Wall of Shiuan com-2

by C. J. Cherryh

  She gathered herself to her feet, Changeling in her hand; but to his amazement she offered it to him, sheathed and crosswise.

  It never left her, never. By night she slept with that evil thing; she never walked from where it lay, not more than a room’s width before she turned and took it up again. When she rode, it was either under her knee on the gray horse’s saddle, or across her shoulders on her sword belt.

  He did not want even to touch it, but he took it and gathered it to him carefully; and she left him so, beside the fire. Perhaps, he thought, she was concerned that the warrior who guarded her sleep not do so unarmed; perhaps she had some subtler purpose, reminding him what governed her own choices. He considered this, watching her settle to sleep in that corner of the ruin where the stones still made an arch. She had their saddles for pillow and windbreak, the coarse saddle-blankets, unfolded, for a covering: he had lost his own cloak the same way he had lost his sword, else it would have been his cloak that was lent their injured prisoner, not hers. The consciousness of this vexed him. He had come to her with nothing that would have made their way easier, and borrowed upon what she had.

  Yet Morgaine trusted him. He knew how hard it was for her to allow another hand on Changeling, which was obsession with her; she need not have lent it, and did; and he did not know why. He was all too aware, in the long silence after she seemed to have fallen asleep, how clear a target the fire made him.

  Roh, if his hands retained any of their former skill, was a bowman of the Korish forests; and a Chya bowman was a shadow, a flitting ghost where there was cover. Likely too the girl Jhirun had kinsmen hereabouts seeking her, if Roh himself did not. And perhaps—Vanye’s shoulders prickled at the thought—Morgaine set a trap by means of that bright fire, disregarding his life and hers; she was capable of doing so, lending him her chiefest weapon to ease her conscience, knowing that this, at least, he could use.

  He rested the sword between his knees, the dragon-hilt against his heart, daring not so much as to lie down to ease the torment of the mail on his shoulders, for he was unbearably tired, and his eyes were heavy. He listened to the faint sounds of the horses grazing in the dark, reassured constantly by their soft stirrings. Nightsounds had begun, sounds much like home: the creak of frogs, the occasional splash of water as some denizen of the marsh hunted.

  And there was the matter of Jhirun, that Morgaine had set upon him.

  He tucked a chill hand to his belt, felt the rough surface of the Honor-blade’s hilt, wondering how Roh fared, wondering whether he were equally lost, equally afraid. The crackling of the fire at his side brought back other memories, of another fireside, of Ra-koris on a winter’s evening, of a refuge once offered him, when no other refuge existed: Roh, who had been willing to acknowledge kinship with an outlawed kin.

  He had been moved to love Roh once, Roh alone of all his kinsmen; an honest man and brave, Chya Roh i Chya. But the man he had known in Ra-koris was dead, and what possessed Roh’s shape now was qujal, ancient and deadly hostile.

  The Honor-blade was not for enemies, but the last resort of honor; Roh would have chosen that way, if he had had the chance. He had not. Within Gates, souls could be torn from bodies and man and man confounded, the living with the dying. Such was the evil that had taken Chya Roh; Roh was truly dead, and what survived in him wanted killing, for Roh’s sake.

  Vanye drew the blade partly from its sheath, touched that razor edge with gentle fingers, a tightness in his throat, wondering how, of all possessions that Roh might have lost, it had been this, that no warrior would choose to abandon.

  She has found you, the girl had said, mistaking them in their kinsmen’s resemblance. Are you not afraid?

  It occurred to him that Roh himself had feared Morgaine, loathed her, who had destroyed his ancestors and the power that had been Koris.

  But Roh was dead. Morgaine, who had witnessed it, had said that Roh was dead.

  Vanye clenched both hands about Changeling’s cold sheath, averted his eyes from the fire and saw Jhirun awake and staring at him.

  She had knowledge of Roh. Morgaine had left the matter to him, and he loathed what he had asked, realized it for what it truly was—that he did not want the answers.

