We were still making circles round Moriana’s wretched patrols, who indeed we never saw. It was all done with the drums. Zem and Zam never tired of watching our drummer squatted between his two hollow wooden pipes with their lydwyr hide heads, polished and blackened by decades of sweat, his palms fluttering like butterflies as he beat out the signal, so soft at close quarters, carrying for miles on that soggy air. He would stop. Listen. Speak to Ygg, the headman’s son. Ygg would relay to Amver, who would ceremoniously repeat to Beryx, who for form’s sake would consult with me before returning the ritual reply, “I will use Ygg’s eyes.” And Ygg would launch us into another maze where I had to wait for sun or star-rise to orient myself.
Our routine was already formed: breakfast and salgar at dawn, drum-talk, march and hunt, brew up. Catnap, march, bivouac, drum-talk, bed down. To the Ulven it was normal life with a spice of danger added, and soon it seemed so to us. Then Amver listened with mounting excitement to the morning report, and burst out, “Sir, they’re going back! The patrols’ve pulled out!”
A wide grin split Ost’s muddy countenance. Karis pounded Zyr’s back. But Beryx lowered his eyes and said nothing at all.
“Sir?” Evis prompted at last.
“Yes,” he said. His eyes were unsmiling, midnight green. “I just wonder what she’ll try next.”
Our fears eased when she had tried nothing by noon. Evis, however, had been speculating on his own lines. As we lay watching the barbed helmyn fronds scratch and whisper overhead, he asked suddenly, “Sir, the Lady . . . who—what is she, actually?”
“She was born,” Beryx answered presently, “of aedric stock. A branch from the same tree as mine.” His eyes crinkled. “And across the blanket like us. Her father came east after one of the aedric collapses. A bloodbath, as usual. Nearly—eleven of your generations ago.” Evis caught his breath. “Part of that’s the Well, of course, but aedryx do live longer than men.” He spoke without apology, but without pity either. It was a fact. Reality.
“Eleven generations.” Evis had taken it another way. A slow, vengeful anger woke in his voice. “Of enslavement for Assharral.”
“Not all her fault,” Beryx demurred. “She was the only child of an aedr with non-existent morals and hair-raising vices. He died when a boy his pet darre was chasing in the snake-pit threw it out on him. She was left the heir. A fifteen-year-old girl with four equally villainous uncles, a brood of hell-hound cousins, and a grandmother who could put the fear of death into them all. The uncles expected her to be a puppet. If she got too uppity, one said, he’d marry her.
They took her ten years to remove, not exactly by honest means, and by then they’d done a fair job of brutalizing Assharral. When she poisoned the last, five provinces were in flames, three in arms, and the last two were hardly models of fidelity. That’s when she discovered the Well. I think she crushed the revolt so drastically because she was new to that power. And young. And . . . afraid.”
The silence disagreed.
“At any rate, she made such a job of it that you’ve never risen again. That left her with the cousins, a viper’s nest of trouble and intrigue. She arranged a family banquet and made a clean sweep of them. She still had her grandmother to survive. Five years ‘regency.’ If you could call it that, with the old harpy thwarting her at every turn, and always the danger that she’d provoke another revolt.” It was near sympathy in his voice. I knew he looked from a fellow sovereign’s point of view. “In the end, the old lady pinched at her once too often. Moriana walked her over Los Morryan’s parapet.”
When nobody spoke, he went on himself.
“So then she was on her own. The Well in her hands, an empire under her yoke. Unlimited power of both kinds, no knowledge of Math, a bad upbringing, a worse heredity, and some cruel experience to reinforce them. All in all, it’s a wonder she didn’t rot far worse. After all”—his eyes turned, teasing me—“Assharral has been wealthy, peaceful, orderly—and fairly safe.”
It was Evis who supplied the rebuttal. I had never heard such savagery from him. “And bewitched.”
“Well . . . yes.”
Evis sat up. “I think,” he said with grim emphasis, “the Ulven are right. It’s time to end the drought.”
Beryx was looking unhappy. “Yes. There must be an end to Ammath. But . . . you must be careful how you manage it.”
“I know how to manage it.” Evis’ teeth showed. “We ought to make her walk over that parapet herself. But a gibbet will do. It did for my grandfather. And he was never a ‘rebel’ in his life.”
“Yeah,” Dakis came in, the blood light kindled in his own eyes. “And there’s a few others’ll hang with her. They reported my uncle—just for keeping one cow undeclared.”
“No,” Beryx broke in, almost desperately. “Can’t you see, if you do that, you’ve changed nothing? You’re as bad as what you destroy. You’ll just re-create Ammath.”
Evis turned on him. “Then do we walk out with our hands up, sir, and say, ‘We forgive your sins, come and commit a few more on us’?”
“No, of course not. But you can stop wrong and not renew it. Not load it onto your own backs.”
“By the pits”—there was a slow blaze in Wenver’s golden eyes—“not them that come for my father’s folk—”
“Let off scot-free?!” yelled Zyr. “Those boot-licking—”
“Never!” shouted Karis. “Let ’em pay their debts!”
Beryx’s dismay vanished. He shot upright and his eyes were crystal white.
“If you do that you are more abominable than the wickedness you destroy. There is no absolution for those who go into evil having knowledge of Ammath.”
