It took three of the sorry huts to lodge the seven of them, and the windsteeds, too big to fit any house of the village, had to be tied outside. The beasts huddled together, ruffling their fur against the sharp sea-wind. Rocannon’s striped steed scratched at the wall and complained in a mewing snarl till Kyo went out and scratched its ears. “Worse awaits him soon, poor beast,” said Mogien, sitting beside Rocannon by the stove-pit that warmed the hut. “They hate water.”
“You said at Hallan that they wouldn’t fly over the sea, and these villagers surely have no ships that would carry them. How are we going to cross the channel?”
“Have you your picture of the land?” Mogien inquired. The Angyar had no maps, and Mogien was fascinated by the Geographic Survey’s maps in the Handbook. Rocannon got the book out of the old leather pouch he had carried from world to world, and which contained the little equipment he had had with him in Hallan when the ship had been bombed—Handbook and notebooks, suit and gun, medical kit and radio, a Terran chess-set and a battered volume of Hainish poetry. At first he had kept the necklace with its sapphire in with this stuff, but last night, oppressed by the value of the thing, he had sewn the sapphire pendant up in a little bag of soft barilor-hide and strung the necklace around his own neck, under his shirt and cloak, so that it looked like an amulet and could not be lost unless his head was too.
Mogien followed with a long, hard forefinger the contours of the two Western Continents where they faced each other: the far south of Angien, with its two deep gulfs and a fat promontory between them reaching south; and across the channel, the northernmost cape of the Southwest Continent, which Mogien called Fiern. “Here we are,” Rocannon said, setting a fish vertebra from their supper on the tip of the promontory.
“And here, if these cringing fish-eating yokels speak truth, is a castle called Plenot.” Mogien put a second vertebra a half-inch east of the first one, and admired it. “A tower looks very like that from above. When I get back to Hallan, I’ll send out a hundred men on steeds to look down on the land, and from their pictures we’ll carve in stone a great picture of all Angien. Now at Plenot there will be ships—probably the ships of this place, Tolen, as well as their own. There was a feud between these two poor lords, and that’s why Tolen stands now full of wind and night. So the old man told Yahan.”
“Will Plenot lend us ships?”
“Plenot will lend us nothing. The lord of Plenot is an Errant.” This meant, in the complex code of relationships among Angyar domains, a lord banned by the rest, an outlaw, not bound by the rules of hospitality, reprisal, or restitution.
“He has only two windsteeds,” said Mogien, unbuckling his swordbelt for the night. “And his castle, they say, is built of wood.”
Next morning as they flew down the wind to that wooden castle a guard spotted them almost as they spotted the tower. The two steeds of the castle were soon aloft, circling the tower; presently they could make out little figures with bows leaning from window-slits. Clearly an Errant Lord expected no friends. Rocannon also realized now why Angyar castles were roofed over, making them cavernous and dark inside, but protecting them from an airborne enemy. Plenot was a little place, ruder even than Tolen, lacking a village of midmen, perched out on a spit of black boulders above the sea; but poor as it was, Mogien’s confidence that six men could subdue it seemed excessive. Rocannon checked the thighstraps of his saddle, shifted his grip on the long air-combat lance Mogien had given him, and cursed his luck and himself. This was no place for an ethnologist of forty-three.
Mogien, flying well ahead on his black steed, raised his lance and yelled. Rocannon’s mount put down its head and beat into full flight. The black-and-gray wings flashed up and down like vanes; the long, thick, light body was tense, thrumming with the powerful heartbeat. As the wind whistled past, the thatched tower of Plenot seemed to hurtle toward them, circled by two rearing gryphons. Rocannon crouched down on the windsteed’s back, his long lance couched ready. A happiness, an old delight was swelling in him; he laughed a little, riding the wind. Closer and closer came the rocking tower and its two winged guards, and suddenly with a piercing falsetto shout Mogien hurled his lance, a bolt of silver through the air. It hit one rider square in the chest, breaking his thighstraps with the force of the blow, and hurled him over his steed’s haunches in a clear, seemingly slow arc three hundred feet down to the breakers creaming quietly on the rocks. Mogien shot straight on past the riderless steed and opened combat with the other guard, fighting in close, trying to get a swordstroke past the lance which his opponent did not throw but used for jabbing and parrying. The four midmen on their white and gray mounts hovered nearby like terrible pigeons, ready to help but not interfering with their lord’s duel, circling just high enough that the archers below could not pierce the steeds’ leathern bellymail. But all at once all four of them, with that nerve-rending falsetto yell, closed in on the duel. For a moment there was a knot of white wings and glittering steel hanging in midair. From the knot dropped a figure that seemed to be trying to lie down on the air, turning this way and that with loose limbs seeking comfort, till it struck the castle roof and slid to a hard bed of rock below.
