Land of the Burning Sands

by Rachel Neumeier

  There was a little silence. Gereint thought about the Teschanken and Nerintsan Rivers, which not only linked north to south but also watered all of Meridanium and the whole eastern half of Casmantium. If the whole lower Teschanken ran dry—not merely low, but dry, as Amnachudran said—he said in a low voice, “Casmantium can’t exist without the river.”

  “Not as it is presently constituted, no,” agreed Emre Tanshan.

  “Without the rivers, a good part of the north will turn to desert,” put in her husband. “Not necessarily to a country of fire, but to a country where men cannot easily live. Our rain rides the cool winds off the mountains: If the griffin’s lay their desert across those mountains, none of our northern towns will survive. Tashen, Metichteran, Pamnarichtan—and over in Meridanium, Alend and Taub, Manich and Streitgan and Raichboden—everyone will have to flee south, as the people of Melentser did.”

  “Dislocation enough to have the folk of Melentser displaced. But if the whole north empties, we will have nowhere to go,” Lady Emre said in a low voice.

  “The river sustains Dachsichten as well,” murmured Gereint, not really speaking to anyone, but merely speaking aloud because his mind had leaped ahead and presented him with images too grim to contain in silence. “And Breidechboden. Geierand will do well enough, and Wanenboden, and Abreichan. Or they would, if not for northern refugees. But there will be so many refugees.” He could imagine, far too vividly, the flood of desperate folk from north to south, hopelessly in excess of the numbers the south could sustain.

  Peaceful towns like Geierand would simply be overrun and destroyed, as surely as though a plague of locusts had come down on the land, and far more thoroughly. But Breidechboden and Abreichan—he knew that the great cities of the south would arm against the mass of northern refugees—they would have no choice—he tried not to imagine soldiers in their shining ranks drawn up against the ragged multitude of refugees, but the images were vividly compelling and he could not put them out of his mind. He said, his tone hushed with horror, “Casmantium will be destroyed. It can’t sustain this blow. Something will survive, but… I think it won’t be a country any of us will recognize. It will be something small and poor and weak and well practiced in brutality…”

  Beguchren settled back in his chair, tented his hands, and gazed at Gereint over the tips of his fingers. “Destroying Casmantium is, I believe, the griffins’ whole intention,” he agreed.

  “How can they dare? However strong they are—however few cold mages we have—how many griffins can there be? A few thousand? They must know we will spend however many men and mages we have to stop this—”

  “Due to a slight miscalculation on our part, and a tremendous stroke of good fortune on theirs, the griffins at this time possess an immense advantage that we may not, in fact, be able to overcome.” Beguchren’s quiet, uninflected voice concealed, barely, a horror that, Gereint was beginning to suspect, equaled his own.

  Everyone gazed at the frost-haired mage, waiting. For a moment, Gereint thought he was not going to answer their unspoken question. But he said eventually, “I should think you had word of the, ah, the broad outline of events in Feierabiand.”

  “Well, yes, an outline, at least,” Lady Emre said sympathetically. “I was very sorry to hear of your loss, Beguchren.”

  “Yes,” the mage said, and paused. For the first time, Gereint wondered exactly how many cold mages had died in Feierabiand: all of them, he knew, except Beguchren. Half a dozen? A dozen? And how many of those mages had been Beguchren’s personal friends? He had understood the tactical problems that arose from the lack of cold mages—or at least, he had understood that tactical problems did arise from that lack—but now, for the first time, he flinched from the question of how it would feel to be the only surviving mage.

  “But you—” began Amnachudran, but stopped.

  “But, Beguchren,” protested Lady Emre, bolder than her husband, “you’re only one man, after all, however powerful—”

  “I can effectively oppose fire. I am alone, but so is the remaining griffin mage, I believe.” Beguchren’s voice had gone taut. “He is very powerful, but I can challenge him. If it were only he and I, I would challenge him and win. But there is now a fire mage in the high desert who was born human, whose nature is not quite the nature of a griffin. Had you heard so? Well, it is true. She lends the griffins an advantage I—we—cannot well answer.

