The thoughts he touched looked back at him. And they looked with appalling force.
Who? WHO?
It was like a voice, like a bird’s cry, screaming in his ear, so loud the very bones of his face seemed to reverberate.
Show yourself!
He had never felt less like obeying an order. Yet something told him that it would be deeply dangerous to stay silent and submissive.
‘You show your own damned self!’ he panted, and undying fire leaped to his thought. The landscape heeled, violently. His sight vanished. Darkness enveloped him. There was nothing except a horrible, sickening fall, into more dark; and in that blackness a face – a mask, not unlike his own, a bird’s countenance but shorter and flatter in the bill. Black, with white markings and eyes outlined in red; staring, terrible eyes. Something struck at him, a frightening collision that brought exploding lights of pain; and another mind assailed his own. A rush of disjointed thoughts poured over him, as if to drown his by their very force. Like his own, but more smoothly, the mask dropped open. Within it, eyes closed, mouth open as if gasping, was the face of a girl.
It was not Savi. It was nobody he had ever seen, like nobody he had ever seen. The cast of it was strange, the eyes, the cheekbones, the hard planes of the jaw, everything; and the long hair, strange to tell, was not black, like all normal human hair, but curling threads of what could have been pure gold. He thought it very fair, yet frightening. It was spattered, as was all the face, with small smears of glistening red. And even as he admired its serene calm, like living ivory, the eyes narrowed and the expression shifted to incandescent fury.
WHO?
Like claws fixing in his flesh, raking, digging deep for the veins—
He hurled himself back, he remembered familiar sights good and bad, he clung to them, he ran to them, to himself. He sought Savi, but she blurred and became that beautiful face, swooping down on him with terrifying force and a vast thunder of wings. Once again the river wheeled beneath him, a broad bend lined with reedbeds and little inlets and side streams, and far away from it now, the road, the distance … He tore free, and flung himself away back. The last he saw, those wide dark wings, many of them, all around him, beating with appalling strength; yet all of them spotted and slathered with clots of bright scarlet …
Light burst in on him, long golden rays of the rising sun stabbing through the clouds. Somebody was panting, so hard they were almost sobbing. Himself. He found himself, back on the hillcrest, on his knees, panting, with the mask at his feet. He staggered to his feet, limp and bewildered, to find the others on the slope below, staring up at him.
‘Are you—’ ventured Vansha, and got no further.
‘What’ve you seen, lad?’ demanded Kalkan. ‘You were doing some strange things—’
Alya blinked about him, about the lands around, struggling to regain himself, to understand. Then he saw the river, gleaming barely a couple of thousand paces away, and in sudden fright he scanned the northward sky.
Dark against the cloud they wheeled, as if in anger or distress, wide-winged shadows against the shining air. He snatched up the mask, and bundled it into its bag. ‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Get to cover, fast! Hide the horses! That body, too! Anywhere!’
Vansha opened his mouth, but Alya hissed, ‘No time!’ Nightingale, watching him wide-eyed, gave one sharp sniff of the air, yelped, and bounded for the baggage ponies. Asquan was already seizing the horses, and Kalkan and the soldiers after him, experienced enough to know an alarm when they heard it. Chiansha scooped up the protesting Tseshya, and together they swung the body into the bushes, then grabbed their horses and drew them in after. Rysha rolled headlong under a thorn-bush, yelped, and stifled it at Alya’s glare. The little glade was suddenly empty of all save meaningless debris.
Alya peered up through the veil of twigs at the sky. It remained obstinately clear, and he was just beginning to relax when a half-dozen huge shadows, at least, swept across the space from a wholly unexpected direction, so low the downdraught pressed down the twigs overhead, and blew dead leaves in gusts from the mould. With strange, lonely cries they wheeled about the clearing, and were gone.
It was long minutes of silence before anybody stirred, lest they come around again. ‘What in the world was that?’ demanded Vansha, in Alya’s ear.
‘I’m not sure,’ admitted Alya. ‘But they were dangerous. Searchers in the sky. Their thoughts were all of battle and war.’
‘I might guess a name for them,’ said Asquan quietly. ‘Or Tseshya.’
