After they recovered from twelve Assharran refugees’ appearance over a border uncrossed in living memory, the Phaxians were kind enough. They tried to stare no more than was humanly possible, and to Beryx they were more than kind. Doctors, the best quarters, any necessity, no expense or trouble grudged.
It was needed. For three days he did not stir out of that swoon. The chief physician did his best, tapping my belt buckle, whose height was most convenient, as he assured us, “Is quite all right, sir captain, only exhaustion, is no cause for alarm,” in that sing-song Phaxian accent which makes all sentences end in midair, but we still found it hard to believe.
Meantime they fed, clothed and housed us, causing drastic upheavals in the fort, and asked not a single question about our flight, even about the state of the Taven, which in a Phaxian general’s place I would have had out of us forthwith, manners or not. After Beryx revived we had only to walk about like visiting lords, while we adjusted to the four layers of Phaxian clothes, the pointed felt hats, the wildly spicy food, and admired the well-kept, well-designed, well-sited fort with a catapult under each of the four-storey tower’s overhanging roofs, the skirmishers’ ponies for sorties, and the clean, keen, five hundred troops.
Zem and Zam were adopted by a patrol and almost deserted us. Callissa kept close. The others, like me, were troubled that we could not repay so much kindness with trust.
I have never understood our primeval antipathy to Phaxia. It is not their barbaric customs, skull-top drinking cups, prisoners of war sacrificed wholesale to Ahlthor, ruler chosen by death duels, his bodyguard pledged to slay their horses along with themselves upon his grave. Not even their taste for fricasseed dog. Odder customs occur in Assharral. Nor is it that we are usually at war. Nor a difference in race. Our little band was a perfect sample of the Assharran stew: Sivar and I were white-skinned gray-eyed Frimman stock, Evis a swarthy hook-nosed Nervian who shaved twice on parade days, Zyr pure Axairan, red as his canyons with the same facial planes. Amver, like Krem, was all Gjerven, frizzy hair, midnight skin, squashy nose, while Karis’ yellow hide and dropped Morryan eyelids could have been Phaxian. Uster and Dakis were bronze-black high-nosed Kemrestanis, Ost had the dun Tasmarn skin and coarse horse-like black hair, and Wenver was a golden Darrian. We never noticed our differences. Yet one sight of a Phaxian would have us hackling like dogs with an intruder in the pack.
After a week Beryx courteously but adamantly left the physician protesting by his vacated bed. Physically he seemed recovered, and he was brisk enough; but we all knew the memory of that Taven bridge had not healed. His once incorrigible, often infuriating merriment had vanished, and we grieved for its memory, as you do at sight of some great swordsman with a tendon shorn.
In another week he had intimated to the commandant with the invincible charm of high nobility that he wished to be on his way. Little Phaxian horses were produced, and amid exchanges of esteem and a fifty-man guard too respectful to be called an escort, we set out for Phamazan.
* * * * *
Phaxia’s capital is a bare fifty miles from Assharral, but safe enough, for most of that stands on end. It lies on the high arid plateau beyond the even higher Azmaere range, where you boil in summer and in winter freeze. Less hardy rulers summered in mountain eyries and wintered among Gevber’s palm-lined coves, but Zass stayed in Phamazan all year round. It is a good indication of his character.
That was written, though, on every mile of our road. Phaxia is more populous than Assharral in far less space. Small yellow people swarm in the most barren and inclement districts, compensating with industry for their poor material. The Azmaeres are terraced to the very summits, minute fields that plunge dizzily down the mountainsides, ploughed by tiny sure-footed donkeys where no Assharran would dare to hoe. The Veldisk plateau is irrigated by channels from the great northern river Othan, and the narrow coastal strip of Gevber is cropped for rice three and four times a year.
All this the escort officer told me with unassuming pride. He had no need to tell me the point of the arms drill in every village, the profusion of troops on the march, the endless pack-trains of arms coming from the big northern cities of Vyrne Taskar, the bustle of supply collection and levy enrollment in every sizeable town. Steadily, purposefully, by a long-prepared program, Phaxia was winding up for war.
Natural enough, I thought. His last trouncing would rankle in Zass’s militant mind. No one could wonder if he meant to even the score, but I felt no happier now I was technically on his side. Those wicked little jungle fighters in Stirsselian had scarred and scared me far too much.
At Phamazan we were billeted in the palace itself. As Klyra said, it is a barrack of a place, sullen yellow sandstone, stuck on a hill outside the town like an oversized citadel: no concessions to the site, treeless without and few gardens within. Most of the courts are bare pavement. Fountains are rare. And everywhere wide windows offer a sentinel’s prospect over miles of glary sandstone-studded landscape, where the dust smokes from the zealously worked fields to the rienglis that circle patiently in that thirsty upland air.
When we arrived Zass was watching cavalry maneuvers from the balcony above the mile-long practice field that serves as the palace’s great court. Dust whirled above the sandstone battlements, and the chamberlain, ushering us into a vestibule, murmured, “The master is with his army. Never to disturb.” We sat on long felt cushions, tried not to grimace at the bitter black tea, and declined the services of pages with huge paper fans, until the chamberlain shepherded us into an audience hall.
At the far end Zass sat enthroned under the hall’s sole ornament, a trophy of Phaxian swords. They are lovely things, curved shimmering blue blades of the finest steel I know, hilts that include every extravagance of fabric and workmanship, gold, silver, ivory, gems, all fantastically carved. Tall copper-colored drapes were half drawn across the windows behind, so the light showed the faces of petitioners and masked Zass’s own. I made out he was in cavalry boots, trousers and over-tunic, standard issue and liberally floured with dust, his only signs of rank a truly outstanding sword and a scarlet pointed felt hat.
