The End of the Game

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Now there was enough juice to put them to sleep for a season, about. Well, for ten days at least, I thought, not realizing how much webwillow pulp and fragments had remained on the rock to adulterate my brew. My own ignorance saved me. An experienced herbalist might not have tried it without better equipment.

  I was just getting ready to go over to the fire once more, this time to put the juice in their stew—I’d have to go without eating anything tonight myself—when there was a hail from the mountain and I looked up to see a Herald in full panoply and two people with blindfolds on. It was Joramal Trandle and Murzy, but not Mendost. Bloster was swearing in a tight, ugly voice.

  Another thing Murzy had told me about invisibility. If you do what you always do when other people are distracted, they simply won’t see you. So I kept right on moving toward the fire, scent bottle in hand, reached for the stew spoon, and took a bite—burning my mouth—then dumped the juice in it as the spoon went back. All the men were watching the Herald. None of them was watching me.

  “Let all in sound of my voice give heed,” cried the Herald. “Mendost of Stoneflight Demesne, Armiger, against whom Game has been called by Porvius Bloster, Tragamor, denies any interest in the person of Jinian, sister, person of Stoneflight Demesne—”

  “I told you so,” I muttered.

  “—and denies challenge to Game, saying let Porvius do to the person Jinian what Porvius will, for he cares not. However, on hearing of the abduction of Jinian of Stoneflight Demesne, did one Joramal Trandle, Negotiator for King Kelver of the Dragon’s Flight Demesne, assert right of interest in the dispute. I bring here Joramal Trandle and one Murzy, servant to the person Jinian.”

  “That coward!” yelled one of the men. Porvius didn’t say anything. He had a confused look on his face, as though he couldn’t track what was happening. Well, I’d tried to tell him. It occurred to me then that the dams and I might have outwitted ourselves. Perhaps my private negotiations with Joramal had ruined any value I might have had to Mendost. Certainly he had wanted to use me for something, some bargaining point. Well, now it was up to Joramal.

  Joramal called, a little uncertainly, “If we may have the blindfolds removed, we would Negotiate for the person Jinian.”

  “It’s a bluff,” snarled Porvius, turning to glare at me.

  “Truly, Gamesman, it is not,” I said, trying to look meek and inconspicuous and not worth killing. “Mendost simply doesn’t care what you do to me. He wouldn’t care if you killed the whole family.” He hadn’t sucked on the dream crystal since the night before, not that I’d seen. Perhaps the effect had weakened enough to let him deal with reality. I crossed my fingers and prayed to several newly invented deities.

  He snarled and swore, but after a few minutes he allowed the blindfolds to come off. Joramal went with Porvius into his tent, and Murzy was allowed to come about a manheight from me. Not close enough to give me anything, though she’d brought a bundle. Looking at her face, I was mightily distressed. I had never seen Murzy this upset before, but she was really frightened. I couldn’t tell whether it was because of my predicament or something else, but whatever it was, it made me pay very close attention to what she said.

  “Jinian,” she began softly, fixing me with her eyes. “This is a dreadful thing to have happened.”

  The man who was listening yawned and took a step or two away, never taking his eyes off her.

  “I’ve brought you some warmer clothes,” she said, pointing to the bundle. “More suitable.” There was a long pause. Then, “You know how important it is for you to go to Xammer, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Murzy,” I said. There was a message there. I didn’t understand it, but I jotted it down in memory.

  “What have you been doing to pass the time?” she asked in a grandmotherly voice.

  “Oh,” I said, “I found some rainhat twigs and some bark of shivery-green, and I’ve been making a basket,” pointing at the half-finished webwillow basket next to the hollow stone.

  She gave me a look that said she understood what I’d been up to. “It’s good to keep busy,” she said. “Your task should be finished as soon as possible, Jinian. You should keep in practice.”

  Then there was yelling from the tent and Joramal stumbled out, very white and with his mouth narrowed to a tight line. “Tell Mendost he has until dawn!” screamed Porvius. “Until dawn. Then this one dies, and her head will be carried to Stoneflight Demesne as challenge of Great Game upon all who dwell there!”

