High Couch of Silistra

by Janet Morris

  Then I rested while he worked briefly with Tyith. With the boy, he was very hard, sending the knife flying from the youth’s hand with his second stroke. With sword, also, he made short work of him. I thought it cruel, unworthy of the Seven of Arlet, to deal so harshly with the boy’s barely emergent skill.

  “Perhaps tomorrow you will be able to keep a better hold on your weapons.”

  Tyith said nothing and turned to fetch the threx.

  “He loves you so,” I objected when Tyith was out of earshot. “You could have given him, fairly, the courtesy you showed me.”

  “You do not have to make your living by the sword and your fitness to bear it. There is always someone to fight for you. He will have no help but that he can draw from within. With you it is play; I like to watch you move. With him it is chaldra. Never will I be easy with him. Easy is not what a Slayer’s life is about. Perhaps, someday, he will be able to knock the knife from my hand on the second stroke. When he can, he will. Until then, it is necessary for both of us to know that he cannot.” His eyes were hard. Sereth of Arlet did not like criticism.

  I shrugged and turned from him to help Tyith with the threx, reminding myself of the low worth of words. I had found it served me better to keep silent, especially with this man. I had been foolish to break my custom.

  We harnessed and mounted and returned to the Morrltan road in silence. Issa, as usual, would not suffer being second, so Sereth and I rode abreast, with Wirin and Tyith bringing up the rear. The road became dirt-and-stone path, the fields scarce, forest thickened. We began to climb, the threx scrambling up what was now only rocky trail. Once, Wirin stumbled and almost fell. Sereth checked his tri-shod front foot and determined that the mid-shoe was loose, and so we walked them slowly toward Morrlta proper, where we could perhaps have the nails redriven. We arrived, well past dusk, under a rising gibbous moon, at the outskirts of Morrlta, the pelter town that had its few crude log buildings at the Sabembe’s very feet.

  We did not go into Morrlta, but stopped at a group of four low wooden shacks perhaps five neras from town. Sereth, somehow, determined that we would be safer in the tiny, ill-lit room he bought from the grizzled innkeeper than in the Morrltan town, where one could have found at least indoor plumbing.

  We ate greasy, overcooked stew, binnirin bread, and bad kifra, which was served us by one of the innkeeper’s coin girls. There were perhaps a dozen others, pelters and mountain men, loud and drunken, who took a meal at one of the other hand-hewn tables. One grabbed the coin girl who served us, a light-haired, fair-skinned girl with four digits on each hand, as she came toward us to serve kifra. The pitcher dropped from her grasp and smashed on the dirt floor.

  Tyith was on his feet, sword drawn, before Sereth could stop him. The Seven slid from his seat and touched the boy’s shoulder. Tyith shook him off.

  “Let her go,” the youth said loudly. I saw Sereth’s hand go to his hilt. He did not, however, draw his blade.

  One could have sliced the silence. The bearded pelter who had the blond coin girl on his lap looked Tyith slowly up and down, then his father, a pace behind.

  “Did you want her for the night, Slayer?” He smiled, revealing broken teeth.

  Sereth had his knife in hand now, cleaning his nails.

  “I think you have a heavy hand, pelter,” said Tyith, “and, yes, perhaps I do want her. But whether I do or not, you should certainly offer to pay for that pitcher, and take your hands off her, for she was serving us. You, I believe, have another server.”

  The bearded, swarthy pelter stared hard at Sereth, and me, who had come up beside him. He released the girl, who darted back toward the bar.

  The man shrugged and picked his teeth, leaning on the table, both hands in clear sight.

  “I need no trouble with Slayers this early in the season,” he said with a canny look. I could feel the tension ease. “She is bony, anyhow.” He turned his back to us. He had not acceded to Tyith’s demand that he pay for the kifra. Chairs scraped as his companions relaxed, and they bent their heads over their drinks.

  Tyith stood for a moment, as if he would push the matter. Sereth put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and spoke to him in a low voice.

  I took my seat, and Sereth, before doing the same, took from his pouch some gold dippars and gave them to Tyith.

  “I think perhaps you should use those on that girl, if you would risk your life for her,” he said to the boy, and turned toward me.

