Sisters in Fantasy

by Edited by Susan Shwartz

  “Was he a felon, to want such secrecy?” one good-wife muttered from the sidelines.

  Ciondo replied in indignation. “Does it matter?” Then good sense prevailed over argument, and Kala scolded the gawkers roundly for keeping poor Juard from his bed.

  A month passed, and seven days. Juard recovered his health and returned to fishing on the sloop. The Wayfinder who had brought his recovery took a longer time to mend. Kala pressed food and comforts on him constantly, until he complained of her coddling. Unlike anybody else, she listened, and left him alone. His white hair grew out its natural color, a golden, honey-brown, until Sabin sitting in her chair seat on the cliff-side could no longer pick him out from the villagers who manned the sloops. She saw him seldom, and spoke with him not at all. Winding the skeins of wool and stringing the looms in her father’s craft shop in furious concentration, she avoided walking the beach. Since the night she forgot her jacket, she could not bear to watch the combers. She heard them, felt them, even indoors with her ears filled with the clack of shuttle and loom—the thunder of what might be hooves, and the tumble of white, upflung spray that pounded the beaches in procession. She swept cut threads from the floor, and helped her mother bake, and each night begged her sleep to show her silence.

  It did not. She misplaced socks and tools, and once, let the fire burn out. The waking world came to seem as a dream, and herself, strangely separate, adrift. She was scolded more often for stargazing, and seemed more than ever to care less.

  The Wayfinder laughed in the tavern at night, accepted, but with a reverence that marked him apart. Two boats he saved from ruin when storms caused shoaling off the reefs. Another smack was recovered with a damaged compass after squall winds blew it astray. No one knowingly broke the Wayfinder’s faith, but his presence loomed too large to shelter. Sabin understood this, her hands fallen idle over wool she was meant to be spinning. She twisted the red-dyed fibers aimlessly, knowing: there were traders who had heard of Juard’s loss, and who saw him back among the men. They asked questions. Driven by balked curiosity, they pressured and cajoled, and won themselves no satisfaction.

  The silence itself caused talk.

  Summer passed. The winds shifted and blew in cold from the northeast, and the fleet changed quarter to follow the shoals of fish. The looms in the weaver’s shop worked overtime to meet the demand for new blankets. Sabin crawled into bed each evening too tired to blow out the lamp; and so it chanced that she wakened in the deeps of night by the blood-dim glow of a spent wick. This time no forgotten jacket needed recovery from shore. The restlessness that stirred her refused to be denied.

  She arose, dressed in haste, and let herself out the back door. Lights still burned in the tavern, and a few drunken voices inside argued over ways to cure sharkskin. Sabin slipped past, down the lane toward her uncle’s cottage. Once there she did not knock; every window was dark. Instead she went on down the cliff path. Her shins brushed the stalks of purple flowers, dried now, and rattling with seedheads in the change of season. Wind snatched her clothing and snapped at the ends of her hair. A wild night, yet again, the kind that was wont to bring wrecks. She completed the last, familiar steps to the chair seat, dreading what she might find.

  The horizon was clearly delineated under a waning half moon. Clouds scudded past like dirty streamers, muddling the swells pewter and gray, and against them, like pen strokes in charcoal, an advancing forest of black masts. Where peaceful craft would have plied sails, this fleet cleaved against the wind, lashing up coils of foam beneath the driving stroke of banked oars.

  War galleys, Sabin identified, though the Karbasch to her were just talk. The Wayfinder’s secret was loose in the world, and his overlords returned now to claim him. Poised to run and rouse the town, Sabin found she could not move. Her flesh became riveted by a cry that had no sound, but ripped between the fabric of the air itself to echo and ring through her inner mind.

  The vibration negated her scream of terrified surprise, and filled her unasked with its essence: that of rage and sorrow and mystery, and a wounding edge of betrayal.

