Guardians of the Lost

by Margaret Weis

The Sovereign Stone travels north, Dagnarus said. It travels north and it travels south.

  Shakur turned his horse’s head north.

  The Sovereign Stone in its magical knapsack, held by the pecwae, traveled north. And so did the blood knife.

  The bearer of sad news and a love token, Bashae had a solemn responsibility, but he did not let that stand in the way of enjoying the trip. Every day brought a wonderful new experience, new sights, new sounds. Whatever the day brought, Bashae never failed to thank the gods for it when he went to his rest, adding his prayers to the muttered prayers of the Grandmother, as he fell asleep to the clicking of her stones.

  Jessan enjoyed himself, too, although not in the light-hearted manner of his friend. Jessan was always conscious of the burden of responsibility he carried, responsibility for the safety of the two pecwae, responsibility for the successful conclusion of the journey and the safe delivery of the token. He was the guide. He determined their course each day. He decided how far they should travel and when they could rest. He selected the night’s camp site.

  At the start of their journey, he wanted to set a watch, for evil beasts roamed the forests and sometimes evil men, both of whom preyed on the hapless traveler, alone in the wilderness. Bashae offered to split the night duties with Jessan.

  The very first night, Bashae had every good intention of remaining awake and alert, but the hours of darkness are the time to visit the sleep-world. Jessan woke to find his friend curled up in a ball like a dormouse, slumbering soundly. Since Jessan could not stay awake all night and paddle the boat all the next day, he reluctantly abandoned the idea of setting a watch, adding that he thought it quite likely their throats would be cut while they slept.

  “Bah!” the Grandmother stated. “What good is setting a watch anyway? Mortal eyes are blinded by the darkness and see too little. Mortal ears are open to every little sound and hear too much. The stick”—she pointed to the walking cane with the agate eyes—“sees no evil anywhere around us. You can trust the stick.”

  Jessan looked dubious.

  “Very well,” the Grandmother added, put out, “if it will make you sleep soundly in the night and not keep waking me up with your prowling about, I will insure that no one will disturb us.”

  That night, after they cooked their meal of fish, they laid out their blankets close together. The Grandmother insisted that they sleep near each other, in an open area. As Jessan watched, the Grandmother walked a circle around the blankets, muttering to herself and depositing, at fixed intervals, a turquoise stone.

  “Twenty-seven stones,” she said. “A circle of protection through which nothing with evil intent can pass.”

  Mindful of his uncle’s decree that Jessan must treat the Grandmother with respect, he dutifully held his tongue each night after that, while the Grandmother went through her muttering and stone planting and he slept without a murmur inside the circle she created. But he slept with one eye and one ear open, as the saying went.

  Whether it was the stones or Jessan’s watchfulness or the Grandmother’s mutterings, something worked, for during the weeks they traveled in their boat down the Big Blue river, they were not harmed by beast nor man.

  The Big Blue river was narrow and swift flowing with occasional dangerous rapids. Whenever they came to a place where the water frothed and bubbled and crashed, they were forced to haul the boat out of the water and portage overland until they passed the raging water and could once more resume their journey. The Trevenici build boats that are lightweight and easy to carry—for two Trevenici. Hauling the boat out of the water and overland for sometimes several miles proved more of a challenge for one Trevenici and one pecwae.

  Jessan took the prow and Bashae the stern. The pecwae didn’t have the strength in his arms to lift the boat over his head and so he was forced to hoist the overturned boat on his rounded back. The first time Bashae tried this, he took five steps and then collapsed beneath the boat’s weight.

  “At this rate,” Jessan said, extricating his friend from under the boat, “we will reach the elven lands when I am so old that I will be tripping over my beard. What are we going to do?”

  The Grandmother began to sing.

  She sang of thistles and cottonweed floating in the wind, of spider’s webs and duck feathers and corn silks. As she sang, she ran her gnarled hand over the smooth planed wood that covered the boat and suddenly the boat was light enough that Bashae might have carried it all by himself and gone running away with it. After that, the trip down the Big Blue river was peaceful, idyllic. Every time they came to a portage, the Grandmother sang the boat up onto their shoulders.