Like most Phaxians, he is small, bowlegged and wiry, inexhaustible. Unlike most, he has high cheekbones, barely slitted eyes, and a jaw undercut so extremely that his mouth resembles a shark’s, set straight between nose and neck. The chamberlain made obeisance. Silently, Zass crooked a finger. Then he made a pushing motion as we all moved, leveled the finger at Beryx and crooked it again.
Beryx stepped forward. His arm was in a silk sling, the fort commandant’s one victory. Since no ordinary size would fit, some hastily conscripted tailor had made him Phaxian clothes, and he carried off the baggy trousers, voluminous shirt and close-fitting mud-brown tunic well enough, though the tailor had closed his eyes at the sight. But as he stepped toward Zass his bearing set a royal cloak swirling at his heels. He was no longer a fugitive wizard. He was a journeying king.
Zass had read it in the first stride. The finger crooked again. Stewards flew like hail. A state chair materialized on the dais to the right of the throne, an inlaid table set with ornately enameled jar and cups for Phaxian rice wine followed it. Beryx inclined his head and seated himself with the same regal air. Zass swiveled sideways on his throne. I saw his hawk-yellow razor eye, and knew that if a sword had made him, he had no swordsman’s mind. Then a steward plucked discreetly at my sleeve. Our presence was no longer required.
To our relief we were quartered together, in the eastern wing. Forbidden to explore, Zem and Zam resorted to making cushion castles and sliding down to flatten them. Evis prowled. The others were out of their depth and showing it. A hundred questions about our future hung in the air.
There was time to ponder them. Being mere chattels, we were left to cool our heels while Zass gave Beryx a conducted tour of Phamazan, then had him to dinner in the royal rooms. Bugles had called the Phaxian Lights-out from a hundred different barracks before he came to bed.
He still wore the polite mask of a diplomatic duel. It melted far enough to assure Sivar and company, though without his former gaiety, that they were not yet for the rubbish heap. Then he quirked a brow and asked, “Fylghjos, can I degrade you to body servant? I’ll never worm out of this tunic alone.”
His room was furnished with the usual austerity, though with a few additions: a splendid silver ewer, a silk quilt on the low wooden bed, a conspicuously posted scarlet hat. Eying it, he observed with a trace of his old self, “Show your rank, or else.”
As he sank rather heavily on the bed, I essayed his own tactics and asked, “Shall I start with the boots? My squires always did.”
He answered in mindspeech, without looking up.
<It’s no good.>
It was sheer incomprehension that muzzled me.
<Zass would be delighted to give me asylum. I’m a king, I have manners, I’d set off his court. The trouble is the board. I’m also an aedr. The weapon to end all weapons. With me he couldn’t just settle his score and give the Lady the bloodiest of noses, he could conquer Assharral.>
Confusion whirled in me. Wasn’t that why we came, it’s better than beggary, did you mean to forget the whole thing, surely you wouldn’t mind a little of your own back, won’t conquering Assharral remove Ammath?
He lifted his eyes, black-green in the lamp glow, revealing the fatigue of Zass’s interview and the stresses beneath.
<I don’t want to invade Assharral. I certainly don’t want it invaded by Zass.> He shuddered. <The bloodshed, the waste! I’ve done enough damage there myself.>
But it would overthrow the Lady, I thought.
His face sharpened. <To replace her with Zass.>
I sat limply on a tathrien stool. Will you leave Phaxia, then? You can hardly stay, if you refuse Zass! With sinking heart I contemplated fresh flight to some wholly foreign place. Will you go back to Hethria?
<No.>
Then . . . ?
He pulled himself up. “I don’t know,” he said. “And I’m too groggy now to find out. Skin me out of this tunic, Fylghjos. I might turn up something in my sleep.”
* * * * *
It did not show at breakfast if he had. He was composed but inscrutable, and soon left at a summons from Zass. We had resigned ourselves to another day’s idleness when a chamberlain entered to announce that the foreign lord desired his retinue. Looking unsociable, Callissa muttered, “I’ll stay with the twins.”
The great court does have a colonnade, a promenade for officials, nobles and idlers. As we appeared Beryx rose from a stone bench by the main gate, saying, “I thought you’d like to see the great court. Thank you, Fen, that will be all.”
Chamberlain dislodged, we paced out onto the hot, dusty, hoof-beaten earth, dutifully noting the myriad slender pillars of the balcony, a princelet flying a merlin in jesses, the dusty emerald flutter of a forgotten cavalry mark. When other strollers were well clear Beryx said without preamble, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I can’t stay in Phaxia. If I do, Zass will expect me to conquer Assharral for him.”
I looked round on blank dismay. They too would have preferred a fixed exile, it seemed.
At length Evis asked hollowly, “Will we—go to Hethria, sir?”
“No.”
“Vyrenia’s not bad,” Sivar offered half-heartedly, “ ’cept that blighted rain every day.”
“Vyrenia?” Beryx stared. “Why would I go to Vyrenia?”
“But sir—you can’t stay in Phaxia, you gotta go somewhere!”
“To go to Vyrenia won’t stop Zass invading Assharral.”
“Let him,” said Dakis. “Who cares? Not our affair.”
Beryx said flatly, “It is not what Assharral deserves.”
There was a discomfited pause. Then Karis asked, “How’re we gonna stop it, sir?”
He studied our faces. A hint of the old mischief flickered, overlaid by worry and remorse.
“Zass knows my powers,” he said. “If I weren’t in his camp, he’d be very wary of crossing me. And he’d think twice about invasion if I were anywhere I could interfere.”
Zyr pulled a copper plait. “Yes. But, sir, where?”
“I thought a long time about that. In the end, there was only one choice. Only one place it could be.” He paused. Plunged. “Stirsselian.”