  “We hadn’t thought the griffins bent on our destruction. They seemed otherwise inclined, and we didn’t understand that they might use Melentser as a bridgehead to support an attack on all of Casmantium. Or, as you might guess, we would have tried much harder to prevent them taking Melentser. But we failed of imagination, to our great cost. Now, with that human fire mage to support them, a few thousand griffins may well match all the men and mages we can possibly bring to this… conflict.” He did not quite say “war.”

  “But…” Gereint protested, but then, under Beguchren’s level gaze, did not know what to say and fell silent once more.

  “I have one method in mind that may hold some promise.” Beguchren turned his gaze toward Eben Amnachudran. “I will wish to see the desert. I also wish my associate Gereint Enseichen to see the desert.”

  Gereint kept his expression placid, refusing to be drawn.

  Beguchren finished quietly, “Then I will need a day or two to arrange… certain matters. I will have instructions for you, I believe. And then… we shall see what can be done.”

  “If you believe anything can be done, my lord,” Eben Amnachudran said fervently, “I assure you, my household and all my resources are entirely at your service.”

  Beguchren inclined his head in courteous, unsurprised acceptance of this offer. But his glance at Gereint questioned whether Gereint too might be willing to place everything he owned and all his resources at his service.

  “I understand why you want me to see this,” Gereint said to him a little later, as they made ready to ride up into the hills and look at the desert that, they were assured, lay hardly any distance from the estate. “But I’ve seen it before. It hardly seems necessary to ride out to the desert on my account. What if there are griffins there? Their mage, the one you say opposes you, what if he is there now, today, waiting for you?”

  “He is not. He is the last of the great griffin mages; he will be too wise to risk himself against me when he has no need. He will not face me directly unless I can manage to force a confrontation.”

  “Can you?”

  Beguchren lifted an ironic eyebrow. “The griffin mage thinks not, I suspect. He is mistaken. I will force him to face me, Gereint, but not today, and not until I have arranged circumstances to my liking.”

  Gereint shrugged noncommittal acceptance of this assurance, took the reins of both the horses a hostler had led out for them—not the black mares, which had been turned out to rest, but a pair of Amnachudran’s horses that he had loaned them for the afternoon—and without comment turned to assist Beguchren to mount. Equally without comment, the small mage set his foot in the cupped hands Gereint offered. Straightening, Gereint tossed him up into his saddle without effort. He said, “An easy ride up into the hills, an easy ride back in time for supper: That’s the idea, is it?”

  Beguchren gathered up his reins, gazing down at Gereint with a wry look in his pale eyes. “Just so.”

  “We don’t intend to do anything more than look at the desert this afternoon.”

  “Just so,” Beguchren repeated.

  Gereint shook his head, asked rhetorically, “Why do I doubt that assurance?”

  “You needn’t. It’s quite true.”

  “I’ve seen the griffin’s desert before,” Gereint repeated.

  “Then this afternoon you can see it again. Or will you balk?”

  “Now? No. Maybe later. Now, it’s either too late to shy away, or too early.” Gereint swung up into the saddle of the other horse, a sturdy bay gelding with the height to carry a man his size, and gave Beguchre
n an ironic little nod.

  The mage didn’t flinch from that irony, but only led the way out of the courtyard and through the near orchard without hesitation, heading straight north as though he knew exactly where he was going.

  He probably did, Gereint reflected. Probably he could feel the precise border where the country of earth gave way to the country of fire; probably it was like an ordinary man watching a storm approach across the southern plains, or the line of a swift brush fire pass through a woodland. Something obvious, powerful, and potentially dangerous.

  There was no red dust riding a hot wind today; Beguchren’s doing, Gereint suspected. But the orchards showed the effects of the past few days: The leaves of the apple trees had gone dry and brown around the edges, and the green was leaching away to browns and yellows as though the season had already turned. Ripe and near-ripe fruit had been picked, but the unripe apples still on the trees were shriveling on the branches.

  They passed the empty pond and rode up along the dry bed of the stream that should have fed it, topped the hill and headed up again at an angle along the slope of the next hill. Then they crested that hill and looked down across the slope that fell away from them toward the next, higher, rank of hills, leading to the mountains beyond.