He glared at us. It was not simple wrath. It was the threat of justice, more pitiless than the evil it will suppress. Only Evis dared to retort.
“If you say so, sir. But whoever’s let off, there shouldn’t be any mercy for the witch.”
The white threat vanished. His eyes danced green, his mouth turned up, he was suddenly mischief incarnate. “Oh,” he drawled, “I do have plans for her.”
But though we waited expectantly, it seemed that was a quite private jest.
* * * * *
Next morning the drums reported all clear. In an almost lazy atmosphere we packed up, and the twins were helping me cart the first load to the dugouts when Zam dropped the pot. He clutched his head. Zem cried out. Then he said, “Sir Scarface!” And they both bolted for a tangle of lianas beyond the camp. In my own alarm I hurried in pursuit.
Beyond the vines sun struck bright on a little inlet’s gloss of olive-green water and root-gnarled banks and the spiny green of helmyn fronds. Beryx must have been on reconnaissance too. He was perched on a leaning helmyn trunk, his back to me. The twins were within armslength, silent, motionless, strained forward yet not touching him. Some quality in his stillness halted me as well.
It seemed a long time before he turned. He was white, the scar livid as a brand, with a numb blankness in his eyes. He looked at the twins as if he had never seen them before.
Zem swallowed, Zam gulped. His eyes came past them to me.
“Rema,” he said dully. “And the maid—Zepha, wasn’t it?”
My mouth dried. He hid his face in his hand.
“The Ruanbraxe . . . she couldn’t break it. So she hunted them. Family . . . informers . . . spies. . . .”
I heard myself speak. Needlessly. “Dead?”
His head moved. I could just hear it. “. . . tortured them. . . .”
A helmyn frond crackled down. His fingers were crooked over his temple, white among the raven hair. I swallowed too. But what could I do or say? I knew where he would lay the guilt.
At last, trusting he would know it was tact and not desertion, I turned away. Like a new-dealt wound, the news moved with me as I went back, told Amver to postpone departure. Braced myself, and disclosed the rest.
When Beryx reappeared it was left to Callissa to give the only practical aid. With her own magic she had kept the fire up, the pot on the boil, and brewed tea the instant he appeared. Wordlessly she took the cup over and put it in his hand.
He nursed it against his right palm, staring into it. A ring of Ulven had formed, taking the sense of the tragedy with the empathy he ascribed to them. He drank the tea. Then he looked at me and said dully, “I suppose . . . we’d better go.”
* * * * *
Next morning I woke in a dread Beryx did nothing to allay. He looked ill, almost cowed, and when he woke, sat a long time huddled silently in his cloak. We were packing up before I saw him take a deep breath, stiffen his shoulders, and turn his gradually emptying eyes toward the south.
The camp movement ebbed away. One by one we turned to watch him, waiting, with a pang of fearful anticipation, for what his vision might reveal. The Ulven had gathered behind us, silent as ever, but with a shade of expression in their midnight eyes.
Heartbeats ticked by. Were left uncounted. Their passage grew stressful, painful, and still he stared . . . Then he gave a violent jerk and wrenched back, clapping the left hand over his eyes. His shoulders twisted. He said something incoherent, and buried his face in his knees.
It was an act of sheer willpower when he straightened up. After another endless moment, he
began to speak.
“Your sister. . . .”
My eyes flew up, Zyr had blanched a mottled whiteish pink. Beryx’s eyes were black in a bloodless face. I knew what he wanted to say, and that no words were adequate.
He got up, tottered up, a hand to his head. “Think,” he said thickly. “Must think. . . .” And walking through us as if we were not there he vanished into the scrub.
* * * * *
The sun climbed, the Ulven appeared and dissolved and reappeared. The day crept on. We offered our futile sympathy to Zyr, and he wrought with his grief. Zem and Zam, looking scared and queasy, had drawn in close to me. Recalling their gift, I could not stop myself asking, “Can you. . . .” And Zam nodded, and gripped his lips together. But he did not speak.
It was mid-afternoon before the scrub rustled, and Beryx, slow and bent as a cripple, made his way out.
His face was pale, with shadow-like bruises round the eyes, he had that shrunken look of a critically wounded man, and he moved as if he had met some adversary beyond even an aedr’s strength. His eyes found Zyr, and flinched away. Then he came slowly to the middle of the camp, and nerved himself to speak.
“I put a Ruanbraxe on . . . all your kin. All I could find.” He forced his eyes back to Zyr. “If I’d thought . . . if I’d done it sooner . . . I’ll never forgive myself.”
And that, I knew, was gospel truth.
Zyr answered very steadily, “Not your fault, sir.” Iron came into his voice. “It’s hers.”
Beryx shut his eyes a moment. A cold rill shot down my spine. I could tell he was steeling himself for other, more dreadful news.
“Rema. The maid. Your. . . .” His voice was ragged, just audible. “I had it wrong. . . . Not revenge.” He dragged in a breath. “It’s the next . . . offensive. In here . . . we can’t be reached. So—we have to be brought out.”
We stared. He seemed to shrink on himself.
“By—by—using . . . hostages.”
Understanding, then vivid horror, then an altered horror showed in every face. The conclusion none of us dared to voice.
