Well of Shiuan (11 page)

"Well-defended, then."

They are powerful lords, and rich."

"Then it is well," said Morgaine, "that we have you with us, is it not, Jhirun Ela's-daughter? You do know this land after all,"

"No," Jhirun insisted at once. "No, lady. I can only tell you the things I have heard."

"How far does this marsh extend?"

Jhirun's fingers touched Vanye's back, as if seeking help. "It grows," she said. 'The land shrinks. I remember the Shiua coming into Hiuaj. I think now it must be days across."

"The Shiua do not come now?"

"I am not sure the road is open," Jhirun said. "They do not come. But marshlanders trade with them."

Morgaine considered that, her gray eyes thoughtful and not entirely pleased. And in all their long riding she had no word save to Jhirun.

By noon they had reached a place where trees grew green at a little distance from the road. The storm had blown over, giving them only a sprinkling of rain as it went, to spend its violence elsewhere. They drew off to rest briefly, on the margin where the current had made a bank at the side of the causeway, and where the grass grew lush and green, a rare spot of beauty in the stagnant desolation about them. The watery sun struggled in vain to pierce the haze, and a small moon was almost invisible in the sky.

They let the horses graze and rest, and Morgaine parcelled out the last of their food, giving Jhirun a third share. But Jhirun took what she was given and drew away from them as far as the narrow strip of grass permitted; she sat gazing out across the marsh, preferring that dismal view, it seemed, and solitude.

And still Morgaine had spoken no word. Vanye ate, sitting cross-legged on the bank beside her, finally having decided within himself that it was not anger that kept her silent now: Morgaine was given to such periods when she was lost in her own thoughts. Something weighed upon her mind, in which he thought he was far from welcome.

"She," Morgaine said suddenly, startling him, softly though she spoke, "was surely desperate to come this road alone. For fear of drowning, says she; Vanye, does it occur to thee to wonder why out of all the years of her life, she suddenly set out, with nothing in preparation?"

"Roh can be persuasive," he said.

"The man is not Roh."

"Aye," he said, disturbed in that lapse, avoiding her eyes.

"And she speaks what we can understand, albeit the accent is thick. I would I knew when she comes, Vanye. She surely did not have her birth from the earth and the fog yesterday noon."

"I think," he said, gazing off in the direction Jhirun stared, ahead, where the forest closed in again, great trees overshadowing the road, "I think her folk are surely in that hold we passed, and Heaven grant they stay there."

"They may be looking for her."

"And we," he said, "may come into trouble on her account, or what is more likely—she will meet it on ours. Liyo, I ask you earnestly, send her away—now, while she is near enough home she can find her way back."

"We are not taking her against her will."

"I suppose that we are not," he agreed, not happily. "But we are on a track they cannot mistake."

"The horses do confine us to the roadway," she said, "and this land has shown us one fellow-traveller, and not a breath of others. It occurs to me, Roh being ahead of us, it would be simple for folk hereabouts to choose some place of meeting to their advantage. I do think I saw a shadow move this morning, before you came down the trail."

Cold settled about him—and self-anger; he remembered his reckless ride, how she had turned her back to him and stayed silent when he had joined her. He had taken it for rebuff. "Your sight was clearer than mine," he said. "I was blind to it."

"A trick of the light, perhaps. I was not sure."

"No," he said. "I have never known you prone to visions, liyo. I would you could have given me some sign."

"It did not seem good then to discuss it," she said, "nor later, with our guest at your back. Mind, she met us either by design or by chance. If by design, then she has allies—Roh himself, it may be—and if by chance, why, then, she feels herself equal to this ugly land, and she is not delicate. Mind thy back in either case; thee is too good-hearted."

He considered this, which he knew for good sense, and he was ashamed. In all the time that they had ridden this land, he had felt himself lost, had forgotten every lesson of survival he had learned of his own land, as if any place of earth and stone could be utterly different. Blind and deaf he had ridden, like a man shaken from his senses; and little good he had been to her. She had reason for her anger.

