Leaving Eskan Helken, we struck south-west in as direct a line for southern Everran as is possible in Hethria. When Beryx turned that way I had gulped, which earned me one quietly ironic look. “Don’t worry, Harran,” he said. “I know where I’m going.”
Hethria was in full bloom, fields of unknown, exotic flowers. Water often lay on bare claypans, and beasts ran from our very feet. We were so short of food that in a day or two we had to hunt. Beryx said, “I don’t like this, but... So we’ll make it a gambler’s shot.” He summoned a wyresparyx in bowshot, then let it go, and I managed, with some help I think, to put an arrow in its skull. The skinning was gruesome, but the flesh tasted a little like fish.
Our next camp was a permanent water which we shared with huge flocks of gweldryx, jewels of lime-green and gold, crimson and azure, gold and azure, or emerald, crimson and gold together, their only blemish an unfailingly raucous voice. As I yearned for a closer look, one splendid crimson and cobalt-winged specimen swooped across the water to my very feet. A lime and scarlet followed, an emerald and azure stipple-winged, a violet-cheeked... they stood in a row, lifting their wings, turning their heads from side to side. Then they exploded into a cloud of wings, a shattered rainbow in flight.
Restored to myself at last, I turned to find Beryx with amusement in his look. “Yes,” he said. “The only trouble with birds is that they see one eye at a time.” He crossed his eyes and moved one each way so comically that my dawning comprehension turned from fear to mirth.
After that a bird or beast which took my interest would often come closer, even put itself on display. I did not think, or rather, I hid from thinking, what the prelude to these kindnesses would have to be.
In Eskan Helken, Everran had seemed a mere premise, like zero in figures, accepted by the mind, not physically real. But as those red towers sank in thought as they had on the horizon, Everran rose in their place. I wondered what the dragon had done. I counted the months: three now since we left. It would be winter, we should have to find warm clothes if we were going, as it seemed, into the hills of the south.
Tirs made me think of Sellithar. I had forgotten Fengthira ever gave me a command, I had even forgotten why. I saw our farewell in Maer Selloth, when she kissed me with stoic composure and said, “Take care of yourself.” And then I found myself thinking of Sellithar when she shared my bed, as a man thinks of a lover and not his love, with a hot pang of longing imaging her body, her limbs, her breasts—
I glanced up across the fire to find Beryx watching me and did not have to wonder what had lightened and crystallized those green eyes, I knew my thoughts had been shared.
Could I have run into the sand like water, I would have run. Horrified, shamed to my soul, terrified, I tore away my eyes.
There was a dreadful pause. Then Beryx said in a rush with a shame that seared deeper than my own, “I’m sorry, Harran, I didn’t mean to do that... It was—when someone thinks with, with—loudly—you can listen before you know, and I—” he turned away.
I knew his shame at eavesdropping would dwarf mine at what he had read. That he would absolve me, and probably never forgive himself. Never had I missed my harp with such a pang. Bitterly I recalled Fengthira’s, “Horses’ morals are simpler than men’s.”
He stood up, his back to me. Over his shoulder, muffled, he said, “I can’t bear that you should be—afraid.”
In that moment I plumbed the depths of an aedr’s isolation as well as the lure of the aedric vice. So easy to take a fearsome revenge. So impossible to live as a man among men whom your smallest art can reduce to terror, drive away.
“It doesn’t matter,” I gabbled, snatching at the nearest banality. “Don’t blame yourself—it was my own fault. I shouldn’t have ‘thought so loud.’”
The sally was as pathetic as his laugh. “Well, in future,” he said, turning, “when you mean to do it, put up a sign.” And I knew with grief that if our comradeship had been salved, it would never be quite the same again.
When Everran next came to my mind I diverted it by asking Beryx what had happened there. If it pained him, I felt it would be the lesser hurt.
“Hawge has finished up... Saphar Resh.” He was staring into the fire. It made his face seem chipped from hard red stone. “It had a turn round Meldene too.” I saw ancient hethel groves blazing: the knife turned in my own wound. “Then it went back to Tirs. Tenevel was very pleased about that.” The irony in his mouth’s twist deepened. “My uncle got out of Askath with singed heels, and now he’s down in Maer Selloth too. My ‘government.’” That was black bitterness. “Morran managed to survive being left behind. The Guard have drilled so much they wish he’d gone.”
Two impossible alternatives lay before me. I was thankful when he chose the lesser one.
“The maerian thief is hiding in Estar. Perhaps he thinks, among so many, Hawge won’t recognize one.” The irony muted. “Odd that dragons know Letharthir, yet not Pharaone... But Maerdrigg will have to wait till I have time to fetch him back.” As I swallowed, his mouth-corner spoke Fengthira’s mockery. “Oh, yes, I can bring him back. Like a fish on a line.”
Skirting the other pit, I asked tentatively, “And Hawge? How will you—?”
“We’ll cross the Gebros at Gebasterne. It still has an open gate.” Remembering the road west to Astil I thought he meant to move with speed, but he shook his head. “I’m going to deal with Hawge as soon and as safely as I can. Out in Gebria on some nice... flat... barren plain.”
His brows were down. His mouth had straightened. What looked into the fire was cold, sure, implacable, fuelled but not commanded by revenge. I said, “But if Hawge is in Tirs...” And he glanced up: I caught one glimpse of his eyes before I averted mine.
“King-summoned,” he said. “I understand part of that, now. When I’m ready, I’ll call it. And it’ll come.”
* * * * *
Gebasterne lies at the point of the V where the Gebros meets the Helkents’ last northern elbow, before they vanish into Hethria. We came there just before sunset on a bitter afternoon, riding for miles over a plain of stones no bigger but harder than a fist, with a few silver-green istarel bushes scattered on its breadth. The wind was behind us with all the cold of Hethria’s wastes. Low, mean clouds broke the sun, so the Helkent glowered, the Gebros looked decrepit, and homecoming was robbed of joy.
