Runestone of Eresu

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  The victory in Burgdeeth had been fine. Riding now free in the night, the wind chilling his naked body, Ram grinned at the memory of Venniver’s face, twisted with rage and fear, with submission.

  Below, flames licked down to touch hills and meadows, but the mountains themselves seemed to have calmed. He could see no flame there now. Dalwyn dropped his silver wings in a glide and brought Ram down to the hill where the wolf bell lay buried. Ram retrieved it, searching in darkness, then crouching naked among stones, digging. Then they leaped skyward again, the stallion keeping well south of the fires. They flew low over hills where thin fingers of lava crept down in the deepest creases. Ram could see, at some distance, a few dim lights burning where Kubal lay; and the stallion had begun to drop toward that place. Ram felt the horse’s quick humor and agreed he needed clothes.

  Where one guard stood with his back to them, the stallion came noiselessly down out of the sky to land without a stir of air.

  Ram sized up the man’s height and width of shoulder. Yes, these clothes would do fine. His pulse quickened. He poised ready, moved silently.

  Ram took the guard’s clothes and left him naked and unconscious in a tangle of sablevine; fingered the weapons and was glad he had left a few in Kubal. Now, perhaps, the Kubalese would learn to hunt with clubs. When he turned to the silver stallion, he stood with his hand on the great horse’s neck, tried to reach out to Telien, to sense her somewhere in those mountains, and could not.

  “Can you find her, Dalwyn? If she lives among those fires, can you find her? Can you sense the red stallion and his mare?”

  Dalwyn turned to stare toward the dark mountains. He would try. His every nerve went taut, trying to sense Rougier and Meheegan, to sense the invisible. They would go among the mountains. They would try.

  Ram knelt beside a spring and washed and drank. He smelled the stink of the borrowed clothes, made a face, wished he had found a cleaner guard.

  Dalwyn was sloshing and drinking, enjoying the water thoroughly. Ram’s wonder was never diminished that even this horselike action was as a man would do, that every action of the horses of Eresu was a sentient, balanced action, unhorselike in the extreme. The stallion turned to him at last; Ram swung himself up, and they leaped skyward so fast he was almost unseated, heading at once into deep smoke and heat.

  On the land beneath them, smoking lava lay cooling, little flames licking out where grass and bushes still burned. As they rose toward the higher peaks, Ram prayed for Telien. And prayed that if she had died, it was quickly and without pain.

  To think of her dead was unbearable; Telien could not be dead. He would know in the same way he had known, when first he saw her, that they were linked in a way he might never understand. Telien had never really left him since that moment on Tala-charen. All the women he had known since had been judged against her. Skeelie had been judged against her, good, faithful Skeelie whom he otherwise might have loved; Skeelie, who was his sister, his mother, his friend, but never anything more—because of Telien.

  *

  It was dawn on the road between the ruins and Blackcob. Skeelie and the old Seer, Berd, and a few soldiers rode hunched over, sleepy, sated with a huge breakfast. They had left in darkness, the pack horses only black lumps at the ends of their lead ropes; desperate to get to Blackcob because they knew there would be a need there. They rode now along the edge of the dark sea, the breakers making a pattern of white movement against darkness. The sea’s pounding seemed not a part of that pattern, seemed a delayed echo from the recent wild thunder of the mountains.

  What they would find in Blackcob was largely unclear. They had watched all night the fiery sky, heard the rattling cries of the mountains. But only glimpses had come to them of the seething land itself. Skeelie had held for one brief instant a clear vision of Ram leaping skyward from Burgdeeth amidst the fiery sky, had known with elation Ram’s victory and the victory of the gods of Eresu—Carriol’s victory over Venniver’s sadism. She stared ahead in the direction of Blackcob, buoyed by this victory against the pain that awaited her there. She could not extricate herself from the blackness into which she had been driven when first she heard, from the refugees coming out of Blackcob, that Ram had found Telien. She had turned away, fists clenched, when they spoke of the two of them whispering together their good-byes.

  Ram would be coming to Blackcob, she knew that clearly. How or why, she did not know. But she must see him once more. See for herself that he was lost to her. She pulled her cape around her, found she was hugging herself in a desolate passion of loneliness.

