Wall of Shiuan com-2

by C. J. Cherryh

  “We are ready,” Morgaine said to her. “Vanye will take you up behind him.”

  “I can ride my own pony.”

  “Do as you are told.”

  Jhirun arose, scowling, started to come toward him. Morgaine reached to the back of her belt, a furtive move. Vanye saw, and dropped the saddlebag he had in hand.

  “No!” he cried.

  The motion was sudden, the girl walking, the sweep of Morgaine’s hand, the streak of red fire. Jhirun shrieked as it touched the tree beside her, and Vanye caught the gelding’s bridle as the animal shied up.

  Morgaine replaced the weapon at the back of her belt. Vanye drew a shaken breath, his hands calming the frightened horse. But Jhirun did not move at all, her feet braced in the preparation of a step never taken, her arms clenched about her bowed head.

  “Tell me again,” Morgaine said softly, very audibly, “that you do not know this land, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter.”

  Jhirun sank to her knees, her hands still clenched in her hair. “I have never been further than this down the road,” she said in a trembling voice. “I have heard, I have only heard that it leads to Shiuan, and that was before the flood. I do not know.”

  “Yet you travel it without food, without a cloak, without any preparation. You hunt and you fish. Will that keep you warm of nights? Why do you ride this road at all?”

  “Hiuaj is drowning,” Jhirun wept. “Since the Wells were closed and the Moon was broken, Hiuaj has been drowning, and it is coming soon. I do not want to drown.”

  Her mad words hung in the air, quiet amid the rush of wind, the restless stamp and blowing of the horses. Vanye blessed himself, the weight of the very sky pressing on his soul.

  “How long ago,” asked Morgaine, “did this drowning begin?”

  But Jhirun wiped at the tears that spilled onto her cheeks and seemed beyond answering sanely.

  “How long?” Morgaine repeated harshly.

  “A thousand years,” Jhirun said.

  Morgaine only stared at her a moment. “These Wells: a ring of stones, is that not your meaning? One overlooks the great river; and there will be yet another, northward, one master Well. Do you know it by name?”

  Jhirun nodded, her hands clenched upon the necklace that she wore, bits of sodden feather and metal and stone. She shivered visibly. “Abarais,” she answered faintly. “Abarais, in Shiuan. Dai-khal, dai-khal, I have told you all the truth, all that I know. I have told everything.”

  Morgaine frowned, and at last came near the girl, offering her hand to help her rise, but Jhirun shrank from it, weeping. “Come,” said Morgaine impatiently, “I will not harm you. Only do not trouble me; I have shown you that... and better that you see it now, than that you assume too far with us.”

  Jhirun would not take her hand. She struggled to her feet unaided, braced herself, her shawl clutched about her. Morgaine turned and gathered up Siptah’s reins, rose easily into the saddle.

  Vanye drew a whole breath at last, expelled softly. He left his horse standing and went to the fireside, gathered up his helmet and covered his head, lacing the leather coif at his throat. Last of all he paused to scatter the embers of their campfire.

  He heard a horse moving as he turned, recoiled as Siptah plunged across his path, Morgaine taut-reining him to an instant stop. He looked up, dismayed at the rage with which she looked at him.

  “Never,” she hissed softly, “never cry warning against me again.”

  “ Liyo,” he said, stricken to remember what he had done, the outcry he had made. “I am sorry; I did not expect—”

  “Thee does not know me, ilin. Thee does not know me half so well as thee trusts to.”

  The harshness chilled. For a moment he stared up at her in shock, fixed by that cold as Jhirun had been, unable to answer her.

  She spurred Siptah past him. He sought the pony’s tether, half blind with shame and anger, ripped it from its branch and tied it to his own horse’s saddle. “Come,” he bade Jhirun, struggling to keep anger from his voice, with her who had not deserved it. He rose into the saddle, cleared a stirrup for her, suddenly alarmed to see Morgaine leaving the clearing, a pale flash of Siptah’s body in the murk.

  Jhirun tried for the stirrup and could not reach it; he reached down in an agony of impatience, seized her arm and pulled, dragged her up so that she could throw her leg over and settle behind him.

