TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

by Janny Wurts

  With his bandaged hand cradled in the crook of his left elbow, Arithon firmed his tired grip on the reins. 'Bear up, little brothers.' He used voice to coax the recalcitrant horses and prayed he would not have to goad them. The buckskin released a long-suffering sigh, then yielded a molasses step forward. The packhorse complied out of ingrained habit, its flagging stride muffled amid pristine snowdrifts.

  Arithon broke the ground before them on foot, prodded by bald-faced urgency. The wound in his hand languished in sore neglect. The angry, stinging pain of fresh injury had long since progressed to the pounding throb of edema. His stopgap field bandage was dirtied and blood-soaked, frayed the more ragged each time he bent to chip the balled ice packed in the horses' shod hooves. No wound fared well under such constant usage. He had lost the immediate, opportune chance to flush the clean puncture with spirits. Warned by the onset of harsh, fevered heat, and swelling that strained at the dressing, he fretted. Inflammation would have already set in. Arithon fought the blind urge to curse fate. His hands shaped his Masterbard's skill on the lyranthe. At the earliest moment, he must draw the infection with infusions of heat and strong poultices.

  He cajoled the horses across the next ridge. Unfolded beyond lay the glacial scar of another rock-strewn valley. The space was too open, as evinced by the circling flight of a hawk, and the indignant chitters of a red squirrel startled to rage by his trespass. Overhead, the sky shone lucent turquoise, serrated by the snowcapped boughs of rank upon rank of tall fir trees. Game was not scarce. Arithon noted the lock-stitched tracks of hare. Later, he flushed an antlered stag. Beside the black current of another mountain freshet, he carved a parallel course with the pug marks left by a khetienn, the compact, northern leopard that hunted the deep wilds of Rathain.

  The drifts on the bank lay piled waist deep. Forced to carve a tortured course back to the high ground, where the north gusts flayed off the snow cover, Arithon winced to the report of shod hooves clanging over bare granite. He cast a sharp glance down his back trail. Although he detected no sign of pursuit, he dared not bide in complacency. His narrow lead must be carefully hoarded, each hour snatched from the jaws of adversity his margin for rest and recovery.

  Noon found him atop a raked notch in the foothills. The frigid air knifed his laboring lungs, and the geldings, heads drooping, puffed beside him. The vista ahead showed no promise of surcease. Downslope, and northwest, the land sheared away into weathered ledges of rimrock. The disused Baiyen trail that the centaurs had built hugged the scarp, a narrow ribbon cut into forbidding, black granite. The firs clung in pruned patches, culled by ice and storms until their whipped trunks jabbed the slopes like stuck needles. Sun sheened the drifts to pearlescent silk. Defined by the altitude's rarefied clarity, a deer could not move unseen by the eyes of a hunter.

  Shivering against the cut of the breeze, Arithon searched to find a descent with some semblance of trustworthy footing. He could ill afford a turned ankle himself, far less risk laming the horses. Exhaustion had slowed his reflexes to poured lead. The smallest misstep might trip him. Unable to find a secure passage down, he veered westward, a moving target framed by clear sky, with the shod horses slipping and scrambling over the weather-stripped slabs of worn bedrock.

  Two arduous hours later, he traversed a ravine bordered with lopsided hemlock. He picked his way, gasping with pain each time the horses jerked on the reins to snatch for a mouthful of forage. The needles were poison, and would induce colic. Yet the demand of their empty bellies overrode the precaution of instinct.

  Beneath jutting rock, striped in the shadow of a spindly stand of birch, Arithon stopped. He broached the supply packs and scrounged out the nose bags, then measured a sparing ration of grain. The horses munched. He took stock, perils and assets, while the sun dipped in the sky to the west, and a quilting of shade crept across the timbered valley. Daylight waned strikingly fast in the high country. Already the wind gained an edge. Under darkness, the gusts turned unbearably bitter. Though to choose the sure route down the Baiyen trail would leave tracks for oncoming patrols, Arithon bowed to necessity. He had to find shelter before sundown. None would be found in this vista of steep cliffs and raked scree, which harbored no shred of ground cover.

