Shattered Stone

by Murphy, Shirley Rousseau

  If Thorn had a twinge of revulsion at giving MadogWerg to anyone, even Kubalese, he put it down. He took Zephy’s hand in the darkness and knew she, too, wondered if they sinned, doing such a thing. Then he felt her resolve as she thought of the Children like living dead who had lined the walls of the tunnel.

  They could sense the Kubalese outside, dismounting, hobbling their horses, ducking as they came through the low tunnel, hot and tired. They could smell their sweat as they lumbered past shouting for the Kubalese guards.

  “Ag-Labba! Ag-Labba, rouse your filthy soul, you worthless Karrach! Fill the mugs, fire the stew pot, you’ve a crew here starving and lusty!”

  “Sewers of Urdd, it’s a dark and stinking place!”

  “Bleed it, man, bleed it! Roll out a new keg, we’ve had no drink in a dog’s tracking time, you suckers!”

  “Bring ogre’s breath, you sons of Urdd! Roll out the ogre’s breath!” There was coarse laughter and much stamping, and a loud guffaw that ended in a belch.

  Zephy felt Thorn laugh at their crudeness, then felt the cold fear they both shared with the others as seven Children slipped out the entrance behind them, to lead the Kubalese horses away quietly. Zephy sensed the care the Children took as they loosened the horse’s saddles, cooled them, watered them, and took them to graze and rest on the hills—it might be a long night for these mounts.

  Then Zephy felt Elodia touch her in the darkness, felt the alarm of the others suddenly. Something was in the tunnel with them. It was the darkness they had sensed so often; but it was close now, not held back. Very close and real, and one of the Children was slipping away. The dark was there, concentrated in that one, they could feel it now as if, in unusual effort, the dark Child could not keep his evil diffused. Who was he? Which one of them? Zephy could feel Toca’s fear. She slipped out behind Thorn after the dark one. She could feel Meatha and Elodia beside her. Toca took her hand. She could feel Clytey and the others following.

  They could hear the soldiers in the brewing room, grumbling because two guards were missing. “Where the fracking Urdd . . . ?”

  “Dallying with the sleeping girls, I’ll guess! Ag-Labba! Rouse your filthy self. Poke him, Herg-Mord. Roll him out of that bunk!”

  “Get up you fracking sot. Serve us up some supper. Pull yourself out of there!”

  Behind the shouting Zephy and Thorn could feel the urgency of the Child who hurried through the dark passage, could feel the warning forming on his lips. Thorn was ahead, running, Zephy on his heels. They could hear the mugs clink, then Yanno shout—and Thorn had him, his fist in the young man’s mouth, his arm around his throat; it was Yanno! He spun back, his eyes terrified, the feel of darkness like a stench on him, to stare at Thorn in terror, then to grab at Thorn’s knife and twist it out of the scabbard.

  Thorn hit him so he went limp.

  They crouched there, listening, expecting the Kubalese to burst out of the brewing room. But the men were still cursing the missing guards, toasting each other loudly, laughing and swearing by turns. They had heard nothing.

  They dragged Yanno into a side tunnel to question him, and Zephy could feel Thorn’s fury as he propped him against the wall. “Where is he?” He hissed, his fingers twisting into the man’s shoulder so Yanno cringed in pain. “Where is Anchorstar? What have you done with him?”

  But Yanno, limp now with fear and pain, seemed to have gone as empty as a shell. No evil reeked from him now. Only fear. He would not answer Thorn. He seemed to have drawn into a place where Thorn could not reach him. He had given up, yet at the same time he clung to something that would not let him speak. Zephy felt that he would die soon, that they could not prevent it, that he would carry Anchorstar’s secret with him.

  Then at last Meatha went into his mind in a way the others had not. She seemed suddenly able to strip away layers of emptiness and lay bare, at long last, the final dark kernel of Yanno—to lay bare the knowledge they had sought.

  And they, going at once back to the entrance of the tunnel and through the cleft to the outside, found the second cleft, tucked behind the first like a wrinkle in the earth. And Thorn pushed in to find the second door.

  This one seemed locked or bolted from within. Finally it gave slightly as if the bolt was weakening. Or as if the door was not bolted, but held. They pushed harder, ramming the door in unison until at last it gave and swung in. Two boys stood before them, the reek of evil strong about them. Yanno’s counterparts. Yanno’s dark partners, Children lost in their minds and turned inward around a kernel of evil that now ruled them.

