Moving Water

by Kelso, Sylvia

  “She’s found us,” he said.

  He sank slowly on his heels. With a stab of guilt I wondered if my scullion had shown the trail.

  “That was the Well. I might—not have broken her Command in time.” I knew he had changed his words to spare Evis. “So to be sure of ourselves now, if of nothing else—I’ll free every one of you.” A brief glimmer of amusement. “From the spell, you might say. Zem, will you come here?”

  Like Thephor, when my turn came I wondered, Is that all? Just looking into his eyes, into that incandescent green that burnt furiously, magnetically, while he put forth another gigantic effort, and I felt nothing at all.

  He sat back, wheezing, and retorted,

  Evis flapped, saying, “Sir, you must rest—” He shook his head and looked at Callissa, the only one left.

  Callissa backed around the fire with a sharp, panicky “You’re not touching me.”

  My forbearance failed. I addressed her like a ranker for the first time in my life. “Come here and do as you’re told!”

  “No!” She backed faster, in a moment she would run, at full stretch I just caught her elbow and yanked her round with a harshness wrung from my own taut nerves. “Come here!”

  She struggled, I subdued her, one hand over her mouth, she fought in a frenzy as Beryx struggled up and approached. Yet there was only concern and shame and affliction in his look.

  “Ma’am”—it was entreaty—“please don’t distress yourself.” I sensed her fear had opened an old wound. “I don’t want to harm you. You mean as much to me as Alkir.” He lifted his left hand. “If I did this for him, how can you think I’d mean ill to you? Please think a moment. If I leave this, you’re open to the Lady. Like Krem. And she won’t turn you against me. She’ll use you against Alkir. Or the twins.”

  He waited, a suppliant. Once more I thought bitterly how powerless is power that binds itself in goodness’ chains.

  Callissa’s muscles loosened. I let go her mouth. With a different sharpness she said, “The twins?”

  “What it can’t best,” he said, “Ammath will do its utmost to hurt.”

  Another pause. Then, steeling herself, she said sourly, “If I must.”

  Chapter VIII

  There was no sparkle in that night’s ride. Oddly enough, Krem’s absence depressed me most of all. Odd in such a peril, odder because he had been a purebred Gjerven, black to the whites of his eyes, so the one time I should not have missed him was at night. . . . I berated my mind back where it belonged, with my horse. If Beryx had been “getting along” before, he was now in downright haste.

  Long before dawn we were installed in a tumbledown abandoned milking shed. Blundering over the debris of bails to feel through the acrid scent of ancient manure for each salt-caked shoulder, steamy back, drooping neck, I thought grimly, If this keeps up. . . .

  “It can’t,” Beryx said at my elbow. “We must have fresh horses tomorrow. It’s still sixty miles to Gjerven as the morval flies.”

  “Sixty! It can’t be!”

  “We veered west tonight; tomorrow we’ll go east. Try to lose her.” The cloud lifted a moment. “You’d never think, would you, that the one thing to foil an aedr, even with the Well, would be simple dark?”

  I could not share his frivolity. “But the horses—”

  “Alkir, do you know where we are? Five miles west of Vendring. What’s a mile to its east?”

  I thought, remembered, was deprived of breath. I sat down precipitately on a broken bail. “You wouldn’t—you couldn’t—even you wouldn’t—not the imperial stud!”

  “Oh?” He was snickering like an urchin. “Why not?”

  “Why not?” Then it got the better of me. I let out a guffaw. “You madman, if the Lady doesn’t crucify you, Zabek will!”

  “Then,” he said solemnly, “we should get the fastest possible beasts.” And we both folded up.

  * * * * *

  Every soul in Assharral knew the imperial stud, the light of the Lady’s heart. Its stallions were the cream of field and track, its mares sprang from an old pure line that was every other breeder’s despair, its cast fillies went to the knackers, its cast colts sold as geldings for an outrageous price. Its champions carried the Lady’s colors, its other progeny were the pride of the cavalry, which was the pride of Zabek. Once, back from a posting in Gjerven, I rode past, just to look. The huge immaculate stables, the lush green white-railed paddocks, the gloss of a farm free of an empire’s purse, all paled before the stock. Mares with foals at foot, playful yearlings, two-year-olds walking out for the breakers, stallions bugling from their pens. And for any single one a horseman would sell his soul.