  “Hold to me,” he ordered her, jerked her shy hands about his waist and laid spurs to the gelding, that started forward with a suddenness that must have hurt the pony. He pursued Morgaine’s path, only dimly aware of branches that raked his face in the passage. He fended them with his right hand and used the spurs a second time. One thing he saw, a pallor through the trees, fast opening a lead on him.

  Soul-bound: that was ilin–oath, and he had strained the terms between them. Morgaine’s loyalty lay elsewhere, to a thing he did not understand or want to know: wars of qujal, that had ruined kingdoms and toppled kings and made the name of Morgaine kri Chya a curse in the lands of men.

  She sought Gates, the witchfires that were passage between world and world, and sealed them after her, one and another and another. His world had changed, he had been born and grown to manhood between two beats of her heart, between two Gate-spanning strides of that gray horse. The day that he had given her his oath, a part of him had died, that sense of the commonplace that let ordinary men live, blind and numb to what terrible things passed about them. He belonged to Morgaine. He could not stay behind. For a stranger’s sake he had riven what peace had grown between them, and she would not bear it. It was that way with Morgaine, that he be with her entirely or be numbered among her enemies.

  The trees cut off all view; for a wild moment of terror he thought that in this wilderness he had lost her. She rode against time, time that divided her from Roh; from Gates, that could become a fearful weapon in skilled hands. She would not be stayed longer than flesh must rest—not for an hour, an instant. She had forced them through flood and against storm to bring them this far—all in the obsessive fear that Roh might be before them at the Master Gate, that ruled the other Gates of this sad land—when they had not even known beyond doubt that Roh had come this way.

  Now she did know.

  Jhirun’s arms clenched about him as they slid on the down-slope. The pony crashed into them with bruising force, and the gelding struggled up another ridge and gained the paved road, the pony laboring to keep the pace.

  And there to his relief he saw Morgaine. She had paused, a dim, pale figure on the road beneath the arch of barren trees. He raked the gelding with the spurs and rode to close the gap, reckless in their speed over the uncertain trail.

  Morgaine gazed into the shadows, and when he had reined in by her, she simply turned Siptah’s head and rode, sedately, on her way down the road, giving him her shoulder. He had expected nothing else; she owed him nothing.

  He rode, his face hot with anger, conscious of Jhirun’s witness. Jhirun’s arms were clenched about him, her head against his back. At last he realized how strained was her hold upon him, and he touched her tightly locked hands. “We are on safe ground now,” he said. “You can let go.”

  She was shivering. He felt it. “We are going to Shiuan,” she said.

  “Aye,” he said. “It seems that we are.”

  Thunder rolled overhead, making the horses skittish, and rain began to patter among the sparse leaves. The road lay in low places for a time, where the horses waded gingerly in shallow water. Eventually they passed out of the shadow of the trees and the overcast sun showed them a wide expanse where the road was the highest point and only landmark. Rain-pocked pools and sickly grasses stretched to left and right. In places the water overflowed the road, a fetid sheet of stagnant green, where dead brush had stopped the cleansing current.

  “Jhirun,” said Morgaine out of a long silence. “What is this land named?”

  “Hiuaj,” said Jhirun. “All the south is Hiuaj.”

  “Can
men still live here?”

  “Some do,” said Jhirun.

  “Why do we not see them?”

  There was long silence. “I do not know,” Jhirun said in a subdued voice. “Perhaps they are afraid. Also it is near Hnoth, and they will be moving to higher ground.”

  “Hnoth.”

  “It floods here,” Jhirun said, hardly audible. Vanye could not see her face. He felt the touch of her fingers on the cantle of the saddle, the shift of her grip, sensed how little she liked to be questioned by Morgaine.

  “Shiuan,” Vanye said. “What of that place?”

  “A wide land. They grow grain there, and there are great holds.”

  “Well-defended, then.”

  “They are powerful lords, and rich.”

  “Then it is well,” said Morgaine, “that we have you with us, is it not, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter? You do know this land after all.”

  “No,” Jhirun insisted at once. “No, lady. I can only tell you the things I have heard.”