“I thought about it.” The mere consideration must have been torture. “I thought of—everything.” His face twisted. “And—I have no choice.”
I heard Callissa choke a cry. Amver was gray, Evis white. The image of Klyra’s head, Thephor’s remains, burnt before my eyes. But not the twins, I thought desperately. Not the twins as well!
Then bitter, helpless hatred blazed in me. Witch! I raged. Hell-hag, diabolical whore . . . she knew he could not have borne the murder of innocents, his followers’ kin, blameless in every way. That he would sacrifice himself first. And us. Once again his own good, that should have been a shield, had been made a dagger inside his guard. With fists and teeth clenched I prayed, If I could just get my hands on her . . . oh, to the pits with this useless, crippling Math!
My eyes cleared. The acceptance of certain, horrible death was on every face. Sivar spoke for us, his voice just recognizable.
“Well, I—I’ll go with you, sir—at least.”
Others murmured. Beryx stared. Then more excruciating realization woke. His voice shook worse than Sivar’s.
“No . . . You don’t understand. I mean—I can’t go out.”
For a moment I doubted either my ears or my wits. All of us were speechless. He faced us, a man caught between his own integrities and being pulled apart.
“If I stay,” his voice shook almost uncontrollably, “she’ll hunt out your families . . . farthest kin . . . friends . . . anyone so much as linked with you.” The sweat was standing on his face. “One by one . . . While we watch. . . .”
“Sir, can’t you stop it?” Evis broke in wildly. “Fight her! Do something! Surely—”
“She has the Well,” Beryx said flatly. “I’m not strong enough.”
The silence yawned like a grave. We had seen the scope of his power, however leashed. For the first time I really understood Los Velandryxe’ threat.
Wenver was stammering, “But s-sir, if we went back to Ph-Phaxia, if we didn’t try to—”
Beryx’s eyes blackened like smoke-stained glass.
“She planned it . . . while we were in Phaxia. I saw. . . .” He thrust a hand over his eyes. “She let me see. . . .” It was the barest whisper. “She’ll go on with it . . . wherever we are.”
Beside me Callissa spoke up in a small, unsure, wholly well-wishing voice. “Fengthira . . . did you think to ask . . . ?”
Beryx’s face clenched. “I can’t see her. Or speak to her. I don’t know if . . . Moriana’s stopped me. Or—”
My blood ran cold. That the Well’s malignity might reach so far as Hethria, affect Fengthira, who had been in my mind, an unexamined hope of reserves, superior force, was almost the worst of all. And for him, to find his own mainstay gone. . . .
He wiped his face. There was a shake in his hand. “But the worst is . . . if I . . . give myself up. She’d . . . she won’t kill me.” He struggled to go on. “She’d corrupt me. The Well . . . I couldn’t hold out. I’d—“ He actually gagged. “I’d become—Ammath.”
I understood. Death, torture, betrayal of us and our innocent kin, all would pale beside the threat of being not merely defeated, not merely enslaved, but perverted. Himself become the evil he feared and shunned and fought against with all his living might. There are worse destructions than to simply die.
He was flinching at some further horror, the most unbearable, because it was already familiar to him.
“She’d make me . . . the bane of Assharral. And I can’t. I couldn’t . . . not again!”
That broke us all. Evis blurted, “No, sir, you mustn’t, love of—That would be the worst that could—” Amver, stiff-lipped, cut in, “If we gotta go, our people gotta go, all right—but not that!”
We had not eased him in the least. “You have no right to decide that—I have no right! To spill innocent blood—whatever the reason, it’s Ammath! Whatever I do, it’s Ammath!”
He had reduced us to his own helplessness. It was Callissa who went across to take his arm and say with frail control, “Then you have to take the lesser of the two. If some of us suffer . . . it’s still better than—than the worst.”
He looked blindly down at her. “I thought of killing myself.” She turned white. “But that solves nothing. You’re left in her hands—and Assharral as well.”
“You can’t do that.” She spoke with fright’s command. “You must think of something.” I caught my breath. With just such blind faith she had bidden me “think of something!” in the vault. “There has to be a way out. You’ll have to find it, that’s all. You must!”
Incredibly, that steadied him. After a time he stopped trembling. In a quieter if still hopeless voice he said, “I can only see one chance. And even that. . . . It’s pure chance. Blind trust in Velandryxe. But . . . if I don’t . . . give in. . . . No matter what she does. . . .” He shuddered again. “She’ll go on trying—worse and worse. And perhaps . . . she’ll try the one thing too much. Overreach herself. Break her own power. And do what I can’t. Destroy Ammath.”
He looked at her without hope of understanding, and I thought how I had failed him at the same tactical crux. But whatever her sense of the theory, Callissa had a better grasp of the emotional point.
“Then that’s what you must do.” She sounded quite matter-of-fact. Her lips trembled, but she mastered it. “No matter what happens—what it costs. At least there’ll be a—hope.”
I saw him swallow. Then he set his teeth and took a long deep breath. His eyes looked past us, drained of power or vitality, but I knew he was mustering resources for the worst battle of his life.