Alya shrugged. ‘So might I. I don’t know. But they will search a while longer. For now you’d better lie low, hide yourselves! Hole up here awhile. I … I need one of the fresher horses. There’s something I have to seek, to understand.’
‘Alone, brother?’ demanded Vansha. ‘You’ll need me along, at least!’
‘No, brother! You least of all!’ Vansha, being who he was, could wreck everything, but there was no way to tell him that. ‘You must stay with the band; someone must survive who knows Savi. Keep northward on this road and you should find the wagon tracks again. I believe she is with them still; but they are days ahead, even further than I feared. If I do not return – greet her for me. And you, Asquan, stay also.’
‘You must take someone!’ protested Asquan.
‘Part of the way, then. My Lord Kalkan?’
‘At your service, lad. Whither away?’
‘Towards that river there. Towards a great reed-bed. I think I can tell the one. But you must stay well back. What may be there is a mystery no man can match.’
‘Except you, eh?’
‘Except, perhaps, me.’
They galloped down from the hill into the rising sun, across grassland that was smooth and easy going, and down on to the flatter floodplain beyond, where growth was richer and more tangled, the ground boggier and harder to pass. After a short time they dismounted in the shelter of low trees some hundred paces from the great river bend, while he scanned the banks. There were reedbeds aplenty, but one, in the crook of the stream, extended out a good wide way into the water, with a more solid shadow at its heart that stood out beneath the growing disc of gold. ‘That one!’ said Alya decisively, and Kalkan picked up his spear.
Alya barred him. ‘Come with me no further! One may succeed where two would be seen!’ He hurriedly stripped off mail and jacket, belt and boots, keeping only shirt and breeches, with his dagger in the waistband.
‘You know something,’ said Kalkan, tugging at his moustache. ‘Whose thought did you touch, Seer?’
‘Cold ones, warrior. You would not be glad to know more. I need you to wait, and watch, my lord!’ Which brother Vansha would not have been content to do. ‘If I call, come help! Otherwise, wait till all is quiet, then ride back as if demons were after you. Or they may be! Get the others to the road again. It will be no use looking for me.’
Kalkan nodded calmly. ‘Makes sense. Good luck, then – weather-luck, weapon-luck, woman-luck, a man can never have too much of those!’
‘Truer than you know, my lord!’ The reeds hissed in the wind, mockingly. ‘There. That’s where I’ll be.’
The river bank was an illusion. Only a little way beyond the trees it grew soggy and moss-ridden, and here and there patches of bog sucked noisily at his bare feet. He winced at every sound, thanking the Powers that the wind was in his face; and at last he cast himself down and slithered like a serpent across the quaggy ground, as silent and as subtle – or so he hoped. He came to the edge of the reeds, and there was water under his breast; but he hardly heeded its cold caress, when he saw the arrowhead of wings come gliding down the sky. Keeping ever low, he pulled himself forward, half crawling, half swimming through the matted vegetation to the low island in its midst, scarcely more than a sandbar. The cold bit at him; but fire drove his limbs where plain strength might have failed. The water was so thick with rotting debris that he had to struggle to sink down, but he managed it, smearing mud over his exposed face. O
nly just in time; for the swans circled low over the water with wings widespread and feet outstretched. They left hardly a ripple as they settled on the calm dark water
Swans; but black. A kind he had never seen – huge birds, as great as the vast vultures of the high steppes and mountain airs, glossy black in plumage and bill, with red-rimmed eyes. With regal grace they came sailing in towards the reeds, like the ships he had dreamed of, and he watched in growing awe. He guessed what was to come, but he was no more prepared when it happened – the swans, as they reached the reeds, rearing upwards in the water with a great thrash of wings, outspread as if to buffet an enemy. For a moment primal terror, colder than the water, struck him breathless, the numbing fear that lies in all things beyond nature.
Yet then a wonder no less chilling took its place, as he saw the black plumage drop away from pale bare shoulders, whirled off like so many cloaks, and be cast down upon the sandy shore. One fell within feet of him at the water’s edge. Where the swans had been, nine naked girls splashed in the shallows, frolicking as carefree and shrill as any young peasant girls, and with as little dignity.