  “We should get an early start. I will be with the shoer an hour before first light.” We rose, and Sereth left a half-dippar amid the remains of the meal. He had well-tipped the four-fingered girl.

  “Try to stay out of trouble, and be at the stall before the shoer, with Wirin in good order,” he said to Tyith, with his hand on the back of the boy’s neck.

  Thus we spent the night in the filthy, ill-lit room, on a feather-stuffed pallet set on a web-cloth grille, which sank toward the middle and creaked when one moved, with the strain of web against the wooden frame.

  “There are bugs in this place,” I complained. “I can feel them. I cannot sleep here.” I twitched and itched, just thinking about it.

  “There are bugs in the open, also. They do not bother you unduly. What difference a bug on the ground, or a bug on the couch? Take off your clothes.”

  I did, and climbed with much distaste between the damp-smelling covers. Sereth brought my knife and his with him, sliding his by the blade between pallet and frame. He handed me mine, and I did the same.

  Sometime later, when I lay, unable to move, drained in mind and body, panting and sweat-dampened atop the rumpled and wadded covers, Sereth rose and slapped my rump smartly, going with blade in hand to check the door. Whatever he had heard, I had not.

  “Bounce,” he hissed. I bounced and thrashed, and he jerked the door violently open. There was no one there. I lay silent, listening. I heard Sereth’s footsteps up and down the hall.

  He reentered the room, shaking his head.

  “Nothing,” he said, closing the door and throwing the bolt. “But either I heard footsteps, or my ears lie to me.” He went to the shuttered window and opened it, letting in the risen moon and the clear, starry night.

  When he had finished at the window, he left it open and roughly pulled from under me the covers, spreading them over me, and climbing between. I took no notice. When he had opened the shutters, I had seen, clear and sharp, hovering in the moonlight, a cowled figure, wrapped in shadow, peering in at me from its perch in midair. Within the shadow I could see only eyes, burning, pulsing bronze. But Sereth had not seen. He had calmly relieved himself at the window and come to couch. It had been so real that the reality of the room within which I lay had become dwarfed, overshadowed by the cowled one’s presence.

  I said nothing, but it was long before I slept, before my heavy lids closed of their own accord, blocking the peaceful night sky from my view. In my dreams, the apparition reappeared, amid a sliding time-scape, calling me out from an ice-silvered peak. I tried to resist, but the ground under my feet turned to rushing river, and carried me, the current running backward, closer and closer to that beckoning shape. I woke before I reached it, dry-mouthed, shaking.

  The sky, predawn soft and colorless, greeted me, whispering windsong. I lay a long while staring at the clouds. Sereth was, I assumed, with the shoer. I dressed quickly and went to meet him, disdaining another meal from the innkeeper’s squalid kitchen.

  “I was just coming to rouse you,” said the Slayer as I descended the steps to the yard. Wirin, Issa, and Krist were harnessed and ready, Tyith already mounted.

  I avoided the Slayer’s hand and went to Issa, swinging up on her back without assistance. She sidestepped, jiggling. Sereth took her head, stroking her, looking up at me. The wind blew, moist and cold, promising storm.

  “What troubles you, lady?” he asked me. I had no answer.

  “I am only anxious to be away from here.”

  “That is easily done.” H
e let go Issa and mounted Krist, who stamped and blew his impatience. We left Morrlta at a lope, heading due north, toward Santha.

  Before long, all semblance of trail had disappeared, and the rain and wind down from the north beat the air from my lungs and the threx steamed as the cold wet hit their hot, straining bodies. Issa’s muzzle seemed to drag along the rocky ground as she picked her way up the treacherous slope. I could see Krist’s hindquarters ahead, bunching, sweat and rain running in rivulets down his legs as he hazarded the steep climb, Sereth bent over his withers.

  I was wet and miserable, shivering, muddy, and cold. The sun had made no appearance by midday, nor did we stop to eat, and it was all I could do, leaning forward with my breasts against the threx’s plunging neck, to keep my seat as she scrambled and hopped her way along a dry streambed that seemed to go on forever.

  When I was sure I would fall from the saddle, numb with exhaustion, Krist’s rear, in front of me, finally halted. I had seen nothing but his flanks for neras. The black stood, head low, heaving. His legs were widespread, and he trembled. Issa laid her muzzle on his rump. Krist did not even twitch his bristled tail. Sereth turned in his saddle, his face begrimed. He pointed off to the right, and kicked Krist into motion. Speech would have been a gift to the howling wind, which already begrudged us breath.

