The Ages of Chaos

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Maura was blinking rapidly and looked as if she was about to cry. She said in an undertone, more to herself than Romilly, "I like this not at all, spying upon Rakhal's movements. I - I swore not to fight against him. But Lyondri has brought all this upon himself, for he too is oath-forsworn! After what he has done . . . kinsman or no . . ." and she broke off, pressing her lips tight together and saying, "Romy, will you fly first?"

  "But I know not what to do," Romilly said.

  "Yet you are hawkmistress . . ."

  "I know the sentry-birds, habits, diet and health," said Romilly, "I have not been schooled to their use in warfare. I do not know-"

  Maura looked startled, but quickly covered it, and Romilly was amazed; she is being polite to me? She said quietly, "You need only fly the bird and remain in rapport with her, seeing what she sees through her eyes. Ranald will make the link with you and so relay what you have seen to Carolin, so that he can spy out the land ahead and know what are Rakhal's movements in the land."

  The name sentry-birds suddenly made sense to her, she had never really thought about it before. She took Prudence from the block, loosing with one hand the knots which secured her jesses, and lifted her free; watched her soar high into the sky. She arranged her body carefully in the saddle, leaving a part of her consciousness ... a very small part ... to make certain she did not fall from the saddle, and then....

  . . . high into the sky, on long, strong winds, rising higher and higher. ...

  All of the land lay spread out below her, like a map. She could see the curve of water below, and was dimly aware of a presence within her mind, seeing what she saw through her link with the bird. Through this mind, which she recognized as Carolin's, she began to make sense out of what she saw, although this was very distant and almost unconscious . . . most of her was soaring with the bird, seeing with keen sharpness everything which lay below.

  . . . There the shores of Mirin Lake, and beyond that, Neskaya to the north, at the edge of the Kilghard Hills. And there . . . ah, Gods, another circle of blackness, not the scar of forest-fire, but where Rakhal's men have rained clingfire from the sky from their infernal flying machines! My people and they burn and die beneath Rakha's fires when it was given to me and I swore with my hand in the fires of Hali that I would protect them against all pillage and rapine while they were loyal to me, and for that loyalty they burn ...

  . . . Rakhal, as Aldones lives, I shall burn that hand from you with which you have sown disaster and death on my people . . . and Lyondri I shall hang like a common criminal for he has forfeited the right to a noble death; the life he now lives as Rakha's sower of death and suffering is more ignoble than death at the hands of the common hangman....

  Over the Kilghard Hills now, where the hills lie green with summer, and the resin-trees blaze in the sun ... there again a Tower rises . . . quickly, fly to the North, little bird, away from the spying eyes of Lyondri's own forsworn laranzu'in..

  And there they lie, Rakhal's armies, where I can march to the East and take them unawares, unless they can spy with eyes like mine . . . and I think there are no sentry-birds now except in the far Hellers. . . .

  Romilly heard the shrill crying of the bird as if from her own throat; the contact melted and for a moment she sat on her horse again, Carolin gone from her mind, Ranald Ridenow suddenly jolted out of contact, staring at her. She lurched in the saddle, swayed, and Maura said quietly, "Enough. Ruyven, your turn, I think. . . ."

  Romilly had not noticed; Ruyven had loosed Temperance at the same time as Prudence. Diligence, too, was gone from Maura's saddle. She saw Ruyven slump . . . as she had done? .. . and for an instant she was part of Ruyven/Ranald/Carolin flying in rapport with the bird, swooping low over the armies, something inside her counting . . .

  Horsemen and foot soldiers, so many . . . wagons of supplies, and archers, and . . . ah Gods . . . Evanda guard us, that smell I know, somewhere within their ranks they are again making clingfire . . .

  By sheer force of will Romilly tore herself, exhausted, from the rapport. She was not interested in the details of Rakhal's armies. She would rather not know; the horror she had felt in Ruyven's mind, or was it Carolin's, made her feel dizzy and sick. Spent, she collapsed in her saddle, almost asleep where she sat, weak, light-headed. She noticed at the edge of her consciousness that the sun was substantially lowered, almost at the edge of the horizon, and the light was dimming enough so that the great violet disk of Liriel could be seen rising from the eastern horizon, a few nights before its full. Her mouth was dry, and her head ached and throbbed as if a dozen tiny smiths were beating on their forge-anvils inside it.

