The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh

by C. J. Cherryh

  The woman ran, white flashing of limbs in the firelight. He jerked the horse's head over and spurred after, grinning for breath and for anticipation, reined in when she darted into the brush and the rocks—he vaulted down from the saddle and labored after, armor-burdened, in and out among the brush and the branches, with one thought now—some woman of the towns, some prize worth the keeping while she lasted, or something they had gotten hereabouts from the farms. He saw her ahead of him, naked among the rocks, trying to climb the shoulder of the mountain where it thrust out into the forest, white flesh and cloud of shadow-hair, shifting from one to the other foothold and level among the black stones. "Come down," he mocked her. "Come down."

  She turned where she stood above him, and looked at him with her pale fingers clutching the rock on her right, her hair blowing about her body. Looked up again, where the rocks became an upward thrust, a wall, unclimbable. "Come down to me," he called again. "I'm all the choice you have."

  She made a sign at him, an ancient one. The fingers let go the rock—a blur of white through shadow, a cry, a body striking the rocks. She sprawled broken and open-eyed close by him, and moisture was on his face and his hands. He wiped at his mouth and stood shuddering an instant, swore and stalked off, blood cooled, blood chilled, a sickness moiling at his gut.

  Waste. A sorry waste. No one to see it, no one to know, no one that cared for a trifle like that, to be dead over it, and useless. A little warmth, a little comfort; there was not even that.

  He found his horse, bewildered and lost in the brush, took its reins and led it back to the fire where he hoped for something of value, where two dead men lay in their blood; but the horses had run off in the dark and the woods.

  There was food, at least; he found that in the saddlebags by the fire, and chewed dried beef while he searched further. There were ordinary oddments, bits of leather and cord and a pot of salve; and wrapped in a scrap of dirty cloth—gold.

  His hands trembled on the heavy chalice-shape in unveiling it, trembled; and he laughed and thought about his luck which had been wrong all his life until now. Gold. He rummaged the other saddlebags, hefting them and feeling the weight with his heart pounding in his chest. Out of one came a second object wrapped in cloth, which glittered in the firelight, and weighed heavy in his hands. A cross. Church plunder. They had gotten to that in the last stages.

  He let it down with a wiping of his hands on his thighs, gnawed his lip and gathered it up again, shoved it into one bag. Then he snatched another bit of the beef, swallowing the last. . . found a wine flask by the fire and washed it down. He knelt there staring thoughtfully at the dead face of the first man, which lay at an odd angle on a severed neck. Familiarity tugged at him . . . someone he had seen before; but in ten years he had seen many a man on both sides, and bearded, dead and dirty faces tended to look much alike. He drank deeply, warmed the death from his own belly, got up to tend his horse and paused by the other corpse, the one the horse had trod down.

  Then familiarity did come home to him. . . long, long years, that he had known this man. Bryaut, his name was, Bryaut Dain's-son; young with him; afraid with him in his first battle; wounded in another . . . ways parted in the war and came together again here, tonight. Of a sudden the wine was sour in his mouth. He could have ridden in on the camp and Bryaut would have welcomed him. Not many men would, in these days; but this man would have. If there had been friends in his service—this was one, a long time ago, and mostly forgotten; but there was the face, no older than his, and blond, and with that scar down the brow he had gotten at Lugdan, when he himself had gotten the one on his jaw, where the beard would not grow.

  He swore, and was ashamed in front of that dead face with its eyes looking sideways toward the fire, as if it had stopped paying attention. There was a time they had talked about winning honor for themselves, he and this young man no longer young, wealth and honor. And then he laughed a sickly laugh, thinking of the church-robbing and the woman and what an end it had come to, the war and the things they had planned and the reasons they had had for going to it at all. Bright treasure and fine armor and a station close to a king; and it came all to this. Church gold and a cold woman. He tipped up the wine flask and drank and walked away, thinking with a wolf's wariness that there had been too much noise and too much firelight and that it was time to go.