  A zigzagged descent down a snow-clad embankment disgorged horses and rider onto the ancient, shored causeway that traversed the Skyshiels to Daon Ramon. Here, the incessant blast of the wind had mercifully raked off the drifts. Arithon turned northwestward, the dry-packed snow squealing under his boot soles. The geldings followed, lackluster. Lathered sweat crusted their coats into whorls. Necks to hindquarters, they would have to be curried to free their thick guard hairs for warmth. Yet concern for that added burden of care must give way before the vast grandeur that opened ahead: the swept crown of rock held a mythic weight, instilled in all works wrought by Athera's blessed races.

  Despite the worn state of man and beast, the old Baiyen way stood as a monument to evoke awe.

  The trail, with its slope in graceful incline, had been a life artery through two prior Ages of history. Each massive, fitted block underfoot had been laid by Ilitharis Paravians. Their artistry still withstood the battering elements, bulwarked by the awareness of stone wakened to perpetual service. Too narrow to bear the wagons and teams that were the province of man, the stepped ledge had provided First Age Paravian war bands swift passage when marauding packs of Khadrim had made their lairs in the Skyshiels. By fire and sword, drake spawn and Paravian had waged battles over the causeway. At solstice and equinox, when lane tides ran highest, the fallen still danced in perpetual combat. Their haunts could be seen by those born with talent, silent and silver under the frost flood of moonlight. Here and there, tumbled fissures of slagged rock showed where the balefires of Khadrim had melted glassine scars in sheer granite.

  Man's footsteps had never trodden here freely. When the Fellowship's compact had been sworn to answer humanity's plea to claim sanctuary, none walked where the old races forbade them, except by strict courtesy and permission. A man broke that law at risk of his sanity, Paravian presence being too bright to bear for those families whose heritage lay outside clan bloodlines. The needs of town trade had been negotiated by the long-past generations of clan chieftains, the old rights of way drawn by Paravian law into harmony with sky and earth. The sites which seated the mysteries stayed reserved in perpetuity.

  Baiyen Gap was one of those crossings held sacrosanct, even after the uprising broke charter law, and the town trade guilds ran roughshod over the established tradition of way rights. The Fellowship of Seven still enforced the strict ban against road building, despite fierce opposition, and round upon round of hot argument. Nor was the old law forgotten in the deepest wilds, where the imprint of the mysteries still lingered and centaur guardians had not taken kindly to trespass.

  Arithon s'Ffalenn had little to fear, whatever the road's haunted status. By right of blood, his granted sanction as Rathain's crown prince set him as spokesman for mankind's chartered rights on the land. Wherever he walked, if he honored the old ways, the past centaur guardians would have granted him passage. He could but hope, as he set foot on the path of his ancestors, that in his hour of need the enemies riding with Jaelot's town guard would not be shown the same license.

  The level footing allowed faster progress. No strange lights or haunts revisited to trouble him, or startle his flagging horses. The sheer wall of the cliff eased gradually into a milder grade crossing the broken scree slopes between mountains. Arithon traversed a succession of corries, each one thicketed in fir, and slotted with deer tracks where passing herds had paused to browse on the greenery.

  Lowering sunlight burnished the high peaks. As eventide shadow tinged the snow-clad hills to a ruckle of lavender silk, he entered a vale and broke the paned ice over a tumbling streamlet. Upland silence wrapped him in the spiced scent of balsam, while the horses sucked down bracing water. Prompted by the punched spoor of a mountain hare, Arithon hitched their reins to a deadfa
ll. A foray into the underbrush led him through the tumbled scar of a rockslide to a spring hidden within a dense copse of aspen. Fir saplings and dead briar cloaked the mouth of an oblate, scraped fissure that had once served Khadrim, and later, untold generations of wolves as a snug summer lair to raise young.

  'Blessed Ath,' Arithon gasped on a breath of sheer gratitude.

  He returned for the horses, then used the last hour before the light faded to sweep down the snow where his tracks left the Baiyen causeway. Twilight saw both geldings curried and fed, and a dead aspen limb chopped for fuel. The fire Arithon laid was economically small, hot enough to boil the water for remedies, but too scant to shed warmth for his body. He dared not risk the least presence of smoke to draw the attention of enemies. By the fragrant, low light of the embers, he shouldered the unpleasant task of attending his injured right hand.