  And behind them on the slab lay Anchorstar.

  Hardly a heartbeat had he. Zephy and Meatha knelt beside him, and Elodia brought water. Thorn, with Yanno dangling from his grasp, faced the two dark Children coldly. “Yanno. Ejon. Dowilg,” Thorn said in a flat voice, divining their names. The stench of their evil filled the cave. The three stared back at Thorn with empty, hate-ridden eyes. The other Children faced them in a circle, a small cold army. Zephy shuddered, and turned back to Anchorstar.

  Meatha’s arms were around him, Meatha’s tears on his face. Then Tra. Hoppa was there, she had brought herbs and brew. But they could not wake him.

  “He only sleeps,” Tra. Hoppa said. “He only sleeps, he’s not dead. You must wake him. You must make a strength between you that you have never made before, all of you. You must not let Anchorstar die!” Her voice rang cold and compelling in the cave: a command they could not have resisted. The Children, having trussed and secured the dark ones, gathered now, and commanded life, demanded life of Anchorstar as they had not done even for one another. They strained, they sweated with their effort as a man sweats moving boulders.

  But they could not wake him. There was no stir, no sign of color or of change in his almost-imperceptible breathing—until at last, the prisoners were taken away and the darkness left the cave. The evil left with them, left the Children free to demand life of Anchorstar without the fetters that Yanno and the two others had put on them.

  At long last, after many hours more, Anchorstar moved his hand. Then later his pale, weathered cheek seemed to have a little color. They knelt then, all of them, never moving, willing him to live. When it was clear that he would live, some of the children went to clear the brewing room of the drugged Kubalese soldiers, and Tra. Hoppa made a broth of rabbit, with the herbs. In the small hours of the morning Anchorstar was able, with his head supported, to accept a few drops of this. His eyes were open but dead-seeming. It tore at Zephy to see the blankness with which he regarded them.

  They kept the stone beside him as they watched in shifts through the day and the next day and night. The deep, patient prodding was taken up by one group then the next, never ceasing.

  And when he woke truly at last, and looked around him, the others who had gone to rest woke at once, were called out of sleep, and came to him. Meatha was there kneeling beside him, crying. Toca, all the Children hurried out of sleep to gather before him. With their silent urging, with the stone and with love pulling at him, Anchorstar looked around him at last with true recognition. With surprise. And then with great good humor.

  It was several days more before he was strong enough to travel. Fresh rabbits boiled into soup strengthened him, and all the Children took turns caring for him. When Zephy sat with him one night, he told her how he had been captured, and she thought him very patient, for surely he had told many of the others. He had waited in the dark beyond the housegardens as they had planned, on the night of Fire Scourge. And he had been surprised as he crouched there in a low depression to hear a dozen Kubalese troops suddenly thundering down on him. They had not seen him, but were following the plan of attack. And he, having no way to escape running horses, for his own horses were farther up the mountain, had crouched lower, hoping he would not be discovered.

  But one Kubalese horse had shied, startling others, and one of the soldiers dismounted to investigate. Anchorstar did not dare move, but remained frozen, hoping still he might b
e missed, his knife ready in case he was not.

  He had been found, had killed one Kubalese soldier and wounded two before he was overpowered by the rest. He had been gagged and locked then in a tool shed and left there for three days, until some Kubalese corporal remembered he was there, and told his superiors.

  Then Anchorstar had been force-fed MadogWerg and had waked days later in the dark cave longing nearly to madness for MadogWerg. He had not cried out for it and had refused it when the guard came. “But it was all I could do,” he said. “And in the end they forced it down me.” He looked at Zephy with such defeat—and then with that wry humor at himself. She had bent and kissed him, more touched than she could admit.

  While Anchorstar mended, the Children waited patiently; and the Kubalese horses waited, hidden in the hills. Their masters, with the great quantities of MadogWerg they had imbibed, had needed burying on the hilltop. Then at the very last moment Toca and Thorn took the runestone and went down out of the hills into the valley, where Toca called the two Carriolinian mares and the larger horses into a band that submitted quietly to the rope and harness they found in the wagon there; the band of horses followed him docilely up the hills in the evening light.

