Wall of Shiuan com-2

by C. J. Cherryh

  Suddenly he realized that she would have trusted him to understand her obligations, to trust that she would do the rational, the necessary thing—and make for the one landmark in all this quaking marsh as soon as possible: the one place where all travelers met.

  The qujalin road. She would be there, confident that her ilin would be there, would follow if he could, knowing what she would do.

  He cursed himself: his driving fear was suddenly that she would have found the road before him, that in the night and the storm she would have gone on—that she might have saved one of the horses, while he was afoot, incapable of overtaking a rider.

  He reckoned by the flow of the current which way the road must lie, and walked, tearing his way through the brush on as straight a course as his strength could make him.

  He came upon the first stones at midmorning, and everything lay smooth as an unwritten page, no marks at all on the new sheet of mud laid by the flood, only the crooked trail of a serpent and the track of a lizard.

  He cast about with all his skill to find any smallest remnant of a track left during the ebb of the flood, and found nothing. Exhausted, he leaned against a low branch and wiped thickly mudded hands on his sodden breeches, trying to think clearly. There was such desperation welling up in him now, his best hope disappointed, that he could have cried his anger and grief aloud to the listening woods. But now that he thought it unlikely that she was nearby to hear, he could not even find the courage to call her name aloud, knowing that there would be silence.

  She was moving ahead of him, joining the road further on; or she was yet to come. The other possibility occurred this time with frightening force. He thrust it quickly from his mind.

  His one hope, that answered either eventuality, was to be at the place she sought, to reach Abarais as quickly as human strength could carry him and pray—if prayers were heard in this Hell, and for Morgaine—that she would either stay for him or overtake him. He would wait, if he reached Abarais, holding the Gate for her, against men, against Roh, against whatever threat, until she came or until he died.

  He gathered himself, fought dizziness as he did at each sudden move, coughed and felt a binding pain in his chest. His throat was raw. Fever burned in him. He had been ill on the run before, and then, with his kinsmen on his trail, it had been possible to sweat the fever out, to keep moving, relying on the horse’s strength to carry him.

  This time it was his own shaking limbs that must bear him, and the waters and the inhabitants of them waited for his fall below that dark surface.

  He walked a staggering course down the road, seeking some sign on the earth—and then he realized that he should leave one of his own, lest she take his track for Roh’s, and hang back. He tore a branch from a tree, snapped it and drove its two ends into the mud, a slanting sign that any who had ranged Andur-Kursh could read like the written word: Follow! And by it he wrote in the mud the name-glyph of clan Nhi.

  It would last until the waters rose again, which in this cursed land gave the life of the message to be short indeed; and with this in mind, he carried a stone from the paving of the buried road and cut a mark now and again upon a tree by the road.

  Every caution he had learned in two years of outlawry, fleeing clan Myya, cried out that he guided none but enemies at his back. Men lived in this land, and they were furtive and fearful and would not show themselves; and therefore there were things in this land that men should rightly fear.

  Nevertheless he held the center of the road, fearing more being missed than being found.

  And came the time that he ran out of strength, and what had been a tightness in his chest swelled and took his breath away. He sank down in his tracks and drew breath carefully, feeling after ribs that might well be cracked; and at times the haze came over his mind again. He found a time when he had not been aware what passed about him, and some moments later he was afoot and walking with no memory of how he had risen or how far he had come.

  There were many such gaps after that, periods when he did not know where he was going, but his body continued, obedient to necessity and guided by the road.

  At last he was faced with a gap in the road where a channel had cut through; he stared at it, and simply sank down on the slope at water’s edge, reckoning how likely he was to drown attempting it. And strength left him, the exhaustion of a night without sleep stretching him full-length on the muddy slope. He was cold. He ceased to care.

  A shadow fell over him, a whisper of cloth. He waked violently and struck out, seeing bare feet and a flash of brown skirt; and in the next moment a staff crashed into his arm—his head, if his arm had not been quick. He hurled himself at his attacker, mailed weight and inconsiderable flesh meeting: she went down, still trying for his face, and he backhanded the raking attack hard enough that it struck the side of her face. Jhirun. He realized it as her face came clear out of the shock of the attack.

