Moving Water
Page 23
Beside me Callissa spoke up in a small, unsure, wholly well-wishing voice. “Fengthira . . . did you think to ask . . . ?”
Beryx’s face clenched. “I can’t see her. Or speak to her. I don’t know if . . . Moriana’s stopped me. Or—”
My blood ran cold. That the Well’s malignity might reach so far as Hethria, affect Fengthira, who had been in my mind, an unexamined hope of reserves, superior force, was almost the worst of all. And for him, to find his own mainstay gone. . . .
He wiped his face. There was a shake in his hand. “But the worst is . . . if I . . . give myself up. She’d . . . she won’t kill me.” He struggled to go on. “She’d corrupt me. The Well . . . I couldn’t hold out. I’d—“ He actually gagged. “I’d become—Ammath.”
I understood. Death, torture, betrayal of us and our innocent kin, all would pale beside the threat of being not merely defeated, not merely enslaved, but perverted. Himself become the evil he feared and shunned and fought against with all his living might. There are worse destructions than to simply die.
He was flinching at some further horror, the most unbearable, because it was already familiar to him.
“She’d make me . . . the bane of Assharral. And I can’t. I couldn’t . . . not again!”
That broke us all. Evis blurted, “No, sir, you mustn’t, love of—That would be the worst that could—” Amver, stiff-lipped, cut in, “If we gotta go, our people gotta go, all right—but not that!”
We had not eased him in the least. “You have no right to decide that—I have no right! To spill innocent blood—whatever the reason, it’s Ammath! Whatever I do, it’s Ammath!”
He had reduced us to his own helplessness. It was Callissa who went across to take his arm and say with frail control, “Then you have to take the lesser of the two. If some of us suffer . . . it’s still better than—than the worst.”
He looked blindly down at her. “I thought of killing myself.” She turned white. “But that solves nothing. You’re left in her hands—and Assharral as well.”
“You can’t do that.” She spoke with fright’s command. “You must think of something.” I caught my breath. With just such blind faith she had bidden me “think of something!” in the vault. “There has to be a way out. You’ll have to find it, that’s all. You must!”
Incredibly, that steadied him. After a time he stopped trembling. In a quieter if still hopeless voice he said, “I can only see one chance. And even that. . . . It’s pure chance. Blind trust in Velandryxe. But . . . if I don’t . . . give in. . . . No matter what she does. . . .” He shuddered again. “She’ll go on trying—worse and worse. And perhaps . . . she’ll try the one thing too much. Overreach herself. Break her own power. And do what I can’t. Destroy Ammath.”
He looked at her without hope of understanding, and I thought how I had failed him at the same tactical crux. But whatever her sense of the theory, Callissa had a better grasp of the emotional point.
“Then that’s what you must do.” She sounded quite matter-of-fact. Her lips trembled, but she mastered it. “No matter what happens—what it costs. At least there’ll be a—hope.”
I saw him swallow. Then he set his teeth and took a long deep breath. His eyes looked past us, drained of power or vitality, but I knew he was mustering resources for the worst battle of his life.
* * * * *
It is hard to assemble a picture of that campaign. As in battle or nightmare or by Los Morryan, time grows distorted; memory jumbles under the impact of stress and distress, and, as in all crises, the past shrinks upon itself. I suppose we drank salgar, made and broke camp and traveled in Stirsselian, but like eating after a funeral, we took no note of it. Our real life was in the waiting, like citizens of a plague-stricken town, for the axe to fall on us.
Beryx’s strategy was not all passive. In those first days he scattered our kin across Assharral, commanding them to flee if without certainty of escape, doing his very best to thwart the Lady’s pursuit. “Neither of us,” he said, “can See everywhere at once. If I concentrate on anyone, she’ll just raise more and more hunters till she smothers me. But she can’t hunt a hundred packs as one. . . .” So he shifted his attention between fugitives, making this one zigzag, another double back, blinding or disturbing un-Commanded pursuers or guard-posts to help a third, bringing others to shelter or a horse. And abandoning them, with bitter anguish, when the Lady took command of the chase.