  “We go in,” Beryx squatted under the fallen door-beam, “about middle of first watch. After night round, before they check the heavy mares. You, me, Zyr, Evis. We’re in luck. The cavalry draft goes next week.” I practically heard Zyr’s mouth water. Like all Axairans, his true god is a horse.

  “Er—” Evis cleared his throat.

  “Evis,” Beryx reproached him. “Have you never lifted a horse? Blanket boots. We’ll make them today.” He twitched his cloak. The crowning insult, to hide the theft of the Lady’s treasure in her own guard’s gear, blazoned with her crest. “I know the way. And I think I can still control a horse or two. Someone will see us? Evis, you positively wound me. Don’t you think I’m a wizard at all?”

  The four of us left the rest at the brood pasture end, under a huge kymman clump, horses solemnly commanded to “Keep it quiet.” Snaking up the pasture, Beryx clicked and murmured to shadows that snorted or leapt, then stood with spellbound serenity in our wake. Past the exercise yards. The stables snorted and rustled and sighed, the human quarters shone with blithely ignorant lamps. Beryx strode down the long aisle as if he owned it, lightning selections, a low “Stand, child,” and we slid in to the sniff, the shine of a liquid, curious, tranquil eye, the still more amazing docility with which they let us tie on the blanket boots, lead them out. Twelve colts we lifted, and never a one so much as jibbed.

  Quite speechless, we slithered outside. Back across the pasture, never a nicker heard. Trembling with tension and unbelief we saddled up, the colts steady as old cavalry mounts. Swung up. “Come on,” Beryx bade beasts and men. Our old mounts fell in like dogs. An owl called in praiseful derision as we rode away from the most brazen, impossible horse-theft ever perpetrated in Assharral. Ho-ho-o-oke! Ho-ho-o-oke!

  * * * * *

  Three miles east Beryx called a halt. “Good lad,” he murmured, bandaged hand rubbing behind his old mount’s ears. “You did so very well. Off you go.” They all melted away. “And now,” he bubbled into gaiety, “let’s get out of here.”

  “You do know,” I cantered beside him, reveling in the colt’s effortless rake of a stride, “that if all Assharral wasn’t hunting us before, by the pits, they will be now!”

  “Might as well annoy her,” he answered blithely. “You know the saw: Lost temper, lost fight.”

  Thirty-five miles later we found the outbuildings of a disused inn. “How,” I wondered, “do you ferret out such. . . .” and he laughed. “I had ample time to look.”

  It dawned on me then that every step of this journey had been minutely, meticulously planned. The horses were still willing to go, but he shook his head. “Save them. Tonight we’ll need every ounce of it.” He grew grim. “If not before.”

  No one asked his meaning. Nor did anyone cavil at clambering in turn to the musty hayloft where we stood to crane through a skylight at the four dusty roads that converged upon the inn, while the others slept amid our splendid loot. Zyr would rather have used the day to worship his tall lean yellow-dun colt. “Magic!” he said over and over. “If this is magic I’ll—I’ll turn wizard myself!”

  Beryx grinned and retorted, “Partnership?” But his sleeping face, slack, stripped and spent, revealed the foray’s cost. Wreve-lan’x on not one but twelve horses, first at the stud, then over forty fast-ridd
en lightless miles, had exacted a price beyond even the value of the prize.

  I plunged awake to Sivar tearing at my shoulder with awful urgency in his face. “Sir, cap’n, save us, there’s dogs ’n hoes ’n pitchforks ’n I dunno what ’n half the country headed this way!”

  Up the ladder I shot. He was right. All four roads bore a turbulent cloud of closing dust, too irregular for troops. My eye made out the gleam of domestic weaponry, the uniform of farmer, cowman, roadman, cook, Krem’s purposeful dream-like advance. Not an enraged but an enlisted mob.

  We fled forthwith, straight north between two roads at flat gallop to outstrip the pincers instantly thrust from each flanking crowd. As we drew clear I glanced back. The vanguards had slowed to a stop. Spilt aimlessly. Were gaping at each other, at their weapons, clumped in bewildered groups, scratching their heads.

  Beryx laughed aloud. “It’ll be the riddle of the century,” he called. He steadied his horse. “Hang on, ma’am.” His bay rose to a sagging gate, I heard Callissa squeak as hers sailed over in his wake, and wondered how she was holding him. I was hard put to do that myself.

