'We won't leave it,' Kane called out. He went over to one of the packhorses and lifted off a waterskin. And emptying its contents on the ground, he went over to the stream, where he bent down to scoop into the skin handfuls of sandy mud. He laid the waterskin on the ground next to the firestone, and he used a rock from the stream to push the firestone point-first down into the opened neck of the mud-filled skin. We waited a while longer, and although the leather skin grew warm, it seemed that the firestone was not hot enough to burn through sand and consume its container. Kane stowed it back on the horse, and he said to Maram: 'If it gets any worse, it will burn the beast and not you.'
His assurance, however, did not console Maram, or any of the rest of us. Maram said, 'I always hoped that if I faced Morjin again, I might burn him with my stone's fire. But now I'm afraid he's coming to burn me.'
I was afraid of this, too. I began to sweat as a familiar and dreaded sensation stabbed through my spine into my belly. It was like being devoured inside by a ravenous snake.
Maram looked straight at me then, and so did Kane and Master Juwain. Bemossed did, too. His soft eyes filled with a grave knowing as he said to me, 'This poison that Morjin put in your blood burns you and bonds you to him, doesn't it, Valashu?'
'Yes,' I said, 'it does.'
Bemossed stepped up close to me; he set his hand upon the scar on my forehead as if to cool the fever that always tormented me. 'He is drawing nearer, now, isn't he?'
I nodded my head as everyone looked at me. I felt Morjin's desire to destroy me driving through my navel, even as the point of Maram's firestone had pierced Kane's waterskin. A terrible pressure inside me bruised my organs and built hotter and hotter.
'He has found me,' I said. 'Either he or his droghul.'
'Then let us ride,' Kane said, 'and see if we can reach the mountains before him.'
There was nothing to do then but mount our horses and try to outdistance the enemy I felt pursuing us. Whether this might be a single droghul hunting by himself or Morjin riding with Lord Mansarian and two hundred Red Capes, I could not say. Neither could I tell how far behind us they might be.
'All right,' I said to Kane, 'let us ride.'
And so we set out up the road leading north, toward the great, snowcapped peaks of the Crescent Mountains that shone in the distance many miles away.
Chapter 40
The horses' hooves beat a thudding tattoo against the earth as the trees along the narrow road flew by. I soon saw, however, that Bemossed could not hold this pace. Twice his foot popped out of his stirrup, which confused and angered his usually gentle horse. As we were bounding down a rough, turning stretch of road, he lost the reins altogether and in desperation threw his arms around Littlefoot's neck to hold on for his life. I called for a halt then. I waited while Bemossed collected his senses and his breath. I rode over to help him reposition himself and take up the reins again. Then I set forth at a slower pace.
I heard Maram mutter to Atara, 'Ah, but it's going to be a long day.'
For two hours we rode through the forest, until it gave out onto an expanse of farmland. The road turned toward the northwest; as the Khal Arrak lay to the northeast, we had to ride off the road to find little lanes between the fields and sometimes cut straight across them. More than one farmer shook his hoe at us and shouted curses at us for trampling his cabbages. I worried that we attracted too much attention. I felt our enemy drawing ever closer - even as the pressure inside me built ever more painful, and hotter and hotter.
'We must ride faster,' I turned to tell Bemossed. 'You must try.'
He nodded his head at this and said, 'It still seems wrong to burden this beast this way, but I will try.'
'Your horse is named Littlefoot,' I told him. 'And he is no beast but a great being who is proud to bear you. If you do your part, he will do his.'
He grasped his reins and patted Littlefoot's neck with a new resolve. And for the next hour of the day, beneath the hot noon sun, he managed to hold a canter without once losing his stirrups or reins.
And then we came into a torn, treeless country of poor soil that looked to have been overfarmed. Hesperus sometimes torrential rains had eroded the slopes of the hills rising up toward the mountains. We had to cross many gullies and slips of silt and stones. This demanded skillful horsemanship, but as we were riding over a particularly broken patch of ground, Bemossed clenched his reins too tightly and caused Littlefoot to whinny and rear up. He lost his balance then and flew off onto the ground. Although he took no injury from this fall, he barely managed to roll out of the way in a frantic effort to keep Uttlefoot's driving hooves from crushing him. After that, he did not want to ride anymore. I felt him, however, steeling himself to climb back into his saddle and master this difficult art.
