Treason (18 page)

We filed hopelessly up the narrow road leading through the rough eastern hills. There was little desertion now; in these hills, the best source of food was our wagons, and deserters would have little hope of surviving with the enemy so close behind. Besides, the men who were still with us now were the hard core of Father’s supporters. The kind, we thought, who would die before they’d abandon him.

“I’m toying with an idea,” Father said to me as we headed the column along the twisting road. “My idea is to pick a good spot here and go down fighting.”

“That’s a stupid idea,” I said cheerfully.

Father smiled. But it was a grim smile. “I’m realizing, the closer we get to Ku Kuei, that I’m a bit superstitious, too. Are you sure you got through there safely?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

“You’re here, but what does that prove? Lanik, my son, I’m a blathering old man, but unless I’m mistaken, you knocked down a wall of my palace without so much as a small rock or a catapult.”

“I learned some things in Schwartz.”

“Lanik, I don’t doubt you. But don’t you realize that what is possible for you might not be possible for anyone else?
You
might be safe enough in Ku Kuei, but what makes you sure any of the rest of us will live?”

“Anything I learned, I learned in Schwartz. I was an ordinary boy when I went into Ku Kuei, and I came out weary but unchanged.”

He sighed. “What are we going to do in Ku Kuei?”

“Survive.” What other plans did he expect me to have?

The road veered north, and in the distance to the east we could see the trees of Ku Kuei begin. There was not so much as a path leading toward the forest—it wasn’t the usual direction for travelers to go. So I picked out what looked like a reasonably good route, and started overland.

The troops didn’t follow.

Not that they said anything, or rebelled. The front ranks just sat there on their horses, watching me, not speaking, not moving.

Then Father left the road and came after me, his horse at a slow walk, and one or two others started, too. But while Father came on until he joined me, the others reined in and stopped a few meters from the road.

Father turned to face them. “I won’t command any man to come,” he said. “But that’s where the Mueller’s going, and all the Mueller’s true men will come with him. Stay with me and you will live as long as I do.”

I don’t know whether Father’s little speech would have been enough to persuade them by itself. Much more convincing was the flight of arrows that sailed toward our column. The aim was not good—the distance was too great for accuracy. But the message was clear: the Nkumai had flanked us, and the entire length of our column would soon be exposed to enemy arrows.

Father cried out, “To me, Mueller!” and then whispered loudly to me, “Lead, dammit!” I took off at a totally unwise canter over broken ground; my horse and I were lucky, but others were not, and many horses spilled their riders before they reached the shelter of the woods.

The trees were tall, but the branches were often low, and it was hard to pick a clear path. I had to dismount, and that meant that our forces would also have to pause at the forest edge, exposing themselves to Nkumai archers as they waited for those ahead of them to move under the trees. We lost more than two hundred men there; but when I had led us two hours into the forest, the rearmost men called ahead that the Nkumai pursuit had withdrawn.

The urgency of flight was over, but we couldn’t stop there. The trees were so dense that no decent forage for the horses could grow. I decided to lead the men on to the shores of the narrow lake where I had first stopped. There the trees broke into enough meadow to keep the horses for a few days, at least.

Our passage through the forest was silent. I didn’t look behind me at the men—it would have made them even more nervous to know how nervous I was about them. I kept waiting for our strength to fade while time seemed not to pass, as had happened to me before. This time, however, nothing was happening to our endurance, but the very silence of the forest despite the steady tramping of the horses’ hooves and the soldiers’ boots was unnerving. It was as if the sounds were swallowed up in the silence, a bit of ourselves stolen away by the trees and not reflected back to us.

We spent a hard night in the forest. The ground was soft enough, and there was plenty of food in the saddlepacks, but by morning hundreds of men had disappeared. Gone off into the night or turned away first thing in the morning, but gone. We knew they had merely deserted (and more than a few who had stayed were no doubt wishing they had gone, too), but the feeling that men could simply vanish in the night did little to promote calm.

We lived out of our saddlebags, and it took us more days than I thought possible until at last we found the lake. Hadn’t I reached this place—exhausted, yes—but after only a single day of running? Sunlight poured down and birds skirted the edge of the water and the horses grazed openly on the meadow and I thought we had made it to safety. I counted the men. Fewer than a thousand. And with this we hoped to return to power in Mueller.

