Mogien paid no attention to him. “I saw it on the plains, where it was seeking me. And twice in the hills while we sought the pass. Whose death would it be if not mine? Yours, Yahan? Are you a lord, an Angya, do you wear the second sword?”
Sick and despairing, Yahan tried to plead with him, but Mogien went on, “It’s not Rokanan’s, for he still follows his way. A man can die anywhere, but his own death, his true death, a lord meets only in his domain. It waits for him in the place which is his, a battlefield or a hall or a road’s end. And this is my place. From these mountains my people came, and I have come back. My second sword was broken, fighting. But listen, my death: I am Halla’s heir Mogien—do you know me now?”
The thin, frozen wind blew over the rocks. Stones loomed about them, stars glittering out beyond them. One of the windsteeds stirred and snarled.
“Be still,” Rocannon said. “This is all foolishness. Be still and sleep…”
But he could not sleep soundly after that, and whenever he roused he saw Mogien sitting by his steed’s great flank, quiet and ready, watching over the night-darkened lands.
Come daylight they let the windsteeds free to hunt in the forests below, and started to work their way down on foot. They were still very high, far above timberline, and safe only so long as the weather held clear. But before they had gone an hour they saw Yahan could not make it; it was not a hard descent, but exposure and exhaustion had taken too much out of him and he could not keep walking, let alone scramble and cling as they sometimes must. Another day’s rest in the protection of Rocannon’s suit might give him the strength to go on; but that would mean another night up here without fire or shelter or enough food. Mogien weighed the risks without seeming to consider them at all, and suggested that Rocannon stay with Yahan on a sheltered and sunny ledge, while he sought a descent easy enough that they might carry Yahan down, or, failing that, a shelter that might keep off snow.
After he had gone, Yahan, lying in a half stupor, asked for water. Their flask was empty. Rocannon told him to lie still, and climbed up the slanting rockface to a boulder-shadowed ledge fifteen meters or so above, where he saw some packed snow glittering. The climb was rougher than he had judged, and he lay on the ledge gasping the bright, thin air, his heart going hard.
There was a noise in his ears which at first he took to be the singing of his own blood; then near his hand he saw water running. He sat up. A tiny stream, smoking as it ran, wound along the base of a drift of hard, shadowed snow. He looked for the stream’s source and saw a dark gap under the overhanging cliff: a cave. A cave was their best hope of shelter, said his rational mind, but it spoke only on the very fringe of a dark non-rational rush of feeling—of panic. He sat there unmoving in the grip of the worst fear he had ever known.
All about him the unavailing sunlight shone on gray rock. The mountain peaks were hidden by the nearer cliffs, and the lands below to the south were hidden by unbroken cloud. There was nothing at all here on this bare gray ridgepole of the world but himself, and a dark opening between boulders.
After a long time he got to his feet, went forward stepping across the steaming rivulet, and spoke to the presence which he knew waited inside that shadowy gap. “I have come,” he said.
The darkness moved a little, and the dweller in the cave stood at its mouth.
It was like the Clayfolk, dwarfish and pale; like the Fiia, frail and clear-eyed; like both, like neither. The hair was white. The voice was no voice, for it sounded within Rocannon’s mind while all his ears heard was the faint whistle of the wind; and there were no words. Yet it asked him what he wished.
“I do not know,” the man said aloud in terror, but his set will answered silently for him: I will go south and find my enemy and destroy him.
The wind blew whistling; the warm stream chuckled at his feet. Moving slowly and lightly, the dweller in the cave stood aside, and Rocannon, stooping down, entered the dark place.
What do you give for what I have given you?
What must I give, Ancient One?
That which you hold dearest and would least willingly give.
I have nothing of my own on this world. What thing can I give?
A thing, a life, a chance; an eye, a hope, a return: the name need not be known. But you will cry its name aloud when it is gone. Do you give it freely?
Freely, Ancient One.
Silence and the blowing of wind. Rocannon bowed his head and came out of the darkness. As he straightened up red light struck full in his eyes, a cold red sunrise over a gray-and-scarlet sea of cloud.
