Runestone of Eresu

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  Then at last he felt Dracvadrig drawing away from him, as if the firemaster was distracted or had turned his attention toward another. It seemed to him the firemaster was reaching out in another direction, touching a consciousness far distant. Lobon’s mind quickened with interest, and he reached out toward that same vision, tried to immerse himself in the image that Dracvadrig’s mind seemed to conjure so sharply and in the rush of voices that accompanied it, disjointed and confused. All shifted senselessly, though Dracvadrig was mingling with the scenes comfortably enough, as if he had done this before. Where? Where were these Seers he conjured? Surely these were Seers, whose minds Dracvadrig touched so deftly. How could they remain unaware of the firemaster?

  The creature had blocking skills, powerful skills. He felt Dracvadrig begin to beguile one mind in particular, and to turn and shape its thoughts as if he were shaping clay. A girl. Young. Lobon could see her face, fine-boned, thin; dark hair falling across her shoulders loose and tangled as if from sleep. And her eyes were startling, huge and lavender like the wings of the mabin bird. Her skin was lightly tanned, but a streak of white shone where her hair parted behind one ear. Her cheeks were ruddy, the whole essence of her as brilliant in coloring as was the mabin bird. She was unaware of Lobon’s scrutiny, and seemed aware of Dracvadrig only vaguely; though she was disturbed by him and by the darkness he drew around her, for she shuddered as if from a brutal touch. Yet there was an emptiness within her, too, something soft and malleable that made Dracvadrig easily welcome in spite of her revulsion. Lobon sensed people around her, the activity of a town. He could hear the sea crashing close by. He tried to touch the lower, dreaming levels of the girl’s mind, tried to seek as Dracvadrig sought; but he could not touch her. Why did the dragon seek her out? What did she have that Dracvadrig wanted? Then suddenly the vision vanished, the sense of Dracvadrig faded. Lobon was alone, shivering in the cold darkness.

  The fire had burned to embers. The wolves were pushing at him, returned from the hunt. Four rock hare lay at his feet. He looked at them muzzily, then knelt to build up the fire so he could see to skin out his supper.

  Late in the night, long after he had gone to sleep, something awakened him so violently he jerked upright, scraping his arm against a boulder. He swore with the pain, was wide awake and sitting up staring into a path of moonlight that held two images: dry sand and stone outside the den, and the vision-image of a pale stone room. The girl was lying asleep on a narrow cot, and through the room’s window, Ere’s twin moons hung thin as crystal above the sea.

  He could sense Dracvadrig touching the girl’s mind with fingers like flame. He felt her confusion as she woke, watched her rise from her bed and cross the room to stare out at the moonlit sea. He felt her mindless compulsion, watched her turn at last and begin to dress, then pull on a dark cloak, all the time trying to free herself from Dracvadrig’s possession, but yet needing terribly to obey him.

  He watched her leave the room and climb a flight of twisting stone steps to a huge, cavernous grotto washed with moonlight. He could hear the sea far below. In the center of the room stood a round stone table, and above it hung a stone on a long gold thread, a deep green stone, catching moonlight: a shard of the runestone of Eresu. This must be Carriol, then. This must be Carriol’s runestone.

  The girl shook her head, stared at the runestone, wanting it, coveting it. She tried to push Dracvadrig’s dark compulsion away. Yet she needed to reach for the stone, needed desperately to touch it.

  Still something held her back. She turned away at last, shaken, and made her way out and down the stairs.

  Lobon sat puzzling. Why had Dracvadrig’s power receded?

  Surely the tower had been in Carriol, surely it was the tower at the ruins of Carriol, and this was Carriol’s runestone, the only other stone in Ere now held and used by Seers. It had drawn Dracvadrig’s covetous lust. But why had he let the girl go away without taking it? And why, when Lobon carried four shards, would the firemaster bother about Carriol’s stone? Was he, then, so afraid of Lobon as to seek the power of a runestone elsewhere, to add to the power of the one he carried?

  Was Dracvadrig not powerful enough to better him? Elated with the thought, Lobon burned to confront the firemaster.