  The blow had dazed her, much as he had restrained it at the last instant; and seeing her, who might know of Morgaine, he was overcome with fear that he had killed her. He gathered her up and shook at her in his desperation.

  “Where is she?” he asked, his voice an unrecognizable whisper; and Jhirun sobbed for breath and fought and protested again and again that she did not know.

  After a moment he came to his senses and realized the girl was beyond lying; fear was knotted in him so that he found it hard to relax his hands; he was shaking. And when he had let her go she collapsed on the muddy bank sobbing for breath.

  “I do not know, I do not know,” she kept saying through her tears. “I did not see her or the horses—nothing. I only swam and swam until I came out of the current, that is all.”

  He clutched this to him, the only hope that he could obtain, that he knew Morgaine could swim, armored though she was; and Jhirun had survived; and he had survived, who could not swim at all. He chose to hope, and stumbled to his feet, gathering up Jhirun’s abandoned staff. Then he began to seek the other side of the channel, using the staff to probe the shallowest way. It became waist-deep before it grew shallow again, and he climbed out on the other side, with the staff to help him on the slope.

  A splash sounded behind him. He turned, saw Jhirun wading the channel with her skirts a sodden flower about her. Almost the depth became too much for her, but she struggled across the current, panting and exhausted as she reached the bank and began to climb.

  “Go back,” he said harshly. “I am going on from here. Go home, wherever that is, and count yourself fortunate.”

  She struggled further up the bank. Her face, already bruised, had a fresh redness across the brow: his arm had done that. Her hair hung in spiritless tangles. She reached the crest and shook the hair back over her shoulders.

  “I am going to Shiuan,” she said, her chin trembling. “Go where you like. This is my road.”

  He looked into her tear-glazed eyes, hating her intrusion, half desiring it, for he was lost and desperate, and the silence and the rush of water were like to drive a man mad. “If Abarais lies in Shiuan,” he said, “I am going that way. But I will not wait for you.”

  “Nor for her?”

  “She will come,” he said; and was possessed by the need for haste, and turned and began to walk. The staff made walking easier on the broken pavings, and he did not give it up, caring little whether Jhirun needed it or no. She walked barefoot, limping; but the pain of his own feet, rubbed raw by watersoaked boots that were never meant for walking, was likely worse, and somewhere in the night he had wrenched his ankle. He gave her no hand to help her; he was in pain and desperate, and during the long walk he kept thinking that she had no reason whatever to wish him well. If he left her, she could find him in his sleep eventually and succeed at what she had already tried; if he slept in her presence, she could do the same without the trouble of slipping up on him; and as for binding the child to some tree and leaving her in this flood-prone land, the thought shamed him, who had been dai-uyo, whose honor forbade dealing so eve
n with a man. At times he looked down on her, wishing her unborn; and when she looked up at him he was unnerved by the distracted look in her eyes. Mad, he thought, her own folk have cast her out because she is mad. What other manner of girl would be out on this road alone, following after a strange man?

  And came one of those times that he lost awareness, and wakened still walking, with no memory of what had happened. Panic rose in him, exhaustion weakening his legs so that he knew he could as well have fallen senseless in the road. Jhirun herself was weaving in her steps.

  “We shall rest,” he said in the ragged voice the cold had left him. He flung his arm about her, feeling at once her resistence to him, but he paid it no heed—drew her to the roadside where the roots of a tree provided a place less chill than earth or stone. She tried to thrust free, mistaking his intention; but he shook her, and sank down, holding her tightly against him. She shivered.

  “I shall not harm you,” he said. “Be still. Rest.” And with his arm about her so that he could sense any movement, he leaned his head against a gnarled root and shut his eyes, trying to take a little sleep, still fearing he would sleep too deeply.