  “You understand that King Kelver may bring Game against you,” Joramal was saying. “Against you and yours. This is his betrothed…”

  Murzy was saying quietly, under the other noise, “The Demesne is not a healthy place just now, not for me or mine, tha or thine. The east is safer than the south.”

  “No King of honor would betroth a child!” Porvius screamed, making little stones leap around under Joramal’s feet. “This is another of Mendost’s dishonorable, craven tricks. Put the blindfolds back on them and get them out of here.” Well, he was back in his own dream of events again.

  Murzy, however, was not distracted. She tapped her chest several times, mysteriously, then was blindfolded and led away. Grommy went with her, treacherously abandoning me, and I wasn’t sad to see him go. That was one less thing to worry about. I sat down quietly before my own tent and waited for the men to eat their dinner.

  They did everything else. They talked, argued, stamped around. Porvius made a small earthquake, just to illustrate his displeasure, during which I lay down and whimpered. If I’d appeared poised, it would have made him angrier, I figured. At last they filled their bowls, giving me none; since Porvius said someone being beheaded in the morning didn’t need dinner. Then they ate. Then they sat, and drank, and talked, and talked, and talked. I was wondering what I’d done wrong. Were the seeds not ripe? Had I dug up the wrong roots by mistake? Had I ... Not for the first time, I longed for a Talent. For the first time I began to wonder if I would ever get one. Not an early one, certainly. I was already past that age.

  At last there were snores from the campfire, and I sighed, only then realizing how impure the mixture must have been, which meant, of course, there was no telling how much time I had before they woke.

  I did a spell, Mothwings Go Spinning, picking a rainhat berry out of the bush and sending it circling, wider and wider, tilting and tumbling. “Touch all,” I muttered under my breath, keeping it up until it banged Porvius Bloster on the head where he lay, him and then his henchmen. Any Tragamor could have done the same with his Talent, but this was a movement spell and according to Sarah I could do it very well, better than most Wize-ards. I liked the spell because it took no paraphernalia, only certain words and a few small, precise gestures to pick up any smallish thing and send it flying. So I banged upon Bloster and his men enough to be sure they were soundly asleep, then picked up a rock and began bashing at the leather tether.

  It seemed to take hours. The leather was tough. All it wanted to do was crush, not cut. Finally it came apart. I took a knife from Porvius’s belt, considered killing all four of them but couldn’t quite get up the gumption to do it, picked up the bundle Murzy had brought for me, and made for the horses. I had never ridden anything that size before, but I wasn’t about to take off on foot and have them following me. I tied all four horses together, then led the first one over to a tall stump and climbed on top. He was well schooled, thank the old gods, and didn’t act up. It was a cloudy night; I had no idea which way was home; the important thing seemed to be to get gone.

  So, I got.

  5

  It was dark and very misty when I left. There was a long, straight canyon which appeared to be the shortest way out of the place. It seemed to go generally east, though I couldn’t see beyond the first gentle curve. The horses and I went that way and kept going until light, during most of which time it rained. I hoped the rain would wash away the hoofprints. When it got a little bit light, I took one horse over a ridge and turned h
im loose. He went off into the slush very nicely. Horses and I had always understood each other very well, and he was probably thinking about hay and a warm stable. The other three of us went a bit farther, then another one went loose, and the last one just before noon. It may have been noon. There was a sort of general lightness at the top of the sky which might have meant that. Or it might have meant the clouds were thinner there, who knows. If anyone were following me—if they weren’t Seers or Pursuivants or some other finder kind of Gamesman—they might follow one of the loose horses instead of the one I was on.

