by Janet Morris
Before the crossed spear and shield, racked blades and the tas-wrapped, seven-lashed stones, naked, his chald glittering in the meager light from the wall slits, he seemed the Silistran archetype—formidable, stern, the killer by whose sword Silistra had been raised from ashes.
I had expected some grand keep, but now I realized that such would have been out of character for this man. Also, I reminded myself, he did not live here, but somewhere out of Arlet, with his prized threx herd.
He turned from me and stooped to open the single wisper chest, drawing out a tooled and armored vest, circlets overlaid with steel at breast and back, and took from the wall a silver-hilted sword in figured scabbard. I leaned over on impulse and took the worn common leathers into my lap.
“May I take this, Sereth?” I fingered a place under the armhole where the color was gone from the hide and the soldered links thinned to the breaking point. “It could do with some oil and polish, and the chalder should check these links.” It smelled strong, of sweat and trail use.
He looked up from buckling the black sword belt, with the Seven’s mark worked on it, around his waist. He looked regal and imposing, quite different from the dusty Slayer who had offered to try me the day I had fought Celendra.
“That is work for an apprentice, not a well woman.”
“I would enjoy it.”
“Then do as you will.” He was still angry with me for speaking my mind at table.
The plain wooden door swung slowly open, and the red-haired, rana-skinned youth who served us in the dining alcove peered around it.
“What is it, Tyith? Come in and close it.”
The youth did as he was bid, squatting in the corner. His eyes were yellow-brown, wide, and clear. He stared at me solemnly.
“Estri, this is my son, Tyith bast Sereth.”
The boy jumped to his feet, wiping his hand on his rump, that he might greet me. The son of Sereth of Arlet had his father’s lithe body, but otherwise little favored him.
“Out of Celendra?” I guessed. Sereth nodded. A man-child takes the mother’s hide-name and the father’s first, a girl-child, the mother’s first and hide, and the father’s first. It had been an easy guess, given the bast hide-name, Tyith’s dusk-dark skin and sensuous features. The flaming hair, however, fit neither parent’s stamp.
The boy’s hand was cold and moist, and hard with callus.
“I am done with my duties,” he said to his father. “I beat Uther soundly at stones, and got a nod from the master with short-sword.” His pride was ill-concealed. “I wondered if you had anything for me to do, for I have won the rest of the day free.”
“What of maintenance?” said Sereth sternly.
“That was the prize I won from Uther.”
“It is a fool who does not tend his own gear, when his life depends on it. Who knows how deeply your victory rankled your opponent? When you beat a man, even in fun, he is half an enemy. You may take this lady, since you have so much free time, back to the Well. Do not bother your mother, but come straight back, and I will take you with me to find bearers for the funeral.” Sereth rose and came to me and whispered in my ear. I nodded, realizing for the first time, with his request, how deeply the trader’s strange death had worried him.
“And bring Uther and another with you,” he told Tyith, “and your gear. I would see its condition, before I send the three of you to the farm. I would have Issa and Krist; and another mount of your choice, one you would like under you on the trail to Santha.”
The boy’s eyes fairly shone.
“Issa and Krist?” he asked wonderingly.
“What good is a first string, but to use when one needs a threx?” Sereth queried his son, smiling.
“Could I take Wirin?”
“You will need at least Wirin for such a long trek. Now, move. I want them here by sun’s rising tomorrow.”
The boy was half down the hall before I made it to the door.
“Wait,” I called, laughing, running to catch up. “You must be very proud of your father,” I said to him as we crossed the threshold into the blinding bright of the Inner Well.
“Pride is the cloak of fools. It has no place in a Slayers heart,” the boy quoted. “But I would live up to his expectations, which are often beyond me. My mother wanted me to go to the Day-Keepers’ school, but I have only sisters, and anyway, my call is as his.”
“In such matters,” I reminded him gently, “it is the individual’s chaldra to please his inner self, the mother’s, the father’s, or teacher’s wishes notwithstanding. Who brought you up?”
“I spent equal time at my father’s farm, where there are well women, and with Vistri bast Fevnell, who raised up Celendra.” The sun beat down hot on our heads.
