Well of Shiuan (7 page)

She drew a great mouthful of air, like one drowning, and stared into the white nothingness and knew that she was not going back. She gathered her limbs under her, and rose and moved quietly through the mist.

Her kinsmen were down by the bank, calling to each other, seeking whether she had left in the boat. Soon they found the gold that was left there, abandoned in the night. Their voices exclaimed in profane greed. Already they were fighting over the prizes she had brought.

She cared nothing for this. She had no more desire for gold or for anything that they valued. She moved quietly round by the stable's outside door, cracked it so that she could see in without being seen. The goats bleated and the birds stirred in the loft, so that her heart froze in her and she knew that the houseward door would be flung open and her presence in the outer stable discovered upon the instant. But there was no stir from the house. She could still hear the shouting down by the boat, distant and angry voices. There would be no better chance than this.

She slipped inside, went to the pony's stall and eased the gate open. Then she took the halter from its peg and slipped it on him, backed him out. He did not want to leave his stable when she reached the outside door, laid back his ears at the weather, but he came when she tugged on the rope— stolid, thick-necked little pony that bore their burdens and amused the children. She grasped the clipped mane and rolled up onto his back, her legs finding pleasant the warmth of his fat sides, and she nudged him with her bare heels and set him moving downslope, having to fight him at first: he thought he knew the trail she wanted, and was mistaken, and had to be persuaded otherwise.

The water had sunk away in the channel this morning, and kept to center. The pony's hooves made deep gouges in the mire, betrayal when the sun should clear the mist away, and the pony had careful work to find a way up the next bank: marshbred, the little beast, that knew his way among the flooded isles, far sturdier for such travelling than the slender-legged horse of the stranger-king. Jhirun patted his neck as they came up safely on the next hill, her legs wet to the knees; and the pony tossed his head and blew a puff of excitement, moving quickly, sensing by now that things were not ordinary this morning, that it was not a workday.

In and out among the Barrow-hills they travelled, in places so treacherous she must often dismount and lead the pony. Her bare feet were muddy and numb with cold, and the mist clung as it could on chill days. She felt the aches of her flight of the night before, the weariness of a night without sleep, but she had no desire to rest. Fwar would find the tracks; Fwar would pursue, if none of the others would. The thought of him coming on her alone, without his father and brother to restrain him, made her sick with fear.

Eventually in the mist she found the way she sought, the stones of the old Road, and solid footing for the pony. She climbed astride again, absorbing the warmth of the pony's sides, her damp shawl wrapped about her. She congratulated herself on having eluded pursuit, began for the first time to believe she might make it away clear. Even the pony moved gladly, his unshod hooves sounding hollowly on the stones and echoing back off unseen hills.

It was the only Road left in all Hiuaj, khal-made and more ancient than the Kings. Any who followed her must find her if she delayed; but they must come afoot, and she had the pony's strength under her.

Somewhere ahead, she believed, rode the stranger-king, for a northward track had brought him to Barrows-hold, and there was no way but this for a rider to take. She had no hope of overtaking him on that fine long-legged horse, not once they had both reached the Road itself; but in her deepest hopes she thought he might expect her, wait for her—that he would become her guide through the terror of the wide marsh.

But already he faded in her mind, a vision that belonged to the dark; and now things were white and gray. Only the gull-image at her heart and the

bonehandled dagger in the waistband of her skirt proved that he had ever existed, and that she was most coldly sane, more than all her kinsmen.

In her common sense she knew that she was bound for grief, that she was casting herself into the hands of marshlanders or worse, who would learn, as her cousins knew, that she dreamed dreams, and hate her, as Chadrih-folk hated her, Ewon's fey daughter. But all the terror her nightmares had ever held seemed this morning at her back, hovering about Barrows-hold with a thickness that made it impossible to breathe. Death was there; she felt it, close, close and waiting. Away from Barrows-hold was relief from that pressure; it grew less and less as she rode away... not to Aren, to hope for that drab misery, within constant reach of Fwar. She chose to believe that she travelled to Shiuan, where holds sat rich and secure, where folk possessed Hiua gold. It was not so important to reach it as it was to go, now, now, now: the urgency beat in her blood like the heat of fever, beyond all reason.