The men bathed in the lake, splashing each other with water like children. They laughed loudly. They were safe now, and had no urgent need, neither men nor horses. Father and I decided to leave Homarnoch in charge of our peaceful, happy troops, and go off searching for a place where we could camp, and build huts, and plant crops. Unspoken was the faint hope that in the process we might also find the Ku Kuei, if any such people lingered here.

Saranna clung to me and told me I mustn’t go. But Father and I left her anyway, and went searching through the forest. It seemed wise at the time.

It could have been a holiday in one of the Sweet River woods. Father walking briskly along (he isn’t old at all, I realized) and I following only a little behind, watching as his hands reached up to touch leaves and branches, down to pluck grass or flowers, out in wild gestures as he talked. Once I had thought those gestures were flamboyance, showing off—or worse, a way of striking out, reaching out to control me and everyone else around him, to beat us into submission. That was when I was a child, though. Now I saw that the waving, slashing, jabbing of his arms was a sign of exuberance. His body wasn’t large enough, didn’t move swiftly enough to contain all his life and joy.

Ironic, then, that I realized this only now, when his joy was so out of place. It should have been contagious, but to me it seemed forced. Now instead of wanting to laugh and move and shout along with him, I wanted to weep for him. I would have, too, except that it would shame him. There were things that could be wept for, like long-lost sons come home, but for the losses a Mueller didn’t weep. Didn’t even give grief for the loss of a kingdom. My father was still alive, but already I mourned for him, because his true self was the Mueller, the ruler, the man so large that only a kingdom could contain him; and now here he was, confined into the space of his body, his kingdom a strange forest and a few men who loved the memory of what he was, and so continued to serve this shrunken remnant of himself. Ensel the Mueller was dead. But Ensel Mueller insisted on being alive, on carrying a kind of greatness with him even in defeat.

I had always expected to inherit the kingdom from him. To step into his place when he died; to
become
him. I thought I was capable of it. But now, following behind him through the forest, I realized that while I might have become the Mueller, had things worked out differently, but I was not yet large enough to take
his
place, because when he died he would leave so many places empty, places that I barely knew existed, roles that I would never be large enough to fill.

We left the lake soon enough, without event. I was beginning to wonder if what I felt before, when I passed through Ku Kuei mad with weariness, was mere illusion. But then it began again, just as it had happened when I passed through Ku Kuei before. We walked and walked, and still the sun was high in the sky, hardly seeming to move; Father got hungry and we ate, and the sun had not moved, and we walked on until we were tired, and the sun had moved only a little, and at last we had walked until we were utterly exhausted and couldn’t walk anymore, and it might have been noon.

“This is ridiculous,” Father said wearily as we lay in the grass.

“I find it consoling,” I said. “Now I know that I wasn’t insane when this happened before.”

“Or else that we both are.”

“This is just what happened to me when I came here before.”

“What, you got weak and gave out after only a morning’s walk?”

“That’s what I thought, only now I’m not sure.” I had learned some things about the world since I last passed through Ku Kuei. That stargazers in treetops could imagine ways to make men fly faster than light between the stars. That naked savages in the desert could turn rocks into sand. Were we wearing out early? Or was the sun merely a little slow in her travels? “We see that no matter how tired we get, no time has passed, so we think we must be wearing out early. But think—doesn’t it feel as if we’ve been traveling forever? Maybe our bodies are fine, and it’s time itself that’s gotten a little sluggish.”

“Lanik, I’m too tired even to understand you, let alone think about what you said.”

“Rest, then,” I said to Father.

Father drew his sword and lay on his left side, so his right hand, which held the sword, would be free to move into action the moment he awoke. He was asleep in a moment.

I also lay on the grass under the trees, but I didn’t sleep. Instead I listened to the rock. Listened through the barrier of living soil and the voices of a million trees, and heard:

Not the voice of the rock, but rather a low, soft, almost unthinkable whisper, and I couldn’t understand. It seemed to speak of sleep, or could that have been my own mind? I tried to hear the cries of the dying (though usually I tried to shut them out) and this time I heard, not a crush of voices crying in agony together, but rather distinct, low calls. Tortured, but slow. Tortured and hating and fearing but endlessly delayed and separated and distinct, and against their rhythm my own heart was quick, racing, panicking, and yet I was at rest and my heart beat normally.