  Suddenly the girl broke contact with his eyes, hurled herself to her feet and for the shadows.

  He sprang up and crossed the intervening distance before she could take more than two steps—seized her arm and set her down again on the cloak, Changeling safely out of her reach in the bend of his other arm. She struck him, a solid blow across the temple, and he shook her, angered. A second time she hit him, and this time he did hurt her, but she did not cry out—not a sound came from her but gasps for breath, when woman might have appealed to woman—not to Morgaine. He knew whom she feared most; and when she had stopped struggling he relaxed his grip, reckoning that she would not run now. She jerked free and stayed still, breathing hard.

  “Be still,” he whispered. “I shall not touch you. You will be wiser not to wake my lady.”

  Jhirun gathered Morgaine’s white cloak up about her shoulders, up to her chin. “Give me back my pony and my belongings,” she said. Her accent and her shivering together made her very difficult to understand. “Let me go. I swear I will tell no one. No one.”

  “I cannot,” he said. “Not without her leave. But we are not thieves.” He searched in his belt and found the gull-ornament, offering it. She snatched it, careful not even to touch his hand, and clenched it with the other hand under her chin. She continued to stare at him, fierce dark eyes glittering. In the firelight. The bruised cheek gave the left eye a shadow. “You are his cousin?” she asked. “And his enemy?”

  “In my house,” he said, “that is nothing unusual.”

  “He was kind to me.”

  He gave a sour twist of the lips. “You are fair to look upon, and I would hardly be surprised at that.”

  She flinched. The look of outrage in her eyes was like a physical rebuff, reminding him that even a peasant girl was born with honor, a distinction that he could not claim. She looked very young, frightened of him and of her circumstances. After a moment it was he that looked aside.

  “I beg pardon,” he said; and when she kept a long silence, still breathing as if she had been running: “How did you meet him, and when?”

  “Last night,” she said, words that filled him with relief, on many accounts. “He came to us, hurt, and my folk tried to rob and kill him. He was too quick for us. And he could have killed everyone, but he did not. And he was kind to me.” Her voice trembled on the word, insistent this time on being understood. “He went away without stealing anything, even though he was in need of everything. He only took what belonged to him, and what I gave him.”

  “He is dai-uyo,” he answered her. “A gentleman.”

  “A great lord.”

  “He has been that.”

  Her eyes reckoned him up and down and seemed perplexed. And what are you? he imagined her thoughts in that moment, hoping that she would not ask. The shame of his shorn hair, the meaning of the white scarf of the ilin–perhaps she understood, reckoning the difference between him and Chya Roh, highborn, cousin. He could not explain. Changeling rested across his knee; he was conscious of it as if it were a living thing: Morgaine’s forbidding presence, binding him to silence.

  “What will you do with him when you have found him?” Jhirun asked.

  “What would you have done?”

  She gathered her knees up within the fur and stared at him. She looked as if she were expecting him to strike her, as if she were prepared to bear that—for Roh’s sake.

  “What were you doing,” he asked her, “riding out here with no cloak and no food? You cannot have planned to go far.”

  “I am going to Shiuan,” she said. Her eyes brimmed with tears, but her jaw was set. “I am from the Barrow-hills, and I can hunt and fish and I had my pony—until you took him.”

  “How did you get the dagger?”

  “He
left it behind.”

  “It is an Honor-blade,” he said harshly. “A man would not so casually leave that behind.”

  “There was the fight,” she said in a low voice, “I was going to give it back when I found him. I was only going to use it until then.”

  ‘To gut fish.”

  She flinched from the spite in his voice. “Where is he?” he asked.

  “I do not know, I do not know. He said nothing. He only left.”

  Vanye stared at her, weighing her answers, and she edged back from him as if she did not like his expression. “Go to sleep,” he bade her suddenly, and rose and left her there, looking back nevertheless to be sure she did not make some rash bid to escape. She did not. He settled again on his stone by the fire, so that he could watch her. For a time she continued to stare at him through the flames; abruptly she flung herself down and hid herself in the cloak.

