Runestone of Eresu

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  The moons had gone. Ram and Skeelie carried Hermeth’s body back to the hall and began to wake Hermeth’s men, wake the families who helped in the hall and kitchen. Lamps were lit. Hermeth was laid on a bench in the hall before the dead fire. Those who came knelt immediately, as if no man wanted to stand taller than Hermeth in this moment. Messengers were sent throughout the town.

  They made his grave upon a hill at first light. Processions streamed out of the village from all directions in absolute silence: Folk cleanly dressed and carrying little bowls of grain in the traditional gift for the winged horses who might come over Hermeth’s grave to speak with him and carrying little bowls of fruit and meats to leave there on his grave for the gods, for if fate smiled, the Luff’Eresi might come too in a last rite to Hermeth. The ceremony itself was simple enough. Ram spoke solemn words, as did Hermeth’s lieutenants, the five Seers among them bowing their heads in a last gift of power to Hermeth. Ram held the runestones tight, wanting power for Hermeth now in these moments, wanting to lend Hermeth strength; thought he knew that already Hermeth had left his body, left this place to move into another place and time, another sphere; that there was no need for the power of Seers, of the stones; but still they gave it.

  Ram turned away at last from the bare earth that covered the grave like a scar against the green hill. Hermeth’s men and the entire city of Zandour followed him down the hill in silence. The wolves, who had come at Hermeth’s death down out of Scar Mountain, stood last upon the hill and raised their voices in a wailing lament, in a death song that trembled the sky and would long, long be remembered in Zandour. And then the wolves came down, too, from Hermeth’s grave, and his body was alone there beneath the rising sun.

  They would carve and lay a slab of granite, the people of Zandour, to mark the place where Hermeth lay. A little child, staring back up the hill, said, “He can look out now over the sheep meadows.” But no one thought Hermeth was there to look out. He was in another place that they could not yet fathom.

  “He left no children,” Skeelie said, mourning. “No wife—no young Seers.”

  “There are other Seers, that handful among his lieutenants.”

  “Untrained. Unskilled, Ram. Just—just those with some power, but not master Seers.”

  Ram looked down at her, unsettled. “Was I meant to stay here, Skeelie? To use the stones, in his place, to protect Zandour? Or if I can follow Telien, was I meant to leave Hermeth’s shard of the runestone behind, to keep only that one taken from the wraith?”

  “I don’t think you are meant to do anything, Ram. Do you think it is all planned out? What do you know you must do?”

  He looked at her a long time, a deep look, searching his own soul through what he saw reflected in her eyes. “I will hold these shards of the runestone and keep them, Skeelie. Against the day when the stone will again be whole. And I—I will follow Telien.”

  That night in the hall, Ram brought together a council of the five young Seers who had ridden as scouts for Hermeth, seeking to understand what skills they had, and to train them.

  This five, then, must rule Zandour, for in them lay the needed power. A council of the entire city sat with them, planning; men taking over, as smoothly as they could, the work that had been Hermeth’s. Late in the night Skeelie dozed in a chair beside the hall fire, waking only now and then to the men’s raised voices. Then suddenly she woke to Ram’s hand on her arm, saw that the night had waned and dawn had begun to touch the shuttered windows with gray. Ram stood staring down at her, tired, drawn tight with too much talking. “Get your pack, Skeelie. Put on your boots, your leathers. Take off those silly sandals. I want . . .” He turned to stare northward as if he could look through the very walls of the hall. “I want to climb Scar Mountain. I want . . .” The sense of unrest about him, of need, was powerful.

  She rose, forcing herself awake, hurried through the hall, and returned shortly dressed in leathers, with her pack and weapons, to find him in the courtyard pacing and restless as a river cat, his own pack and bow slung over his shoulder, eager to be moving. What Was drawing Ram so? Simply restlessness? The sudden need to return to his childhood place? A hope of finding Gredillon for some reason? He was strung taut as a bowstring. Surely something spoke to him, something was pulling at him, but she could make no sense of it. She was only grateful that he wanted her to go, too. They started off at once into the faint touch of dawn, north up the first hill of the sheep pastures, Ram striding out impatiently and Skeelie hurrying to keep up. As they climbed, wolves began to come to them out of the darkness, one here, and then two, all in silence, until soon a dozen wolves paced beside them, Fawdref pressing close to Ram, Torc and Rhymannie nuzzling sometimes at Skeelie’s arm.