  Yet still hope rose in spite of logic, and she rode for Blackcob with some wild unexamined notion that maybe . . . maybe . . .

  She knew Ram would ride for Blackcob strung tight with some urgent need, come there in wild desperation. And when she was honest with herself, she had to wonder: Did she ride for Blackcob with the hope that Ram would come there in grief, having lost Telien to the holocaust of the mountains? Yes, if she was honest, she knew she wished Telien dead. Wished her gone, and wished to console Ram in his sorrow.

  Yet Telien’s death would make no difference; Ram would love Telien, not until she died, but until he died.

  Tears touched her cheeks. No matter the pain of her jealousy, she wanted no pain for Ram. No matter her own sorrow, underneath her hatred she wanted Telien to live—for Ram. For Ram to be happy. Wanting that, Skeelie was more miserable than ever.

  She had insisted on going, had stared into Jerthon’s eyes with fine defiance and seen his hurt for her, had sworn at him for a fool. “I don’t go because of Ram! I go because they will need me. If there are wounded, burned from the fire . . .

  “You go because Ram will come there, Skeelie girl. And you . . .” He had left the rest unsaid. Great fires of Urdd! Sometimes she wished they were none of them Seers and could never, never see into the mind of another!

  *

  The stallion changed direction suddenly, seeking over the fiery land, winged over and down into a blast of hot wind then through a narrow valley, rock walls rising beside them. Ram clung, saw not the walls or the smokey sky, Saw a clear vision suddenly of Telien kneeling, white and sick, beside the newborn foal. He heard Telien’s thoughts as if they were his own: was death the same as birth? Was death, too, a wild struggling after a mystery we cannot know, can only sense? He shouted into the hot wind, “Don’t speak of death! Don’t think of death!” And only the stallion heard him.

  He felt the stallion sweep suddenly in a different direction, seeking again, disoriented and unable to touch the others with his thoughts. The great horse’s direction was confused and uncertain. They soared low between mountains where smoke still rose sullenly, dropped down across a valley that steamed from the cooling lava. Everywhere there was lava going gray, burned brush and trees. The sweating stallion moved with the same uncertainty that a crippled bat might move, sensing his direction then foiled of it suddenly, blinded again so his course changed, changed again. Dalwyn grew weary, his wings heavy; the hot air did not hold him well. He came down at last to rest.

  It was well after midday. Ram dismounted beside a stream bed dried up, the land above it charred. Between ancient boulders he found a protected place where the heat had not come so fiercely and dug with his knife until at last he uncovered a bit of dampness. They waited for an interminable time until the water had oozed up to make a small pool from which Dalwyn could drink. Ram said, “You cannot hold the sense of the red stallion, Dalwyn. Will we ever find them?”

  Dalwyn lifted his head. He did not know. Rougier would come into his mind then fade at once, and Dalwyn’s idea of the direction would twist and become confused. He was as the hunting birds of old Opensa that were whirled around in baskets until they had no notion of which way were their eyries, and so returned to their masters at last in confused submission.

  So were the dark Seers confusing Dalwyn now.

  “But why? Such a little thing as finding Telien . . . Ram stared at the stallion with risin
g anger. “Why should BroogArl care if . . .” Then he stiffened. Why should BroogArl care? And why should he not care? It was Telien—Telien who would bring another stone into Ere!

  Of course BroogArl wanted her lost. Lost to Ram and to Ere, forever. Ram laid a hand on Dalwyn’s withers, touched his sweating sides. “We must find her, and soon.” He took off his jerkin and began to rub the stallion down, wiping away sweat, smoothing his coat. When water had seeped again into the cupped sand, Dalwyn drank a second time, then they were off, Ram forcing his powers now against BroogArl, against the Hape, in an aching effort to stay the dark while Dalwyn circled, sought out Rougier, and swept off in a direction from which they had recently come. The air was smokey, drifting with ash, so hot in some places, that their vision was blurred. Ram held with great effort against the dark, felt the strength of the wolf bell sustaining him, held so until at last Dalwyn swept down suddenly and surely to the mouth of a cave high in a dark peak, and Ram knew she was there, could sense her there.

