Moving Water
Page 4
I had taken a step back. But it was not me he saw. Those eyes looked past me, laughter all blown out. Dark and deep as a sunless forest pool. And blind, as if they had been stunned.
Then they shortened focus. That time, all of us stepped back.
“Could I not?” He barely whispered, but it cut like a whip. “Not knock the sword out of his hand? Stun him? Throw him a sarissa-length away? Stop him in his tracks . . . But no. I had to use A’sparre.” Suddenly he buried his face in his hand. “ ‘A brick-maker stitching silk.’ . . . Oh, Four. Any brick-maker could have bettered that.”
With a degree of wounded dignity I said, “You did save my life. Or perhaps you’d rather have saved his?”
He just shook his head to and fro. Then, muffled in his arm, he said, “Fengthira was right.”
“About what?”
He ignored that. But something in the bow of his shoulders made me burst out, “Don’t tell me you’re scared of your poxy witch!”
In another moment he looked up. His eyes were still stunned, but the shock was changing. Now he looked nearer to despair. And oddly forlorn, as if I had deserted him.
“You don’t understand,” he said. And it was not blame, but grief.
I stared. He looked back to the corpse.
“That . . . he . . . was unique.” He said it very softly. The grief remained, as if he were speaking some great hero’s eulogy.
“There never was, there never will be another of him. It took all time, and everything that ever was, to put him here. And I destroyed him. Blew him out, Phut! Not because I had to.” His head went back in his arm. “From sheer . . . blind . . . criminal . . . incompetence.”
I could not fathom the technical terms, I was uncomfortable at the depth of his remorse, baffled by this extravagant metaphysical breast-beating over a scurvy back-stabber who had got his deserts, and it gave me an odd sense of falling short, of lacking some value I could not even define. That, like all awareness of deficiency, made me angrier.
“He’s still dead,” I said brutally. “And that’s all there is to it.”
There was a long pause. Then he took his hand down and stood up, and when I saw his face I knew there would never be words I would wish so bitterly to have left unsaid.
“Yes,” he said.
* * * * *
I beat a thankful retreat to the practical. The other curs were well to heel. They saddled up with speed, and I had just ordered, “Dakis, Krem, tie that crowbait on with his stirrup leathers,” when a voice behind me said, “Alkir, wait.”
He seemed to have recovered a little or, at least, to have begun to think. “This was my fault,” he said. “All of it.” An echo of that grief ran across his face and I wanted to look away. But he went on at once, “There’d have been no trouble if you weren’t escorting me.”
That I could not agree made me no more amiable.
“So . . . he could have drowned yesterday. We could bury him here. And”—he swept a glance round the ten of us—“finish it.”
Was I to clap or swear? Conspiring with your men to falsify a death and conceal an aborted mutiny, entrusting your career to a pack of toy-shop heroes’ malice or drunkenness—if they did not read his mercy as weakness and kill us both. Nothing is so rancorous as pardoned crime. Before taking the chance he did I would have struck the mare. But perhaps such gambles, or an insight that makes a surety of them, are the mark of high command.
Before anyone produced a word or, I daresay, a thought, he said in open relief, “Thank the Four.” Then he looked surprised and, almost under his breath, amended it to an equally fervent, if more cryptic “Imsar Math.”
* * * * *
“In the name of Math,” what? I wondered irritably, as with no sound but blundering horses we rode into the ravine; through the girth-deep, neglected ford. Back to the road. Silence held as we dipped and climbed amid a forest wet and glittering as new-polished shields. A Thangrian timber jinker passed, fourteen horses, a giant of a log, skill and power joined. An orchid collector, a pack of rainbow exotica on his back, his tree-boy running ahead. I was still unsure of the guards, he noticed none of it. No one would ask about those moments over the corpse. But finally my confusion marshaled on a single idea.
“I don’t see why it was . . . incompetent.”
The forest shook to the roar of a falling giant. I heard the clap of another axe beyond. Still staring between the mare’s ears he said, “It’s not a snub. Will you give me time to think?”