  He was wiser than Bryaut, and maybe soberer. He packed the gold and the food and the things he wanted onto his horse and climbed into the saddle with the flask in his hand . . . rode off slowly, leaving the fire to die on its own, with the dead eyes staring on it. When he slept finally, it was in the saddle, with the flask empty; and the horse staggered to a stop and stood there till he mustered the strength to climb down and shelter in the brush.

  There he slept again in his armor, his sword naked across his knees—dreamed, of towns burning and of dead faces and naked white limbs plunging past him; waked with an outcry, and shuddered to sleep again.

  Dreamed of a church, and fire, and a priest nailed to his own chapel door.

  Lugdan and the mindless push of bodies, the battering, hours-long thunder of metal and human voices; and the silence after—the empty, feelingless silence—

  A stone-walled room with candles burning, a gleam of gold on the altar, the chalice brimming full, the solemn sweet chanting of voices echoing out of his youth. The Lady Chapel, the blue-robed statue with painted eyes, hands offering blessings for all who came . . . The silence fell here too, taking away the voices, and the candles went out in the wind.

  The stones became jumbled, and the wind blew, scattering smoke-black hair across pale features. The silence shrilled asunder, the shriek of the woman, the white limbs falling. . . .

  He cried out, and the horse started and shied off through the thicket, stopped when the brush stopped it and he scrambled after it cursing, still dazed with sleep and dreams, scratched by brush across his face and hands.

  Daylight had pierced the canopy of leaves. He retrieved his sword and sheathed it, checked the girth, dragged himself back into the saddle and rode on, on a trail narrower than he recalled. A bird sang, incongruous in the shadow where he traveled, under the arch of branches, some bird sitting where the sun touched the tops of the trees, some bird seeing something other than the dead brush and old leaves and the contorted trunks; and he hated it. He spurred the horse at times where the road was wider, pushed it until the froth flew back on his knees and its bony sides heaved when he let it walk. He spurred it again when he saw daylight beyond, and it ran from dark to light, slowed again, panting, under the sun, where the forest gave way to open grass and brush, and the road met another road from the west.

  It was not the way that he remembered. He traveled with the sun on his back, warming now until sweat ran under the armor and prickled in the hollows of his body and struck his padding to his sides and arms and thighs. By afternoon the way led downward again, into yet another valley, and by now he knew himself lost. There were signs of man, a boundary stone, a mark of sometime wheels on the narrow road, which wended two ways from a certain point—one which tended, wheel-rutted, west, and one which tended easterly, overgrown with grass, snaking toward a distant rim of woods.

  He had no heart now for meetings, for braving alone the farmers who would have feared him if he had come with comrades. A knight alone might have his throat cut and worse if the peasants had their chance at him. He had seen the like. It was the eastward way he chose, away from humankind and homes, only wanting to go through the land and to find himself somewhere the war had never been, where no one had heard of it or suffered of it, where he could melt down his gold and pass it off bit by bit, find a haven and a comfort for the rest of his years.

  Sometimes he would sleep as he rode, his head sinking forward on his chest while his hand, the reins wrapped about his fingers, rested behind the high bow. The horse plodded its way along, stole mouthfuls from brush along the track, dipped its head now and again to snatch at the grass which pitchi
ng movements woke him, and he would straighten his back at waking, and feel relieved at the daylight still about him. He dreamed of fire and burnings; those had been his dreams for months. He no longer started awake out of them, only shivered in the sweat-prickling sun and listened to the ordinary sounds of leather and metal moving, and the whisper of the grass and the cadence of the hooves. He tried not to sleep, not for dread of the dreams, but because of the road and the danger; but the sounds kept up, and the insects sang in the late summer sun, and try as he would his head began to nod, and his eyes to close, not for long, for a little time: the horse was only waiting its chance for thefts, and it would wake him.

