute, but when Beryx woke they converged on him. “Be my guests,” he smiled, tucking one under each arm. “Driest rooms in the house.”
From his left armpit Zem asked with desperate composure, “Sir Scarface, you did kill the dragon, didn’t you? In the end?”
“Of course.” He sounded reassuringly matter-of-fact. “That’s why I’m an aedr, you know.” Zam’s head emerged, I saw others’ interest. Anything to occupy them, I thought.
Beryx evidently agreed, for he went on, “Magic was the only way to kill it, you see. So I had to find an aedr. Someone”—he looked sidelong—“who’d teach magic to me.”
Zam popped up too, eyes wide in gorgeous awe. “Fengthira?” He did not, I noticed, stumble over the name. “She taught you?”
“She did.” He was smiling faintly. “Yes.”
Zem was nearly bouncing in place. “So once you knew magic, you killed the dragon.”—“And then Everran was safe.”—“And you could be king again.”
The smile faded. “Not quite,” he said softly. “Once I was an aedr—I couldn’t go back to being a king.”
Puzzle pieces showering into place, I sat stone still lest I break the thread. Zem and Zam were thinking with their eyes. I wanted that thread intact too.
“Aedryx aren’t kings,” he told them lightly, smiling again. “It isn’t right.”
This digested, Zem asked a strange question. “But—an aedr could be a soldier—couldn’t he?”
“I don’t see why not,” Beryx agreed. The query that woke in his eyes was never answered. Amver pelted up from the southern sentry-point with a face shouting ultimate catastrophe.
“Sir, sir! There’s half a phalanx coming up behind us—’n they’re beating the timber on the way!”
Beryx’s voice slashed the tumult to bring Amver up as on a rope. “How far?”
“Sir, a mile, less’n a mile—”
“And how fast? How fast!”
“S-sir they keep halting, they gotta wait for the flankers, the timber knots ’em up—”
“Stand to your horse!”
A crack that lifted the whole camp. He was all aedr now, irises writhing in the heat of calculation swift as light. He glanced at the sky. Whatever he saw there, the resulting expression turned me weak with fright.
I had no time to ask. His face twisted in denial, conflict, distress. Then it set.
“Not Math,” he muttered. “But. . . .” And was on his feet with the lunge of a rearing snake.
“Sivar, take Zem. Karis, take Zam. Alkir, you know your tree? Be sure, man!” His eyes skewered me. I nodded, praying it was truth. “When we go, make straight for that. Lead my horse. Don’t talk to me, and whatever you see, don’t stop! You hear? Don’t stop!” He took six huge strides to the bay and swung himself up.
My hand shook on the wet clammy rein. Behind was the hubbub of panic half unleashed. Beryx shut his eyes, propped his left wrist on the bay’s wither, and drew the first harsh extended breath.
Nothing happened. His face contorted, his muscles shuddered, the bay backed under the merciless pressure on his ribs, crueler and crueler grew the battle for each riving breath. And nothing happened. A wizard tearing himself apart while we stared helplessly, doom closed on us, and the gray rain dripped from a bleak gray sky.
Only when I cast a desperate glance across the Astyros did I realize with shock that the rain was pelting down out there so hard its ricochets jumped from the mud, so hard that visibility had shrunk to a scant quarter mile, outposts, forts, watch-towers all lost in a sheet of solid white. My heart leapt, and sank. What use was cover, with guards posted twenty yards apart?
A surge of wind hit the trees. Behind it came the rain, beating clean through the foliage, pounding on our heads. The colts began to spin and plunge, it was pummeling us like fists. I heard the front wash on across the timber in one huge airborne wave. Overhead growled the fruity, thick-throated thunder that escorts deluge rain.
Beryx gasped and dropped, face down on the bay’s neck. With terror’s severity I jabbed the bit to restrain the horse. He was shaking as if every muscle were unstrung. I could just hear his words.
“Count . . . five hundred . . . or wait for yells. Then go. Fast as you can ride.” He straightened, head bowed into the deluge, black hair streaming waterfalls over a bloodless face. His back arched. As I counted ten I heard the resumption of those racking breaths.
Two hundred. Three. I was choking with tension and fear, not least that I would lose the count. Four hundred and fifty. Fifty-one. Evis bounced and gasped. “I heard something! From Salasterne! Sir—”
“Four-sixty—wait! Sixty-one . . . two. . . .” And tearing the rain like paper came the scream of Salasterne’s trumpets as they sounded the Attack, the Alarm, General Stand-to, Alarm, Alarm!