Now Rocannon saw why they had joined in the duel: the guard had broken its rules and struck at the steed instead of the rider. Mogien’s mount, purple blood staining one black wing, was straining inland to the dunes. Ahead of him shot the midmen, chasing the two riderless steeds, which kept circling back, trying to get to their safe stables in the castle. Rocannon headed them off, driving his steed right at them over the castle roofs. He saw Raho catch one with a long cast of his rope, and at the same moment felt something sting his leg. His jump startled his excited steed; he reined in too hard, and the steed arched up its back and for the first time since he had ridden it began to buck, dancing and prancing all over the wind above the castle. Arrows played around him like reversed rain. The midmen and Mogien mounted on a wild-eyed yellow steed shot past him, yelling and laughing. His mount straightened out and followed them. “Catch, Starlord!” Yahan yelled, and a comet with a black tail came arching at him. He caught it in self-defense, found it a lighted resin-torch, and joined the others in circling the tower at close range, trying to set its thatch roof and wooden beams alight.
“You’ve got an arrow in your left leg,” Mogien called as he passed Rocannon, who laughed hilariously and hurled his torch straight into a window-slit from which an archer leaned. “Good shot!” cried Mogien, and came plummeting down onto the tower roof, re-arising from it in a rush of flame.
Yahan and Raho were back with more sheaves of smoking torches they had set alight on the dunes, and were dropping these wherever they saw reed or wood to set afire. The tower was going up now in a roaring fountain of sparks, and the windsteeds, infuriated by constant reining-in and by the sparks stinging their coats, kept plunging down toward the roofs of the castle, making a coughing roar very horrible to hear. The upward rain of arrows had ceased, and now a man scurried out into the forecourt, wearing what looked like a wooden salad bowl on his head, and holding up in his hands what Rocannon first took for a mirror, then saw was a bowl full of water. Jerking at the reins of the yellow beast, which was still trying to get back down to its stable, Mogien rode over the man and called, “Speak quick! My men are lighting new torches!”
“Of what domain, Lord?”
“Hallan!”
“The Lord-Errant of Plenot craves time to put out the fires, Hallanlord!”
“In return for the lives and treasures of the men of Tolen, I grant it.”
“So be it,” cried the man, and, still holding up the full bowl of water, he trotted back into the castle. The attackers withdrew to the dunes and watched the Plenot folk rush out to man their pump and set up a bucket-brigade from the sea. The tower burned out, but they kept the walls and hall standing. There were only a couple of dozen of them, counting some women. When the fires were out, a group of them came on foot from the gate, over the rocky spit and up the dun
es. In front walked a tall, thin man with the walnut skin and fiery hair of the Angyar; behind him came two soldiers still wearing their salad-bowl helmets, and behind them six ragged men and women staring about sheepishly. The tall man raised in his two hands the clay bowl filled with water. “I am Ogoren of Plenot, Lord-Errant of this domain.”
“I am Mogien Halla’s heir.”
“The lives of the Tolenfolk are yours, Lord.” He nodded to the ragged group behind him. “No treasure was in Tolen.”
“There were two longships, Errant.”
“From the north the dragon flies, seeing all things,” Ogoren said rather sourly. “The ships of Tolen are yours.”
“And you will have your windsteeds back, when the ships are at Tolen wharf,” said Mogien, magnanimous.
“By what other lord had I the honor to be defeated?” Ogoren asked with a glance at Rocannon, who wore all the gear and bronze armor of an Angyar warrior, but no swords. Mogien too looked at his friend, and Rocannon responded with the first alias that came to mind, the name Kyo called him by—“Olhor,” the Wanderer.