  We trudged through trailless forest, branches snapping against us, for what seemed another day, emerging into a clearing where a building of calked stones had once stood. Now it was crumbled and roofless, but still some shelter from the storm.

  We dismounted and led the threx through the stone-littered yard and the open space that had once been a door. The wind and much of the rain excluded by the high walls, we huddled together and ate dried fruit and meat from our stores. There was no way to walk out the threx, so they stood, steaming, shifting their weight from foot to foot.

  “Are you still in love, Tyith?” Sereth asked when, we had eaten our fill and were resting, steaming a bit ourselves with our backs to the cold stone wall. The wind howled no more; the storm seemed to be abating.

  “I am,” said Tyith in a husky voice.

  “He thinks he got the coin girl with child,” Sereth explained to me. “That is truly what I need. Two more mouths to feed. Tyith, if you still want her on the way home, and she is pregnant and has not told her master, you might bid for her.”

  If she had told her master, the chance of fulfilling chaldra would not be easily bought. Even to the rightful father, the price would be high. If a man owns a coin girl, any issue from that girl is considered his. This is an incentive to the master to keep his girls in good condition. Tyith would be stealing the child from under the rightful legal guardian, if the girl was pregnant and he succeeded in purchasing her.

  “Bid for her?” Tyith repeated, grinning widely.

  “If you want her,” Sereth amended.

  “Of course I do,” said the youth, scrambling to his feet, taking the pelt that had covered the three of us with him.

  “Give that back, you dorkat whelp!” Sereth of Arlet scrambled after his son. He caught and downed the lad, and the two wrestled playfully, twisted around the brist pelt. For the first time that day, the sun broke through the overcast. I judged it to be around third second, or fifth bell in Arlet. Our twenty-eight-enth day is divided into four sevens. Midday is second seventh, midnight is fourth seventh. The bells have so rung since hide days.

  The warmth of the sun called me. I stretched and stood, wishing the dampness out of my aching muscles. I felt as if my back and bottom bore the imprint of every stone in the wall. Such a change, I wondered, looking around me where monochrome had become stone and grass, clover and mud, and the dark rich forest beyond. Such weight we put upon what our eyes see and body feels. This had been a forbidding, ugly place in the storm-gray cold. It was now pleasant, even perhaps picturesque, with the red-gold light and warmth upon it. Or upon me.

  I went to Issa, while Sereth and Tyith were sorting the harness, and picked out the stones from between shoes and inner hooves before I went to get my gear. The threx and I were beginning to develop a rapport, and I wanted to encourage her. She stood easily for me as I slipped the headstall over her ears and looped the girths that held the saddle tight.

  We cut back through dense trees the way we had come, but the spray from the dripping needled branches glittering in the sun was far preferable to the gloom and wind and rain that had driven us before it to the crumbled shelter.

  Once on the almost invisible trail, however, the mud proved increasingly difficult. The threx floundered and skidded, and only their mountain ancestry saved them, a hundred times, from nasty falls as we. picked our way up one of the unnamed foothills of the Sabembe range.

  Toward dusk we gained the rounded plateau, heavily treed, that would host us for the night. Ahead for the morrow was harder going, and we loped through the trees, so high-branched that we had no need to crouch down to avoid low limbs, that we might get the last light and an edge on the morning’s climb.

  I heard a sharp crack, and Issa leaped high into the air. I was thrown onto her neck, grabbing with both hands in her bristled crest. In two jumps she was past Krist. She held her head high, plunging ahead at breakneck speed, and the reins dangled loose around her legs. I was leaning over to grab one when she bunched under me and launched herself into the air. I did not make the jump with her. I was first aware of the rope stretched between the trees when I landed on it. It wrenched my back badly, but broke my fall, which nonetheless knocked the wind from my lungs, and sight from my eyes.