  More than once, as he walked along the portage path made by many feet over the hundreds of years his people had been navigating the Big Blue river, Jessan recalled how irate he had been when he’d first heard the Grandmother had decided to come with them. He had feared she would be a drag on them, a burden slowing them down. He had learned a valuable lesson. He was unfailingly respectful to the Grandmother after that and even helped her gather up her twenty-seven turquoise stones in the morning. If the Grandmother noticed this change and smiled, she was wise enough to smile her smile when Jessan had his back turned.

  The Big Blue river flowed beneath thickly wooded banks. Tree limbs overhung the water that was dappled with patches of darkness and bright sunlight. Weeping willows clung to the shore. Bashae felt the delicate leaves brush his upturned face as the boat glided beneath them. Thanks to the fast flowing river and the Grandmother’s assistance with the portage, this first part of their journey was the easy part.

  Once they left the Big Blue river, they would have to travel north up the Sea of Redesh. Their going would be slower for they would not have the current to help them. And so Jessan decreed (much to his private regret) that they did not have time to waste to make a detour to Vilda Harn, the town the Trevenici claim as theirs.

  Bashae might have tried to wheedle Jessan into changing his mind, but the pecwae was excited to see the Sea of Redesh for, he had been told, it was such a large body of water that it extended clear to the horizon. Jessan thought they were near the sea (that wasn’t really a sea at all, but a large lake), although he had no way of knowing for certain. Raven had estimated that it would take them twenty days to travel down the Big Blue river. They were coming up on their twentieth sunrise.

  “According to my uncle, before we enter the Sea of Redesh, we will pass between the Lovers—two enormous rock formations, many times bigger than a man, that stand one on either side of the Big Blue river,” Jessan said that morning, as they took their places in the boat.

  He sat at the rear, propelling the boat forward with strong, untiring strokes. The Grandmother sat in the center, saying little to the young men, but often murmuring or humming softly to herself. Sometimes she would hoist the stick with the agate eyes high into the air, turning it this way and that, giving each eye a chance to see. Satisfied, she would rest the stick carefully in the bottom of the boat. Bashae sat at the prow, sometimes helping to paddle if the current was very strong, but more often casting out a line and hook, baited with bread dough, to catch trout that he would wrap in leaves and cook on heated rocks.

  The twelfth day, the Grandmother lifted the seeing stick up into the air and, after a moment, announced, “We are close. Very close. Around the next bend.”

  Jessan made a face. He knew better than to scorn pecwae magic, but he also knew with all the certainty of eighteen years that a stick was a stick and agates were rocks. He also guessed that they were close to the mouth of the river, but not because any agate eyeball told him. He could tell by signs the river was giving him—eddies and currents flowing in odd directions, strands of water that were a different color, the gradual widening of the banks.

  Around the next bend, the Lovers came into view. The Grandmother snorted with satisfaction. Jessan smiled and shook his head and told the wildly excited Bashae to sit down or he was going to overturn the boat.

  The two
strange rock formations leaned toward each other, but did not touch, although they came close. The Trevenici had woven a legend around them, that they were two lovers from warring tribes who had been barred by sensible parents from having anything to do with each other. The lovers had disobeyed their parents and met on the river bank. Because of their disobedience to their parents, they had been turned to rock and made to stand here as a warning to rebellious children.

  Bashae gazed up, open-mouthed in awe and wonder, as the boat slid beneath the towering rocks that leaned at a perilous angle and looked as if they might topple at any moment and crush those who sailed beneath. A gap of no more than five feet separated the rocks that were sheer, smooth-sided, with nary a hand- or foothold to be seen.

  “My uncle says that whenever a group of our people travel this river, they halt their journey so that every warrior can test his courage by climbing the rock formation, then leaping across that gap,” said Jessan.