Ogoren gazed at him curiously, then bowed to both and said, “The bowl is full, Lords.”
“Let the water not be spilled and the pact not be broken!”
Ogoren turned and strode with his two men back to his smouldering fort, not giving a glance to the freed prisoners huddled on the dune. To these Mogien said only, “Lead home my windsteed; his wing was hurt,” and, remounting the yellow beast from Plenot, he took off. Rocannon followed, looking back at the sad little group as they began their trudge home to their own ruinous domain.
By the time he reached Tolen his battle-spirits had flagged and he was cursing himself again. There had in fact been an arrow sticking out of his left calf when he dismounted on the dune, painless till he had pulled it out without stopping to see if the point were barbed, which it was. The Angyar certainly did not use poison; but there was always blood poisoning. Swayed by his companions’ genuine courage, he had been ashamed to wear his protective and almost invisible impermasuit for this foray. Owning armor that could withstand a laser-gun, he might die in this damned hovel from the scratch of a bronze-headed arrow. And he had set off to save a planet, when he could not even save his own skin.
The oldest midman from Hallan, a quiet stocky fellow named Iot, came in and almost wordlessly, gentle-mannered, knelt and washed and bandaged Rocannon’s hurt. Mogien followed, still in battle dress, looking ten feet tall with his crested helmet, and five feet wide across the shoulders exaggerated by the stiff winglike shoulderboard of his cape. Behind him came Kyo, silent as a child among the warriors of a stronger race. Then Yahan came in, and Raho, and young Bien, so that the hut creaked at the seams when they all squatted around the stove-pit. Yahan filled seven silver-bound cups, which Mogien gravely passed around. They drank. Rocannon began to feel better. Mogien inquired of his wound, and Rocannon felt much better. They drank more vaskan, while scared and admiring faces of villagers peered momentarily in the doorway from the twilit lane outside. Rocannon felt benevolent and heroic. They ate, and drank more, and then in the airless hut reeking with smoke and fried fish and harness-grease and sweat, Yahan stood up with a lyre of bronze with silver strings, and sang. He sang of Durholde of Hallan who set free the prisoners of Korhalt, in the days of the Red Lord, by the marshes of Born; and when he had sung the lineage of every warrior in that battle and every stroke he struck, he sang straight on the freeing of the Tolenfolk and the burning of Plenot Tower, of the Wanderer’s torch blazing through a rain of arrows, of the great stroke struck by Mogien Halla’s heir, the lance cast across the wind finding its mark like the unerring lance of Hendin in the days of old. Rocannon sat drunk and contented, riding the river of song, feeling himself now wholly committed, sealed by his shed blood to this world to which he had come a stranger across the gulfs of night. Only beside him now and then he sensed the presence of the little Fian, smiling, alien, serene.
IV
THE SEA STRETCHED in long misty swells under a smoking rain. No color was left in the world. Two windsteeds, wingbound and chained in the stern of the boat, lamented and yowled, and over the swells through rain and mist came a doleful echo from the other boat.
They had spent many days at Tolen, waiting till Rocannon’s leg healed, and till the black windsteed could fly again. Though these were reasons to wait, the truth was that Mogien was reluctant to leave, to cross the sea they must cross. He roamed the gray sands among the lagoons below Tolen all alone, struggling perhaps with the premonition that had visited his mother Haldre. All he could say to Rocannon was that the sound and sight of the sea made his heart heavy. When at last the black steed was fully cured, he abruptly decided to send it back to Hallan in Bien’s care, as if saving one valuable thing from peril. They had also agreed to leave the two packsteeds and most of their load to the old Lord of Tolen and his nephews, who were still creeping about trying to patch their drafty castle. So now in the two dragon-headed boats on the rainy sea were only six travelers and five steeds, all of them wet and most of them complaining.
Two morose fishermen of Tolen sailed the boat. Yahan was trying to comfort the chained steeds with a long and monotonous lament for a long-dead lord; Rocannon and the Fian, cloaked and with hoods pulled over their heads, were in the bow. “Kyo, once you spoke of mountains to the south.”
“Oh yes,” said the little man, looking quickly northward, at the lost coast of Angien.