  The last horse and I went on together a bit more, but by that time it was really difficult to stay on. No sleep to speak of for two nights was more than I could manage. The rain was letting up, and it seemed a good opportunity to rest. I slid off the horse, walked back a way, and found that the hoofprints were disappearing in the muck. So, we were lost but not trackable. That was hopeful. It left only one major worry—that we’d been traveling in a circle and would come trotting back into Porvius’s camp just as he woke up. There wasn’t any point in considering that, really. I’d done my best to hold a straight line, and that’s all anyone can do.

  We found a dry place under a great needly tree. Horse stood on one side of the tree, and I lay down on the other. Murzy had packed some food, a rain cape, and some warm clothes, still dry inside the oilskin pack. Almost, I said to myself, as though she knew I’d be off on my own in the rain. That set me to thinking about that strange interview we’d had. Whatever else her mysterious talk had implied, it had certainly meant I was not to try and get back to Stoneflight. She had said to hurry, which I had. She had tapped her chest over and over. I tapped mine, something beneath my fingers biting into my skin. The star-eye. Tap, tap. She wanted me to remember the star-eye? What did that mean? I gave up, my mouth full of bread and cheese. When I woke in the night, there were still bits of bread and cheese between my teeth, so no time had been lost in wakefulness.

  The sky had cleared and was full of stars. It was easy to tell which direction was south, and I sleepily marked the trunk of the tree with the knife before rolling over and going back to sleep. When I woke again, it was half-light. Thinking time.

  The fact was, I did not know where I was. Stoneflight Demesne might have been east, or south, or west of me. The Tragamor’s camp had probably been northwest of the Demesne, but the canyon I had followed when I left had curved back and forth, and I could have been almost anywhere.

  During the night, Murzy’s message had come clear, however. She had meant, “Get the hell out of here; try to get to Xammer as quickly as possible; stay away from the south—the High Demesne and the Ogress Valearn—use the wize-arts and be sensible.” That sounded like Murzy, though she had not exactly sounded like herself during that last conversation. It might be that Mendost had threatened her or one of the other dams. It would have been like him. Not healthy for me or mine, she had said, and Mendost often made places unhealthy for people. So—on to Xammer.

  Which lay far, far to the east. That was the one direction of which I was certain.

  The town of Mip lay northwest of our Demesne, down the canyon and across the mountains and down into the valley of the Dourt. If I had gone in Joramal’s wagon, we would have gone from Mip, up the river to its confluence with the Haws, then up the mountain road to the Banner, down the Banner to the Gathered Waters, and down the Gathered Waters to River Reave, to Gaywater, and thence east to Xammer. That’s more or less the way we had gone to Schooltown long before, and it would have taken a long time to get there.

  Or one could put a canoe in Stonybrook, follow it down to the falls, carry it down the old stone stairs into the canyon below, thence into Long Valley and the great open fields above Lake Yost. Then, if one didn’t wish to paddle upstream on the Reave and the Gaywater, one would walk to Xammer, the whole business taking twenty days or less.

  So I had two perfectly logical routes to Xammer, east or west. If I kept going west, I couldn’t fail to run into River Dourt. If I went east, I couldn’t fail to encounter Stonybrook—which became Stonywater lower down—or the walls of the great canyon. According to Cat Candleshy, once past the falls, Stonywater was calm and easy enough in contemplation, though I had never done it.

  Despite Murzy’s warnings about the High Demesne, I had no real fear of coming upon it. There was all of Long Valley between our mountains and Tarnost—the Demesne of King Prionde and Valearn the Ogress. I was far enough north not to fear from the Ogress of Tarnost. I thought. It did not occur to me then that she might go elsewhere.

  Well, tic-tac, front or back, dark or bright, left or right, fast or slow, here we go. I picked east. It seemed shorter.

  So warmed, rested, fed, we set out. Though I had never been allowed to have a real horse before, I could mark definite advantages over Misquick. This one didn’t stumble, didn’t fall down, and didn’t stand with his head down refusing to move the way Misquick often did. He looked intelligently at the way we were headed and picked a simple, sure-footed way along it. I thanked him for this, which seemed to please him, and we went sedately along. Which left me free to think about other things.

