Riverwind the Plainsman

by Paul B. Thompson

  Riverwind fell face down on the ground. Tears welled up in his eyes. He had chosen wrong. He had failed Mishakal. He had failed Goldmoon. Catchflea had died for nothing. He pressed his face into the dirt, feeling it scrape his cheeks. How could he go home? How could he face Goldmoon again without the staff? She was lost to him forever.

  The plainsman lay quiet for a long time, a great despair consuming him.

  Finally, he got slowly to his feet and looked toward the Forsaken Mountains. The shaft leading down to Hest was there; he would throw himself down it. Riverwind’s bowed back straightened a bit with this decision. The magic in the shaft was gone; he would die in the fall. Then no one would know his shame.

  Mors, master of the realm of Hest, sat unmoving in a hard stone chair, listening to the chosen representatives of the diggers and warriors argue over how to distribute the meager harvest of wheat. They had been disputing for a long time, and Mors was rapidly losing what little patience he had. The crop was the smallest in Hest’s history, and word had come that the fruit trees were dying as well. Without magic, there was no way to preserve them. There would be hunger in Vartoom before long.

  Mors resolved to quell the petty bickering by force if need be, but even as he prepared to shout for order, a strange thing happened. He saw a glimmer of light. It stunned him, for he had lived in total blackness since the day Karn had blinded him. The light was only a gleam, a firefly flash of blue, but still he saw it and it shocked him.

  Mors stood. A digger representative called a question to him. The blind warrior did not hear him. Gradually the hall fell silent. Mors remained standing, motionless. The twinkle of light still glimmered before his sightless eyes.

  “Muster fifty soldiers in the street,” he said evenly. “Lightly clad, with spears only.”

  “My lord,” said an elder digger, “what is it?”

  “Something is happening,” Mors replied. “I can see it.” For the first time in many years, he strode out of a room without staff or elf to guide him. The assembly stirred with curiosity. What was afoot?

  Mors followed the light out to the street. Somehow he knew where it was—he could feel it as well as see it. Though his surroundings were as invisible to him as ever, by following the flickering light he avoided all obstacles. He simply knew where to put his feet. The light beckoned him on. The tramp of soldiers’ feet told him that his escort had arrived.

  “Who is in command?” Mors asked.

  “I, my lord, Prem,” said the elf officer.

  “Do you know the great temple of our ancestors?”

  “The haunted temple?” asked Prem.

  “The same. We will go there at once, but only I will enter. Is that clear?”

  “Certainly, my lord. What is going on?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Mors replied firmly. “I fear—” He did not finish. How could he say it? How could he tell them his fear that the blue glimmer was caused by Li El. Dead Li El.

  Mors led them across the ruined fields. The flickering glow grew stronger and steadier. The soldiers jangled along in close formation. Mors was consumed by curiosity and dread. A hundred days had passed since the deaths of Li El and Vvelz. No magic had occurred in Hest since then. Both brother and sister had been burned on funeral pyres. Nothing of them remained. And now this …

  After two hours’ quick march, the warriors scrambled up the broken rocky path to the temple. As they gained the plateau where the temple stood, they stopped dead in their tracks. Mors heard their footsteps cease. He sharply demanded a reason.

  Prem said, “There’s a light in the temple, my lord!”

  “You see it, too!”

  “We all do.”

  “Form a line!” Mors barked. “I’m going inside. I don’t want anything to get out, understand?” The warriors formed a half-circle facing the vast entrance to the abandoned temple. They watched in awe as Mors advanced up the worn steps into the field of azure light.

  A feeling of gentle beneficence wrapped around Mors like a blanket. Part of him was aware this was a magical effect, perhaps not real, but it was such a profound feeling that he lost most of his apprehension. The blue glow intensified until his eyes began to burn. A groan escaped his lips, and he lifted his hands to his face. He saw the rough, thickened tips of his fingers. His groan of pain changed to a strangled cry of astonishment. He dropped his hands and staggered back against a massive, fluted column.

  Mors could see. Before him was the floor of the temple, littered with broken columns and other debris. He saw all of it with startling clarity. He really could see.