  As they climbed, the sense of promise, of beckoning grew strong indeed. On the crest of the hill Ram stopped and turned to watch the dawn sky lighten. Down in the town they could see the dark shapes of wagons and of horses and riders moving in over the hills and roads, as folk from the farther reaches of Zandour began to arrive in Zandour’s city to pay their last respects to Hermeth. Ram stood staring down, then silently he drew from his tunic the little pouch he had made of soft white goathide and spilled the two runestones and the starfires out into his palm. He seemed puzzled. Skeelie watched, still and expectant, not knowing what was to happen, but filled with growing excitement. Something was building around them, something of power. She began to feel Ram’s curiosity, his questions rising, felt him begin to reach out hesitantly. They stood looking down upon the slowly lighting land, and then, alarmed suddenly, she turned to look back up the mountain, saw the wolves turn too; Ram turned as if someone had spoken his name. He took her shoulder in a sharp grip.

  Above them the mountain had become unclear, as fast winds moved down across it sweeping toward them, blurring their vision. Fingers of wind snatched at them, blurring the dawn sky. Then the great body of wind itself was sweeping and pummeling them, ripping at their tunics, laying the wolves’ coats and ears flat. Fawdref crouched and snarled; the wind pounded, tore the very grass from the hill, and a rider came racing out of it leading two wild, rearing horses, shouting, “Mount! Mount you, Ramad!” The hooded rider, his cowl bound tight against the bite of the wind, his tall, thin figure leaning from the saddle, urged Ram; and Ram did not pause or question, but grabbed the reins and was in the saddle. Skeelie’s fear for him rose like a tide. “No, Ram! Wait!” She leaped for his reins, tried to stop his plunging horse. “Don’t follow! You don’t know . . .” Terror of his being swept away, terror of the cowled rider made her scream into the wind as Ram kicked the horse, jerked the reins from her hand and sent his mount into the turmoil alongside the dark rider.

  “Oh, don’t, Ram. You don’t know . . .” All hint of dawn had disappeared; the wind was dark as midnight. The wolves stood frozen, then suddenly leaped to follow Ram. “Ram . . .” Skeelie’s voice was empty, a whisper blown back in her face. “You don’t know where he leads you. . . .” But Ram had disappeared in the storm of wind.

  She jerked the reins of the riderless horse until it stood still, then leaped to the saddle and was swept into the dark wind herself. The flanks of the dark mounts were ahead; then the wolves were running beside her leaping through wind. She stared ahead at the hooded rider. Who was this man, racing out of Time’s winds to snatch them up like this? She felt his attention, though he had not changed his crouching position over the withers of his stallion. Then suddenly he straightened in the saddle, brushed back his hood as if annoyed, and turned to look at her, wind whipping his white hair across his face.

  Anchorstar?

  Was it Anchorstar? Yes, she recognized him now, that long, thin face. He nodded to her and she stared back through the wild wind, cross and suspicious. But she settled down to ride, watching Anchorstar warily, watching Ram’s back ahead of her. The tearing speed of the horses increased as the wind increased, and the wolves sped with them across winds that threatened to fling the riders from their saddles into timeless
space, washing Skeelie with cold fear, and exciting her to madness. Never was there land, but faces looked out of darkness, and the moons were full, then gone, then new again.

  Then the wind died. The night became dense and still. The moons hung like two half coins, casting silver light across the quiet horses where they stood on an open hill beside a wood. The white-haired rider dismounted as casually as if he had just trotted across a farm meadow. He unsaddled his stallion, then turned it loose to graze, ignoring Skeelie and Ram. Picking up sticks from the edge of the wood, he began to lay a fire on the bare slope.