  I chose to think about the old gods. Prompted by Murzy’s chest tapping, probably. The star-eye was a symbol of one of the old gods, one of the elder people of the world. Not the True Game world, the whole world, which went on beyond the boundaries of the True Game in all directions, to the Southern Sea, the Glistening Sea, the jungles of the north, and even beyond those. Tess Tinder-my-hand had an old, old rhyme:

  Bright the Sun Burning,

  Night Will Come Turning,

  Warm Fire Is Sparkening,

  Sleep Brings a Darkening,

  Bitter Tears Falling,

  Lovers Come Calling,

  Egg in the Hollow,

  Hatching to Follow,

  Mothwings Go Spinning,

  End and Beginning,

  Inward Is Quiet,

  Dream Chains to Tie It,

  Silence and Shadow,

  Music and Meadow,

  Eye of the Star,

  Where Old Gods Are.

  Each line of the verse was a spell. Egg in the Hollow was a hiding spell. Music and Meadow was a summoning of the deep dwellers used in bridge or tree magic sometimes. There were hundreds of couplets if one knew them all. Some weren’t used often. Hatching to Follow was a pregnancy spell, for instance, and it wasn’t often used. Though each line is a spell, there’s more to it than that. It has meaning in groups of lines—if you look at different groups, you can see how they fit together—and as a whole, too. Taken as a whole, Tess said it meant the old gods held it all together, in balance, so that everything had a place: fire, water, life, death, earth, and sky—everything. And everyone. I used to comfort myself with that sometimes at night when everyone had been after me all day and it didn’t seem there was any place for me at all. Then I’d sing, “Silence and Shadow, Music and Meadow, Eye of the Star” to myself until I went to sleep.

  So, I had said, if it had all been so nicely balanced when the old gods were around, where were they now?

  “Lost,” said Sarah, sadly.

  “Betrayed,” said Margaret.

  “Imprisoned,” said Cat. “The deep lookers and far studiers say that. Imprisoned. Locked up. No one knows where.”

  “If I were a god,” I had said to Cat Candleshy, “I would not allow myself to be locked up.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t know what was happening until it was too late,” said Cat. “Perhaps they were great, slow beings who did not imagine that any creature would do such a thing. And perhaps those who did it didn’t know it was gods they were shutting up. Each time they may have thought it was something else, like a hurricane or a thunderstorm or even a plague of gobblemoles. I rather think things like that were the ... the vocabulary of the old gods. As well as being their identity.”

  Cat talked like that sometimes. Margaret said something once about Cat having been a Gamesmistress in a School, though s
he could not have meant exactly that. One would have to be Gamesman caste to be a Gamesmistress. Perhaps Margaret meant another kind of teacher. When I asked her, though, she refused to discuss it. I did ask Cat about something that confused me, however. “Cat, I’ve never heard anyone speak about old gods except the dams. I never heard anyone in the Demesne speak of it, nor anyone in Schooltown when we went there.”

  She puckered her mouth as though she wouldn’t answer me at all, but then said, “It’s part of the wize-art, Jinian. We hear certain things and draw certain inferences from that. Often inferences are all we have. We hesitate to pass them on lest they acquire an unmerited currency, but among ourselves we speak of it. Now, ask no more. You’ll learn in time.”

  Don’t you hate it when people tell you you’ll learn in time? Obviously, the time to learn is when you’re interested! There was no use arguing with Cat, though, so I had to let it go. Now, on the mountainside, going east with the sun on my forehead and my stomach saying it was time for lunch, it would have been nice if she’d told me more. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing!

  Lunchtime came and went. Sometime about mid-afternoon it began to occur to me that Stonybrook or the edge of the canyon should have appeared some time ago. We went from Stoneflight to Stonybrook every summer to get rushes for baskets, sometimes several times during the summer. It wasn’t a long trip even in a slow, bumpy wagon. Even if I had been at the extreme western edge of the table-mountain, right above the valley of the River Dourt, I should still have come upon Stonybrook by now. Which meant ... what?