That is the closest I ever came to outright revolt. No, I thought in instinctive refusal. Bad enough to be homeless, penniless and futureless in Phaxia, but not Stirsselian! The mosquitoes, the quick-mud, the fever, the clethras, the whole nerve-fraying reality washed back over me. No, I cried before I could help it, Not again! Not with Callissa and the twins!
My eyes cleared. Beryx was watching me, with sympathy, understanding, absolution. <I know,> he said. I know, that look added, exactly how you feel.
Hearsay alone had given the others pause. He turned to them.
“This is something I have to do,” he said. “But I have no claim on you. I’ve already made you exiles. If you want to go to Vyrenia—Hethria—I’ll do my best to see you safe.”
There was some hard gulping and grimacing. Then Sivar set his jaw.
“I been in this from the start,” he announced. “ ’N Stirsselian or no Stirsselian, I don’t reckon I wanna pull out before the end.”
Amver set his teeth. “Or me.”
“Or me,” Karis came in.
Others followed. I was not aware of the choice. I only heard myself say, sounding distorted, “Once is enough.” They looked at me in puzzlement, but Beryx understood.
He looked around us. Swallowed too. Then he said, “I wish I could give you more than thanks.”
Feet were shuffled. Evis was already deep in plans, the others facing up to the plunge. Then Wenver spoke up.
Like most Darrians he seldom wasted words, but he was something of a tactician in his methodical way. “Sir,” he began, apologetic but not timid, “if we want to stop Zass . . . we can do it just as well . . . probably better . . . and a lot more comfortably . . . from Vyrenia.”
Beryx considered him. Then his eyes pulsed, shimmered, turned to white-flecked jade. With joy, with intense foreboding, I saw the old impishness return at last.
“Yes,” he said. “It would stop Zass if I sat on his northern border. But it wouldn’t help with what I want.”
“Then what,” I demanded, “do you want?”
He said, “Assharral free of Ammath.”
All our mouths fell open. He stared at us. And then the laughter sparkled out at last, alive, wicked, fountaining like Drytime sun through leaves.
“When I called this a strategic withdrawal—that was exactly what I meant. I may have shifted my ground. I haven’t ceded the field.”
“B-but,” Dakis out-spluttered the rest, “we thought—”
“So you did.” The laughter had become an outright grin.
“But if we ha’nt pulled out,” Karis burst forth, “whyn’t you stay with Zass? If ever there was a chance to smash her, it’d be here—”
The mischief was full-blown now, provocation giving it fuel.
“I don’t want,” he said blandly, “to smash her. I want to free her too.”
My jaw hit my collarbones. His eyes danced at me. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“You—you. . . .”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“You are impossible!” I was beyond manners, let alone respect. “Turn up these crazy, these lunatic ideas and laugh. . . . Laugh! Is it the magic? Did the Lady rot your brains out? Or were you always like this? Heaven pity your phalanx commander—he probably lost his mind as well!”
He was simmering like a kettle, his whole face alight. It did waver at mention of his phalanx commander. But in a moment the sparkle revived.
“Inyx,” he agreed, almost demurely, “did use to say things like that. . . .” I threw my hands in the air. “But I think I was probably born this way.”
I got my breath. Carefully, I said, “You mean—you don’t just want to free Assharral—you’ll go on trying to reclaim, reform, convert, whatever you like to call it—the Lady? To—to—”
The simmer had become sparks of sheer delight. “Actually, I don’t mean to do anything,” he said, “except follow Math.”
I would have flung my hands up then, had I been capable.
“Madness, yes.” He chuckled. “Pure insanity. But—”
“But you can’t—you won’t—what can you do!”
The light spired, spiraled in his eyes, dancing as in that vision by Los Morryan.
“I shall sit in Stirsselian . . . and block Zass . . . and infuriate Moriana . . . without doing a thing.” The dance intensified. “Zass is a canny general, with nothing personal against me. When his agents report from Assharral, he’ll decide it’s worth his while to wait. But Moriana . . . Moriana has a grudge. So . . . I shall let her make herself into Math.”
For an instant the laughter spilled over so it seemed to clothe him in light, summer-green, riotous, reveling. Then the dancers stilled.
“That is,” he said unsmiling, “if she doesn’t make Ammath out of me.”
* * * * *
As we trooped back to quarters I reflected that the most daunting part of it would be to tell Callissa, and I was right. The storm evicted the rest and terrified the twins. I wished fervently for Beryx’s help, but it did not come. In the end I was reduced to the flat statement that I was going, and the boys with me, “and if you want to stay in Phaxia, that’s up to you.”
After Zyphryr Coryan we had no doubt that an aedr could get us out of Phamazan. He did it that night. Doors opened, horses materialized, underlings helpfully fulfilled our needs and washed us from their minds, we rode out the city gate past a blithely oblivious guard. After he recovered, Beryx glanced back at the rowdy lamplit streets and said rather guiltily, “I hope Zass doesn’t roll any heads for letting an aedr slip.” Then he flexed his hand, two days out of bandages, glanced at the rising moon, and said, “We don’t have a lot of time.”
We were down that vile switchback road and over the Azmaeres by dawn. The sun met us in the foothills, staring copper-red on the few unploughed rocks, spreading a tender blue-and-green haze toward the distant sea and more distant Assharral. But directly ahead it fell flat and impotent on the olive-green-and-gray band of Stirsselian, and my stomach knotted at the sight.
“Sir,” Amver pushed his pony into the van. “I been thinking. About Stirsselian.” Beryx nodded. “We might do better going west. See, sir, it’s fresh water then. ’N it widens out a lot. Better for hiding.” This is true. In places the basins are two hundred miles across. “What’s more. . . .” He grew ill-at-ease. “There’s—wild Gjerven up there.”