“Do you know anything of the people that live in the southern land—in Fiern?”
His Handbook was not much help; after all, it was to fill the vast gaps in the Handbook that he had brought his Survey here. It postulated five High-Intelligence Life Forms for the planet, but described only three: the Angyar/Olgyior; the Fiia and Gdemiar; and a non-humanoid species found on the great Eastern Continent on the other side of the planet. The geographers’ notes on Southwest Continent were mere hearsay: Unconfirmed species ?4: Large humanoids said to inhabit extensive towns (?). Unconfirmed Species ?5: Winged marsupials. All in all, it was about as helpful as Kyo, who often seemed to believe that Rocannon knew the answers to all the questions he asked, and now replied like a schoolchild, “In Fiern live the Old Races, is it not so?” Rocannon had to content himself with gazing southward into the mist that hid the questionable land, while the great bound beasts howled and the rain crept chilly down his neck.
Once during the crossing he thought he heard the racket of a helicopter overhead, and was glad the fog hid them; then he shrugged. Why hide? The army using this planet as their base for interstellar warfare were not going to be very badly scared by the sight of ten men and five overgrown housecats bobbing in the rain in a pair of leaky boats…
They sailed on in a changeless circle of rain and waves. Misty darkness rose from the water. A long, cold night went by. Gray light grew, showing mist, and rain, and waves. Then suddenly the two glum sailors in each boat came alive, steering and staring anxiously ahead. A cliff loomed all at once above the boats, fragmentary in the writhing fog. As they skirted its base, boulders and wind-dwarfed trees hung high over their sails.
Yahan had been questioning one of the sailors. “He says we’ll sail past the mouth of a big river here, and on the other side is the only landingplace for a long way.” Even as he spoke the overhanging rocks dropped back into mist and a thicker fog swirled over the boat, which creaked as a new current struck her keel. The grinning dragonhead at the bow rocked and turned. The air was white and opaque; the water breaking and boiling at the sides was opaque and red. The sailors yelled to each other and to the other boat. “The river’s in flood,” Yahan said. “They’re trying to turn—Hang on!” Rocannon caught Kyo’s arm as the boat yawed and then pitched and spun on crosscurrents, doing a kind of crazy dance while the sailors fought to hold her steady, and blind mist hid the water, and the windsteeds struggled to free their wings, snarling with terror.
The dragonhead seemed to be going forward steady again, when in a
gust of fog-laden wind the unhandy boat jibbed and heeled over. The sail hit water with a slap, caught as if in glue, and pulled the boat right over on her side. Red, warm water quietly came up to Rocannon’s face, filled his mouth, filled his eyes. He held on to whatever he was holding and struggled to find the air again. It was Kyo’s arm he had hold of, and the two of them floundered in the wild sea warm as blood that swung them and rolled them and tugged them farther from the capsized boat. Rocannon yelled for help, and his voice fell dead in the blank silence of fog over the waters. Was there a shore—which way, how far? He swam after the dimming hulk of the boat, Kyo dragging on his arm.
“Rokanan!”
The dragonhead prow of the other boat loomed grinning out of the white chaos. Mogien was overboard, fighting the current beside him, getting a rope into his hands and around Kyo’s chest. Rocannon saw Mogien’s face vividly, the arched eyebrows and yellow hair dark with water. They were hauled up into the boat, Mogien last.
Yahan and one of the fishermen from Tolen had been picked up right away. The other sailor and the two windsteeds were drowned, caught under the boat. They were far enough out in the bay now that the flood-currents and winds from the river-gorge were weaker. Crowded with soaked, silent men, the boat rocked on through the red water and the wreathing fog.
“Rokanan, how comes it you’re not wet?”
Still dazed, Rocannon looked down at his sodden clothing and did not understand. Kyo, smiling, shaking with cold, answered for him: “The Wanderer wears a second skin.” Then Rocannon understood and showed Mogien the “skin” of his impermasuit, which he had put on for warmth in the damp cold last night, leaving only head and hands bare. So he still had it, and the Eye of the Sea still lay hidden on his breast; but his radio, his maps, his gun, all other links with his own civilization, were gone.
Three Hainish Novels Page 6