  “How far does this marsh extend?”

  Jhirun’s fingers touched Vanye’s back, as if seeking help. “It grows,” she said. ‘The land shrinks. I remember the Shiua coming into Hiuaj. I think now it must be days across.”

  “The Shiua do not come now?”

  “I am not sure the road is open,” Jhirun said. “They do not come. But marshlanders trade with them.”

  Morgaine considered that, her gray eyes thoughtful and not entirely pleased. And in all their long riding she had no word save to Jhirun.

  By noon they had reached a place where trees grew green at a little distance from the road. The storm had blown over, giving them only a sprinkling of rain as it went, to spend its violence elsewhere. They drew off to rest briefly, on the margin where the current had made a bank at the side of the causeway, and where the grass grew lush and green, a rare spot of beauty in the stagnant desolation about them. The watery sun struggled in vain to pierce the haze, and a small moon was almost invisible in the sky.

  They let the horses graze and rest, and Morgaine parcelled out the last of their food, giving Jhirun a third share. But Jhirun took what she was given and drew away from them as far as the narrow strip of grass permitted; she sat gazing out across the marsh, preferring that dismal view, it seemed, and solitude.

  And still Morgaine had spoken no word. Vanye ate, sitting cross-legged on the bank beside her, finally having decided within himself that it was not anger that kept her silent now: Morgaine was given to such periods when she was lost in her own thoughts. Something weighed upon her mind, in which he thought he was far from welcome.

  “She,” Morgaine said suddenly, startling him, softly though she spoke, “was surely desperate to come this road alone. For fear of drowning, says she; Vanye, does it occur to thee to wonder why out of all the years of her life, she suddenly set out, with nothing in preparation?”

  “Roh can be persuasive,” he said.

  “The man is not Roh.”

  “Aye,” he said, disturbed in that lapse, avoiding her eyes.

  “And she speaks what we can understand, albeit the accent is thick. I would I knew whence she comes, Vanye. She surely did not have her birth from the earth and the fog yesterday noon.”

  “I think,” he said, gazing off in the direction Jhirun stared, ahead, where the forest closed in again, great trees overshadowing the road, “I think her folk are surely in that hold we passed, and Heaven grant they stay there.”

  “They may be looking for her.”

  “And we,” he said, “may come into trouble on her account, or what is more likely—she will meet it on ours. Liyo, I ask you earnestly, send her away—now, while she is near enough home she can find her way back.”

  “We are not taking her against her will.”

  “I suppose that we are not,” he agreed, not happily. “But we are on a track they cannot mistake.”

  “The horses do confine us to the roadway,” she said, “and this land has shown us one fellow-traveller, and not a breath of others. It occurs to me, Roh being ahead of us, it would be simple for folk hereabouts to choose some place of meeting to their advantage. I do think I saw a shadow move this morning, before you came down the trail.”

  Cold settled about him—and self-anger; he remembered his reckless ride, how she had turned her back to him and stayed silent when he had joined her. He had taken it for rebuff. “Your sight was clearer than mine,” he said. “I was blind to it.”

  “A trick of the light, perhaps. I was not sure.”

  “No,” he said. “I have never known you prone to visions, liyo. I would you could have given me some sign.”

  “It did not seem good then to discuss it,” she said, “nor later, with our guest at your back. Mind, she met us either by design or by chance. If by design, then she has allies—Roh himself, it may be—and if by chance, why, then, she feels herself equal to this ugly land, and she is not delicate. Mind thy back in either case; thee is too good-hearted.”

  He considered this, which he knew for good sense, and he was ashamed. In all the time that they had ridden this land, he had felt himself lost, had forgotten every lesson of survival he had learned of his own land, as if any place of earth and stone could be utterly different. Blind and deaf he had ridden, like a man shaken from his senses; and little good he had been to her. She had reason for her anger.

  “Back there,” he said, “this morning: I was startled, or I would not have cried out.”

  “No more of it.”

  “ Liyo, I take oath it was not a thing I would have done; I was surprised; I did not reckon—I could not believe that you would do murder.”