I was about to comment when Dellin came tearing down the Well steps and stopped dead in his tracks, to watch us approach him. I still carried Sereth’s common leathers.
“What is it?” I said when he made no move to greet me or step from my path.
“I have been looking for you since mid-meal. Where were you? Who is that? Have you taken to couching children? What is that on your arm? Would you take the Slayer’s chain?”
Khaf-Re Dellin was more angry than I had ever seen him.
“Tyith, take this to the chalder, tell him to check it and do as he sees fit, and that I will come for it this evening. And do not forget your own gear, which you must take to your father.”
“I would not have forgotten,” Tyith called back over his shoulder, already running.
Dellin shook my arm urgently. “Where were you?” he demanded again.
“With Sereth, in the hostel.”
“Perhaps if I chain and whip you, you will follow me around, also?”
“You have no right to pass judgment on whom I see, or why. I did not initiate this relationship with the Slayer. And furthermore,” I said defensively, “unless I am mistaken, you and Sereth between you have apportioned a great deal of my time, both past and future, and without my consent. Now, what troubles you?”
“Vedrev has been to see me,” Dellin announced.
“And what does the Day-Keeper want with you?”
“What he wants is that I keep my hand out of his affairs. You should know, you and Sereth. I need that witchman’s goodwill, and with you and the Slayer pulling power plays, I almost lost it. How was I to know you are a Day-Keeper’s project? He informed me that the Falls of Santha are sacrosanct, and by involving myself in your problems, I was tipping some infernal balance. Crux, he called it. I would like to crux him. He backed me into a corner and peeled back the layers of my mind like diseased fruit, to see if it’s rotten through and through. Then he changed his tune and began going on about the seed-sowers, as if nothing had happened. I will need the gods of my mother to protect me when the rest of his rank return from conclave! He mentioned that there was no record at any port on Silistra of Estrazi, not a ship, not an ID, nothing. If your father came here, which he obviously did, he has either an undetectable spacecraft, which is impossible, or some way of traveling without spacecraft, which is also impossible.” Three or four knots of people had gathered in the shade near us. I cautioned Dellin to lower his voice.
“That,” Dellin continued, “is what triggered my memory. I showed him a map which I got before I left M’ksakka. It is the newest survey ship’s work, the first accurate holo of this cluster of stars, taken from a probe on its way to Grieodsa nebula. He agrees with me, that it has an uncanny resemblance to the design on your ring. Remember the red stone? There is a red giant in exactly that position. We faxed M’lennin, and he checked the copies he had of your tape against the recording made on the B.F.’s visit to the one inhabitable planet of that system. The syntax and phonemes showed significant similarities to the voice sample we had from you. The reason the first search came up with nothing is that the planet is proscribed, and proscribed data are under a special code. Do you know what it means when a planet is proscribed?”
I shook my
head mutely. The hairs stood up all over my body in the hot sun.
“It means that for one reason or another, a planet is unsuited for contact. I remember seeing the tapes of first contact with the planet of the red star, which is called Zredori. I could never forget it. The inhabitants are cannibals, barbarians, and before the eyes of the transmitting camera, disemboweled every member of the first contact party, with great relish. Then we lost the picture. They probably smashed the ship to pieces. They are, truly, animals. Copper-skinned animals. No ship will take you there. Proscription is permanent, not some warning to be ignored at will. There is little resemblance between those savages, shambling about on four limbs with human bones in their ears, and the man I saw, your father, on the tape. Now, what say you?”
“What did Vedrev say?”
“Nothing fazes that man. His answer was that perhaps two races live on Zredori, and that we met the primitives only, or that they wanted no uninvited guests and chose that manner to so inform us. But he has never seen the contact tape. He still holds to his seed-sower theory. If those are the seed-sowers, senility has come upon them, and they have greatly degenerated. He sent me to tell you, to see what you would do.”
“I will think,” I said, “on the way to Santha. If there is no way to reach Zredori by starship, if it is indeed the right place, then another way will surely be provided me. My father told me to seek him. I am no uninvited guest.”