Beryx had ridden slowly, partly for the stones, partly to reach the gate when the token guard would be so thoroughly bored two desert travelers would earn no more than a glance that missed the phenomenon of his eyes. For some reason he meant to remain anonymous.
In the event it was quite easy. I said we had come from Phengis’ garrison, on a hunting trip. Agreed that it was wretched weather. Wished them goodnight, and beyond the echoing arch Gebasterne’s cluster of adobe houses lay behind the spike-topped mud wall, all dim in a dusk already starred with lamps. As I looked longingly, ashiver in my thin desert robe, Beryx reined in.
“Harran,” he said, “could you buy us some supplies? A couple of coats?” He dragged out the pouch so long unused and tipped the last three rhodellin into my hand. “I’ll water the horses while I wait.”
The travelers’ well is outside the gate. When I arrived he had hobbled the horses and made a fire of prickly bush. We ate some of the nauseous dried Gebrian cheese and a few flourcakes, shivered through the night, and before dawn were riding north-west into Gebria’s flat, monotonous red wastes.
Before I went there I wondered how people lived in Gebria, and I am no wiser for having been. The truth is that they are only born there and depart as soon as possible, to be replaced by those with no money or no sense or no choice, who take up the little wretched holdings east of Saeverran Slief, work them a year or five if they have good seasons, then go bankrupt and leave. Or those who come on east to the deep gold mines at Deltyr or Gevdelyn and work a season or two before moving on, or being killed in the drives. Or those who are posted to the Gebros. Survive a season of garrison feuds, Hethrian hunting and Gebros boredom, say the Guard, and you are safe in war.
We, however, were riding into the real desert, south of the mines, east of the farms, west of the wall, stony red flatland stretching to the horizon, with desert herbage too meager to make a show. It would have been impossible, except in autumn, and with an aedr. But storms had left some pools, and Beryx found them where no native Gebrian would have dared to go.
What he was seeking I have no idea. What he chose was another stretch of rusty stones running north from a semi-permanent water in a weathered outcrop that I suspect would interest a miner far more than it did me. A few of the rare Gebrian desert trees stood on the northern side. We arrived in late afternoon, icy cold, and Beryx insisted on a bath as well as a shave, which I thought lunacy, until I realized: tomorrow was battle-day.
I was knee-hobbling the horses out on the apology for feed when a more pressing point arose. How was I supposed to ‘appraise the men of valor’ on a plain that would not hide a half-grown mouse?
I walked back to the saddlebags. Beryx was shaving, carefully as a bridegroom. This time there was none of that crazy gaiety he had shared at Coed Wrock: he was composed, contained, entirely self-assured. Looking round, he gave me a little grin and answered my unvoiced question.
“With me,” he said. I hardly noticed, Fengthira had made me so used to it. “You’re too valuable to leave anywhere else.”
Nothing I could see made me the least valuable, until I recalled Fengthira’s parting words. Taking it for some odd aedric superstition, like Sellithar’s talisman, I said no more.
* * * * *
Dawn came in a slow wide golden-red glow and a bitter wind, to find Beryx whistling softly as he piled up sticks, broke off to light them with one quick green flash, put on the tiny traveling kettle, smiled at me, and said, “Mustn’t make Hawge wait.”
Groaning, I clambered from my blankets into the new sheepskin jacket. Before the sun had risen a hand span we were walking out into the north.
“Have to leave the horses.” Yet again he answered my thought. “They’d go crazy. If Hawge tries to take them... I’ll see what I can do.”
I did not answer. My stomach was turning hoops; my heart was trying to climb out of my suddenly arid throat. Beryx looked up into the cloudless blue and lemon-tinged sky and said, “This’ll do.”
After awhile I sat down, which did help to warm my legs. He went on standing, occasionally scanning the sky, patient, utterly unperturbed. The wind tried to make noises in the stones and failed.
The sky turned entirely blue. Not moving, stiffening, betraying any sort of emotion, Beryx said, “There.”
I had been looking too high, too far, and the wrong way. As I jumped up, Beryx stepped round in front of me, and past his shoulder I saw Hawge.
It had made a circuit to come in from the east with the sun behind it, and it was gliding down along the sunbeams’ angle, no more than three hundred yards away, barely fifty feet up, the huge black wings held out horizontal, motionless, the sun making gold on the impenetrable mail. It must have been stalking us. When Beryx turned, seeing it had failed, it backwatered and dropped heavily to earth.
Then it advanced. Gradually the shoulders sank, the back arched, and the tremendous body seemed to vanish behind the eyes, which did not revolve but were steady and glowing and wide as a stalking cat’s.
Beryx’s shoulder nudged me. I took a step back.
The dragon spoke, in its vast grating whisper which after aedric speech made me suspect it had no voice at all, but thought directly into your mind.
<Aedr,> it said.
Beryx responded in a soft, carrying, expressionless voice.
“Hawge.”
When he did not go on, the dragon said, <It is long since I saw... one of thy kind.>
Beryx said nothing. After a moment Hawge mused, <But now I remember. I have seen thee before. With the soldiers. It was thee,> slowly, obscenely, it licked its lips, <who had the horse.>
Beryx still did not reply. The dragon sank its chin toward the ground. Its vast nostrils dilated, but blew no fire. The wind tried to blow again, and failed. Yet some sort of duel was going on, too subtle for senses’ perception, a preliminary crossing of swords.
Then Hawge said, <What dost thou want with me?>
Beryx’s voice was soft, empty, remote. He said, “Thou knowst.”
Hawge’s eyes revolved slowly, once. When it spoke again its whisper was a suave, ingratiating purr.
<Why should we quarrel, thou and I? There is plenty of room for us both. I will give thee this part north of the mountains. I will go into the south. There should be no warfare between—kin.>
Its eyes cocked, to judge the efficacy of the thrust. Then it went on, softer still.