  Dizzied almost to sickness, she clawed at the rocks for a handhold to ward off a tumbling fall. The summons faded but did not leave silence. The grind of the sea overwhelmed her ears with a mauling crescendo of sound. Cowering down in the cleft of the chair seat, Sabin saw the sea roll back. It sucked in white arrows of current off the tide flats until slate, shingle, and reef were laid bare. Fish flapped in confused crescents across settled streamers of weed, and the scuttled, half-rotted hull of a schooner turned turtle with a smack in the mud, Fishing boats settled on their anchor chains, and townside, the bell in the harbormaster’s house began steadily tolling alarm.

  Faintly, from the cottage behind, Sabin heard her uncle’s bellow of inquiry as the clangor aroused him from bed. Juard, also, would be tossing off blankets, and stumbling out with the rest.

  Sabin did not move. She, who had been born in a village of seafarers, and should have been, would have been, one of them, could only stare with her joints locked immobile. She alone did not flee in blind concern toward the beach path to stave off the threat to the boats.

  Had she gone, it would not have mattered; the chair seat offered an untrammeled view as the horses thundered in from the sea.

  They came on in a vast, white herd, manes tossing, and forehooves carving up arcs of flying spray. The water swirled under their bellies and legs, and rushed in black torrents behind uncountable upflung tails. Wave after wave, they surged in, plowing up weeds and fish and muddy gouts of sea bottom, and milling the shells of galleys and sloops into shreds and splinters as they passed. Spars of fishing smacks entangled with snapped-off oars and the dragon-horned timbers of Karbaschi shipwrights; the cries of warriors and oarsmen entangled in the flood mingled with shouts from the villagers who saw their fleet and that of the raiders become smashed to kindling at a stroke. The horses swept on in a boil of foam that boomed like a god-wielded hammer against the shore. Spindrift sluiced across the cliffs. Ancient pines shivered and cracked at the blow, and boulders broke off and tumbled.

  Drenched to her heels by cold water, Sabin cowered down, weeping for the beauty of a thousand salt-white steeds that reared up and struck at the windy sky. And with that release came understanding, at last, of what all along had been wrong: her heart held no sorrow for the terrible, irreversible destruction that rendered her whole village destitute.

  Lights flickered through the pines at her back, as angry men lit torches. Shouts and curses carried on the wind, and the tolling bell fell silent, leaving the seethe of the seas a scouring roar across the reef. Sabin pressed her knuckles to her face. The Wayfinder was going to be blamed. This ruin was his doing, every man knew, and when they found him, they would tear him in pieces.

  Pressed into her cranny by a weight of remorse she could not shed, Sabin saw the wild horses swirl like a vortex and turn. Back, they plunged into the sea that had spawned them, leaving churned sand and burst wood and snarled bits of rope. Amid the roil of foam, a lone swell arose and broke; one mare spun away and parted from her companions.

  Sabin saw her stop with lifted head, as if she listened to something far away. She tossed her mane, shedding spray, then raised up one forehoof and stepped, not into water, but most irrevocably, out onto wrack-strewn sand.

  Sabin cried out at that moment, as if some force of nature wrenched her, spirit from flesh. Reflex overturned thought, and she was up and running inland at a pace that left her breathless. Voices called out to her as she reached the lane, people she knew, but she had no answer. The torchlight in the market did not slow her, nor the press of enraged men who gathered to seek their revenge. Scraps of conversation touched her ears and glanced away without impression—the in’am shealdi and his vicious, unfair bargain—Juard’s life, in exchange for the livelihood of all the village. Boats had been broken and sunk. Folk would starve. The Wayfinder would be made to pay, made to burn; they would pack him off in chains to rot in the
dungeons of the King’s bailiff. A hangman was too good for him, someone yelled, his words torn through with the sounds of a woman’s crying.

  Sabin stumbled and kept going, past the cedar shingles of the wool shop where her mother stood on the door stoop. “Girl, where are you off to, there’s salvage work to be done, and soup to be fixed for the men.”

  But the rebuke of her parent was meaningless, now, and had been for quite some time.