  The light still called him forward. He walked among the lordly columns until he came upon the source of the brilliant blue light.

  Floating a foot off the rutted floor was the upright figure of an elf woman, eyes closed, arms tight against her sides. She was clad in the black shift of a Hestite digger, but the copper cloth was torn and the black paint chipped and scratched. A few inches in front of the woman, hovering vertically, was a magnificent staff of sapphire. The blue light emanated from it.

  Mors went down on one knee. “Who—who are you?” he whispered.

  Listen, said a fluting voice inside his head. Hear me.

  Tears formed in his newly cleared eyes. Mors asked again, “Who are you?”

  I am the one your ancestors knew as Quenesti Pah.

  Mors inhaled sharply. “The goddess?”

  This woman of your race I return to you. She has striven mightily in the cause of good. To save her from madness and death, I have brought her back home.

  “Who is she, divinity?” Mors asked.

  Her name is Di An.

  “My little eyes! An Di—” He started to rise, but the goddess spoke one final time to him, and the strength of her voice drove him back to his knees.

  Let this place become sacred again. Keep my laws, and the bounty of health and healing shall be yours. This woman shall be my priestess, and through her I will make myself known to all your people.

  Mors bowed his head. “It shall be done,” he vowed.

  “Thank you, divinity, for restoring my sight.” But the goddess was gone.

  The blue aura vanished next, leaving Di An standing on the floor. Finally, the sapphire staff disappeared, too. Di An wavered like a sleepwalker. Mors moved quickly to her side and braced her up.

  Her eyes opened slowly. “Mors? Is that you?” she asked weakly.

  “It is. You have changed, little digger.”

  “I’ve grown up. Are you … angry that I went away?”

  “I was, but no longer.”

  Di An thought that it was strange to feel Mors’s arm around her waist. Strange, but good. She asked, “Did you hear the words of the goddess, too? Did you see her sacred staff?” When Mors nodded, she added, “I dwelled in the realm of the gods. For how long, I don’t know. Riverwind and I were trying to escape from the dragon, and there were men like lizards—”

  “Dragon!” Mors exclaimed. “Men like lizards? Are you sure your head is clear?”

  Di An fixed him with a startling stare. Her formerly dark eyes were now a brilliant blue, the same color as the staff of Quenesti Pah. “My head is quite clear, Mors.” She thought of poor Catchflea, dead at the hands of the draconians. She saw Riverwind burning with fever—was he safe? “And my heart is quite heavy.”

  Mors and Di An went out to the waiting warriors. He could hardly believe this cool, ethereal woman was the barren child who had led him around during his darkest days.

  “I shall always try to lead you well,” Di An said in a confidential tone. Mors blinked. She’d read his thoughts. “After all, I would not be here now if I hadn’t followed you—even as I led you.”

  Mors presented Di An to the warriors, and they saluted her by raising their spears high. That done, Mors was at a loss. He asked Di An what she wanted to do.

  She looked out over the smoky, poisoned cavern. She thought of all the barren children laboring in the fields and mines. Though she could now r
emember the surface world without fear, she knew she belonged in Hest, with her own people. As her bright gaze took in the hazy vista, Di An said, “I want to heal this place. And, perhaps, heal myself.”

  Somehow Riverwind managed to make it to the base of the mountains. One foot after the other, he plodded through a day and a night and a day. His decision to throw himself down the shaft drove him. Though other methods of death threatened him—hunger and thirst among them—he was obsessed with the notion that he must die in the shaft. Somehow that would be right.

  Riverwind felt baked hard from the fever heat inside him, so the discovery of a spring of sweet water in a cleft of the rocks was as great a gift as he ever thought to receive.

  His thirst slaked, the hunger that tightened his belly into a knot returned. Riverwind had no bow and hardly expected to take any game with his bare hands. He found some pine nuts growing in clusters around some of the taller boulders. He ate hundreds of the tiny, thready seeds. That helped a little, but he couldn’t live on them. As night fell again, he lay atop a gently rounded boulder, the peaks of the mountains looming over him. He would never make it up the mountainside in his weakened condition. He would fail in his resolve to die in the shaft. I can’t even carry that quest through, he thought bitterly.