  He set his hands together on Changeling’s pommel, resting against it, all his peace destroyed by the things that she had said.

  He understood her loyalty to Roh, even as a stranger; he knew his cousin’s manner, that way of reaching for the heart of any who dealt with him—as once Roh had drawn him in spite of Roh’s other failings. It was painful to know that this aspect of the man was still intact, that he had his former gentleness, his honesty—all those graces that had been Chya Roh.

  But it was illusion. Nothing of Roh’s soul or essence could survive. Morgaine had said it, and therefore it was so. Return it to him, Morgaine bade him, arming him. He thought of racing Roh at weapons’ edge, and another nightmare returned to him, a courtyard in Morija—a flash of blades, a brother’s dying. Of that he was guilty. To destroy, to plunge home that blade when it was Roh’s face and voice, for this possibly he could prepare himself... But, O Heaven, he thought, sickness turning in him, if it should be more than outward seeming—

  He was kind to me, the girl had said. He went away without stealing anything, even though he was in need of everything.

  There was no kindness in the qujal, who had sought his life and taken Roh’s in its place, nothing so simple or so human as kindness, only sweet persuasiveness, the power to convince with seeming logic, to play on a man’s worst fears and darkest impulses and promise what he had no intention of giving.

  Nor was there honor—the manner of a high-clan warrior, a clan lord, who would not stoop to thievery, not even in great need: that was not the manner of the being who had lied and murdered and stolen through three generations of men, taking what he desired—even the body in which he lived. Generosity was unknown to him.

  That was not the qujal. It was the manner of Roh himself, Chya and more prideful than practical, the blood they both shared; it was Roh.

  “Vanye.”

  He spun toward the whisper, the tread upon leaves, heart frozen at the sight of the shadowy figure, even when he knew it was only Morgaine. He was embarrassed that he had not heard her moving, though she was herself adopted Chya, and walked silently enough when she chose; but the more he was disturbed for the thoughts in which she had come upon him—that betrayed his oath, while she trusted him.

  For a moment he felt that she read him. She shrugged then, and settled beside the fire. “I am not disposed to sleep,” she said.

  Distress, displeasure—with what, or whom, he could not tell; her eyes met his, disturbing him, striking fear into him. She was capable of irrationality.

  Knowing this, still he stayed with her; at such times he remembered that he was not the first who had done so—that she had far more of comrades’ blood to her account than that of enemies—that she had slain far more who had shared bread with her than ever she had of those she had wished to harm.

  Roh was one such that had crossed her path, and deserved pity for it; Vanye thought of Roh, and of himself, and in that instant there was a distance between himself and Morgaine. He thrust Roh from his mind.

  “Do we move on?” he asked her. It was a risk and he knew it, that she might seize upon it in her present mood; he saw that it tempted her sorely—but since he had offered, she was obliged to use reason.

  “We will move early,” she said. “Go rest.”

  He was glad of the dismissal, knowing her present mood; and his eyes burned with fatigue. He took the sword in his hands and gave it to her, anxious to be rid of it, sensing her distress to be parted from it. Perhaps, he thought, this had disturbed her sleep. She folded it into her arms and leaned forward to the fire, as if having it comforted her. “It has been quiet,” he said.

  “Good,” she answered, and before he could gather himself to his feet: “Vanye?”

  “Aye?” He settled back to his place, wanting, and not wanting, to share her thoughts, the things that had robbed her of sleep.

  “Did thee trust what she said?”

  She had heard then, listening to all that had passed. He was at once guiltily anxious, trying to remember what things he had said aloud and what he had held in his heart; and he glanced at Jhirun, who still slept, or pretended to. “I think it was the truth,” he said. “She is ignorant—of us, of everything that concerns us. Best we leave her in the morning.”

  “She will be safer in our company a time.”

  “No,” he protested. Things came to mind that he dared not say aloud, hurtful things, the reminder that their company had not been fortunate for others.

  “And we will be the safer for it,” she said, in a still voice that brooked no argument.

