Empire of the East Trilogy

by Fred Saberhagen

  But Charmian was quick to catch him up. “Would take what?”

  The nameless magician evidently regretted starting to say whatever it was that he had left unfinished. How could he have made such a clumsy slip?

  “Disagreeable fool, you are going to have to tell me sooner or later.”

  Imagine a vast buried sea of power, into which a man might hope to sink a secret well, not in safety, but still with reasonable hope of not being caught in a disaster, because he and a few others had managed to do it successfully a few times in the past. The Nameless One pondered briefly and fatalistically the secret syllables of a Name forbidden to be spoken. Wood knew that name, and Ominor of course, and four or five others in the highest councils of the East. It was seldom even alluded to—the Nameless One had heard Wood do so only once, on the day of Ardneh’s visit to the capital.

  Charmian prodded him: “It would seem to be a worthless power, or whatever it is, if it cannot be used.” And again: “Remember, I meant what I said, both my promise and my threat.”

  The Nameless One believed her. “All right, then. We will see. I will try what can be tried.”

  Throughout the remainder of the day, the Constable gained upon his prey, but not enough. As sunset came, the wind abated and the prairie-elemental died; but the night belonged to the West, and Abner reluctantly gave orders to make camp and set a vigilant guard.

  VI

  Ardneh

  * * *

  Rolf was saying: “You told me yourself that your Offshore man is likely wedded by now to someone else. What does it matter, then, if you should come and sit by me?

  It was morning again, the second since their flight had begun. The bird had gone into hiding for the day in a nearby tree, where he—or she, Rolf was not sure—was now practically invisible. Since talking with the bird, Catherine and Rolf had slept a little, and had drunk their fill of fresh running water.

  She looked at him now with what was almost a smile. “Is it some military matter you wish to discuss?” Catherine had been kneeling on the stream’s grassy bank trying to see her face in the water below. The swelling on her cheekbone had gone down, but the discoloration was if anything worse than before, mottling from purple into green.

  “Well...” He spread his hands. “We could begin with military secrets. You are at least four meters away, and to shout them across such a space would put them in danger of being overheard by the enemy.” He looked up and around him with a great show of wariness. Catherine almost laughed.

  They were in a little grove cut through by the stream. Looking out of the shade of the trees Rolf could see in all directions, fields and gentle hills of grass dotted here and there with other copses or single trees. It might be the patchy remnants of a receding forest or the struggling outposts of a new one.

  Rolf sat with his back against a fallen trunk, facing across the stream, which was here only six or eight meters wide, and very shallow. With his right hand he patted the smooth grass beside him, indicating to Catherine where she was invited to sit.

  She had given up trying to study her face in the water, but as yet she came no closer. “I do not know, sir, whether I should. Still, I suppose you are now my commanding officer, and if I flout your orders I am liable to find myself in some military court.”

  A cloud of irritation passed over his face. “No, don’t joke about that. Giving orders, I mean.” She sat back with her feet tucked under her, looking at him steadily. “I mean, I have seen people I knew executed by military courts. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to squelch a joke. You must have had few chances for them, since... when were you taken by the East?”

  “A lifetime ago.” No longer close to laughing, she got up slowly, and with her hands rubbed her bare arms as if she were peeling, scraping, something off. “But let’s not talk about that now. I wish this stream were deep enough to swim and soak in it.” Her servant’s dress was stained, as were Rolf’s clothes, with travel and hard usage, and her bound-up brown hair was dull with dust. But she looked less tired by far than she had before their flight.

  “We could look for a deeper place,” he said. “I would enjoy a swim myself, I think.” He felt a little pulse begin, inside his head.

  “Leave these trees, in daylight?”

  “I meant tonight. At dusk.”

  She came nearer then, though not quite as near as his patting hand had indicated, and sat down. Her eyes flicked at him, unreadably; at nineteen he had long since given up trying to understand women.

  He said: “I should never have mentioned that man you were to wed.”

  “No. I am thinking only of the girl I was, and how I have been changed. How when I was young I flirted and laughed and teased.”

  “When you were young? What are you now, about seventeen?”

  “Two years ago I was fifteen, I think. But now I am no longer young.”

  “So, you are really such an old woman.” Now his voice was growing more soft and tender. “Then you must be a fit companion for an old man like myself. “ And somehow he had traversed the little distance that had been between them, and his fingers had begun a gentle stroking of her bare arm, up to the coarse slave’s-cloth at the shoulder.

  Her look seemed to say to him that his behavior was far from being unendurable; that, perhaps, if it went on a little longer it might begin to give her pleasure. His arm would have needed less encouragement than that to start unhurriedly going around her. It had always seemed to Rolf something of a wonder how this hard and angular limb of his always managed to adapt itself so neatly and exactly to the soft job of girl-holding. This one was certainly a soft girl now, regardless of how lean and strong she had appeared only a little while ago. Now in response to a firm pressure of his fingers on her cheek (safely below the blackened eye) her face turned round to his more fully. He found her lips.

  Her smooth face rubbed willingly under his straggly beard. Time passed, then seemed about to be forgotten. Now he would kiss tenderly the swelling on her cheekbone, before he began a line of kisses moving down her throat.

  Now, what was this upon her skin?

  What had happened—

  What—

  With an outcry Rolf sprang to his feet and backed away, stumbling and almost falling in his haste. He grabbed up his sword and half-drew it from its sheath before he was aware of doing so, and when he became aware he scarce knew whether to finish pulling out the blade or push it back.