Sometimes he succeeded. When Karis’ father sailed a dinghy out of Zyphryr Coryan we celebrated with more joy than I felt returning from Phaxia. When his cousin reached Stirsselian, Amver egged the Ulven on to raid a caissyn farm and concocted a brew that laid out the whole camp. When Evis’ mother found the Sathellin we lit a bonfire and danced. To a Sky-lord the whole thing must have resembled a chessboard in the heat of a ferocious contest, each player striving to deceive, anticipate or wreck the other’s assault. But this chessboard was a whole empire, with a hundred scenes of ploy and counter-ploy, and one player was determined not to damage the pieces, while the other was bent on savaging him regardless of cost. And the pawns were not wood or ivory, they were living, breathing flesh and blood.
Beryx actually said it to me once. “It’s like Thor’stang. Aedric chess. Only she doesn’t know how to read my mind or use a hidden Command or mesmerize me, and I can use all the arts. But she has the Well.” His face stiffened. “And we’re playing with pieces of Math.”
* * * * *
The mere sustained relentless deployment of his arts would have been draining enough, even if, unlike the Lady, he did not care for the pawns. And of course he did. Every loss wounded him triply, for the dead, for the bereaved, and on his own account. It was a breach of faith. A culpable negligence. A failed responsibility.
At the beginning he asked us, with rare awkwardness, “Would you rather know—or not?” Feeling a pale echo of his own choice, we decided we would rather know, so he had the task of telling us atop the rest.
That is one of the clearest memories, printed deep by repetition and the crescendo of that helpless, expectant fear. A morning fire, among helmyns, in a heagar shadow, amid some eyot’s scrub, baggage stacked on the bare earth that is the only sign of an Ulven camp. Callissa crouched over the boiling pot. The Ulven perimeter. And the faces, stiff, strained, trapped in idleness, even at times betraying the vile hope that this time it might be you, to have it over with.
Until Beryx emerges from his reconnaissance, haggard and white with more than simple defeat. Then that searing endless moment while he nerves himself to deliver the blow in one or another waiting face. And the hideous knowledge that however deeply you suffered, it was still not over. That it would not be over, until your whole family, down to the remotest marriage kin, had been wiped out.
He flatly refused to say what happened to them. From the nightmare look on Zem and Zam’s faces I guessed they sometimes heard, and the Ulven must have shared it too. After the first really cruel reverse, when Wenver’s brother and all his family were taken on the very march of Kemrestan, Beryx was crouched on a stump, more shattered than Wenver himself, when Ygg came over. He did not speak. He merely laid a hand on Beryx’s shoulder and left it there.
After a moment Beryx looked up at him. He was silent too. Support was offered, and accepted, and gratitude returned, in an understanding that did not look for words.
The ordeal took a fearful physical toll. Weight melted off him, and he went off his food to compound the effect. Most of his time was devoted to the arts, but the breaks did little to revive him, for he could seldom sleep. If I roused from my own broken rest he would more often than not be pacing the camp, a silent, unseen focus of distress, and when he did sleep his nightmares were worse than mine.
That is another image driven deep by repetition and stress: Callissa’s face over re-woken embers, thicker shadows of sleeping men in the outer dark. Beryx crouched over a cup beyond the fire, so the light exaggerates the jut of bones in his wasted face, images mo
re dreadful than reality haunting his eyes. Sometimes they talk, the trivia of such moments. And sometimes a fire spurt catches the gray glint of Zem or Zam’s wakeful, watchful gaze.
All this time she and I had been waiting for our own swords to fall. We knew we must be prime targets, yet the days passed, and still the blow delayed. Reason told me it was only a matter of time, or a refinement of the rack. Reason has little sway over what is neither mind nor flesh and blood. It follows its own senses, and is never ready for the smash.