Yahan and Mogien slept huddled together on the lower ledge, a heap of furs and cloaks, unstirring as Rocannon climbed down to them. “Wake up,” he said softly. Yahan sat up, his face pinched and childish in the hard red dawn. “Olhor! We thought—you were gone—we thought you had fallen—”
Mogien shook his yellow-maned head to clear it of sleep, and looked up a minute at Rocannon. Then he said hoarsely and gently, “Welcome back, Starlord, companion. We waited here for you.”
“I met…I spoke with…”
Mogien raised his hand. “You have come back; I rejoice in your return. Do we go south?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said Mogien. In that moment it was not strange to Rocannon that Mogien, who for so long had seemed his leader, now spoke to him as a lesser to a greater lord.
Mogien blew his whistle, but though they waited long the windsteeds did not come. They finished the last of the hard, nourishing Fian bread, and set off once more on foot. The warmth of the impermasuit had done Yahan good, and Rocannon insisted he keep it on. The young midman needed food and real rest to get his strength back, but he could get on now, and they had to get on; behind that red sunrise would come heavy weather. It was not dangerous going, but slow and wearisome. Midway in the morning one of the steeds appeared: Mogien’s gray, flitting up from the forests far below. They loaded it with the saddles and harness and furs—all they carried now—and it flew along above or below or beside them as it pleased, sometimes letting out a ringing yowl as if to call its striped mate, still hunting or feasting down in the forests.
About noon they came to a hard stretch: a cliff-face sticking out like a shield, over which they would have to crawl roped together. “From the air you might see a better path for us to follow, Mogien,” Rocannon suggested. “I wish the other steed would come.” He had a sense of urgency; he wanted to be off this bare gray mountainside and be hidden down among trees.
“The beast was tired out when we let it go; it may not have made a kill yet. This one carried less weight over the pass. I’ll see how wide this cliff is. Perhaps my steed can carry all three of us for a few bowshots.” He whistled and the gray steed, with the loyal obedience that still amazed Rocannon in a beast so large and so carnivorous, wheeled around in the air and came looping gracefully up to the cliffside where they waited. Mogien swung up on it and with a shout sailed off, his bright hair catching the last shaft of sunlight that broke through thickening banks of cloud.
Still the thin, cold wind blew. Yahan crouched back in an angle of rock, his eyes closed. Rocannon sat looking out into the distance at the remotest edge of which could be sensed the fading brightness of the sea. He did not scan the immense, vague landscape that came and went between drifting clouds, but gazed at one point, south and a little east, one place. He shut his eyes. He listened, and heard.
It was a strange gift he had got from the dweller in the cave, the guardian of the warm well in the unnamed mountains; a gift that went all against his grain to ask. There in the dark by the deep warm spring he had been taught a skill of the senses that his race and the men of Earth had witnessed and studied in other races, but to which they were deaf and blind, save for brief glimpses and rare exceptions. Clinging to his humanity, he had drawn back from the totality of the power that the guardian of the well possessed and offered. He had learned to listen to the minds of one race, one kind of creature, among all the voices of all the w
orlds one voice: that of his enemy.
With Kyo he had had some beginnings of mindspeech; but he did not want to know his companions’ minds when they were ignorant of his. Understanding must be mutual, when loyalty was, and love.