  “Does that matter?” she asked. “Thee will not appoint thyself my conscience, Nhi Vanye. Thee is not qualified. And thee is not entitled.”

  The horses moved, quietly grazing. Water sighed under the wind. His pulse dimmed awareness of all else; even the blood seemed dammed up in him, a beating of anger in his veins. He met her pale eyes without intending to; he did not like to look at them when she had this mood on her.

  “Aye,” he said after a moment.

  She said nothing. It was not her custom to argue; and this was the measure of her arrogance, that she disputed with no one, not even with him, who had given her more than his oath. Still one recourse he had with her: he bowed, head upon his hands, to the earth, and sat back, and gave her cold formality, the letter of the ilin–oath she had invoked. She hated to be answered back; and he did it so that she was left with nothing to say, and no argument.

  Her frown darkened. She cast a stone into the water, and suddenly arose and gathered up Siptah’s reins, hurled herself to the saddle. She waited, anger in the set of her jaw.

  He stood up and took the reins of his own gelding, the black pony still tethered to the saddle-ring; and he averted his eyes from Morgaine and rose into the saddle, reined over to Jhirun, who waited on the bank.

  “Come,” he said to her, “either with me or on the pony, whichever pleases you.”

  Jhirun looked up at him, her poor bruised face haggard with exhaustion, and without a word she held up her hand to be drawn up behind him. He had not thought she would choose so; he had wished that she would not, but he saw that she was nearly spent. He smothered the rage that was still hammering in him, knowing the look on his face must be enough to frighten the girl, and he was gentle in drawing her up to sit behind him. But when she put her arms about him, preparing for their climb to the roadway, he suddenly remembered Morgaine’s advice and the Honor-blade that was at his belt. He removed it to the saddle-sheath at his knee, where her hands could not reach it.

  Then he turned the horse upslope, where Morgaine awaited him on the road. He expected her to ride ahead, scorning him, but she did not. She set Siptah to walking beside the gelding, knee to knee with him, though she did not look at him.

  It was tacit conciliation, he suspected. He gathered this knowledge to himself for comfort, but it was far down the road before there was a w
ord from her, when the cold shadow of the trees began to enfold them again.

  “My moods,” Morgaine said suddenly. “Forget them.”

  He looked at her, found nothing easy to say. He nodded, a carefully noncommittal gesture, for the words were painfully forced from her, and he did not think she wanted to discuss the matter. In truth, she owed him nothing, neither apology nor even humane treatment; that was the nature of ilin law; but that was not the way between them. Something troubled her, something heart-deep, and he wished that he could put a name to it.

  The strangeness of the land was wearing at them both, he decided; they were tired, and nerves were tautly strung. He felt in his own body the ache, the weight of mail that settled with malevolent cunning into the hollows of a man’s body, that galled flesh raw where there was the least fold in garments beneath. Therein lay reason enough of tempers; and she feared—feared Roh, feared ambush, feared things, he suspected uneasily, the like of which he did not imagine.

  “Aye,” he murmured at last, settling more easily into the saddle. “We are both tired, liyo. That is all.”

  She seemed content with that.

  And for many long hours they passed through land that was low and all the same, alternate tracts of cheerless, unhealthy forest and barren marsh, where the road was passable and in most places well above the water. Qujal–made, this road, Vanye reckoned to himself—wrought by ancient magics– qujalin works lasted, strange, immune to the ages that ate away at the works of men, some seeming ageless, while others crumbled away suddenly as if they had become infected with mortality. There was a time not so long ago when he would have sought any other road than this, that led them so well in the direction Morgaine sought: qujalin roads surely led to qujalin places—and surely such was this called Abarais, in Shiuan, which Morgaine sought.

  And better, far better, could they ride that way alone, unseen, unmarked by men. He felt Jhirun’s weight against his back, balancing his own, she seeming to sleep for brief periods. It was a warm and altogether unaccustomed sensation, the nearness of another being: ilin, outlaw, bastard motherless from birth, he could recall few moments that any had laid hands on him save in anger. He found it disturbing now, this so harmless burden against him, that weighed against him, and against his mind.