Yet peasants these could never be, nor anything within the common run. No two were akin; for their skins were of many hues, and their hair of shades he had never guessed at. Only two had the black hair and level eyes that were the only human kind he knew, and of those just one a ruddy-brown skin like his own; lithe and lean-bodied, small breasts bouncing, she reminded him heartstoppingly of Savi. The other was paler and yellower, like fine parchment, and her features smaller and less distinct: like a doll’s, he thought. But compared to the rest she looked normal.
Some were dark, one so dark he wondered if she were still part-swan; but her skin shone glossy brown in the water as another girl washed her back. Her face was strange but fine, cheekbones high, lips full; and at least her hair, however strangely curled, was a decent black. Others were deathly pale in his eyes, their skin white enough to be shaded by the blood beneath, like the white-bone demons he had heard of in his youth. One of these had short dark hair that seemed normal enough, a slender frame and neat features; but the others were startling. One, taller and more stalwart by his standards, had long straight hair like a fall of gold indeed, and as she turned, running her hands through it, he recognised his vision, the face in the mask. A troubled face, if he could read those unfamiliar features, less blithe than the rest. He could guess why.
But eeriest of all was another, also tall and strongly built, but with a skin that was pale to transparency, save where it was oddly mottled, like a beast’s, all over cheek and shoulder and thigh – mottled the same terrifying hue as her shaggy crop of hair. The very sight of her appalled him. These had to be shape-shifting demons, surely; for what remotely human creature could have red hair?
Yet he was seeing them here unguarded, as themselves, and they behaved as girls. He remembered the tales of the men beyond the wide waters. Could these creatures reflect different races, shaped by different climes?
The idea fascinated him; and so, for all his thoughts of Savi, did their bodies. He had never imagined beauty could come in so many different guises, so strange and yet so much alike. Nobody in the village had concerned themselves much about nakedness, among folk they had known all their lives; yet lads still spied upon girls bathing, older ones especially – and sometimes, Savi had told him, the other way about. As an outcomer they had usually barred him, but this had the same tinge of mischief about it, spiced with a more adult shiver of danger.
They stirred his blood and his body, those girls, so that even with Savi in his mind he ached to be there among them, to seize one or many of those bodies, search out their secrets and the heat of their pleasures, the taste, the scent, the sheer essence of woman that he missed so much. But his blood needed no chilling; who could say what would happen to him if they so much as sensed his presence?
Demons they might not be, the human form came naturally enough to them – might once have been their own, even. And yet now they were scarcely more human than if they had been swans, indeed, wearing hands only to wash themselves clean. That was the purpose of their game, though it pleased them also, perhaps, a pleasure whose wildness hinted at their nature.
That, he had no wish to arouse; yet the ache drove him to be foolhardy. Them he could not touch; but he eased forward, still hidden under reeds and murky water, till he could stretch out and stroke the nearest cloak.
He almost gasped aloud at the touch. Feathers indeed; but they felt not like a discarded garment, but a living fell, with quickening flesh beneath. Something about it was sticky and congealed. The girl with light-brown skin exclaimed, turned quickly to her sisters, then to the swan-cloak where it lay. But Alya’s hand was beneath the surface again, and he lay deadly still. She would have seen him, had she waded over; but she shrugged, and turned again to steeping her long black tresses. He slid slowly away, breathing as shallowly as he dared, propelling himself with his trembling fingers, no more. He knew now of what they cleansed themselves, what had spattered the fair face. He had touched blood.
He drew back barely in time; for they took up the swanhames, and drew them through the water, combing them with their fingers, preening almost. He watched the bend and sway of their haunches and breasts, drawing a wry pleasure from the mingled menace and allure. So strange, yet so ordinary, young girls in nature, as if that nature ran far beyond the confines of the mere body. He knew now what he had come to make sure of, that the things he had glimpsed through the eyes of the golden one were true, and not some delusion or extension of his fancy.