Unless driven to it, no civilized Gjerven will so much as admit they exist. They are too close akin. Beryx said, “You think they’d help us?” And Amver wriggled on his wooden saddle.
“Well, sir—it’ll be worse’n impossible in there if they take a dislike to us.”
I had never seen one, but the tales were lurid. Little naked men with stone spears and poisoned arrows who were there and gone in a blink, who could set an ambush six feet from a path, who signaled on drums and were wont to eat their prisoners. Amver offered the supreme sacrifice. “We lived on the edge of Stirsselian. In fact—I was sort of—brought up with them.”
Nobody ostracized him. Evis said in relief, “Best news since Frimmor.” Beryx carried briskly on, “Thank Math for someone who might know what he’s doing. Amver, I’ve been thinking too. The best way to move in there wouldn’t be horses, or on foot. It would be boats. Do you know anything about. . . .”
“Sure, sir!” Amver shot up ten feet. “You want a swamp punt. Two, three, maybe. We’ll make ’em on the edge.” He grew pensive. “ ’N . . . we better boil up some salgar as well.”
Around noon we abandoned our ponies, took a final backward glance to be sure no zealous Phaxian had sighted us, and tramped, with varying shades of reluctance, across the last soggy field, over the first swamp branch, and into Stirsselian.
It was much as I remembered. Steaming wet, peculiarly airless, not only because of the smothering trees and the sun that stewed miles of water, jungle and mud, but with a listening pressure that is the most unnerving of all. It is as if Stirsselian itself were sentient, and resentful, and at any moment the ambush will be sprung.
The mosquitoes struck instantly, backed by stinging flies, sticky flies, leeches, and some odd bees that like the taste of sweat. Our march flushed an army of birds, gray hisyrx, the northern heron, black and white waders, all kinds of duck, red-billed slithillin, pouch-billed pelicans, tiny water-runners and tree-dwellers as well, which attracted the raptors, morvallin, rienglis and so on. Once a perrilys glared from a whitened stump, gold-rimmed eye, mottled white and brown six-foot wings, but he was a fish-eater and little concerned with us. The morvallin were another matter. They thought it a hunt, and expected scraps, and in the end Beryx needed Wreve-lan’x to be rid of them.
By then we were on an eyot conveniently infested with emvath bush and hooky quennis vines, with a small fire to boil up the first salgar infusion while Amver supervised the making of punts. This meant wading, often thigh-deep, to the stands of smooth pole-like thrithan trees which are the swamp-dweller’s staple, and which were inevitably barricaded among helmyn clumps. They are palms whose leaves grow in spirals, are lavishly barbed, and when stepped on rattle like the drums of a general alarm. Amver, however, said we would grind the nuts for flour.
He also treated the quick-mud patches with cavalier unconcern, merely bidding us prod with a stick if we left others’ tracks. A wide slide-mark down a mud bank made me shy in real alarm, but he discounted that too. “Fresh water sort. They don’t eat men.” Resolved that Zem and Zam would be confined to camp, I struggled on, wrestling my queasy stomach, picking off leeches, and finally, like Amver, repulsing the mosquitoes by daubing all my exposed skin with mud.
The punts were festooned with vine-ends like a botched haystack, almost unmaneuverable, but they floated, they held two or three people, and they had a bare six-inch draught. Amver took command of the first. Sivar, on the strength of his brother the fisherman, was allotted the second, and Beryx, boasting, “I may be one-handed and never have sailed in soup, but I can bully you lubbers around,” installed himself in the third. The twins promptly joined him. Callissa, still red-eyed and bitterly mute, gave them a savage glance and pointedly made for Amver’s craft.
I let her go, since there seemed no alternative. We renewed our mud masks, downed our salgar draft, manned our paddles, and blundered away west into the labyrinth.
* * * * *
I must admit that to tackle Stirsselian by water, with a competent pilot, is far better than to wallow along in an army patrol, with the nerve-wracking chance of a Phaxian ambush round every bend. Before camp Amver reckoned we might have made eight miles, and since we had struck west on land, this put us near Kerym Cletho, the first of the gigantic basins that fill Deve Gaz’s rift from march to march. We camped among helmyns over a deep channel. There were no mud slides, but fish showed in the amber water, and also lilies, anchored flotillas of a deep vivid pink, closed for the night. Beryx gazed at them a long time, with an expression of revived and poignant if not happy memories.
Stirsselian soon routed the past. We had hardly lit our fire when Evis cocked an ear. Amver stopped, listened too. Then nodded. “Drums,” he said.
They muttered on in the hush, a just-audible irregular pulse. Zyr looked behind him. Zem and Zam closed up on me. Beryx raised his brows to Amver. “Do we make a peace sign? Or leave it to them?”
Amver pulled his wide lower lip. He sounded a trifle unsure. “I think . . . we just go along quietly and wait. When they’re ready . . . we’ll know.”
Beryx nodded. “Like Hethox. Look you over first.” And he turned to choosing a bed-spot, unperturbed.
For three days we paddled deeper and deeper into Kerym Cletho, the only sign of other human life those evening drums. We acquired a helmyn nut grinding-quern, a net of pounded vine fibre, a bow built by Evis to shoot arrows with fire-hardened points which eventually, amid general triumph, felled an unwary duck. Like Zem and Zam we began to replace clothes with mud, more practical for wading, easily repaired, far more leech and insect proof. No crocodiles, Phaxians, or quick-mud appeared. At times, as we wobbled down some convoluted deep-water channel, roofed by a mesh of sun-shot clethra leaves, walled in arches of clethra roots, pleasantly cool in the watery shade, with white dashes of sun on amber water, helmyn fronds dangling harmlessly overhead, lilies sliding safely underneath, mud to foil the mosquitoes, Amver to steer us, and Beryx, if necessary, to get us out, I almost enjoyed myself.