  Darkness descended so swiftly that Romilly wondered if she had been asleep in her saddle; it seemed to her that one moment she looked on sunset and the next, on violet moonlight, with Liriel floating in the sky. As she came aware, she realized Ruyven was looking at her anxiously.

  "You're back?"

  "For some time," he said, surprised. "Here, the soldiers have food ready for you," He gestured, and she slid from her horse, aching in every muscle, her head throbbing. She did not see Maura at all. Ranald Ridenow came and said, "Lean on me, if you wish, Swordswoman," but she straightened herself proudly.

  "Thank you, I can walk," she said, and Ruyven came and motioned her to sit beside them on the grass. She protested "The birds-"

  "Have been seen to; Maura did it when she saw the state you were in," he said. "Eat."

  "I'm not hungry," she said, shrugging it off, and rose swiftly to her feet. "I had better see to Prudence-"

  "I tell you, Maura has the birds and they are perfectly all right," Ruyven said impatiently, and thrust a block of sticky dried fruit into her hand. "Eat this."

  She took a bite of it and put it aside with a grimace. She knew that if she swallowed it she would be sick. From somewhere her little tent had been put up, the one she shared with Maura, and she shoved into it, aware from somewhere of Ranald Ridenow's face, white and staring, troubled. Why should he care? She flung herself down on her pallet in. the tent and fell over the edge of a dark cliff of sleep.

  She knew she had not really wakened, because she could somehow see through the walls of the tent to where her sleeping body lay, all thin like gauze so that she could see through it to beating heart and pulsing veins. She waved a hand and the heart speeded up its beat slightly and the veins began to go in swirling circles. Then she flew away and left it behind her, rising over plains and hills, flying far away on long, strong wings toward the Hellers. Ice cliffs rose before her, and beyond them she could see the walls of a city, and a woman standing on a high battlement, beckoning to her.

  Welcome home, dear sister, come here to us, come home...

  But she turned her back on them too, and flew onward, higher and higher, mountain peaks dropping away far below, as she flew past the violet disk ... no, it was a round ball, a sphere, a little world of its own, she had never thought of the moon as a world. Then a green one lay beneath her, and the peacock crescent of Kyrrdis, dark, lighted only at the rim by the red sun, which somehow was still shining at midnight. She flew on and on, until she left the blazing sun behind and it was only a star among other stars, and she was looking down from somewhere on the world with four moons like a jeweled necklace, and someone said in her mind, Hali is the constellation of Taurus, and Hali the ancient Terran word for necklace in the Arabic tongue, but the words and the worlds were all meaningless to her; she dropped down, down slowly, and the great ship lay smashed against the lower peaks of the Kilghard Hills, and a Ghost wind blew across the peaks . .. and a little prim voice in her mind remarked, racial memory has never been proven, for there are parts of the brain still inaccessible to science . . . and then she began to fly along the rim of the Hellers. But the glaciers were breathing their icy breath at her, and her wings were beginning to freeze, the dreadful cold was squeezing her heart, slowing the wing-strokes, and then one wing, hard like ice, broke and splintered, with a dreadful shock of pain in her
head and heart, and the other wing, white and frozen and stiff, would no longer beat, and she sank and sank, screaming....

  "Romilly! Romilly!" Lady Maura was softly slapping her cheeks. "Wake up! Wake up!"

  Romilly opened her eyes; there was a soft lantern-glow in the tent, but through it she was still freezing among the glaciers, and her wings were broken .. . she could feel the sharp jagged edges near her heart where they had shattered in the cold and splintered away....

  Maura gripped her hands with her own warm ones, and Romilly, confused, came back to her own body's awareness. She felt the unfamiliar, intrusive touch . . . somehow Maura was within her body, touching it with mental fingers, checking heart and breathing . . . she made a gesture of refusal, and Maura said gently, "Lie still, let me monitor you. Have you had many attacks of this kind of threshold sickness?"