Master Juwain, I saw, was having a hard time of things, too. The work of getting across the gullies caused him to gasp, as if drawing in breath was a strain. This surprised and worried me. He had always seemed to me as tough as tree bark. Even in the heights of the Nagarshath range of the White Mountains, where the air is the thinnest on earth, he had climbed up through a terrible terrain as if he possessed the lungs of a much younger man.
When we stopped by a stream to refill our waterskins, I saw him take out his green gelstei and stare at it. Then I finally understood. I said to him, 'It is Morjin, isn't it?'
He nodded his head, then gasped out, 'He has .. . found his way ... again... into this crystal.'
Maram came up and looked at it. 'I never felt a fire so terrible as that which came out of your stone when you tried to heal me. Morjin is burning you with it, isn't he?'
'No... it isn't like ... that,' Master Juwain said again. He waited to catch his breath. 'The varistei, I think ... is making my blood sick. Making it so that it can't... hold the air I breathe in.'
Liljana stepped over to look at the beautiful emerald crystal in his hand. She said, 'Then you must get rid of it.'
'I will,' Master Juwain said, closing his hand around his crystal. 'If things get worse, I will bury it.'
I did not want to pause any longer to hold an argument. None of us, I knew, would readily abandon his gelstei. I told myself that
if we could flee far enough from Morjin, he would lose whatever power he might be gaining over the stones.
'Let us ride,' I said. I looked at the mountains, now standing out sharply in stark gray and white lines perhaps only twenty-five miles away. 'Let us leave this dreadful country behind us.'
We set out again, and the terrain became even worse: rockier along the steeply cut slopes of the hills, and filled with dense vegetation in their troughs. Much grass grew here, and we saw a few herders grazing their sheep and goats upon it. But a tough, rubbery plant called hape also sprouted from the poor soil, in large patches through which the horses had a hard time driving their hooves. Littlefoot stumbled twice here, and I didn't know how Bemossed was able to keep from being thrown. Even Fire, the most surefooted of our horses, nearly broke her leg in a tangle of hape that concealed a rocky hole.
As the sun crossed the sky's zenith and began falling toward the west in a gout of yellow fire, the air grew stiller and hotter. We sweated and prayed for any hint of wind. I wondered if Estrella might be able to summon up a breeze. But this strong, sweet girl worked hard just to keep her horse moving forward. I listened as Master Juwain gasped and wheezed, and our horses snorted out froth into the blazing afternoon. My eyes burned as if someone had pushed me face-first into an oven. My heart burned, too, and my blood which pulsed through my aching veins. And with every mile we put behind us, I felt the hateful thing that pursued us drawing closer.
At the crest of one hape-covered rise, I called for a halt. I scanned the country behind us. A haze of heat and moisture steamed off the broken hills. I could not detect anyone riding over this ground; the only things that moved were a few dozen sheep a mile away. Kane, who had dismounted, lifted up his ear from a rock on the ground, and he shook his head. He murmured, 'Nothing
- not yet.'
'Atara?' I said, looking over to where she stood leaning against her horse. 'Can you see anything?'
The sickness that burned through her belly struck deep into my own. I felt smothered in a thick blackness, as if a great hand had pushed me down into a mass of stinking black mud. I saw Atara grasping at the pommel of her saddle with one hand, even as she clutched something close to her body with her other. And then she turned to show me her diamond-clear gelstei. She told me, 'I can see almost nothing - not the land which we ride over, or the hours of the rest of this day. There is only Morjin. He is here, inside this crystal. And he is here, in these hills, somewhere. He comes, Val - how quickly he comes!'
Bemossed moved over to help her mount her horse. I thought it strange that even totally blind, she could ride much more fluidly than he, as if she had become a living part of her fierce, beautiful mare.