* * * * *
It is hard to assemble a picture of that campaign. As in battle or nightmare or by Los Morryan, time grows distorted; memory jumbles under the impact of stress and distress, and, as in all crises, the past shrinks upon itself. I suppose we drank salgar, made and broke camp and traveled in Stirsselian, but like eating after a funeral, we took no note of it. Our real life was in the waiting, like citizens of a plague-stricken town, for the axe to fall on us.
Beryx’s strategy was not all passive. In those first days he scattered our kin across Assharral, commanding them to flee if without certainty of escape, doing his very best to thwart the Lady’s pursuit. “Neither of us,” he said, “can See everywhere at once. If I concentrate on anyone, she’ll just raise more and more hunters till she smothers me. But she can’t hunt a hundred packs as one. . . .” So he shifted his attention between fugitives, making this one zigzag, another double back, blinding or disturbing un-Commanded pursuers or guard-posts to help a third, bringing others to shelter or a horse. And abandoning them, with bitter anguish, when the Lady took command of the chase.
Sometimes he succeeded. When Karis’ father sailed a dinghy out of Zyphryr Coryan we celebrated with more joy than I felt returning from Phaxia. When his cousin reached Stirsselian, Amver egged the Ulven on to raid a caissyn farm and concocted a brew that laid out the whole camp. When Evis’ mother found the Sathellin we lit a bonfire and danced. To a Sky-lord the whole thing must have resembled a chessboard in the heat of a ferocious contest, each player striving to deceive, anticipate or wreck the other’s assault. But this chessboard was a whole empire, with a hundred scenes of ploy and counter-ploy, and one player was determined not to damage the pieces, while the other was bent on savaging him regardless of cost. And the pawns were not wood or ivory, they were living, breathing flesh and blood.
Beryx actually said it to me once. “It’s like Thor’stang. Aedric chess. Only she doesn’t know how to read my mind or use a hidden Command or mesmerize me, and I can use all the arts. But she has the Well.” His face stiffened. “And we’re playing with pieces of Math.”
* * * * *
The mere sustained relentless deployment of his arts would have been draining enough, even if, unlike the Lady, he did not care for the pawns. And of course he did. Every loss wounded him triply, for the dead, for the bereaved, and on his own account. It was a breach of faith. A culpable negligence. A failed responsibility.
At the beginning he asked us, with rare awkwardness, “Would you rather know—or not?” Feeling a pale echo of his own choice, we decided we would rather know, so he had the task of telling us atop the rest.
That is one of the clearest memories, printed deep by repetition and the crescendo of that helpless, expectant fear. A morning fire, among helmyns, in a heagar shadow, amid some eyot’s scrub, baggage stacked on the bare earth that is the only sign of an Ulven camp. Callissa crouched over the boiling pot. The Ulven perimeter. And the faces, stiff, strained, trapped in idleness, even at times betraying the vile hope that this time it might be you, to have it over with.
Until Beryx emerges from his reconnaissance, haggard and white with more than simple defeat. Then that searing endless moment while he nerves himself to deliver the blow in one or another waiting face. And the hideous knowledge that however deeply you suffered, it was still not over. That it would not be over, until your whole family, down to the remotest marriage kin, had been wiped out.
He flatly refused to say what happened to them. From the nightmare look on Zem and Zam’s faces I guessed they sometimes heard, and the Ulven must have shared it too. After the first really cruel reverse, when Wenver’s brother and all his family were taken on the very march of Kemrestan, Beryx was crouched on a stump, more shattered than Wenver himself, when Ygg came over. He did not speak. He merely laid a hand on Beryx’s shoulder and left it there.
After a moment Beryx looked up at him. He was silent too. Support was offered, and accepted, and gratitude returned, in an understanding that did not look for words.
The ordeal took a fearful physical toll. Weight melted off him, and he went off his food to compound the effect. Most of his time was devoted to the arts, but the breaks did little to revive him, for he could seldom sleep. If I roused from my own broken rest he would more often than not be pacing the camp, a silent, unseen focus of distress, and when he did sleep his nightmares were worse than mine.
That is another image driven deep by repetition and stress: Callissa’s face over re-woken embers, thicker shadows of sleeping men in the outer dark. Beryx crouched over a cup beyond the fire, so the light exaggerates the jut of bones in his wasted face, images more dreadful than reality haunting his eyes. Sometimes they talk, the trivia of such moments. And sometimes a fire spurt catches the gray glint of Zem or Zam’s wakeful, watchful gaze.
All this time she and I had been waiting for our own swords to fall. We knew we must be prime targets, yet the days passed, and still the blow delayed. Reason told me it was only a matter of time, or a refinement of the rack. Reason has little sway over what is neither mind nor flesh and blood. It follows its own senses, and is never ready for the smash.
The first warning was when Beryx did not return from his reconnaissance. The waiting, always a torment, became unbearable. We shifted and looked at each other, not daring to ask, What is it this time? Or is it he, himself? In the mind below thought, I think I already knew. When the Ulven began to wriggle and eye the sun, I went to search for him.
He had found a tangle of clethra roots on the water’s edge. His back was turned, bowed, so for one frightful moment I thought that stance betokened final disaster, surrender rather than defeat. Then I understood.
I recall thinking, with vicious outrage, that the greatest of all injustice was that Math’s servants should suffer less from their enemies than from themselves. That it would cost him less to discover the atrocity, than to make himself turn around.
