Hem's eyes had been blurring in and out of focus for some time now, and at first he wasn't sure if he was imagining it: could it be daylight? But then he noticed that the air was fresher than the still, close air of underground. He didn't really believe that they had reached the end of their journey until Ire gave a little caw and leaped off his shoulder, flapping toward the light. The crow perched on a stone near the cave entrance, ruffling his feathers, and looked back.
Eagerly they followed Ire, and in a short time stood at the entrance. Long flowering vines hung down from above it, stirring in a slight wind. All Hem could see were leaves, veil after veil of leaves of every imaginable shade of green. After the lamplit tunnel, he felt almost drunk with the color. The trees and bushes were dripping, as if it had only just stopped raining, and the earth was exhaling a damp, rich smell of rotting vegetation.
Looking up toward the sky, Hem saw that they were just above the floor of a narrow gorge: red cliffs climbed high on either side of them. He couldn't see the sun, but it felt as if it were just after dawn: the air was still crisp and cool. He stood at the cave entrance and gulped in the fresh air, too overcome to speak.
None of them spoke, in fact, for a long time. In the filtered light Hem could see how tired Saliman was: underneath the grime and blood that smeared his face, his skin was ashen. He sat down heavily, drew a flask of medhyl out of his pack, took a gulp, and passed it around.
After the medhyl, Hem's limbs stopped shaking so much. Soron sat with his back to the others, and did not answer when Hem addressed him. Hem remembered that he had asked after two Bards who were supposed to be with them and had not come; they must have been friends of Soron's, and now he grieved for them. Zelika leaned against the trunk of a tree and gazed up at the small patches of blue that she could see through the leaves.
The first thing Hem did was to change his wet clothes. He sat beneath a tree and felt the deathly cold of the caves slowly leaving his body. Ire, who had flown up into a tree out of sight, came back and sat on his shoulder, nipping his ear.
I did not like that, he said. Never take me back there.
It was better than being cut to pieces, said Hem. But I didn't like it either.
It is not over, said Ire. Something is going to happen.
What? asked Hem. What's going to happen?
I don't know, the bird answered. The earth is crying out. Ire restlessly jumped off his shoulder, and then hopped back on, and finally flapped up into the trees again.
Ire was making Hem jumpy; he remembered the rumbling he had heard underground. Trying to rid himself of his unease, he looked across at Saliman, who lay on his back staring up at the sky.
"Saliman," he said. "What happened, out there on the Lamarsan? Did you clear the seaways?"
Saliman did not answer for a time. Then he sighed heavily, and sat up.
"Aye, Hem, we did," he said. "The last defenders of Turbansk are, I hope, now well on their way to the Zimek Harbor, from which they can retreat to Car Amdridh. It is not an enviable journey, not with the Black Army on their heels; but their way is open, and I hope we have bought them some time."
As he spoke, he took off his tunic and inspected a nasty wound on his forearm. Hem stood up, searching in his pack for his healing balm and a spare bandage, and knelt down to help him.
Zelika's face lit up. "Then it worked," she said.
"Yes, it worked, but at a heavy cost. Of the two score ships that set out to destroy Imank's navy, less than half returned to harbor. And on each of those ships were no less than four score warriors and oarsmen."
"But we won," said Zelika, with a savage joyousness. "That's what matters."
Saliman caught her eye. "Zelika," he said, with a hard edge to his voice. "I am a warrior by necessity. I fight not because I love war or joy in arms, but because I must. We had the victory on the sea, but I cannot be glad of it; it is a bitter triumph. Many, many people died, so that many more could live. That is a harsh logic. I accept it, but I do not like it."
Zelika blinked with confusion and averted her gaze.
Saliman went on. "I believe that we were betrayed. We were expected, and in the darkness and rain our fleet was encircled. It was all too neat for comfort: someone knew our strategy intimately. For a time I thought that we had failed utterly. But we did not fail, even though when we came back to harbor, we found two black ships had come in over the boom chain, and soldiers were setting fires in some of the ships and in the markets. That was when Palindi was killed. He saved my life: but for him, I too would be lying cold in the Harbor of Turbansk. He was murdered by treachery." Saliman's voice hoarsened, and he stared down at the ground, his eyes hidden.