  The puncture had bled and scabbed many times, until the dressing tied on in the field had to be soaked away. The wound underneath wept amid angry swelling, stuck with dirt and frayed threads. Sweating in discomfort, wrung from exhaustion and hunger, Arithon was trained healer enough to persist until the raw tissue was clean. As well, he realized he had been lucky. Fionn Areth's blade had grazed between the long bones. No tendons were severed, but the steel point had entered at an oblique angle and emerged above the heel of his hand. There, the leather-wrapped tang of Alithiel had stopped the thrust and prevented the blade from slicing disastrously home.

  Arithon heated the tip of his dagger red-hot, and made his best effort at cautery. The remedy came much too late, he well knew. Already the scarlet streaks of infection ran past his wrist, drawn by the veins in his forearm. The sepsis he dreaded had already set in. Dakar's forethought had provisioned the saddle packs with a stock of healer's simples. Arithon sorted the tied packets of herbs, haunted by memory of happier hours, when Elaira had taught him the art of their use in her cottage at Merior by the Sea. The pain in his heart surpassed without contest every hurt to his outraged flesh. He wondered where the next Koriani assignment would send her; then ached for the unendurable fact of her absence through the left-handed clumsiness of fashioning a poultice of drawing astringents. To goldenrod and black betony, he added wild thyme and tansy, whose virtues would help clear the sickness from traumatized tissues.

  The aftermath of the bandaging left him weakened and dizzy, the pain running through him in sucking waves that pressed him to the rim of unconsciousness. The call of that blissful, seductive darkness became all too powerfully inviting. There lay rest and peace, and the sublime balm of forgetfulness. In that hour of cold night, with the wind off the summits a whining hag's chorus, and body and mind half-unstrung, death almost wore the mask of a friend. The crossing promised oblivious freedom, and compassionate severance from care.

  'I have to refuse you,' Arithon said aloud, his words forced through gritted, locked teeth. Bone weary, driven close to delirium from hunger and lack of sleep, nonetheless he clung to commitment. A blood oath sworn to a Fellowship Sorcerer yet bound him this side of Fate's Wheel.

  That directive prodded him onto his feet, to paw through the packs for provender. He found black beans, which he set soaking in water. Dakar had also packed jerked beef, hard waybread, and a frozen rind of cheese. Although stress had undone inclination and appetite, Arithon wrapped himself in the damp folds of his cloak and pursued the chore of addressing survival and sustenance.

  He did not intend to fall short of that goal. But sleep stole in and captured him unaware. He drifted the dark spiral into oblivion with the jerked beef and bread scarcely touched between slackened hands.

  * * *

  Arithon wakened, untold hours later. His mouth and throat felt packed with dry cotton; his head whirled, on fire with fever. The coals he had used to heat water for poultice were long spent. Drafts sent by the moaning gusts off the peaks had swirled through and scattered the deadened ashes. Nor had the frail links of reason withstood the onslaught as wound sickness claimed him. He did not know who he was; only where. Rock and snow framed the prison where his mind ranged, propelled into dreadful nightmare. The dark and the cold themselves seemed unreal, a fretful presence at war with the forge flame that raked through his shivering limbs. If he raved, none heard but two horses whose forms the shadows remade into creatures outside the familiar.

  For hours, he saw faces, adrift in congealed blood: the dead cut down by his strategies at Tal Quorin, Vastmark and the Havens. Hands plucked at him, and whispers lamented the cut threads of lost lives. The haunts shed ghost tears, and multiplied into their legions of sad widows and fatherless children. Dead sailhands came, weed clad, out of the silted deeps of Minderl Bay. They sat at his side, weeping glittering brine and pointing bone fingers in eyeless remonstrance. Arithon addressed their silent condemnation, crying aloud for their pain. He left none of their questions unanswered, though his heart held no power to console them, nor had he the coin to purchase his own absolution. Unlike his half brother Lysaer, he claimed no grand principle; no moral truth; no lofty reason to account for the slaughter spun by Desh-thiere's curse. His apologies rang flat, and the tides of remorse ran in scouring agony straight through him.

  His voice cracked. His throat was too parched for the gift of his music, and the right hand that Halliron had trained to high art throbbed and burned, and jetted rank pus through soaked bandages.

  The darkness was ink and scalding misery, and finally, in a fevered, terror-filled hour, the night velvet of Dharkaron's cloak of judgment fell over him. Propped on one elbow, eyes wild and wide, Arithon faced down the ebony shaft of the Avenging Angel's Spear of Destiny.