It was not mosquitoes that roused me the fourth day. It was a sound that hurled me back to those awful dawns when the Phaxians made a surprise assault: the grunt of a man struck down and out.
Plunging from my cloak I clawed for a sword—or would have, had a vise not pinned my hand and Beryx rapped, <Keep still!>
I sat, every muscle over-taut, tightened further at what I saw.
The camp had been overrun. A ring of small coal-black men with helmets of mud-packed hair watched us from behind drawn arrows with dull, smeared heads. My blood ran cold. More were among our baggage, at the punts, the smoored fire, watching the rest wake. Zyr, the sentry, lay face down, motionless, while a nuggety warrior with cicatrices on his breast tucked a short bludgeon back in a twisted hair belt. It was impossible to deduce anything from those small, shut, wildcat faces. Thankfully, I saw Amver rouse.
His mouth sagged open, but he kept his nerve. After a moment, still supine, he spoke to them.
It was some Gjerven dialect, too corrupt for me. He sounded conciliatory, but like a man among strangers of his own blood. None of the archers reacted; but at length the sentry-feller approached.
There was an exchange. I caught, “Assharral,” and, “Phaxia,” and, “alsyr”—peace. Then, rather impatiently, the small warrior asked something else.
Amver’s face changed. More talk. His surprise became wonder, incredulity, something near to awe. He gestured at Beryx. The warrior glanced round, then issued a command.
Amver rose. They both came over to Beryx, still seated in his cloak with his empty left hand prominently displayed, and in a very queer tone Amver said, “He wants to know if—you’re the rainmaker, sir.”
Beryx did not hesitate. “Tell him, Yes.”
The warrior had understood. He squatted down in that boneless way, knees in armpits and hands dangled between, staring into Beryx’s face. His small eyes were pitch-black, bright as coals, and as intense. He might have been trying to read the mind behind the face as well.
Silently, Beryx looked back at him. His own eyes were barely awake, just a hint of motion in the irises, the twine of deep currents in a green-stained stream. But no human eyes move like that.
The camp was dead quiet. For a moment I wondered if they were exchanging thoughts. Then the warrior reached out one small pink-palmed hand and delicately, but without timidity, laid it to the scarred side of Beryx’s face.
Beryx did not move. Withdrawing his hand, the warrior looked at the crippled arm. Beryx shrugged it from his cloak. The warrior put his hand on the wrist. Carefully, withdrew. His eyes moved. With a small grin Beryx murmured, “I’ll end in my skin,” and began to unbutton his voluminous Phaxian shirt.
It was half-open when the warrior, with that same intent, unoffensive decision, intercepted his hand, kept the grip an instant to be sure it was not misunderstood, then gently eased the shirt back until he could see the edges of the scar.
Beryx waited. Even more gently, the warrior re-adjusted the shirt, then watched closely as ever while Beryx did it up. After that he squatted a long time and once again studied Beryx’s face. I could not decide if any change showed in his own.
Finally, not turning his head, he addressed Amver in a level, dead-pan voice.
Amver’s brows shot up. He wrought with emotions. Then he said, “He thinks, sir, that our fishing net must have been made by a—a—sheep-butcher from Kemrestan.”
I had just worked out that this came to an insult when Beryx showed me its real nature by replying in the same straight-faced formality, “Tell him that should please him. We’ll miss more of his fish.”
Amver translated. A sparkle warmed the black eyes. A silent laugh rippled round the perimeter, and before I knew it the warrior was talking full gallop to Amver, hands flying, emphasis in his face, Beryx was saying, “Take it quietly, all of you,” and a crowd of small, respectful but thoroughly searching rank and file were all over us.
Ulven are not content to use their eyes. Pink-palmed hands tested our bow, assessed our cooking pot, felt the texture of my cloak, my sword-hilt, my hair, my very fingernails. Zem and Zam got on famously, for they touched with equal freedom in return, but after Callissa’s first shrink and squeak they avoided her. In any case, it was Beryx who was the real cynosure.
They clustered round him six deep, putting out their hands with that odd, intense concentration that held neither fear nor captor’s insolence, but was not, as with us, plain curiosity. It was as if they already knew what he was, and were driven to make the closest possible contact with what they saw.
His dialogue over, Amver forged into the crowd, more agog than anyone. “Sir, they know about wizards—aedryx, I mean!” Beryx nodded, unsurprised. “Lisbyrx, they say, rainmakers, there are old stories handed down, so when you made it rain at the Taven they knew what you were, they’ve been trailing us since Phaxia, that was the drums, of course, because there’s a prophecy—I’ve never heard it!—that a crippled lisbyr’ll come to Stirsselian, this is the headman’s son and the old folk sent him to find us because,” with rising urgency, “there’s troops coming in from Assharral!”
Beryx’s look of confirmation had become a kind of wariness. Now it sharpened. “How far? How many?” He was the general again. “On our track?”
“Nossir, there’s four or five patrols at the end of Kerym Cletho but they’re just probing ’n in trouble with the swamp, the Ulven’re shadowing ’em all ’n they reckon no problem to get rid of ’em—if you want. . . .”
With a glance at the bows Beryx emphatically shook his head. Amver nodded as if he had expected it and was off again. “So they came to warn us and they’ll hide or help us or whatever we want because you’re a lisbyr and because”—he assumed a thoroughly mystified tone—“the prophecy says the crippled wizard will end the Assharran drought.”
Beryx sighed in candid relief. “Just so long,” he said, “as I’m not expected to make yams and kanna fall from the sky.”