He looked up at me, eyes all black in a deathly face. His lips moved. When nothing emerged, he used mindspeech instead.
<I can’t tell her,> he said.
A great calmness came on me. “How many?” I said aloud. “Who?”
He hid his face. <Her parents. Everyone . . . with them. At the farm.> He added a rare detail. <It was burnt.>
As I steeled myself, for Callissa’s sake as well as my own, he was driven to fill the pause. <After everything I’ve cost her . . . I can’t face it. Not this.>
Looking down at him huddled on the clethra roots, his nerve gone, when he had not hesitated to put his own hand in the fire, I reflected with still more bitter irony that it took kindness, not cruelty, conscience, not coal-lumps, to break the courage if you followed Math.
There was a rustle behind us. I knew it was Callissa before she spoke.
“Who is it?” She sounded calm. Steeled to meet the worst.
Beryx shrank like the most arrant cur. I put my arm round her, led her back into the scrub, and told her what he could not.
She did not break down. She did not so much as weep. She listened in silence, eyes bigger and bigger in a shrinking face. Then she left my arm and went back through the scrub. Beryx literally cowered. Standing in front of him she said quietly, “Don’t. You said it to me. ‘Wherever we are, we have to go forward. And make the best of it.’ ”
* * * * *
Fugitives were coming by then, in ones and twos found and guided by the Ulven into camp, shattered by the hunt, utterly baffled by its motives or those of their flight. Amver’s cousin, one of Karis’, Dakis’ brother-in-law. I never admitted, and could never stamp out the last stupid flicker of hope that one day my parents would appear like that. Everything I knew of them, of the situation, told me otherwise, but hope is not a reasonable thing. It persisted till the day Beryx emerged from a thrithan clump looking even more flogged than usual. And this time his eyes came to me.
At such times instinct demands solitude. I do not recall going, but when he found me I was huddled into the cover of another heagar, beyond sight or earshot of the camp. Only when the van of the grief had passed, begun to alter into the will for revenge, into unslakeable hate, did he break in upon my thoughts.
<I can’t dispute your feelings. I know it’s unforgivable. But, Alkir>—the very force of his will dragged my eyes up—<I beg you, I beg you. . . .> I knew he felt it was hopeless and that only integrity compelled him to go on. <Don’t let it drive you to Ammath.>
My eyes must have answered. His grew almost translucent.
<It can’t be forgotten. But if you give in—if you start to hate>—even in mindspeech I felt his anguish—<then she’s really won. The only fight that counts.>
My expression cannot have changed.
<I know it’s . . . I know. . . .> He did not have to say, I too would find it all but impossible. <I just wish you could . . . try.>
I was within a hairsbreadth of turning on him as I had in the vault, I could see the expectation in his eyes and knew that even now he would not fight back. I understood then that there are bloodier battles than those where armies massacre each other. And what a conquest is demanded of those who claim so much as the tithe of a right to say, “I follow Math.”
If I did not choke, it felt so. My very flesh seemed to boil with pain and hate and the need to hurt. When it subsided, I put up my hand and found, with no surprise, that there was sweat on my face as I had so often seen it on his.
He was smiling at me. A shaky, exhausted, radiant smile. I knew then that I had just won him his greatest triumph. That I had redeemed my past betrayals, that if the Lady finally vanquished him, I had bestowed his victory crown.
* * * * *
How much longer did it go on? More distortion of time. I remember, though, that the swamp began to dry, mud margins widening, trees shabby, sun staring from an ever-more-torrid sky. Then the first battalions of soggy, long-based silver clouds massing in the north, the heavier sultriness, and Amver saying, “The Wet won’t be long.” I recall that because it was the day before the Lady opened her next charge.
Beryx could not look at us that morning. He would not even speak until Callissa, divining a crisis, half ran to him with the usual cup of tea and thrust him down on a rolled-up tent. It was to the cup that he finally spoke.
“She’s . . . changed targets.” We all froze, half reprieved, half in deeper fear, for the new atrocity was plainly worse. He did not look up. “Your old corps. . . .”
All the eyes jerked to me. The words jerked in my throat.
“What about them? What?”
He put the cup down. His hand was steady. I do not know if it was control, or the torpor of being struck too much.
“She executed them. All of them. Last night. In the main square . . . Zyphryr Coryan.”
For a moment I shared his pain for innocents slain on my behalf, crueler in some ways than kinfolks’ loss. They had done nothing, nothing at all. Merely served with me. Faces filled my mind, troopers and seconds and brother-officers, honest, loyal, blood-bound comrades with whom I had hammered out trust in so many battle lines. Now hung on gibbets like traitors, deserters, criminal dogs. For a moment it was too much. I learnt then that the battle is never over when the enemy is Ammath.
I came round with the taste of blood in my mouth and the nails driven clean through my palms. Beryx was watching me. With compassion, with comprehension. And now with the praise of a fellow-fighter who understands your victory. The most precious garland on earth.
“She’s learning,” he said at last. “A clean sweep, because otherwise I’d have got some out. At night. And not kinfolk, because she knows this is worse . . . once you’re bound by Math.”
It was Evis who exploded. “Then for the love of your cursed Math why don’t you stop it! Fight her! Do something!”