  He did not pause to think of the subtlety of the stones’ powers, or that those powers could vary with forces that lay beyond them: with the strengths of those who wielded them, and with strengths far greater still, as yet only vaguely understood. He did not care to remember Skeelie’s words or Canoldir’s explaining the casual balances of those forces beyond the stones, beyond men, forces as mindless and natural as the erupting of Ere’s heaving volcanoes. He thought only of his own power in the stones he carried, and of the foe he sought.

  He set himself to studying with heated urgency the sense of the uncharted land deep in the abyss, the directions the fiery rivers took, the power of the land’s upheavals. He studied the sense of Dracvadrig, turning at last from the girl and from Carriol’s runestone, knew that the firemaster would return his mind-powers there. Then he felt Dracvadrig moving below in the abyss, slow and ponderous, waiting for him.

  TWO

  Meatha woke to find herself standing in her moonlit room fully dressed, her cloak dragging from one shoulder. She was shaken and upset and did not know why, or where she had been. She was sure she had just come through the door, that she had been out in the chill halls of the tower. Her hands were cold, her cheeks numb with cold. She stood with her fist pressed to her lips, trying to make the image that clung in her mind come clear, something half-forgotten and upsetting; but it blew away like smoke. Where had she been? It was the middle of the night, the moons outside her window hung low above the sea, and she was fully dressed. Why? She had been walking, she was sure she had. She knelt to feel her boots and found them dry. Then an image of the shadowed citadel touched her mind, an image of the runestone, deep green, catching moonlight. Why had she been in the citadel?

  Why? Why would she go there in the middle of the night, and then not remember? She shivered, stood staring absently at her rumpled cot.

  She remembered going to bed, remembered snuffing the lamp. What could have waked her, made her dress and go from her room unknowing? Made her go to the citadel, then not remember going? A darkness clung within her mind as cold and repugnant as death.

  Slowly, slowly she began to pull memory out of nothing, until she knew at last that she had indeed stood pressing against the stone table staring at the suspended runestone, wanting to lift it down, her thoughts confused and frightened and at the same time wildly elated.

  She had come away at last, she thought, against her own wishes. And why were her thoughts of the runestone afire with guilt? Surely she could go to look at the runestone if she wished; she herself had helped to bring it secretly to Carriol.

  She left her room at last, too confused, too full of questions to sleep, and made her way down the inner stone stairway to a side door and out onto the moonlit ruins, her mind filled with thoughts that remained vague and shapeless and threatening. She walked slowly, head down, hardly seeing the broken stone rubble of the ruins, washed white with moonlight, stone that had once been towers, dwelling places. Behind her the great tower loomed, white and tall. She was on a high, narrow hump of land that separated Carriol from the sea. To her right and below lay the town. To her left, below jagged cliffs, the sea swung and pounded and flung moon-washed foam to break against the cliff. She stood staring down, caught in the sea’s mindless rhythm, unable to escape her half-formed fears.

  This was not the first time she had been somewhere she could not afterward remember, not the first time she had felt the brushing of cold shadow across her mind and not been able to capture the form of it. For days she had been edgy and uncertain, done badly at weapons practice, had been distracted in her work with Tra. Hoppa. And yesterday she had been so short-tempered and irritable with her young teaching charges that she had cut the class short. One could not teach Seers’
skills with a mind as bristling as a sprika-shell. And she had been mean and bad-tempered with Zephy at a time when Zephy did not need that kind of distraction.

  Now when she thought of Zephy’s journey, even it made her uneasy; her fear rose suddenly and inexplicably as if chill hands had again touched her. She clenched her fist, frowning, trying to puzzle out what disturbed her.

  This journey of Zephy and Thorn’s must not be touched with darkness. This journey would be like none Carriol had sent out before, and if there was some terrible threat to it, she must see it. She tried, willing steadiness in her mind, willing herself to reach out.

  She could see nothing. Only this unformed fear. Maybe it was nothing, then, maybe just her own unsettled state of mind.

