Wall of Shiuan com-2

by C. J. Cherryh

  The hills cut them off from view of what lay behind, gray-green hills that opened constantly before them and closed behind; and gradually their steady pace brought them to the head of the long line of weary folk. They rode slowly there, for there was nowhere to go but where the column went, and no profit in opening a wide lead.

  They were first to reach the hillside that overlooked the lately flooded plain, the rift of the Suvoj, where still great pools showed pewter faces to the clouded sky, small lakes, rocks that upthrust strange shapes, stone more solid than the water had yet availed to wear away; it was a bleak and dead place, stretching far to the other hills, but the road went through it until the river, and there the stones made only a ripple under the surface of the flood.

  A stench went up from the rotting land, the smell of the sea mingled with dying things. Vanye swore in disgust when the wind carried it to them, and when he looked toward the horizon he saw that the hills ended and melted into gray, that was the edge of the world.

  “The tide comes in here,” murmured Jhirun. “It overcomes the river, as it does the Aj.”

  “And goes out again,” said Morgaine, “tonight.”

  “It may be,” said Jhirun, “it may be. Already it is on the ebb.”

  The noise of others intruded on them, the advance of the column that came blindly in their wake. Morgaine glanced over her shoulder, reined Siptah about, yet holding him.

  “This hill is ours,” she said fiercely. “And company will not be comfortable for us. Vanye—come, let us stop them.”

  She led Siptah forward, toward the van of the column, that were strong men, Aren-folk, who had fled early and marched most strongly: and Vanye slung his sword across the saddlebow and kept pace with her, a shadow by her side as she gave orders, directed sullen, confused men to one side and the other of the road, bidding them set up shelters and make a camp.

  Two of the Barrows-men were there, grim, tall men: Vanye noticed them standing together and cast them a second, anxious look, wondering had they been two of the number with Fwar—or whether they were innocent of that ambush and did not yet know the bloodfeud that was between them. They gave no evidence of it.

  But there was yet another matter astir among them, sullen looks toward the hill where Jhirun waited, standing by the bay mare, her shawl clutched about her in the cold, damp wind.

  “She is ours,” one of the two Barrowers said to Morgaine.

  Morgaine said nothing, only looked at him from the height of Siptah’s back, and that man fell silent.

  Only Vanye, who rode at her back, heard the murmuring that followed when Morgaine turned away; and it was ugly. He turned his horse again and faced them, the two Barrows-men, and a handful of marshlanders.

  “Say it louder,” he challenged them.

  “The girl is fey,” said one of the marshlanders. “Ela’s-daughter. She cursed Chadrih, and it fell. The quake and the flood took it.”

  “And Barrows-hold,” said one of the Barrows-men. “Now Ohtij-in.”

  “She brought the enemy into Barrows-hold,” said the other of the Barrowers. “She is fey. She cursed the hold, killed all that were in it, the old, the women and the children, her own sister. Give her to us.”

  Vanye hesitated, the gelding restless under him, misgivings gathering in him, remembering the dream upon the road, the mad-eyed vagaries, the tense body pressed against his.

  Oh, the dreams, the dreams, my lord, I dreamed...

  He jerked the gelding’s head about, spurred him past their reaching hands, sought Morgaine, who moved alone among the crowds, giving orders. He joined her, saying nothing; she asked nothing.

  A camp began to take shape, makeshift huddles of stitched skins and brush and sodden blankets tied between trees or supported on hewn saplings. Some had brought fire, and one borrowed to the next, wet wood smoking and hissing in the mist, but sufficient to stay alight.

  The column was still straggling in at dusk, finding a camp, finding their places in it, seeking relatives.

  Morgaine turned back to the hill that she had chosen, where she had permitted no intrusion; and there Jhirun waited, shivering, with wood she had gathered for a fire. Vanye dismounted, already searching out with his eye this and that tree that might be cut for shelter. But Morgaine slid down from Siptah’s back and stared balefully at the flood that raged between them and the other side, dark waters streaked with white in the dusk.