Beryx came off the tent in a single bound and his eyes went green-shot white.
“By the Sky-lords’ faces, you squalling pup, do you think I don’t ache to tear the whole thing apart and stamp all over its guts? Do you think I want to sit like an owl on a stick and bleat to a bunch of ninnies about ‘Math’? Do you think I don’t have to fight myself every mortal second not to go out there and take her on, here and now, and to your pits with the consequence, to the pits with everything so long as I can act!”
Evis nearly fell over. The rest of us recoiled, cowered, fled outright. We had seen him vexed, we had seen him touchy. We had never seen him in unbridled wrath.
He was breathing like a racehorse, face distorted, hand driven into his side. For a moment I saw what an aedr could be, as Th’Iahn had been, uncurbed by Math. Then I realized that this strategy had crossed not only his beliefs but his nature. A king, a general, it was born and bred and schooled into him in the face of disaster to react. To refuse had galled him so bitterly he had lost control not merely from stress, but in the revolt of instincts too long and too savagely denied.
The rage had already collapsed. “Oh, Four,” he groaned. “Oh, Four . . . I’m so sorry, Evis.” The remorse became despair. “Oh, when will I ever learn to follow Math?”
Though still fiery red, Evis was over shock and fear and struggling to swallow the rest. He answered unsteadily, “Sir, I should have known better. Don’t blame yourself.”
They looked at each other. Then a wraith of humor woke in Beryx’s eye. “I think,” he said with irony, “you’ll have plenty of chances to get it right.”
* * * * *
The Lady worked through the army as she had through our kin. Every rankmate, fellow officer, friend, barest past or present acquaintance that she caught was executed in the basest way. Beryx saved some by the exhausting maneuver of tracing all our careers with Phathire, then breaking her command over possible victims and sending them off in flight, but they were heart-breakingly few. The chess war resumed. Some did escape. The others supplied another turn to her knife, but this time injustice mingled rage into our grief. And at times I mourned the Assharran army, in which I had been proud to serve, for whatever its allegiance it had been a fine service, and I sorrowed as for any skilled craftsmanship wrecked in wanton spite.
As that phase closed we all began to wonder what she would try next. Where humans can live is less miraculous than where they can laugh. We met our losses with silence, our wins with vicious delight, and we speculated on the future with that black wit you find in lulls along a sore-tried battle front. Beryx’s condition was the one thing about which we could not jest.
He was skeleton thin, unable to eat. He still slept badly, recovering more and more slowly from his bouts of Ruanbrarx. And, we noted with silent apprehension, his physical strength had begun to fail.
By the third day after the army’s release the tension had gone beyond jest. When Beryx retreated with lagging steps into a clethra stand we waited with a keener version of the old dread. We knew her capabilities now. We did not know her choice.
We had underestimated. He came out of the clethras like a bolting horse, halfway across the camp before he got control. “Oh, Four,” he said, turning in circles. “Oh, Four, I don’t think I can handle this.”
Terrified, we rushed to calm him, sit him down, fetch tea. He would have none of it. He strode up and down as if driven by whips, raging to the indifferent air.
“How could she? How could she? Four, not the lousiest bandit, not the dirtiest mountain rat with four troopers in his tail and a half a yoke of Gebria to terrorize would—” His voice rose in anguish. “It’s worse than incompetence—it’s—it’s—bestiality!”
“But sir,” pleaded Sivar, scurrying in his wake, “what’s she done?”
He spun round. His eyes were crystalline light green, distilled rage.
“Tengorial. She turned the whole town out on the farms. Worse than an invasion—killing, wrecking, raping, burning—their own folk! And then she turned them on each other.” His eyes narrowed, fairly spitting. “Tengorial’s ablaze and the citizens won’t fight the fire, they’re butchering each other in the streets. Etalveth’s the same—but she used the garrison there.” He choked and whirled on his heel. “Four, the bloodiest usurper ever crowned never made his people tear their own country apart!”
“She must have gone mad.” Zyr was stunned. “Lost her wits.”
“Oh, not in the least!” He began to patrol with the same huge frenzied strides. “This time I can’t do a thing. I can’t anticipate, I can’t prevent, I can’t interfere. If I do, she just moves somewhere else. They don’t have to mean something to us. Anyone will do. They’re all Assharrans. All innocent. All her own—oh, Four, Four, how could she ever think of it!”
Words were on Evis’ lips. They were on mine, but I held them there. I had said too often, Is this not a Must?
Wenver said it for me. “Sir, mightn’t this be—the one thing too much?”
“No!” Beryx rounded on him. “It hasn’t broken her power. For that she has to misuse the Well so completely that—I don’t know what will happen, it’ll shatter, blow up in her face, I can’t guess. No, Four help me, this isn’t the one thing too much.” The gale collapsed. “Except,” he sounded strained, “it may be too much for me.”
* * * * *
After that we watched him like a fever patient at crisis point. I have to confess, with shame, that Assharral’s woes meant less than they ought to us. We had been through the fire. We felt for his pain, and we feared he would break, and we earnestly desired to live. Not only for survival, but because, despite all he had said, we wanted our revenge.
There was no march that day. The Ulven crept about the perimeter, Callissa made endless brews of tea, and the rest of us kept in earshot but beyond the thunder’s range, while he scoured up and down, more than three quarters out of his wits.