  She remained quiet against him, the warmth of their bodies giving a welcome relief from the chill of wet garments; and in time she relaxed across him, her head on his shoulder. He slept, and wakened with a start that frightened an outcry from her.

  “Quiet,” he bade her. “Be still.” He had tightened his arm by reflex, relaxed it again, feeling a lassitude that for the moment was healing, in which all things, even terrible ones, seemed distant. She shut her eyes; he did the same, and wakened a second time to find her staring at him, her head on his chest, a regard disturbing in its fixedness. Her body, touching his, was tense, her arm that lay across him stiff, fist clenched. He moved his hand upon her back, more of discomfort than of intent, and felt her shiver.

  “Is there none,” he asked her, “who knows where you are or cares what becomes of you?”

  She did not answer. He realized how the question had sounded.

  “We should have sent you back,” he said.

  “I would not have gone.”

  He believed her. The determination in that small, hoarse voice was absolute. “Why?” he asked. “You say Hiuaj is drowning; but that is supposition. On this road, you may drown for certain.”

  “My sister has already drowned,” she said. “I am not going to.” A tremor passed through her, her eyes focused somewhere beyond him. “Hnoth is coming, and the moons, and the tides, and I do not want to see it again. I do not want to be in Hiuaj when it comes.”

  Her words disturbed him: he did not understand the sense of them, but they troubled him—this terror of the moons that he likewise shuddered to see aloft. “Is Shiuan better?” he asked. “You do not know. Perhaps it is worse.”

  “No.” Her eyes met his. “Shiuan is where the gold goes, where all the grain is grown; no one starves there, or has to work, like Barrowers do.”

  He doubted this, having seen Hiuaj, but he did not think it kind to reason with her delusion, when it was likely that neither of them would live to know the truth of it. “Why do not all the Hiua leave, then?” he asked. “Why do not all your folk do what you have done, and go?”

  She frowned, her eyes clouded. “I do not think they believe it will come, not to them; or perhaps they do not think it matters, when it is the end. The whole world will die, and the waters will have everything. But she—” The glitter returned to her eyes, a question trembling on her lips; he stayed silent, waiting, fearing a question he could not answer. “She has power over the Wells.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, for surely she had surmised that already.

  “And you?”

  He shrugged uncomfortably.

  “This land,” she said, “is strange to you.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “The Barrow-kings came so. They sang that there were great mountains beyond the Wells.”

  “In my land,” he said, remembering with pain, “there were such mountains.”

  ‘Take me to that place.” Her fist unclenched upon his heart; her eyes filled with such earnestness that it hurt to see it, and she trembled against him. He moved his hand upon her shoulders, wishing that what she asked were possible.

  “I am lost myself,” he said, “without Morgaine.”

  “You believe that she will come,” she said, “to Abarais, to the Well there.”

  He gave no reply, only a shrug, wishing that Jhirun knew less of them.

  “What has she come to do?” Jhirun asked it all in a breath, and he felt the tension in her body. “Why has she come?”

  She held some hope or fear he did not comprehend: he saw it in her eyes, that rested on his in such a gaze he could not break from it. She assumed that safety lay beyond the witchfires of the Gates; and perhaps for her, for all this land, it might seem to.

  “Ask Morgaine,” he said, “when we meet. As for me, I guard her back, and go where she goes; and I do not ask or answer questions of her.”

  “We call her Morgen,” said Jhirun, “and Angharan. My ancestors knew her—the Barrow-kings—they waited for her.”

  Cold passed through him. Witch, men called Morgaine in his own homeland. She was young, while three generations of men lived and passed to dust; and all that he knew of whence she came was that she had not been born of his kindred, in his land.

  When was this? he wanted to ask, and dared not. Was she alone then? She had not come alone to Andur-Kursh, but her comrades had perished there. Qujal, men called her; she avowed she was not. Legends accounted her immortal; he chose not to believe them all, nor to believe all the evil that was laid to her account and he asked her no questions.

