The Blue Sword d-1

by Robin McKinley

  "It does not matter that it is not my fault, does it?" Harry tried to smile, but Mathin's dark face was too worried, and she gave it up. "Thank you, my old teacher; I will try to remember what you say."

  Mathin said softly, "You are still the keeper of my honor, Harimad-sol, and I have faith in you, whatever happens. If you forget all else, do not forget that."

  "I will not," Harry said.

  They had left the slight shelter of the mountains now, and rode northwest across the plain to come to the great gap in the northern range as soon as they might, where the Northern invaders would pour through. They rode quickly but without driving, for the horses and their riders needed to have the strength to engage the other army; and Corlath further hoped to arrive enough in advance of their enemy that he might choose the ground where they would meet. They had ridden over little true desert; soon after they left the foothills' border the scrub fringe of desert began turning green, and they passed the occasional carefully irrigated small holding, now silent and empty.

  In three days' time they would arrive at the Gate of the North, the Bledfi Gap, and Corlath called a meeting again of his Riders and the chieftains. Terim and Senay waited outside the zotar by a little fire, guarding Harry's saddle and baggage, and Harry went to hear what her king would have to say; and she remembered Luthe's words to her: "You could do worse than to believe in him."

  They counted themselves. There were some foot soldiers who would meet them at the end of their ride, but only a few; there were few of the Hills who did not feel better, more useful, more real, on horseback. Barring them, they were full strength. Few of the Hillfolk came from any farther west, for the taint of the Outlanders was oppressive to them. Harry stared at her hands, burned a cinnamon-brown as dark as any Hillman's. Aerin's hair was red, she thought, and pushed back her hood; and I am a Rider.

  The muster came to a little shy of two thousand; and there was silence as everyone considered the Hills black with Northerners, and the width of the mountain pass. Corlath, without making any face-saving remarks about its not being as bad as it looked—For Hillfolk, thought Harry, don't seem to like that sort of thing: what would poor Sir Charles do here?—began to describe their options; but Harry, to her horror, found her mind wandering. She yanked it back, pointed it at Corlath, and it promptly ducked out again. Is this the first symptom of failure of nerve? she thought, feeling cold and clammy in spite of the dry heat.

  Various of the new men had questions or comments; and then the meeting broke up; and while Riders' councils always ended quietly, there was a subdued feeling to the air in the king's tent that was not pleasant. Only a few people were left when Harry stood up and faced Corlath and said, tiredly, as if she couldn't help herself: "Why do you persist in ignoring the northwest pass? I cannot believe the Northerners may not give us an unwelcome surprise by its use."

  "I ignore it because it does not require my attention," said Corlath, and while his voice was a low rumble, there was as yet no lash of anger in it.

  "But—"

  "You know nothing of it."

  The flatness of his tone goaded her and she said: "The Outlanders make maps none so ill, and I have seen the maps of that area—and I can read maps too! And they tell me that a force, not so small as to be ignored, could slip down the northwest pass very easily, and follow the mountains east, and catch us on the plain from behind, and then your earthworks will be mounts to fall on when we are set on from our backs!"

  "Enough!" roared Corlath. "You I will place in a hollow in the side of the hill, so you may see from all directions, and I advise you to look overhead as well, for eagles that might be carrying rocks!"

  Harry turned and ran out. She noticed, without registering it, that Innath and Faran and Mathin stood listening; and she did not see the troubled looks they sent after her.

  The night air was cool with the sudden coolness of the desert when darkness falls, and she took a few deep breaths. Then she went to her fire, and sat down, and tried to make her face calm; and if her mind had been calm, she might have thought it strange that Senay and Terim asked her no questions; but she was relieved at their silence and wrestled as best she could with her own demons. Mathin came and sat near her also, and he too was silent, and she did not notice how he looked at her.