  Across a cow pasture we poured, Beryx slowed, and with prideful expert’s riskiness Zem leant far out to slip the gate chain. Beryx glanced at the sky. An hour after noon. Flushed out, I thought, and the hounds running on sight.

  It was a harrowing afternoon. We ducked and dodged erratically to avoid farms and mask our route, pursued with vain zeal from Kenath and Imarval, with three gallops to evade those menacing puppet crowds which sprang up full in our path. It cost time and distance and horse-flesh, yet I could see we were still making what could be called a dash. And that however zigzag, our general progress was north.

  The inn, I judged, had been twenty miles from Gjerven as a morval flies. We must have ridden more like thirty, but in third watch the horizon bulged, and my heart leapt. Every soldier back from Phaxia hails them as homecoming’s seal, the rank of crooked, thumb-like pinnacles which line the Frimman glacis. The Fallers, they call them, though they remain upright. The Gazzath.

  * * * * *

  By then we were deep in Gazzarien district, which grows the rhonur whose white bolls spin a finer thread than wool. In every direction rank upon arrow-straight rank of chest-high bushes marched off to clash across the next farm’s ranks, the sun weltering down on their humid greenery while the Gazzath swam in a blue murk of heat. Somewhere to the left was Veth Gammas, the best and chief way down the two-thousand-foot drop known as Gazzal, the Fall. I was still squinting for it when Evis, the tail-scout, let out a yell of dismay. “Sir! There’s cavalry behind!”

  No mistaking them. At least three troops, the flicker of armor, the geometric formation so different from civilian riders however purposeful, retained even at the gallop. As these were.

  Beryx checked, Callissa went white. Zyr’s eye flashed. Amver groaned. Evis shouted, “Sir, we can’t waste a moment, we have to reach the road, we’ll be pincered on that cliff—” Beryx rapped, “Quiet!” in a voice that shut us all up like traps.

  “Math,” he said, wheeling for one quick scan. “I didn’t want to do this.” He licked a finger. The wind was vigorous, from the north. “Waste. Wanton waste. . . . Hold your horses. I said hold them, not put them in leading strings!”

  Quelled, we each took an iron grasp of the bit. He drew one protracted stertorous breath. Then his eyes spat green fire and the length of the rhonur rank behind us went up simultaneously, a half mile of tinder-dry white bolls that exploded in fusillades of eager flame.

  Wrestling my colt, I saw his eyes’ second flash. Another rank went up to the left. Traverse. Flash. Another on the right. Two, three miles of fire took hold and swept enthusiastically away before the wind, pouncing on the uppermost bolls and hurdling to the next rank as if the six-foot intervals did not exist.

  Beryx’s breath escaped on a single concussive sob. He collapsed on the bay’s wither, it spun and reared and in horror I slammed my own beast in to back up Zem’s brave snap on the bit.

  The colt dropped and stood, Wreve-lan’x restored. Beryx straightened, as if crippled, face dripping sweat. Croaked at Zem, “Good lad.” Took a last look at the fire. Three long-drawn breaths. Then he wheeled his horse. “Now,” he said with that general’s intonation, “sit down and ride!”

  We parted the rhonur bushes like a stampede, rushing them breast-deep, cramming the colts to prevent a balk, we jumped whatever divided their formations, gate, ditch or fence, we took gullies as they came, we scattered a division of rhonur pickers and a hundred frantic dogs. Nursing my green and fiery steed to keep rank and survive obstacles, I wondered if Veth Gammas were garrisoned, what we would do if the cavalry overcame the fire in time to cut us off, how we could stop them following us down. Glanced at Beryx, and did not ask. The flared eyes, blind to all but the land ahead and poised for lightning-swift choice or change of course, the taut face warned me. You do not distract the pathfinder of a cross-country cavalry charge.

  The rhonurs ended at a fence, a road-ditch, and we right-wheeled thunderously onto paven carriageway, Beryx roaring, “Whoa!”

  Plunging, foaming, protesting colts cavorted everywhere, my chestnut passaged uncontrollably into a vertical yellow flank, Zyr still crooning “Oh, you beauty, you dream, you pearl. . . .” We looked back on a boiling black wall laced with red twinkles of flame, a diagonal swathe that bisected twenty rhonur fields, and a mob of farmers coming pell-mell with bawls of honest murderous rage.

  Sivar let out a cracked laugh, but Beryx looked ashamed. “Didn’t want to do it. Such a good crop. And ripe for harvest, too. But we can’t explain. Come on. At the trot!”

