The Window and the Mirror

by Henry Thomas

  She mounted her gray mare and laid the staff across her lap. She spoke a word to the mare and together they set off toward the east and the rising sun.

  Joth stood dumbly for a moment, and then mounted the white gelding and followed, ponying the bay behind him. He muttered a curse to himself under his breath and thought that his fortune had taken a horrid turn as he kicked his mount up and matched pace with Eilyth.

  They made their way through the rolling hills over the next few days, camping near the streams that flowed down from the mountains to the west, the mountains that marked the border between their respective lands. After two days, as they sat near a fire and ate the broth that Eilyth prepared every evening with their bread, Joth asked Eilyth what she had meant regarding the colors of horses.

  “White is the color of peace. Bay is the color of a war horse, because brown is the color of the earth and it is for the earth that we as a people engage in war.”

  “When I stole the white horse and the bay horse, what did that mean?”

  “That you saved your life, and the life of your friend. You chose wisely, as my father said.”

  And so the People had thought he was sending them a message of peace because he had stolen a white horse and placed a wounded man on the back of a bay. “Lady,” he said, “Eilyth. Listen to me, I didn’t choose the colors of those horses because I knew anything. I just picked the best two I could find in a hurry.” He passed the wineskin back to her. “I’m not wise.”

  She said something in her own tongue and laughed to herself. “Silly Joth. Wisdom does not choose sides. It simply is.”

  He shook his head obstinately. “I’m a simple man. I don’t understand this, and I feel like I’m out of my depth here with you.”

  Eilyth smiled at him. “You are indeed, Oestman.”

  All he could do was go red and look at his hands. “I mean to say that I don’t understand. Anything.”

  “That is the first step to understanding.” She stood and moved to her tent. “I shook you, and now you become awake.”

  “What of your horse?”

  She smiled again and threw open the flap to her tent. “Aila? She is gray, and gray is the color of wisdom.”

  Joth was left staring at the coals and contemplating her words. She shook him, she said. Yes, she had shaken him, in his heart and soul she had shaken him and his understanding of the world and who he was. It was a long time that he lay thinking before sleep overtook him.

  After the fifth day they came upon the Magister’s Road. The sky was clouded over and the air was misty cool and their breath and the breath of their horses frosted as they stopped and took in the way before them. It was a touchstone of familiarity for Joth to see the cobbled and raised road, wide and gray, cutting a swath through the green and yellow of the low hills that stretched on for as far as the eye could see. It was broad enough for four wagons to travel abreast upon. After weeks of traveling game trails and dirt tracks through the mountains and hills the road seemed incongruous and unnatural to the landscape, even for Joth.

  Eilyth regarded it with wonder. “They made this?” She asked, amazement in her voice.

  “Yes, lady.”

  “How many worked upon this?” She studied it with narrowed eyes.

  “I know not. Many, I’ll wager.”

  “It stretches to the cities?”

  “Yes, to several of them.” Joth wondered what Eilyth would think about the inns and small villages that had grown up around the road as they made their way deeper into Oesteria, what her idea of a city even was.

  She shook her head for a long moment and sat her horse. Finally she spoke. “Which direction will we take now?”

  “We shall go this way,” he said as he pointed. “North by northeast. To Borsford.”

  He had never been to Borsford, but Wat had told him the way. Wat had written down orders for him as he had said he would, stamped it with his signet ring, and made it look very official, even wording it as though the orders had come from Lord Uhlmet. On a separate scrap of parchment he had drawn a rough map from the Magister’s road to Borsford. Wat had been to both Borsford and Twinton. He used to work as a courier in his youth before he became a soldier. Joth had never seen a city outside of Immerdale or Trieston, where he was raised, but that was hardly a city, more like a hamlet; and Immerdale was just a fortress with a town sprung up around it, nothing like the big cities of the east, like Twinton. Now he was meant to take the girl to the airship harbor and to travel like a lord and seek audience with the High Mage. How fortune had spun her wheel, Joth thought ruefully; hopefully they would not hang him for desertion in Twinton, but perhaps Wat’s orders would save his skin.

  Eilyth was looking at the stones as if they were somehow animated, as though the road itself might leap into action at any given moment and attack. “The horses won’t like it,” she said. “Let us ride alongside of it.”

  Joth nodded. The way he looked at it the horses did not have a say in things, but it was better to listen to the lady and to do as she wished. She had queer notions about horses, but she knew them well. Joth was wise enough to know that much at least.

  They rode along beside the Magister’s Road for two days and camped near the water that they found there. After the first day Eilyth stopped regarding the road as though it might rear up and grow teeth to bite her, and they ventured onto its cobbled stones for a few miles, their horses stepping cautiously at first before they became used to the sound of their own hooves on the smoothly paved road.

  The iron shoes rang out boldly in the quiet stillness, and a great flock of birds took flight from a copse of trees in the distance ahead of them. The People kept their horses shod, at least, Joth had noted. He had grown used to riding now without stirrups, as strange as it had seemed to him at first. He still preferred stirrups, but it was not completely uncomfortable to ride without them once one grew accustomed to it. At first he had relied on using his legs too much and they had become cramped and sore, but after a few days of traveling he had learned to relax and this had made a world of difference.