  Food and blankets had been packed onto the two donkeys, and now the Children mounted two and three to a horse on the big Kubalese animals. Anchorstar, with Thorn behind to steady him, was helped up onto one of the two mares. He handed the reins of the other mare to Zephy and Meatha, and they scrambled aboard so eagerly Thorn could not help but laugh.

  The little group, double-mounted, triple-mounted, children’s legs sticking nearly straight out on the broad backs, moved up over the Kubalese hills in the darkness, the horses forged quickly on and the two donkeys pulled ahead in spite of their reluctance. Tra. Hoppa, astride a broad black Kubalese mount behind a tall young man, seemed to cling like a fly. Toca, squeezed between them, could hardly be seen.

  They did not stop for rest or water, but kept riding hard, forcing the horses until the animals began to blow and fight them. With the heavy burdens, the horses were easily spent, and just before dawn, they were forced to rest. There had been a little light while the moon still hung in the sky, but now it was dark indeed. They had crossed the Kubalese valley and the river Urobb and were now at the foot of the mountains. They dismounted and removed some of their harness to rub the horses down and cool them; then watered them from the trickle of brook they had been following. When dawn began to come, they could begin to see the valley stretched out behind. Thorn was withdrawn and silent, thinking of the three dark Children he had executed. He had asked of them, “Why did you have Anchorstar captive? Why was he so important that you let him live? Did you guard him at the direction of the Kubalese?”

  “Not the Kubalese,” Dowilg had croaked, as if he didn’t care what he told, as if it didn’t matter any more. “Our way,” he said, staring at the others. “It was our way . . .”

  “He was a leader,” Yanno said as if leader were a filthy word. “There was light around him.”

  Thorn had stared at them, feeling their revulsion for Anchorstar and for himself and the Children. “Then why did you let him live?”

  “We thought to make use of him,” Ejon said. “We thought we could turn his mind and make use of him against you.” He had laughed with a bitter, cold sound that had turned Thorn’s hatred to disgust.

  “But why didn’t you warn the guards of our coming? You were on their side, surely.”

  “Not on their side,” Yanno said. “They would use us.”

  “We were to ourselves,” said Dowilg. “Before the stone came we were someplace dark, to ourselves.” He seemed unable, or unwilling, to explain that other mental state but Thorn sensed it; the feel of it came strong around him, and he understood that when the stone came, these three had awakened to a new level, where their evil became concentrated once more on the Children and Anchorstar. “But he kept us bound with his mind even in sleep,” Dowilg said with cold hate. “We were not strong enough.”

  Thorn had killed them quickly and buried them in the mound.

  Now he sat by the little spring, holding the reins of five resting horses, feeling sick at the memory of what he had done; but knowing he had had no choice. To kill in battle was one thing, to kill in cold blood quite another; but to turn that evil loose on Ere would have been unthinkable. When one mare raised her head, then another, he paid little attention. The animal stiffened and began to fidget and stare down into the lightening valley. Then suddenly he was on his feet, fastening harness, shouting to the others . . .

  A band of Kubalese soldiers roared up the valley toward them, yelling for blood.

  Children leaped up; harness was secured hastily; the horses milling and shying. Thorn shoved Children onto rearing backs; three riderless horses pulled away and went plunging up the mountain. They heard the Kubalese shout as a darkness came over them all; the soldiers were blotted out by the darkness in the sky, all was seething confusion . . .

  The darkness in the sky dropped around them; then flying dark shapes landed, pawing, snorting at the other horses. Thorn lifted Children up onto winged backs now, pushed Zephy up, saw the Horses of Eresu leap into the sky seconds before the Kubalese pounded up the last slope, shouting. The abandoned horses were milling, some heading for the mountains. A winged shape landed before him; he lunged to mount, felt a hand grab him from behind and pull him back. He whirled to face the Kubalese soldier. He lashed out, his fist hardly grazing the man, drew back grabbing for his knife, was hit so hard in the head he reeled; he found some mark with his blade, jerked away and leaped wildly for the winged back . . .

  The others were specks above him, Zephy’s terror for him sharp in his mind as the winged horse lifted to meet her.

