“But,” he wailed, “I’m not supposed to do that anymore!” At which Evis patted his shoulder, saying kindly, “Never mind, sir. It was an education. Now you just relax and get your wind.”
It was all he would delay for, and afternoon was worse. Never have I been so thankful as when the carts thinned and the caissyn fields tailed off into the foothills of the Frimmor range.
There is an inn at the pass foot. Since he fainted clean away after the final cart, Sivar was free to dart into its kitchen and annex a fistful of cups and a mighty kettle of mint-tea, from which we all recruited our strength. As we rode off I glanced back to see a sooty child, clearly a scullion, gaping after us. I glanced at Beryx, and kept quiet. One child could hardly prove dangerous, and he had driven himself hard enough.
Frimmor range is just a winding climb among the tawny coastal hills, and traffic was blessedly light. Beryx reached the crest with strength in hand for a last view of Morrya, patches of opulent black soil, lush cultivation and lusher natural greenery spread into the smoke haze, steaming under the humid sun.
“So rich,” he said under his breath. “So much potential. How could you want Ammath, when you owned a province like that?”
“Isn’t Everran,” I asked, “like that?”
He came to himself. “Everran was poor land,” he answered. “A lot of it desert, most only fit for hethel trees and grapevines. Nothing like this.”
“Was,” I thought. Everran, supreme happiness, had been deliberately, irrevocably put behind him. A sacrifice. At least two of the Phathos’ cards had spoken truth.
We changed horses at the post-house on the crest. This time he wobbled out in the yard and personally chose every horse, the selections of a cavalryman. And chosen, I noted with foreboding, for stamina above all else.
* * * * *
Frimmor is just high and dry enough for grain, chiefly fed to the ubiquitous milking herds and more ubiquitous pigs. Most of Assharral’s cheese and bacon come from us. The crops patch into the rolling red-and-yellow-green landscape with its dirt tracks to each whitewashed farm, the earth tank and cultivation and selected groves of shade-trees, the paddocks grazed by phalanxes of red or roan milking cows. A quiet, prosperous, mellow land. I had never coveted its kindness, till I saw it through Beryx’s eyes.
Sunset, fading golden to prettify our stubbly faces and mistreated clothes, found us at the bypass for Tengorial. Stirian Ven makes no concession to towns. In its path, it goes through, otherwise it goes past. Callissa eyed the faded sign with her first show of life. Evis eyed it too. Hungrily.
“Sir,” he suggested, “if we asked for dinner at a farm . . . couldn’t you make them forget?” Evis is not one to let weapons, however unusual, rust in his hand.
Beryx weighed it. Then he said, “The next useful cover, two of you can go and ask a farm for whatever they’ll give. If it’s not enough, don’t press them. We’ll try somewhere else.”
On or off the road, Frimmor has little cover. We ended under a stand of tall silvery hisgal whose boughs offered little more than midday shade, and the very grass beneath had gone for travelers’ fires. Beryx slid off and lay flat, leaving it to us. When Karis and Krem brought back a bucket of milk, a cooked ham and a wheel-sized cheese, he roused to blot their tracks, but then he lay back again, a shadow in the dusk. And we were so hungry it was a shameful time before we remembered him.
“No,” he murmured, waving away Evis’ fist-thick wedge of ham and cheese. “Later, perhaps. Not yet.”
In consternation we coaxed and begged. To no avail. Evis gave up in patent distress. Callissa had been supervising the twins, with brittle severity. Now she muttered, “I’ve had enough of this!” snatched the disdained food and bore down on him.
“Sit up!” There was no kindness in her voice. “You have to eat, and you will, if I push it down your neck.” She cut off his answer in her no-appeals nursery voice. “Don’t say, Can’t, to me.” She broke a piece of cheese and prepared to make good her threat. “Open your mouth!”
“Oh, Math!” he lamented. Then he struggled onto an elbow. “All right, ma’am. I know when to do as I’m told.”
We were still resting on our stomachs when he said apologetically, “I know you’re all very tired. But . . . tonight may be the last time we can use the road.”
The silence was more eloquent than words. Then Zyr said grimly, “If you c’n do it, sir, so c’n we.”
