by Janet Morris
Sereth got to his feet and extended his hand to me. I took it and rose, and he put his arms around me, holding me close, stroking my back.
“You lie to me, lady,” he said softly in my ear. “But I will not press you. I, too, sometimes see.”
Eventually he released me, that we might make the cave before dark.
Not long afterward, as we rode three abreast along the wide rocky shelf, we heard a thunderous noise that shook the ground under the threx’s feet and made them snort and dance in fear. I could feel Issa tremble between my legs. There was not a cloud in the sky, yet it was as if lightning had struck uncomfortably close. The air was charged, the silence deafening in its wake.
I looked at Sereth, and he at me, but Krist plunged and reared, and I had my hands full with Issa’s fear, and Wirin’s ears were flat to his head, and it was perhaps five neras later that we found the source of that ear-splitting crack.
We stood at the edge of a wide crevice, perhaps two threx lengths across, that extended, barring our path, endless in both directions.
The threx sidled back from the abyss, from which steam hissed, blowing toward us on the west wind.
“This was not here the last time I came this way,” Sereth said needlessly, dismounting and squatting uncomfortably close to the edge. He picked up a fist-sized rock and tossed it into the maw that had opened in the ground. Beside him, I waited to hear it land, but no sound came out of the crevice.
“Would you chance it?” he asked me. “It will take us a set to retrace our path and come up again from the south.”
“Let it be your decision.”
He squinted at the far side, where a luckless tree dangled by its scrawny roots, top downward, over endless descent. The mist curled around its tortured limbs, and the smell of rock dust and warm earth belly was acrid in my nostrils.
“We will try it,” he said finally. He went to Wirin and began loosening the straps that bound Tyith’s body, gamy now from so long in the brist pelt. Taking a deep breath, I went to help him. When we had it free, the Slayer picked the corpse up in his arms and carried it to the abyss, where he let it fall. Again I listened for the sound of the weight striking bottom, and again I heard nothing. So much for the words we might have said at the Falls of Santha.
We checked our gear, and, sure that no girth would give at a critical moment, led the threx well back from the yawning split.
Sereth stripped Wirin totally, while the steel threx stood, eyes rolling. We left the harness on the ground, not wanting to burden Krist further.
Sereth, mounted, trotted Krist another few lengths back from the crevice, turned him, and launched the black threx at full speed toward it. Almost at its edge, when Krist should have bunched for the jump, the black slid down on his haunches, shying right, foam flying in gobs from his mouth. Again Sereth tried him, and again the threx refused.
The Slayer, angry and tense, walked him a third time back from the crevice. He dismounted and took one of the discarded sword belts from the ground, and stood with it in his hand as he spoke reassuringly to the agitated animal. On the third try, at a dead run, goaded by the strap stinging his rump, the black launched himself, stones flying, across the gap. It seemed that they hovered there unreasonably long, over beckoning eternity, and then Krist’s front hooves were on the far side. He scrambled for footing, his rear feet pounding the air, and he was over, on his knees, safe on solid ground. Sereth vaulted from his back, taking his head, urging him up. Heaving, the black got his feet under him and stood, legs spread, his huge head pressed against Sereth’s chest, his whole body slick with froth and sweat.
Issa turned her head and rubbed it against my knee.. I walked her slowly, farther back than Sereth had gone for a start on the leap, and turned her. I was frozen with fear, facing the crevice with the trembling threx under me. For some time I sat her there, stroking her neck, until her trembling ceased.
Taking a deep breath, I dug both heels into her side and leaned low on her, against the bristles of her neck, my weight on her forequarters as we sped toward our fate. My eyes were on Sereth, safe on the other side, waiting. I thought she would refuse it, as we pounded close to the edge, but she bunched under me and leaped with such force that I had all I could do to stay steady on her withers. My head pressed to her neck, I could see with clarity the mist and steam below us. My heart sank with Issa’s bulk, and my stomach rose in my throat as we passed the apex of our arc. I thought us far too short, but her front legs hit the ground and her rear the half-rooted tree, and she lunged, scrabbling, her belly scraping the edge, the tree under her rear feet cracking beneath her weight. Her left rear gained solid footing just as the tree, ripped away from the edge by her struggles, plunged into the gap.
