The Door into Sunset (22 page)

The family settled finally for a new pot, slightly smaller than an old, holed one they had, with a half-dozen nails added to make up the difference in weight. Lorn added four needles to this, a goodwill gift of the kind any tradesman might add on his first visit to a given customer. After that Lorn would have been content to lie down in any spot they showed him, but they would not have it. Nothing would do but that he be shown the room with the bed and the door that shut—Lasif’s room, he thought, that she shared with her husbands: the bed might be stuffed with straw, but it was roomy enough for all of them, and there was real linen on it, just pulled out of the depths of the linen-press. And then Lorn was told to rest himself for a while, and the household went into a flurry of activity, as the oldest laying chicken was asked for pardon, and had its neck wrung. Parsnips were put on to roast, and more ivy wine was brought out, and the end of a side of bacon was fished out of the chimney with the smoking-hook. More butter was brought from the cold store, and milk from the afternoon milking, and buttermilk, and half a hard cheese, and half a soft one. Lorn, infected by the excitement, got no more than half an hour’s nap before giving up and going to help out in the kitchen.

They feasted him, giving the best they had, and there was no way he could have talked them out of it. This time of year, so far south, sunset came late. By an hour before midnight the dusk was just falling outside the windows, and they were still picking the roasted hen’s bones and retelling old jokes and stories. The children were asleep in chairs, or by the hearth; the cat had come in from a day’s hunting and was dozing tucked up in a warm corner.

About midnight, everyone began to tire. Lorn toasted them all in a last cup of wine, and made his way to the sweet-smelling linens, and bed. Sleep, much longed-for, leapt out of the early-morning dimness and pulled him gratefully down as soon as his head touched the straw-stuffed pillow.

*

He awoke suddenly, in the dark. Something nearby had spoken his name. He could hear the shape and sound of the word in the silence that surrounded him now.

Lorn sat up and listened. No sound: not even that of someone breathing, waiting to see what he did. No one here after all. Just a dream. The window was open, and moonlight fell through it as a silvery square on the flagstoned floor. A soft rustling came from outside; one of the cattle, moving restlessly in its byre, the next building over. The householders didn’t leave the cows outside at night, though it was warm enough to do so this time of year. There was still danger from lions.

Lorn realized suddenly that the last several cups of wine he had drunk were now clamoring to get out of him. He slipped out of the bed, felt around for his breeks, tugged them on, and then climbed out the window. Outside it was the cowyard, all dirt and straw, but looking much less prosaic than usual in the still silver light. Lorn made his way across it, found a handy drainage ditch up against the fence that divided the yard from the pasture, and proceeded to ease himself.

About five minutes later, it seemed, he was finished. He sighed, tucked himself back in, and leaned on the fence, looking out over the fields all rough with pasturage and moonlight. The cattle had stopped their shifting; he could hear the quiet breathing of them, off to the side and behind him. The moon was westering, sliding down the sky. Some distance away, across the pasture, Lorn heard a yowl: a cat challenging another one, or else threatening some other night-rover—a fox, or badger, perhaps. The yowl rose to a frightened shriek—then silence again. Behind him, the cows’ uneasy breathing got louder as the cat-yell broke off. Lorn stood there a moment more, then sighed, thought of bed, looked up at the paling moonlight, the brightening sky.

And froze, realizing where the Moon was, and where the growing light was.
Wait a minute. What is dawn doing coming up in the west—?!
If it was one. Not a morning color. Dark, lowering, long streaks of dark red—

Footsteps behind him, soft and heavy. The sweat broke out on Freelorn as he realized what the cat had been challenging, and had fled. He turned. The moonlight that was fading in the face of that awful light in the west, somehow still fell full and cold on the white shape that loomed up behind him, breathing soft and thick, a cold white fetid steam that jetted out of it in the icy air and blew in a sickening caress against his face. Claws reached, and the red on them was the red of the sunset, but dried-on and flaking—

Freelorn leapt over the fence and ran. It was no use, as usual; that breathing, heavy, amused, was close behind him, getting closer second by second, toying with him. He splashed through a brook—some things of the Dark couldn’t cross water. This one had no problem; it splashed through behind him, the spray of its passage hitting him in the back, ice-hot as molten metal, as he ran. He turned and fled northward over the pasture, but it was no use; that disastrous sunset was reaching around into even that airt now, so the whole sky was alight with it. And then Lorn felt the claws in his back, catching, pushing him down. He shouted in pain—

And was staring at the flint walls, and Lasif, with a rushlight in her hand, who stood there looking at him in shock from the open door.