The first warning was when Beryx did not return from his reconnaissance. The waiting, always a torment, became unbearable. We shifted and looked at each other, not daring to ask, What is it this time? Or is it he, himself? In the mind below thought, I think I already knew. When the Ulven began to wriggle and eye the sun, I went to search for him.
He had found a tangle of clethra roots on the water’s edge. His back was turned, bowed, so for one frightful moment I thought that stance betokened final disaster, surrender rather than defeat. Then I understood.
I recall thinking, with vicious outrage, that the greatest of all injustice was that Math’s servants should suffer less from their enemies than from themselves. That it would cost him less to discover the atrocity, than to make himself turn around.
He looked up at me, eyes all black in a deathly face. His lips moved. When nothing emerged, he used mindspeech instead.
he said.
A great calmness came on me. “How many?” I said aloud. “Who?”
He hid his face.
As I steeled myself, for Callissa’s sake as well as my own, he was driven to fill the pause.
Looking down at him huddled on the clethra roots, his nerve gone, when he had not hesitated to put his own hand in the fire, I reflected with still more bitter irony that it took kindness, not cruelty, conscience, not coal-lumps, to break the courage if you followed Math.
There was a rustle behind us. I knew it was Callissa before she spoke.
“Who is it?” She sounded calm. Steeled to meet the worst.
Beryx shrank like the most arrant cur. I put my arm round her, led her back into the scrub, and told her what he could not.
She did not break down. She did not so much as weep. She listened in silence, eyes bigger and bigger in a shrinking face. Then she left my arm and went back through the scrub. Beryx literally cowered. Standing in front of him she said quietly, “Don’t. You said it to me. ‘Wherever we are, we have to go forward. And make the best of it.’ ”
* * * * *
Fugitives were coming by then, in ones and twos found and guided by the Ulven into camp, shattered by the hunt, utterly baffled by its motives or those of their flight. Amver’s cousin, one of Karis’, Dakis’ brother-in-law. I never admitted, and could never stamp out the last stupid flicker of hope that one day my parents would appear like that. Everything I knew of them, of the situation, told me otherwise, but hope is not a reasonable thing. It persisted till the day Beryx emerged from a thrithan clump looking even more flogged than usual. And this time his eyes came to me.
At such times instinct demands solitude. I do not recall going, but when he found me I was huddled into the cover of another heagar, beyond sight or earshot of the camp. Only when the van of the grief had passed, begun to alter into the will for revenge, into unslakeable hate, did he break in upon my thoughts.
—the very force of his will dragged my eyes up— I knew he felt it was hopeless and that only integrity compelled him to go on.
My eyes must have answered. His grew almost translucent.
My expression cannot have changed.
He did not have to say, I too would find it all but impossible.
I was within a hairsbreadth of turning on him as I had in the vault, I could see the expectation in his eyes and knew that even now he would not fight back. I understood then that there are bloodier battles than those where armies massacre each other. And what a conquest is demanded of those who claim so much as the tithe of a right to say, “I follow Math.”
If I did not choke, it felt so. My very flesh seemed to boil with pain and hate and the need to hurt. When it subsided, I put up my hand and found, with no surprise, that there was sweat on my face as I had so often seen it on his.
He was smiling at me. A shaky, exhausted, radiant smile. I knew then that I had just won him his greatest triumph. That I had redeemed my past betrayals, that if the Lady finally vanquished him, I had bestowed his victory crown.
* * * * *
How much longer did it go on? More distortion of time. I remember, though, that the swamp began to dry, mud margins widening, trees shabby, sun staring from an ever-more-torrid sky. Then the first battalions of soggy, long-based silver clouds massing in the north, the heavier sultriness, and Amver saying, “The Wet won’t be long.” I recall that because it was the day before the Lady opened her next charge.
Beryx could not look at us that morning. He would not even speak until Callissa, divining a crisis, half ran to him with the usual cup of tea and thrust him down on a rolled-up tent. It was to the cup that he finally spoke.