“That’s it!” It came out of me in a grunt as the colt, mad with waiting’s tension, fairly fired us into the rain.
How we got over the Astyros at that pace, in that downpour, I conceive to be a direct mercy of whoever-you-like. There was no visibility. I galloped for a stump I had laid in line with the heagar, picked another beyond it and bucketed on, praying that if Beryx’s colt tripped without a firm hand on the bridle he was long enough in the rein to gallop himself up. From behind came the dead thunder of hooves in mud and the yells of men too crazed to think what they were saying, over all was the cavalry rumble of the rain. . . . They’ll never see us from the road! I was yelling it in silent manic delight, And we can ride the cordon down—
With shattering instantaneity we burst out of the rain and tore in virtually clear air and full view of the forts across the last quarter mile of the Astyros, we would be atop the archers in twenty strides, my hand leapt for the bit as my mouth opened for a frantic futile Halt! and Evis’ black jammed its shoulder into me while he screamed and howled like a man watching his horse take out a close-run race, “Come on keep going it’s all right it’s all right!”
My eyes shot left, a smoky breakfast fire flashed under us and was gone with not an archer by, my eyes shot up and they were running, running like madmen, but not for us, they were bursting their hearts to reach Salasterne and nobody there would think about us, the trumpets were still shrieking and up every side of the stockade poured a flood of little bandy-legged men in spiked helmets and fish-scale armor and mud-brown cloaks whose color was more familiar than my own eyes. The colors of Phaxia. A surprise attack.
War reflexes are burnt deep. Even then my heart made an extra pump, my bridle hand leapt automatically for the wheel that would fling us to their aid and Evis nearly deafened me. “He said don’t stop, he said don’t stop!”
Before I could argue Stirsselian leapt at us, unmoved, inimical, blank, fresh terror stopped my breath. Then there it was, a midnight cloud above the clethras, the giant heagar.
I would undoubtedly have swept the whole unit clean past it onto the causeway without attempting to draw rein, I was too crazed to think of anything else. But as we tore round the tree’s buttress Beryx twitched and almost burst my head. <Whoa!>
We ended half on the causeway, horses going mad in the same tranced drive to run as ours. He literally fell off the bay and crumpled in the mud, I abandoned both beasts to dive and catch him up. Hooves flailed about us while he jittered convulsively in my arms, far gone and driving himself to get out the last crucial commands.
<Horses—let go! Tell them dismount! Quick, quick! On causeway—run. Never mind me, go!>
I bellowed the orders and enforced them by sheer manic will. The colts fled broadcast, going like bolters, the humans stumbled past us onto the slimy, treacherous logs, he was pushing me with a nerveless hand, choking, “Go, GO!” Disobediently I lifted and dragged him with me, aware even at that pent-in moment of some change in the outer world. Then I realized what it was.
The trumpets had fallen quiet.
At the clethras’ brink I could not help one backward glance. Rain blotted half the Astyros. I could hear its tidal roar. Salasterne loomed black and distinct against that curtain of white. But no fiendish little knife-fighters capered in triumph on its catwalk, no bodies, Assharran or Phaxian, lay writhing or moveless in the mud. There were no Phaxians at all. Just a crowd of archers and garrison who confronted each other over arrow and sword-point, motionless, too thoroughly confounded even to scratch their heads.
We were on the first bridge, with Evis helping Beryx to stagger between us, before I finally understood. Then I yowled like a cat-a-mountain and pounded bruises into his back.
“It was Pellathir, it was Pellathir, wasn’t it? You lovely crack-brained lunatic, they were never there at all!”
He was reeling, white and wet and spent beyond all but an attempt to laugh. He answered in mindspeech, <Alkir, you clever soul!>
Then we both laughed so hard we fell over, and the others had to rush back in fresh panic to pick us up.
<Pellathir for the archers,> he said, as we tottered off again. <Wrevurx for the rear attack. It’s still coming down in waterfalls. They won’t have seen a thing.>
“Wrevur—” It slammed back at me. “Weather-work! You mean—you didn’t just conjure the Phaxians? You made the rain as well?”
<Shouldn’t have done it.> He sagged on my shoulder, eyes falling shut. <Twisting things that far . . . not Math.>
I literally hugged him, still too delirious to care for anything but the stupendous splendor of the trick. “It got us out, didn’t it? When any mortal general would have sat down and cut his throat? Who gives a tinker’s ill-wish about Math!”