I was off her, pulling at her head, without knowing how I had gotten there. Her knees were cut and bleeding, but she had made the jump. I stroked her where she lay, sucking wind and trembling, until I had my own legs under control. Then, Sereth at her other side, we urged her to her feet. The threx would not put her left rear on the ground, but held it gingerly high.
Sereth; kneeling beside the injured foot, cursed softly. Her pastern was ripped open to the tendon, the blood flowing down her tri-part hoof and puddling on the rocky ground.
I cut from my tas jerkin two long strips and got the salve Celendra had given me in Arlet from my belt. Sereth held Issa’s head still while I spread the yellow gel thick over the cut and bound it. The threx almost jerked Sereth off his feet in her attempts to rip the foreign object from her leg, but he managed to hold her.
When I took her head, he went to the edge of the crevice and picked up two good-sized rocks. Wirin, on the other side, his nose high in the air, snorted and paced back and forth along the abyss.
“Wirin, home! Go home!” he shouted, throwing the rocks for emphasis. Both hit the ground short of the steel-gray threx, who snorted and backed uncertainly away. “Go on! Home!”
Trumpeting, pawing the ground, Wirin regarded us. Then, with a final shake of his head, he turned tail and loped away.
“Do you think he will?” I said to Sereth’s back, watching the retreating threx.
Sereth shrugged and turned from the crevice, going to Krist, who was sniffing Issa’s bandaged leg.
“No matter. He will survive in the mountains, surely, if he does not choose to return to the farm. I caught him, perhaps eighty neras from here, the year Tyith was born. His mother, whom I was hunting, was dead when I found them. He was born in this range, still suckling when I took him.”
I was surprised. There are few threx herds left in the mountains. They are too tempting a prize, too valuable. I wondered if Wirin would go to the farm, or become another loss I had caused Sereth of Arlet.
We led them, Issa hobbling, snorting every time she tried her left rear with her weight, until dusk came upon us. I had said nothing, but was desperate to reach shelter before night. We could make little time with injured threx, but we had no choice.
I looked up into the darkening sky.
“Will we make it to the cave by dark?” I asked him, trying to hide my agitation.
“Must we?”
“It would be wise.”
Sereth, his eyes turned to Issa, quickened the pace. The threx struggled to keep it. Dark was falling fast around us. I found myself sweating, grinding my teeth together so hard my jaws ached.
As the first star appeared, uncannily bright in the thin air, we began to climb from the shelf up the slope. I heard, high above me, a rustling as if of many wings as the night came to life around us.
“Almost there,” said Sereth, as the first ebvrasea, shrieking, dived at us out of the gloom.
Krist trumpeted before me, but I could not see him. Wings brushed my head, and the wind from their passage was a fierce gust. I hurried Issa up the rocky incline, the ebvrasea all around me. Beaks ripped at my clothing, my hair. I tried, with my knife, to fend them off. I heard Issa squeal in pain as I collided with rock in front of me.
; “Here,” said Sereth, the voice coming from my right, mixed with the snap of wings and the unmistakable kill cry of the mountain ebvrasea.
The great beaks tore at me, and I lost Issa and sank to the ground, protecting my face with my arms. Claws dug into my back, and I screamed and felt Sereth’s hand on me, heard the sing of his sword and the thunk as it bit into feathered flesh.
Somehow, he dragged me, still holding Issa’s reins, by the waist along the ground into the cave. I heard the angry cries of the ebvrasea, whose twice-man-length wingspread would not allow them access. There must have been a great number of them, by the wind sound and the numberless screechings. Ebvrasea never hunt in flocks.
Crumpled where Sereth had dropped me against the cave wall, I felt the blood trickle down my back, down my arm, across my side. There had been no pain when I was struck by beaks and raked by claws, but now my wounds burned unbearably. I heard Sereth moving around. I tried to rise, to see Issa. My legs and arms did not obey me. The last thing I remember, before unconsciousness took me, was silence, as if the birds, as a group, had given us up as a bad job.