  The fires burned down, and everyone lay down to sleep. Harry chose not to sleep in the zotar that night; and Mathin stayed by her little fire as well, though he still said nothing. Harry turned on her back and stared at the sky. She let the stars swing above her for a time, and then she stood up quietly, and picked up her bedding and her saddlebag, and made her way to the horses; and she remembered what Mathin had taught her of stealth. Narknon made none of her usual protest at being disturbed, and meekly followed her. Sungold rubbed his head against her but made no sound, for war-horses are trained to silence; and she mounted him and jogged away slowly. She had a terrible headache; it had been building all evening, and now it seemed to stand out around her like a cloud. Perhaps it was a cloud indeed, for no one challenged her as she set Sungold's head west.

  They covered many miles before morning, for Sungold was of the best of the Hill horses, and the speed the army traveled was to him slow. Harry remembered a little spur of hills running down to the central plain that she should meet before morning broke too clearly for watching eyes to see a lone chestnut horse with a Hillman on his back working his way quickly west. She hoped, because the hills had looked overgrown on the Outlander map, and because Dedham himself had ridden so far and drawn the chart himself, that she would be able to lose herself in them; and she hoped that the stream that flowed through them would be easy to find.

  She was tired by the time she felt the sun on her back, and she knew Sungold was weary too, although his stride was as long and elastic as it had been hours ago. Narknon loped along beside them, keeping pace. But the hills were at hand: rough outcroppings of grey and rust-red rock, with little but lichen to meet the traveler's first look; but as Sungold picked his way around a tall grey standing stone, suddenly grass appeared before them, and Sungold's feet struck good dark earth, and then they heard the stream. Narknon reached it first; she had none of most cats' aversion to water, and leaped in, sending water in all directions, and splashing Harry playfully when she followed. "I should not have let you come with me," Harry said to her; "but I don't suppose there's any way I could have prevented you. Thank the gods." Sungold was laying his ears back in mock anger and striking with his forefeet as Narknon splashed him too. "And besides, I daresay Sungold would miss you, and I had to bring him."

  It was after they had all soggily climbed out of the water again that she heard the hoofbeats; and she whirled around to face them. The faces of her four-footed companions remained undisturbed, and Sungold turned his head mildly to look over his shoulder at whoever approached, but this was no comfort, for they did not understand the awfulness of what she had done, or that the friends who had followed her were friends no longer.

  It was Senay and Terim. Their horses showed the pace they had kept worse than Sungold; but they were well mannered and stood quietly, waiting hopefully for their riders to tell them they might stop and rest, and drink and graze, as their brother was doing already.

  "Why did you follow me?" said Harry. "Did Corlath send you? I—I won't come back. If you take Sungold away from me, I'll go on foot."

  Terim laughed. It wasn't a very good laugh, but there was some weary humor in it nonetheless. "I don't think anyone could take Sungold away from you, unless perhaps by cutting him in pieces; and we are not sent by anyone. We followed you … "

  "We followed you because we chose to follow you," said Senay. "And Mathin sat up and watched us go, and said nothing; and you will not send us back, for we shall follow you anyway, like Narknon." Senay dismounted deliberately, and sent her grateful horse to the water; and Terim followed her.

  Harry sat down where she stood. "Do you realize what I've done? What you've done by following me?"

  "M
ore or less," said Terim. "But my father has other sons; he can afford to disinherit one or two."

  Senay was pouring water over her head. "There are a few who will come to me; we will pass near my village, and I will tell them, and they will follow. There are not many left in the western end of the Horfels; but most of those there are owe allegiance to my father. The best of them, I fear, rode to join Corlath after I left for the trials; but there are some—like my father himself—who chose not to desert the land they've loved for generations."

  "That will not help you when he disowns you, like Terim's father," said Harry.

  Senay shook her wet hair back and smiled. "My father has too few children to lose one; and I am the only child of his first wife, and he raised me to make up my own mind. The way he did this was by yielding to me when I asked, even when I was foolish. I lived through it; and I know my own mind; and he will do what I ask him."

  Harry shook her head. "Do you know where … we're … going?"