  Eilyth rode along the paved way for a while and then moved off back to the low trail beside the road, saying that her mare was not used to the stones. “I shall teach her a little each day and she will know it better.”

  “As you like, lady.” Joth stayed on the road for a while longer but then moved off when he understood that she had meant that incremental teaching for all of the horses they had brought over from the land of the People.

  She smiled at him then and said, “You learn a little each day too, it seems.”

  Joth felt his face go red when she laughed at her own jest, but then he was laughing too and he realized that Eilyth was only having a go at him. It was hard to fear her when she was lighthearted with him. It was hard for him not to stare at her and regard her with wonder at the same time. She did frighten him, but not because of who she was. He was more afraid of what she was and the mysteries of her powers and his ignorance of them, his ignorance of everything about her that he did not have the power to understand. She made him feel ignorant, brutish, and ugly, because she was the opposite of all of those comparisons he had imposed between her and himself.

  Once they had left the border hills, the undulating landscape grew more and more even and flat. They saw no travelers on their journey and Joth felt very much alone and isolated, and he asked Eilyth if she felt the same.

  “I never feel alone. Even when I am alone, I’m never alone,” she replied.

  Joth nodded again for what must have been the thousandth time.

  “You nod, Joth, but you don’t understand.”

  Joth sighed heavily. He was becoming weary of feeling like he was being lectured every time he opened his stupid mouth. He could say that the sky were blue and he would catch an earful of the varying shades of blue that the sky could appear to her, all of them differe
nt than his own.

  “I was only saying that it feels lonely out here, that’s all. I was just trying to make some pleasant conversation, I suppose.” He did not mean it to sound petulant but it did.

  “You grow impatient with me.” She smiled. “Everything is alive around you, everything is talking to you. How can you think that you are alone anywhere there is life growing?”

  Joth knew that she was right; their horses had personalities like people, he knew that. There were birds and plants and trees and there were the two of them, himself and Eilyth, to share ideas and conversation; but Joth was used to living in a community of people, moving in groups, and working in routines of daily regularity. He was used to seeing the same faces everyday at mess, used to his habits and theirs; it gave him a sense of comfort and security. He was not like Eilyth and her people, as much as he could appreciate them now that he had lived among them. He was an Oesterman, and that was who he was, that was all that he was. He said as much to Eilyth. She only laughed at him and shook her head.

  “You are one of the People now—as you always have been, Joth Andries. The ‘life’ that you speak of is a lie. Your old life is gone.”

  Joth could only stare as she stepped her horse out ahead of him.

  Eight

  Rhael Uhlmet was alone in the dark, naked and cold and covered in his own filth. His elbows were bloody and sore, and they were the only things keeping him from plummeting deeper into the chasm that the dirty savages had tossed him weeks ago, or what he supposed may have been weeks ago. He actually had no idea if it were day or night or for how long he had been suffering in this horrid pit the old cruel savage had sentenced him to linger. Half crazed, half starved, he had screamed and screamed until his voice failed him.

  Then finally after what seemed to have been seasons pass-ing, a round loaf and a gourd filled with water were lowered down to him on a string to where he lay straining and bracing his raw hands and feet against the chasm walls. They had kicked him head first into the rocky hole after dragging him on his spent limbs from the Roundhouse. He had bounced against the rough walls, scrambling for handholds or footholds, any way to arrest his momentum as he plunged down and down into the pitch black abyss. The chasm seemed to narrow and twist in such a way that every sharp edge and jagged outcrop would find his soft tissue and send him rebounding and hurtling toward the next hard unyielding surface. His hands were torn to shreds and his head was throbbing and bleeding. He had spent the longest stint of his time in the chasm wedged into the narrow choking passage upside down, his knees and shins pressing his back against the opposing wall, hanging there like some kind of misbegotten animal. Like an animal he had covered himself with his own urine and feces from his topsy-turvy positioning in a most disgusting manner. The loaves and gourds on strings had come irregularly, and never seemed to be enough to satisfy his needs. His thirst was such that he had even attempted to drink his own urine as it streamed past his chin, but it only made him retch.

  When his legs finally went slack and he tumbled further down the shaft, he managed to cover his already filthy, wounded body with whatever vomit had managed to cling to the rough walls of his dark hellish prison. His arms had trembled and shook and at last given out on him. Again he tumbled concussively down through the shaft until at last he bounced and rebounded to a stop in the inky darkness. A low, almost inaudible moan escaped his split lips. One eye blinked unavailingly in the black, the other swollen shut beneath a bleeding goose egg protruding from his once proud brow. Mage Imperator Rhael Lord Uhlmet puked and gagged on the stony floor of the cavern, unable to move except for his broken body’s spasms. Wracked with pain, he wept like the broken man that he was; but his weeping was born of pain; compassion never entered into his thoughts. It was as strange to him as the idea of traveling on land might seem to a creature born of the sea. He had no feelings of guilt or shame for his actions, he only cared for his predicament and his insatiable desire for power and knowledge, and above all, revenge. He wanted revenge against the cruel stupid savages who had been so bold as to think that they had any rights whatsoever to challenge the Magistry’s own representative, himself, and think that they could punish him for any perceived wrongdoings in such an arrogant and overt manner. Once he found himself outside of this cursed pit and back in Oesteria, in civilization, he would have any survivors of his company’s soldiers hanged and mount a new expedition, except this time he would see to it personally that the savages were brought to their knees once and for all. He would end the problem of “sharing the land” through extermination of their kind and culture, and he would see to it personally. So vehement was his hatred that he managed to raise himself up and take a shaking step on his one good leg before his other folded underneath him like a wet reed, broken and useless. He screamed in pain and whimpered there again on the floor, then dragged himself along with his hands and one good knee until he hit a wall.