  A downward step jolted him, a sudden sinking of the horse's right shoulder, a splash of water about the hooves at every move. He lifted his head in the twilight haze and saw green slim leaves about him, weeping branches and watery waste closely hemmed with trees and brush. Mud sucked, and the horse lurched across the low place, wandered onto firmer grass.

  Dubhan turned in the saddle, looking for the path, but the brush was solid behind, and the place looked no different in that direction, closed off with trees trailing their branches into the scummed water, mazed with heaps of brush and old logs and pitted with deeper pools. Willow fingers trailed over him as the horse kept its mindless course— he faced about and fended the trailers with his arm, and the horse never slowed, never hesitated, as if it had gone mad in its exhaustion, one step and the other through the sucking mud and the shallow pools. The light was going; the sky above the willow tangle was bloodied cream, the gloom stealing through the thickets and taking the color from willow and water bit by bit, fading everything to one deadly deceptive flatness. He tugged at the reins and stopped the horse, but no sooner did he let the reins slack than the horse tugged for more rein and started moving again its same slow way, never faltering but for footing in the marsh, patient in its slow self-destruction. Frogs sang a numbing song. The water gurgled and splashed about the hooves and a reek of corruption went up from the mud, cloying. The water wept, a strange liquid sound. He pulled again at the reins, and the horse—instantly responsive in battle— ignored the bit and tugged back, going madly on. He wrapped his hand the tighter in the rein and hauled back with his strength against it, forcing the beast's head back against its chest, and then he could stop it. . . but whenever he let the rein loosen, it took its head again, and bent its head this way and that against the force he brought to bear; he hauled its head aside and faced it about to confuse it from its course, but it kept turning full circle, feet sliding in the mire, and came back again to force a few steps more. He cursed it, he cajoled it, the old horse he had ridden young to the war, he reminded it of days past and the time to come, some better land, some warm shelter against the winter, no more of fighting, no more of sleeping cold. But the horse kept moving in the colorless twilight, with the sky gone now to lowering gray, and the water weeping and splashing in the silence.

  Something touched his eyes, like cobweb, crawled on his face and hands. He waved his hand, and the cloud came about him, midges started up from the reeds and the water; they crawled over his skin, buzzed about his ears, investigated the crack of his lips and settled into his eyes and his ears and were sucked up his nose. The horse snorted and threw its head, moved faster now, and Dubhan flailed about him with his free hand, wiped his eyes and blew and spat, blinded, inhaling them, clinging to the horse as the horse lashed its tail and shook itself and pitched into a lurching run. Branches whipped past, raked at Dubhan, and he tucked down as much as he could, clung to the reins and saddle and clenched his hand into the war-horse's shorn mane, shorn so no enemy could hold; and now he could not, and reeled stunned and bruised when a branch hit his shoulder and jolted him back against the cantle and the girth. The horse staggered and slid in the mud, recovered itself, feet wide-braced, head down.

  Then the head came up and the legs heaved and the horse waded fetlock deep, slowly, on its winding course, while the sobbing sounded clearer than before. Dubhan clung, wiped at his eyes with one hand, body moving to the relentless moving of the beast he rode. He crossed himself with that hand, and remembered what he had in the saddlebags—a memory too of painted eyes, and fire and darkness, voices silenced. Fear gathered in his gut and settled lower and sent up coils that knotted about his heart. His hand no longer fought the reins . . . no hope now of going back, in that mad course he had no idea which way they had turned, or how far they had come. He had faith now only in the horse's madness, that terror might be driving it, that his brave horse which had charged at the king's iron lines might be running now, and it might in its madness get him through this place if only it could walk the night through and not leave him afoot here and lost. He talked to it, he patted its gaunt neck, he pleaded; but it changed its going not at all, neither faster nor slower, though the breath came hollow from its mouth and its shoulders were lathered with sweat.