  They were over Ere. They were on the wind, free; the wonder of the flight obliterated the terror they had felt. The land dropped below them, lit with the coming dawn. They saw the sweep of the valley from Kubal to Urobb. The sun, lying just below the sea, sent a sharp orange light onto the outer islands of Carriol far in the distance. Back toward the mountain, Thorn could see the Kubalese riding hard, only specks now, after the escaping horses. He caught a glimpse of the two donkeys, turning off into a protected ravine. Maybe they would be missed. He touched the runestone, safe in his jerkin, and smiled across at Zephy, sensing the wonder of flight that held her, the fierce joy. He could see Tra. Hoppa farther away clinging to a dark roan, holding Toca tight. The child gripped a handful of mane and stared down in wide-eyed wonder. All of them were safe; the sweep of dozens of pairs of huge wings before him, behind him, lifting and soaring on the wind so effortlessly, held him spellbound; the sweep of land beneath him, another world so far removed from this tide of wind, made him drunk with glory.

  The river Voda-Cul cut below them now, through the pale loess planes of Carriol. A deep woods lay between the white expanse and the sea, and in the loess hills themselves he could see carven clusters of dwellings, with the smaller river Somat-Cul wandering down between them toward the lush green pastures that made up most of Carriol. He could see the sparkle of cities there as the sun lifted red; and the names Blackcob and Kirkfalk and Plea came to him, though he didn’t know which was which. He knew which was the city of Fentress, there on the largest of the three islands; and that must be the ancient ruin lying on the coast south of Fentress. He peered down between the sweeping wings, mane whipping in his face and the smell of the horse he rode warm and sweet. He laid a hand on the silken neck and felt the strength beneath, and the muscles pulling in flight. He turned to look at Zephy again, though he didn’t need to see her face to know her joy; she was thinking of the stone, too. Given twice? But it has not been. And carried in a search and a questing? Have we done both, Thorn?

  You gave it to me once, he answered. When we found it in the saddle. We have had a search all right. Was that a questing too?

  Or is there more? she thought.

  There is always more. There is a whole lifetime of
questing. He did not know whether the others heard their thoughts. It didn’t matter. Carriol was there below them, a sanctuary, a place of freedom, and new beginning; and they rode on the winds above it as they had dreamed, as all of them had longed to do. He laid a hand on his horse’s neck and felt again the warmth of the strong body beneath him, saw the horse’s ears go forward as he chose a distant landing. They descended, and he felt Zephy’s longing to stay windborne forever; their two horses swept close together, playing in the wind, nipping lightly, and then settled into a long glide that, Thorn thought, would take them down over Carriol’s islands. Crouching beneath the dark wings, he could see all of Ere for a moment, the deep Bay of Pelli, the deserts beyond. It was not so large and forbidding, seen from the sky; nor would it seem so large again, ever.

  The winged horses descended, dropping down over the coast of Carriol. The sea swept away to the left Thorn felt his horse tense, saw the land come up quick, felt the great wings catch at the wind in a new way—felt the jolt as the Horse of Eresu landed on a high mass of stone and crumbling walls that rose from the cliffs above the sea. The stallion’s wings, at sudden rest, folded over Thorn’s legs and beside his body. The others were landing, plummeting down.

  They were high above the sea and cliffs on a patch of green supported by ancient walls and towers. They were high in the ruined city, the ancient city Carriol. Below them the ruins crumbled away. Above them a broken tower rose into the clear sky. To the south they could see the pastures of Carriol, a city, farms, then a bay and far in the distance the huge neck of land running out into the sea; this would be Sangur. To the right of Sangur lay the wide Bay of Pelli. But this was all very distant softened by mists. Close at hand, on Thorn’s left, the sea beat a strange soothing cadence as breakers crashed upon the cliffs. Zephy came close and stood with him. They looked out at the three islands, Fentress and Doonas and Skoke, and at the dwellings clinging there, and the little winding streets; and to their right, below the broken walls, the sweep of Carriol. The winged horse still stood close to Thorn, nuzzling him now, then raised its head to look out over Carriol, too, with a soft nicker; nuzzled again, then lifted its wings. Thorn rubbed its neck, loathe for the stallion to leave but knowing he must. Zephy clung to her own horse and there were tears in her eyes. Then all in an instant the horses reared and were airborne, wings sweeping, were leaping into the wind, rising, were gone on the wind, a seething flock there above them, vanishing in cloud. The Children of Ynell crowded closer together, and gazed down over the waiting land.