Socha had smiled the morning she parted from them; Jhirun recalled her wrapped in sunlight, the boat gliding from the landing as it parted into that golden light: Socha had taken such a leave, at Hnoth, when madness swelled as the waters swelled in their channels. Jhirun let herself wonder the darker thoughts that she had always chased from her mind, whether Socha had lived long, swept out into the great gray sea—what night might have been for her, adrift in so much water, what horrid plunging of great monsters sporting near the shell of a boat; and in what mind Socha had come to the end,—whether she had wept for Barrows-hold and a life such as Cil had accepted. Jhirun did not think so.

She drew the gull amulet from between her breasts, safe to see it now in daylight, safe where no one would take it from her; and she thought of the king under the hill, and the stranger—himself driven by a nightmare as her own drove her.

The white rider, the fair rider, the woman behind him: day and white mist, as he was of the dark. In the night she had shuddered at his ravings, thinking of white feathers and of what lay against her heart, that seventh and unfavorable power—that once had prisoned him, before a Barrows-girl had come where she ought not.

The gull glittered coldly in her hand, wings spread, a thing of ancient and sinister beauty, emblem of the blankness at the edge of the world, out of which

only the white gulls came, like lost souls: Morgen-Angharan, that the marshlanders cursed, that the Kings had followed to their ruin—the white Queen, who was Death. A nagging fear urged her to throw the amulet far into the marsh. Hnoth was coming, as it had come for Socha, when earth and sea and sky went mad and the dreams came, driving her where no sane person would go. But her hand closed firmly about it, possessing it, and in time she slipped it back into her bodice to stay.

She could not see what lay about her in the mist. The pony's hooves rang sometimes on bare stone, sometimes splashed through water or trod on slick mud. The dim shapes of the hills loomed in the thick air and passed her slowly like humps of some vast serpent, submerged in the marsh, now on this side of the Road and now on the other.

Something tall and thin stood beside the roadway. The pony clopped on toward it, and Jhirun's heart beat faster, her fingers clenched upon the rein, the while she assured herself that the pony would not so blithely approach any dangerous beast. Then it took shape clearly, one of the Standing Stones, edgewise. She knew it now, and had not realized how far she had ridden in the mist.

More and more of such stones were about her now. She well knew where she was: the ruined khalin hold of Nia's Hill was nearby, stones which had stood before the Moon was broken. She rode now on the border of the marshlands.

The little pony walked stolidly on his way, small hooves ringing on stone and now muffled by earth; and all that she could see in the gray world were the nearest stones and the small patch of earth on which the pony trod, as if creation itself were unravelled before and behind, and only where she rode remained solid. So it might be if one rode beyond the edge of the world.

And riding over soft ground, she looked down and saw the prints of larger hooves.

The Road rose again from that point, so that earth no longer covered it, and the ancient stone surface lay bare. Three Standing Stones made a gathering of shadows in the mist just off the Road. Distantly came an echo off the Stones, slow and doubling the sound of the pony's hooves. Jhirun little liked the place, that was old before the Barrows were reared. Her hands clenched on the pony's short mane as well as on the rein, for he walked warily now, his head lifted and with the least uncertainty in his gait The echoes continued; and of a sudden came the ring of metal on stone, a shod horse.

Jhirun drove her heels into the pony's fat sides, gathering her courage, forcing the unwilling animal ahead.

The black horse took shape before her, horse and rider, awaiting her. The pony balked. Jhirun gave him her heels again and made him go, and the warrior stayed for her, a dark shadow in the fog. His face came clear; he wore a peaked helm, a white scarf about it now. She stopped the pony.