  After they shot past the rocks, Jessan headed immediately for shore, for Ravenstrike had warned him that once they passed between the Lovers, they must make landfall, for farther downstream the river tumbled over a small spillway. This would be their last portage and it would be the longest, about five miles. At the end, they would put the boat in the water of the Sea of Redesh.

  Climbing out of the boat, the Grandmother hoisted the stick into the air to have a look around. Jessan hauled the boat up onto the bank, while Bashae went to talk to a group of deer who had come to the water’s edge. Both the deer and the stick reported that no one had been in these parts in recent days. Jessan could tell the same from the lack of tracks in the damp mud along this popular portage site. Glancing at the sun, he concluded that they had plenty of daylight left. They could travel a couple of miles and camp closer to the Sea. The Grandmother sang her song. They hoisted the boat onto their shoulders and started off.

  That day was the first day of the journey that Bashae had not had a chance to catch fish. When they made camp that night, the Grandmother cooked up a stew of wild onions and garlic with some sort of green leaves tossed in. She and Bashae were content to eat the resulting green sodden mass, but Jessan had worked hard that day and felt the need for meat. He went off to hunt.

  He saw several squirrels, but they were too quick for him. Taking to the trees, they chattered at him in irritation and threw nut shells on his head. Padding soft-footed, he came upon a young rabbit feeding on some dandelion leaves. Jessan came quite close, before the rabbit heard him. Jessan pounced. The rabbit bolted and would have got away, but that it ran straight into a tangle of brambles.

  Jessan caught the rabbit. Drawing the bone knife, he quickly ended its terror and its struggles by slitting its throat. The rabbit’s warm blood flowed over the knife. Far away, the Vrykyl Shakur tasted the blood and saw an image in his mind.

  Jessan had not used the bone knife up to this point; there had been no need. He was impressed to find how sharp it was, how cleanly it cut. Jessan dressed the rabbit, cooked it and ate it out of sight of their camp. He told himself he did this because he did not want to offend the pecwae by eating meat in front of them. This was only an excuse. The pecwae were used to the meat-eating habits of the Trevenici and with the pecwae’s casual “live and let live” attitude toward life, neither would have been at all upset.

  In truth, Jessan was loath to use the bone knife around the two pecwae, particularly the Grandmother. He cleaned the knife in a nearby stream and returned to camp just as the Grandmother was placing her twenty-seven stones around the campsite. She asked if he had eaten well and said that they had saved him some boiled greens, if he wanted some.

  Jessan politely declined. They spread out their bedrolls in the protective circle and went to sleep.

  Eyes were looking for him. Terrible eyes. Eyes of fire in a head of darkness. The eyes had been looking in another direction, but now they turned toward him. Jessan was afraid for the eyes to see him. He cowered in a bush, the body of a freshly killed rabbit in his hand, the blood pulsing warm from the rabbit. The eyes had almost found him…

  Jessan woke with a start. Jumping to his feet, he looked around the campsite and beyond, into the woods, out to the river, to the dark water flowing past, murmuring quietly to itself. He listened and sniffed the air, but he sensed nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Close by, Bashae and the Grandmother both slept. Bashae’s sleep was deep and calm. The Grandmother was restless, however, tossing and crying out. Her hand reached for the stick with the agates, touched it. She seemed reassured when she found it, for she sighed and ceased to talk.

  Jessan looked sharply at the agate stick. Lit by the lambent light of the stars and a pale, thin moon, the agates shone white, like eyes that are wide open. Perhaps it was these blasted agates that had caused the strange and disquieting dream.

  Jessan lay back down on his blanket.

  “Superstitious old woman,” he said to himself grumpily.

  Jessan rarely woke in the night and, when he did, he could always return to sleep easily. This night, however, he lay awake, staring at the stars until the gray light of dawn caused the stars’ light to diminish.

  They made a late start the next morning, due to the fact that Jessan slept past dawn. Bashae had to wake him to come to breakfast. This delighted the pecwae, for usually it was Jessan who was tossing water on Bashae’s face, not the other way around.