“But what’s it mean, sir? There’s no drought in Assharral. Unless they mean Axaira, ’n it never rains there anyway.”
“No?” Beryx shot him a piercing glance. “How long have they been ‘wild’? And why? Not been hunted, by any chance? Nobody thought they were dangerous animals and tried to wipe them out?”
Amver stammered, confounded. “B-but—we—they—it’s always been like that! They are dangerous! They raid crops—kill cattle—burn farms, sometimes! My father sort of knew them ’n he still had to pay a bullock a year peace price ’n—everybody thought we were low going near them at all. . . .”
He tailed off, finding, as I had, shame in what had once seemed reputable. Beryx nodded sadly, his eyes on the naked crowd.
“Primitive,” he said. “Driven back on poor land, then punished when they couldn’t live on it. Made more backward by the hunts. Just primitive, and the stories warped to a cross between demons and beasts.” There was pity in his eyes.
He looked back to Amver. “Not your fault,” he said more gently. “You were bred to the thinking. But . . . no wonder they want to end the drought.”
Amver rallied a little. “But sir, the prophecy. How did they know?”
“They don’t. It’s a hope. A lot of us live on them. Or perhaps there’s a foresighted strain, there often is with people like this. And your headman’s son doesn’t know Ruanbrarx, but he could follow my mind. He only knew about this”—he touched his side—“when I thought of it.” His smile was wry. “Empathy. Like a higher form of beast.”
Amver retired hastily on the tangible. “Do we go with them, though? ’N what about the troops?”
“Go with them, yes, if they can get us round the patrols.” He frowned. “But not to their village. When Moriana gets serious she might destroy it. I don’t want any surplus hostages.”
“No problem, sir.” Amver’s face cleared. “They don’t have a village, just season camps. They live on the move, in their boats.”
Beryx’s face cleared too. “At least,” he said, smiling, “they might teach us how to fish.”
* * * * *
They taught us we were babes in Stirsselian compared to them. That first morning, giving their tacit opinion of our punts by ignoring them, they loaded us in their own craft, single log dugouts without so much as an outrigger, kept upright by the paddlers’ balance and skill, no deeper than the punts but immeasurably swifter, handier, water-tight, able to knife unchecked into the thickest undergrowth. Their fishing nets are finger-sized meshes of twisted human hair, they use tiny bird-bows you can draw in elbow-length, bone sliver knives and needles kept in their hair, woven cane tents that fold down into a dugout and can be pitched anywhere, stone spears and axes patiently chipped and ground from raw flint. They are immune to swamp fever, insensible to mosquito and leech, swim like fish, see safe mud at a glance, move with shadow speed and silence afloat or afoot, know their territory to the inch, and have positively uncanny communication on the road or in the hunt. The dugout fleets veer simultaneously, like starlings in the air. Nor are beaters or archers instructed for a hunt. They assemble at the boats, reach the run, melt away, flush the game, and rise at the precise spot for the equally silent, uncelebrated kill.
Silence, indeed, is the watchword of Ulven life. Babies never cry; even at play children do not shout; adults consult, gossip, mourn, exult, in a permanent undertone. No doubt, like their impassiveness, it has been bred in by generations of outlawry.
What their race numbers I have no idea. Normally they live in family groups which rove a particular territory, but we had caused a general mobilization of the most tenuous sort. Some fifty warriors had mustered to scout or meet with us, from which I guess there are perhaps three hundred in the Kerym Cletho tribe, but we never saw them assembled. On a low islet whose sole sign of occupation was its bare-trodden earth, we met the headman, whose one badge and function of office seems to be the maintenance of four wives, and the rest of the Old Ones, men and women as inscrutable as their envoy. They studied us all, gathered to touch Beryx with that same deep constrained respect, then dissolved, leaving the warriors to act as escort, commissariat and guides.
There was also an entourage of families, brotherhoods, hunting teams, who would join us for a day or a week, then melt away and be replaced. Perhaps it was because we were in their runs, but chiefly, I think, it was that they wanted to be near Beryx for a while.
They were never extravagant or importunate. There was just the silent, intent gaze, the compulsion to touch, the repression by their people’s discipline of an emotion close to reverence, that yet contained affection. A hunger for bodily contact with something legendary, a prophesied deliverance that was also flesh and blood.
It neither embarrassed Beryx nor went to his head. I daresay he had been schooled to a lesser scale of such treatment when he was a king, but his use of the arts certainly did nothing to discourage it. We landed one day in a stand of huge nerran trees where a work-party were hewing with stone axes at a dugout-sized trunk. Two days’ labor, and the cut, dimpled like embossed hammer work, was barely three inches deep. Beryx took one look and sprang to life.
“Four! They’ll be there for weeks.” A swift glance raked the terrain. “Amver, tell them to stand—over there. You others too.”
The Ulven obeyed, impassive as ever, but every eye was riveted on him. He swung to face the tree. Stiffened, drew the first familiar extended breath.
Pressure built up. The air seemed to vibrate. Then his body whiplashed, there was a lash of green-white fire. With a deafening crackle of shorn wood the giant snapped at the cut, tilted, gathered momentum and thundered to its earth-shaking fall.
Leaves, twigs, and frightened birds erupted everywhere. Beryx stood back, getting his breath, with a contented smile. “Not the biggest I ever cut,” he said to us. “But it’s something I can do for them.”
The axemen, nailed down till the last echo faded, had finally crept up to look. There was none of the outcry you would find in Assharral. Just small hands creeping over the shorn butt, and a look behind them, whites vivid in those masked Ulven eyes.
Beryx smiled at them in turn, and made the gesture for “It was nothing.” The eyes grew wider. They were still watching two hours later when we paddled away.