We had reached an inn, breakfasted, and set out again before he said a word. Then, as our horses breasted the first rise, slowly, all but fumblingly, he began to speak.
“You think what I did was justified. Self-defense. For act or worth, he—Gevos—deserved no better.” I nodded. “But everyone’s stupid when they’re afraid. Nor was that all his fault. So much for him.”
My neck told me the curs had grown six inches extra ear.
“And for me?” A wry smile. “It was about as fair as a mouse against a tiger-cat. I needn’t have killed him. Why I should not is the heart of it.”’
He was still staring ahead, almost back in that morning’s somberness.
“Fengthira told me, when I left. Warned me. ‘Tha’st been safe, in Hethria. T’will not be so easy, among the temptations of men.’ ”
I did not have to find a prompt. His mouth tightened and he said too quietly, “ ‘I’m usually strong enough.’ I actually said that. I’d forgotten—after trees, and rocks, I’d forgotten how fragile it is—flesh and blood.” He looked up into the dew-starred forest canopy and added, yet more quietly, “And I’d forgotten Math.”
I let the silence ask, Math?
“I follow the Four, I said to you. I thought Math was—an idea. A theory. Fengthira’s business . . . something I just had to hear about. I know now, it’s not.”
I just managed not to blurt, “Eh?”
“It isn’t a theory.” Now I could hardly hear him at all. “For an aedr. . . . It’s inside you, part of you. When you damage that, or break it. . . .” He made a little sound that was poles from a laugh. “Then you find what it means, to say, This’ll hurt me more than it hurts you.”
I must have twitched or somehow else betrayed myself. His eyes came right round and he said it for me. “I’m sorry. You don’t understand. You don’t know anything about Math.”
I tried to make it sound neither pressing nor accusing. “No.”
He frowned. “I don’t think I can explain this very well, because it’s Math, to begin with. And I’m new to it. And I was never very good with words. But I think . . . ‘Math’ is twofold. The—vision. And the rule. For the vision, Math means, Reality. That-which-is. For the rule . . . Fengthira says, the simplest is, Respect that-which-is. Trees, beasts, men. Because every single one is the sum of Math, and you can alter or destroy them, but to make them is beyond us all. It takes the whole world and all of time, it was never done before, and will never be done again.”
It was almost, I remembered, what he had said over the dead man.
“And the more power you have over that-which-is, the more reluctant you should be to exercise it. A little fire won’t temper a sword-blade, but nor will it turn a master-sculptor’s marble into lime.” I nodded. “I am an aedr. I can damage that-which-is more than—just about any living thing. I can misuse power. The way I did this morning. What’s worse, I could come to enjoy misusing it.” He looked down at his crippled hand. “When I learnt the arts, Fengthira gave me a lesson on that I’ll never forget. But the temptation lasts. Power can rot you. It can make you”—his voice grew careful—“destroy yourself.”
“Go on,” I said.
He shot me a glance, and looked away. Perhaps, I thought, he changed what he would have said.
“Um . . . so, the greater the power, the greater the obligation to respect Math. Be good, so to speak, to keep goodness good.” I wondered what the ears would make of that. “So when I kill a man by incompetence, I’m not only a
bungler at my trade. I am a destroyer of Math. And because my power’s the greater—so much the worse is my default.”
“You mean,” I was floundering, “if I step on a grasshopper, deliberately, it’s still better than if you do—what you did—by mistake?”
He answered bleakly, “Yes.”
I stared. I had never dreamt of such a power, nor one which could so implacably condemn itself under a statute only its own consent could enforce.
“We are all responsible for Math”—he stared ahead of him—“according to our power. I’m an aedr. I used to think I had problems when I was just a king.”
His vague and enigmatic Math went straight out of my head. But the somber set of the mouth, the eyes still dark as malachite, warned all too clearly, Don’t ask. Not now.
