The Blue Sword d-1

by Robin McKinley

  "I can't leave my post—another man'll have to take the word. I won't open the gate to Hillfolk. It's Hillfolk it's closed for. Tom's too easy. How do I know you're Harry Crewe? You look like a bloody Darian, and you ride like one, and you can't even talk right."

  Harry's pulse began to bang in her ears.

  "For pity's sake—"

  "Not you, Tom," said Bill; "we already know as how you're off duty. Get another man what's on."

  "Don't bother," said Harry, between her teeth; "I'll take the message myself. I know where Jack's quarters are." She dropped her pole in the dust, and, conscious she was doing a supremely stupid thing, she brought Sungold a few more dancing steps away from the gate, turned him, and set him at it.

  He went up and over with a terrific heave of his hindquarters, and Harry had reason to be grateful for the perfect fit of her saddle; but once in the air he seemed to float, and look around, and he came down as lightly as a blown leaf. He trotted two steps and halted, while Harry tried to look calm and lofty and as though she had known what she was doing all the time. The leap was over in a few seconds, and no one had expected anything so incredible, even from a Hillman; now men were shouting, and there was a crowd all around her. She thought no one would shoot her out of hand, but she wasn't quite sure, so she waited, instead of going in search of Jack Dedham as she had threatened. Sungold stretched his neck out and shook himself. Narknon flowed over the gate behind them—there was a howl of fear and wrath from Bill—and the cat trotted to Sungold and crouched under his belly.

  But she did not have to look for Jack after all, because the row at the gate brought him at a run scant seconds after Sungold's leap. He rounded the narrow corner of some dark building opposite the place where Sungold stood. The horse lifted first one foot and then another, unaccustomed to such noisy reckless human beings, but still obedient to his rider's wishes. He replaced each foot in just the print it had left.

  Jack came to a halt, barely avoiding running into them. Sungold pitched his ears toward the balding grey-haired Outlander who stood now, stock still, staring: his eyes traveled from the big chestnut horse down to the laconic cat, up to the horse's rider, and his jaw visibly dropped. Harry's hood was still back on her shoulders, and her bright hair flamed in the young sunlight; he recognized her immediately, although he had never seen such an expression on her face before. A moment passed while he could think of nothing; then he strode forward with a cry of "Harry!" and raised his arms, and she, a young girl again with a young girl's face, ungracefully tumbled off her horse and into them. He thumped her on the back, as he might have one of his own men back from an impossible mission and long since given up for lost; and then he kissed her heartily on the mouth, which he would not have done to any of his own men; and Harry hugged him around the neck, and then, embarrassed, tried to back away. He held her shoulders a minute longer and stared at her; they were much of a height, and Tom Lloyd, looking wistfully on, found himself thinking that they looked very much alike, for all of the girl's yellow hair and Hill clothing; and he realized, without putting any of it into words, that the girl he had danced with months ago, and thought about as he blacked his boots, and lost sleep over when she disappeared, was gone forever.

  Harry drew a hasty sleeve across her eyes; and then Tom, emboldened by his commander's behavior, hugged her too, but backed away without meeting her eyes; and Harry, even preoccupied as she was, was briefly puzzled by Tom's air of farewell, and she guessed something of what her brother had never told her.

  The whole fort was aroused; there were dozens of men standing around staring, and asking questions of one another; some were in uniform, and some looked like they had fallen out of bed a minute before; a few carried rifles and were looking around wildly. A few of those rifles were pointed at Narknon, but the cat had sense enough not to move, or even yawn and display her dangerous-looking fangs. The Outlanders asked each other questions, and there was a lot of shrugging; but while their colonel's evident delight in their sudden Hill visitor allayed any immediate fears they might have, Harry thought they looked tense and wary, as men may who live long under some strain.