"I came to find you," she said, and his lack of welcome was already sending uncertainties winding about her heart, a sense of something utterly changed.

"Who are you?" he asked, which totally confounded her; and when she stared at him: "Where do you come from? From that hold atop the hill?"

She began to reckon that she was in truth going mad, and pressed her chilled hands to her face and shivered, her shaggy pony standing dwarfed by that tall black horse.

With a gentle ripple of water, a ring of shod hooves on stone, a gray horse appeared out of the mist. Astride him was a woman in a white cloak, and her hair as pale as the day, as white as hoarfrost.

A woman, the warrior had breathed in his nightmare, a rider all white, the woman that follows me—

But she came to a halt beside him, white queen and dark king together, and Jhirun reined aside her pony to flee the sight of them.

The black horse overrushed her, the warrior's hand tearing the rein from her fingers. The pony shied off from such treatment, and the short mane failed her exhausted fingers. His body twisted under her and she tumbled down his slick back, seeing blind fog about her, up or down she knew not until she fell on her back and the Dark went over her.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER Four

It was not, even within the woods, like Kursh or Andur. Water flowed softly here, a hostile whisper about the hills. The moon that glowed through the fog was too great a moon, a weight upon the sky and upon the soul; and the air was rank with decay.

Vanye was glad to return to the fire, bearing his burden of gathered branches, to kneel by that warmth that drove back the fog and overlay the stench of decay with fragrant smoke.

They had within the ruin a degree of shelter at least, although Vanye's Kurshin soul abhorred the builders of it: ancient stones that seemed once to have been the corner of some vast hall, the remnant of an arch. The gray horse and the black had pasturage on the low hill that lay back of the ruin, and the shaggy pony was tethered apart from the two for its safety's sake. The black animals were shadow-shapes beyond the trees, and gray Siptah seemed a wraith-horse in the fog: three shapes that moved and grazed at leisure behind a screen of moisture-beaded branches.

The girl's brown shawl was drying on a stone by the fire. Vanye turned it to dry the other side, then began to feed branches into the fire, wood so moisture-laden it snapped and hissed furiously and gave off bitter clouds of smoke. But the fire blazed up after a moment, and Vanye rested gratefully in that warmth—took off the white-scarfed helm and pushed back the leather coif, freeing his brown hair, that was cut even with his jaw: no warrior's braid—he had lost that right, along with his honor.

He sat, arms folded across his knees, staring at the girl who lay in Morgaine's white cloak, in Morgaine's care. A warm cloak, a dry bed, a saddlebag for a pillow: this was as much as they could do for the child, who responded little. He thought that the fall might have shaken her forever from her wits, for she shivered intermittently in her silence, and stared at them both with wild, mad eyes. But she seemed quieter since he had been sent out for wood—a sign, he thought, either of better or of worse.

When he was wanned through, he arose, returned quietly to Morgaine's side, from which he had been banished. He wondered that Morgaine spent so much attention on the child—little enough good that she could do; and he expected now that she would bid him go back to the fire and stay there.

"You speak with her," Morgaine said quietly, to his dismay; and as she gave place for him, rising, he knelt down, captured at once by the girl's eyes—mad, soft eyes, like a wild creature's. The girl murmured something in a plaintive tone and reached for him; he gave his hand, uneasily feeling the gentle touch of her fingers curling round his.

"She has found you," she said, a mere breath, accented, difficult to understand. "She has found you, and are you not afraid? I thought you were enemies."

He knew, then. He was chilled by such words, conscious of Morgaine's presence at his back. "You have met my cousin," he said. "His name is Chya Roh—among others."

Her lips trembled, and she gazed at him with clearing sense in her dark eyes. "Yes," she said at last "You are different; I see that you are."

"Where is Roh?" Morgaine asked.

The threat in Morgaine's voice drew the girl's attention. She tried to move, but Vanye did not loose her hand. Her eyes turned back to him.