<Didst not know that we were kin? Why dost think thou canst look into my eyes? And I can read men’s thoughts? And we are both destroyers? I, of the flesh. Thou, of the mind. I will leave these people for thy... games. Perhaps I will rid thee of some enemies.>
When Beryx did not reply, it began to straighten from its crouch. The great wings flexed, drawing forward along the ground, the hind claws shifted a little, gaining purchase to launch its flight.
Beryx still sounded soft, almost gentle. He said, “I will follow thee.”
Hawge dropped back into a crouch. Its eyes spun rapidly, then grew crystalline and fixed. It said, <Thou knowst why I came? Why thy folk are homeless? Thy city fallen? Thy land in ruin? The lore is true. It is thou, not I, who art Everran’s bane.>
Beryx answered softly, “I know.”
Hawge’s nostrils flared. This time they shot a puff of black oily smoke.
<And knowst how thou called me? Art aedric blood. Hast seen, then, thy ancestors wailing for their ended line? Because thou art a king with a barren queen? And knowst that the barrenness is in thee?>
I flinched. Beryx did not. His voice was soft as ever. “I know.”
Hawge breathed a short, sharp gout of flame.
<And dost thou know,> now the whisper grated, <that the one at thy back is thy betrayer? That thy queen has lain in his bed, in his arms, and wished to be rid of thee?>
Through a black wave of horror I heard Beryx answer, soft, steady, quite unflinching, “I know.”
Hawge’s breath came in pants. Its tail lashed. The whisper went shrill.
<And thou also knowst who holds my firestone!>
Beryx moved. His shoulder pushed me sideways and I woke with a shock to find the sun behind me and realize in hair-crisping fright that all the time it spoke Hawge had been creeping forward, and Beryx had been edging sidelong, keeping his distance and forcing it to pivot to maintain its own. As the sun centered behind us he answered, softly as ever, “I know.” And then he smiled.
Hawge reared right up on its hind legs with a scream that stunned my ears and blasted a huge gout of fire at the sky. The tail lashed round with the sting flying foremost and Beryx bent his knees, arched his back; his eyes shot a blinding green flash and the tail flew harmlessly over our heads while Hawge turned turtle as the force of the stroke upset its balance and rolled it over and over, hurling stones like a horizontal avalanche.
It came up with a plunge, gravel flying from the monstrous claws, and the wing-blast battered us as it flung itself into the air. It screamed again. Beryx tilted his head back as it climbed, shooting itself up in huge rocketing thrusts, then whipped over with folded wings as the head came out in that arrow-like dive. I cowered, Beryx took a quick fierce breath.
Down it came, those eyes skewered me, the nostrils were open furnaces, big as caves, full of leaping flame—Beryx clenched his hand and went up on his toes as if launching a missile with all his bodily strength. Hawge shrieked hideously and botched its dive in a tangle of head and claws and floundering wings, hit the ground, ran a few ungainly strides like a pelican that has misjudged its landing, and thrust itself back aloft.
Beryx stood rigid, panting, huge hungry breaths. Hawge whipped round again. Dived. Beryx arched his back. And the dragon’s nerve broke.
It could have been nothing else. It swerved out of the dive, planed round in a long furious circle, and thumped back to earth. Then it came forward, stalking once more, but this time the tail lashed behind it, and the lips were drawn up in a grin of bloodcurdling rage.
Beryx had caught his breath. Now he shifted a little and his whole body seemed to loosen, with the hair-trigger suppleness of a snake prepared to strike. As he moved I caught a glimpse of his eyes. They were dazzling, blinding, pits of green-white flame.
Hawge was hissing: flame and smoke spurted with each breath. Beryx moved a hand. It was very nearly a drawl, gentle, silky, and quite terrifying. He said, “Stop.”
And Hawge stopped. Its tremendous thighs and shoulders bulged, its neck arched over, its spines rose as the back doubled like a hairpin. I saw every muscle in the mailed flanks stand out in ridges high as a man’s forearm and wider than his chest. Its head came down, down, tucking back and under, the monstrous dilated nostrils leveled right at us, the eyes starting from the nightmare head. Its breath turned to gigantic, straining grunts.
Beryx did not breathe. His body was like an iron bar and his face had contorted into a copy of the dragon’s grimace, and the air between them shuddered like an over-weighted wall.
With the kick of a parted hawser, something snapped. Hawge fell flat on its belly, all four legs straight out. Beryx’s body whiplashed and shot straight. Hawge got up, and stood unsteadily. I would not have believed those trunks of legs could shake.
Beryx said, sounding as if he had barely exerted himself, “Hast played with words, and with muscles. Now wilt thou fight?”
Hawge reared its head to the sky. Beryx smiled. It was cold and passionless and deadly as his voice.
Hawge’s head sank again. The eyes, which had been revolving, came to a stop. A green fire shot through them, splintering into a thousand facets, and Beryx said quietly, “Harran, look away.”
My head turned as if on a peg. I dropped my eyes, and they came to rest on the dragon’s forefoot. It was so close I could see the horn-like graining of the claws, black blended into streaky grays, then a dirty yellow at the tip.
Beryx’s breathing grew audible. Time bent to the pattern of his respiration, long, slow, metronomically regular breaths, hardly abnormal, with no indication of strain. It was perhaps a hundred of them before I realized he had an accompaniment. A vast, grating, throaty inhalation, exhalation, was keeping perfect time with him, like a choir singing behind the soloist. Hawge was breathing too.
Little by little the rhythm grew labored. Slower. Each inhalation became effortful, strenuous. Slower still. Now heartbeats passed between release and inhalation, still more between inhalation and release. The sounds grew louder, less like breathing than long-drawn groans. Louder. Then something like a huge death-rattle made me leap out of my skin and the rhythm broke in a flurry of grunts and gasps and coughs and clatters like stone flung on a roof; I caught one glimpse of Hawge crouched with all four feet thrust out and braced and head stretched like a horse at full gallop, black and searingly vivid on a ground of flame; then something like an explosion in the sun’s heart quite blinded me. Only my eyelids retained the after-image, a blast like the clash of lightning bolts, a starburst of green-white, scalding, incandescent light.