* * * * *
It was a long time before we sobered up. What if we were penniless, provisionless, horseless, shelterless, faced with a fifty-mile walk in pouring rain over an unscouted road to Phaxia? We had escaped Assharral. Foiled the Lady. Shared a stratagem that would have made military history, if any historian could ever be brought to write it down.
“And,” added Beryx proudly, “it didn’t kill a single man.”
We congratulated him as we trudged, contented except for Zyr, who was engaged in a wake for his colt. “Why,” I asked, “did we leave the horses behind?” At which Beryx shook his head. “Too dangerous out here. Besides, I hope it might—er—mitigate the crime.”
I could not see it mattered, now we were forever beyond the Lady’s power. Sivar had just asked with not-quite-pure facetiousness, “Sir, whyn’t you send all this rain off to Assharral?” when Evis, tail-scout as usual, called in a carefully wooden voice, “Sir! I think there’s something behind.”
Beryx stopped in mid-stride. He shut his eyes. I heard him whisper, “Oh, no.” He called without looking round.
“Are you sure?”
A pause, while we all strained our eyes. Then, yet more woodenly, “I’m sorry, sir. I’m sure.”
Beryx still would not look. “Can you tell what it is?”
There was a change in the rain-smeared umber length of the Taven, that stretched blade-straight back to the Astyros’ open light. I knew the answer before Evis spoke.
“Troops.”
Silently, Beryx groaned. I wondered why he had not used farsight, recalled he had still leant heavily on me as we went, saw he was using it now. He spoke again.
“How far?”
“I think . . . two miles—mile and a half.”
“Mile and three-quarter,” interjected Sivar. I realized where Beryx had been looking when he said, summoning strength, “Hurry then. It’s a mile to the next bridge.”
We hurried, and they gained, though their pace was not fast. There was something dreadfully familiar about that steady, smooth advance. Once Beryx himself glanced back. His eyes dilated, and he began to scurry faster, with jerky, un-coordinated strides.
It was a major bridge over the first tidal channel, six pontoons anchored by a web of cables to the clethras that flanked a muscular, dirty-chocolate stream, tree-trunk bridge-spans floored with planks. Cat-footing in the slime, we crept across.
The troops had closed to three-quarters of a mile. “Phalanx,” said Amver, superfluously. We could all see the broad white shields, blazoned with a black moontree, as they shone dully in the rain, the fitful shimmer of helmet or mailcoat or the gleam of a sarissa head, fifteen feet above.
Beryx cast a hunted glance at the clethras, deep in fluid mud, at water’s shine between the mud-coated tussocks in the marshes ahead. Evis said, “Sir—sir, we’ll have to cut the bridge. No cover up there. And the children—”
No need to finish, They could never keep ahead.
For the first time I saw overt indecision in Beryx’s face. The troops had closed to half a mile. Evis said tentatively, “Sir, if you—could you—”
“I could. . . .”
And did not want to, I could hear. I said roughly, “We can do something for ourselves. Sivar, Dakis, Uster, don’t just stand there—you do carry swords!” Beryx opened his mouth, then let us go.
We hacked with strenuous haste, concentrating on the third pontoon. But those cables were set by good engineers who meant their work to last. We still had two uncut when Beryx called, “Come out of it, Alkir! I’ll do the rest.”
The troops were inside three bowshots, still coming, steady, unhurried, a whole taxis, two hundred phalanxmen, their rank kept with remarkable skill, in quadruple file for the track. Beryx gave them one last look, then turned to the bridge.
It was less summons than a supplication. He said, “Imsar . . . Math.” Then he clenched his fists, arched his back, and his eyes fired like a multiple catapult, flash upon searing flash.
The cables snapped. The planking jumped in the air. The two tree trunks cartwheeled majestically and went seaward in the pontoon’s wake with a resounding splash, and Stirsselian’s noisome waters swirled hungrily under a twenty-foot gap. With sighs of relief, we turned our attention to the troops.
It took some time to accept. Then Sivar’s voice cracked in shock and disbelief. “Sir, they’re not gonna stop!”
“Clear the bridge,” Beryx snapped. “They may try to throw—though what they expect to hit with sarissas,” he echoed my thought, “I can’t think.”
We retreated thirty yards up the causeway. The troops came on, unhesitant, unhurrying, tramp, tramp, tramp.
They were in bowshot. Fifty yards. Amver shifted uneasily, some premonition showed on Sivar’s face. I glanced at Beryx to find him deathly white. I caught what may have been an actual thought fragment, for it did not sound like speech. She wouldn’t—she couldn’t—she can’t! Then he yelled in mindspeech, nearly pulverizing my skull.