Few Frimmans travel at night. After a time we adapted the long-distance cavalry mode, half an hour ahorse, five minutes afoot, while Beryx nursed us with the skill of the born cavalry commander, who senses just how much beast and man can bear before he must slacken the rein. Once I recall gazing up at the constellations learnt from so many campaign watches, drowsily telling him the Assharran names. Tirstang, its five stars rolled over by the passage of the night, the sparkle of the two bright Ethryn pointing in to it. Firkemmon, its crooked scourge sweeping across Ven Selloth, the stars’ own highway, the golden eye of Heshyr shepherding us from the west. And at last Selionur, as he rose at the Hunter’s heel to bring the morning watch.
I woke with my head on a curb and dew on my cloak in what resembled a battle’s aftermath. Loose horses browsed in the ditch, men lay with an arm through the reins, propped on each other, on curb or gatepost, oblivious. Sivar was actually upright, his horse’s neck in an affectionate embrace. At my back Callissa’s arm pinned a restive cat. Beyond her the twins had been laid out straight and rolled in a cloak. Beryx sat over them, fine-drawn and pale, watching in the sun.
Looking past him, I started to see a gate known all my life. With a dogged grin he asked, “Think they’ll feed their wandering boy?”
“We had to hurry,” he said as the rutted track led us past the five black-butted morgars where I cantered my first pony after truant cows, past the sorghum patch, the milking yard, the orange orchard fence. The dairy rose ahead, the red house-roof, I could hear the squeal of dining pigs. Then his last words caught up. “. . . take them a while to pack.”
Reason was sluggish. We topped the last rise. I said, “They won’t go.”
“What!” he sounded alarmed.
“My father’s been here from birth. Like my grandfather. And his father. Even for . . . the Lady . . . I doubt he’ll go.”
Callissa struck in vengefully, “They won’t. They’re pharraz. Like my people. They don’t leave their land for flood or fire or drought, or any trouble on earth.”
Beryx shut his eyes. I saw that until now I had only thought him tired.
Callissa pressed on with rising triumph. “And if they would, Alkir has three brothers and two sisters, I have two of each. They’re all married. With families. Are you going to uproot them all—not to mention fifteen or twenty uncles and aunts?”
Beryx said with unutterable weariness, “Let’s have breakfast first.”
He did his best. After my father had kicked a dozen truculent dogs, tilted back his ancient hat, drawled, “Ah, Alkir. You back?” After my mother kissed me, and we had devoured an entire milking, a side of bacon, three days’ eggs and a week’s sorghum porridge, when Callissa had fallen asleep on her plate, the twins had been borne out and the rest succumbed on any vacant floor, Beryx argued with conviction, urgency, unflagging energy, and unfailing respect.
My father, a little thinner and more stooped than I remembered him, sucked a sorghum stalk and said, “Ah,” in the right places. At the end, he announced, “That’s all as may be. But this is my land. Whatever comes, I’d as lief it found me here.” While my mother smiled at Beryx and said, “I’ll warrant that’s made you dry, young man. You’d best have another drop of tea.”
Then I did my part. They listened with slightly more interest, exclaiming, “Well, well!” and, “Fancy that!” Then my mother enquired mildly, “But, son, what on earth would the Lady want with us?”
Beryx put down his cu
p. He did no worse, till an unlucky mention of his wizardry woke my father up.
“Are you, by’rLady! Then just you come and look at this cow. Two heifers the goodwife had from me, and she’s drier than when I asked. . . .” Beryx was swept off, to return still protesting his ignorance of cows, and so seal his rout. My father retired on the sorghum. Beryx sat on the doorstep, head in arm, shoulder to a jamb. I propped the other side, taking and I hoped giving comfort in defeat.
“They have to come,” he said into his arm. “They’re the first ones she’ll—and we’ve killed ourselves getting the head start to—it can’t be much longer. Alkir, can’t you—”
“I stopped arguing with my father at fourteen,” I said, “and joined the army to find someone I could beat.”
Evis, who had vanquished sleep, came up demanding, “Sir, can’t you make them? Give them a—a Command?”
Beryx lifted his head. He was red-eyed, with that strung air of a man functioning on pure will. “It would not,” he said flatly, “be right.”