  Deep darkness wrapped the hollow where the crossroads met the town and the lane led inland through forest. Sabin went that way, her lungs burning, and her eyes streaming tears. The terrible truth pursued her: she did not weep for loss. The village was nothing to her, its hold inexorably diminished since the moment she left a jacket on the beach.

  By the stone marker on the hill above the market, the Wayfinder waited, as she knew he would. He sat astride a mare whose coat caught the moonlight like sea-foam, and whose eyes held the darkness and mystery of water countless fathoms deep. She tossed her head at Sabin’s arrival, as if chiding the girl for being tardy, and her mane lifted like a veil of spindrift; subsided like falling spray.

  The Wayfinder regarded Sabin gravely, the burning in his eyes near to scalding. “You heard my call,” he said. “The mare came, and you answered also.”

  Sabin found speech at last. “You knew I would.”

  He shook his head, his unbleached honey-colored hair veiling his weather-beaten face. “I wasn’t sure. I hoped you might. Gifts such as yours are needed sorely.”

  The white mare stamped, impatient. She blew a salty, gusty snort. New tears welled in tracks down Sabin’s cheeks, and she reached out trembling fingers and touched the shimmering white shoulder. It was icy as sea-water; magical and terrifying and beautiful enough to bring madness. The words she struggled to shape came out choked. “If the horse cannot return, then neither will I.”

  “You are both my responsibility,” the Wayfinder admitted. “And will be, to the end of my days.” He extended his hand, no longer so thin, but disfigured still with old scars. “You must know the Karbasch would have burned more than boats, and slaughtered and raped did they land.”

  Sabin felt as if she had swallowed a stone. “You spared the whole village, and they hate you.”

  He sighed, and the mare shifted under him, anxious to be away. “Oh my dear, it could not be helped. What is a boat? Or a man? New trees will grow and be fashioned into planks, and women will birth babies that age and grow senile and die. But just as this mare can’t return to the waves, so an earth spirit that is maimed can never heal. The Karbasch shed more than mortal blood. I could not allow myself to be captured, however bitter the price.”

  “You could have died,” Sabin said, her gaze transfixed by the horse.

  And he saw it was not his exile, but the fate of the mare that she mourned. The two of them, man and girl, were alike to the very core.

  A shout knifed the quiet, and torches shimmered through the trees. The mare stamped again, and was restrained by a touch as the Wayfinder said in measured calm, “I can still die. But you must know, the mare should be cared for. She is not of mortal flesh. If I give myself up, hear warning. Your talents will blossom with time. A horse such as this will draw notice, and the Karbasch will send another fleet. Their craving for conquest is insatiable as the ocean is vast, and in’am shealdi to guide them, most rare.”

  She made no move, and her rejection seemed to shatter his detachment. He lifted his head as the noise of the mob came closer. The edgy, unaccountable wariness that every offered kindness had not softened gentled very suddenly into pity. “In’am shealdi,” he murmured in the grainy, musical voice that had commanded the horse from the sea. “This mare left the water at my call, you are right, but her sacrifice was never made for me.”

  Sabin looked up, stricken. “For my life?” she gasped, “or my gift?”

  “Both.” His eyes were not cold. Inside the serenity lent by power lay a human being who could bleed. “If you treasure the beauty of the horses, heed this. We are the only ones who know their kind. Others see no more than surf and foam. It is our protection, Sabin, that keep this spirit-mare alive, our call that lends her substance.”

  The torches reached the crossroad, and light flared and arrowed between the trees.

  “There he is!” someone shouted, and the note of the mob quickened like the baying of hounds that sight game.

  To her dream-filled ears, the pursuers uttered no words, but made only a cacophony of vicious noise. The roll of the sea held more meaning, and from this time forward, always would.

  Sabin grasped the Wayfinder’s hand. Clinging as if to a lifeline, she let him pull her up astride the mare. As the villagers burst into the clearing, they lost their quarry in a half-glimpsed flash of white. The clearing resounded to what could have been hoof beats, or the enduring thunder of a comber pounding the pebbles of the shore.