  Pulse and pain receded, and my burning lungs drew air, and I struggled to lift myself onto hands and knees. I could not hear clearly, and my lifted eyes saw, slow motion, dreamlike, Krist’s belly above me as he leaped to avoid trampling me. Wirin was riderless, a knot of men about him. I saw Tyith, his blade flashing. Then the lad was down in the midst of them, and Krist shaking the ground at my back. The threx squealed and thrashed in rage, great-toothed jaws snapping at the men gathered around him. Sereth hacked at them from the bloody-mouthed beast’s back. Gore flew in chunks. The ground was slippery, covered with it. I saw a head, severed, roll under the savage threx’s legs and be crushed gray and pulpy. I saw Sereth’s sword cleave a man from shoulder to breastbone, where it lodged. He was drenched red, his arms dripping. I tried to rise, to help, for there were many hands at him, trying to drag him from the saddle, and he with only knife to keep them back. I could not make my legs work. I was rooted from the knees to the earth. I struggled, tossing my head wildly. Then I saw it, from the corner of my eye.

  It hovered at the edge of my vision. I could not turn to face it. The cowled figure, from dream and vision spawned, and it spoke echoing words in my mind while the wind blew at its cowl, whipping and snapping.

  The voice I heard was wind, also, wind from the chasm at the edge of the world.

  “Regress,” it demanded. “Turn back and forget. Leave forever, and save the days you may.” … I convulsed in fear, yet my body did not tremble, nor my mind run in circles like the caged beast who sees its death approaching. Instead, from deep behind my awareness, that which guides within spoke, void-toned and ringing. The fear of me listened numbly.

  “You cannot deny me my birthright,” I said. “You cannot stop me by your own hand. This thing will be, and you cannot block it.”

  “I will. I have. Those who aid you—would you give them as price? This world—would you give it? If you open the way, who will use it?”

  “Do speak more,” I said to it, “that I may know you when we meet again.” My terrified self crouched scrabbling at the edge of sanity. The power within me took no notice.

  “Dissolution will certainly accompany you.” The bronze fires burned from within my mind. “Blood and death mark your path.”

  “In flesh or spirit, I will find you, when I am strong. You cannot harm me. I have no such injunction. Let his will be done.” That power which possessed me from without receded, leaving me with m
y terror, kneeling, trembling violently, on the ground. There was no sound but the blowing and stamping of threx. There was no cowled one.

  Freed from my paralysis, I rose unsteadily. Behind me was Krist, knee-deep in gory corpses. His muzzle was bloodied almost to the eye sockets. He seemed unhurt, munching there among the dead. Sereth was my only thought as I backed the threx and pulled at the mangled bodies, but of the seven I turned, none was the man I sought, and none lived.

  Tearing my red-splattered hair away from my face, I searched the trees. Perhaps he had dragged himself, wounded, to hiding. I saw nothing. Slowly, my eyes on the ground, I made my way under the rope stretched between the trees, to Wirin and the second clump of still forms beyond. I felt no pain, no emotion, just empty cold.

  I found them both there, in the fading light, beyond the steel-blue threx. Four motionless bodies lay on their backs, turning blind eyes to the sky. A fifth form squatted over the last, still as death. Sereth of Arlet, expressionless, stared down into the smiling face of his only son. I remember thinking it odd that Tyith smiled, as I bent to close his sightless eyes. Then I sat, at the boy’s shoulder, facing Sereth, who did not see me as darkness fell and the moon rose. Twice I spoke to the Slayer, but he did not hear. I cried a long while.

  I heard Krist’s trumpeting bellow, and an answer, and I knew Issa was back. I thought I should feed them, but then I remembered the grisly feast at Krist’s feet. When I felt able, I went to Wirin and got the tools and gathered wood and made a fire. It was a cold night in the foothills of the Sabembe.

  When I had the blaze crackling steady, I caught the threx and hobbled them, and the brist pelt from Issa’s cantle, and went to rouse Sereth. I had had long to think about the day’s tragedy, what might have been, what had to be. I had wrestled with my guilt by the dead boy’s side. My help, had I been able to give it, would have done Tyith little good. He had died before my eyes in those first moments, while I grasped at consciousness under the rope and Krist’s belly. That I was guilty as catalyst was a certainty. If not involved with me, the boy would have lived. But I would not take the weight for that burden. Crux calls its children home, all of us, sometime, and it chooses who and when, according to a rhythm we cannot perceive.