Had there been another reason? Had he hoped to see this kind of a sight? He realised he probably had. Foolish; but human, for all the might of the Powers that had been thrust into him. Perhaps Powers could also be foolish; and in that there might lie some obscure hope. At least now he might make some sense of the jumble of thoughts he had picked up from that other overbearing mind.
He watched the girls still, as they shook their cloaks free of water with careless strength, like great wingbeats, and shrieking laughter as they soaked one another once again. Then one, the girl with parchment-shaded skin, flung hers about her shoulders once more and ran splashing through the shallows; but she flung wide her arms, and it was a swan that rose into the noon sun. With a vast fluttering rush, like a great breath, the others lifted in a cloud behind her, not paddling along the surface like ordinary swans, but soaring up into the light, heading straight and swift to the northward. His desire soared with them; and the fires surged in his blood. What he had seen was true. That was the way he must go.
‘What did you see?’ demanded Vansha, as they plodded back into camp.
‘Down there?’ growled Kalkan. ‘He’s been for a paddle, but he won’t say. Few ducks off the river, that was all I saw.’
‘I saw …’ began Alya, shivering over the miserable little fire that was the most they dared kindle. His desire had succumbed to bone-chill. ‘I had a vision; more than one. Tseshya, have you and Nightingale got anywhere with your map?’
‘Somewhere!’ grunted the scholar, glaring at Nightingale. ‘A lot further, if I could hold his attention for two breaths in three! And talking of his breath …’
He caught Alya’s glare, and hastily thrust a leaf of reed-paper at him. Alya nodded absently, turning it this way and that, trying to read Tseshya’s impossibly ornate letters. ‘Yes,’ he murmured, more to himself. ‘This here – and here – this is what I saw! Through the bird’s eye – and hers. In the rush of the wind—’
Flame flared in him, and he was no longer cold. Memory brought the crude page suddenly to life. He had striven to find what he should be able to see, the line of the great road, and saw it pass crazily by. The wagons, the dust – he had yearned for some sight of her, some confirmation. And yet he did not really need it. He traced the line of the road, saw how true its path lay – for indeed, it came from the mind of one who knew it – and saw also in that a devastation of his hopes.
&nb
sp; ‘Well?’ demanded Vansha.
‘A good map. I can add to it. I saw them, brother – just here.’
‘There? But on that measure …’
‘Yes. Well on their way. They move faster, those wagons, than ever we gave them credit for. They drew fresh guards from the main army, no doubt, fresh horses. So now they are five days ahead, even; and getting further.’
‘But when can we hope to catch them up?’ demanded Vansha anxiously.
‘We cannot,’ said Alya, and was amazed at how calm he felt. ‘Not as such. They will have reached their journey’s end long before, if I am right.’
Vansha crumpled and grew angry, all at once. ‘How so? Where will it end, then?’
Alya’s fingers strayed across the blank area at the upper edge of the leaf. He had reached the bounds of his memory, and suddenly he was back among the others again, squinting at mere paper in the feeble firelight. But he realised, with deepening astonishment, that it was not wholly blank. There were no roads, no rivers marked; but within its very bounds, there were a few lonely circles.
He looked up at Tseshya, in speechless astonishment; and the scholar nodded, grimly. ‘Within it, yes. So the man’s memory says. Within the walls of winter, its very heart and substance.’
Circles, the signs the scholar had used to indicate towns.
Vansha closed his eyes. ‘You tell me – they’re taking her into the Great Ice itself?’
Alya flung his hands wide. ‘Where else? Should that stop us trying? At least we know now where we’re headed, my friends. Do we not?’
Once again, very lightly, he tapped the map.
CHAPTER 7
Children of Powers
SAVI woke, as always, with a start. Her dreams had been bad; and that too was usual. The straw in the wagon was flattened and stale, no longer even slightly comfortable, crawling with vermin, stinking of bodies too little washed, and of worse than that: of despair. Since the barge had landed them again they had moved away from the river into low hills, with only small streams, and both these and the weather generally had become too cold to allow all but the most perfunctory wash. Some of the girls had let themselves go, sinking into despondency and inaction, caring no longer about themselves or each other.
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