Moving Water

by Kelso, Sylvia

  He lifted his eyes, black-green in the lamp glow, revealing the fatigue of Zass’s interview and the stresses beneath.

  He shuddered.

  But it would overthrow the Lady, I thought.

  His face sharpened.

  I sat limply on a tathrien stool. Will you leave Phaxia, then? You can hardly stay, if you refuse Zass! With sinking heart I contemplated fresh flight to some wholly foreign place. Will you go back to Hethria?

 

  Then . . . ?

  He pulled himself up. “I don’t know,” he said. “And I’m too groggy now to find out. Skin me out of this tunic, Fylghjos. I might turn up something in my sleep.”

  * * * * *

  It did not show at breakfast if he had. He was composed but inscrutable, and soon left at a summons from Zass. We had resigned ourselves to another day’s idleness when a chamberlain entered to announce that the foreign lord desired his retinue. Looking unsociable, Callissa muttered, “I’ll stay with the twins.”

  The great court does have a colonnade, a promenade for officials, nobles and idlers. As we appeared Beryx rose from a stone bench by the main gate, saying, “I thought you’d like to see the great court. Thank you, Fen, that will be all.”

  Chamberlain dislodged, we paced out onto the hot, dusty, hoof-beaten earth, dutifully noting the myriad slender pillars of the balcony, a princelet flying a merlin in jesses, the dusty emerald flutter of a forgotten cavalry mark. When other strollers were well clear Beryx said without preamble, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I can’t stay in Phaxia. If I do, Zass will expect me to conquer Assharral for him.”

  I looked round on blank dismay. They too would have preferred a fixed exile, it seemed.

  At length Evis asked hollowly, “Will we—go to Hethria, sir?”

  “No.”

  “Vyrenia’s not bad,” Sivar offered half-heartedly, “ ’cept that blighted rain every day.”

  “Vyrenia?” Beryx stared. “Why would I go to Vyrenia?”

  “But sir—you can’t stay in Phaxia, you gotta go somewhere!”

  “To go to Vyrenia won’t stop Zass invading Assharral.”

  “Let him,” said Dakis. “Who cares? Not our affair.”

  Beryx said flatly, “It is not what Assharral deserves.”

  There was a discomfited pause. Then Karis asked, “How’re we gonna stop it, sir?”

  He studied our faces. A hint of the old mischief flickered, overlaid by worry and remorse.

  “Zass knows my powers,” he said. “If I weren’t in his camp, he’d be very wary of crossing me. And he’d think twice about invasion if I were anywhere I could interfere.”

  Zyr pulled a copper plait. “Yes. But, sir, where?”

  “I thought a long time about that. In the end, there was only one choice. Only one place it could be.” He paused. Plunged. “Stirsselian.”

  That is the closest I ever came to outright revolt. No, I thought in instinctive refusal. Bad enough to be homeless, penniless and futureless in Phaxia, but not Stirsselian! The mosquitoes, the quick-mud, the fever, the clethras, the whole nerve-fraying reality washed back over me. No, I cried before I could help it, Not again! Not with Callissa and the twins!

  My eyes cleared. Beryx was watching me, with sympathy, understanding, absolution. he said. I know, that look added, exactly how you feel.

  Hearsay alone had given the others pause. He turned to them.

  “This is something I have to do,” he said. “But I have no claim on you. I’ve already made you exiles. If you want to go to Vyrenia—Hethria—I’ll do my best to see you safe.”

  There was some hard gulping and grimacing. Then Sivar set his jaw.

  “I been in this from the start,” he announced. “ ’N Stirsselian or no Stirsselian, I don’t reckon I wanna pull out before the end.”

  Amver set his teeth. “Or me.”

  “Or me,” Karis came in.

  Others followed. I was not aware of the choice. I only heard myself say, sounding distorted, “Once is enough.” They looked at me in puzzlement, but Beryx understood.

  He looked around us. Swallowed too. Then he said, “I wish I could give you more than thanks.”

  Feet were shuffled. Evis was already deep in plans, the others facing up to the plunge. Then Wenver spoke up.

  Like most Darrians he seldom wasted words, but he was something of a tactician in his methodical way. “Sir,” he began, apologetic but not timid, “if we want to stop Zass . . . we can do it just as well . . . probably better . . . and a lot more comfortably . . . from Vyrenia.”