* * * * *
His mood had not lightened by our midday halt, though he was hardly quieter than the guards. Girthing up again, I wondered what might distract him, when he had ridden unseeing in the trenchant upland air under the mightiest trees in Thangar, past traffic that a day ago would have rotated off his head. Then a bend showed me the closest skyline. I eased my horse back a little behind the mare, and waited on events.
The hoof-noise told me the rest had closed up on us both. The mare flicked her ears, but he paid no heed. Then the light changed, and as you would expect his head came up.
He shot upright on the mare. His mouth fell wide. Then he cried, “Alkir, you louse!” and fairly flew from the mare’s back to the highway edge.
If it is a whim of the Lady or her engineer I cannot say, but whoever built it had a craft to match the sheer audacity of the design. The Horned Gate lies on the very range brink, at the end of a long rising ridge that sweeps round from south to east; but at the bend-head the road diverges to spring clean across that bight of valley almost as deep as the range, rising on the gentlest of gradients to Vallin Taskar’s port, upheld by pylons that elongate in center valley until the trees are green cauliflowers beneath each dizzily perpendicular stone jet, and the crowning span bears you across the sky like a spider on a giant’s thread. While under the parapet the range falls in tiny, defeated folds to eighty miles of Morryan coastland and the knuckle of the Morhyrne and the tenuous, unending, aquamarine circumference of the sea.
There is no warning. Just a last jink of the tree-shuttered road and the bridge fires you out into immensity. Glancing round at nine grins wider than my own, I thought what joy there is in seeing others’ joy take them by surprise.
“You femaere,” he said when I dismounted and walked over. “You never said a word.”
“You did say,” I pointed out, “that you wanted to see it with your eyes.”
“So I did.” He was still devouring it, too rapt to comment again, even in superlatives.
When he finally moved and sighed, I said, “We call the ocean Gevber. The Eastern Sea. The land is Morrya province. That little hill’s the Morhyrne. Zyphryr Coryan’s on its seaward side. And above Zyphryr Coryan is where the Lady lives.”
“Oh, yes.” At that moment she could not have mattered less. But at last he turned away, to scan the bridge again, and then remark, “Must be some good in Assharral, when they build something like this just to show off something like that.”
When I said, “Thank you,” he looked delightfully abashed. Then he said indignantly, “Sneak that under my shield, you can expect a kick in the teeth.” And I swung back astride laughing, so relieved to have him himself again, I dismissed questions of kingship along with his baffling Math.
* * * * *
The byplay had touched the guards too, though it was hardly perceptible. Just a minute sense of atmosphere grown indefinably easier, as we passed Vallin Taskar and the road began its zigzag down a vertical cliff into the forest depths.
Lisdrinos’ trees are mammoth, its undergrowth impassable. Bird and beast flourish in that wet green labyrinth, but you catch only rare glimpses, like the spell-cast vistas from a road shoulder: half a waterfall in the fern, a segment of Morrya past a vine-hung cliff. If you are lucky, the frigid quiet may yield one syllable of a ferrathil’s slow, chiming call. It was in there, soon after we left next morning, that one of the horses chose to cast a shoe.
“Take him back, Wenver,” I told his rider, “with my nastiest compliments, and get another one.” I felt the cold war had eased to such small levities. “The rest fall out, but sit on the road, unless you want to banquet the whole family Leech.” I had been through such forests before. Then, thinking there could not be too much danger, I lay down with my head on the curb and my feet in the sun, and promptly fell fast asleep.
I came upright inside out clawing my sword as I spun to meet a mass assassination attempt. He was nowhere in sight. Eight amazed faces stared uphill at me. “What—where—” I had just begun to yell when he broke in, sounding oddly flat.
Then how in the Lady’s name, I almost shouted as I ran, could you talk to me down here?
As if after a Phaxian sentry I slithered up to the father of logs that was their ambuscade, with sour thoughts of leeches nestled to its spongy bark, inched my head up to gauge his line of sight. And forgot everything else.