  "What should I ask first?" said Jack. "Why are you here? Your horse tells me where you've been these months past—God, what an animal—but I am totally awestruck by the intelligence … although, come to think of it, I don't seem to be surprised. Do you know that the entire station turned out to look for you when you vanished? Although I doubt in fact that you know anything of the sort; I flatter myself I searched as painstakingly as anyone, but what the Hills take, if they mean to keep it, they keep it, and I rather thought they meant to keep you. Everyone was sure the Hillfolk did have something to do with your evaporating like that—although it was more a superstition than a rational conclusion, as nary a trace of anything did we find; no rumors in the marketplace either. Amelia, poor lady, had well-bred hysterics, and Charles chewed his mustaches ragged, and Mrs. Peterson took her girls south to Ootang. And your brother stopped talking to everybody, and rode three horses to death—and he takes good care of his horses, usually, or I wouldn't have him here. I don't think he even noticed when Cassie Peterson left."

  Harry blushed, and looked at her feet.

  "So you see, he does care—you've wondered, haven't you? He wasn't too fond of his commanding officer there for the weeks that it lasted, for I couldn't somehow work up the proper horror—oh, I was worried about you, but I was also … envious."

  He looked at her, smiling, wondering what her reaction would be to his words, wondering if he had said the right thing, knowing that the truth was not always its own excuse; knowing that his relief at seeing her made him talk too much and too freely—a reaction that had, often enough in the past, gotten him into trouble with his superior officers. And Harry looked back at him, and she smiled too, but she remembered the vertigo of the Outlander girl alone in a camp of the Hillfolk, surrounded by a people speaking a language she could not speak, whose hopes she did not understand, whose dreams she could not share.

  The people of the Hills had been her own people's foes for eighty years and more, for she was born and bred a Homelander; how could Jack—even Jack—speak of envy?

  Her smile froze, and her tunic napped against her back and hips, for she had, somehow, lost her sash, and she had hung Gonturan from Sungold's saddle, so as to look, she hoped, a little less like immediate war. Lost her sash. A Hillman would never lose his sash. What was she? Damalur-sol. Ha. She laid a hand on Sun-gold's shoulder, but when he turned his head to touch her with his nose she was not comforted, for he had lived all his life in the Hills. She wished bitterly that her brother had told her of Tom Lloyd, months ago. That was something she might have understood, and Tom was kind and honest.

  She swallowed and looked at Jack again, and he saw memory shining in her eyes, and he smiled sadly at her, and was sorry for any further pain his thoughtless words had given her. "Child," he said quietly, "choices are always hard. But do you not think yours is already made?"

  Harry's fingers combed through her Hill horse's mane, and she said, "There never was a choice. I ride the only way open to me, and yet often and again it seems to me I am dangerously unfit for it." She laughed a little and shakily. "It seems to me further that it is very odd that fate should lay so careful a trail and spend so little time preparing the one that must follow it."

  Jack nodded. "It is not the sort of thing that is recorded in official histories, but I believe that such thoughts have come not infrequently to others—" he smiled faintly—"ensnared as you are."

  Harry's hand dropped back to her side and she smiled again. "Colonel, I shall try not to take myself too seriously."

  "And I shall try not to talk too much." They grinned at each other, and knew that they were friends, and the knowledge was a relief and a pleasure and a hope to each of them, but for different reasons. Then Jack looked her over again, as if noticing the travel stains for the first time and said in a deliberately bright tone: "You look like you cou
ld use a bath … My God, that sword: you're carrying a king's ransom casually across your pommel."

  "Not casually," said Harry somberly.

  "Questions later," Jack said, "but I will hope that you will answer them. First food and rest, and then you will tell me a very long story, and it has to be the true one, although I don't promise to believe it."

  "I am not quite alone, " said Harry, smiling again. "Will you let two friends of mine past your formidable gate as well?"

  "Not so formidable," said Colonel Dedham. "I wish I'd arrived a minute earlier and seen that jump. I don't believe it."

  "It's true, sir," said Tom.

  "I believe it's true, I just don't believe it," said Jack. "No doubt all of your story will be just as impossible. And just to start with, what is that?" he said, pointing at Narknon, who still had not moved.

  "She's a hunting-cat, a folstza. She adopted me soon after … I left here."