By the time my vision returned the mélée was over, but now the sounds were so dreadful I wanted to block my ears. Hawge was the worse. Its frightful furnace roars began with a rattle and ended with a gagging retch, then resumed after such a lapse that each time I thought it had died. Beryx was harder to hear. They were out of time now: all I caught was an occasional thin, whooping crow, like a man in lung-fever unable to take his breath.
It went on, and on, and on. My own lungs started to strain, to founder, there was no air left in the world. Red spots swarmed across my sight. The air around me was shivering, as it had when Beryx and Fengthira fought, but this was no mere tension, this was a stress that would rend the very earth. I heard myself panting. My eyes swam. It was unbearable. It had to end. Since I dared not look at Beryx, I looked at the dragon’s foot.
Hawge was standing on the claws. The pad was three feet off the ground and the claws were driven half their length into the ground, the spur was bowed clean under the pad and was grinding down, then up, then down, in time with each gargantuan struggle for breath. Something glistened in the muscle grooves of the foreleg: drops, rivulets, that dripped down to darken the torn-up soil. It took me some time to believe it must be sweat.
Caution went to the winds. Unable to help myself, I looked up.
Though it was broad day, I still see that image on a background of red-shot, firelit black. I must have moved, or they had, for they are in profile, the vast body of the dragon, arched almost double, drawn up on its claws as if convulsed, the muscles trembling so the mail spangled like reflections on a gold-shot morning lake, the head strained right back into the shoulder spines, the jaws wide open, and the eyes—I could not look at those. And opposite it the man, so small and fragile in contrast you wondered why Hawge had not pulped him into the dust. Until you realized he was not a small mass but a sliver of compacted energy, the sort of power that detonates volcanoes and makes earthquakes rip whole mountain chains apart.
Next moment both image and battle shattered. Hawge leapt forty feet backward in one spasmodic plunge whose recoil fired it high into the air, Beryx went down as if pile-driven full on his back and rebounded like steel instead of flesh. I was still trying to believe my eyes and wondering when I would be incinerated when it dawned on me. The dragon had not been attacking. In both senses, it was in flight.
I was too stunned for reaction: disbelief, triumph, anything at all. I looked at Beryx instead.
He was drenched from head to toe in sweat, but he showed no distress. I could not see him breathe. His eyes were indescribable. He looked up into the air after Hawge’s dwindling shape, and then his lips drew back in something that might have been a smile, if volcanoes smile, before the eyes quite obliterated his face. I heard him speak, though: a thin, fine, vibrant articulation that was the conveyance of naked thought.
He said, <Fly.>
Hawge’s head tilted up. It began to climb, the angle growing steeper and steeper and the forward motion less until it was rising almost vertically, as hawks do up a shaft of wind. Higher and higher it lifted, clear into the zenith, a minute black insect shape.
Beryx addressed it again then, in that blood-chilling speech. This time he commanded, <Stop.>
My eyes were dazzled by distance and light. Through sliding beads of tears I saw the tiny wings falter, beat wildly, go limp. Then, with a scream that seemed to rend the firmament to its foundations, Hawge began to fall.
At some stage it must have turned over, in response to Beryx’s will or in an attempt to escape. It hit on its back, its body almost horizontal, and it landed fairly athwart the outcrop by the waterhole with an impact that shivered every rock for yards, split the mailed body like a melon, and threw black blood and dust so high that I felt it descending, like rain upon my face.
* * * * *
Beryx may or may not have watched it all the way to the ground. When I came to myself, drew breath, looked round, it was just in time to see him silently, bonelessly, collapse.
My limbs untied. I flew to him. He was not breathing. I jammed my head to his chest. Nothing. I think I knelt up and screamed to the unforgiving heavens at the injustice of it, that having paid such a price, having sacrificed and lost so much, he should fall dead with victory in his very grasp. I know I tore my hair. And then an insane fury took possession of me. He should not be dead, I would not let him be dead, he should live whether the heavens decreed it or not.
I yanked him on his back. I know nothing of medicine. Some instinct dictated it, perhaps: he was not breathing, so he should breathe. I could almost hear Fengthira acidly commanding, <Make him breathe, tha dolt!>
I thumped him in the chest. He gasped. But thumping his chest would only drive breath out. I had to drive it in.
I scrambled frenziedly to his head, pried his mouth open, and forced my own breath into it with all the pressure of my lungs. His chest moved. Now, said instinct, he is not a balloon: it must come out. I drove both hands under his rib cage and he gasped again. His lips were blue. I shot back to his head, forced another breath in, drove it out. Pump, I screamed silently, ramming the heel of my palm over his heart, and flew to drive in another breath.
His face was whiter than Maerdrigg’s. No use, sobbed reason: he is dead. You are mishandling a corpse. Four rot you, screamed unreason. He is not dead. He is not!
I drove another breath into him, forced it out. Another. My own heart was pounding madly, my muscles shook, I could hardly find wind to breathe for myself. But a harper learns young to stretch his lungs beyond the compass of other men’s. Pump, damn you, pump, I swore at his heart with tears running down my cheeks, and gave it a furious rub as I caught my next breath.
Another. Another. I do not know how many it was before I sat back on my heels, weeping outright now with rage and despair and grief, ready to give up: looked at his face, and saw the blue was gone from his lips.
Not daring to believe it, I set an ear, more gently than a feather landing, to his chest. My own blood was in such a thunder I was slow to hear. But what I heard sent me back to breathing for him as if I had an aedr’s endurance myself.
Eventually, after driving out a breath, I dared sit back, my own heart in my mouth. And when his chest lifted, so faintly I could barely feel it against my lightly resting fingers, I felt as if I had beaten Hawge with my own hands.