  The stars came out. He saw the broken scales of Hiddukel, the bison head of Kiri-Jolith, the black hood of Morgion. Beside Morgion, just peeking over the tops of the mountains, was the constellation Mishakal. Like the steel amulet he’d given Goldmoon, the stars of Mishakal formed two joined circles. “The Endless Chase,” his father had called it. If you traced the loop with your finger, you never reached the end.

  “What does it mean?” the boy Riverwind had asked.

  “It means, no matter where you wander, the goddess is always with you,” his father had replied.

  Always with you—like the face of Goldmoon, which was never long out of his thoughts. Riverwind closed his eyes and conjured up her image. The silver-golden hair, the flashing eyes, the soft, red lips.… The sight caused tears to trickle from under his closed eyelids. She was so beautiful. His quest having failed, she would marry another. Arrowthorn would insist. He had never approved of Riverwind anyway.

  The idea of Goldmoon as another man’s wife sent a surge of anger through Riverwind. Despair had not completely consumed him. He would never permit Arrowthorn to marry her to another! He would steal her away first—

  His eyes snapped open. How stupid! How selfish! He’d forgotten his other vital task, to warn everyone of the draconians and their plans for conquest. That alone should be reason enough to return to Que-Shu. And his courting quest was not a failure. While he lived, the quest would go on. And if it took ten years or a hundred, Goldmoon would wait for him. He knew how strong her spirit and her will were. She would never be forced into marriage.

  Riverwind got up from the boulder and started climbing. Every mountain begins the same way, he thought grimly. From the bottom, going up. And that’s the way, ill or hearty, he had to take them.

  It was a nightmare climb. The plainsman’s legs shivered in the cooling mountain air, and more than a few times they failed, buckling and throwing him to the ground. When that happened, Riverwind clawed his way along with his fingers. Never mind that blood flowed from his torn nails. Never mind the blurring of his sight by the still-raging fever. He had to continue his journey.

  He reached a small plateau and rolled over on his back to catch his breath. It streamed out, a thin white vapor in the night air. Only a moment to rest, just a short moment.

  The Blue Crystal Staff materialized in the air above him. He moaned, thinking it was a feverish delusion, but when Riverwind put out a hand to grasp the floating staff, his fingers closed around smooth, hard sapphire. The staff had returned. It was cold and bright in his hand. The magic aura subsided, and Riverwind felt the rough, dark wood.

  “Thank you, Mishakal,” he said. ‘Thank you!” The mountain rang with his cry.

  He wondered what had happened to Di An, where she was. The goddess must have helped her. She must have. He said a silent prayer for the elf woman.

  Riverwind resumed his climb. He leaned heavily on the five-foot-long rod, and it supported him on the long ascent.

  In the days that followed, Riverwind’s fortunes waxed and waned. In the high, narrow valleys of the Forsaken Mountains, he found wild berries and roots to eat, but no game he could catch bare-handed. The swamp fever would fade for an hour, or a day, only to strike him again, reducing the plainsman to a huddled, shivering wreck. During these periods, Riverwind wandered aimlessly off his chosen path, sometimes three or four leagues in the wrong direction. His mind grew dull with the heat and pain. He cut his hands and feet, stumbling over sharp stones. He wandered for three days, delirious, only to be brought to his senses by a sudden downpour of ice-cold rain. It was then that he discovered how lost he was. The peaks around him were unfamiliar, and the forest unlike any he’d entered before.

  While Riverwind stood in the cold rain, marshaling his thoughts, he heard a young man’s voice say, “What do you want, vagabond?”

  He turned and saw he had stumbled into the open near a camp. Two stout wagons were set axle to axle, a canvas tent spread out before them. A fire burned fitfully under the sodden tarp. Standing between Riverwind and the camp was a young man in a dripping cape and rain-soaked hat. He held a slim-bladed sword. The point faced Riverwind.

  “I said, what do you want?” repeated the young man. From beneath his hat, yellow-hair gleamed.

  “I’m lost,” Riverwind said.