Soron, who had been listening intently, stirred but said nothing.
Before Hem's inner vision passed a series of images, brief but intolerably vivid, of burning ships moving through veils of rain over an expanse of black water, of broken corpses floating waterlogged between broken wreckage, of the desperate struggles of the drowning and the terrible fights on the decks of the triremes and on the quays. Darkness and water and fire and death. He shuddered.
"Betrayed?" said Zelika sharply, bringing him back to the present. "Who would betray Turbansk like that?"
"I do not know," said Saliman shortly, and would say no more. But into Hem's mind flashed an image of Alimbar. He had not trusted him; something had moved in his stomach whenever he had had to speak to him. He had put it down to his misadventure in the garden, but Hem knew in that moment, in some deep part of him, that Saliman suspected the same thing.
"Why would anyone do that?" Hem whispered, staring at Saliman. The idea that a Turbanskian, even a Turbanskian he distrusted, should even speak to the Black Army shocked him to the core.
"Fear, perhaps," Saliman shrugged. "Greed, no doubt. Hulls, after all, were all Bards once. Some people desire only power, and will do anything for it. I do not care why. If ever I meet the traitor, I will take my revenge, Balance or no Balance."
Hem had never heard such implacable hatred in Saliman's voice before. Even given everything that had happened, it surprised him; Saliman had always seemed to him somehow too noble for such emotions. He finished tying off Saliman's bandage in thoughtful silence.
As he did so, he suddenly realized that everything around them had gone still: he was sure he had heard birdcalls before, but now he could hear only the wind rustling through the leaves. Around them the air seemed thick with a dreadful, tense quietness. He looked at Saliman and opened his mouth to ask a question; but it was never asked. At that moment the earth shrugged, and Hem, taken by surprise, toppled over onto his face.
He scrambled up and looked around him wildly as a shower of small pebbles and soil rained onto his head from the rocks above. Zelika sat bolt upright, her eyes wide with alarm, and Soron put out his arms to steady himself, his face white. Saliman cried out to the others and ran for the middle of the gorge floor, between the swaying trees; stumbling in panic, they followed, afraid that the rock walls were about to collapse on top of them. A landslide of boulders crashed down on where they had been sitting only moments before, and stones bounced down the cliffs above them and landed around them. Before Hem, a great tree seemed to rise up in the ground like a living thing, and fell over, dragging smaller trees in its wake. There was nowhere to shelter: if they went back to the cave it might collapse on them.
The ground shuddered like a giant animal for what seemed an age. Hem, terrified, wondered if the gorge walls would fall on top of them, burying them beyond recall. When at last it stopped, all four cautiously looked up. There was another long silence and then, all at once, a chorus of birdcalls broke out, and far off Hem could hear the indignant chittering of a troop of monkeys. Ire, frightened witless, burst out of the trees and landed on Hem's shoulder, cawing in distress.
"What was that?" asked Hem shakily.
"An earthquake," said Zelika. "It sometimes happens."
"It was indeed an earthquake."
Saliman st
ood up, and Hem saw that his face, already haggard with strain and exhaustion, now seemed drawn with a dreadful grief.
"Juriken has done what he promised he would do," Saliman said. "No Bard in all the ages of Edil-Amarandh has done anything greater than Juriken's task this day."
Hem stared at Saliman. "You mean that Juriken made the earthquake happen?" he asked, his voice cracking. He thought of his last sight of the Bard, and how he had sensed that he was about to do something terrible. He had not imagined anything like this.
"Aye," said Saliman quietly. "Here we felt just the outer edges of his power: we are far enough away not to feel its full wrath. Turbansk now will be a wasteland of rubble. That was our plan: to attack and then retreat, so we would draw the Black Army into Turbansk – and once they were within the walls, to call up the slow anger of the earth and bring the city down upon the heads of Imank's forces. Juriken alone, of all of us, had the power to do such a thing. And now it is done, and he will be dead."