I let myself fall into the soil, which gave way only reluctantly until I was down, resting against the rock. Stones slid away behind my back; deep roots slithered off to let me by; and then harsh rock gave way and cushioned me gently and I heard:

Nothing unusual at all. The voice of the rock was unchanged, and what I had heard near the surface was gone.

I was confused. I hadn’t merely imagined what I heard before, and yet now, next to the rock, all was as it had been in Schwartz a few weeks before.

I rose again, listening all the way, and gradually the song of the earth changed, seemed to slow, seemed to separate into distinct voices. The earth, too, seemed more sluggish to part and let me by. But at last I was on the surface, my arms spread, floating as always on what could only seem to me to be a slightly-thicker-than-normal sea.

Father was standing, watching me, the expression on his face indescribable. “My God,” he said, “what’s happened to you!”

“Just resting,” I answered, because there was little else to say.

“You were gone, and then you rose up out of the earth, like the dead coming back out of the grave.”

“I forgot to tread water,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I had to find something out. I—Father, in Schwartz I learned to do some things. Things that could never be exported through an Ambassador, because they’re a way of—thinking, and talking to—things that other people never think of talking to.”

“I’m afraid of you, Lanik. You aren’t—you aren’t human anymore.”

I knew what he meant, but still it stung to have him say it. “That issue was decided when I sprouted tits and Homarnoch declared me a rad.”

“That was—”

“Different,” I said, finishing his sentence. “Because then I was less than human, and now you think I’m more. But neither one is true, Father. I was human all along, either way. This is just one thing that can happen to a human, one thing that a human being can do. Not a god, not a devil. A human.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m a human, and I can do it.”

“You were gone for nearly an hour it seemed, forever it seemed, Lanik. How did you breathe?”

“I held my breath very tight. Father, forget what you saw me do. Let me tell you what I
learned
. There’s something about the soil here. Something that slows things down, or makes it seem that way. It’s as if—I don’t know. As if there’s a bubble, enclosing us and the earth and trees around us in a sphere, and inside that bubble, time goes slower. Or no, that doesn’t work. It’s as if time goes
faster
for us. We walk farther, we do a day’s worth of walking, and yet to the world outside, only a few minutes have passed. While we’re inside, all the rest of the world seems to go slowly, but it doesn’t. It’s the same as always.”

“If we really walked as far as it feels like, that’s one big bubble.”

“Unless it follows us around.”

“Why didn’t it happen for the army?”

“Maybe we had too much momentum or something. I don’t know. But look at the sun.” It was only a little past the zenith. “And we’re already through for the day.”

“I’m rested now,” Father said. “Felt like I had a long nap, and I woke up and you were gone, not a footprint or anything, just gone. I didn’t dare leave, for fear I’d lose you again. I waited forever it felt like.”

“I was gone a few minutes, that’s all,” I said. “But I spent those minutes outside the bubble.”

“I don’t know about bubbles,” said Father, “but I’m rested now.” So we went on.

By the sun it was only midafternoon; by my own reckoning, I had done two days’ walking since morning when we reached another lake. It was one whose southern edge I had skirted on my earlier journey. Now we stood on its western shore, and the far shore was so near we could see it easily. If it was the far shore, that is. Because it seemed to disappear to the north and south, we supposed we might be looking at an island or a peninsula.

I hadn’t slept when Father did, but his rest had done him little good. He was staggering like a drunk, and I was so weary that each step was a separate effort, a triumph of will. “I don’t know about you,” I told Father, “but this is my limit. This is where I stop.”

We slept almost before we lay down.

I awoke in darkness. I had never seen night in Ku Kuei on my first journey, and the night before, with the army, I had had other things on my mind. Now I watched the sky. Both Dissent and Freedom had risen, and at this time of year they were near each other. I lay there, still weary with sleep, letting my mind wander, when it occurred to me that Dissent should have passed Freedom by now.

Instead, there was almost no detectable motion.