  Dalwyn came down fast to the lip of the cave. Ram slid off and was inside running downward into the darkness. He startled the mare. The little foal jumped away from him in alarm. He laid a hand on the mare’s cheek. He was sorry to have frightened her. But Telien—Telien was not there.

  He searched the small cave for other openings. There was one; but he turned back to the entrance, the mare directed him back. Dalwyn called to him in silence.

  Outside on the mountain, he followed the silver stallion up a thin thread of path that climbed steeply beside a steep drop. The heat was terrible here, rising from the burned hills. He found Telien at last, lying cold as death, inches from the drop. How could she be cold? The air was stifling. She was barely conscious, shivering, her skin like ice. He lifted her and held her, trying to warm her. She whispered so low he could barely hear her, “The ice—it’s so slippery. I can’t climb, I can’t get to the grass. She is so hungry . . .”

  Ice? The mountain was hot as Urdd. And yet her hands and face were freezing cold, her tunic cold and wet and, in the creases, stiff with ice crystals that melted at his touch. He stared at the swollen, blood-crusted wound on her forehead, and a memory of just such a wound made him feel the pain again. He knew at once the dizziness she felt, the nausea, guessed her confused state.

  But why was she cold?

  Her arms and legs, her face were scraped and dirty. Her legs were black with ash but smeared, too, with the melting ice. Beneath the grit her skin was pale. Her hair was tangled with twigs and dead sablevine and dulled with ashes. When he tried to smooth it, she sighed, reached to touch his hand, then dropped her own hand, palm up curving in innocence. But then she looked at him suddenly without recognition, fell into sleep again, frightening him anew.

  He carried her down into the cave and laid her on a stone shelf, covered her with his dirty tunic. The cave was cooler, but still stifling. Telien shivered. He began to chafe her wrists, then at last he lay down over her, keeping his weight off but trying to warm her. She stirred a little then, opened her eyes. She was shivering uncontrollably. “The snow comes so hard. Will it never stop? There is ice . . . the path . . . I must not fall. Meheegan . . .”

  “Telien! Telien!”

  She had gone unconscious again. He gathered her close, trying to warm her, trying to understand what had happened. She shivered again. He must get her warm or she would die. He rose, stared around the cave. He had flint, but there was nothing here to burn. It was then he saw the wolves come around him suddenly out of the darkness. Fawdref nuzzled close to him in wild greeting, his great tail swinging an arc. Rhymannie stared up at him grinning with joy. They came at once onto the shelf with Telien and lay down all around her, covering her. They had dropped their kill at Ram’s feet, three fat rock hares.

  Ram could see little more of Telien now than her cheek and one strand of pale hair, so completely did the wolves cover her. Rhymannie began to lick her face. Ram took up the rock hares, carried them to the mouth of the cave and began to clean them. Telien would need food, something hot. But where in Urdd was he going to get fuel? Fawdref spoke in his mind then, showed Ram where there was grass on the mountain, and he understood that Telien had been trying to climb there to gather it for the mare.

  He went up the narrow steep trail to gather the grasses dried brown by the heat and to gather some of the dried manure left by the winged ones. He returned to the cave, built a fire, and cut the rock hare into small portions to cool quickly. When the first pieces were done, he woke Telien. She ate slowly, watching Ram, uncertain still of her surroundings. She discovered the wolves clustered over and around her, was afraid, then lost her fear as suddenly and pulled Rhymannie’s muzzle down to her in affection, sighing with the life-giving warmth. Ram had brought grass for the mare. She ate with the dispatch of one truly hungry, while her greedy young colt nursed, flapping his stubby wings with pleasure.

  When Telien had eaten, her color was better, her eyes clearer. “It was so cold, Ram. Did the snow melt? It’s warm now; how long has it been? When did you come here?” She stared up toward the cave opening, puzzled. “The mountains were white with it. And you—you haven’t any tunic. You . . .”