He was breathing as hard as a man who’s been running a race. It took him a moment to get enough breath to look at her and say, “A dream.”

“So I thought,” she said. Her eyes were shadowed in the dim light. Morning was coming up, but it would be a while before its light was bright enough to see by. Shadowy, she stood and looked at him, and said, “You were quite close to that battlefield, weren’t you?”

“I think I still am,” he said, still shaking.

She nodded, and turned, and went away.

Lorn lay down again and fell asleep once more, exhausted. It took a while. His back smarted, and he knew he had much worse coming.

*

Many of the others slept late too, all but Lasif, who had to get up and milk the cow. She was working at the churn when Freelorn came in; the children were eating bread-and-butter and washing it down with buttermilk from the previous churning. Lorn was glad enough to sit down among them and have let Lasif give him a hunk of bread of his own. The butter still tasted of flowers.

“Going north?” Lasif said.

Lorn nodded and munched his bread. “Most of the business seems to be there these days.”

“As far north as Prydon, perhaps?”

“That far,” Lorn said, “probably.”

Lasif pried up the churn-top, peered in, replaced it and started churning again. “Just be careful,” she said. “All these soldiers running around—” She shook her head. “They get ideas.”

He thanked her kindly, and went out to pack the horses.

They came out into their street to see him off, the whole family, relatives and neighbors and all. Lorn bade them all goodbye, and could not get rid of the feeling of Lasif’s eyes resting on him, thoughtful but oblique. Blackie was dancing, eager to be gone, and Lorn saw Lasif glance at him as well—thoughtfully again, noticing a horse better than a tinker needed, no matter how prosaic his packhorse might look.

He swung up onto Blackie, and nodded at Lasif. “My blessing on all of you,” he said, “and Hers.” And he rode away.

*

He made the best speed north that he could, without attracting attention to himself. Lorn was not a fool, to ignore his dreams. He knew which way he had been running, in the dream, and he was ready for the pain that would follow. So he kept telling himself.

The countryside warmed and gentled around him. Even high summer was cool, down south; but he was coming into the midlands now, no more than ten leagues from Hasmë or so; and the summer crops were standing high. Those crops had changed from the oats and barley of the southern country, to wheat and corn and other crops that needed more heat and a fiercer sun.

He passed his days much as he had in Imisna—arguing, bargaining, taking hospitality as he found it; a barn here, a bed there. He lost some of his newer pots, and gained some more old, holed ones, which he disposed of as scrap metal to a smith south of Hasmë. His mind was less than completely on his “work”, though, for all around him was the constant distraction of country he knew much better than the high south. He had not been this way since his mother rode down this way with him, to take him to be fostered out.

It was one of the few times she had ridden any distance with him—one of few memories he had of her any more, and one of the clearest. She had always been delicate. At least, that was the word they had always used when talking to him about it. Whenever people in Kynall mentioned his mother, it was always as “the good Queen”. But always the voices went hushed, as if there was something wrong, as if someone might hear something they were saying, someone of ill intent, some thing— Even then, when he was young, it seemed that people knew she was not going to be with them for long. He knew, because he had been told later, that his was a hard birth. There was a question, though no one ever said it to Freelorn’s face—he put it together for himself, slowly, over time—that somehow his bearing
did
something to her. Maybe that was the cause of the delicacy, the long wasting. It was hard to tell.

