Bevn couldn’t believe their bad luck. They weren’t going to make it to the riverbank at all.
A lone figure stood beside a stone guardhouse where the cable had terminated, low on the cliff. With the low angle of the sun and the way the driving mists streaked by in the wind, Bevn couldn’t be sure, but it seemed to be a dark-faced figure, broad-shouldered and grim.
The wind shrieked and they were driven into the head of the Knarles.
“Turn it, turn downriver,” Glavenor told Gabrielle. “We’ll drown if we go over any rocks facing this way. You, sit in the middle of the boat.” He pushed Bevn away and braced himself in the bows, a short pole in his hand.
Bevn tried to make light of the situation, because of his fear. “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat. It’s only a river. How bad can it get?”
_____
Garyll knew there was deadly white water ahead. They had to go fast, it was the only way. It was useless for him to try row with only one hand, and he didn’t trust the boy to navigate, so he had to trust Gabrielle to the oars.
The river had lost its slick appearance. Streaks and eddies plagued its surface, restless heralds of what was to come. The river narrowed. The roar became a thunder, and the air became moist, filled with the spray of the imminent violence. The spur of Slipper rose on their right, the receding walls so far above on the imposing cliff face. Then the cliff cut the town off from view altogether.
“I can’t believe Saladon has abandoned us to this,” Gabrielle said quietly to the air.
The current took them swinging right up to the cliffs and then swept around the tight left-hander. The boat rocked over a series of deep furrows, then tipped again into a rushing pace. Gabrielle cursed as her oar struck an exposed rock.
“Mind your bloody oar,” Bevn cursed behind him.
A hard slap and a thump described the prince’s fate. Garyll didn’t need to turn.
The boat lurched over a hump then wallowed in a depression. Garyll reached out to fend them off the rock. “Left!” he called to Gabrielle.
The boat began to swing.
“Other left!” he shouted. “Go right!” He’d forgotten she was facing the stern.
She reversed her input. She trusted him, because she didn’t want to die.
“That’s enough. Now left!”
They shot past a cluster of jagged rocks. The river foamed around them. The boat dropped and juddered, then slewed wildly.
“Left! Left!” he cried to Gabrielle. She grunted against the sudden pressure in the oars. A second later she fell back off her seat as the oar was plucked from the water by the canting boat. Something ground against the boat, and Garyll dived over to force it away with his pole. A large scarred rock shot by, trimming shavings from the boat. Close, too close. He had almost lost the pole altogether. The boat bucked again, and slewed left. Garyll looked ahead with dread. The river, so deep and blue above Slipper, was now a white churning mess, marked by jagged black pillars of defiant rock. The rapids stretched far ahead, a rumpled surface of treachery.
They dropped with gut-wrenching suddenness, and ahead the water loomed in a feathering crest. They were swept into the standing wave and through it. Garyll was knocked from the bows again, but this time he held onto the bow-rope, and was able to haul himself back to his post.
Gabrielle’s next oar-stroke found mostly air. She timed her next stroke to coincide with a trough, and she found purchase this time.
“Left!” shouted Garyll.
The rock was a submerged beast with a razor-sharp fin along its back. It would split them down the centre of the hull. There was no time for a good stroke from Gabrielle. Garyll dug his pole in, and leant all his weight against it. The wood creaked, his feet slipped and his legs flailed against the rails. The boat turned, but they slowed, and were more at the mercy of the wild current than before. Gabrielle cursed as she fended off with her oar, and Garyll heard the sound of splintering wood. They scraped past the obstruction, and tipped into the trough in its lee.
They topped three rapids which lifted them like a bucking horse. Then a wave leapt high in the sudden confluence of currents. Cold water swept over the bow and slammed into Garyll’s face. The boat was awash and reeled drunkenly under the weight. They began to spin out, side-on to the current. Gabrielle fought the oars to regain control.
“Bail, or we drown!” he shouted at the Prince. The prince stared at him with wide eyes.