  “Hush.” He knelt, laid a hand over her lips. “It’s all right. I found you on the ledge, you were almost frozen. Where—it was hot, Telien. The air is like steam. Where . . . what happened to you?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know. I was . . .” She tried to sit up, so Rhymannie’s head was lifted on her shoulder. Ram helped her. The wolves stirred, resettled themselves around her. She stared across the dim cave at the mare, saw the foal. “I—I was going up to get grass for Meheegan, she . . . on the mountain. The wolves said . . . She startled, looked at Ram with amazement. “They—the wolves spoke to me, Ram. Spoke in my mind . . .” Her eyes were filled with wonder. “How can that be? I—I am no Seer.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “They showed me—in my mind—where the grass was left untouched, and then they went to hunt. I went—I went up along the path and Rougier came flying up beside me in case, I—I was so dizzy. He stayed with me, and then suddenly he—he was gone and the path was all ice, the mountains white and—and then I don’t remember—then you came, I guess.” She reached to touch his face. “How—how did you find me here?”

  “Dalwyn found you. I cannot, even with the wolf bell I could sense little.” He knew he must go for food for her, for fuel. For water, grain for the mare. Telien needed herbs, bread, needed more than meat alone—and even rock hares must be hard to find after the fires, for surely game had perished. He laid a hand on the dark wolf’s head. “Stay with her, Fawdref. Stay with her, hunt for her if I do—stay until I return.” He tucked the tunic tighter around her, held her for a long moment, then rose and turned to the cave’s entrance where Dalwyn waited, silhouetted like a dark statue against the ashen sky.

  “Ram?”

  He turned back. He thought he could not bear to leave her. They had been apart all their lives. Now, to part so soon was unthinkable. He saw her eyes, needing him, but knew that he must go. “The wolves—Fawdref and Rhymannie will care well for you. I will bring you food, cakes. What girl, Telien, what girl in Ere has such tender nurses?”

  She smiled. “No girl. Not such nurses as these. Oh, Ram . . .” Her eyes grew large suddenly and darkened as if some foreshadowing had touched her. She glanced away, then back at him more lightly. “Don’t be long, Ramad of wolves.”

  Fear twisted in his stomach as he mounted. He turned to look back at her, wanted to say, Come with me, Telien. But she was too weak. He watched Rhymannie reach to lick her face. He mounted the silver stallion and was gone into the sky.

  Part Three: Telien

  Love’s will cannot be drawn against the will of Time, but must swing with it. Love’s fate cannot be shaped by the minds of those who love: except as they cleave to the infinity of power that carves out all life. Except as they cleave to the spirit that has birthed them.

  Ther
e is no path through the fulcrum of Time, there is no promise that one will return, no promise that one will not die lost in Time and alone. There is no promise that what one seeks will be given.

  And you who are Seer born, your mission is perilous. If you hold the power of the jade or hold a taint of that stone, those who are dark will lust for it, and follow.

  And think not the gods to save you.

  Think not the gods to meddle. To twist and warp your path through Time, and so destroy your freedom. You are thrown into Time alone, and so alone shall you travel. And if you come, one to another swept on the tides of Time, and if you cleave one to another, perhaps you cleave then to the power that carves out all life, to the spirit that has birthed you. And if you cleave so one to another, then shall you cleave to joy though Time itself spin you broken as flotsam upon its eternal shore.

  NINE

  Blackcob, scarred from the Kubalese raids, now stood sullen indeed with the ravages of the mountain fires. For, though the lava had not touched her to set her aflame, the volcanoes’ refuse lay around her feet, lava boulders scattered as far as one cared to look, spewed out by the Voda Cul in a tidal flood when the blocked river had finally broken free: black, twisted rock lying now all around the foot of Blackcob’s stumpy hill. And the settlement itself covered with ash, the ruined houses and sheds, the rooftops gray as death, and the ash still drifting down like dirtied snow.

  Skeelie and Berd were unsaddling, Berd’s pale beard catching in the harness as he leaned forward. The two young soldiers were bringing hay. Skeelie stared with dismay at the patched fences and sheds, at the great patch of blackened boulders below, ruining the town’s whitebarley fields and gardens. She paid no attention to Berd watching her, she could have been alone, felt far too upset by the condition of Blackcob and by her premonitions about Ram to be civil to anyone.