“Don’t,” Beryx was saying huskily. The sweat was running down his jaw. “For the love of Math, Evis . . . Zyr . . . Wenver . . . wait. Think.” Something told me that if they refused he would not hinder them. Would not attack them, might not even resist. But they would only come to Moriana after they had hacked him apart at her feet.
“Try to—look forward.” His voice shook. “You needn’t—fall in the pit. You can go on. Try to—to—”
To be more than human. To achieve what in all her time the Lady had never done. To make one giant’s stride out, free, over the past, and arrive at magnanimity. Greatness of soul.
Math.
They were poised as Moriana had hung, a leaf in the wind’s eye, on that parapet. But there was no mercy. No heed. Not in Evis, not in Wenver’s, not in any of their eyes.
And as it all teetered to the precipice edge, Zem piped up.
He had wormed to Evis’ side. I have no idea how much he understood. Probably, I fear, far too much. But he spoke with his age’s single-minded satisfaction at a long-standing puzzle solved.
“So that,” he said, “is what you planned to do with her.”
For a moment we were all paralyzed. Then Moriana’s eyes flamed. Evis’ jaw dropped and Beryx yelled in awful consternation, “Zem, you wretch!”
Moriana rounded on him. He literally ducked. “It wasn’t like that!”
“Oh, it wasn’t, was it?” She had turned whiter than on that parapet. “You dared talk about me like a—a—and to a child!”
She swung at him, a barrack-room roundhouse. He howled, “I never said a word, I never thought, I swear it. . . .” She charged him and he actually ran, round Fengthira and back behind me, the good arm over his head like a farmer caught in hail. Moriana swept down on us both. I had no time for fight or flight. He yelled across my shoulder, panicked to the point of burlesque, “I did tell you, I had plans!”
He was cowering like the most hen-hearted recruit behind a sentry-post, holding me before him one-handed, peering past my neck. I did not have to see how it looked. That was written in Moriana’s face beside me, the eyes huge, the skin white, the mouth. . . .
The mouth suddenly twitching uncontrollably. The face’s mask shattering, the eyes, yet again, turning to sheets of black-shot mist. And then, bursting out like a dam gone down, the full depth of that waterfall laugh.
How could the most vendetta-crusted blood-thirst resist that?
I can see Evis crumbling behind her, the swept-away look on Zyr’s face. Karis and Wenver had succumbed, it swept the circle like some new, precious plague. I felt the rocks buckle in my own memory’s wall. Saw the future rise beyond the rubble at last, clear and irresistible as a trumpet calling, Stand down.
When the flood ebbed Beryx was still lurking, wringing the moment to its last. Moriana caught her breath along with us. Then she spluttered and cried, “Oh, you fool! Come out!”
He crept out, not done burlesquing himself. She gave him one fulminating, not wholly counterfeit glower. Then it changed.
“You did that on purpose.” It was half outrage, half disbelief. “Ran away . . . Pretended. . . .” Her voice rose. “Deliberately!”
He looked at her under his lashes. Though in his bent head that mock-timidity lingered, the corners of his mouth had crept up. But it was not foolery, when he spoke.
He said, “The Ulven called me, Rainmaker.”
Because the crippled wizard will end the Assharran drought.
I remembered, then, what it had meant. Leveled in that laughter’s wake I understood, through flesh and blood’s reality, what it meant now: my chest’s enlargement, my blood moving, heart and spirit released. As if the hate had been not merely a wall but stasis, stagnation, the suspension of time that drought imposes. A living death.
And now it had broken. Life, water, time, could move again.
The others remembered too. But a different memory, more than understanding, was moving like another freshet in Moriana’s stare.
Then she turned her head and looked me full in the face.
“Alkir”—that lovely liquid voice was lovelier for the evil it had sloughed—“we can’t go back. And no recompense would be enough. But we could go on—couldn’t we?” And she held out her hand.
T’would need a Velandyr, I heard Fengthira saying, to amend that. And, unless tha dost the same, t’will be fare-thee-well ’twixt him and thee. But the choice had already been made, in my own mind. My own heart.