  “It is lower,” she said, pointing to the place where the road made a white-frothing ridge in the flood. “We might try it after we have rested a bit.”

  The thought chilled him. “The horses cannot force that. Wait. Wait. It cannot be much longer.”

  She stood looking at it still, as if she would disregard all his advice, staring toward that far bank, where mountains rose, where was Roh, and Abarais, and a halfling army.

  The flood would not be sufficient to have delayed Roh this long; Vanye reckoned that for himself, and did not torment her with asking or saying it. She was desperate, exhausted; she had spent herself in answering questions among the frightened folk behind them, in providing advice, in settling disputes for space and wood. She had distracted herself with these things, gentle when he sensed in her a dark and furious violence, that loathed the clinging, terrified appeals to her, the faces that looked to her with desperate hope.

  “Take us with you,” they wept, surrounding her.

  “Where is my child?” a mother kept asking her, clinging to the rein until the nervous, war-trained gray came near to breaking control.

  “I do not know,” she had said. But it had not stopped the questions.

  “Will my daughter be there?” asked a father, and she had looked at him, distracted, and murmured yes, and spurred the gray roughly through the press.

  Now she stood holding her cloak about her against the chill and staring at the river as at a living enemy. Vanye watched her, not moving, dreading that mood of hers that slipped nearer and nearer to irrationality.

  “We camp,” she said after a time.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was one mercy shown them that evening. The rain stopped. The sky tore to rags and cleared, though it remained damp everywhere, and the smoke of hundreds of fires rolled up and hung like an ugly mist over the camp. Scarred Li rose, vast and horrid, companionless now. The other moons had fled; and Anli and demon Sith lagged behind.

  They rested, filled with food that Morgaine had put in her saddlebags. They sat in a shelter of saplings and brush, with a good fire before them; and Jhirun sat beside them, eating her share of the provisions with such evident hunger that Morgaine tapped her on the arm and put another bit of bread into her lap, charity that amazed Jhirun and Vanye alike.

  “I have not lacked,” Morgaine said with a shrug—for it must come from someone’s share.

  “She hid in the stable,” Vanye said quietly, for Morgaine had never asked: and that lack of questions worried at him, implying anger, a mood in which Morgaine herself was unwilling to discuss the matter. “That was why your searchers could not find her.”

  Morgaine only looked at him, with that impenetrable stare, so that he wondered for a moment had there been searchers at all, or only inquiry.

  But Morgaine had promised him; he thrust the doubt from his mind, effort though it needed.

  “Jhirun,” Morgaine said suddenly. Jhirun swallowed a bit of bread as if it had gone dry, and only slightly turned her head, responding to her. “Jhirun, there are kinsmen of yours here.”

  Jhirun nodded, and her eyes slid uneasily toward Morgaine, wary and desperate.

  “They came to Aren,” Morgaine said, “hunting you. And you are known there. There are some Aren-folk who know your name and say that you are halfling yourself, and in some fashion they blame you for some words you spoke against their village.”

  “Lord,” Jhirun said in a thin voice, and edged against Vanye, as if he could prevent such questions. He sat stiffly, uncomfortable in the touch of her.

  “A
quake,” said Morgaine, “struck Hiuaj after we three parted company. There was heavy damage at Aren, where I was; and the Barrows-folk came then. They said there was nothing left of Barrows-hold.”

  Jhirun shivered.

  “I know,” said Morgaine, “that you cannot seek safety among your own kinsmen... or with the Aren-folk. Better that you had remained lost, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter. They have asked me for you, and I have refused; but that is for now. Vanye knows—he will tell you—that I am not generous. I am not at all generous. And there will come a time when we cannot shelter you. I do not care what quarrel drove you out of Barrows-hold in the first place; it does not concern me. I do not think that you are dangerous; but your enemies are. And for that reason you are not welcome with us. You have a horse. You have half our food, if you wish it; Vanye and I can manage. And you would be wise to take that offer and try some other route through these hills, be it to hide and live in some cave for the rest of your days. Go. Seek some place after the Ohtija have dispersed. Go into those mountains and look for some place that has no knowledge of you. That is my advice to you.”