VII. Beneath the Falls of Santha
I woke to the smell of roasting ebvrasea, from a dream of cowled, beaked beasts who sat in judgment upon me in a crystal palace before an audience of shapeless, glowing forms, just as sentence was about to be passed. The daylight streamed in the open cave mouth, and from where I lay I could see the remains of what must have been a night-long battle. At least a score of the huge carcasses littered the ground directly before the cave. Several were dressed and plucked inside. Sereth had his back to me as he squatted tending the ebvrasea he turned on a spit. As I looked around me, wondering where he had gotten the wood, I realized that this cave was well-used. There were stacked kindling and water-skins against the rear wall.
I tried to sit up, but fell back, dizzy, on my stomach. My back and left shoulder throbbed in their tas bandages, my arm in front of me bore a deep open slash the length of my hand, white and swollen at the edges, angry red in the middle. It had truly happened, then; the solitary predators of the mountains had gone against their nature and attacked us. I shivered and tried to rise again. I had not the strength. I cursed the cowled one, and envied his skill.
I could see Issa and Krist, heads on each other’s rumps, dozing to my left. Issa had a badly gashed shoulder, but she stood squarely on her injured rear foot.
Sereth rose from the fire and came and knelt beside me. I put my hand out to him and smiled my best, and I saw his face relax.
“Lie still,” he said, and he loosened the bandage and removed it from my back. I moaned when he pulled the clotted leather, stuck fast to my flesh, away from the wound and redressed it.
“Do I need a bandage?” I managed.
“Not if you remember not to roll on it. I wanted to keep it clean.” I felt the cooling yellow salve ease the throb.
“Can you sit? You should eat. You lost a good deal of blood.” He eased me up, and I crossed my legs under me and leaned against him until the sight returned to my eyes and the dizziness faded.
He brought me a steaming, black-crisped ebvrasea slice, and watched while I ate it.
“You had me worried, but I should have known better,” he said, getting me another chunk of the dark meat, and sitting beside me then with a leg for himself. It was a huge leg, from that mighty beast, the size of my own arm.
When my stomach would hold no more, I put the meat aside and leaned against his shoulder. My muscles trembled uncontrollably, and my eyelids seemed to have a mind of their own.
“Do you think they will return?” he asked me, his eyes on the sky.
“I doubt it. He has yet to try the same stroke twice.”
The Slayer squinted into the sun. I could see the muscles twitch in his jaw.
“You know, I did not truly believe you until last, night. Now I do not know what to do. I would take you back to Arlet, and forget this thing. You are out of your depth, and I even more so. I cannot fight this spirit, and the whole of nature, which it seems to command. Let it go, Estri. No man is worth this.”
It must have cost him to admit his fear, and his willingness to give up. No man is worth this, he had said. He, then, held the same attitude as Dellin, that I searched for a man to get me with child, more than release from the chaldra of the mother. I wondered what else Dellin had told him. But what he said gave me cause to reflect. If this man found himself unnerved by what had happened, he who lived forever on the edge of the abyss, who was I to insist that we proceed? But I was as loath to face the crevice and the long arduous trek to Arlet as the unknown ahead. And might not the cowled one, seeing us routed, redouble his efforts? I thought so. As long as I proceeded on my father’s business, I had some little protection. If I turned back, perhaps the cowled being would be satisfied, perhaps not.
“If we turn back now, he will surely kill us,” I said slowly.
“Is it a he?”
“I think so. And I think I know the rules of this game. But I cannot be sure. If we wait here a day, and nothing more happens, will you trust me and go on?”
“Even if something does happen, and you still want it, I will take you. I said I would. I will not go back on my word. But I do not like it.”
I could feel him tense, but he did not draw away from me.
“Sereth, let me sleep. I will think on what you have said.”
“Sleep sitting up, then. I do not want you rolling that wound in the dirt.”