For a good while longer I watched, every now and then wetting a finger to hold before his lips lest the Sky-lords should have betrayed me at the last. Finally, when it seemed credible, I sat on, looking down into his face, spattered with black drops of dragon blood, caked with dust that had rained down upon his own sweat, blotched an ugly yellow by the great scar under all. His eyes were closed now, normally, so it was safe to look.
With all conscious control and feeling removed, his face recorded every ravage of the war: those two upright furrows above the nose had come at Eskan Helken. The Confederacy had etched the bitter, finely traced brackets about the mouth, the deep horizontal scores across the forehead were from Coed Wrock. The gauntness, the look of chronic suffering might have come from Tirs, or Saphar, or Inyx’s death, or his own inner burden. Or from Sellithar. Or me. Yet I found myself recalling Fengthira’s words: suffering there was, wounds there had been, but even in that nakedness of the asleep or the unconscious, he did not show an ounce of vice.
I was still looking when he drew an audible breath and moved his head. Woken to sense, I doffed my jacket and eased it under for a pillow. Then I thought of water, the only other help I had, but was too convinced of my work’s frailty to leave him, or dare to move him, until it had drawn toward noon, and his breathing had the relaxed sound of natural sleep.
Then, rather doubtfully, I tried him in my arms. But at Coed Wrock he had been a tall healthy man in the flower of a soldier’s strength, and now I could lift him quite adequately. With wry memories of Eskan Helken I tied his wrists together and slipped them round my neck, got an arm where it would support his head, and tottered up.
His eyes opened halfway across the plain. He looked sleepy, bewildered, not at all like an aedr. He studied me, then the sky. Then I saw memory and understanding blend with consciousness, and gradually become a drowsy content.
Presently he remarked, <We seem to make a habit of this.>
I was too busy to reply aloud. In the same serene lassitude he answered my thought.
<You carrying me off battlefields, I mean.> I stumbled on a stone, and with the faintest trace of a grin he added, <I’ll keep quiet now.>
How morvallin communicate or how they live in Gebria I do not know, but as we neared the waterhole and Hawge’s massive wreck rose like a new-made hill above us, a cloud of black scavengers whirled up with irate yarks. Glancing down, I saw that though Beryx’s eyes were closed, he wore a small, tired, triumphant smile. Then I understood that Inyx had been finally and fittingly avenged.
* * * * *
While I brewed mint-tea he sat propped on a pack and began, as all soldiers do, to fight the battle over again.
“It was quite easy, really. No, I mean it.” A grin at my look. “Those word-games at the start. Misleading. All the time I was using Scarthe... knew every word it would say. The tail—used axynbr’arve for that. The fire... I don’t know what that was. Something with its eyes. But then I had it sorted. So I made it stop. Just to upset it. Calke, that was. And then challenged it. Very strong, of course. But stupid. No finesse.” He sounded quite regretful. “When it flew... Silliest thing it could have done. If it had stayed on the ground, I could never have killed it. It just had to wait till I wore out.” He smiled reflectively toward the massive corpse. “I doubt we’ll get so much as a trophy out of that.”
Indeed, all we got was the stench, which was supernatural as Hawge, and it was two full days before Beryx was fit to ride. I gratefully used the second one to find the horses, which when Hawge came down beside them had found they could gallop in hobbles after all.
The third morning we saddled up. By then the morvallin had made sizeable inroads even on that mighty carcass, and Beryx looked longingly at a half-picked rib-bone thick as a ship’s. But then he shrugged, and turned his horse, and did not glance back.
Six days later we rode across the Gebasterne road upon a mirror-signal unit and four frustrated needle-eyed boys who were Morran’s idea of a dragon watch and had trailed their quarry clean from Tirs, only to be baulked by Gebria’s wastes. At sight of them Beryx pulled up his horse. “Tell them, Harran,” he said, rather awkwardly. “I’ll wait here.”
It was difficult to tell them, and harder to win belief. When they did flash out a signal to Lynglos I think they were still inclined to put, “Unconfirmed,” on the end. But when one of them nodded to Beryx, asking, “Who’s he?” and I said, “The king,” his face cleared in a flash.
“The king! King-slain! It must be right!” He was a wiry, freckly, carroty young Tiriann with as much bounce as his unruly hair, and he promptly went rushing up to Beryx’s horse. “Lord! Lord! You did it, you killed it! Tell me, show me, it was the weapon, wasn’t it?” Evidently Phengis’ message had traveled as far as Tirs. “Where is it? What is it? Ouh, it must be, must be...”
His eye took the empty scabbard, and filled with disbelief. It lifted, and Beryx looked silently down from his horse.
With his sheepskin jacket, the filthy sling, battered trousers, and what remained of his black turban, he did not look a king. He might have been an outlaw, a desert vagabond. But one glance into those fathomless, steadfast, yet constantly fluxing green eyes would teach you your mistake.
I saw the boy’s own eyes widen. His jaw sank. His jubilation died in uncomprehending fear that went deep as consciousness itself. Then, still mute, still staring, he began to back away.
Beryx smiled a little, sad, tired smile. “That’s the weapon, Skith.” Now I listened, I could hear the aedric intonation, the soft, impersonal, menacing sound of dormant power. “To kill a dragon, that’s all you need.”
* * * * *
Lynglos took the quick way to verify the signal by coming out to meet us on the road. When we topped the last long ridge and saw its untidy outskirts spreading their vegetable patches and stunted trees and clotheslines about the seething human mass, Beryx pulled off his turban, observing, <Better show them it’s me.> Our youthful honor guard, all personal qualms lost in the glory of their role, were already chanting, “It’s the king! The dragon’s dead! It’s the king!”
Lynglos was not so sure. It is a Gebrian town, and Gebrians are as skeptical as they are dour. I saw a large man with the stomach of office reserving judgment, a band with instruments tucked under their arms, a banner not yet unrolled. Then a broad lame person with Phalanx written all over him reached the front. I heard him grunt, “That’s Beryx all right!” He hobbled forward, demanding “You’ve done it, sir? It’s dead?”
When Beryx nodded, he drew a long, long breath. Then he flung back his head and let out an ear-splitting triumph yell.
