Over the next few days, An-Shai learned to search out pockets of the grass, or browse on the tough brush when there was no grass to be found. He drank gratefully and deeply from bitter alkaline pools, once a day at best, for the black preferred to go to water at sundown, grazing the night away at a great distance from the rare water holes, where predators often lurked. During the day, they shaded up under some scant-leaved acacia, drowsing the hot hours away tail to head, whisking the flies off each other’s faces with lazily swinging tails.
An-Shai nearly became a desert lion’s dinner one evening as they went down to water. He was in the lead, and only the chance-glimpsed flicker of movement out of the comer of his eye gave him warning enough to spring aside, receiving a neat quadruple furrow of claw marks in his flank as he did so. The two horses drifted on out of the old haunts that night, and took up a new territory farther north. The grass was not so good but there were fewer predators.
An-Shai grew as ragged and tangled as the black. His shoes worked off one by one, and he walked sore-footed for a few days until his hooves toughened. His halter he left snagged in a tree limb against which he had been absent-mindedly scratching, and hardly noticed its loss. His well-grained plumpness fined down to a greyhound thinness, all wiry sinew and muscle.
The black had been nervous all day, peering about suspiciously, blowing rollers in his nose. An-Shai, who had learned to respect the wild one’s instinct, and who had almost forgotten that he had ever been anything but a horse, was uneasy too. There was something amiss in the desolate land where the two feral horses had their territory. The desert birds were flighty, and once a herd of little gray deer came bounding past, eyes starting in terror, drawing the two horses with them into a panicky flight. They ran several miles, but saw no pursuers and circled away from the deer to examine the back trail anxiously. They saw nothing, but something was wrong.
Something certainly was. They had shaded up in the heat of the day when suddenly a rider burst out of the brash. Both horses jumped from sound asleep to a dead run in one stride, but the black’s forefeet were yanked from under him before he could take a second. A thrown noose had looped neatly about them, and the unfortunate animal somersaulted, landing on his side with a thud that jarred the earth. An-Shai ran on, almost unaware of what had happened. Within a few hundred feet, though, he realized that his companion was no longer running by his side. Halting, he looked back.
The black was lying on the ground, his legs tied together, a stout halter already in place on his head. He was again a captive of the humans. There were two of them and their saddle horses. Even as he turned, one stood up and walked a few paces toward him. “An-Shai! An-Shai!” he called.
The voice was familiar. It was Felim. It brought back memories of a warm, well-bedded stall, a manger filled to overflowing, careful grooming—and the bit and the whip. An-Shai turned again to face the empty desert. He could flee now and they would never catch him. But if he did so, he would go alone. He would be cold in winter and hot in summer, always a little thirsty and always on the verge of starvation, every meat eater’s prey. But he would be subject to no whim but his own.
And then An-Shai understood the point of the whole drama. He was being offered a choice. Which was better, perilous freedom or well-cared-for captivity? He looked back, and it seemed that even the tied-up black was watching with bated breath to see what his decision would be.
An-Shai the bishop knew what the decision should be, if he didn’t want to imperil his argument. But An-Shai the horse had his nostrils full of the sweet, hot scent of the creosote bushes; his flinty hooves danced over the fiery sand; his willful spirit took command. Flinging up his head and his tail, An-Shai galloped away from comfort and care and into danger and privation as hard as he could go.
Chapter 12
An-Shai pulled himself up from the narrow bench and looked around. He had never had so vivid an experience in the overmind. It had taken weeks, subjectively, but the candle jft its holder was only half burned away. Across the room, Tsu-Linn was stirring and groaning.
“Now will you believe me when I tell you that these outlanders are dangerous and should be destroyed?” said Tsu-Linn.
“I didn’t expect such an elaborate scenario, nor one that had such power to draw the players into it, from novices,” An-Shai answered with a groan.
“Perhaps this will teach you to expect the unexpected. These people are not as our peasants. You were a fool to run away at the end. You gave the woman the victory.”
“I couldn’t help myself. It was what the horse would have done, and by that time, I had nearly forgotten that I was An-Shai. But they haven’t won yet. I’ll have my chance to devise a scenario, and it won’t be a simple one, easily mastered. It will be subtle and seductive, appealing to the wants and needs of such a woman as Adelinda. She cannot be frightened into obedience. We’ll see if she can’t be lured into it.”
Tsu-Linn snorted. “Watch that you don’t fall into your own traps.”
Both were a little reassured to find that they had to help the two outlanders to find their way out of their drama; real experts would have kept track of their physical bodies.
“Well?” challenged Adelinda, when she had been brought
back to the physical world. “I noticed that you chose freedom over comfortable servitude.”
“The horse I was, which you had a great part in creating, did. Wait until you’ve been in my scenario before you judge.”
Len, who was still shaking his head, groaned. “Not tonight, surely.”
“Your Grace, could Len have a little more to eat, please? He’s fading away,” Adelinda requested.