“If, as Vedrev thinks, these are more than men, this race from which you sprung, then what are you?” His finger dug painfully into my arm. “If you cannot conceive with any but your father’s people, and they are degenerate barbarians, then will you go and live among them? If they are near-gods, what will you do? You said once you cared for me.”
He stopped and looked at me, then pulled me close. I felt no triumph at his words.
“I do not want you to go, Estri. Give up this quest. Would you die like the trader from Baniev? Perhaps your father has changed his mind, and is trying to tell you. If he is all-powerful, he could simply have come here and taken you. He did not.”
I could hardly breathe, so tight did Dellin hold me there in the Inner Well, with the growing number of curious onlookers staring at us.
“Let us go to my keep and talk this thing out privately. I should like to see the star picture.”
“I have it with me,” Dellin said as we mounted the steps to the Well.
VI. The Cowled One
When Celendra heard that Sereth intended to take Tyith to Santha, she locked herself in her keep and would not eat, nor speak, not even to the Slayer himself.
On the second fifth, the day we left Arlet, she had still not broken her fast and her silence. The day dawned bright and humid, a continuation of the unseasonably warm spell that had persisted through the whole set previous.
I met Sereth and Tyith in the Inner Well, at first light. I wore the tas jerkin and boots I had brought from Astria, and carried hunting knife and straight sword, for Dellin had insisted I be fully armed. With me I had a thick brist-fur pelt, for high in the Sabembe range, spring would be barely started.
I gasped when I saw the three threx Tyith had brought from Sereth’s string. Never had I seen such depth of chest, thick-muscled quarters, symmetry of line. From tri-part steel-shod hooves to bristled mane and tiny pointed ears, they were flawless. Their iridescent hides gleamed in the early light as they ate, their wedge-shaped heads thrust deep in buckets of eggs and chunked bondrex. Threx are omnivorous, but prefer meat, fresh and raw. They switched their bristled tails and blew softly through distended nostrils. There was one female, and she shone fire-gold in the early light. Tyith fussed over them, rubbing the biggest male, whose steel-blue body already shone like a mirror, with astringent about the pasterns.
I helped Tyith, taking a rag to the black’s long legs. Sereth did not appear until we had them saddled and the wire-banded bitless headstalls settled and latched around their graceful throats. Issa, the female, gave us a hard time, throwing her head into the air when the harness was presented. Finally, I held her by her sensitive ears, and Tyith slipped the strap over them while she rolled her huge brown eyes and snorted spray and froth.
“I have never seen their equal,” I said to Sereth as he checked the girths, that they be tight but not binding; and the tailpieces, that no bristles were caught in the loops; and the breastplates, that they be even and hold the saddles, of parr-covered wood lined with tas fleece, from slipping back as we rode.
“I thought Issa would suit you,” he commented as he gave me a leg up and adjusted my stirrups. The threx danced in place when she felt my weight on her, plunging and snuffling until Sereth hit her smartly across the muzzle.
“Quiet down,” he said to her. “You will get all the run you can use, soon enough. I raced her last year, and she still thinks ‘ride’ means ‘run.’ But she was unbeaten the entire season.” I stroked Issa’s twitching neck. Already she was slick with moisture.
Sereth swung up on Krist, the gigantic black, and wound the reins once around the saddle grip. The threx stood, sniffing, his head high and ears turned behind, as if to make sure the weight on his back was truly his master, and then, without apparent guidance, ambled toward the Arletian gates, head low to the ground and snaking back and forth, ears flicking.
Issa leaped after him, almost unseating me. I jerked hard back on her, but by that time she was abreast of Krist and content to pace him. I gave her rein, for she pulled fiercely, and when she had it, she settled into a swinging walk.
Sereth nodded. “They both work better with knee than rein. I like a short handle on a threx, that they do not lose their spirit by overtraining.”
I could hear Tyith’s Wirin blowing and jiggling behind us.
The sleepy gatekeeper, near the end of his shift, yawned and stretched as he let us through. Immediately outside the walls of Arlet, Wirin came up on my right. He did not like being last.