A dozen times he checked to stand staring south, with rage, with grief, in an agony of opposed compulsions, only to wheel and start pacing again. Once he burst out, “Cursed woman!” Once he cried, “Oh, if only Fengthira was—” More than once he cried, “No!” and spun like a top, but what he was refusing we could not tell.
He brushed off Callissa’s attempts to make him eat or drink, with his nearest ever approach to brusqueness, and presently I found the anxiety had acquired a sharper tooth. I knew now what Math required of a conqueror. It is not enough to defeat your enemy, or to forego retribution. You must also worst Ammath in yourself. Even if he did not crumple under the pressure, she had broken his guard. Outraged his ruler’s instincts, the deepest sanctities of his life. He was perilously close to losing what he had called the real battle. Of succumbing to hatred. Falling into Ammath.
It was late afternoon before the tempest waned at last. Yet again he halted, staring south. But this time I saw the tension slowly drain away. His shoulders relaxed. Then they firmed, the stance of the ensign-bearer that proclaims, Here I am, and here I stay.
Presently he spoke. Very quietly, a final commitment, he said, “Imsar Math.”
Then he came over to the fire. His eyes were translucent, sheets of heaving green shadow like the aftermath of storm swells in their depths, his face loked almost pure bone. As he sank down by the coals Callissa silently poured yet another cup of tea. This time he took it, saying in a rather slurred voice, “Thank you, ma’am—Callissa, I mean.”
It was only a lull. Next morning he had to reconnoiter, and by noon he was fighting the whole engagement over again. By nightfall his fingernails were bitten to the quick and he was pacing to and fro, to and fro, with eyes that patterned the inner tumult, swirls of lime and viridian, fluctuant, vivid and fascinatingly spectacular. Only this time the dance was not power but distress.
The Ulven crowd had increased that day. I had the oddest feeling, as their eyes followed him about, that unlike us they were not in search of reassurance but poised to offer help. Just on dusk Ygg came up to Amver and drew him aside. Then they summoned Callissa. Then she beckoned me.
She held two or three sprigs of some unknown plant. “Ygg says,” she began without preamble, “this is a sleep-maker. I’m going to put some in his food. But Ygg wants your consent.”
“I know the dose.” She was impatient at my blank look. “But he says Beryx won’t like it. I don’t know how he knows, but . . . anyway, he says you have to agree.”
I could not see what my consent had to do with it. Then I looked again at that driven, easeless face and said without hesitation, “Yes.”
It took more coaxing than a virgin’s seduction to get the fish down his throat, but the result was all we asked. He fell asleep over the plate. Not breathing, we rolled him in his cloak. He did not stir. Feeling happier than for weeks, I set the watch.
Dawn was past before he woke. First he rubbed his eyes, then his head. Then he stared about, at our carefully disinterested faces, Callissa making business at the fire, the Ulven audience. His eyes flickered. He got up.
“I’ll have some of that tea,” he said, walking up behind Callissa, who nearly joined the pot in the coals. “And this time, see it’s not doctored.” He glared at us, an attempt to look baleful foiled by a twitching lip. “Confounded impudence!”
Since we knew better than to repeat that, we tried feeding him instead. Some mornings he would end like a temple idol, heaps of every known or unknown game, vegetable and fruit piled at his feet, and a score of Ulven pleading in dog-like silence behind. Since he could not bear to disappoint them, that had limited success. The one thing he did express a wish for we could not provide. None of us played an instrument, few of us could sing, and all lacked the nerve to try. “Never mind,” he said wearily. “I just thought. . . . But this is Assharral. You don’t have harpers here.”
* * * * *
How long? Again I cannot tell. We did not ask about the torments of Assharral, though we knew he watched them all. Frimmor, Darrior, Climbros, Thangar, Gjerven, Kemrestan, Axaira, Tasmar, Nervia, Morrya. When the wind set southerly, smoke would pierce even Stirsselian’s humid shroud. Sometimes a particularly wanton ruin would make him cry out, as at some precious possession of his own smashed before his eyes, but we did not ask. It was enough to know that if, beyond our refuge, Assharral was malignly tearing its heart out, it had not yet succeeded in breaking his.
The weather grew heavier and more sultry. In the shade, at night, you were still oppressed by the stifling air, the weight of thunder coming to the boil. When Amver called me for middle night watch I was usually awake. I recall the night he whispered, in a tone of revealed miracles, that Beryx was actually asleep.
“Sat down just now and dropped right off. Worn out.”
The ever-present, unacknowledged fear was in his voice. Trying for silence myself, I tiptoed off to the sentry post by a thrithan clump. Ygg materialized beside me, and we sat watching Beryx’s shadow against a clethra butt, head fallen on his breast, breathing softly, motionless. Then Ygg’s hand took my elbow, and in the same moment I heard it for myself: the first low longdrawn growl of thunder, far in the north.
With a blood-curdling yell Beryx turned inside out and bolted as he hit his feet, my own rush collided us head-on and he punched and kicked and clawed as if tackling Hawge barehanded. I just had time to pray he would not use the arts, before he woke.