  "Of course," said Terim, surprised. "Besides, Mathin told us, days ago."

  Harry was beyond arguing; and, she realized in the back of her mind, she didn't want to argue. She was too warmed and heartened by having two more friends with her in her self-chosen exile; and unlike Sungold and Narknon she could not feel she had compelled this man and woman. "And we brought provisions," Terim said matter-of-factly. "You shouldn't go on desperate missions without food."

  "Narknon would take care of me, I think," Harry said, trying to smile.

  "Even Narknon can't bake bread," said Terim, unrolling a twist of cloth that held several loaves of the round pot-baked bread the army ate in vast quantities.

  They unsaddled their horses in companionable silence, and rubbed the sweat marks with grass, and the horses waded into the stream again and splashed their bellies, and then found sandy patches on the shore to roll in, scratching their backs and withers and grunting happily. Horses and riders together rested in the shade of some thin low-branching trees, till the sun was low on the western horizon; and then the riders brushed their horses till they gleamed in the twilight. And they saddled and rode out with the sunset blinding their eyes, with a long lean cat-shadow following behind.

  Mathin could not sleep after he had silently wished Senay and Terim speed and luck. He lay down again, and his thoughts roved back over the last weeks, and his memories were so vivid that dawn was breaking and other bodies were stirring before he thought to rise himself. Innath joined him at the fire that Senay and Terim and Harry had sat around the night before; and neither of them was surprised when they saw Corlath leave the zotar and come directly to them. They remained seated, and gazed up at him as he towered over them; but when he looked down they found they could not meet his eyes, or did not want to recognize the expression in them, and they stared into the fire again. He turned away, took a few steps, and paused; and bent, and picked something up. It was a long maroon sash, huddled in a curve in the ground, so that it looked like a shadow itself. He held it over his hand, and it hung limp like a dead animal; and the small morning breeze seemed unable to stir it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was two days later when, as the morning sun shone down on them, Harry first saw Istan again; and she altered their course a little to the north, for it was not the town she was aiming for, but Jack Dedham's garrison. She prayed to anything that might be listening that he would be there, not off on some diplomatic sortie or border-beating. She could not imagine trying to explain her errand to anyone else; she did not think Jack would conclude that she was mad. She did think that anyone else—even Dickie; especially Dickie—would. But even if Jack were at the fort, and believed her story, would he help her? She didn't know, and didn't dare make guesses. But she and Terim and Senay, even with Senay's father's reinforcements, would not be very effective by themselves.

  Rather more effective than I would have been by myself, though, she thought.

  The first evening, after Senay and Terim had joined her, and after the animals were settled and the other two human beings were asleep, Harry had cut herself a long straight slender branch from a tree, and stripped it with the short knife she kept in one boot. When they set out that evening she tied it lengthwise to Sungold's saddle, so it rubbed against her right leg as she rode, but at least it did not threaten either of her companions, who rode close at her sides. They eyed it, but said nothing. When she first recognized Istan looming out of the dawn light at them, she paused, took out her knife again, and deliberately ripped several inches of hem from her white tunic, unlashed her branch, and tied the raveling bit of cloth to one end of it. She tucked the other end just under one leg, and held it upright with one hand. "It is a sign that we come in peace," she explained, a little sheepishly, to her friends; their faces cleared, and they nodded.

  It was still very early. The town was silent as they skirted it; nothing, not even a dog, challenged them as they rode toward the fort. Harry found herself watching out of the corners of her eyes, looking for any odd little wisps of fog that might be following them. The dogs ought to bark. She didn't see any fog. She didn't know if either of her companions was a fog-rouser; and she knew only too well that she did not know what she herself was capable of.