  The wolves turned, grinned, then leaped away into the wood. Torc flung back, To hunt! To hunt for meat, sister! Skeelie could feel the passionate curiosity among the wolves at being in a new place, could taste for a moment the new smells as Torc did; and she held for a brief moment Torc’s wild excitement at the newness, the land virgin to be traveled and tasted and known intimately. Then she dismounted, only slowly recovering from the drunkenness of that wild ride.

  Ahead rose immense mountains, washed in moonlight. To her right, the wood was a velvet patch of dark. And to her left, the land dropped down steeply to what seemed, in the moonlight, a very deep chasm or valley. The space around her seemed greater than she had ever known. She felt exposed, threatened by such space; and felt again a cold twinge of unease because Ram had followed so easily. But she was being foolish; Ram knew Anchorstar. She turned to unsaddling her mount. What else did she think Ram would do but follow whatever way might lead to Telien? She reached out to Ram in her mind, but he was oblivious to her in his sudden hope that this wild ride had set him on a course that would bring him soon to Telien.

  “Unsaddle your horse, Ramad,” Anchorstar said. “He cannot graze with the bit in his mouth. He will come to me when I call. They are Carriol-bred horses, bred from your own stock, Ramad, in years past.” He tipped his chin toward the tall dun stallion he had ridden. “Do you not remember him? You tried to buy him once.”

  Ram pulled himself back from his tumbled thoughts. “I remember him. A horse I would have sold my soul to have.”

  Anchorstar bent to put flint to the fire. When the blaze had flared, then settled and begun to burn steadily, he produced from his saddlebags a tin kettle, tammi tea, hard mawzee biscuits, mountain meat.

  Skeelie hunkered down by the fire, hardly tasting the food she ate, so caught was she in Ram’s rising hope, his need to push on, to reach out to Telien; and then in his beginning uncertainty that perhaps Anchorstar would try but could not lead him to Telien; and then his growing depression, his returning desolation at the horror of Telien’s possession.

  “We will sleep here until dawn,” Anchorstar said, ignoring Ram’s depression, “and then we will push on. We are in a time out of Time, Ramad. We are now in the time of the Cutter of Stones.”

  Ram stared at him. “How can you move with purpose through Time when I cannot? I could not follow Telien. 1 have only been buffeted through Time with never any reason until—until it was too late. I could not touch her soon enough, reach far enough back into Time to save her from NilokEm. There is no reason to how I have moved.”

  “There was reason, Ramad, when you fought to help Macmen, then to help Hermeth.” Anchorstar stared into the fire, and Ram did not speak again. Anchorstar said at last, “I do not move us through Time, nor do I pretend to know the intricate patterns that touch such movement. Though I know that I lead you, now, to the Cutter of Stones, lead you by his will. And that through him you can seek the wraith, seek Telien.”

  “Why do you help me? Why do you care if I find Telien, or if I can save her and destroy the wraith?”

  “I am linked to the wraith, even as are you. I do not know why. Perhaps it has to do with my own time. I feel that this is so. I feel certain I must return to my own time, and soon. Something there calls to me, and perhaps the wraith has to do with that in some way I do not yet comprehend.”

  *

  The wind changed in the night to blow icy, down from the mountains. Skeelie woke once to see Anchorstar building up the fire, then slept again. Dawn came too soon, and she woke huddled in her blanket, to watch Ram saddle the horses while Anchorstar came from out the shadowed wood carrying the tin kettle. He gave her a rare smile. “There is a spring there in the wood if you care to wash.”

  She sat up, pulling the blanket around her. The sky was hardly light. The wood lay in blackness. Ahead, the dark smear of sharp peaks rose against a gray horizon, peaks with a shock of snow at the top. To her left, the hill dropped steeply to the valley far below. She could sense, but not yet see, that a river ran there at the bottom like a thin silver thread. Wild land, and huge, rising up to peaks that must surely be a part of the Ring of Fire.

  She rose and went barefoot into the shadowed wood where dawn had not yet come, found the stream twisting cold between the roots of ancient trees, washed herself, shivering, kneeling in shallow rapids. When she came out, dawn was beginning to filter into the wood, and the wolves were there among the trees. She pulled the blanket around her, embarrassed at her nakedness, and rubbed herself dry. Only when the wolves had gone, Fawdref dragging the carcass of a deer over his shoulder, did she remove the blanket to pull on her shift. She could sense Ram finishing with the horses, could feel his mood like a dark pall, knew he had waked with the sense of Telien’s captive spirit gripping him. When she returned to the camp, he was surly and rude.