Her fingers curled, slight and fragile as vine stems, round mine. I heard Beryx say low and thickly, “Well done.” I did not ask which of us he meant. I felt the spring of his joy waken, though, as I looked at the others. And if his eye had pleaded, I did my utmost to make mine a fierce command.
They understood. And at the last, they could not turn their backs on the liberation that had taken them, however unawares.
Evis conceded first, advancing with past hate and present disapproval and undigested laughter still mingled in his look. As Moriana met his eye an answer woke in hers. But she bit her lip ferociously, and it sounded almost earnest when she spoke.
“Whatever we say will be . . .” impossible, I supplemented. An insult, a grotesquerie, or a wound too raw to touch. “But. . . .”
She pulled her chin up in that old implacable way. But I saw her shoulders brace, before, again, she put out her hand.
Evis took it, perforce. With a pause, a gingerliness close to revulsion. Then past training rescued him. He bowed over her fingers and uttered a cliché from another life. “I wish you happy, ma’am.” His eye found Beryx’s suddenly radiant face and he amended with no reservation and no effort at all, “Happier than anyone could ask.”
One by one the rest followed, mumbling something, clasping hands. Stepping back, with a look of woken wonder on each face. Until only Zyr remained.
He glowered at us across the shifting but persistent glacis they had all left. His narrow bronze-red face was laconic at the best of times and now quite inscrutable, but in the pause I heard Beryx suddenly catch his breath.
Moriana stiffened. She did not put out her hand. I would have prayed, if I had a god left, that the pride, the mockery, had not revived in her eyes.
Zyr looked at Beryx instead.
Beryx did not speak, but I knew what his eyes would say. Don’t hold back, they would beg. Do this for your own sake. It’s human, it’s natural to grieve and demand punishment and thirst for revenge exacted in blood, but don’t do it. Be more than human. Cleave to Math.
Zyr looked back to Moriana. He jerked one shoulder to the corpses under the arch and said evenly, “For me, you should be hanging with them.” He paused. “But. . . .”
His eyes flicked to Beryx again, and that glance said it all. If I can’t do this for your reasons, neither can I deny you. What you made me feel. That moment’s overwhelming, cleansing laughter, when the hate broke. I will do this for what you mean to me.
Then he caricatured an imperial salute and took a step back. I will not touch you, said that dour glance, in reconciliation. But I will sanction your passage. Into amnesty. Into hope.
Moriana’s chin came down. Beryx bent his head. Softly, huskily, and I could feel with what intensity, he said, “Thank you, Zyr.”
* * * * *
And I remember the next advance, that evening, after a trial restoration in Ker Morrya: a dozen different work-parties to clear debris, stable horses, forage dinner, gather splintered furniture for firewood, organize quarters, succor the corpses at the gate. Barricade the gate itself.
We gathered in a cleansed piece of the great gallery, lit by tallow dips in silver candelabra, reclining on salvaged cushions or Phaxian cloaks, as we ate pot-luck soup and griddle cakes and drank barley-spirit too raw even for looters from a crystal decanter they had missed. Beryx and Moriana presided, sharing his cloak, with Fengthira on his right and me on Moriana’s left; which might still have been unnerving, had she ever been aware of me. As of course she was not.
/> When the motley cups were charged there came a sudden pause. I had felt it happening all afternoon: the recurring tug-of-heart between hope and resurrected memory, the embers of grief and hate rousing, to be re-drowned by another deluge of their joy. This time it was clearer, simpler. The moment, the action, demanded the stamp of ritual. But was it to be a mourners’ wake? Or a betrothal feast?
Fengthira glanced sideways and sighed. Neither Beryx nor Moriana heard. She looked past, with irony and mockery and the involuntary, if often wry smile forced from all who looked at them, and told me, “Tha’ll do. Give us a toast.”
I stood up. Cleared my throat. Cleared it again. Waited. Bellowed, “Stand to!” They leapt apart, the audience fell apart. Beryx gave me a wrathfully merry look. I gave them the toast.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
In a moment, Zyr’s hand relaxed. Then Evis lifted his cup. Wenver and Ost nodded, looking past me too. “Tomorrow,” they repeated, and tipped their cups.