  Narknon, deeming the moment right, stood up slowly, and opened her big green eyes to their fullest extent, batted the long golden lashes once or twice at Jack, and began to pace toward him, while he gamely held his ground. Narknon paused a step away and started to purr, and Jack laughed uncertainly; whereupon the cat took the last step and rubbed her cheek against the back of his hand. Jack, with the look of a man who throws dice with the devil, petted her and Narknon redoubled the purr. "I think I'm being courted," said Jack.

  "Narknon has an excellent sense of whose side it is most expedient to be on," said Harry. "But—"

  "Yes, we will let your companions come in in the traditional fashion. Unbar the gate, there, Shipson, and be quick about it, before anything else comes over it. I don't like the new standing orders, and they obviously aren't much good besides." Jack looked up from Narknon, who was now leaning her full weight against his legs and tapping her tail against the backs of his thighs, to gaze again at Sungold. "A real Hill horse. Can they all leap over Outlander forts before breakfast?"

  "No. Or they may, but most of their riders have more sense than to try it. Particularly after a journey such as we've had." The excitement of seeing Jack again, and the reassurance of the warmth of his welcome, drained away from her, and she remembered that she was exhausted, and the sense of coming home to a place that was no longer home oppressed her further. "I'd like the bath and the food, and we all have to have sleep. But most of the story will have to wait; I'll tell you what I must, but … we don't have much time."

  "You are here for a purpose, and I can guess some of it. I'll try not to be stupid."

  The gate opened, and Terim and Senay rode quietly through and stopped by Sungold's flank and dismounted. Harry introduced them, and they bowed, touching their fingers respectfully to their foreheads, but without the last flick outward of the fingers that indicates that the one addressed is of superior rank. When she said in Hill-speech, "And this is Colonel Dedham, whose aid we are here to seek," she was pleased with the way her Outlander friend in his turn bowed and touched his fingers to his forehead, only glancing at her with mild inquiry.

  "I am sorry," said Jack as he led the way to his quarters, "but I speak only a little of your Hill tongue. I must ask you to tell me what I need to hear in my own language, and apologize to your friends for the necessary rudeness of excluding them." This was spoken in heavily accented but perfectly adequate Hill-speech, and Terim and Senay both smiled.

  "We understand the need for speed and clarity, and it would not have occurred to us to take offense," said Terim, who had a king's son's swiftness for turning a diplomatic phrase; and Senay simply nodded.

  So Jack Dedham cleared off the table in the second of the two small rooms that were his, the table in question accustomed to duty as a dining-table and writing-desk, as well as a convenient surface to set any indeterminate object down on; and his batman brought breakfast for three. The three ate their way through it with enthusiasm, and the man, grinning, brought second breakfasts for three. "Make it four, Ted," said Dedham. "I'm getting hungry again."

  When they were finished, and Harry was staring into her teacup and realizing with uneasy chagrin that she'd rather be drinking malak, Jack filled his pipe and began to produce thick heavy clouds of smoke that crawled around the room and nosed into the corners. "Well?" he said. "Tell me in what fashion you have come to seek my aid."

  Harry said, staring at the worn tips of her Hill boots, "The Northern army will be coming through the mountains … soon. Very soon. Corlath's army is camped on the plain before the wide gap—the Bledfi Gap, we call it—the Gate of the North, you know, in the Horfel Mountains—"

  Jack said from a cloud of smoke: "The Gambor Pass, in the Ossander range. Yes."

  "We want to plug the northwest leak, the little way through the mountains above Ihistan—where an undesirable trickle of Northern soldiers could come through and—"

  "And raze Istan, and go on to harass Corlath."

  Harry nodded. "Not just harass; there are not many Hillfolk to fight."

  "That explains, no doubt," said Jack, "why there are only three of you—and a cat with long teeth—for the northwest leak, as you call it."

  Harry smiled faintly. "It was almost one of me, alone."

  "I would hazard, then, that you are not precisely here under Corlath's orders."

  "Not exactly."

  "Does he know where you are?"

  Harry thought about it, and said carefully, "I did not tell him where I was going before I left." Her ribs missed the pressure of a sash.