  Jhirun’s hand crept to Vanye’s arm. “Lord,” she said faintly, plaintively.

  “There was a time,” Vanye said, hardly above a breath, “when Jhirun did not say what she might have said, when she did not say all that she knew of you, and stayed by me when it was not convenient. And I will admit to you that I gave her a promise... I know—that I had no right to give any promise, and she should not have believed me, but she did not know that. I have told her that she should not have believed me; but would it be so wrong, liyo, to let her go where we go? I do not know what other hope she has.”

  Morgaine stared at him fixedly, and for a long, interminably long moment, said nothing. “Thee says correctly,” she breathed at last. “Thee had no right.”

  “All the same,” he said, very quietly, “I ask it, because I told her that I would take her to safety.”

  Morgaine turned that gaze on Jhirun. “Run away,” she said. “I give you a better gift than he gave. But on his word, stay, if you have not the sense to take it. Unlike Vanye, I bind myself to nothing. Come with us as long as you can, and for as long as it pleases me.”

  “Thank you,” Jhirun said almost soundlessly, and Vanye pressed her arm, disengaging it from his. “Go aside,” he said to her. “Rest. Let matters alone now.”

  Jhirun drew away from them, stood up, left the shelter for the brush, beyond the firelight. They were alone. Across the camp sounded the wail of an infant, the lowing of an animal, the sounds that had been constant all the evening.

  “I am sorry,” Vanye said, bowed himself to the ground, expected even then her anger, or worse, her silence.

  “I was not there,” Morgaine said quietly. “I take your word for what you did, and why. I will try. She will stay our pace or she will not; I cannot help her. That—” She gestured with a glance toward the camp. “That also has its desires, that are Jhirun’s.”

  “They believe,” he said, “that there is a way out for them. That it lies through the Wells. That they will find a land on the other side.”

  She said nothing to that.

  “ Liyo–” he said carefully, “you could do that—you could give them what they believe—could you not?”

  A tumult had arisen, as others had arisen throughout the evening, on the far side of the camp, distant shouts carrying to them: disputes, dissents, among terrified people.

  Morgaine set her face and shook her head abruptly. “I could, yes, but I will not.”

  “You know why they have followed you. You know that.”

  “I care nothing for their beliefs. I will not.”

  He thought of the falling towers of Ohtij-in: only a hand’s breadth closer to the sea, Jhirun had laughed, attempting humor. Somewhere the child was still crying. Among the rabble there were the innocent, the harmless.

  “Their land,” he said, “is dying. It will come in the lifetime of some that are now alive. And to open the Gates for them—would that not—?”

  “Their time is finished, that is all. It comes to all worlds.”

  “In Heaven’s good name, liyo–”

  “Vanye. Where should we take them?”

  He shook his head helplessly. “Are we not to leave this land?”

  “There are no sureties beyond any Gate.”

  “But if there is no other hope for them—”

  Morgaine set Changeling across her knees. The dragon eyes of the hilt winked gold in the firelight, and she traced the scales with her fingers. “Two months ago, Vanye, where were you?”

  He blinked, mind thrust back across Gates, across mountains: a road to Aenor, a winter storm. “I was an outlaw,” he said, uncertain what he was bidden remember, “and the Myya were close on my trail.”

  “And four?”

  “The same.” He laughed uneasily. “My life was much of the same, just then.”

  “I was in Koris,” she said. “Think of it.”

  Laughter perished in him, in a dizzying gap of a hundred years. Irien: massacre—ancestors of his had served Morgaine’s cause in Koris, and they were dust. “But it was a hundred years, all the same,” he said. “You slept; however you remember it, it was still a hundred years, and what you remember cannot change that.”

  “No. Gates are outside time. Nothing is fixed. And in this land—once—an unused Gate was flung wide open, uncontrolled, and poured men through into a land that was not theirs. That was not theirs, Vanye. And they took that land... men that speak a common tongue with Andur-Kursh; that remember me.”