“She’s . . . changed targets.” We all froze, half reprieved, half in deeper fear, for the new atrocity was plainly worse. He did not look up. “Your old corps. . . .”
All the eyes jerked to me. The words jerked in my throat.
“What about them? What?”
He put the cup down. His hand was steady. I do not know if it was control, or the torpor of being struck too much.
“She executed them. All of them. Last night. In the main square . . . Zyphryr Coryan.”
For a moment I shared his pain for innocents slain on my behalf, crueler in some ways than kinfolks’ loss. They had done nothing, nothing at all. Merely served with me. Faces filled my mind, troopers and seconds and brother-officers, honest, loyal, blood-bound comrades with whom I had hammered out trust in so many battle lines. Now hung on gibbets like traitors, deserters, criminal dogs. For a moment it was too much. I learnt then that the battle is never over when the enemy is Ammath.
I came round with the taste of blood in my mouth and the nails driven clean through my palms. Beryx was watching me. With compassion, with comprehension. And now with the praise of a fellow-fighter who understands your victory. The most precious garland on earth.
“She’s learning,” he said at last. “A clean sweep, because otherwise I’d have got some out. At night. And not kinfolk, because she knows this is worse . . . once you’re bound by Math.”
It was Evis who exploded. “Then for the love of your cursed Math why don’t you stop it! Fight her! Do something!”
Beryx came off the tent in a single bound and his eyes went green-shot white.
“By the Sky-lords’ faces, you squalling pup, do you think I don’t ache to tear the whole thing apart and stamp all over its guts? Do you think I want to sit like an owl on a stick and bleat to a bunch of ninnies about ‘Math’? Do you think I don’t have to fight myself every mortal second not to go out there and take her on, here and now, and to your pits with the consequence, to the pits with everything so long as I can act!”
Evis nearly fell over. The rest of us recoiled, cowered, fled outright. We had seen him vexed, we had seen him touchy. We had never seen him in unbridled wrath.
He was breathing like a racehorse, face distorted, hand driven into his side. For a moment I saw what an aedr could be, as Th’Iahn had been, uncurbed by Math. Then I realized that this strategy had crossed not
only his beliefs but his nature. A king, a general, it was born and bred and schooled into him in the face of disaster to react. To refuse had galled him so bitterly he had lost control not merely from stress, but in the revolt of instincts too long and too savagely denied.
The rage had already collapsed. “Oh, Four,” he groaned. “Oh, Four . . . I’m so sorry, Evis.” The remorse became despair. “Oh, when will I ever learn to follow Math?”
Though still fiery red, Evis was over shock and fear and struggling to swallow the rest. He answered unsteadily, “Sir, I should have known better. Don’t blame yourself.”
They looked at each other. Then a wraith of humor woke in Beryx’s eye. “I think,” he said with irony, “you’ll have plenty of chances to get it right.”
* * * * *
The Lady worked through the army as she had through our kin. Every rankmate, fellow officer, friend, barest past or present acquaintance that she caught was executed in the basest way. Beryx saved some by the exhausting maneuver of tracing all our careers with Phathire, then breaking her command over possible victims and sending them off in flight, but they were heart-breakingly few. The chess war resumed. Some did escape. The others supplied another turn to her knife, but this time injustice mingled rage into our grief. And at times I mourned the Assharran army, in which I had been proud to serve, for whatever its allegiance it had been a fine service, and I sorrowed as for any skilled craftsmanship wrecked in wanton spite.
As that phase closed we all began to wonder what she would try next. Where humans can live is less miraculous than where they can laugh. We met our losses with silence, our wins with vicious delight, and we speculated on the future with that black wit you find in lulls along a sore-tried battle front. Beryx’s condition was the one thing about which we could not jest.
He was skeleton thin, unable to eat. He still slept badly, recovering more and more slowly from his bouts of Ruanbrarx. And, we noted with silent apprehension, his physical strength had begun to fail.