  “Well, wandering thieves aren’t welcome here!”

  “There’s no need for threats,” Riverwind said. His teeth chattered as the cold of the rain seemed to penetrate to his bones. “I’m not a brigand.”

  “How do I know that?” asked the blond fellow. “You’re a big fellow and you carry a stout stick.”

  “Look, could I warm myself by your fire? I am chilled through and through.”

  “No! Be off!” He stamped his foot for emphasis, but only succeeded in splashing mud on his own boots.

  Riverwind considered trying to disarm the youngster, but before he could act on the notion, his temporary sense of balance fled, and the next thing he knew, he was lying in the mud on his back. The blond boy was joined by another figure in a hooded cape.

  “Who’s that? What did you do to him?” asked the hooded one. The voice sounded like a girl’s.

  “I did nothing,” replied the boy. “He’s only some beggar.”

  “He has the bearing of a warrior,” the girl observed. “But he looks quite ill.”

  “We can’t take in every starving robber who passes.”

  “Well, we certainly can’t leave him out here in the rain!” the girl declared. Riverwind wanted to applaud her good manners, but he was too weak to even make a sound.

  The girl tried to lift him by an arm, but wasn’t strong enough. The boy watched for a moment, then joined in. The two of them half-carried, half-dragged Riverwind to the wagons. With much straining and complaining, they hoisted him into one wagon.

  The canvas flap fell, and the boy removed his hat. He had a high forehead and lots of freckles. His gray eyes were bloodshot. The girl slipped back her hood. She had a pleasant, plump face, a button nose, and curly black hair.

  “Hand me a cloth, Darmon,” said the girl. The boy plucked a rag from the bow frame of the roof and gave it to her. She blotted Riverwind’s face and neck, wrung out the rag, and dried his hands and arms.

  “Thank you,” the plainsman managed to say.

  “What’s your name?” asked the girl gently.

  “Riverwind.”

  The boy, Darmon, snorted. “A barbarian name!” he declared. The girl shushed him.

  “Don’t take him too seriously,” she advised the young plainsman. “Darmon likes to think he has noble blood, and that allows him to look down on other people.”

  “I do have noble blood, Lona! My uncle is
Lord Bedric of—”

  “So you’ve told me. And told me.” The girl wrung her cloth again. “My name is Arlona. Lona for short. What happened to you, Riverwind, that put you in such a state?”

  He blinked his burning eyes and marshaled his thoughts. “I’m trying to get home,” he said. “To Que-Shu. My beloved is there, waiting for me. I have to give this staff to Goldmoon.” It lay beside him on the pallet of blankets.

  “That thing?” Darmon said, pointing at the staff with one toe. “What’s so special about that old stick?”

  “The Staff of Mishakal. It fulfills my quest,” Riverwind said feverishly.

  The boy rolled his eyes and shook his head, muttering, “Barbarians.”

  Lona made some hot soup, and while it simmered she told Riverwind how she and Darmon came to be out here in the middle of nowhere.

  “Darmon and I are the last survivors of Quidnin’s Royal Theatre Company,” Lona said, stirring the broth. “We’d been on the road from the New Ports for Solace when Master Quidnin had a falling out with the wagon leader over the best route to take. Quidnin won out, unfortunately, and we went east.” The dark-haired girl stared into the pot. “It seems we should have gone west. We ended up in the mountains. The drovers were furious with Quidnin for getting us lost. There was a terrible argument, and the drovers abandoned us. Quidnin was still certain that we couldn’t be too far off. He sent scouts one by one to search for help, for food, for water. None of the scouts ever came back. Of the eleven people in the theatre company when we set out from the New Ports, only Darmon and I remain.”

  “Actors?” Riverwind said. He sipped the mug of weak but hot broth Lona had given him, and felt better. He reached out and fingered the end of the blade Darmon had presented to him in the rain. It bent easily under his thumb. The sword was a prop, made of tin.

  “Hey!” Darmon protested. “You’ll ruin it! Stop!” He shifted to the other side of the wagon, out of Riverwind’s reach. The plainsman chuckled at the realization that he’d been threatened by a boy with a toy sword.