So I did, fitfully, waking often, through that whole day, and then deeply through the night.
In the early morning, when I woke, Sereth was not in the cave. Neither was Issa. Krist dozed contentedly, leaning against the cave wall. I felt reasonably healthy; the salve had done its work on my arm. There was only a tiny dark line where the nasty gash had been. My back, when I rose and stretched, did not pain me. I picked up a quarter-full waterskin and drained it, and was starting toward the kindling when I heard Issa enter the cave. She was saddled, walking easily on her feet. Sereth led her, and from the look on his face I could tell that the threx’s condition pleased him.
He dropped her reins near the opening, and she sniffed hungrily at the carcasses piled there. The Slayer picked up one plucked winged corpse and lugged its considerable weight to Krist, where the black stood dozing.
Slapping the threx resoundingly on the neck, he dropped the bloodied bird in front of him. Issa followed of her own accord, sniffing. The two fell to their feed with relish.
Although we had plenty of wood, Sereth hacked cooked meat off the previous evening’s meal and handed some to me.
I ate it greedily, with my fingers, licking the grease from them hungrily. He threw me the knife he had used, and I went and cut another.
“Your back looks fine.” He was leaning over me as I squatted above the bird. “You heal quickly.”
“It is Celendra’s salve that heals quickly.”
“Do you not have it in Astria?”
“I had not needed it in Astria. I suppose we must.”
“It is from the caocu root.”
“Then we certainly have it.” I could hear his unasked question. ”There has been no further trouble? While I slept, were you bothered?”
“Nothing untoward,” he admitted.
“Then we will try it?”
“If it is your wish.”
“But you think me foolish.” I turned, still on my knees, and looked up at him.
“I think you overly determined. But we will try it.” He put his hand on my face, tracing the line of my cheek with a callused finger. The look he gave me spoke for itself.
Sometime later, near midday, we left the cave. Sereth of Arlet would not, at least, face the trail un-sated.
Issa was sound under me, fresh and saucy from her rest. We made good speed that afternoon and slept in the open that evening without problem.
On the morning of the third fourth, the day we had expected to reach the falls, we turned southeast and
began descending. Trees became more common, though still small and scrubby, and often we had grassed ground under us instead of sheet rock. By that evening, we could hear the Falls of Santha roaring in the distance. The night was misted and cloudy, and the moon wore gauzy rings around her three-quarter-full girth. I woke near dawn, weeping, with no recollection of the reason for my tears. Sereth held me until I fell back to sleep, but we were both drawn and troubled in the morning. My dreams had proved too accurate to discount, and though neither of us mentioned it, we both held those tears to be an evil omen.
As I got myself dressed in the tatters and strips of what had once been my tas jerkin, now bloodied and stiff and barely enough for breech and band, Krist let out an ear-shattering trumpet and skittered in his hobbles. Sereth shot me a look that said “Get ready,” and went to calm him. I dived for my sword belt and knife and was just buckling them around me when Santh ambled into the clearing, a tawny and obviously pregnant female a pace behind.
“Santh,” I called delightedly, running to embrace him, regardless of Sereth’s drawn sword and the threx’s agitation at being so close to their hereditary enemy.
The Slayer, his hands full with the two plunging, rearing beasts, looked on in wonder as the giant hulion licked my face and arms and extended his head that I might scratch behind his ears.
“Get them out of here, Estri. Now!”
I looked up at Sereth, holding tight to Krist’s headstall. The threx was wild-eyed and foam-flecked, his teeth snapping the air.
“Where were you when I needed you?” I chided the hulion softly.
He purred and followed me down an incline, his huge feet padding silent behind me.
“Who is your lady friend?” I asked him, when we were some distance from Sereth and the threx, but he only licked his tawny mate with his huge red tongue. His golden eyes glowed with pride.
I spent a long time with the hulion, petting and scratching, and getting acquainted with the sand-colored mother-to-be, and would have stayed longer, but Sereth called down an ultimatum: Leave now, or turn back.