  Anchorstar had cooked thin slices of the deer meat on a stick. Ram ate hunched over, not speaking, gulping his food. The morning was bright, the air cold and clear. Skeelie reached out to the aliveness, the wholeness of the rising morning, needing this, needing to put away from her the sense of death and depression Ram carried. Deliberately, she savored the tender deer meat, the tea and warmed bread. But though she tried, she could not rid herself of Ram’s misery. She supposed he knew she shared it. Perhaps that made him surlier still. He tossed down his eating tin finally and rose, glowering at her before he went to untie the horses.

  She gazed up at the far peaks, crowned with white, feeling miserable herself suddenly, angry at Ram for making her so, and angrier at herself for letting him. Anchorstar laid a hand on her knee in friendship and understanding. She stared into his strange golden eyes, felt his sympathy. His voice was soft. He glanced once to where Ram had already mounted, then looked ahead to the mountains. “This is strange, wrinkled land. There lies ahead a mountain still hidden, we will come on it as we top the next hills. That is our destination, Esh-nen, a mountain capped with ice but with fires deep in its belly, with a lake like a steaming bath. Well, but you will see.”

  When they set out, Ram’s thoughts still ran through Skeelie’s mind and would not be stilled. If the wraith was growing stronger so rapidly that it could now suck out a man’s life, could they hope to defeat it before it destroyed them? It carried Hermeth’s spirit within it now, which made it infinitely stronger; Skeelie remembered its hoarse whisper, there in Gredillon’s house, You will come into me our way, as the others have come Could they, even through the Cutter of Stones, follow and destroy that creature of death? The sense of the wraith closed in around her as they started over a rise of boulders, the horses humping in a lurching gallop against the steepness; and then suddenly, coupled with her worry over the wraith and somehow a part of it, she began to feel Anchorstar’s restlessness, his growing need to return to his own time. She thought that he could sense something amiss there but not discern its shape; she felt a darkness touching him too painful to bring to view.

  At midday the riders came over the last of a series of rises and were facing quite suddenly a great white mountain that sprawled just above the hills like an immense reclining animal. “That is Esh-nen,” Anchorstar said. “The white shoulder.” The west wind blew the mountain’s cold breath down to them. “There in Esh-nen the Cutter of Stones dwells in a place out of Time, a place impervious to Time.”

  They built a fire for their noon meal and set the meat to cook. Ram stripped th
e horses to let them graze, then hunched down beside the fire and drew the leather pouch from his tunic. He fished out the three starfires and held them in his palm. They caught the firelight, flashing. He looked up at Anchorstar with taut impatience. “Tell me about the Cutter of Stones. Tell me where he came by the stone from which he cut these, and what he intended for them.”

  “The Cutter of Stones himself will tell you what he wishes you to know of the starfires, Ramad.” Anchorstar shrugged, dismissing the subject. Then he looked at Ram and seemed to soften, adding, ‘There were five. I carry one still. And Telien carries the other.”

  “And that one has not helped Telien. Perhaps they are cursed stones.”

  “I do not think that,” Anchorstar said, then grew silent. When at last he spoke again, his words were harder, clipped, as if he in turn had lost patience. “Where is the runestone, Ramad, that Telien brought out of Tala-charen?”

  “I do not know. When I held her close to me there in the wood, I caught a sense of it, quick and fleeting. A sense of it in darkness. Lost. As if Telien herself did not remember where.”

  “And if you were made to choose between the search for Telien and the search for the shards of the runestone—which you vowed once, Ramad, that you would join together again—which path would you choose?”

  Ram stared at him for so long it seemed he did not mean to answer. At last he rose, still silent, and walked away from them. When he turned back, his scowl was more lonely than angry; and still for a long moment he did not speak. Then he said only, “You know as well as I, what I would do. What I must do. But it does not help to contemplate that pain before—unless—I must.”