  Zephy and Thorn’s journey would not be a fighting force sent out to help defend another nation against Kubal, nor even a trading party gathering intelligence. This journey would be a mission of friendship and dramatic showmanship designed to win the confidence of the new and puzzling cults that had risen so quickly across Ere; cults that no one, yet, understood, but that made all Carriol uneasy. She stood letting her mind wander, hardly aware of her own thoughts, until she noticed suddenly that the twin moons had dropped nearly to the horizon. She huddled into her cloak and watched the first touch of dawn begin to lighten the sky.

  Soon a rosy light began to touch the cliff below her and to wash the fallen stones of the ruins where she stood. It reached down to the town below, fingering across the highest thatched rooftops, then down the stone buildings and across the second-floor shutters where folk still slept. Then sunlight touched the faces of the first-floor shops and the cobbled lanes. A bedroom shutter was pushed open, and a woman in a nightdress leaned out. Below, a door opened, and a leather-clad man set a bucket by the stoop. A boy came around a corner leading three fat ewes. Another door opened, shutters were flung back. Pretty soon folk were on the lanes, most of them heading toward the green before the baker’s and brewer’s shops, arriving to stand in little clusters, staring skyward. Soldiers were due this morning. Other soldiers would be departing. A small flight of winged horses was already rising into the sky down below Waterpole, but only Meatha from her height could see it.

  On the green now, six young soldiers had gathered to inspect the bundles laid out on the long tables. Meatha could feel their tension as if it were her own. The breeze quickened. She glanced skyward with a sense of excitement, but the first group of winged had gone, and she saw nothing else, only the deep gray clouds over the eastern hills, still empty of life. When she turned, sunlight caught across her cheek so the bones of her face showed sharp and clean, the baby softness of two years earlier gone now, traded on the training fields and the battlefields for a taut, quick boyishness that Zephy said only heightened what she called Meatha’s maddening beauty. Meatha pushed back her dark hair absently.

  She knew, without the Seeing, what Zephy would be feeling this morning, strung taut with the nervy discipline they had learned, reacting to possible danger—even though they did not head into battle—with the aggressive eagerness they had been taught. Zephy, so in charge of herself, so certain about everything. Zephy, so very complete and happy since she and Thorn had married. Meatha wished she might have half Zephy’s self-assurance and direction, instead of the emptiness that so often gripped her—instead of the dark fear that dwelt with her now, stirring a deep, subterranean terror that she did not want to examine.

  She needed to talk to someone. Yet that very thought frightened her. Certainly she could not talk to Zephy this morning, could not distract her now. Nor could she talk to Tra. Hoppa without disturbing the old lady’s deep concentration over the work in which she was so immersed.

  She could talk to Anchorstar if he were here. She swallowed, her own distress replaced suddenly by grief. Where was Anchorstar? What had happened that day? The sky had been so clear, their mounts so close together their wings nearly touched, and Zephy on his other side, Thorn just ahead of him. Anchorstar had looked across at her, his face in the shadow of the mare’s wings; and then suddenly he was gone, he and the mare gone as if a hole had opened in the sky.

  She saw Anchorstar’s lean; leathery face and white hair so vividly she thought for a moment it was a true vision, then knew it was only memory combined with her sharp longing for him. How could he have disappeared? If she could talk with Anchorstar, he could tell her why she had been in the citadel in the middle of the night. He could tell her why she felt such fear.

  She wished her Seer’s powers could bring him back, that she could bring him to Carriol by the very power of her need for him; but Seer’s powers had not been enough, nor had the combined power of all the master council together been enough. Nor had any Seer been able to divine what had happened to him. Though there had been some wild and frightening speculations. Had he been snatched into the unknown lands by some evil they did not understand? Or, as Alardded thought, been thrown by forces even more inexplicable into another time, into the future or the past?

  Oh, but that was impossible, that was the stuff of tales or ballads. Like the ballads of Ramad. Not fact. Everyone knew Alardded’s ideas could be tinged with madness. Though his inventions were not; they were wonderful. His waterwheels had changed the whole life of Carriol, had made way for goods and luxuries beyond anything they had imagined. And his irrigation network spreading out from the rivers Voda Cul and Somat Cul had brought a richness of pastures and crops never before known across the northern loess plains, so that the fine horses of Carriol had prospered. Yes, Alardded’s inventions were solid enough. But his talk of people moving through time was only a flight of his wonderful fancy.