  Romilly pushed her away. "I don't know what you're talking about; I had a bad dream, that is all. I must have been tired. I've never done that before with the birds, and it was exhausting. I suppose the leroni are accustomed to it."

  "I wish you would let me monitor you and be sure."

  "No, no. I'm all right.'' Romilly turned her back to the other woman and lay still, and after a moment Maura sighed and put out the lantern, and Romilly picked up a fragment of her thought, stubborn, but I should not intrude, she is no child, perhaps her brother . . . before she slept again, without dreams this time.

  In the morning she still had a headache, and the smell of the carrion for bird-food made her as queasy - she told herself impatiently - as if she were four months pregnant! Well, whatever ailed her, it was not that, for she was as virgin as any pledged leronis. Perhaps it was her woman's cycles coming on her - she had lost track, with the army coming and her intense work with Sunstar. Or perhaps she had eaten something that did not agree with her; certainly she had no mind for breakfast. After caring for the birds, she got into her saddle without enthusiasm; for the first time in her life she thought it might be rather pleasant to sit inside a house and sew or weave or even embroider.

  "But you have eaten nothing, Romilly," Ruyven protested.

  She shook her head. "I think I caught a chill yesterday, sitting so still after sunset in my saddle," she said. "I don't want anything."

  He surveyed her, she thought, as if she were Rael's age, and said, "Don't you know what it means when you cannot eat? Has Lady Maura monitored you?"

  It was not worth arguing about. She said sharply, "I will eat some bread in my saddle as we ride," and took the hunk of bread, smeared with honey, that he handed her. She ate a few bites and surreptitiously discarded it.

  Ranald was riding with the blank look Romilly knew enough, now, to associate with a telepath whose mind was elsewhere. At last he came out of it and said, "I should know how far it is to the main branch of the armies; Carolin will join with us sometime today, though they are some way behind us. Romilly, will you take your bird and see if you can spy out Carolin's armies, and see how far they are behind us?"

  She felt some alarm after her last experience with the flight with birds. Yet when she flung the bird in the air and followed it with her linked mind, she found that there was none of the disquieting disorientation; to her intense relief, it was only like flying Preciosa; she could see with a strange doubled sight, but that was all. The bird's sight, keener than her own a hundred times, told her that Carolin's armies lay half a day's ride behind where she rode with their little advance party, and she could sense, but with no sense of intrusion, that Ranald had picked up then: position and relayed it to Carolin himself.

  "We will camp here and wait for them," Maura said with authority, "We are all weary, and our hawkmistress needs rest."

  I should not let them pamper me. I do not want Ruyven, nor Orain, nor Carolin himself, to think that because I am a woman I must be favored. Orain will respect me if I am as competent as a man. ...

  Lord Ranald yawned. He said, "I too feel as if I had been dragged backward over a waterfall, after these days of hard riding. I shall be glad of the rest. And the birds need not be moved more." He gestured to the soldiers to set up the camp.

  Chapter Six

  Romilly knew the main army was approaching, not from what she heard - though, when she listened quietly, where she lay inside the tent she shared with Domna Maura, she could hear a soft distant sound in the very earth which she knew to be the noise of the great column of men on the march. But what really told her of Carolin's approach was a growing awareness within her mind, a sense of oneness, an approaching that she knew....

  Sunstar. Her mind was within and surrounded by the black stallion, it seemed that it was not on his but her back that the king rode, surrounded by his men, and for a moment her mind strayed to touch his too, to see Orain for a moment through his eyes, with love and warmth. Once she had seen them together, unguarded, wishing somehow that she had such a friend. Now she shared, for a moment, the quick unconscious touch between the king and his sworn man, something not sexual but deeper than that, a closeness which went back through their lives, mind and heart and somehow encompassed even a picture of their first meeting as young children, not yet in their fourth year ... all three dimensions of time as somehow she was aware of Sunstar as a colt running hi the hills of his native country....

  She jerked herself away from the extended contact and back into her own body, shocked and startled. She did not know what was happening, but she supposed it was some new dimension of her laran, opening of itself - what did she need, after all, of a Tower?