  They rode up to the closed gate of the fort, the horses' hooves making small thunks in the sandy ground, kicking up small puffs of grit; she thought of the fourposter pony, who was no doubt drowsing in his stall now, dreaming of hay. Harry looked at the fort gate in surprise; as she remembered, and she was reasonably sure that she remembered correctly, the gate was opened at dawn, with reveille, and stayed open till taps at sunset. The gate, wooden and iron-barred, in a wall of dull yellow brick, was higher than her head as she sat on Sungold, looking up; and its frame was higher yet. They rode right up to it, and no one hailed them; and they stood in front of it, at a loss, their shadows nodding bemusedly at them from the grey wood before them and Harry's little flag limp at the end of its pole. Narknon went up to the gate and sniffed it. Harry had never thought of the possibility of not being able to get inside the fort in the first place. She rode up next to the gate and hammered on it with her fist. As her flesh struck the solid barrier it sent a tingle up her arm, and a murmur of kelar at the base of her skull told her that she could walk through this wall if she had to, to pursue her purpose. In that instant she realized exactly how Corlath had stolen her from the bedroom that at present was not so far from where Sungold stood; and she understood as well that the kelar must see some use in her errand at the Outlander fort to back her so strongly; and for that she did not know whether to be glad or sorry or fearful. And if fearful, for the sake of whom? Her new people—or her old friends? And she had a quiver of wry sympathy for how the Hill-king must have felt, walking up the Residency stairs in the middle of the night; and then she tipped her head back to stare at the Outlander wall, and touched her calf to her Hill horse's side, to move him away from that wall.

  "Since when is this gate closed during daylight?" she shouted; and Homelander speech tasted strange in her mouth, and she wondered if she spoke the words as a Hillwoman might.

  With her words, the spell, whatever spell it might be, was broken; and the three Hill riders suddenly blinked, as if the sun had grown brighter; and a small panel shot back, beside the gate and above their heads; and a man's face glared down. "Where did you come from, Hillman, and what do you want of us?" He looked without pleasure at the white rag.

  "We came from the Hills," Harry said, grinning, "but I am no Hillman; and we would like speech with Colonel Dedham."

  The man scowled at her. She suspected that he did not like her knowing Jack's name. "He does not speak to Hillfolk—or those who ride like Hillfolk," he added disagreeably. By now there were several faces peering over the wall at them; Harry did not recognize any of them, and found this strange, for she had known at least by sight nearly all of Dedham's men. She had not been gone for so many months that it seemed likely the entire complement of the fort could have changed. She
squinted up at them, wondering if her eyes or her memory was playing her tricks.

  She frowned at her interlocutor's tone. "You could bear a message to him, then," she said, trying to decide if it was worth the possibility of some kind of uproar if she said her name.

  "Hillfolk—" began the man at the window, and his tone was not encouraging.

  "Oh, Bill, for the love of God, the new orders say nothing about rudeness," said one of the faces at the fence. "If you won't carry a message as requested, I will—and I'll be sure to mention why an off-duty man had to do it."

  "Tom?" said Harry hesitantly. "Is that Tom Lloyd?"

  There was a tense and breathless silence, and the man at the open panel hissed something that sounded like "witchcraft." The voice from the fence came again, slowly but clearly: "This is Tom Lloyd, but you have the advantage of me."

  "True enough," said Harry dryly, and shook back her hood and looked up at him. "We danced together, some months ago: my brother, Di—Richard, collected favors from all his tall friends to dance with his large sister."

  "Harry—" said Tom, and leaned over the fence, his shoulders outlined against the light, his face and hands as pale as the desert sand. "Harry?"

  "Yes," said Harry, shaken at how strange he looked to her, that she had not recognized him before he spoke. "I need to talk to Colonel Dedham. Is he here?" Harry's heart was in her mouth.

  "Yes, he is: reading a six-months-old newspaper from Home over a cup of coffee right now, I'd say." Tom sounded dazed. "Bill, you wretch, open the gate. It's Harry Crewe."

  Harry's legs were tight on Sungold's sides, and the big horse threw his head up and shivered.

  "He don't look like Harry Crewe," Bill said suddenly. "And what about the two with him—her? And that funny-colored leopard?"

  "They're my friends," said Harry angrily. "Either open the gate or at least take my message."