"I did not know," said Soron in a low voice. He was sitting with his hands clasping his knees, rocking from side to side. "I did not know what he was going to do, but I knew I would never see Juriken again."
"Alas for Juriken, whom I loved as a brother," said Saliman. He looked up to the sky, and Hem saw that tears were running down his cheeks. "I cannot speak his loss: it goes deeper than words, deeper even than song. I have no words for Juriken, my friend and my master; Juriken of Turbansk, greatest of Bards; Juriken, whom I loved."
He bowed his head and Hem, filled with wonder and awe, did the same, his heart cold with the thought of what Juriken had done: its courage and its utter ruthlessness.
After a long silence, Saliman spoke again. "Alas, alas for Turbansk! Turbansk, the city of my birth, the city where first I walked as a child, where I grew into a man – city of memory and song, ancient and beautiful and forever young. I will never again walk through the covered streets of the markets to buy persimmons, nor gaze down from the Red Tower onto the beauty of the Jiela cedars; nor will I eat and laugh with my friends in its fragrant gardens. All is gone, gone, gone: as the green grass withers on the hill, as the winds of spring kiss our cheeks and never return, so my city is shivered into ruin and all its loveliness shattered, never to come again..."
And as the Bard-born will, Saliman spoke his grief, turning it into song; and amid the bird-haunted greenery the others listened to his lament, in awe and fear and sorrow.
NAL-AK-BURAT
* * *
Before the shrine of Nyanar
Eribu bowed his head
And the Elidhu spoke to him:
Go forth from this city
Not in banishment but in hope.
Go forth though your tears stain your face.
Now I will go forth from this city, Said Eribu.
Not in banishment but in hope,
Though tears stain my face.
I fear I will never see again
The light-filled palaces of Nal-Ak-Burat.
I fear that I will never again stand
In the Temple of Dreams.
I fear I will never touch again
My sons and my daughters.
And Nyanar said: I will not say
Do not fear.
Fear is the other face of hope.
Fragment from The Epic of Eribu,
Library of Turbansk
XII
THE THREE GATES
Saliman drew a map in the sand with his forefinger. "This is Turbansk," he said, making a dot. "This is the Lamarsan Sea. Last night we went south, underneath the sea itself, and then turned north. The II Dara Wall is twenty or so leagues northeast of here, and the Neera Marshes begin about a league hence. We are now in Savitir and we need to get here." He stabbed a point eastward on his makeshift map. "Near to Nazar, just past the Undara River."
"So we're in conquered land," said Zelika, leaning forward to see the rough diagram, frowning with concentration. "How can we go from here? Won't we be seen by the spies of the Black Army?"
"If we tried to move above ground, yes, we would almost certainly be seen," Saliman said.
"More caves?" Hem shuddered. "Ire won't be very pleased."
"Yes, more caves." Saliman grinned mirthlessly. "Not so wet nor so narrow as those we went through earlier, fortunately. And, I hope, far enough away that they have not collapsed."
It was some hours after the earthquake. The sky had gradually cleared of clouds, and as the day heated up, it had begun to get warm even in the shade of the gorge. Earlier, Hem and Zelika, followed by Ire, had cautiously made their way up the gorge, pushing through the shrubs of thyme and wormwood that grew under groves of wild almond and fig trees. Many of the larger trees had fallen, and the ground was littered with broken branches and leaves. A little farther on they found a pool of green water that was bordered on one side by flat, red rocks and on the other by a narrow shore of sand. It might have been designed for bathing.
They sent Ire back to tell Saliman and Soron where they were, and then stripped to their underclothes and jumped into the pool. The water was very cold, most likely because it was spring-fed, and they stayed in just long enough to wash off the mud and sweat of the previous days. The relief of having clean skin was inexpressible. Hem washed his dirty clothes, and stretched them out on the rocks to dry. Then he and Zelika lay down side by side and idly watched the sunlight dancing on the surface of the water. Occasionally a butterfly flew raggedly across their field of vision, but otherwise all was still: a low hum of insect life filled the air with soporific music. Before long they had both fallen fast asleep.