Next moment the band was thumping, the banner waving, the stomach had surged forward with an effulgent smile, and Lynglos had lined the road, laughing, weeping, cheering, patting our knees or feet or horses’ shoulders, shouting whatever came into their heads. I heard two ancients disputing fiercely over what weapon would suit a one-handed man. A girl threw me the keerphar flower from behind her ear, the veteran was fighting the stomach for the honor of housing us. Ahead of me all was tearful rapture: behind me, I could hear the moment when Beryx passed.
He had been looking straight ahead, but no king like Beryx could bear to greet such a welcome with indifference. I knew he would begin to smile, to glance about in search of known faces or in answer to some particularly pressing call, and I knew what happened when he did. I had seen it with Skith. My heart bled for him as the wave of silence passed and the valiant, uncertain rejoicing broke out again in its wake.
The veteran won the battle of the beds on condition that the stomach, who was council Ruand, had us to dine with them. It was a poor meal, for if Lynglos had escaped Hawge’s personal attentions it was still part of Everran, and worsted the stomach’s eagerness to give us what we deserved. When the watered wine stood alone on the table, he said, “And now, lord, tell us. How was it done?”
Four! I thought. I could almost hear Fengthira’s, “Dost not know what tha askst.” Then I glanced at the council, leaning forward with every appearance of avidity and not an eye on his face, and thought, How can he tell you, when you dare not even admit what he is?
Beryx too had mostly kept his eyes on his plate. Now he smiled quickly, a man not wanting to seem aloof and unable to be otherwise. A mere shadow of his old charm, but enough.
“Harran’s making a song,” he said. “If I steal his audience, I dread to think what he’ll do.” He told the tale of our slander-bout in Estar, and rose on the laugh. “I beg your pardon, Tarmel, but after so much Hethrian water I daren’t tackle a night on our own wine.”
The veteran made a better fist of meeting his eyes, but I could feel the effort in every glance. When the abbreviated reminiscences were over and we were left in the tiny best bedroom, with horses feeding under the window and Everran’s helliens masking a star, Beryx sank down on the nearer bed. And when I saw the way his shoulders bent, the pain became too much.
“Dost thou wish,” I said, “thee”ing him for the first time, partly out of love, partly from my own distress, “that I had never carried thee from a field?”
After a moment he shook his head.
“No,” he said. It came with conviction. He was looking eastward through the hellien, and I knew he saw those half-stripped bones in the desert sun. “It was worth it. All of it. Even this.”
* * * * *
It was the same all the way west, through ever more elaborate, better prepared welcomes, more hectic rejoicing, more determined attempts to confront him normally. But always that silence would run along the crowds as they sought for a weapon and found it, always there was that reluctance to meet or too-quick aversion from his eyes.
Or not always. What was worse was the ones who looked and then stood entranced, who would sometimes follow us to the next town and beyond, and when asked why, would answer in bewilderment, “I don’t know. I just... had to come.”
The people of Saphar had been returning before Phengis’s message arrived. We rode up on a wet gray winter morning to a city with sodden banners strung across gaps whence rubble had been cleared, with a wall of fully furbished Guardsmen restraining a thin, patched but spirited populace, and to my infuriated amazement, a Regent posted at the bridgehead under an umbrella to protect his official robes.
Beryx’s eyes slitted. “My uncle,” he murmured, with that new, fearful intonation, “never learns.” Then he choked. “And,” the gurgle was suppressed laughter, “he’ll be so happy with this!”
The Regent, however, had evidently been warned, for if his welcome was forced it did not break. “We’ve worked on the palace for you, m’boy... Ah, here’s Kyvan—” And out popped Kyvan, complete with prayers and crimson cloak, which had to be girded on then and there. Beryx submitted, with the first softening of his braced composure since Lynglos: but as he walked forward into the roar of cheering it became a smile of genuine delight.
“Morran!” he said. “Well done!”
I saw the young face under the helmet flush. I also saw he was one of the rare few who could manage, quite naturally, to hold Beryx’s eye. “Sir,” he said stiffly. Then, more easily, “I’ve left a terrible lot for you.”
* * * * *
For the next three weeks Beryx did it, at more than his old pace. This I can vouch for, since I had to share the task. It was, “Harran, what do you think of this? Harran, what shall we do about that? Harran, will you see so-and-so, fix something-or-other, decide such-and-such,” so in those three weeks I never touched a harp. I thought he wanted to keep out of view, I feared a loss of his inherent decisiveness, and was too busy to ponder the cause. I was finding a new Treasurer, blazoning Everran’s redemption round the Confederacy, even arranging a new audience hall and rooms for Sellithar.
It was raining hard that morning, so we had drawn the panels at the roofed end of the old hall, lit the fire, put hangings for the drafts and buckets under the drips. There was little business. More and more often it was, “Harran, will you ask the king this? See if he wants that?” It hurt me, if I understood why. But at the very end a thin, furtive man with an Estarian face and fixed, blank eye emerged from the departing crowd. He did not speak. He merely stood before the high seat and looked up at the king.
That disquieting aedric smile began to weave in Beryx’s eyes. He held out his hand.
Still with a tranced stare, the man slid his own hand into his cloak, and Beryx’s palm filled with the cataracted, golden-shot white fire of Maerdrigg’s maerian.
Beryx looked into the man’s eyes. Slowly they woke, showed bewilderment, panic; he gave a wild start. Beryx shook his head. The man stood still.
Beryx said softly, “For the nerve, I admire you. For what you cost Everran, I should roast you alive. I won’t. But if I were you, I should be in Quarred tomorrow night.”
The man fled like a lydyr with ulfann on its track. Beryx tilted the great maerian. Then he said without looking up, “Harran, will you ride with me, one more time?”
* * * * *
We wore our old traveler’s clothes and took the horses we had ridden so very far. As they led up Beryx’s big dark-brown, one of the blood horses he had so loved in earlier days, he slapped its neck lightly and clicked his tongue. And did not tighten the reins, I noticed, when he swung up.