  He had followed her, as others had, now dust. She spoke of time as an element like water or air, as if she could come and go within its flow, confounding nature.

  Panic coiled about his heart. He was not wont to let his mind travel in such directions. Morgaine had not known this land; he held that thought to him for comfort. She had needed to ask Jhirun the name and nature of the land, needing a guide.

  A guide, the thought ran at the depth of his mind, to this age, perhaps, as once in Andur she had been confounded by a forest that had grown since last she had ridden that path.

  “Come,” he said brusquely to Jhirun, beginning to sit up. “Come.” He used the staff to pull himself to his feet and drew her up by the hand, trying to shake off the thoughts that urged upon him.

  Jhirun did not let go his hand as they set out again upon the road; in time he grew weary of that and slipped his arm about her, aiding her steps, seeking by that human contact to keep his thoughts at bay.

  Jhirun seemed content in that, saying nothing, holding her own mind private; but there was a difference now in the look she cast up at him—hope, he realized with a pang of guilt, hope that he had lent her. She looked up at him often, and sometimes—unconscious habit, he thought—touched the necklace that she wore, that bore a cross, and objects that he did not know; or touched the center of her bodice, where rested that golden image that he had returned to her—a peasant girl, who possessed such a thing, a bit of gold strangely at variance with her rough dress and work-worn hands.

  My ancestors, she had said, the Barrow-kings.

  “Have you clan?” he asked her suddenly, startling her: her eyes gazed at him, wide.

  “We are Mija,” she said. “Ila died out. There is only Mija left.”

  Myya. Myya and Yla. His heart seemed to stop and to begin again, painfully. His hand fell from her shoulder, as he recalled Morija, and that clan that had been his own undoing, blood-enemy to him; and lost Yla, that had ruled Morija once, before the Nhi.

  “Myya Geraine Ela’s-daughter,” he murmured, giving her foreign name the accents of Erd, that lay among mountains her folk had almost forgotten.

  She looked at him, speechless, with her tangled hair and bruised face, barefoot, in a dress of coarsest wool. She did not understand him. Wh
atever anger there was between him and Myya, it had no part with Jhirun Ela’s-daughter; the blood-feud the Myya had with him carried no force here, against a woman, in the drowning wastes of Hiuaj.

  “Come,” he said again, and gathered her the more closely against his side, beginning to walk again. The clans were known for their natures: as Chya was impulsive and Nhi was stubborn, clan Myya was secretive and cold—of cruelty that had bided close to him all his life, for his half-brothers were Myya, and she who had mothered them, and not him.

  Myya hated well, and waited long for revenge; but he refused to think such things of Jhirun; she was a companion, on a road that was otherwise alien, and seemed endless, in a silence that otherwise was filled with the wind and the bubbling waters.

  There were things worse than an enemy. They lay about him.

  In the evening, with the light fading into streamers of gold and red, they walked a place where the marsh had widened and trees were few. Reeds grew beside the road, and great flocks of white birds flew up in alarmed clouds when they drew near. Serpents traced a crooked course through the stagnant pools and stirred the reeds.

  And Vanye looked at the birds that taunted them and swore in desire, for hunger was a gnawing pain in his belly.

  “Give me a strip of leather,” Jhirun asked of him while they walked; and in curiosity he did so, unlacing one of the thongs the ring at his belt held for use on harness. He watched while her strong fingers knotted it this way and that, and understood as she bent to pick up a stone. He gave her a second strip to improve her handiwork, and the sling took shape.

  A long time they walked afterward, until the birds began to wing toward them; and of a sudden she whirled the sling and cast, a skilled shot. A bird fell from the sky; but it fell just beyond the reeds, and almost as it hit the water something rose out of the dark waters and snapped it up. Jhirun simply stood on the bank and looked so wretched that his heart went out to her.

  “Next time,” she said.

  But there were no more birds. Eventually, with night upon them, Jhirun pulled up a handful of reeds, and peeled them to the roots, and ate of this, offering one to him.