We began moving again, north and east toward the break in the mountains called the Khal Arrak. Whenever we came up over a swell of ground, I looked for this pass in the folds and fissures of rock to the north. I could not quite make it out. Even so, I felt certain that we rode more or less straight toward it: my sense of dead-reckoning told me this was so. I tried to assure Maram that we were going the right way, and he made a joke of this, saying, 'I hope you're right, because if you don't reckon correctly, we're all dead.'
A short distance farther on the ground got better, with fewer rocks and hape plants, and more grass for grazing. There should have been many sheep in the hills hereabout, and shepherds, too. For three miles we saw none of these; however, we did come across half a dozen houses, crumbling and obviously abandoned. I wondered why everyone had left them.
Bemossed, exhausted, fairly teetered on top of his horse and said, 'I heard there was war in this district, and plague, too.'
'Oh, excellent!' Maram grumbled. 'A cursed land - and we have to ride straight through it. Is there no other way?'
I looked out at the hot green hills around us. Perhaps ten miles farther on, a band of darker green forest covered the rising ground leading up to the mountains.
'Hmmph, you'll be all right,' Atara said to Maram, joking with him. 'Just don't drink the water here, and try not to breathe the air.'
Liljana, upon hearing this, did not smile. She sat on top of her horse next to Daj as she combed her fingers through his thick hair, checking to see if he might have picked up any ticks or other vermin on our ride. Then she broke off her inspection and said,
'I wish that I did not have to breathe the same air as Morjin, anywhere on earth. He makes everything so foul.'
The unusual shrillness of her voice alarmed me, and I nudged Altaru over to her. We traded knowing looks, and I asked her. 'Has Morjin found his way into your gelstei, too?'
She nodded her head as she brought out her blue whale figurine. She looked at it hatefully. 'He slides himself into my mind, like a tapeworm! He is filth! He is an abomination who never should have been born! I can't tell you what he is saying to me - I can hardly tell myself.'
Her words alarmed not just me, but everyone. Kane rode over to her, and cast his eyes upon the blue gelstei. He shouted, 'Then it must be destroyed!'
'No, not yet,' Liljana murmured, closing her fingers around her crystal. 'I can still bear it.'
'Can you bear giving us away? If Morjin can see what you see, hear what you hear, then -'
'But he can't!'
'How do you know?'
'I just do. He wants only to madden me. He speaks and speaks to me, but he doesn't really know if I can hear him.'
'But how do we know that, eh?'
'How can you ask that? After all we've suffered together? Don't you know me?'
'But what if you're wrong, eh?'
Liljana thrust her hand inside her cloak as she glared at Kane. And she snapped at him, 'You'll just have to trust me!'
'So,' he growled as he glared back at her. 'So.'
Liljana usually spoke with care, so as not to upset the children with things that they didn't need to know. But now she cried out: 'It doesn't matter anyway! Morjin is tracking us, and not by my thoughts. He will run us down, and soon!'
'Did he tell you that?' I asked her.
'Yes!'
I looked up at the mountains, which seemed so close, and yet still too far away. I said to Liljana, 'Then he told you lies - we will escape him, again.'
'You tell yourself lies. We are riding so slowly.'
'Be quiet, woman!' Kane thundered at her. 'You worry more than Maram! And that's just what Morjin wants, eh? It's your damn gelstei! You should throw it away before I do!'
His large hands, it seemed, fairly trembled to rip open the folds of her cloak and seize her gelstei. And so I shouted at him: 'Kane! Morjin wants even more that we should start tearing at each other's throats!'
As I said this, the deep lines cut into his savage face smoothed out, and his eyes cooled, slightly. He turned away from Liljana. Then he brought out his black gelstei and sat on his horse staring at it.
'Damn Morjin!' he muttered. 'Damn his eyes! Damn his blood!'
He made a fist around his dark stone, and lifted his hand back behind his head as if making ready to hurl it from him. And then his whole body seemed to lose its strength. His arm fell to his side as he slumped in his saddle. He put his gelstei away. He turned to me to snarl out, 'Let's ride, damn it, while we still can!'
And so ride we did, trying to keep our hope fixed on the great rocky wall of mountains growing larger and larger in front of us. We pounded around and over grassy hills. Flies came out to bite us. Our sweat, like fire, burned in the little wounds the flies tore in our flesh.