  Beryx considered him. Then his eyes pulsed, shimmered, turned to white-flecked jade. With joy, with intense foreboding, I saw the old impishness return at last.

  “Yes,” he said. “It would stop Zass if I sat on his northern border. But it wouldn’t help with what I want.”

  “Then what,” I demanded, “do you want?”

  He said, “Assharral free of Ammath.”

  All our mouths fell open. He stared at us. And then the laughter sparkled out at last, alive, wicked, fountaining like Drytime sun through leaves.

  “When I called this a strategic withdrawal—that was exactly what I meant. I may have shifted my ground. I haven’t ceded the field.”

  “B-but,” Dakis out-spluttered the rest, “we thought—”

  “So you did.” The laughter had become an outright grin.

  “But if we ha’nt pulled out,” Karis burst forth, “whyn’t you stay with Zass? If ever there was a chance to smash her, it’d be here—”

  The mischief was full-blown now, provocation giving it fuel.

  “I don’t want,” he said blandly, “to smash her. I want to free her too.”

  My jaw hit my collarbones. His eyes danced at me. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “You—you. . . .”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “You are impossible!” I was beyond manners, let alone respect. “Turn up these crazy, these lunatic ideas and laugh. . . . Laugh! Is it the magic? Did the Lady rot your brains out? Or were you always like this? Heaven pity your phalanx commander—he probably lost his mind as well!”

  He was simmering like a kettle, his whole face alight. It did waver at mention of his phalanx commander. But in a moment the sparkle revived.

  “Inyx,” he agreed, almost demurely, “did use to say things like that. . . .” I threw my hands in the air. “But I think I was probably born this way.”

  I got my breath. Carefully, I said, “You mean—you don’t just want to free Assharral—you’ll go on trying to reclaim, reform, convert, whatever you like to call it—the Lady? To—to—”

  The simmer had become sparks of sheer delight. “Actually, I don’t mean to do anything,” he said, “except follow Math.”

  I would have flung my hands up then, had I been capable.

  “Madness, yes.” He chuckled. “Pure insanity. But—”

  “But you can’t—you won’t—what can you do!”

  The light spired, spiraled in his eyes, dancing as in that vision by Los Morryan.

  “I shall sit in Stirsselian . . . and block Zass . . . and infuriate Moriana . . . without doing a thing.” The dance intensified. “Zass is a canny general, with nothing personal against me. When his agents report from Assharral, he’ll decide it’s worth his while to wait. But Moriana . . . Moriana has a grudge. So . . . I shall let her make herself into Math.”

  For an instant the laughter spilled over so it seemed to clothe him in light, summer-green, riotous, reveling. Then the dancers stilled.

  “That is,” he said unsmiling, “if she doesn’t make Ammath out of me.”

  * * * * *

  As we trooped back to quarters I reflected that the most daunting part of it would be to tell Callissa, and I was right. The storm evicted the rest and terrifi
ed the twins. I wished fervently for Beryx’s help, but it did not come. In the end I was reduced to the flat statement that I was going, and the boys with me, “and if you want to stay in Phaxia, that’s up to you.”

  After Zyphryr Coryan we had no doubt that an aedr could get us out of Phamazan. He did it that night. Doors opened, horses materialized, underlings helpfully fulfilled our needs and washed us from their minds, we rode out the city gate past a blithely oblivious guard. After he recovered, Beryx glanced back at the rowdy lamplit streets and said rather guiltily, “I hope Zass doesn’t roll any heads for letting an aedr slip.” Then he flexed his hand, two days out of bandages, glanced at the rising moon, and said, “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  We were down that vile switchback road and over the Azmaeres by dawn. The sun met us in the foothills, staring copper-red on the few unploughed rocks, spreading a tender blue-and-green haze toward the distant sea and more distant Assharral. But directly ahead it fell flat and impotent on the olive-green-and-gray band of Stirsselian, and my stomach knotted at the sight.

  “Sir,” Amver pushed his pony into the van. “I been thinking. About Stirsselian.” Beryx nodded. “We might do better going west. See, sir, it’s fresh water then. ’N it widens out a lot. Better for hiding.” This is true. In places the basins are two hundred miles across. “What’s more. . . .” He grew ill-at-ease. “There’s—wild Gjerven up there.”