I said, “Not even as a Must?”
“No.”
Evis fell quiet. I looked at the filthy bandage and said, “We should do something about that.”
My mother was helpful, though palpably shocked by the wound. But when she said, “However did you do this, young man?” and he retorted, “Put my hand in the fire to save Alkir burning his,” her eyes merely rounded, before she said, “Very kind of you, I’m sure.” Frimmor is too far from Zyphryr Coryan to credit city barbarities.
As she tied off the bandage Beryx gave a jaw-breaking yawn. Then he said, “We’ll wait for dark,” rolled himself in his cloak and the cloak in a corner, and plummeted into sleep.
* * * * *
At Rise-and-shine I caught a maternal reprimand for dragging Callissa about the country like a thief—“what would her people say?” Callissa, scrubbing viciously at the boys’ noxious coats, supplied the rebuttal in a toneless voice. “He won’t leave the wizard. The boys won’t leave him. And I can’t leave the boys.” I withdrew before I said something to regret.
Evis was assembling his commissariat, while Beryx checked hooves and backs. After one glance at his brisk bright eye I asked, “What have you planned?”
“Magic,” he said cheerfully. “Phatrexe and Pellathir.”
“Translate.”
“Phatrexe. To write a message, on a gem, a chair, a horse, a man, keyed to the right receiver’s mind. Yes, it would be the cipher of the world. I’m going to write on this whole farm.” I gasped. “A big job, yes. I don’t think it’s been done before. I’ll write in Pellathir.” His eyes danced. “If anyone comes here meaning harm, they’ll trigger what I write.”
I gulped, gasped. Rallied. “But will a—an illusion . . . ?”
“Imagine if you ride up here bent on mayhem and lightning strikes in front of you—darres wriggle out—demons charge your flank—” He was chortling. “Then a wizard materializes overhead and says ‘Get the blazes out!’ You think that won’t work?”
“Uh—uh—I suppose it might! But—can you do it?”
“Oh, yes. It might take a little time.”
The understatement of all time. It took perhaps half an hour and cost him more than the whole day in Cessala suffered at once. I was quite sure he had killed himself. I could not hear a breath, find a pulse, I held a drenched, boneless corpse. Then his lips parted on a single silent breath.
He was. Erect, revived, saying with patient emphasis, “Yes, sir, but if anyone offers harm to your or Callissa’s family, you must bring them all out here. I can’t guarantee it, but I think the magic will protect you. It’s important, sir.”
“Keep the weevils off the sorghum?”
“No, but—”
“Urrhum. Thought magic’d at least do that.”
Beryx cast his eyes up, then retorted with restraint, “I’m not a weevil-master, I work with minds. Point taken, Alkir. Let’s go.”
Of the two hundred miles from Frimmor range to Gjerven we covered forty that night. Cross-country, zigzagging to farm gates, skirting dog-ridden homesteads and towns, off and on secondary roads, cantering more often than not, swift and unseen as ghosts. “I always did like,” Beryx remarked, “to get along. And this is easy. Just have to find the way.”
“Oh, yes,” I said politely. It was barely starlight, we were in a maze of ploughland, I had no idea where, how we had got in, or how we would get out. “You can see in the dark?”
“No need. I’m using Phathire. And I scouted in the light.”
His high spirits were infectious. Valinhynga rose as we bivouacked in someone’s old hay-shed, and while we watered the horses I heard Sivar emitting noises that could only be an attempt at song.
We dined palatially with mint-tea in cups and hot porridge spooned from a pot. That night was dark of the moon. “Lovely,” said Beryx. “Black as a morval’s heart. No need for cover. And the Lady’s still waiting for a nibble on her Hethrian lines.”
* * * * *
That night saw off another thirty miles. Amid general satisfaction we halted in what must have been Frimmor’s last uncleared tarsal scrub, and set a watch on the horses, knee-hobbled to graze. Uster woke me at noon. Couched in the maze of shadow, silver leaves, subtle gray boughs and boles and fallen timber, bathed in the warm broken light, idly scanning the horses’ abnormal blotches of color and the sleepers in their artful tangle of boughs, I watched a ploughman snail up and down his chocolate-red ridge, not half a mile away, oblivious.