Ten paces away a tiny glade of bracken ferns was caught in a shaft of blue-white sun, dazzling as liquid thillian in the greenish gloom. The light framed a tall earth mound. I had vaguely heard a racket suggesting a whole barrack-room of birds. Now, as sight slowly became perception, I knew there would be only one.
At first it looked like a filmy white helmet crest shaken out just above the ground. Then the two long bronze and gold-spatched outer feathers came into focus, framing the white plumes in their open-heart curve, two finer ones rising to repeat the heart above. A black flash of foot beneath the silver arch. A shine of bright black eye. And it had assembled, facing me, tail arched forward high over its head as it performed the mating dance. A heart-tail bird, a clythkemmon, or as some say, a terrepher, a silver dancer, or a tingan as others call it, a many-tongue, because it can mimic any sound on earth.
The silver fan quivered. Slid gracefully to the left. On the final hop I had a glimpse of wings. It sidled back. The calls had passed from a ferrathil’s chime to a gerperra’s whipcrack cry to the salvoes of a gweldryx flock. Now, quite distinctly, came the clop of hooves and the very timbre of my commands. Hearing my charge’s breath of a laugh I nearly thumped his shoulder, for they are the shyest of all birds.
But it was all right. The sun flamed on the trembling silver curtain, the gold and bronze feather bars glowed, distinct as beads, the dance went on. Advance, halt, retreat. The hen must be somewhere close, I thought.
A crying child, a windlass’s squeak. A rovperra’s splutter of raucous man-like laughter and the fan swept shut. A dull brown bird with an ungainly tail edged coyly up to a stump, saying, “Choo . . . choo.” Another patch of dowdy brown fluttered down to it, and then the forest had drunk them both.
After a long time the three of us sighed in near-perfect unison, and sat back. I glanced at my charge. He was on my right, still staring into the gloom, turban fallen round his neck, which let me study his undamaged profile: as I took in the long jaw, springing nose, black-lashed green almond of eye, sweet-tempered mouth that belied the bone structure of command, it struck me that women must once have found him a more than handsome man.
Silently, as behoves beauty unindebted to men, we filed back to the road. As we started down, he said, “I’m glad you called me, Sivar. The captain says it was a clythkemmon. Or a tingan. Or a terrepher. By any name, it makes Assharral a lucky place.”
More thought-reading, I d
educed resignedly. And then, galvanized: How did he do that? How did he get any of them to speak to him, let be follow him up there alone?
I did not pull a face at him. I knew Sivar had picked up “the captain says,” too.
That first implicit praise had made him preen as well as mumble. Now his eye-whites were showing. I waited for him to run. A word, a bare glance from the menace would have been enough. But my charge ignored him, making steadily on downhill.
Another three strides, crunching on the road’s damp stone. The others were watching, not yet in earshot. I caught Sivar’s indrawn breath. Then the half-cleared throat, and, with more than natural awkwardness, the word.
“Sir . . . ?”
My charge made an encouraging noise.
“Sir . . . but . . . Fylg . . . ah, the captain—never said anything.”
Does he know, I thought, that this is an overture from the shyest of all birds? Does he guess how much rides on this?
But of course he had.
“Not aloud,” he answered matter-of-factly, not looking round. “But we couldn’t talk up there. So I had to read his thoughts. It’s just another art.”
At Sivar’s, “Oh,” my heart sank.
Then other concerns yielded to my own query. “Apart from picking my mind, just how did you get me up there?”
“Oh, dear.” He stopped, and scrubbed at his hair. Sivar, I noted hopefully, had stopped too, showing more inquisitiveness than fear.
“You see,” he smiled disarmingly, “about the first art we learn is Mindspeech. Lathare. And I couldn’t shout for you.” The smile broadened. “Though if I’d yelled as loud aloud as I did in Lathare I’d have brought the whole of Assharral. You have a great talent for sleep.”
As Sivar gleefully joined the laugh curiosity bested my own wariness. “Can anybody hear—and talk—like that?”