But those who had killed his friends and broken the bond of peace he spied upon, he overheard. He sat on the granite spur of a trackless mountain-peak and listened to the thoughts of men in buildings among rolling hills thousands of meters below and a hundred kilometers away. A dim chatter, a buzz and babble and confusion, a remote roil and storming of sensations and emotions. He did not know how to select voice from voice, and was dizzy among a hundred different places and positions; he listened as a young infant listens, undiscriminating. Those born with eyes and ears must learn to see and hear, to pick out a face from a double eyefull of upside-down world, to select meaning from a welter of noise. The guardian of the well had the gift, which Rocannon had only heard rumor of on one other planet, of unsealing the telepathic sense; and he had taught Rocannon how to limit and direct it, but there had been no time to learn its use, its practice. Rocannon’s head spun with the impingement of alien thoughts and feelings, a thousand strangers crowded in his skull. No words came through. Mindhearing was the word the Angyar, the outsiders, used for the sense. What he “heard” was not speech but intentions, desires, emotions, the physical locations and sensual-mental directions of many different men jumbling and overlapping through his own nervous system, terrible gusts of fear and jealousy, drifts of contentment, abysses of sleep, a wild racking vertigo of half-understanding, half-sensation. And all at once out of the chaos something stood absolutely clear, a contact more definite than a hand laid on his naked flesh. Someone was coming toward him: a man whose mind had sensed his own. With this certainty came lesser impressions of speed, of confinement; of curiosity and fear.
Rocannon opened his eyes, staring ahead as if he would see before him the face of that man whose being he had sensed. He was close; Rocannon was sure he was close, and coming closer. But there was nothing to see but air and lowering clouds. A few dry, small flakes of snow whirled in the wind. To his left bulked the great bosse of rock that blocked their way. Yahan had come out beside him and was watching him, with a scared look. But he could not reassure Yahan, for that presence tugged at him and he could not break the contact. “There is…there is a…an airship,” he muttered thickly, like a sleeptalker. “There!”
There was nothing where he pointed; air, cloud.
“There,” Rocannon whispered.
Yahan, looking again where he pointed, gave a cry. Mogien on the gray steed was riding the wind well out from the cliff; and beyond him, far out in a scud of cloud, a larger black shape had suddenly appeared, seeming to hover or to move very slowly. Mogien flashed on downwind without seeing it, his face turned to the mountain wall looking for his companions, two tiny figures on a tiny ledge in the sweep of rock and cloud.
The black shape grew larger, moving in, its vanes clacking and hammering in the silence of the heights. Rocannon saw it less clearly than he sensed the man inside it, the uncomprehending touch of mind on mind, the intense defiant fear. He whispered to Yahan, “Take cover!” but could not move himself. The helicopter nosed in unsteadily, rags of cloud catching in its whirring vanes. Even as he watched it approach, Rocannon watched from inside it, not knowing what he looked for, seeing two small figures on the mountainside, afraid, afraid—A flash of light, a hot shock of pain, pain in his own flesh, intolerable. The mind-contact was broken, blown clean away. He was himself, standing on the ledge pressing his right hand against his chest and gasping, seeing the helicopter creep still closer, its vanes whirring with a dry loud rattle, its laser-mounted nose pointing at him.
From the right, from the chasm of air and cloud, shot a gray winged beast ridden by a man who shouted in a voice like a high, triumphant laugh. One beat of the wide gray wings drove steed and rider forward straight against the hovering machine, full speed, head on. There was a tearing sound like the edge of a great scream, and then the air was empty.
The two on the cliff crouched staring. No sound came up from below. Clouds wreathed and drifted across the abyss.
“Mogien!”
Rocannon cried the name aloud. There was no answer. There was only pain, and fear, and silence.
IX
RAIN PATTERED HARD on a raftered roof. The air of the room was dark and clear.
Near his couch stood a woman whose face he knew, a proud, gentle, dark face crowned with gold.
He wanted to tell her that Mogien was dead, but he could not say the words. He lay there sorely puzzled, for now he recalled that Haldre of Hallan was an old woman, white-haired; and the golden-haired woman he had known was long dead; and anyway he had seen her only once, on a planet eight lightyears away, a long time ago when he had been a man named Rocannon.
He tried again to speak. She hushed him, saying in the Common Tongue though with some difference in sounds, “Be still, my lord.” She stayed beside him, and presently told him in her soft voice, “This is Breygna Castle. You came here with another man, in the snow, from the heights of the mountains. You were near death and still are hurt. There will be time…”
There was much time, and it slipped by vaguely, peacefully in the sound of the rain.