  The Way Wind

  Andre Norton

  Andre Norton’s imaginary Kingdom of Estcarp, surrounded by enemies, one foot in twilight, the other in the long night of defeat, has always struck me as the metaphor for a kind of patient courage: those who hold the gates, those who wait, those who hope, and those who guard not only against outward enemies, but against their own despair.

  “The Way Wind” Is a story of how the winds of change come to gatekeepers if their courage holds firm.

  The crumbling walled fortress and the dreary, ragged town, which had woven a ragged skirt about it during long years, stood at the end of the Way Pass. It was named I’Estal, which in a language older than legend, had a double meaning—First and Last.

  For it was the first dwelling of men at the end of Way Pass along which any traffic from the west must come. And it was also the end of a long, coiling snake of a road stretching eastward and downward to Klem, which long ago it had been designed to guard.

  There could have been another name for that straggle of drear buildings also—End of Hope.

  For generations now it had been a place of exile. Those sent from Klem had been men and women outlawed for one reason or another. The scribe whose pen had been a key used too freely, the officer who was too ambitious—or at times, too conscientious, the rebel, the misfit, those sometimes fleeing the law or ruler’s whim, they came hither.

  There was no returning, for a geas had been set on the coil road, and those of lowland blood coming up might only travel one way—never to return. There had been countless attempts, of course. But whatever mage had set that barrier had indeed been one of power, for the spell did not dwindle with the years as magic often did.

  Through the Way Pass there came only a trickle of travelers, sometimes not more than three or four in a season. None of them lingered in l’Estal; there was that about the place which was like a dank cloud, and its people were grim of face, meager of livelihood.

  During the years they had managed to scrape a living, tilling small scraps of fields they terraced along the slopes, raising lean goats and small runtish sheep, hunting, burrowing into the rock of the heights to bring out stores of ore.

  The latter was transported once a year to a certain bend in the descending road, and there traded for supplies they could not otherwise raise—salt, pigs of iron, a few items of what was luxury to them. Then it was also that the Castellan of the fort would receive the pouch bearing the royal arms containing, ever the same, orders. And now and again there would be another exile to be sent aloft.

  The trickle of travelers from the west were mostly merchants, dealers in a small way, too poor to make the long journey by sea to the port of Klem itself.

  They were hunters with pelts, drovers of straggles of lean mountain cattle or sheep, small, dark people who grunted rasping words in trade language, kept to themselves, and finished their business as soon as possible.

  Of the Klemish exiles, none took the westward road. If there was a geas set upon that also, no one spoke of such. It was simply accepted that for them there was only one place to be l
onged for, dreamed of, hopelessly remembered—that that lay always eastward.

  There had been many generations of exiles, and their children had known no other place; yet to them l’Estal was not a home but a prison of sorts, and the tales told of the eastern land made of that a paradise forbidden, changed out of all knowledge of what it had been or was.

  Still there was always one point of interest that stirred the western gate sentries each year—and that was the Way Wind. At the very beginning of spring, which came slowly and harshly in these gaunt uplands, a wind blew strongly from west to east, souring the pass, carrying with it strange scents. It might last a single day; it might blow so for three or four.

  And by chance, it always brought with it some one of the western travelers, as if it pulled them on into the line of the pass and drew them forward. Thus, in a place where there was so little of the new and strange, the Way Wind farers were a matter of wager, and often time not only the armsmen at the gate but their officers and their women gathered, along with townspeople, when they heard the outer horn blast, which signaled that the wind herded a traveler to them.

  This day there were four who stood on the parapet of the inner wall, not closely together as if they were united in their company, but rather each a little apart.

  The oldest of that company, a man who had allowed the hood of his cloak to fall back so the wind lifted tuffs of steel gray hair, had the paler face of one who kept much indoors. Yet there was a strength in his features, a gleam of eye which that about him had not defeated, nor ever would. At the throat of his cloak was the harp badge of a bard. Osono he had named himself ten years before when he had accompanied the east traders back from their rendezvous. And by that name he was accepted, eagerly by the Castellan and those of his household.