Could Ku Kuei have developed a way to slow the sun and the moons? No, or we would have seen such things from Mueller, too. What was going on was not real, it was an illusion, a local phenomenon. Not a change in the earth or sky. It could only be a change in us. A change that didn’t happen when the army was with us; a change that happened only when we were alone.

“For once Dissent has learned his place,” Father said. So he was also awake.

“You noticed, too.”

“I hate this place, Lanik.” He sighed. “A beggar loves any coin. But I’m beginning to think I would have been happier with Harkint.”

“Up to a point, you probably would.”

“What point?”

“When they cut your head off and it didn’t grow back.”

“It’s a problem with Muellers,” Father said. “We never can believe that death is permanent. I heard once of a man who couldn’t think how to get vengeance on his enemy, short of killing him, and he didn’t want
that
much vengeance. So he challenged the man to combat and beat him, and while his enemy was lying on the ground, faint from loss of blood, he cut off his arm and sewed it on backward. He liked the effect so well, that he did the same to the man’s other arm, and his legs, too, right at the hips, so that the man’s buttocks were facing the same direction as his face. And of course he had a tail. It was a perfect vengeance. When all had healed, his enemy spent the rest of his life watching himself shit, while he never knew whether he was lying with a pretty girl or a plain one.”

I laughed. It was the kind of tale told by the huge fires in Mueller-on-the-River during the wintertime. The kind of tale that men now lacked the spirit to tell, even if they had the wit.

“I’m never going back, am I, Lanik?” Father said. And the way he said it, I knew he didn’t want the truth.

“Of course you are,” I said. “It’s only a matter of time before the Nkumai collapse under their own weight. There’s a limit to how much land a Family can absorb.”

“No there isn’t. I could have conquered everyone.”

“Not without me, you couldn’t,” I said, belligerently enough that he laughed. It was the same laugh I heard from him when I was a child. I thought of the time I challenged him to single combat when he ordered me to go to my room for my impertinence. He had laughed like that, until I drew sword and demanded to be met with honor. He had to cut my right hand almost off before I was content and would submit.

“I never should have tried,” he said. Tried what, I wondered, until he finished his sentence: “Doing anything without you.”

I said nothing. He had been forced to send me away, a year or so ago; I had acted with little enough choice since then. A year ago? It was yesterday. It was forever. In the darkness I felt as if I had never been anywhere but here, staring up at the stars.

Father was also looking at the stars. “Will we ever reach them?”

“With long enough arms.”

“And what will we find if we get there?” Father sounded vaguely sad, as if he had just realized that he would never find something he had carelessly mislaid a long time ago. “If we of Mueller got enough iron and somehow built a starship and went out among the stars, what would we find? After three thousand years, would they greet us with open arms?”

“The Ambassadors still work. They send us iron. They know we’re here.”

“If they ever meant to let us off this planet, they would have come here years ago and taken us off. Whatever sins were committed, they were paid for a thousand times before I was born, Lanik. Did I rebel against the Republic? What threat am I to them? They have weapons that would let one man stand against all of Nkumai’s armies and win. While I’m an aging swordsman who once won seventeen archery matches in a single day. I’ll wear all my medals and surely they’ll bow.” He chuckled dismally, and the chuckle twisted off into a sigh.

“When you cut their arms off, they don’t grow back,” I said. “So we do have an advantage over them there.”

“We’re freaks.”

“I’m cold,” I said, but the clouds stayed frozen in their places near the horizon, and no wind blew.

“No wind,” I said. “They’ve slowed it all down. Look, Father. Across that inlet, see how the grass is lying over? As if a wind were blowing. And yet they stay that way.”

Father seemed not to notice.

“Father,” I said. “Perhaps we ought to go on.”

“Where?” he answered.

“To find the Ku Kuei.”

“Off like Andrew Apwiter, then, trying to find the third moon, a moon all of iron that will save us from hell. There
are
no Ku Kuei. The Family died out years ago.”

“No, Father. This isn’t a natural occurrence, this bubble of time. It follows us everywhere. Since we’re not doing it, it must be that it is being done
to
us, and that means that someone
is
doing it, and I mean to find them.”

“So maybe there
are
some Ku Kuei. If we were going to find them, we would have found them already.”