  'You've come for me,' he scratched in a desperate whisper. 'I cannot go freely, bound as I am by blood oath to a Fellowship Sorcerer. I swore to live until all resource fails me.' He wheezed through the rags of a laugh, edged in metallic irony. 'If you would claim your due vengeance of me, you must fight. Since I have no sword and no knife at hand, for my part, the contest will end at one parry. Cast your great spear against my bare fists, and be done with this life's useless posturing.'

  But Dharkaron's image faded away with the unused spear still in hand. Arithon drifted in half-conscious solitude, while the winds whipped and screamed over the rock fists of the Skyshiels. Once, he opened crusted eyes and saw that the horses had broken their tethers. By sound distorted and magnified by illness, he realized they now wandered at large, browsing among the stripped trees. Thirst drove him to weak-kneed, staggering movement. He rekindled a fire with shaking fingers that could scarcely hold flint and striker. The flames melted fresh snow, which he drank. Runnels slopped down his stubbled chin, rinsing the soured salt of the sweat unwashed since his duel with Fionn Areth. Strength spent, Arithon collapsed in his cloak. In due time, sleep claimed him, ripping him open all over again as the ferocity of suppressed memories served up vengeful dreams.

  He wakened to sunshine that cut into vision like the steel blade of a knife. Facedown in cold snow, his limbs sweat-drenched and half-paralyzed, he found Elaira's name on his cracked lips. Behind closed eyes, he could see her, bronze hair unreeled in combed waves down her back, and her eyes the silvered, clear gray of wild sage as the leaves shed their dew of spring rainfall.

  'Beloved, don't weep,' he gasped. But her tears did not cease, falling and falling in empathic pain for his suffering.

  Her caring lent him the will to flounder back into the cave. He searched out the ruckled cloth of his cloak, sought refuge under its sheltering warmth, and fell unconscious before he stopped shivering.

  Lucidity returned, sealed in that ominous stillness that presaged severe winter weather. Arithon opened clogged eyes to awareness the fever had broken and left him weak as a baby. The storm scent in the air hackled his instincts to warning. Still alive through the gift of his body's resilience, he understood he had exhausted every last margin for error. Sapped as he was, he must strike a fire. Whatever the state of his sword-wounded hand, the re-dressing must wait for the more pressin
g priorities of bodily warmth and nourishment.

  He was too spent to stand. Dizziness racked him if he so much as propped on one elbow. Reduced to the struggles of a stricken animal, he crawled, belly down, to the supply packs. He scrounged out dry tinder. Striker and flint were cast willy-nilly on the ground, along with an uneaten portion of bread, and a scrap of jerked beef spiked with hoarfrost. The bucket of soaked beans had frozen solid through who knew how many days. Arithon gave up accounting for time. He passed out twice in the course of laying a straggling fire, concerned as his efforts consumed the last sticks of wood he had gathered the night of his arrival.

  The bucket of beans he thawed in the coals. He tossed the bread and meat in to soften and boil along with them, adding fresh snow to keep the gruel thin. Despite that precaution, his shrunken stomach nearly revolted. He closed his eyes, rested, his riled nerves wrapped in patience until the spasms of nausea subsided. Then he picked through the stock of simples, found peppermint leaves, and made a tea to settle his gut. Through the halting course of an afternoon, he managed in slow stages to feed himself. In cold-cast awareness, as warmth returned to his limbs, he knew he owed breathing life to the fact that Dakar had stocked the packhorse for every possible contingency.

  Outside, the horses still wandered at large. They had grazed off the tender twigs of the aspens, and now pawed for moss on the ledges. Arithon whistled them in, gave them rations of grain, then restored their halters and tethers. He knew he should also cut and haul wood, but that daunting task lay beyond him. Any effort to stand straight left him reeling. If he fell in the open, or mired in the snow, he might not have the resilience to drag himself back to the cave.

  The threatened storm still came on. Already, the clouds smoked over the passes. The dire, death stillness that presaged their arrival soon broke before an ominous north wind. That opening note would swell into a gale before the advent of nightfall. Arithon gathered the loose saddlecloths, his cloak, and every spare shred of clothing contained in the packs. There, also, Dakar's thorough care did not fail him. He found oiled-wool blankets, and a sheepskin jacket packed in cerecloth. Also a thick wax candle that could be used at need to heat water in a tin cup.