  They passed into deeper shadow, under aged willows, through curtains of branches which trailed cutting caresses and kept night under their canopies, back into twilight and into night again, and the sobbing grew more human, prickling the hairs at Dubhan's nape and freezing the life from his hands and feet. It became like a child's weeping, some lost soul complaining in the night; it came from left and right and behind him, from above, in the trees, and from before. There was no sound but that; it wrapped him about. And suddenly in a prickling of apprehension he turned in the saddle and jerked free the saddlebag, tore it open and flung out the cup and the cross, which spun with a cold gleaming through the curtain of willow branches and struck the black water with a deep sound, swallowed up. The horse never ceased to move. He turned about again in time to fend the branches, sweating and cold at once. The gold was gone. It bought him nothing; the sobbing was before him now, and above, a gleam of pallor in the gnarled willow-limbs of the next tree, a shadow-fall of hair. He saw a ghost, and drove spurs into the horse.

  The beast flinched, and stopped, panting bellowslike between his legs, head sinking. He looked up into the branches and the gleam of flesh was gone—looked down and beside him and a white figure with shadow-hair moved the willow branches aside—all naked she was, and small. . . and came toward him with hands held out, a piquant face with vast dark eyes, a veil of hair that moved like smoke about white skin. The eyes swam with tears in the halflight of the night. The hands pleaded. The limbs were thin . . . a child's stature, a child's face. He dug the spurs at the horse to ride past as he had ridden past the war's abandoned waifs: it was their eyes he saw, their pleading hands, their gaunt ribs and matted hair and swollen bellies naked to the cold; but the horse stayed and the small hands clutched at his stirrup and the face which looked up to him was fair.

  "Take me home," she asked of him. "I'm cold."

  He kicked the stirrup to shake her fingers loose. She started back and stood there, her hair for a veil about her breasts if she had any, her body white and touched with shadow between the thighs like another whiteness in the dark, among the rocks; but these eyes were live and they stared, bruised and dark with fear.

  "Was it you," he asked, "crying?"

  "I gathered flowers," she said. "And men came." She began to cry again, tiny sobs. "I was running home."

  His belief caught at that kind of story, held onto it double-fisted, an ugly thing and the kind of thing the world was, that made of the girl only a girl and the marsh only a river's sink and some homely place of safety not far from here. Slowly his hand reached out for her. She came and took it, her fingers cold and weak in his big hand; he gained his power to move and caught her frail wrist with the other hand, hauled her up before him—no weight at all for his arms. The horse began to move before she was settled; he adjusted the reins, tucked her up against him and her head burrowed against his shoulder, her arms going about his neck. His hand about her ribs felt not bone but softness swelling beneath his fingers, smooth skin; his eyes looking down saw a dark head and a flood of shadowy hair, and the rising moon played sh
adow-tricks on the childish body, rounded a naked hip, lengthened thighs and cast shadows between. Her body grew warm. She shifted and moved her legs, her arms hugging him the tighter, and the blood in him grew warm. Willow branches trailed over them with the horse's wandering and he no more than noticed, obsessed with his hands which might shift and not find objection to their exploring, with a thin body the mail kept from him, kept him from feeling with his.

  It was a child's clinging, a child's fear; he kept the hands still where they were, on naked back and under naked knees, and patted her and soothed her, with a quieter warming in his blood that came from another human body in the night, a child's arms that expected no harm of him; and he gave none—should not be carrying double on the horse, his numbed wits recollected. He ought to get down and lead, the child sitting in the saddle, but the horse moved steadily and she seemed no weight at all on him, slept now, as it seemed, one arm falling from his neck to lie in her lap, delicate fingers upturned in the moonlight like some rare waterflower. Moonlight lay bright beyond the branches; the horse walked now on solid ground. The branches parted on a road, flat and broad, and he blinked in sleep-dulled amazement, not remembering how that had started or when they had come on it.

  Hills shadowed against the night sky, a darkness against the stars: a mass of stone hove up before that, on the very roadside, placed like some wayside inn, but warlike, blockish, tall, a jumble of planes and shadow, far other than the woodcutter's cottage he had imagined.

  "Child," he whispered. "Child. Is this your home?"