Beryx and Moriana drank with us, with fitting solemnity. But they drank to each other, which Fengthira found too much.
“Hark’ee,” she said. “This billing and cooing’s half-measure to ye, and no use to us. Get y’selves off to the real thing—if ye can find a bed that’s fit for it.”
Beryx blushed. Moriana dropped her eyelids, smiled wickedly, and pulled him to his feet. She glanced down at Fengthira, and Fengthira anticipated the sally in her look.
“If th’art foundered by morning, remember, t’was thee schooled him to do without sleep.”
That routed Moriana at last. As she went crimson Beryx said irately, “ ’Thira, that’s enough!” and hauled her doorward before Fengthira could show just how little his orders weighed with her.
Chapter XIV
That, I suppose, was in truth their wedding feast. There can seldom have been one more bizarre or less worthy of the event, but of the happiness it launched there could be no doubt. Next day they were blazing rather than merely shining, and it was a blaze that did not cool. It warmed everyone around them, it spread through the first salvings of Zyphryr Coryan, it radiated out over Assharral, changing, softening, quickening the renewal, down to the scruffiest urchin re-mustering pigs in a Gjerven swamp. Fuelling Beryx’s inexhaustible energy, his joy in doing what he was bred for: exercising all his natural gifts, not merely to maintain but to reconstruct an entire realm.
Assharral needed it all. It takes longer to build than to destroy, and longer yet to rebuild what has been ruined. Some things can never be restored. The Morhyrne’s cone now sags like a hunchback’s hump. They still boat round the lava on the harbor road, waiting till it is cool enough to begin tunneling. Bridges will always span it in many central streets. And south Morrya will be desolate for the rest of my life. It took the first blast’s full impact: every tree felled for a hundred miles, live things incinerated within thirty, asphyxiated within fifty, the earth within seventy miles shrouded under pumice and lava clots and ash.
With time and patience the other provinces will be healed, sometimes improved. But nothing can restore the bloodline of the imperial stud mares, slaughtered with their unborn foals, nor refound the school of the Climbrian dancers, wiped out to the youngest recruit. Or resurrect the human dead, all dear to someone, who lie in so many unknown graves. And it will take longer than the reclamation of Morrya to wash the salt from fields in so many human hearts.
More than once in those first months I wanted to echo Moriana’s wail of “But where do we start?” So many things crying, This first. We were lucky, for the land’s sake, to begin just before the Wet, and unlucky for the sake of its folk. I cannot tally the miles I rode in the rain as lieutenant-at-large, racing the plague into squalid refugee camps, organizing shelter, food, medicine, then kicking over the wheels in town and village and farm, trying to reconcile the die-hards who abhorred Beryx with the bloodhounds who only wanted Moriana’s head. Mayors and governors, fencing posts and seed corn, returned fugitives, renegade soldiers, discharged priests, town plans and ownerless milking cows; Gjerven farmers persuaded to repopulate Morrya and give the Ulven room. And I had only to tidy the edges and prepare for the great new plans: tax changes, a dismantled religion, a new government.
To Beryx it was all an incentive. “I love building,” he told me once. “And I’ve never had such a chance. In Hethria we started at dirt, and in Everran I left before the fun really began.” From which I assume he defined “fun” as twenty-five hours work a day on Assharral, with extra minutes found for Moriana, and some spare seconds allotted to such mundane necessities as food and sleep.
Moriana worked with him, hour for hour. They could rarely be pried apart, even after their quarrels, which flared over a clause in the new constitution or a civil appointment, some high-handed action in her old manner or a disputed precept in Math, his treatment of some balky underling or an unacceptable part of her aedric apprenticeship. I walked in on the end of more than one storm: the room littered with hurled books and broken inkpots, an official seal poised like a slingstone in Moriana’s hand, a pile of shattered plates and an overset table vibrating from Beryx’s mindspeech, at a volume that would shake Zyphryr Coryan.
Moving Water Page 28