We rode south into the dark winter rain that would heal Everran’s scars, always cold, more often wet than dry. I wondered why Beryx did not use wryvurx to shield us, and he shook his head at me. “It’s better not to meddle,” he said, “unless you must.”
Before we reached Saphar I had noticed how little he used a bridle to manage his horse. That night, as we sat in an upstairs room of the inn at Asleax, I watched him reach over the wine jug without moving a hand. A shamefaced grin came as he caught my eye.
“Well,” he said, “it is easier.” And thinking it little enough compensation for all the sorrow his arts had brought, I nodded and reached for my new harp.
Next day we struck off from the Azilien into central Tirs, traveling now as Inyx had once led us, as the morvallin fly. That night Beryx found a huge old burnt-out khanel to shelter us. Next day we were high in the hills, the Helkent looming over us, slashed white with waterfalls, dark meat-red from the rain. Beryx murmured, “It will be a good season this year.”
I did not ask our destination. I had already guessed. We found it next day, a narrow black valley running up into the mountains’ gut, stony, deserted, pathless, oddly eerie in the unbroken rain. At the mouth Beryx reined in, narrowed his eyes, and nodded. “Ker Eygjafell,” he said. “Shadows’ Home.”
We rode in, our horses slipping and stumbling on the stones. The valley turned, showing its true head was still some way off, a black cliff with the blind mouth of a cave at its base. Something in the very atmosphere made me half rein in, and Beryx gave me a quick, warm smile. “You’ll be with me,” he said.
The horses would not enter the cave, even in the rain, and we did not force them. We walked through what had once been a tall double doorway, into a black, dank, echoing space whose frigid air made me gasp.
“I suppose,” Beryx remarked absently, “he expects me to see in the dark. But I can’t. Harran, did we put any wood in those saddlebags?”
I brought him a piece of twine and five or six sticks, and he lit the torch with one quick flash. “May as well announce ourselves,” he said. “Now. The Ilam.” It is the old Everran word for a high chamber. “It’ll be up here.”
We climbed some broken, hollowed steps, Beryx walking steadily, me treading on his heels. The high chamber was empty and cheerless as the rest. I saw Beryx’s eye alter, and knew that at some time he had seen it differently.
“There should have been a coffer,” he said, “but I suppose that’s gone with the rest. We’ll have to do the best we can.”
He slid a hand into his sheepskin jacket. The maerian answered the torch with a royal crimson meteor, and on its flare, in the darkness beyond us, shone two white, glowing, phantom gems.
My blood curdled. Beryx, unperturbed, looked at the Dead and asked simply, “Where?”
Maerdrigg retreated, or rather receded. Beryx followed. On the far side of the chamber a niche had been delved, high in the stone. He slid the maerian in. With a last flare it vanished, and Maerdrigg vanished with it. Beryx stood a moment looking into the dark, before he murmured, in pity and sadness, “Sleep well.”
I left the Ilam backward, and the cave the same way. Only when we were clear of the valley did Beryx’s shoulders relax and he let out a long, heartfelt, “Whew!”
“No wonder the horses wouldn’t go in,” he said, when I looked at him. “They’re all there. Darrhan, Maersal, Maerond, Darven. The whole Maerheage clan. Worse than the Quarred Tingrith. Ugh!” Then he began to whistle, my catch for the Eskan Helken saeveryr, and we rode off thankfully through the rain.
* * * * *
It had broken when we came down toward Asleax, so Everran lay out beneath us with that vividness only winter sunshine can bestow, azure and pigeon’s breast purple and iridescent emerald. South of Asleax they were flying the kites for Air, specks of color that ducked and towered on the shrewd, gay wind.
As the road appeared Beryx reined in, and took a breath. “Well, Harran,” he said, matter-of-fact as if it had long been agreed to, “this is where we say goodbye.”
The best I could do was, “G-g-g?”
“Goodbye, yes.” His eyes danced with that disconcerting aedric mirth. “Maerdrigg’s asleep. Hawge is dead. There’s only one ghost left to lay. And if you’re going to Maer Selloth and I’m going to—where I’m going—this is where our roads divide.”
“M-Maer Selloth?” None of it made sense.
“Maer Selloth.” He was still smiling, eyes green and scintillant against his damp black hair and scruffy jacket and stubbled face. “Saphar may not look much, but I think it’s fit for a queen—don’t you?”
I thought he had lost his wits. Did he think Sellithar, who had lost him for a scar, would take an aedr back? Horrific images filled my eyes: the old life in Saphar, shameful secrecy, furtive lust, more horrific images of Tenevel when I announced that the king refused to accept a divorce, the reply I should have to relay to Beryx, agonizing images of Sellithar, lost before she was found, brought back to someone else...
I caught for a straw, any straw. “But—but—where are you going yourself?”
His eyes took on a distance that made them wells of emerald.
“I... don’t know yet. Eskan Helken first. There were a lot of things I didn’t learn. Then... they say there’s another ocean beyond Hethria. I haven’t used Pharaone. Some things should be seen with eyes. But an aedr could do things in Hethria too. Dam Kemreswash. Send the water south. Fengthira might be interested. Or she might travel with me...”
It had taken me this long to reach comprehension, let be speech. Even after aedryx, some things exceed the compass of the mind.
“You’re going—away?” He nodded. “Right away?” He nodded again. “Leaving Everran?” He nodded once more. I was too dazed to see that every question would hit him harder than Fengthira’s that first day. “Leaving Everran?” He nodded yet again. His face was set now, stripped of its smile. “But, but, you can’t! It’s what you fought for—what you went through all that for—it’s, it’s—it’s your whole life!”
I must have bared nerves with every phrase. He looked steadily back at me. Fengthira was right: he never had an ounce of vice.
“Everything I fought for,” he agreed. “But the fighting’s done.”