They were woken by Soron, and found that a meal was laid out on the rocks: dried dates and a hard honey-flavored biscuit and smoked meat. Saliman and Soron had also bathed, and they talked in low voices as they ate. By tacit consent, none of them mentioned Turbansk, nor the ordeals they had so recently undergone. After the strain of the past days, the past weeks, the peace of this little gorge seemed dreamlike, something beyond imagining even hours ago, and each of them was loathe to disturb it. Here, there was no trace of war; it was almost strange not to hear the throb of the drums and the bray of trumpets, which had underlain their every moment for weeks now.
When they finished eating, Soron, who had scarcely spoken during their meal, moved away. He sat very still on a rock on the other side of the pool, gazing into the water, his face averted from them. Hem looked at him with concern, and Saliman noticed the direction of Hem's gaze.
"Palindi and Soron were very great friends," said Saliman softly. "Palindi too came to Turbansk from Til Amon. And Jerika – she planned to come with Soron because she loved him. Now he does not know if she is dead or alive."
Hem nodded slowly. He had seen many people mourning in the past few weeks, but repetition didn't make it any easier. If anything, it made it worse; he understood something now about the dreadful isolation of grief. He stirred restlessly, plucking some grass and twisting it around his fingers. Was Maerad still alive? How could he know? And yet he felt that she was...
"So do we go straight north to Annar?" asked Hem at last. "Is there a way across the marshes?"
"The marsh people know how to cross the Neera," said Saliman. "And they have shown me some of their paths. But if we went that way we would have to cross the East Road, and it is too dangerous: I doubt now that even a hare could do so unseen. We will have to journey to Annar by more circuitous routes."
Hem looked down to conceal his disappointment. He had hoped that they might begin to search for Maerad straight away.
Saliman gave him a sympathetic glance, as if he understood what passed through Hem's mind. "There are some people I am hoping to meet who will help us, and some tasks to do before we make our way north, which have been long planned," he said. "And I do not know what is happening in Annar now; there has been no news in Turbansk for weeks. I do not like the idea of walking into the fire without at least some foreknowledge of what to expect."
"And we
have to find Maerad." Hem spoke as if this were the most straightforward of tasks, and despite himself Saliman smiled.
"Yes, we must. Though you do realize, Hem, that to find Maerad is the whole desire of the Nameless One: and if Maerad and Cadvan are in Annar, they will be in hiding. Annar is a very big place, you know. In any case, when we last spoke, she and Cadvan were planning to go north, to Zmarkan."
Hem's heart sank slightly at Saliman's words.
"But we will still look for them? I know we can find them."
Saliman hesitated, and then nodded. "Yes, Hem. There are many things that we must do, and that is one of them. And we have business in Annar."
"What other things do we have to do?" Hem looked at Saliman reproachfully. "Isn't finding Maerad more important than anything else?"
"More important for you, maybe," said Zelika, who had been listening impatiently. "What I want to know is, what do we do now?"
"Well, that is easy to answer," said Saliman. "For the moment we can rest and recover our strength a little. We'll wait until nightfall before we move. The caves we must find are a couple of leagues northeast of here."
"More caves," Hem said again, glumly.
"It's not so bad," said Saliman. "We could be flitting from bush to bush, terrified that at any moment we would be spotted by some spy of Imank's. Be grateful. The land around here is like a honeycomb, and even with its best efforts the Dark has not been able to find all of our hiding places. The caves may be cold and uncomfortable, but we will be safer there than anywhere else in the whole Suderain."
Hem stared gloomily at the ground. "All the same, I don't know if I can persuade Ire back underground. He told me he never wanted to go back there again."
"There's no choice," said Saliman. "If he wishes to stay with you, he will have to."
When dusk began to fall, Hem moodily gathered up his dried clothes from the rocks and called Ire back from the trees, where he had spent his time boasting to the local birds. Remembering how cold he had been the previous night, Hem put on an extra layer. He was still very tired; more than anything, he would have liked a long sleep in a comfortable bed. But, as Saliman said, it was not a question of choice.
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