* * * * *
That swelled our entourage over the next days, especially at the midday halt, when we Assharrans, to the Ulven’s puzzlement, would insist on brewing mint-tea. Since his art was quicker than flint or tinder or even coals from an Ulven ember-flask, Beryx had got into the habit of lighting the fire. A crowd would inevitably gather for it, quite silent and mannerly, those ranks of unwinking eyes patiently expectant for the green flash, the flare of flame; after which they would melt off to let us rest in peace.
Callissa usually made the tea. Having managed to muster us all in the one place at the same time, she was pouring out that day, while we sat cross-legged round the fire like any patrol brewing up. The twins were ensconced at Beryx’s elbows, also as usual. He had just taken the first cautious sip when Zem piped up, “Sir Scarface, why is Mi like a Quarred fyr?”—“And what is it?” added Zam.
I saw Beryx pole-axed at last. He choked, the cup flew from his hand; but instead of being caught with Axynbrarve it dropped plumb in the angle of his crossed shins amid a scalding flood of tea.
“Oh, you stupid boys!” Callissa broke out crossly. “Stand up, quick, before it burns you.” More tartly still, “I don’t want that again.”
She might not have spoken. Beryx had got his wind. Absently he shook out his wet trousers, but his eyes were turning from one to the other wide-eyed, guileless face. He answered with conscious casualness.
“Quarred is a country with a lot of sheep. Fyrx are the dogs that work them. They’re red and small and clever, and very quiet. And I was thinking your mother was like a fyr, because here we all are, going quietly along together in the right direction, while she rushes round out of sight, doing twice the work. Just like a Quarred fyr with a mob of sheep.”
They nodded as if they too saw nothing odd. Callissa was torn between unwelcome pleasure at the compliment and insult at the comparison to a dog. I sat speechless. I had noted his choice of verb.
Still intent on them, he asked casually, “How long have you been hearing me, Zam?”
Zam replied with equal nonchalance. “Ever since you came. But with most people we have to really listen. You’re much better. It’s quite easy to hear everything.”
“Everything,” Beryx repeated. He sounded a little faint. I knew he was torn between consternation and mirth.
Mirth won. He let out a splutter. “Served with my own sauce!” And sobered. “Do you listen to everybody?”
“We listened when you first came,” Zem explained, “like we always do with new people, to be sure they’re all right. Mi and Da don’t often make mistakes, but it’s harder if you can’t hear.”
“Thank you!” I said. “You pair of—of—” Beryx grinned without looking round.
“So I suppose you’ve heard me talk to your father, and the Lady as well?”
Zem nodded. “And we heard you fight for him.” I cringed. “We didn’t like you then, till Mi explained what you really did. To herself, I mean.” He added conscientiously, “We can’t always hear Mi and Da properly either, unless they’re stirred up, but they’re better than anyone except you.” He looked disapproving. “That Fengthira nearly deafened us. And she called Da a dolt.”
“She’s no diplomat.” Beryx’s shoulders shook. “You’ve always been able to hear?”
They nodded. Zem squirmed. “At school—we used to—but nobody understood—or liked it—so now we just use it for ourselves.”
“I see.” His eyes were in flux, lightened to crystal green, but this time it was not the rise of power. Then it altered to amused percipience.
“So now,” he said blandly, “you thought you’d make some real use of the thing?”
“Yes!” they chorused. “We want to talk.”—“And see.”—“And light fires.”—“And manage horses.”—“Like you.”
“And you want me to teach you?”
Their eyes lit up. “Yes, please!”
“Well, I won’t.” He did not mince matters. “Not because I don’t want to. Because it wouldn’t be right. You’ll know why, later on.”
He gazed at them with longing, and the nervousness of someone handed a fragile, potentially dangerous yet precious living thing. It was not their paralyzing innocence that he feared, I understood, but his own inadequacy.
“Dismiss,” he commanded. “Case is closed. Go and talk to the Ulven. And don’t listen in!”
Dashed but obedient, they departed. His eyes lifted across the fire to mine.
“Yes,” he said. “You’ve bred a couple of aedryx. Or aedryx-to-be.”
“But—but—” I spluttered. “What—how—”
“Oh, your side of it’s easy. I thought the moment I saw you, That’s a perfect gray-eyed stiff-necked granite-honest Stiriand.”
“I am not!” I said in revolt and fear. “We’re farmers, we’ve always been farmers—”
“I don’t mean your blood’s pure or that you’re even in the direct line. Some branch of a branch probably drifted east, so long ago they’ve lost the very memory. Or were driven underground, the way they were in Everran when the aedryx were wiped out. You’re just a throwback to the looks, and maybe you carry the power’s seed. But. . . .”
His eyes turned to Callissa, whose face revealed protest, abhorrence, scandalized horror and outright mutiny.
“What was it, ma’am?” The question was gentle, but not to be denied. “Bee-master, water-finder, soothseer, witch? With such a strong show as this, the blood couldn’t come just from one side.”
Callissa went white. Then her eyes shut. It was a bare whisper when it came.
“The sight . . . my mother’s people.” She might have been confessing descent from an army whore. “We never talked about it, but. . . .”
“You’ve no call for shame,” he said gently. “In fact, you should be proud.”
Her eyes shot open. He did not notice. He was gazing after the twins.
“You may not think it, but—you’ve mothered something beyond the greatest hope you ever dreamed.” An immense distance entered his gaze. “Something that couldn’t be manufactured by Velandryxe itself.”
“Eh?” I said.