<Moriana, don’t be such an imbecile! We’re out of reach! You could surrender with some grace!>
We released our ears. The troops came on.
<Moriana, what in the pits are you playing at? Pull them up!>
The troops came on, thirty yards now, tramp, tramp, tramp.
<Moriana!> Panic had adulterated the wrath. <Let them stop—they can’t get across!>
The troops came on.
<Moriana, I won’t fight you for them, you know I couldn’t free two hundred men! Let them stop!>
Twenty yards. Tramp, tramp, tramp.
<Moriana—for the love of heaven! They can’t reach us, do you want to kill them all for nothing, pull them up!>
The troops came on.
“Oh, Math!” he said aloud. Sweat stood in great drops on his face. He yelled again, sounding desperate.
<Moriana, please! Let them stop!>
The troops came on. I could see the front-rank faces, set, stern, expressionless. Tramp, tramp, tramp.
<Moriana, you can’t slaughter them for nothing, they’re innocent men!>
The troops came on, tramp, tramp, tramp.
“No!” he said in anguish. “Moriana, listen—” He changed to mindspeech, deafening my ears as well.
<Moriana, I beg you, let them stop!>
The troops came on, forty feet from the bridge, tramp, tramp, tramp.
<Moriana!> Tears were streaming down his face. <You can’t do this! You can’t!>
The troops came on.
<Moriana, listen, listen to me . . . ! I’ll do whatever you say, I won’t go to Phaxia, I’ll come back, I’ll give myself up!> He had moved forward, my hand shot with motives I had rather not analyze to snatch his arm. <Anything you want, but for pity’s sake, let them stop!>
The troops came on, up to the bridgehead, he was tearing at my hold, yelling, <Anything, Moriana, anything! I swear it! For the love of Math!>
The troops came on, faces still blank, wholly expressionless. Onto the bridge, tramp, tramp, the front rank’s gaze was fixed on us, seeing but unseeing, I too wanted to scream madly, hopelessly, Stop! Stop!
But it was too late. They were past the first pontoon, the planks rumbled, the bridge bucked wildly to their unbroken stride, the second pontoon plunged under them and he screamed in pure agony, “Moriana, NO!”
Instinctively I jerked him round and hauled him up the road and slammed a shoulder into Callissa as I panted, “Get the boys away!” He fought my hold with the whole remnant of his physical strength. I put a headlock on and literally ran him off with thanks to someone that my arm was over his ears, so he at least would not hear that awful repeated sickening splash.
* * * * *
In a hundred feet he collapsed. I picked him up and carried him, driving the rest. Zyr was about to throw up. Dakis was in tears too, Evis whispering, black stricken eyes in a papery face.
“Why did I look, oh, why did I look? They went straight in—all of them—two hundred phalanxmen—not even trying to stop!”
His voice shot up and cracked. I thumped an elbow in his ribs and snarled, “Thank Math they were phalanxmen, in that armor they’ll drown, would you rather they smothered trying to climb up on the mud? Or got out and we had to kill them afterwards? You blind imbecile, get on!”
When Beryx came round no one dared speak to him. After one glance, I hardly dared to look. Eventually we camped, cutting open surcoats to drape over branches on a relatively high spot, then huddled cold, wet and supperless while the rain came down and Stirsselian’s stinging flies helped the mosquitoes crown the misery of the night. Beryx spoke only once, when I thought of setting a watch.
“No,” he said, and there was death in his voice. “There’s no need for that.”
Nor did he speak next day. There was no forage of any sort. We drank swamp-water and struggled on, leading him like a sleepwalker in our midst. Two days later the rain stopped, the sky cleared, the clethras shone silver-bright, and a brisk wind blew snowy clouds down over sharp red mountains behind Phaxia’s umbrella-roofed border forts.
At Stirsselian’s edge Beryx roused himself, and in a lifeless voice bade us cut and peel a clethra bough to make a herald’s staff. Too tired and starven for fear we watched him plod forward with it to the nearest fort. Sentinels challenged. He parleyed. An officer appeared. He parleyed again. After what seemed hours, he turned and beckoned. We crept forward, steeling ourselves.
Small bandy-legged slit-eyed yellow soldiers surrounded us, jabbering frenziedly. Beryx said, “We have safe conduct to Phamazan.” Then he handed me the staff and quietly fainted clean away.