  Dedham blinked a few times, slowly, and said, "I assume I am to conclude that he will be able to guess where you've gone. And these two poor fools decided to throw their lots in with an outlaw? I am impressed."

  Harry was silent for a minute. For all her brave words to Jack at the fort gate, she felt that the path she had thought she was following had blurred and then lurched underfoot as soon as Sungold had jumped the wall. It was difficult for her now to remember who she was—damalur-sol and sashless—and why she was here, and where she was going; her thoughts ambled around in her head, tired and patternless. She remembered Luthe saying to her: "It is not an enviable position, being a bridge, especially a bridge with visions"; and she thought that in fact a nice clear vivid vision would be a great boon. She sighed and rubbed her eyes. "Corlath did not take at all kindly to Sir Charles that day, did he?"

  Jack smiled without humor. "Not at all kindly, no."

  Harry scowled. "He's still cutting off his nose to spite his face, ignoring the northwest pass."

  "Ritger's Gap," said Jack. "He probably doesn't look at it that way, though. He came to us offering an alliance of mutual support, true, but he was doing us a favor by giving us the benefit of his spies' work in the north—which Sir Charles, in his less than infinite wisdom, chose to disbelieve. I would assume that your Corlath will now simply wipe out as many Northerners as he can, and what's left of his Hillfolk in the end will retreat to those eastern mountains of his. Whether or not the western plains are overrun with unchecked Northerners is not, finally, of great interest to him one way or another. Our decision not to help only means a few more divisions of the Northern army to harry them in their Hills: unfortunate but not of the first importance."

  "If the Homeland got behind the attempt to throw back the Northerners—"

  "There was never any chance of that, my dear, believe me," replied Jack. "You are attempting to be logical, I suspect, and logic has little to do with government, and nothing at all to do with military administration.

  "You are also still thinking like a Homelander—an Outlander, if you wish—for all you've learned to ride like a Hillman," and his eyes settled on Gonturan, hanging by her belt over the back of Harry's chair. "You know Istan is here, and it seems like a waste to you that we should be obliterated without a chance; and you were also fortunately absent that day, and did not hear Sir Charles being insufferable. Sir Charles is a good man in many ways, but new things disconcert him. The idea of an alliance between Hill and Outlander is blas
phemously new."

  You are also still thinking like a Homelander—an Outlander, if you wish—for all you've learned to ride like a Hillman. The words hung before Harry's eyes as if sewn on a banner and then thrust into the ground at her feet as her standard. She looked at nothing as she said, "You are working up to telling me that there is nothing that can be done."

  "No; but I am working up to telling you that there is no possibility of there being done what ought to be done—I agree with you, our, or at any rate my, country should get serious about the threat from the North. It is a real threat." He rubbed his face with his hand, and looked momentarily weary. "I am glad you have put this chance, little as it is, in my hand. My orders, of course, forbid me to go skylarking off to engage the Northerners at Ritger's Gap or anywhere else—the official, illogical attitude is that this is a tribal matter, and if we stay quietly at home with our gates closed the wave will break and flow around us. I know this is nonsense, and so do a few of the men who've been here more than a few years. I've been brooding for months—off and on since Corlath's unexpected visit; I believed what he told us that his spies had brought back from the North—whether or not it's worth my pension to go try and do anything about it. I rather think it is, as we're sure to be killed if we stay at home and I'd rather be killed out doing something than have my throat slit in bed. You're just the excuse I've been looking for; it's been a bit hard to determine which dragon a solitary St. George should take on, when there seem to be dragons everywhere."

  Harry looked at Jack, conscious of Terim and Senay at her elbow, and a furry shoulder pressed against her feet under the table. The sense of dislocation was almost a physical thing, like a stomachache or a sore throat; but Jack's words now eased the sore place a little. The bridge could stretch to cross this chasm, perhaps, after all. She was still alone and still scared, but for the first time since she had ridden away from Corlath's camp she felt that her errand was not necessarily a mad one; and so her conviction that she was doomed to it was therefore a little less terrifying. And perhaps it did not matter in what world she belonged if both worlds were marching in step.