He woke up. “The aedryx before Math lived in cycles,” he said. “A cycle would start, they’d increase, then they’d exterminate themselves. Then a new founder would appear, and it would start again. The last cycle was Th’Iahn’s own, and Fengthira thought she was the last of them. Until I came along. I am the first new aedr for eleven human generations.” His quiet voice kept the import of the words. “I was made, not born. And I can’t found a line. But. . . .” Now it was sheer reverence. “They were born. A natural blending of aptitudes. And when they learn Ruanbrarx . . . they’ll grow up with Math. Not, like every other aedr who ever came to it, have to graft it on.” A brief, depthless, ungrudging envy crossed his face. “It’ll be in their lives’ grain. And if a new cycle starts . . . for the first time, it will begin in Math.”
And, I thought, as my heart moved in unflawed joy for him, you will have found your sons.
Callissa took breath. Knowing what she would say, I cut in first.
“If that’s so, why won’t you teach them? The sooner the better, surely, and who better—”
“No,” he said flatly. “Ruanbrarx must go plough-track. Between opposites. Man to woman, woman to man. I don’t know why, even Fengthira doesn’t. The old aedryx didn’t always follow it, but they knew perfectly well that when they didn’t it brought Ammath. I was lucky that when I learnt, the last living aedr was a woman, so I came to it the right way. No matter how much I wanted, I wouldn’t teach them. Not run the risk of—warping a thing like this. If only—”
He fell silent. Then he shot a glance at Callissa, and said abruptly, “Somebody called Math a river because it finds channels where no reason would expect. I’ll just have to hope it finds a channel for this.”
* * * * *
Callissa would not talk about it, and for the boys’ sake I was reluctant myself. The others took their cue from me, so by evening the revelation might never have come at all.
It did make me more conscious of where the boys were and with whom. Next midday, or the day after, we halted under a big heagar, and, waking from a catnap among its roots, I thought as usual, Where are the twins?
There was no sound of them. Beyond the buttress at my back Callissa stirred and murmured. Then she started up with a mew of alarm, and somewhere further away Beryx said in quiet reassurance, “Swimming with Amver. Quite safe, ma’am.”
I heard her breathe in, wholly enraged. “And if they got caught in a snag, the lilies, a man-eater came—just what could you do?”
“I could get them out, ma’am,” he answered softly. “Even then.”
Leaving Phaxia had made one of those long-term rifts in a marriage which time had only just begun to heal. But from the day we left Zyphryr Coryan her coldness to Beryx had been as dogged as his consideration for her, his patient, indomitable and constantly rebuffed offers of peace. So I was startled to hear her answer. And more than startled by the raw note of jealousy.
“No wonder they come before all the rest of us. You knew all along that they’d be sorcerers too.”
I could not have tackled, much less resolved such a mare’s nest. He took the unspoken grievance first.
“Ma’am, even if you weren’t their mother, weren’t Alkir’s wife, had never lifted a finger for me, I couldn’t care more for them than I do for you.”
She said stonily, “Why?”
“Because you are.”
“What?”
“Because you are reality. Living reality. A human being. And there can’t be—degrees of caring for reality. I have to feel as much for every one of you. Else I might as well not have lived.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was born a king. To safeguard anyone in my keeping was bred into me. I built my life on it. Now I’m an aedr it’s more binding still, because I have more power, and everything that is has a claim on me. So I have to do my utmost to—keep faith. I follow Math, and Math says, Respect that-which-is. All of it. If I made differences between you, I’d break faith. I—I’d destroy myself.”
Why, I thought, does he lay himself open like this, where it can do no good? And found the answer in his own words. Keep faith with Math, or destroy yourself.
Callissa was saying with perverse relish, “So I mean about as much to you as a tree? Or a—a dog, I suppose?”
“Not quite, ma’am.” A shade of laughter woke. “It would take a Sky-lord to be so just, and I’m not perfect by any means. I still feel more for people than for trees. Or dogs, if the truth be told.”
Shadows shifted on a stir of wind, dappling trodden chocolate earth, bringing the cool of afternoon. Her silence was unappeased.
When he spoke again it was entreaty, the last resort of power shackled by its own will.
“Ma’am, whatever I say to you I can’t make you believe. I can only say that I never intended harm to you. I’ve never wished you ill. Whatever unhappiness I’ve caused you has been greater unhappiness to me. I never have and never will hold you cheap. And however you’ve treated me, I don’t bear a grudge.” He sounded suddenly spent. “But I’m only flesh and blood. When I have doors shut in my face, it hurts.”
Surely, I thought, breath held, she cannot shut the door on that?
The silence seemed endless. Then she said, wretched but no longer inveterately hostile, “If only we’d never left Frimmor. . . .”
“Ma’am. . . .” He had recovered. Respectful but indestructible, the laughter was awake.
“If you’ll forgive me saying so, those are the most pointless words anyone ever spoke. You can’t reverse time. Not if you’re an aedr with the Well, not if you were a Sky-lord Himself. And if you could, and if you remade it from the first waking of the first idea of the creation of the world in the first of the Four’s minds, it still wouldn’t satisfy everyone. If you’d never left Frimmor. . . . If my line hadn’t interbred till one of us turned up sterile, I wouldn’t have come to Assharral, because I wouldn’t have been an aedr, because there would have been no dragon to kill. I’d have lived and died a king. In Everran. With. . . .” He broke off. I could barely hear the rest. “. . . sons of my own.”
“But it happened,” he resumed. The grief, however mortal, had been veiled. “We can’t go backward. Wherever we are, we can only go forward. And make the best of it.”
When Callissa did not speak, he said meekly, “I’m sorry, ma’am. I’ve been talking philosophy at you again.”
She cleared her throat. She still sounded brusque, but the ground-note was different.
“My name is Callissa,” she said. “There’s no need to call me ma’am.” I heard her scramble up. “And those boys should be out of the water. They’ve been wet far too long.”