"Back there," he said, "this morning: I was startled, or I would not have cried out."

"No more of it."

"Liyo, I take oath it was not a thing I would have done; I was surprised; I did not reckon—I could not believe that you would do murder."

"Does that matter?" she asked. "Thee will not appoint thyself my conscience, Nhi Vanye. Thee is not qualified. And thee is not entitled."

The horses moved, quietly grazing. Water sighed under the wind. His pulse dimmed awareness of all else; even the blood seemed dammed up in him, a beating of anger in his veins. He met her pale eyes without intending to; he did not like to look at them when she had this mood on her.

"Aye," he said after a moment

She said nothing. It was not her custom to argue; and this was the measure of her arrogance, that she disputed with no one, not even with him, who had given her more than his oath. Still one recourse he had with her: he bowed, head upon his hands, to the earth, and sat back, and gave her cold formality, the letter of the ilin-oath she had invoked. She hated to be answered back; and he did it so that she was left with nothing to say, and no argument.

Her frown darkened. She cast a stone into the water, and suddenly arose and gathered up Siptah's reins, hurled herself to the saddle. She waited, anger in the set of her jaw.

He stood up and took the reins of his own gelding, the black pony still tethered to the saddle-ring; and he averted his eyes from Morgaine and rose into the saddle, reined over to Jhirun, who waited on the bank.

"Come," he said to her, "either with me or on the pony, whichever pleases you."

Jhirun looked up at him, her poor bruised face haggard with exhaustion, and without a word she held up her hand to be drawn up behind him. He had not thought she would choose so; he had wished that she would not, but he saw that she was nearly spent He smothered the rage that was still hammering in him, knowing the look on his face must be enough to frighten the girl, and he was gentle in drawing her up to sit behind him. But when she put her arms about him, preparing for their climb to the roadway, he suddenly remembered Morgaine's advice and the Honor-blade that was at his belt. He removed it to the saddle-sheath at his knee, where her hands could not reach it.

Then he turned the horse upslope, where Morgaine awaited him on the road. He expected her to ride ahead, scorning him, but she did not. She set Siptah to walking beside the gelding, knee to knee with him, though she did not look at him.

It was tacit conciliation, he suspected. He gathered this knowledge to himself for comfort, but it was far down the road before there was a word from her, when the cold shadow of the trees began to enfold them again.

"My moods," Morgaine said suddenly. "Forget them."

He looked at her, found nothing easy to say. He nodded, a carefully noncommittal gesture, for the words were painfully forced from her, and he did not think she wanted to discuss the matter. In truth, she owed him nothing, neither apology nor even humane treatment; that was the nature of ilin law; but that was not the way between them. Something troubled her, something heart-deep, and he wished that he could put a name to it

The strangeness of the land was wearing at them both, he decided; they were tired, and nerves were tautly strung. He felt in his own body the ache, the

weight of mad that settled with malevolent cunning into the hollows of a man's body, that galled flesh raw where there was the least fold in garments beneath. Therein lay reason enough of tempers; and she feared—feared Roh, feared ambush, feared things, he suspected uneasily, the like of which he did not imagine.

"Aye," he murmured at last, settling more easily into the saddle. "We are both tired, liyo. That is all."

She seemed content with that

And for many long hours they passed through land that was low and all the same, alternate tracts of cheerless, unhealthy forest and barren marsh, where the road was passable and in most places well above the water. Qujal-made, this road, Vanye reckoned to himself—wrought by ancient magics—qujalin works lasted, strange, immune to the ages that ate away at the works of men, some seeming ageless, while others crumbled away suddenly as if they had become infected with mortality. There was a time not so long ago when he would have sought any other road than this, that led them so well in the direction Morgaine sought: qujalin roads surely led to qujalin places—and surely such was this called Abarais, in Shiuan, which Morgaine sought.