Sobbing, shuddering, he hung on to my wrist, while I got him to the fire. Hushed the camp, made a hash of brewing tea. He was still shaking so badly that he dropped the cup. Blessed with nightmares of my own, I did not ask, “What woke you?” But Ygg came and crouched beside him, one hand on his crippled wrist, and presently, like a horse at a calming touch, he grew quiet.
“Nothing,” he said at last, both answer and denial of my thought. The thunder had died. He looked off into the south. When he spoke my heart jumped, for the tone was no longer torment; it was abysmal, yielding weariness.
“Four,” he said, “let it not be long.”
* * * * *
The next night was hotter than ever, and alive with fireflies. For a long time I lay on top of my cloak, ears full of the mosquitoes’ perpetual whine, thinking that the Wet could not come too soon, while I watched the clouds of tiny torches wake and swirl and prick out again against the stars. When I did drop off, it was to dream that they had become the Lady’s golden meteors, and were sucking me off into space that was not space but the inner distances of her deadly eyes.
But the nightmare did not wake me. I came to sitting up with the camp bolted upright round me, all of us flung straight into battle readiness by the sound.
It was in the air, the jungle, the water, the earth itself. My sleeping ears had recorded its inception, a blast to split the sky. My woken mind perceived the sequel, a protracted ground-shaking thunderously sonorous drumbeat that rumbled on and on and on, till it sank to a floodhead roar that never completely died.
Evis tugged my arm. Twisting in my cloak I saw his face, but not by the glow of our little fire.
The clethras on the camp perimeter were cut out in silhouette, stark and precise, every bole, branch, twig and leaf. A red glow had opened the horizon behind them, a vermilion fierce as sunset, lightening to lurid crimson and then to a diluted scarlet that crept, even as I looked, toward the zenith sky. But it was not moonrise, not even a stupendous sunrise. For I was facing south.
I got up and went over to a gap in the clethras. Without surprise, I found Beryx already there.
The fire dyed his face blood color, and showed its expression. It held no triumph, however innocent of Ammath. It held sadness, and the serene, drained languor of a man in long and excruciating pain who has finally been released.
The red mounted to the zenith, illuminating the whole land around. I could see the dugouts, the tents, the Ulven’s ruddy eyes, every shrub and branch. And hear that distant growl, shaken occasionally by a deeper throb, as of some spasm in the heart of an expiring beast.
“She was trying to use Wreviane,” he said. “With the Well. Before the Wet came. To burn the whole of Stirsselian over us.”
I caught my breath. His eyes were still on the south.
“And,” he said softly, “it went awry.” That peace, too spent to be called triumph, remained in his face. “The Morhyrne’s blown up.”
I was deprived of speech. He remarked, “It always was a volcano, you know.” Though his gaze had not moved, the bloody light showed decision, quiet, sure purpose, crystallizing before my eyes.
“There it is.” He murmured it, with calm, almost elegiac vindication. “The one thing too much.”
* * * * *
With action permitted he knew how to act. Dawn found us on the edge of Stirsselian, uneasy in our mud gear for the first time, farewelling Ulven who had not seemed to need explanation. Beryx embraced Ygg, smiling into his face. “Yes,” he said, not waiting for an interpreter. “No thanks needed either side. We’re off to end the drought.” And Ygg lifted his hand, and watched us walk out into the Gjerven rice-fields, and melted quietly away.
“Stirian Ven,” Beryx said as we tramped. “I’ll get horses, but it may take time. The whole country’s in chaos. And we must be careful. She was lucky with the Morhyrne, the cone blew out at its southern base. So Ker Morrya’s still there. And so is the Well. She’ll have a good deal on her hands. But not enough to forget us.”
We were in striking range of Stirian Ven just before dusk. Halting us in a well-isolated kymman stand, Beryx grinned at me with a resurgence of his old blithe authority. “Want to add horse-catcher to your trades, Fylghjos? Get down by the road and wait.”
I slid into a thrithan clump above that familiar double-paven carriage way, and ensconced myself, gazing down those empty swords of distance into the south. Except for the distant perpetual rumble, it was deathly quiet. No human voices called, no axes rang, no beasts cried or birds sang. Indeed, none had sung all day. The air smelt as if a gigantic forge had been overthrown in mid-fire, and greasy black smoke had spread over the whole sky, so at high noon we had moved in an eerie dusk. But now the sun was going, and the dusk was topaz, golden wine, lilac, royal crimson, a dome of glory over the broken earth. An ironic splendor to have sprung from ruin.
As I thought that, my ear caught the sound of hooves.
I leant out of the thrithan stems and jerked in surprise, for the beast was nearly on me, coming at a smart collected walk. Then it moved out of silhouette, off the road’s skyline, and the hair prickled on my scalp.
It was a gray mare, shimmery as moonlight, built like a war-horse, well-boned, long in the rein, with a fine if placid carriage of the head. And a Sathel rider, blue desert robe, black turban, no stick in his hand. The mare clipped quickly up the carriageway, she was abreast of me, I was still wondering how she had got so near before I noticed, when she checked.
As in a dream I rose among the thrithans, looking up into a pair of almost rectangular, black-lashed, rainwater-clear gray eyes. The mare blew gently through her nostrils. Shadows wove in those gray irises, and then I knew what I had met.
“Fengthira,” I said.