  The edge of the desert lay directly over the crest of the hill less than a mile to the west from Eben Amnachudran’s estate. Gereint had expected to find the border close at hand, but never so close as this. He drew his horse to a halt, staring, appalled, at that boundary. “How can it have come this far?” he whispered. “They’ve brought their desert all the way across the river. How can they have done this?”

  “When we gave them Melentser, we gave them a hold they have used to claw their way across all this country,” Beguchren answered. “Let us go down to it.” Gereint could read no expression in the mage’s fine-boned face.

  Gereint had forgotten the strange, terrible, profoundly foreign power of the griffins’ desert. He had forgotten the ferocity of its sun, the hard metallic glint of its sky, the savage knife-edged red cliffs that sliced the hot wind into ribbons. Flames flickered among the red sands, dying away again like water ebbing on a beach, leaping up without tinder and burning without fuel. No griffins were in sight; not riding the fiery wind nor lounging upon the red cliffs. But near at hand, two of the scimitar-horned fire deer flung up their heads in alarm at the glimpse of men and horses and fled across the desert in long low bounds, flames leaping up where they disturbed the sand.

  Gereint feared that Beguchren might cross the intangible boundary between earth and fire and set foot on the red sand, under that fierce sun. He did not know what he expected might happen then—a hundred griffin’s coming down, outraged, out of that empty sky? The griffin’s own mage pouring himself out of the burning wind? Or that other mage who had once been human flickering out of the hot wind to meet the cold mage, perhaps. But Beguchren drew his horse to a halt a little on the earth side of the border and merely gazed into the country of fire, his gray eyes impenetrably remote.

  Gereint nudged his own horse up beside the other and asked in a hushed tone, “You mean to challenge… all this? Alone?”

  “Not alone,” Beguchren murmured.

  Gereint stared at him, incredulous. “You should have brought every mage in Casmantium with you. Some must remain. If not cold mages, at least ordinary earth mages.” He tried not to allow his voice to rise to a shout, but found he could not match Beguchren’s composure. “What does the Arobern think he’s about, sending you alone? If you need makers—if you need makers who can leap right through vocation and gift and power and remake themselves into mages to serve you, then you should have brought every maker in Breidechboden here! And you only brought me?”

  Beguchren returned a calm gaze. “The Arobern wanted to give me an army. I persuaded him to give me a free hand, instead. Ordinary mages would not understand what they saw here: They would see”—he nodded toward the desert ahead of them—“all this, as you say, and they would lose all capacity for balanced thought. They would only wish to argue with me. Nor do I need every maker in Breidechboden—or if I do, then nothing will suffice. If I am right, I will in fact need only one maker.”

  “You can’t… How can I possibly… What is it you intend to do?”

  “Let us go back a little way.” Beguchren reined his horse away from the desert’s edge and toward a tumble of flat gray stones set amid a patch of tough, wiry-stemmed bindweed, its graceful heart-shaped leaves and perfumed white flowers as yet untroubled by the encroaching desert. Beguchren slid down from his horse and waded through the tangled vines to sit on one of the stones, gesturing to Gereint to join him. “Let it go,” he said, of Gereint’s bay gelding. “They won’t wander far.”

  “Unless a griffin comes.”

  “None will, today. Sit down. I’ll tell you a story.”

  “Will you? About this past summer?” Gereint slipped his horse’s bit, twisted the reins around the pommel, and picked his way through the weeds to join Beguchren. His horse dropped its head, untroubled by the burning desert not a hundred feet away, and began nipping leaves off the bindweed.

  “Yes. But my story begins earlier than that.” The white-haired mage tucked one foot up, laced his fingers around his knee, and watched the horses. His expression was closed and ironic; Gereint suspected that he was not seeing the horses or the bindweed or the stones or even, perhaps, the desert beyond. Beguchren said, his tone perfectly level, “This was my fault, you know. Or the fault of all the cold mages, if you like, but only I remain to take the blame for our mistake. That is only just. It was my mistake as much as anyone’s. How shall I put this? We saw an opportunity to use the king’s ambition to destroy the griffins once and for all, and we took it.”