  Jessan woke in a bad mood. He did not see the joke. Scowling at Bashae, Jessan told him churlishly to act his age. He bade a cheerless good morning to the Grandmother, ate his food swiftly without seeming to taste it and fidgeted impatiently as she gathered up the turquoise protection stones. When she raised the sight stick into the air for the agate eyes to have a look at the morning, Jessan muttered something about seeing to the boat and stalked out of camp.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Bashae wondered, staring at Jessan’s back. He went over to shake out Jessan’s blanket, that he had forgotten. “Maybe he slept on an ant hill.”

  The Grandmother said nothing. She stood staring at the sight stick, turning it this way and that, holding the stick in the air longer than usual. When she did finally lower the stick, she glanced, frowning, after Jessan.

  “What is it, Grandmother?” Bashae asked, neatly rolling Jessan’s blanket. “What do you see?”

  She shook her head. The Grandmother helped Bashae break camp, but she was preoccupied, thoughtful and refused to heed Bashae’s repeated questions. She told him sharply to cease pestering her.

  Admiring the beauty of the sunlight glistening on the water, Jessan took himself to task for punishing his companions for his own sleepless night. When they came to meet him, he made an extra effort at good humor, his way of apologizing.

  “A half-day’s walk should bring us to a place where we can safely put the boat in the lake,” he said cheerfully. “We should make good time. There is a trail. If you will sing the boat, Grandmother—”

  “Evil walked close to our camp last night,” the Grandmother stated abruptly.

  Jessan’s good mood vanished, shredded like the morning mists. He stared at her in shock, in sudden dry-mouthed silence, not knowing what to say.

  “It passed by us,” she continued, waving her hand to illustrate its passing. “But it was there.”

  Jessan opened his mouth, closed it again, moistened his lips. “I thought I heard something. I got up in the night but I couldn’t see anything.”

  The Grandmother stared at him, as if she would sift his soul. Her gaze made him uncomfortable.

  “At least, it’s gone now,” he said with a shrug and an attempt at nonchalance. He shifted his head, shaded his eyes with his hand to look up the trail.

  “Yes,” said the Grandmother. “It is gone. For now.”

  “What was it, do you think, Grandmother?” Bashae asked with interest. “A bear going to kill us? Wolves?”

  “The bear and the wolf are not evil,” the Grandmother returned in rebuking tones
. “When they kill, they do so out of fear or out of hunger. Only man kills out of the darkness of his heart.”

  “No one tried to kill us last night,” Jessan said impatiently, thinking this had gone far enough.

  Snatching his bedroll from Bashae without so much as a thank you, Jessan slung the rope that held it together over one shoulder. “I looked for tracks this morning. There aren’t any, as you can see for yourself.”

  “I did not say the evil walked with feet,” the Grandmother retorted with dignity.

  She began to sing in her high-pitched, reedy voice. After another long look at her, Jessan turned and lifted up his end of the boat.

  “Well?” he demanded of Bashae. “Are you just going to stand there?”

  Bashae looked from one grim face to the other. Tying on his own bedroll, he slung the knapsack over his shoulder and hoisted up his end of the boat. They set out along a trail that had been here for centuries. The Grandmother followed along behind, the stones that decorated her skirts clicking, the silver bells ringing, the stewpot that rode in a notch on the top of the sight stick clinking.

  “His bed must have been crawling with ants last night,” Bashae said, but he took care to say it to himself.

  Sunshine and fresh air and exercise drove away the dream’s horrors. Jessan relaxed and, after a few miles, began to sing a walking song. Bashae joined in the singing good-naturedly; pecwae dislike confrontation and are always quick to forgive and forget. The Grandmother kept silent, but she appeared to approve of the song, for she altered the rhythm of her walk to make the silver bells jingle in time to the steady beat.

  Reaching the spillway, they halted to watch in silent awe the rush of water flowing over rocks that had long ago been worn smooth. This was not a fall, not a cascade. The water did not have far to drop and flowed in almost silence, with only a bubbling churning at the bottom. The water was clear. They could see the rocks through it, even see fish plunge over the spillway, presumably taking no harm, for there were fish in the water below, calmly swimming away.