  Unless driven to it, no civilized Gjerven will so much as admit they exist. They are too close akin. Beryx said, “You think they’d help us?” And Amver wriggled on his wooden saddle.

  “Well, sir—it’ll be worse’n impossible in there if they take a dislike to us.”

  I had never seen one, but the tales were lurid. Little naked men with stone spears and poisoned arrows who were there and gone in a blink, who could set an ambush six feet from a path, who signaled on drums and were wont to eat their prisoners. Amver offered the supreme sacrifice. “We lived on the edge of Stirsselian. In fact—I was sort of—brought up with them.”

  Nobody ostracized him. Evis said in relief, “Best news since Frimmor.” Beryx carried briskly on, “Thank Math for someone who might know what he’s doing. Amver, I’ve been thinking too. The best way to move in there wouldn’t be horses, or on foot. It would be boats. Do you know anything about. . . .”

  “Sure, sir!” Amver shot up ten feet. “You want a swamp punt. Two, three, maybe. We’ll make ’em on the edge.” He grew pensive. “ ’N . . . we better boil up some salgar as well.”

  Around noon we abandoned our ponies, took a final backward glance to be sure no zealous Phaxian had sighted us, and tramped, with varying shades of reluctance, across the last soggy field, over the first swamp branch, and into Stirsselian.

  It was much as I remembered. Steaming wet, peculiarly airless, not only because of the smothering trees and the sun that stewed miles of water, jungle and mud, but with a listening pressure that is the most unnerving of all. It is as if Stirsselian itself were sentient, and resentful, and at any moment the ambush will be sprung.

  The mosquitoes struck instantly, backed by stinging flies, sticky flies, leeches, and some odd bees that like the taste of sweat. Our march flushed an army of birds, gray hisyrx, the northern heron, black and white waders, all kinds of duck, red-billed slithillin, pouch-billed pelicans, tiny water-runners and tree-dwellers as well, which attracted the raptors, morvallin, rienglis and so on. Once a perrilys glared from a whitened stump, gold-rimmed eye, mottled white and brown six-foot wings, but he was a fish-eater and little concerned with us. The morvallin were another matter. They thought it a hunt, and expected scraps, and in the end Beryx needed Wreve-lan’x to be rid of them.

  By then we were on an eyot conveniently infested with emvath bush and hooky quennis vines, with a small fire to boil up the first salgar infusion while Amver supervised the making of punts. This meant wading, often thigh-deep, to the stands of smooth pole-like thrithan trees which are the swamp-dweller’s staple, and which were inevitably barricaded among helmyn clumps. They are palms whose leaves grow in spirals, are lavishly barbed, and when stepped on rattle like the drums of a general alarm. Amver, however, said we would grind the nuts for flour.

  He also treated the quick-mud patches with cavalier unconcern, merely bidding us prod with a stick if we left others’ tracks. A wide slide-mark down a mud bank made me shy in real alarm, but he discounted that too. “Fresh water sort. They don’t eat men.” Resolved that Zem and Zam would be confined to camp, I struggled on, wrestling my queasy stomach, picking off leeches, and finally, like Amver, repulsing the mosquitoes by daubing all my exposed skin with mud.

  The punts were festooned with vine-ends like a botched haystack, almost unmaneuverable, but they floated, they held two or three people, and they had a bare six-inch draught. Amver took command of the first. Sivar, on the strength of his brother the fisherman, was allotted the second, and Beryx, boasting, “I may be one-handed and never have sailed in soup, but I can bully you lubbers around,” installed himself in the third. The twins promptly joined him. Callissa, still red-eyed and bitterly mute, gave them a savage glance and pointedly made for Amver’s craft.

  I let her go, since there seemed no alternative. We renewed our mud masks, downed our salgar draft, manned our paddles, and blundered away west into the labyrinth.

  * * * * *

  I must admit that to tackle Stirsselian by water, with a competent pilot, is far better than to wallow along in an army patrol, with the nerve-wracking chance of a Phaxian ambush round every bend. Before camp Amver reckoned we might have made eight miles, and since we had struck west on land, this put us near Kerym Cletho, the first of the gigantic basins that fill Deve Gaz’s rift from march to march. We camped among helmyns over a deep channel. There were no mud slides, but fish showed in the amber water, and also lilies, anchored flotillas of a deep vivid pink, closed for the night. Beryx gazed at them a long time, with an expression of revived and poignant if not happy memories.