  “Aye,” he said, forcing the word. He felt a hollowness, a sense of foreboding so heavy that it made breath difficult.

  “Take your rest,” she said.

  He departed the warmth of the fire, sought the warm nest that she had quitted. When he lay down amid their gear and drew the coarse blankets over him, every muscle was taut and trembling.

  He wished that Ela’s-daughter had escaped them when she had run—or better still, that they had missed each other in the fog and never met.

  He shifted to his other side, and stared into the blind dark, remembering home, and other forests, knowing that he had entered an exile from which there was no return.

  The Gate behind them was sealed. The way lay forward from here, and it occurred to him with increasing unease that he did not know where he was going, that never again would he know where he was going.

  Morgaine, his arms, and a stolen Andurin horse: that comprised the world that he knew.

  And now there was Roh, and a child who had about her the foreboding of a world he did not want to know—his own burden, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter, for it was his impulse that had laid ambush for her, when by all other chances she might have ridden on her way.

  Chapter Five

  “Vanye.”

  He wakened to the grip of Morgaine’s hand on his arm, startled out of a sleep deeper than he was wont.

  “Get the horses,” she said. The wind was whipping fiercely at the swaying branches overhead, drawing her fair hair into a stream in the darkness. “It is close to dawn. I let you sleep as long as I could, but the weather is turning on us.”

  He murmured a response, arose, rubbing at his eyes. When he glanced at the sky he saw the north flashing with lightnings, beyond the restless trees. Wind sighed coldly through the leaves.

  Morgaine was already snatching up their blankets and folding them. For his part he left the ring of firelight and felt his way downslope among the stones of the ruins, across the narrow channel and up again to the rise where the horses were tethered. They snorted alarm at his coming, already uneasy at the weather; but Siptah recognized him and called softly—gray Siptah, gentler-mannered than his own Andurin gelding. He took the gray and Jhirun’s homely pony together and led them back the way he had come, up again into the ruins.

  Jhirun was awake. He saw her standing as he came into the firelight, opened his mouth to speak some gentle word to her; but Morgaine intervened, taking the horses. “I will tend them,” she said brusquely. “See to your own.”

  He hesitated,
looking beyond her shoulder to Jhirun’s frightened face, and felt a deep unease, leaving her to Morgaine’s charge; but there was no time for disputes, and there was no privacy for argument. He turned and plunged back into the shadows, making what haste he could, not knowing against what he was racing, the storm or Morgaine’s nature.

  Dawn was coming. He found the black gelding a shadow in a dark that was less than complete, although the boiling clouds held back the light. He freed the horse, hauled firmly on the cheekstrap as the ungentle beast nipped at him, then in his haste swung up bareback and rode back with halter alone, down across the stream and up again among the trees and the ruins.

  He was relieved to find Jhirun calmly sitting by the dying fire, wrapped in her brown shawl, eating a bit of bread. Morgaine was doing as she had said, tending to Siptah’s saddling; and she bore Changeling on her shoulder harness, as she would when she judged the situation less than secure.

  “I have told her that she is coming with us,” Morgaine said, as he alighted and flung the blanket up to the gelding’s back. He said nothing, unhappy in Morgaine’s intention. He bent and heaved the saddle up, settled it and reached under for the girth. “She seemed agreeable in the matter,” Morgaine said, seeming determined to draw some word from him on the subject.

  He gave attention to his work, avoiding her eyes. “At least,” he said, “she might ride double with me. She has a head wound. We might give her that grace—by your leave.”

  “As you will,” said Morgaine after a moment. She rolled her white cloak into its oiled-leather covering and tied it behind her saddle. With a jerk of the thongs she finished, and gathered up Siptah’s reins, leading the horse toward the fire, where Jhirun sat.

  Jhirun stopped eating, and sat there with the morsel forgotten in her two hands. Like something small and trapped she seemed, with her bruised eyes and bedraggled hair, but there was a hard glitter to those eyes nonetheless. Vanye watched in unease as Morgaine stopped before her.