The next day or perhaps the next, Yahan came in to him, Yahan very thin, a little lame, his face scarred with frostbite. But a less understandable change in him was his manner, subdued and submissive. After they had talked a while Rocannon asked uncomfortably, “Are you afraid of me, Yahan?”
“I will try not to be, Lord,” the young man stammered.
When he was able to go down to the Revelhall of the castle, the same awe or dread was in all faces that turned to him, though they were brave and genial faces. Gold-haired, dark-skinned, a tall people, the old stock of which the Angyar were only a tribe that long ago had wandered north by sea: these were the Liuar, the Earthlords, living since before the memory of any race here in the foothills of the mountains and the rolling plains to the south.
At first he thought that they were unnerved simply by his difference in looks, his dark hair and pale skin; but Yahan was colored like him, and they had no dread of Yahan. They treated him as a lord among lords, which was a joy and a bewilderment to the ex-serf of Hallan. But Rocannon they treated as a lord above lords, one set apart.
There was one who spoke to him as to a man. The Lady Ganye, daughter-in-law and heiress of the castle’s old lord, had been a widow for some months; her bright-haired little son was with her most of the day. Though shy, the child had no fear of Rocannon, but was rather drawn to him, and liked to ask him questions about the mountains and the northern lands and the sea. Rocannon answered whatever he asked. The mother would listen, serene and gentle as the sunlight, sometimes turning smiling to Rocannon her face that he had remembered even as he had seen it for the first time.
He asked her at last what it was they thought of him in Breygna Castle, and she answered candidly, “They think you are a god.”
It was the word he had noted long since in Tolen village, pedan.
“I’m not,” he said, dour.
She laughed a little.
“Why do they think so?” he demanded. “Do the gods of the Liuar come with gray hair and crippled hands?” The laserbeam from the helicopter had caught him in the right wrist, and he had lost the use of his right hand almost entirely.
“Why not?” said Ganye with her proud, candid smile. “But the reason is that you came down the mountain.”
He absorbed this a while. “Tell me, Lady Ganye, do you know of…the guardian of the well?”
At this her face was grave. “We know tales of that people only. It is very long, nine generations of the Lords of Breygna, since Iollt the Tall went up into the high places and came down changed. We knew you had met with them, with the Most Ancient.”
“How do you know?”
“In your sleep in fever you spoke always of the price, of t
he cost, of the gift given and its price. Iollt paid too…The cost was your right hand, Lord Olhor?” she asked with sudden timidity, raising her eyes to his.
“No. I would give both my hands to have saved what I lost.”
He got up and went to the window of the tower-room, looking out on the spacious country between the mountains and the distant sea. Down from the high foothills where Breygna Castle stood wound a river, widening and shining among lower hills, vanishing into hazy reaches where one could half make out villages, fields, castle towers, and once again the gleam of the river among blue rainstorms and shafts of sunlight.
“This is the fairest land I ever saw,” he said. He was still thinking of Mogien, who would never see it.
“It’s not so fair to me as it once was.”
“Why, Lady Ganye?”
“Because of the Strangers!”
“Tell me of them, Lady.”
“They came here late last winter, many of them riding in great windships, armed with weapons that burn. No one can say what land they come from; there are no tales of them at all. All the land between Viarn River and the sea is theirs now. They killed or drove out all the people of eight domains. We in the hills here are prisoners; we dare not go down even to the old pasturelands with our herds. We fought the Strangers, at first. My husband Ganhing was killed by their burning weapons.” Her gaze went for a second to Rocannon’s seared, crippled hand; for a second she paused. “In…in the time of the first thaw he was killed, and still we have no revenge. We bow our heads and avoid their lands, we the Earthlords! And there is no man to make these Strangers pay for Ganhing’s death.”
O lovely wrath, Rocannon thought, hearing the trumpets of lost Hallan in her voice. “They will pay, Lady Ganye; they will pay a high price. Though you knew I was no god, did you take me for quite a common man?”
“No, Lord,” said she. “Not quite.”
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