And better, far better, could they ride that way alone, unseen, unmarked by men. He felt Jhirun's weight against his back, balancing his own, she seeming to sleep for brief periods. It was a warm and altogether unaccustomed sensation, the nearness of another being: ilin, outlaw, bastard motherless from birth, he could recall few moments that any had laid hands on him save in anger. He found it disturbing now, this so harmless burden against him, that weighed against him, and against his mind.

He watched Morgaine, who glanced constantly to this side and that as they rode, searching every shadow; and it came to him what kept his mind so ill at ease: that Morgaine, arrogant as she was, seemed afraid—that she, who had no sane regard for her life or his, was greatly afraid, and that somewhere in that fear rested the child that rode sleeping at his back.

The forest closed in upon the road in the late afternoon and did not yield them up again, a way that grew more and more darksome, where it seemed that evening came premature. The trees here lived, growing in interlaced confusion, thrusting roots out into the channels, reaching branches overhead, powerless against the closely fitted megaliths that were the body of the road. Brush crowded over the margins, making it impossible for two horses to go abreast.

Morgaine, her horse unencumbered, led in this narrow way, a shadow among shadows, riding a pale horse, that pale hair of hers an enemy banner for any hereabouts who did not love qujal; and they rode blindly, unable to see beyond that tangle of brush that had found root, seeds and earth piled up against the enduring stones. Cover your hair, Vanye wished to tell her, but he felt still that mood in her, that unreason that he did not want to meet yet another time. It was not a time or place for quarrels.

Clouds again began to veil the sky, and that veil grew constantly darker, and plunged the forest into a halflight that destroyed all perspective, that made of the aisles of trees deep caverns hung with moss, and of the roadway a trail without beginning or end.

"I am afraid," Jhirun protested suddenly, the only word she had volunteered all day long. Her fingers clutched Vanye's shoulder-belt as if pleading for his intercession. "The sky is clouding. This is a bad place to be in a storm."

"What is your counsel?" Morgaine asked her.

"Go back. There is known road behind us. Please, lady, let us ride back to higher ground as quickly as we can."

"High ground is too far back."

"We do not know whether the road even goes on," Jhirun urged, desperation in her voice. She wrenched at Vanye's sleeve. "Please."

"And leave ourselves," said Morgaine, "on this side of a flood and Roh safely on the other."

"Roh may drown," Vanye said, set ill at ease by the suspicion that the girl was reasoning more clearly than his liege at the moment. "And if he drowns, all we need do is survive and proceed at leisure. Liyo, I think in this the girl is giving us good advice. Let us turn back, now."

Morgaine gave not even the grace of an answer, only laid heels to Siptah and put the gray stud to a quicker pace, that in level places became almost a run.

"Hold on," Vanye bade Jhirun, grim anger in his heart. Her arms went about him, locked tightly as the gelding took a broken stretch of the road and picked up the clear paving again, dragging the exhausted pony after them. A misstep, a pool deeper than it looked—he feared the reckless pace that Morgaine chose, and feared equally the prospect of being caught in this lowest and darkest part of the land when the storm came down. There was no promise of higher ground as they went further and further, only of worse, and Morgaine, blindly insistent on the decision she had made, led them into it

The clouds gathered yet more darkly and wind ruffled the water of the pools. Once something large and dark slid into the water as Siptah leaped it—vanished beneath the murky surface. Birds started from cover with a clap of wings and raucous cries, startling the horses, but they did not slack their pace more than an instant

The road parted in a muddy bank, a place riven as if stone had pulled from stone, a channel flowing between, and Siptah took it, hooves sliding in the mud, hindquarters bunching as he drove for the other rise. Vanye sent the gelding in his wake, and the pony went down on the slide. The gelding recovered from the impact with a wrench that wrung a cry from Jhirun—stood still on the upslope, trembling—but the pony lacked the strength or the inclination to rise. Vanye slid off and took the pony's halter, hauled against it with his full weight and brought the animal to its feet, but it simply stood there and stared at him with ears down and coat standing in points of mud, its eyes wells of misery.