  He sat very still, the pulse beating in his temples until he was aware of little else. “I knew,” he said at last, “that it might be; that Jhirun and her kindred are Myya.”

  “You did not tell me this.”

  “I did not know how. I did not know how to put it together; I thought how things would stray the Gate into Andur-Kursh, lost—to die there; and could not men—”

  “Who remember me, Vanye.”

  He could not answer; he saw her fold her arms about her knees, hands locked, and bow her head, heard her murmur something in that tongue that was hers, shaking her head in despair.

  “It was a thousand years,” he objected.

  “There is no time between Gates,” she answered him with an angry frown; and saw his puzzlement, his shake of the head, and relented. “It makes no difference. They have had their time, both those that were born to this land and those that invaded it. It is gone. For all of them, it is gone.”

  Vanye frowned, found a stick in his hands, and broke it, once, twice, a third time, measured cracks. He cast the bits into the fire. “They will starve before they drown. The mountains will give them ground whereon to stand, but the stones will not feed them. Would it be wrong, liyo, would it be wrong—once, to help them?”

  “As once before it happened here? Whose land shall I give them, Vanye?”

  He did not have an answer. He drew a breath and in it was the stench of the rotting land. Down in the camp the tumult had never ceased. Shrieks suddenly pierced the heavier sounds, seeming closer.

  Morgaine looked in that direction and frowned. “Jhirun has been gone overlong.”

  His thoughts leaped in the same direction. “She would have had more sense,” he said, gathering himself to his feet; but in his mind was the girl’s distraught mood, Morgaine’s words to her, his dismissal of her. The horses grazed, the bay mare with them, still saddled, although the girths were loosened.

  Morgaine arose, touched his arm. “Stay. If she has gone, well sped; she survives too well to fear she would have gone that way.”

  The shouting drew nearer: there was the sound of horses on the road, of wild voices attending. Vanye swore, and started of a sudden for their own horses. There was no time left: riders were coming up their very hill, horses struggling on the wet slope.

  And Jhirun raced into the firelight, a wild flash of limbs and ragged skirts. The riders came up after, whit
e-haired lord and two white-haired house guards.

  Jhirun raced for the shelter, as Vanye slipped the ring of his longsword and took it in hand: but Morgaine was before him. Red fire leaped from her hand, touching smoke in the drenched grass. Horses shied: Kithan—first of the three—flung up his arm against the sight and reined back, stopping his men. And at that distance he faced Morgaine. He shouted a word in his own tongue at her, in an ugly voice, and then in a shriek of desperation: “Stop them, stop them!”

  “From what,” she asked, “Kithan?”

  “They have murdered us,” the qujal cried, his voice shaking. “The others—stop them; you have the power to stop them if you will.”

  There was ugly murmuring in the camp; they could hear it even here: it grew nearer—men, coming toward the slope.

  “Get the horses,” Morgaine said.

  Two lights appeared behind the screen of young trees, lights that moved; and a dark mass moved behind them. The halflings turned to look, terror in their faces. Vanye spun about, encountered Jhirun, seized her and thrust her again toward the shelter. “Pack up everything!” he shouted into her dazed face.

  She moved, seized up blankets, everything that lay scattered, while he ran for the horses, adjusted harness, that of their own horses and Jhirun’s bay mare as well. The stubborn gelding shied as he started to mount: he seized the saddle-horn and swung up in a maneuver he had hardly used since he was a boy, armored as he was: and he saw to his horror that Morgaine had made herself a shield for the three qujal, they at her back, the mob advancing not rapidly, but with mindless force.

  He grasped Siptah’s reins, leaning from the saddle, and spurred forward, through the qujal, reined in with Siptah just behind Morgaine.

  She stood still, with him at her back; and faced the oncoming men afoot. Vanye stared at what came, panic surging in him, memory of the courtyard—of a beast without reason in it.

  And in the torchlight at the head of them he saw Barrows-folk, and Fwar... Fwar, his scarred face no better for a dark slash across it They came with knives and with staves; and with them, panting in his haste, came the priest Ginun.