They looked at the young man, who was as slight as a twelve-year-old boy. His cheeks were hollow and his collarbones jutted out against his skin. “Very well, since you ask,” said An-Shai. “He can have a double ration of vegetables.”
Karel had been fortunate in finding a retired donkey-packer who had traveled extensively in Godsland and was garrulous enough to be willing to share his experiences. He had no maps and wouldn’t have recognized one if he saw it, but Karel was able to draw one from his descriptions. He gave all distances in days of travel, which Karel estimated for a loaded pack train of donkeys as being about fifteen miles.
“To the west, there’s nothing but desert. We didn’t go there very often,” the old man said. “Once I was with a train that took a load of supplies to one of the frontier forts. It was terrible. It was dry and cold and the wind blew all the time. We lost half our donkeys and three of the packers.”
“From thirst?” Karel asked.
“No, mirage wraiths.” The packer shuddered. “They’d build an illusion that looked like whatever you wanted most. Even fooled the donkeys. Then, when you went running to get it, the picture would disappear and these tall—shapes, sort of—would close around you. When they went away, there wasn’t anything left but dried meat and old bones. They suck out the water, you know. I was too smart for them, though.”
Karel sighed. Old Ku-Tse was full of gory stories about the supernatural creatures he had narrowly escaped. “Can you tell me where the watering places were?”
“Well, there was one the first night we camped. Wasn’t
any the next night. The third night we had to go about an hour’s travel off the trail to the north to find water—nasty bitter stuff it was, too. Then we had to come back the same way the next morning....”
Karel was able to spend several days with the old packer and when he had pumped that well of information dry, he had a crude map of the area for about two hundred miles around. But how they were to get across the ocean without access to ships, he could not imagine.
It was Tobin who gave him the clue he needed to devise a plan to get the two prisoners out. “These people have no idea what the greathorses can do,” he complained. “I found the bunch from Pink Spring Village borrowing Two Fountains Village’s horses and harnessing all four of them to a tiny little cartload of hay that o
ne could have managed without working up a sweat. They told me they always used four donkeys.”
“That’s it!” exclaimed Karel.
“Huh?” said Tobin.
“We’ll hitch a team of horses to those pillars underneath and yank that whole wall of the palace right off. Adelinda and Len can just walk out. We’ll be standing by with the riding horses all loaded and ready to go. Can you ride postilion?”
“I’ve seen it done,” Tobin admitted cautiously.
“We’ll get thirty or so of the greathorses here—we’ll tell them it’s for a lesson on driving large teams. With four of us on the leaders and swing teams and good long traces, it’ll be a cinch.”
“Won’t they stop us when they see we’re hooking the traces to the palace?”
“They won’t see us. We’ll fix up some kind of a big load and lay rigging for that out from the palace. We’ll have fixed the real traces to the pillars the night before and buried them in the grass parallel to the fake traces. When we hook up the team, we’ll do a quick switch, telling everybody to stand back because of flying fragments. The next thing they’ll know, the south wall of the palace will be lying all over the lawn and we’ll be riding out of the Vale sweet as you please. What do you think?”
“I think too much imagination is a dangerous thing.”
An-Shai was kept very busy the next few days—too busy to bother with his prisoners. Anyway, it suited his purposes to let them stew. He didn’t connect the outlanders with the sudden epidemic of imps that were pestering the priests nearly to distraction or the sprites whose pranks were offset by the dozens of delightful minor favors they did for those who left them a little treat of cakes or cheese. However popular the invisible beings were with harried housewives and farmers who could never quite get all the chores done, it was undeniable that they caused a lot of chaos, luring otherwise serious farmers and even their browbeaten wives to moonlit carousing and sunlit daydreams. None of these supernaturals were dangerous, but they had to be dealt with, and that took a lot of the bishop’s time.
He did hear that the brawl that broke out one evening was due to a rivalry over Ina’s attentions, but he didn’t believe it. He had seen Ina (though not in the last few days) and could see no reason anyone would fight over her. Even when the incident was repeated the next evening in another village, he still couldn’t fathom the cause. The unrest that was rapidly developing among the farmers was more worrisome to him. Not only were they grumbling, they were organizing, and the whole situation was developing quite beyond his understanding of the peasants’ capabilities.
Tobin had taken his job as labor organizer to heart. He was convinced that the abuses he pointed out to the peasants were real ones, and his sincerity was more persuasive than any oratorical skill would have been. He put more effort into this work than he had ever done anything before, spending long hours riding from village to village, holding meetings and helping the villagers to set up committees.
Ina, too, was enjoying her role as disrupter. She made certain that any jealousies that already existed were exacerbated. If she went for a walk with a young man from one faction in a village, she made certain that she ate lunch with a party of another faction, and she made them both believe that he was the most important man in her life and that if he were any kind of man at all, he would protect her from the unwelcome advances of the others.