“But, but, but, the rebuilding!” I yelled. “Saphar, Everran, the Confederacy, the—” Now I glimpsed a catastrophe wider than his own. “You can’t, you can’t! We have to have a king!”
At that he grinned in genuine amusement. “Of course they do. Why do you think you’ve been schooled these last three weeks? Why do you think Fengthira told me, if I’d make her welcome in Everran, to guard my harper well?”
That winded me altogether. I could not so much as gasp. He surveyed the shimmering lowlands and spoke as if selecting a new town governor.
“Morran’s too young, and a soldier anyway. My uncle’s a clot. The Council needs a leader. Any lord or Resh-lord would make the others revolt. Tenevel’s only a Resh-lord too. But you know the Confederacy. And kingship. You’ve traveled with me, you’ve done things yourself. The people will accept you. It’s the only choice.”
This time speech came without any travail.
“No!”
“Now, Harran,” he began reprovingly, “don’t be foolish—”
But I was beyond considering foolishness. “No, no, no! I won’t do it! You can’t lose all—give all—suffer all you’ve done and then—not to me! I won’t!” I could not even voice the ultimate shame. If I had been his savior, I was also his betrayer. That he should gift me with Everran as well as Sellithar was such injustice as the heavens would not countenance.
“Harran,” he said gently. He waited till I looked round. His eyes were withdrawn, the marks of old suffering clear in his face. “You know better. You’ve seen how they look at me. Do you think I could bear to rule... like that?”
I could not speak.
“And do you think Tenevel would stomach an aedric king?” He shook his head. “More to the point: every line has its ending. I am the end of mine.”
“Hawge said that!” I exploded. “It’s a lie!”
He shook his head. Very gently he said, “I already knew.”
I could only gape.
“When it first came,” he went on in that voice like falling water, gentle, irrecoverable, “Hawge made me suspect. After Phare, I knew.”
It was more than I could bear to contemplate, that he should find he was himself Everran’s bane. And atop that, I had betrayed him. So long it had lain between us, and it lay there still. But it could lie no longer.
I turned my head away. Then I got out, “Sellithar—and I—”
He answered softly, “I knew that too.”
“If only,” I burst out in bitter, futile retrospect, “I had not ‘thought so loud’—”
“No,” he replied quietly. “I knew in Saphar. Phare made me know I knew.”
A pit yawned under me. When I came to him on the hill he had been raw with these manifold wounds, and it was I who reached him first. He had not only to confront Fengthira, but to look at me, speak to me, as if I were in truth a friend...
His voice was not bitter, only sad. “I couldn’t blame you—or Sellithar. What did Fengthira tell you? ‘Horses’ morals are simpler than men’s.’ After Phare... I had to use them. So it didn’t come between us then. It doesn’t now.”
There must, there had to be, some recompense. “We’ll go away,” I burst out. “Out of Everran. You can be king until—the new line can begin after you!”
When he did not speak, I looked around. There was a kind of laughter in his face, the laughter with which some men meet the deepest hurts of all. He started to speak, and shook his head.
Then he said, “Harran... Hawge didn’t lie, you know. Aedryx and dragons are—kin.”
My hair rose. I choked.
“You saw it,” he insisted softly. “When we did Letharthir, you thought I was Hawge. Fengthira warned me, ‘And dragons have green eyes.’ When you fought me, I felt it for myself.”
He turned his eyes to Everran. “She lives in Eskan Helken, to avoid temptation. But I would be a king. It would be so easy. Lose your patience with one incompetent, coerce one balky council—” His eyes were still and steadfast and irredeemably sad. “I made myself an aedr. I can’t go back. Unless I leave it... I am still Everran’s bane.”
I tore the reins through and through my fingers. The pity, the injustice, the sorrow of it was too much. Everran lay below us, scars masked by the falling sun, the thing he loved best in life, for which he had given his health, his manhood, his very humanity. And now was going, of his own will, to give the thing itself.
“You mustn’t think I’m so unselfish,” he said softly. “Fengthira said once, ‘If tha walkst, t’will not be for any trumpery maerian.’ Maerdrigg taught me such a lesson. To waste your life, your inheritance, your very death, for a stone. If you must have an obsession, it should be worth the price. Like Everran. It will be easier leaving than you think. Everran’s still—my whole life. And I know Everran will be safer without me.”
I thought of the Quarred clans, the Estar guild leaders, the lords like Vellan, the myriad small daily choices upon which Everran rested, as upon the harp’s firm arms the fragile strings. I think I howled aloud.
“Of course you can do it.” His crispness told me the smile had revived. “You’ll have Morran. A reasonable Council. Tenevel to second you.” I tore my head away. He chuckled. “Four, man, if you can get me off Coed Wrock and bring me back this last time, you can do anything!”
I looked round. He was grinning, those green eyes full of simple human mirth. Swinging down from his horse he said gravely, but with a twinkle, “Do you think you could bring yourself, without shrinking, to—er—give me a farewell?”
When we embraced, I found I did not want to let him go. Not only for the injustice, the terror of the future, our broken comradeship, the loss of the man himself, but because I knew now why those he tranced had followed him. He was an aedr. If his going would free me of something fearsome, beyond nature, it would also leave life empty, robbed of a glamour, a savor, that only imminent peril can bestow.
It was he who stood back first. “And,” he said, more gravely, “you really should call me Beryx now.”
He clicked his tongue to summon the horse. Swung astride. Then he looked back, and there was no laughter in his eyes.
“Harran?” he sounded tentative, almost appealing. “When everything’s healed... if I’m to be known hereafter as the king who forsook his kingdom, I’d like them to—understand why?”
* * * * *
Now, with Saphar rebuilt, Everran re-united, back in tune with the Confederacy, with Morran for my general, Zarrar for a hearthbard, and the queen to rescue this song from the jaws of our small but terrible son, I can say to him as truth what I said then as promise, there on the hill above Asleax before he rode away.
“Wherever you are, lord, rest easy. I am still your harper. The songs will be sung.”