  Gereint didn’t think that he made any sound or movement, but the mage’s fine-boned face turned to him as though he had exclaimed aloud. Ice-pale eyes met his, remote as winter.

  “We didn’t think of it in quite that way, of course,” said the mage. “The king was ambitious for a new conquest, and we, well, we longed to rid Casmantium of the threat of fire. Someone thought of a plan. I hardly know, now, whose idea it was, in the beginning. But I favored it as strongly as anyone.” He was silent for a moment.

  Gereint did not speak; he hardly breathed.

  “We thought we would drive the griffins out of their desert and across the mountains into Feierabiand,” Beguchren went on at last. “We thought we would send them before us, a storm of fire and wind, and that, coming behind them, we would find Feierabiand distracted and weakened. Then the king could have his new province—or if he failed of that ambition, we did not care. We thought we and the mages of Feierabiand would, in the end, join against any few remaining griffins and destroy them utterly. Then the country of earth would in time overwhelm the country of fire.” He paused again.

  After a moment, when the mage did not continue, Gereint said quietly, “Everyone knows something went wrong. But I never heard anything but guesses as to exactly what happened.”

  Beguchren’s mouth crooked; his smile held irony rather than humor. He said, “Nothing went wrong, at first. We came into the desert swiftly and quietly and came upon the griffins in the dark. We drew upon the long, slow memories of the sleeping earth. We smothered fire with the weight of earth and laid a killing cold down before us and around us, and they could not withstand us. In those first moments, we destroyed almost all of the griffin mages: all but one. Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin, greatest of the griffin mages. But even he could not hold against our concerted effort. The griffins fled west and south, just as we had intended, and we spun a net of frost across the sand behind them to hold their fire from rising again…

  “It was not an effortless victory. We lost Leide. She had hair like a drift of snow, eyes black as a midwinter night, and a cold, clean power like the heart of winter. We lost Ambreigan, who was eldest of us all: He was too proud, and tried to stand alone against three griffin mages. But there wer
e seven of us who lived to see the dawn, and likely it was a gentler dawn than that country had ever seen. Though we grieved, we counted our battle a victory and we declared our war as good as won.” He stopped.

  This time Gereint did not prompt him. But after a moment, the mage went on, starkly. “Then the griffins found in Feierabiand a weapon none of us had expected. A human girl, a girl right on the edge of waking into her power as a mage. Kes, daughter of… some Feierabianden peasant, I suppose. We don’t know her birth, but it doesn’t matter. Sipiike Kairaithin found her and took her and poured fire into her. He corrupted the magecraft in her before it could wake.”

  Gereint exclaimed, “He made her into a griffin?” and then, afraid Beguchren might stop, leaned back and pressed his lips together, trying to pretend he had not spoken.

  But the mage barely seemed to have heard him. Though he glanced at Gereint, he did not really seem to see him. He spoke quietly, almost as though to himself: “He made a fire mage of her. He made a weapon of her. Or, not exactly a weapon. He made her into, not a sword, but a shield. He made her into something no griffin could be: a healer of fire. We did not realize at once what he had done. He made it impossible for men to do battle with griffins, for that girl would heal them as swiftly as they were struck down. We did not understand this quickly enough. By the time we discovered it, we had already lost everything. We were too confident.”

  Beguchren meant himself and his fellows, Gereint realized: He meant the cold mages. He was not thinking of the Arobern or the ordinary soldiers at all. He spoke with a kind of calm desolation that was very hard to listen to.

  “While soldiers battled, Sipiike Kairaithin hunted us down and killed us,” Beguchren said, still with that terrible calmness. “We did not understand quickly enough… and then we found the King of Feierabiand had made a terrible bargain with the griffins and allied his country with fire. And so we were defeated. And at first we”—now he meant himself and the Arobern, Gereint guessed—“at first we thought that was the end of it.” He bowed his head for a moment, then seemed to recollect himself out of memory. He turned back to Gereint, smiling his wry, imperturbable smile. Gereint found he had preferred it when he had not known what depths of loss and grief lay behind that smile.