“The bucket, you fool!” shouted Garyll. “Under the seat. Take it, scoop the water out!”
Bevn just stared at him with his saucer eyes and clutched hold of his heels instead.
It was then that Garyll realised that they were doomed. His strength wouldn’t last in the fearsome rush. Gabrielle couldn’t row effectively, one oar was shattered already. Ahead, the passage to the lowlands roared its hunger: huge, leaping waves; deep, sucking troughs; and all around, the rocks, sticking up like hungry teeth, waiting in the churning water for a chance to shatter the little boat and its occupants to pieces.
“I hate you. It’s all your fault,” Bevn cried out at his back. Garyll didn’t recognise the danger in time. As the boat pitched down and Garyll reached forward with his pole, the prince slammed into his back, pushing him over the bow.
“No, Bevn, we need him!” cried Gabrielle, but it was too late.
He lost his balance and plunged in. The boat rode hard over him and smote his head. Glavenor sank.
_____
Prince Bevn sat in the bows, dejected. The Swordmaster had spoiled everything. They hadn’t seen him again after he had tumbled into the river. Bevn couldn’t understand why, but he was sorry for what he had done. He shouldn’t care, but Glavenor was different. He was strong. He was good. Too good, surely, but somehow he was a real man. He had tried to capture them, but he had only been following his duty to Bevn’s father in doing so. Bevn knew he hadn’t done it because he wanted the crown for himself, or for money. He wasn’t like Saladon, or Gabrielle. Glavenor did what he did for justice, and that was what made the man so hard to fault. He was more than just a man. He didn’t deserve to die, did he? Bevn had just wanted to escape from him, but now he wished he hadn’t done what he’d done. He hoped the Swordmaster had survived, but the doubt dragged at him. The water around the boat was too polluted; streaked with milky ghosts. Glavenor had fallen right into it.
The air was humid and hot. The river flowed swiftly, swollen by the tributaries they had passed after they’d shot out of the rapids. It didn’t matter that the wind had slackened as the strange storm had passed, for the current was strong enough, and there was a strange force at work on their boat, as if an unseen hand guided the craft and caused it to find the right currents. Gabrielle didn’t bother to row. The shattered stumps of the oars weren’t even worth keeping for firewood.
“When is Saladon going to come to us?” Bevn asked. Gabrielle ignored him. It was only the fifth time he’d asked.
“When he’s finished punishing us for your foolishness,” Gabrielle finally retorted, her words slurred with fatigue. “Here, sharpen my blade if you’re bored. I’d like to know it’ll cut when I stick it in your back.”
Bevn was about to reply with some acid remark then thought better of it. He extended his hand but didn’t get up, forcing Gabrielle to accede should she want the favour. She placed her hand on the rower’s seat midway and leant far forward to pass the knife. His eyes dropped as he took the knife. With her low-cut halter, he had a great view. A small gust of wind tugged at her hair.
“Oh, for crying out loud, you’re hard-up,” exclaimed Gabrielle. She gripped the knot of her halter and pulled it free with a swift jerk. “Is this what you wanted to see?” she shouted out, louder than necessary—a shout that would reach to the riverbank. Her clothing dangled from her shoulders as she stood upright. Bevn gawked. “What more do you want from me, you bastard!” she shouted.
He admired the way the sunlight caught the swell of her breasts as she faced the shore. Perhaps she was
n’t addressing him. She was challenging the wizard. He scanned the shore quickly for what Gabrielle had seen, but he couldn’t find Black Saladon anywhere. “Show yourself!” she demanded.
The flame-leaved trees on the riverbank shook their dry leaves upon the water. Bevn grinned and turned. While Gabrielle searched the shore, he could search her body with his eyes, but it was over too soon. Gabrielle recovered from her passionate outburst, fastened her clothes and sat without a second glance at him.