Orvet spent most of the hours of darkness roaming about, undoing An-Shai’s efforts to control the plague of nuisancy supernaturals that was infecting the Vale. He also subtly altered and strengthened the bishop’s own defenses against the direr sort. Even An-Shai would have had great difficulty in admitting night stalkers or the even deadlier werewolves if he had chosen to do so. As it happened, An-Shai was happy enough that Tsu-Linn, gone about his duties in the other dioceses under his jurisdiction, had been distracted from his plans to reduce the population of the Vale. He spent a lot of effort collaborating unwittingly with Orvet’s efforts to rid the Vale of incubi, bone limpets, and several other kinds of dangerous supernaturals.
An-Shai was uncomfortably aware that, even with Tsu-Linn gone, there was another power in the Vale. The age-old balance was being disturbed; tolerances between certain kinds of supernaturals and the Church that had existed for generations were being upset. There was a great ferment in the overmind, as powers were unleashed in the physical world which unsettled the collective unconscious. It seemed to be a very real possibility that there was some very powerful and completely unknown influence abroad in the land, one that had no fear of the light of day and had no hesitation in pitting itself against the Vale’s rightful protector. It was only more confusing that many of the activities of this unknown entity were positively beneficial to the folk of the Vale.
An-Shai failed to attribute the disturbance to a human agency. His thinking was limited by the preconception that the clergy were the only people in Godsland who received the kind of training it took to deal familiarly with the supernatural. He spent a great deal of time and energy trying unsuccessfully to track the unknown new power to its source. In this he was hampered by a growing fear that time was short. Tsu-Linn had left him directions for finding the Hall of the Initiates and instructions to report there as soon as he had cleared up things in his diocese, but he couldn’t hope that the invitation would be held open forever.
At last he felt driven to turn his attention to his two prisoners. His desire to master the outland woman had developed into an obsession as she balked him again and again. He didn’t realize himself how very much he needed to win the struggle that he had so lighty instigated, much less how important Adelinda had become to him.
He came into their prison carrying the bottle of liquor and the two little cups. Even he was shocked to see how emaciated Len had grown, and with what a lethargy he raised himself from his bed-shelf. Adelinda was in better condition, but she, too, was pale and listless. The “health” diet An-Shai had prescribed for his captives was having its desired effect, and the bishop was shocked and even a little saddened to see what havoc he had wrought. He was coming to respect the courage and tenacity of the two, but if a momentary fleeting wish that their enmity might be ended crossed his mind, it was sternly repressed.
He put the bottle and cups on the table. “Are you ready to take your ttim at the scenario I’ve designed?”
Adelinda pushed back her heavy, tangled hair. “I suppose we have to be. We’re certainly well rested.” The three days since their last encounter with the Bishop had been days of unrelieved boredom. Too weak from hunger to exercise much, they had spent hours sitting or lying lost in their own thoughts. Their conversation had consisted mostly of reminiscences of home and the mouth-watering feasts they had attended there. In Adelinda’s case, these had taken place at parties she had thought were excruciatingly boring at the time, but Len’s were mostly the simple feasts at the Festival of Sunretum and the Midsummer Games. Adelinda was more than a little shocked to find how scanty the meals that Len remembered with such longing were. And the fact that he always ended the recitals with “and everybody could eat until they were full” gave her more insight into the terrible poverty in which the farmer folk lived than all of Orvet’s lectures.
An-Shai examined the captives with interest. They were ready, he judged. Their physical weakness would carry over
into the overmind as a lethargy of will. “If you find that my view of the proper relationship between people like you and those like myself is correct, I can only hope that you will be willing to concede the point.” He poured the doses.
“You weren’t willing to concede,” objected Adelinda.
“I’m willing to concede that for some people, a small minority, it is perhaps better to be free than to be cared for. But no woman is included in that category, nor any peasant. The vast majority of people are content to have their decisions made for them and their actions guided by a greater wisdom. In fact, most people, if guidance isn’t provided by the society in which they live
, will actively seek it out. From what Li-Mun tells me of your own society, its people are only too eager to ally themselves with strange cults, follow some self-appointed religious leader, or otherwise seek to throw away this freedom you’re so determined to retain. Isn’t this true?”
“Some people do that. Not everyone. Not all women and not all of the farmer folk or the city dwellers, whom I suppose you’re equating with your peasants.”
“We won’t argue the point now. Swallow the liquor and see how you feel at the end of my scenario. Will you cooperate with mine as I cooperated with yours?”
Adelinda glanced at Len. “We’ll try. I’m making no promises. Len’s pretty weak. If I think he’s threatened, I’ll do my best to yank both of us out.”
“You’ve just illustrated my point. You automatically assume the responsibility for Len’s welfare, and he’s pleased to let you. Haven’t you just done the same thing to him that you claim is so intolerable for me to do to you?”
Adelinda blinked. “No, it’s different. I can’t exactly explain how, but it is. Ask Len.”
“I don’t know whether it is,” said Len wearily. “Let’s just get on with it.” He took the cup and drank the liquor down.
Claudia J Edwards - [Forest King 02] Page 18