  Under the flank of the gnarled thumb nicknamed One-up, every soldier knows why, and Gjerven lay two thousand feet below us, a motley green of rice field and yam patch and pig wallow and swamp, broken by clusters of stilt-legged conical grass huts. Down to the left went the road at a steady one-in-four gradient, and Beryx pulled up.

  “That’ll do.” He fore-armed sweat from a white and purple face our career had not flushed. His eye was on a cluster of granite boulders that overhung the road. “If I can . . . just manage it.” And for the first time there was a flaw of doubt.

  As Zyr and Karis whooped I thrust my colt against his bay and ordered, “Give me the bridle. Evis, carry on. Don’t let them trot, they’ll kill themselves!”

  The clatter faded. Bloodthirsty shouts echoed from above. With an air of near desperation, Beryx shut his eyes and propped his wrist on the withers of the dancing colt.

  Abruptly, it stopped. They are trained to halt at a double leg-squeeze. His torso had gone rigid, if his leg muscles spasmed the same way he must have near cut the colt’s barrel in half. His face pulled out of shape. Then his eyes flew open, he gave a tremendous jerk and his lungs emptied in one explosive grunt.

  The boulder clump disintegrated. Four small supports opened like an orange, the topmost monster tilted, tipped, slid, landed with a sonorous crunch that sank it a foot deep amid splintered paving stones. The road was completely blocked.

  “Axyn . . . brarve.” It came on a long-drawn sob. “Not . . . unusual. ’Cept . . . the precision. Easier . . . tip it right down hill.” I jerked the bit viciously to still the skirmishing colt. He lay with his left arm on my shoulder a moment longer before he straightened up, and said on a breath of relief, “No hurry . . . for a while.”

  There was no garrison, there was not a shadow of traffic on the road. Half an hour later we walked sedately out into Gjerven’s steamy, marsh-rank atmosphere, and as he slapped off the first mosquito Beryx observed, “That’s a good-looking swamp. We’ll spell the colts.”

  * * * * *

  Walked, cooled, watered and caressed, they fell eagerly on Deve Gaz’s famous earnn grass, we fell hungrily on the last Frimman provisions, and the mosquitoes fell ravenously upon us. Beryx grinned as he caught my eye. “Feel at home?” Then Evis produced Xhen leaves from his bottomless pack, and Zem and Zam lost the worshipful stupor th
at had lasted since the fire and burst out in chorus, “Sir Scarface, I’ll do your hand!”

  The burn had filled in and was drying. Soon it would be fit to meet the air. Gingerly flexing the wrist, he remarked, “I’ll be glad to have this back.” He glanced at Callissa, stonily packing cups. Then he asked suddenly, “Ma’am, does that brown horse pull too hard?”

  I saw surprise, a fleeting softness in her eyes. Then they hardened. Chilly courteous, she replied, “I can manage, thanks.”

  With a silent sigh Beryx turned his eye on the colts. When he said, “We’ll give them a bit longer,” my heart sank, for I knew we would go on that night.

  He lay back in the grass. A series of shuffles edged the right arm under his head. The twins moved closer, rancor woke in Callissa’s eye. Parceling up his medical kit, Evis glanced at those drowsy green eyes, still open, absently content. Paused. With sudden decision put by his pack and hunkered closer too.

  “Sir,” he began. “Krem—why—did it upset you so much?”

  I closed a mouth open to call him off. An aedr’s resilience is more wonderful than his arts, and I had seen those green eyes wake. Resigning myself to the mosquitoes, I lay down and drifted off to Evis’ first steps on the road I was traveling myself.

  * * * * *

  If that night’s going was safe, it was woefully slow. Gjerven is far wilder than Frimmor, and most of its cultivation is rice, which means paddy fields, which mean irrigation channels and mud. Which is hard on any horse. Moreover, we had ridden hard on a half-day’s sleep, and we were flagging ourselves. I doubt we managed ten miles’ actual advance before Beryx called a halt.

  “No use overdoing it,” he said softly, while I waited to see the current lair. “Yet.” Despite full night vision I could find only the vaguest blur ahead. He clicked to his horse. We waded one more slushy channel, mounted an earthen dyke. Grass cones bulked against the stars, I caught the cluck of sleepy hens, a pig’s grunt, hissed in horror, “It’s a village, we can’t—” and he cut me off. “It belongs to the ferryman. He’s sleeping on the other bank.”