When I woke again, shadows at every possible angle barred the golden light of evening which flooded the scrub. Beside me Beryx and Zem, unbreathing, watched a lydwyr buck, his doe and a youngster feeding up to us. A patch of fallow red, a black nose, a long dragging tail, melted and reformed in the sun’s windows, only movement flawing their superb camouflage.
The wind yawed. The buck jerked up. The doe bounced. All three bounded away, jiggering wildly as the horses blocked their path. Beryx and Zem shared a silent laugh. A moment later the camp was astir to what was already routine: gather firewood, assemble food, saddle up. The easy efficiency of a seasoned patrol early in the campaign. Before the battles and the losses start.
Sometimes a mere thought can tempt bad luck. I was still feeling complacent when I noticed Krem.
He had been bringing an armful of wood. Slowly, deliberately, yet with a weird unnaturalness, he came to a halt. His arm opened. The wood fell out. He drew his sword. Then he about-turned to advance on Beryx, perched on a nearby log, blank eyes turned south in his own reconnaissance.
Instinct forced my shout, caution throttled it. But Beryx had already spun to hurdle the log with one hand flying out as his eyes shot a green flash and he hissed, “Stop!”
The bustle shattered as everyone woke up. Some ran in, some back, Callissa gagged her own shriek to snatch the twins behind the fire, horses snorted in contagious fright. Krem was still walking, sleep-slow, arrow-straight. Beryx dodged wildly in the timber so for one corrosive instant I thought he was in flight. Then a sun-patch caught his eyes, jade laced with lightning, and I changed my mind.
The chase went on, a nightmare pursuit, Krem angling through the obstacles while Beryx circled and zigzagged in wild jerky motions that resembled abject rout. I saw Karis’ and Evis’ faces move to disbelief, rising contempt, and wanted to bawl, You’re wrong!
Then Beryx’s eyes shot a gout of pale green fire that dulled the sun. He whipped upright and froze, muscles set like adamant. I heard the first huge intaken breath.
Krem was still coming. Fifteen feet. Ten. An automaton, a puppet’s mechanical, mindless advance. Beryx was gasping, heavy cough-like grunts jerked out by an exchange of blows dealt with all his aedr’s might.
They were five feet apart. Krem waded, as in thigh-deep mud. Beryx’s eyes brightened intolerably, his body arched to some stupendous stress. As Krem’s arm began to swing Evis ran i
n behind him and swept his sword two-handed in a swipe that all but took the head clean off.
As the body spun with head flopping sidelong from that thick red jet and the limbs flailed in their hideous dance I lunged at Callissa and whirled her into the twins, roaring, “Behind the horses! Till I call!” I had no mind to afflict my sons with the memory of such a death.
Krem finished on the rim of the fire. Sivar gulped, “Thank the—” We all stood shaking at the supernatural’s assault, the escape. Only Beryx was still locked in his fight.
The fulcrum must have been a shaven second before Evis struck. Now he was shuddering, jerking, with a barbaric grin of triumph slamming home blows to seal the enemy’s rout. His shoulders arched up, he laughed aloud as you do in the field upon the killing stroke. Stepped back, gasping, a raw jubilance in his sweat-drenched face. And saw Krem’s corpse.
I had time to think: I saw Gevos die. I should have warned Evis.
“B-but sir,” he was stammering. “He would have killed you! I couldn’t . . . Sir, I didn’t mean—I only thought—I didn’t understand!”
Beryx’s eyes were still on the body. I saw the anguish become that quiet, desolate despair he had shown over Gevos. The words burnt in my mind: Velandryxe. The ultimate wisdom is not to act at all.
Evis cried, “Sir, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—please don’t look like that!” He too had sufficient Math to suffer for a mistake.
The desolation faded, willed into abeyance by greater imperatives. Math demanded that he console the destroyer, not mourn the destruction of another part of Math.
“Don’t worry, Evis.” He said it gently, no touch of sarcasm. “I know you did it for the best.”
The burial party returned, wiping earthy swords, just as I finished kicking dirt round by the fire. Callissa crept back. I felt two small arms lock round my legs, and sat on a log to embrace them instead. Beryx dragged his eyes round the hushed, daunted group.
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