  Rhael began to follow it in the darkness, his hands becoming his eyes as he sought to chart his prison within the vastness of his throbbing head. Such a mind he had, such a powerful brain full of thought and knowledge, and yet it was useless in his present situation; it frustrated and unmanned him to be subjected to such physical pain and mental punishment. A highborn man made to crawl like a worm through the bowels of the earth, this crime far outstripped his own alleged crime of destroying those savage children in an effort to understand magical energies. It was so unfair and ill-conceived. How could they judge him in any light when their lives were so meaningless? He wanted to get his hands around all of their throats at once and throttle them until their eyes bulged out of their heads. He would return at the head of an army, with thirty mages under him all quaffing the finest elixirs and burning holes through the eyes of the self-appointed leaders and elders of these pig folk. He would smell that crisp smell of burning flesh and revel in it. Like the smell of bacon to a hungry man, thought Rhael, that is the way these savages will smell to me as they fry and spasm under my energies; I will fry them all, he vowed.

  He pulled himself along for as far as he could but all he felt was an unyielding span of rough cavern wall. His ears had stopped ringing and there was something in the darkness. It was faint, but it sounded like water dripping. At once he began to move toward the sound, his powerful thirst urging him on. He began to fantasize about finding a great pool of water that he could bathe his wounds in, an endless supply of drinking water. Perhaps there would be some creatures inside that he could eat and gain sustenance, replenish his strength and climb his way back up through the chasm and throw his captors back down the way he had come. His split and broken lips cracked a grim smile in the lightless cavern that even the stark yellowy whiteness of his teeth could not reveal. They seek to make this my tomb, Rhael thought, but it is I who shall entomb them before this is over. There will be a great reckoning for the Dawn Tribe, a great reckoning indeed. He willed the thought into a steely hardness and let it seep down into his bones as he crawled his way toward the sound of the phantom spring. As he felt his way with one ragged hand on the floor and the other testing at the craggy wall for what felt like ages, his wall hand gave way and he noticed an empty place, a recession large enough for him to fit his head inside. When he pushed his head cautiously inside he felt cool air and the dripping sound grew louder. A rush of excitement filled him. It was not merely a recessed place he had found; it was a way through the wall and into another cavern, perhaps even a way out of his prison. He scraped and pushed and cried out and shoved himself painfully through the fissure in the stone, bleeding and cursing and panicking as his shoulders became wedged and he was for a long moment stuck there in his blind passage with no way to go forward or back. Feeling his breath coming in ragged gasps, he at last wriggled and inched his way free and through the fissure to the other side where the dripping was louder and the air was cooler. Perhaps it was even moving and flowing through an opening in the walls somewhere. If only he could see something, if only the
re was light. He began to weep again. Stop it! Stop it! He shouted at himself in his head, you mustn’t weep Rhael! He was suddenly a child again before his lord father, crying as he explained himself and his sorry state. Rhael had been thirteen then. His father was the Lord Uhlmet at that time, and Rhael had been run out of the village by his lord father’s peasants after he had taken a sword and slain some dogs there. He was only having a bit of fun and his father was the lord of the land, Rhael could do anything he wanted. One of the brazen peasants had even managed to wound him with his staff, and he wept and wept as he showed his father how they had abused him. Then his father had slapped him once across the mouth so hard that his head spun round and he found himself gasping on the cold stones of his lord father’s study, shocked into a tearless state.

  “Better now that you have silenced your womanly ways.” His lord father had said it so calmly.

  “Now you shall return to the village and mete out our justice.”

  He had ridden into the town then with his father’s men and hanged every one of the perpetrators, even a few who had nothing to do with it, the ones whom had looked at Rhael in ways that he did not like. He had laughed as the dying boys jerked and danced, some of them getting erections or soiling themselves as they died. Oh, how the womenfolk had wailed then. He wanted to see what happened to a woman when she was hanged, but his father’s men did not let him hang the girl. They had said that the Lords Uhlmet were not hangers of women. How his father had beat him upon his return. He had called him a fool and threatened to disown him. Rhael had taken his punishment like a man, and he had not wept once. So fine were his memories of killing the peasants. His father was dead now, perhaps when he made it away from this cursed place then Rhael would change the traditional stance of the Lords Uhlmet on the hanging of women. But the peasants left the land after that incident, they had fled and sought refuge in neighboring fiefdoms even though that was a crime punishable by death.