I had not seen Sereth since that day in the hostel, he being busy with the funeral and I with Dellin and Vedrev. The cooler morning air had already dissipated, and I thought I would be glad when we got into the mountains. I felt happier than I had since I left Astria with Santh. The threx under me was easy-gaited and even, and I exulted in the feel of her muscles between my legs. It would take us about a set to reach the falls, a distance of five hundred neras, more or less, about twice the distance of Arlet from Astria. A threx can easily do eighty neras a day, while a man at a grueling pace might make thirty.
We stopped for a meal in a field of knee-high grass, where a rocky-bottomed stream muttered its way down the gentle slope. Sereth sent the boy to hunt for our food, and Tyith was puffed with pride as he slunk through the grass with his longbow. The threx grazed, hobbled, content with the fresh sweet spring grass.
The saddle pouches were filled with dried fruit, pounded denter, and waterskins, but we would, whenever possible, eat what the area provided. Sereth took a strip of denter to Krist, and the big black nuzzled his master’s shoulder, dribbling greened froth all over the leather I had spent a whole day conditioning.
I stood a little back from Krist, watching from a safe distance. Threx are unpredictable at best, have been known to turn on their riders, drag them from the saddle, and trample them to death, and Krist was an unaltered male.
Sereth motioned me over, and I gingerly scratched behind those black pointed ears. The giant beast stretched his neck out and opened his mouth wide, tongue lolling.
“He would never hurt you. My girls rode him when they were the height of his knee. He just makes a great show.”
The black threx flattened his ears and nipped lightning fast at his master, as if to prove him wrong. Those mighty teeth snapped together with an audible click, a hair’s breadth from the Slayer’s arm.
Sereth grabbed him where the nerve endings are exposed on the muzzle, pressing cruelly. The animal closed his eyes and stood shivering until the Slayer released him. With a disapproving snort, Krist dropped his he
ad to the grass. I heard his teeth grinding the tender shoots.
“We will make Morrlta by nightfall,” Sereth said. He turned to face me. I grinned at him and stretched. Here in the rolling field, under the midday sun, with this man and those incredibly fine threx, and the Falls of Santha ahead, I felt reborn. There is nothing like the mountains in spring, with the world waking all around, singing, to give one perspective.
“I have never seen you so relaxed,” he said, pulling me toward him.
At that moment, Tyith appeared, with a young bondrex, a male with curled horns, over his shoulder. I jumped away from Sereth, smoothing my jerkin.
“Do not be foolish,” Sereth said, putting his arm around my waist. “It matters not to Tyith where my heart lies at a given moment. He has firsthand knowledge of me, and of his mother. He was point between us, growing up, passed from hand to hand as our whims dictated. It was not an easy childhood, but an instructive one. He is old enough, certainly, to couch himself without my approval. I do not need his.”
That was the first he had ever spoken to me of his relationship, or lack of one, with Celendra, mother of his only son. I had wondered, when the boy had mentioned his upbringing, why the Day-Keepers had allowed it. It is a Silistran rule never to suffer the child to become a focus for parental manipulation. If Sereth and Celendra had not been so high in Arlet, the disposition of the child would have been different,
I thought as we walked back to the stream to help Tyith prepare the meat.
The boy did not seem scarred by his unusual upbringing. He beamed at Sereth’s praise, and his large eyes danced with satisfaction. He seemed a different person from the overly controlled, solemn lad he had been in the hostel. I wondered if he was allowed much time with his father, whom he so obviously worshiped.
The bondrex was unusually tasty, and at Sereth’s suggestion, the youth hacked off the spiraled horns and packed them carefully in his saddlebag. As he doused the fire and cleaned the leftovers from the bones for the threx, Sereth and I collected large stones. There in the high grassed field we made a circle of rocks, and Sereth Crill Tyris schooled me at knife and sword in turn. I could not, trying with all my skill, get through his guard, so I had no need to pull my stroke. Finally, my right arm aching so I could scarce keep my numbed fingers around the hilt, I threw the sword to the grass, and gave him point.