The river soon brought them to a great orange hill, which proved to be a great pyramid of clay, bare and fresh as if it had been scoured from the earth somewhere nearby. The river turned brown as it cut past the new soil. Disturbed eddies plagued the water at its base. They scudded over a few rapids, but the flow was deep, and the river soon smoothened again in a straight channel between the hills. Great roots and branches thrust up through the water, some borne on the current; some stuck, straining the flood through rigid arms. They rounded a lazy corner and there, at last, they encountered him.
Black Saladon stood on the shore, his great axe planted like a declaration upon the bluff. The metal fibres in his flared shoulders glinted. The boat heeled over on a stiff breeze, and they were driven toward him. As they approached, his gaze remained hooded, hard. He didn’t help them to disembark, waiting for them to walk to him.
“You come at last to the hardest part of your journey,” he stated.
“How dare you put us through that? You risked my life!” Gabrielle accused him.
“And you failed me,” he replied. His presence seemed to gather the air until little remained to breathe. “Was your task not to protect the prince and to ensure that he retains the crown? Retains it! Yet you allowed them to take it. It was time you learned the cost of failing me.”
“You did not need to be reckless with my life,” Gabrielle said bitterly.
“You had a strong man with you. I took a strategic decision—that you and he would want to live, that you would find a way to survive the Knarles. And that you did.”
“We had a strong man, until piddlewit here pushed him into the drink. I could have died in there, you pig!”
“Watch your tongue, hex, or I’ll strip it from your head. Do you think the risk is any less ahead? That has always been the price of a mistake.”
“And you!” He turned on Bevn, who tried to shrink away, and Gabrielle pulled Bevn back toward her. “What have you done? Nobody should be able to carry your crown away from you. It is bonded to your blood. It will resist any thieves, It will burn their hands and break their minds. Only someone with the blood of Eyrian kings may bear it. What did you do that they thieved it from you?”
Bevn could feel Gabrielle’s breasts pressing against his back. They were firm, as he had expected them to be. Despite his pounding fear of Saladon, he squirmed against her to better feel her body. Gabrielle shoved him roughly aside. “Away!”
Black Saladon stepped close, and Bevn realised he couldn’t delay the tale any longer. Saladon was ready to rip him apart.
“There was a woman,” he admitted.
“What kind of a woman?” His eyes were dark and alive and something hid there, waiting to burst out and seize the world.
“In that place you showed us, the hurry-hurry.”
“And I say there was no woman!” Gabrielle interjected. “I watched over him in our room all night. His crown was safe, I left him for a minute in the morning, yet he came down without it.”
Saladon regarded Bevn intently. “What did she look like?”
“She changed! She was good-looking, to start with. Well, a little.”
“How bad was she? What was her price?”
“Price? She never… I… How would I know?”
“They wear their price on their necks in Slipper. The whores all have copper bands. Did you count them?”
“She ... I don’t think she had any necklaces on. They threw beer at her, and it made her wet.”
“Then she was so bad she hadn’t earned a price yet. What did she look like?”
“She was a half-Lûk.” He looked down. “She was a hag.”
“And how is it that this half-Lûk took your crown?” Saladon demanded.
“She—took me,” Bevn replied, in a small voice.
“She did what?” Gabrielle exclaimed.
“We had sex.”
“Oh lord,” said Gabrielle.
“And then she took my crown. She stole it! There was nothing I could do.”
“What did she say?” Saladon gripped his chin to force his head up, his face so close to Bevn’s he could count Saladon’s twirling wiry whiskers. “Did she say anything at all when she left you?”
“I can’t remember! Something about the fates, that they were a mystery.”
“Mystery. Mystery! Aargh!” Black Saladon threw Bevn aside. He paced away. He smacked his fist into his palm then considered things for a long moment. “She has made a dangerous play. Oh, I see what she is doing. She will attempt to save the others, the fool. She will go to Turmodin. The race is on! She cannot use transference with that thing on her head. Yes, we must move! If I can get you near to the crown I may be able to wrestle it back from her, or compel her.”
“But how can she wear my crown?” Bevn cried. “You said it was only someone with the blood of kings who could wear it. She’s not from Eyri, she was like the Lûk; she was ugly.”