  The sun rose higher, and the gray clouds began to brighten with streaks of reflected light. Then, a sense of flight began to touch her, a sense of freedom, of wild soaring, of wind brushing and twisting past so her heart quickened crazily. She searched the clouds for movement. Below her on the green, folk were all doing the same, staring upward, every Seer sensing flight, every common man taking cue from the Seers, though the winged ones were still invisible in the western sky.

  At last she saw tiny specks moving through cloud. She felt their flight, bold and wild and free, as yet unburdened by riders. Her lips moved in silent whisper, she pushed back her dark hair in an impatient gesture, her blood racing at the exhilaration of flight and at the feel of the winged ones’ power, at the feel of the wind around them. She thought suddenly of herself as a child again, staring up at the empty sky waiting eagerly and usually futilely for the winged horses of Eresu to appear among cloud. A guilt-ridden child, afraid she would be discovered looking up at the sky. For in Burgdeeth, dreaming of the winged ones had been forbidden. Speaking with them in silence, as she had longed to do, had been punishable by death.

  Suddenly the band of flying horses burst out from the cloud, sun slashing across their sweeping wings. They came on fast, soon nearly covered the sky, were dropping down over the pastures in a mass of movement, their silent greetings caressing her. They banked, turned, filled the sky utterly, then plummeted down toward the stable yard and toward the crowded green, a dozen winged ones breaking their flight to land soundlessly and gently among the onlookers, their wings hiding the crowd for a moment in a mass of light-washed movement, amber wings and saffron and gold, snow-pale wings and black. Then they folded their wings across their backs and stood quietly greeting their friends, nuzzling, speaking with voices that came in the Seers’ minds in gentle whispers. Meatha saw Zephy with her arms around the neck of a tall roan mare. Zephy, dressed in flowing green silk like a real Carriolinian lady; her brown hair, not streaming as usual, but bound in a coronet braided with gold, gilded boots; jewelry flashing as she moved so Meatha hardly knew her. Meatha watched the winged horses crowd around Zephy, brushing against one another, wings brushing against her like a benediction. Then Thorn was there, his fighting leathers new ones, elegant pale hides not yet stained from battle. Soldiers crowded around, the twelve who would ride with them,
other groups of soldiers ready to embark on other missions. Meatha stared down at her hands on a broken stone wall and saw that she had gripped until her knuckles were white. She loosed her fingers, frowning at herself, then watched the winged ones accept the delicacies the riders had brought them, knew there would be onyrood pods dipped in honey, mawzee grain made into cakes with nuts and fruits, new green shoots from the gardens. She caught the sense of the horses’ pleasure and endearments, the Seers’ silent and gentle responses. And suddenly she wanted to be going, too, or to be flying into battle again in that close brotherhood between Seer and winged one, leaping down over the heads of earthbound warriors, her bow taut.

  Zephy’s and Thorn’s flight would end in a descent from the sky as dramatic and awe-inspiring as riders and horses together could make it: a descent wrapped in magic, in wonder, in illusion, to impress and so convert their quarry. Ceremony that Meatha knew was not any more to the taste of the horses of Eresu than it was to Zephy and Thorn. But necessary, if they were to win over the rising cults that had sprung to life in the coastal countries. If Carriol must win by subterfuge, by illusion, then so be it—though the cults were only a small part of Carriol’s problem. For since Meatha and Zephy and Thorn and Anchorstar, and all that small frightened band of Children of Ynell had fled the Kubalese caves two years earlier, Kubal had not only subjugated all of Cloffi, but seemed intent on defeating and ruling all the coastal countries. On the eastern peninsula, Pelli and Sangur were constantly threatened by raids, though so far they had held their own. In the west, Zandour seemed strong enough, its small council of Seers evidently hardier than the rulers of the central countries. And what was the source of Zandour’s power? Did that country indeed still hold a shard of the runestone, as was often whispered? Zandour’s Seers claimed they had none such, and many folk believed that when Zandour’s leader Hermeth died generations ago, Hermeth’s shard of the runestone had disappeared.