And then we crested a good-sized hill, and the dark blanket of forest we sought for shade from the fierce sun and cover from our pursuers' eyes seemed almost close enough to touch. I thought that we might possibly reach it and vanish into its trees. Then I turned to scan the rolling ground behind us and a flash of white and red brightened the top of one of the hills. I squinted against the sun, and I could just make out a white horse bearing a bronze-armored warrior and his flowing red cape. Lord Mansarian. I remembered, rode a snow-white stallion. I knew this was he. His men galloped right behind him. There must have been at least two hundred knights of these Crimson Companies, pouring down the hillside like a stream of bronze and red. Somewhere in this frightful mass, I thought, rode priests of the Kallimun. I knew that their master rode with them as well - either he or the droghul of Morjin.
Seeing this, Maram sighed out, 'Ah, too many, too close - too bad.'
'No!' I said to him. 'We can escape them yet! Let's ride!'
I urged Altaru to a gallop; it gladdened my heart to see Bemossed push his gelding to match this pace. He and Littlefoot both seemed near to collapse, but they managed to negotiate the easy slope down the backside of the hill. Another and larger hill rose up before us. I led the way around it, through a broad, grassy trough, and I dared to hope that the sight of our enemy would inspire us to a speed great enough to leave them behind.
But it was not to be. Just as I rounded the hill, I came upon a stream cutting through a gully. Altaru jumped across it almost without breaking stride. Just as I turned in my saddle to warn Bemossed of this unexpected obstacle, though, he seized hold of Littlefoots reins in confusion. Littlefoot planted his hooves in the grass, stopping up short of the stream. Bemossed, completely unprepared for his horse's sudden balk, went flying headfirst from his saddle through the air. His momentum carried him clear across the stream, where he struck the ground with a sickening impact. He threw up his hands to protect his head, and I heard bones break. It was something of a miracle that Atara's horse and those of the children, following close behind him, managed to jump the stream without trampling him.
We all gathered around Bemossed near the edge of the gully and dismounted. Bemossed stood up bravely, holding his drooping arm in his hand. He winced in pain as Master Juwain quickly examined it, but did not utter even a murmur of complain
t
'Both bones in your forearm are broken,' Master Juwain announced. 'Not badly, I think, but they must be set. and your arm wrapped.'
'Not here!' Kane growled out. 'There is no time!'
'He can't ride like this,' Master Juwain said.
'He can hardly ride as it is,' Kane snapped. 'But ride he must.'
'All right,' I said. 'Then he'll ride with me.'
I mounted Altaru, and then helped Maram and Kane as they fairly flung Bemossed up onto Altaru's back behind me. I told Bemossed to wrap his good arm around my waist and to hold on tightly. Then I whispered to my great, black stallion, 'All right, old friend, you must run quickly now - quicker than you ever have before!'
Altaru, however, although the strongest of horses and a fury of speed over short distances, had never had the wind for long races. With Bemossed's weight added to mine, Altaru sprang forward with a great surge of determination that could not last very long. We galloped for a while over the lumpy, grassy ground. The breath snorted from his huge nostrils, and I felt an agony of fire building within the great, bunching muscles of his flanks and legs. I feared that he would run so hard that his heart might burst. I wanted to weep at the valor of this great-spirited being.
I heard the horses of my companions pounding after us and Bemossed's tormented breath exploding in my ear. I felt his arm tight around my belly, but trembling with the effort to keep holding on. I knew his strength was failing, as was Altaru's. After a couple of miles, my horse's pace slowed to barely a gallop. His whole body seemed to knot and quiver with a burning agony. I did not know how he kept on running.
We came out into a bowl of thick grass surrounded by hills, to its center stood an old cottage, or rather, its ruins. It had no roof and only three good walls: the fourth wall, facing us, had crumbled in places, and its doorway lacked a door. I pointed Altaru straight toward this hole in the wall's mortared stone. And Maram cried out in protest to me: 'What are you doing? The pass lies that way!' He pointed off past the right of the house. 'We won't make it - not this way!' I called back to him. 'We must make a stand, here.'
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