  But the first person who came to her, when she was working around the birds, picking up little tags and fringes of the sight-awareness she had known yesterday when she flew them, was Jandria. After the two Swordswomen had greeted one another with a hug, Jandria said, "We had your message through the birds; it was Himself who told me." Romilly remembered that this was always how she spoke of King Carolin when he was not actually present. "You are doing well, Romy. And I have permission from the Swordswomen here for you to go on sharing Lady Maura's tent, if you will. I will go and speak to her; we were girls together."

  Romilly held her peace - she had long known that Jandria was of higher rank than she had ever realized, though she had left it behind her when she took the oath of the Sisterhood. She turned her attention to the birds, though she could hear, with a tiny pang she recognized as jealousy, the two women talking behind her somewhere.

  And 1 have no friend, no lover, 1 am alone, done as any monk in his solitary cell in the ice caves of Nevarsin ... and wondered what she was thinking about, for even now her mind was filled with the awareness of the great stallion racing in the sun, and Carolin with him, riding....

  She made her reverence before she ever looked up at the king's face and then was not really sure whether she had bowed to Carolin or to Sunstar, his black mane disordered with the hill-country wind. Carolin slid from his back and greeted her graciously.

  "Swordswoman Romilly, I came myself to bring you my thanks for your message; you and your companions with the sentry-birds. We are to march tomorrow on Rakhal's armies and you and the laranzu must do this, for I have pledged to my kinswoman Maura that she need not take part in any battle against her kinsman." He smiled at her. "Come, child, you were not so tongue-tied when you rode with me to Nevarsin. You called me 'Uncle' then."

  Romilly blurted, "I did it in ignorance, sir. I meant no disrespect, I thought you were only Carlo of Blue Lake."

  "And so I am," said Carolin gently, "Carlo was my childhood nickname, as my little cousin is called Caryl. And my mother gave me the country estate called Blue Lake when I was a boy of fifteen. And if I was not what you thought me, why, neither were you, for I thought you a stable boy, some MacAran's bastard, and not a leronis, and now I find you."

  She remembered that he had seen her in boy's clothes, and she sensed that he had known her a girl quite soon, and for his own reasons had kept silent. That silence had allowed Orain to befriend her, and for that she was grateful. Sh
e said, "Your Majesty-"

  He waved that aside. "I stand on no ceremony with friends, Romilly, and I have not forgotten that if it had not been for you, I would have been the banshee's breakfast. So; you will fly the sentry-birds to keep my advisers ahead of Rakhal's - or Lyondri's - movements into battle?"

  She said, "I shall be honored, sir."

  "Good. Now I must speak with my kinswoman and relieve her fears," he said. "Dame Jandria, too, I think, still has enough love for Lyondri."

  "For what he was," said Jandria quietly, standing in the door of Maura's tent, "not for what he is, Carlo. It goes against me to raise my own hand to him, but I will not lift a single hand to hold back his fate. If I had laran enough, I would be among your leroni today, to hold back what he has become. If he still holds enough of what he was to know what he is now, he would pray for clean death."

  Maura's eyes were wet with tears. She said, "Carlo, I swore I would never raise hand or laran against my Hastur kin. I am Elhalyn, and they are blood of my blood. But like Jandria, I will not hinder you from what you must do, either." She went to the perch where Temperance sat and bent her head before the bird, and Romilly knew it was because she was crying.

  This war that sets brother against sister and father against son . . . what matters it which rogue sits on the throne or which greater rogue seeks to wrest it from him . . . ? she was not sure whether it was Ruyven's thought she heard, or whether her father spoke in her memory, for it seemed that time had no more existence....

  Carolin said, looking at them sadly, "Still, I swore to protect my people, even if I must protect them from the Hastur kin who are unmindful of that oath. I wish you could know how little I want Rakhal's throne, or how gladly would I cede it to him if only he would treat my people as a king must, respecting them and protecting them. . . ." But at seemed he spoke to himself, and afterward Romilly was not sure whether he had spoken aloud or if she had imagined it all. Her laran, it seemed, was playing strange tricks on her, it seemed as if her mind was too small to enclose everything that wanted to crowd into it, and she felt somehow stretched, violated, crammed with strangenesses, as if her head were bursting with it. She said to Carolin, "May I greet my good friend, your horse, my lord?"