She had not seemed particularly delicate on that ride, when she took him out to foster. He hadn’t wanted to leave Prydon at that point. He was seven, with a castle for his playhouse and a city to run amok in. But his mother had insisted that he would go out and be fostered like anybody else of good house. She had ridden with him, along with his father, down to Hasmë, where they stayed in an inn that fell far short of Freelorn’s princely expectations. He remembered being shocked when his mother remarked on how nice it was for someplace so far out in the country, and that the beds had sheets. Lorn wondered where he was going that beds didn’t have sheets.

But all during that ride, she had seemed unusually robust. Lorn had been used, all during his childhood, to seeing her tire easily, even just after going down to see about marketing in the town, or after a ride in the plains outside the city. On this ride, though, it seemed impossible to pry her out of the saddle, practically from dawn until sunset. She rode like the crazed teenagers Lorn had seen and envied: like a farm girl. She took mad jumps over brooks, and galloped, and laughed as she galloped, leaving Lorn and the rest of the entourage far behind, puffing and trying to catch up.

“I grew up here,” she had said. He had known that—but the way she said it suddenly made him listen. It was the same tone of voice she used when she told him she loved him. It came as a slight shock to him that there might be something
else
she loved as much. He was unnerved. “This is a wonderful place, Lorn... you’re going to like it here. The fields, the sky.... the way it is in the summer.” He had his doubts. But he worshiped his mother; he was willing to believe anything she told him.

They passed through Hasmë, and fetched up, after another day’s ride, in a village so small that Lorn barely recognized it as such, having lived in a city all his life, one of the two great cities of the world. The place they came to was five houses and six farms, and a tiny market square: not much else. “You’re going to love it here,” his mother said. Lorn looked at the dirt street, and had his doubts. He had missed her bitterly when she left. But what ashamed him to this day was that he hadn’t missed her more. Belatedly, perhaps, the excitement of being in a new strange place took hold of him. He was so excited about the dirt and the cows that he could actually run up and pat—or hit with a stick, and in fact he was shortly given the job of bringing the cows in from pasture at the end of the day—that he was almost anxious that his mother should go ahead and leave him with his foster-mother and his foster-sisters, the whole crowd of them. That excitement, the old bite of that shame, now both came back, and fastened on him hard, as he sat ahorse outside Elefrua, and saw the patch of tall trees that marked it. He was as afraid to go in now as he had been all those years ago. More so because it was mostly unchanged. The trees were taller, there were a few more houses, but everything else was the same. The way that light fell was the same. And his first love --

She wouldn’t know him, of course, because of the disguise. Was she even here? Slowly he rode in.

It was market day here, as he had known it would be. Small point in stopping in Elefrua otherwise. He was rather late—the market had been going on since dawn, and the most choice goods had already been snapped up by the country people who came from as much as several leagues away. They would have left home hours before dawn, many of them, had by now disposed of their own goods—the pick of a kitchen garden, a choice chicken or shoat—and were now in the browsing stages, wasting time until a couple of hours before noon, when the house that doubled as Elefrua’s brewery, tavern and cookshop should open up for business. Most of them would be in no mood to buy, already having spent whatever they intended to.

He rode down into town, looking at the fieldstone walls. There was the one he hid behind when he helped Mirik and Lal steal the neighbor’s cow. The road curved, leading into the market square. They had cobbled it since he had been here last.
Ten years?
he thought.
No, eight.
He swung down from Blackmane’s back and looked around at the stalls for a place to stand.

“Are you selling this morning, friend?” said a voice at his elbow. The hair stood up all over him as Lorn turned to see Orl standing there, the neighbor whose cow he had stolen. Lorn went hot with embarrassment, then remembered that Orl would be unlikely to recognize him. It was time as much as Eftgan’s disguise that made this so, for Lorn saw to his shock that Orl was
old
. One of his eyes was gray with cataract, and his back was bent with the onset of bone trouble.
But what did I think? Was time to have stood still while I was gone?

“Uh, yes,” Lorn said, trying not to stare at a man that by rights he should never have seen before. But Orl seemed not to have noticed anything amiss. “Usual fee, then,” he said. “Three pennies, and a tenth of your take in goods or silver.”