“Ugly? She disguised herself well, but you are right, she is not an Eyrian. She is a wizard of the Gyre. She carries your seed, you fool. She is pregnant. So she carries the bloodline of your ancestors and she can wear the crown. Oh Mystery you take a most costly gamble.”
“She is—pregnant?” Bevn repeated. “But she can’t be! She can’t be! I’m just a boy! I can’t be a father!”
“And yet yesterday you were demanding that you were a man,” Gabrielle commented quietly.
It hit him with the full force then and his stomach rushed up at him. He went down on his knees and puked on the spiralweed. He was going to be a father with a hatched-faced half-Lûk. She was a wizard? It didn’t make him feel any better. He felt violated. She had stolen his crown.
Black Saladon squatted on the weeds in front of him, his big axe resting casually across his knees. There was nothing friendly about his demeanour. His eyes burnt with a dark fire. Bevn could believe that worlds could begin and end in that gaze. His words seemed to pull power from the ether and wrap around Bevn’s mind like cables. “Now understand this, Bevn Mellar. The only value you have left to me is in your blood. I can use the Mystery just as well, for my purposes, although she is harder to control. Do not think to defy me anymore, because I do not much care if you live or die. You will come with me, because if you do not, neither of you will survive a day. You don’t want to be near the river from here onward, the water is too tainted. It’s far too dangerous in the Merewraith lands, but the hinterland is not safe either. So stay close and obey me perfectly, or I will trim your head off at the neck.”
38. A TROUBLED WORLD
“Evolution is the slow murder of tradition.”—Zarost
The monster floated in the deep. The water was cool against its burning skin. The world was slow, moving—fluid. Things had changed, it knew, important things, but for now it was strangely content, to drift, to watch the light play through the facetted surface above. Amber trees spread searching branches across the yellowed sky and tall clouds boiled at the fringes of the tilting liquid panorama.
It found a rough rock and it rolled and rolled to clean the old scales from its sides, the ones that itched so terribly, the ones that itched so bad they hurt. The ones that kept its memories. The ones that spoke of ravage, responsibility and failure.
The monster shed its skin, and sought solace in simplicity. There was only the slow climb to the surface for air, the long descent into the darkness, and the wild hard imperative of survival ahead.
_____
The crack in the sky was close, a jagged junction running li
ke a mad painter’s spasm. On the left of the line, a bank of thunderclouds massed in knots. On the right, the pale dusty-coloured sky stretched away in an arc. The crack terminated in a tight angle, where four more cracks joined on a wedge of red clay. It was like looking at badly arranged mirrors. Smoke escaped from the clay and coiled lazily along the seams of the cracks.
“What is that?” Gabrielle asked. “There’s a growing strangeness in this air, Saladon.”
“It’s a gate, a discontinuity. It is our way forward. What you sense is the Chaos essence it throws off just by existing. For every league we travel closer to Turmodin, it will get worse.” He glanced at Gabrielle. “You’ll get cranky, erratic, impulsive and unavoidably erotic. The creatures survive in the lowlands because they are crazy with lust. Otherwise they would have died out long ago with their violence. Chaos is a dangerous, destructive, wrecking force and the Gyre was right to try contain it, but you can feel how it stirs the blood!” He raked Gabrielle with his gaze. “Everything becomes possible, the rules split upon the infinite chances it creates. Spontaneity, surprise. You can never predict what a person will do next, when they are under its influence.”
“Where does the ... discontinuity ... lead?”
“We shall see. I think this one is a pointer to somewhere far from Turmodin, but it matters not, for it is a maze, and if you calculate your sequencing correctly you can move fast and far.”
“Don’t you have a map, or something?” asked Bevn.
“Little use a map, when the land changes with every strike the Sorcerer makes.”
“It ... changes?”
“Moves, shifts, transforms itself! Every hill and mountain has been transplaced and every river course diverted at least a hundred times. He Who Can Not Be Named plays with the lowlands as it were clay and he the sculptor.”
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 65