  Stirsselian soon routed the past. We had hardly lit our fire when Evis cocked an ear. Amver stopped, listened too. Then nodded. “Drums,” he said.

  They muttered on in the hush, a just-audible irregular pulse. Zyr looked behind him. Zem and Zam closed up on me. Beryx raised his brows to Amver. “Do we make a peace sign? Or leave it to them?”

  Amver pulled his wide lower lip. He sounded a trifle unsure. “I think . . . we just go along quietly and wait. When they’re ready . . . we’ll know.”

  Beryx nodded. “Like Hethox. Look you over first.” And he turned to choosing a bed-spot, unperturbed.

  For three days we paddled deeper and deeper into Kerym Cletho, the only sign of other human life those evening drums. We acquired a helmyn nut grinding-quern, a net of pounded vine fibre, a bow built by Evis to shoot arrows with fire-hardened points which eventually, amid general triumph, felled an unwary duck. Like Zem and Zam we began to replace clothes with mud, more practical for wading, easily repaired, far more leech and insect proof. No crocodiles, Phaxians, or quick-mud appeared. At times, as we wobbled down some convoluted deep-water channel, roofed by a mesh of sun-shot clethra leaves, walled in arches of clethra roots, pleasantly cool in the watery shade, with white dashes of sun on amber water, helmyn fronds dangling harmlessly overhead, lilies sliding safely underneath, mud to foil the mosquitoes, Amver to steer us, and Beryx, if necessary, to get us out, I almost enjoyed myself.

  It was not mosquitoes that roused me the fourth day. It was a sound that hurled me back to those awful dawns when the Phaxians made a surprise assault: the grunt of a man struck down and out.

  Plunging from my cloak I clawed for a sword—or would have, had a vise not pinned my hand and Beryx rapped,

  I sat, every muscle over-taut, tightened further at what I saw.

  The camp had been overrun. A ring of small coal-black men with helmets of mud-packed hair watched us from behind drawn arrows with dull, smeared heads. My blood ran cold. More were among our
baggage, at the punts, the smoored fire, watching the rest wake. Zyr, the sentry, lay face down, motionless, while a nuggety warrior with cicatrices on his breast tucked a short bludgeon back in a twisted hair belt. It was impossible to deduce anything from those small, shut, wildcat faces. Thankfully, I saw Amver rouse.

  His mouth sagged open, but he kept his nerve. After a moment, still supine, he spoke to them.

  It was some Gjerven dialect, too corrupt for me. He sounded conciliatory, but like a man among strangers of his own blood. None of the archers reacted; but at length the sentry-feller approached.

  There was an exchange. I caught, “Assharral,” and, “Phaxia,” and, “alsyr”—peace. Then, rather impatiently, the small warrior asked something else.

  Amver’s face changed. More talk. His surprise became wonder, incredulity, something near to awe. He gestured at Beryx. The warrior glanced round, then issued a command.

  Amver rose. They both came over to Beryx, still seated in his cloak with his empty left hand prominently displayed, and in a very queer tone Amver said, “He wants to know if—you’re the rainmaker, sir.”

  Beryx did not hesitate. “Tell him, Yes.”

  The warrior had understood. He squatted down in that boneless way, knees in armpits and hands dangled between, staring into Beryx’s face. His small eyes were pitch-black, bright as coals, and as intense. He might have been trying to read the mind behind the face as well.

  Silently, Beryx looked back at him. His own eyes were barely awake, just a hint of motion in the irises, the twine of deep currents in a green-stained stream. But no human eyes move like that.

  The camp was dead quiet. For a moment I wondered if they were exchanging thoughts. Then the warrior reached out one small pink-palmed hand and delicately, but without timidity, laid it to the scarred side of Beryx’s face.

  Beryx did not move. Withdrawing his hand, the warrior looked at the crippled arm. Beryx shrugged it from his cloak. The warrior put his hand on the wrist. Carefully, withdrew. His eyes moved. With a small grin Beryx murmured, “I’ll end in my skin,” and began to unbutton his voluminous Phaxian shirt.