  Before him now, and lately enfolded most tenderly in his arms, was one of the most hideous human shapes it had ever been his ill fortune to behold. What had been Catherine’s healthy young face had altered while he kissed it to the visage of a withered, snaggle-toothed, misshapen crone. Even where he now stood, some meters distant, he thought he could still taste the pestilent breath. Under stiff, dirt-colored hair, tied up just as the young girl’s had been, were the face and neck of an unrecognizable old woman, skin wrinkled as a rag, dotted with warts and here and there a whisker. The strong smooth arms that Rolf had felt about his neck were shrunken now to quivers of loose skin in which bones slid like crooked arrows. The breathing that had moved young breasts against him now had altered to a scraping wheeze, coming from a body as shapeless as the dress that covered it.

  The old woman staggered to her feet, groping before her with fingers gnarled like roots. Her features worked, but her face was so distorted by age and disease that Rolf could not for a moment guess whether it was terror, anger, or laughter that moved her now.

  Moving like some crippled sleepwalker, she tottered toward him on the brink of the grassy bank. “Rolf?” she cawed out the one word, in something like a reptile’s voice, and then her figure seemed to blur, and down she fell on hands and knees.

  Later he could not estimate how long he had stood there, rubbing his eyes, trying to see the figure before him clearly once again. In time he discovered that the blurring was not in his eyes, but in the female shape before them. Then all at once she was as she had been before he took her in his
arms; healthy and young, the purplish-green bruise upon her cheek, vital brown hair struggling to escape the tie that bound it up. It was Catherine on her hands and knees, her face convulsed in terror. “Rolf?” she cried out once again, this time in her own voice, and he threw down his sword and fell on his knees beside her.

  She covered her face with her hands, until he pulled them away gently. Her whisper was still terrified: “How do you see me now?”

  He put out a hand to caress her, but sudden suspicion made him draw it back. “As a girl. As you were when we first met.”

  “Thank all the powers of the West. Then she could not make it permanent... why do you still look at me so? What do you see?”

  Shaken, he blurted clumsily: “I see a girl. But how do I know which is your true shape, this one or the other? What kind of magic is this?”

  “What kind of magic? Hers, the evil woman’s... she has found some way to do this foul thing to me. I know it.” Now the first immensity of Catherine’s terror was gone, but tears were standing in her eyes. “I heard it from her and others, that never in my life should I escape her. The Lady Demon, Charmian.”

  Gazing at the young form before him, Rolf suddenly could no longer believe that it might be a lie, the product of some Eastern enchantment. Catherine had none of Charmian’s glamor; her youth and health was marked with human awkwardness and imperfection. She was too complete and varied to be unreal. He said, reassuringly: “There are Western wizards who can deal with any spell.”

  “Hold me,” she whispered, and he took her in his arms again. For a while he comforted, he soothed, and all was well. Once more he kissed the bruised cheekbone, which this time did not change. And then, as his caresses ceased to be meant as comforting, he saw the first sagging wrinkle appear upon her cheek.

  This time he did not retreat so rapidly or so far, but still he let her go. This time he watched the progress of the cycle with compassion, as Catherine passed through decrepit ugliness and back to youth again. Then they were silent for a little while, looking at each other like grave children.

  “It is when I embrace you as a man with a woman that it happens,” he said at last. And she nodded, but made no other move. A long time passed before she spoke at all.

  Near sundown, as Rolf awoke from a fitful sleep and began to prepare for another night of travel, he saw a great swarm of reptiles taking shelter for the night in a grove about a kilometer to the southeast. Rolf could see no Eastern ground forces, but they must be near; the reptiles would need at least a few human defenders to survive the night if they were discovered by the Feathered Folk.

  With the first true darkness, the bird awoke, and came to perch briefly on Rolf’s hospitably leveled forearm, settling with a surprising spread of soft, balancing wings; it weighed no more than a small child. Pointing south with his free hand, Rolf said: “It is good we did not rest in that grove instead, for there the trees have just filled up with leather.”

  “Hooo! Then I must go quickly and gather my people here.”

  “I have some words for you to carry to Duncan, also. Some Eastern magic has been worked upon us.” While Catherine stood by listening, he told the bird in brief what had happened.

  “Carry word also,” Catherine added, “that our riding-beasts are failing. One is too far gone to be ridden, I think, and the other not much better.”

  Rolf went to inspect the animals himself, but had to agree that Catherine was right. The bird took thought, and then offered: “Let them gooo free. I will send birds tonight to ride and goad them far from here, so if the East should find them tomorrow they will be misled.”

  The few belongings they had, weapons and cloaks and a small store of food, made no great burden. With compact bundles on their backs, Rolf and Catherine waved goodby to the bird and stepped off once more to the northwest, at first following the stream closely. There would be no looking for bathing-spots tonight, not with the enemy only a kilometer away. He and Catherine managed to cover about fifteen kilometers before dawn. During the night they saw no more birds; probably all who could fly had been mustered for an attack on the roosting reptile horde.

  There was no difficulty on the next morning—or on the next, after another uneventful night of walking—about finding places in which to hide. The country through which they traveled was gradually becoming more thickly wooded, though still the long grass was dominant. The land also grew hillier, and was threaded at frequent intervals with small streams which ended any remaining concern about finding water. Catherine got her bath at last, in privacy.

  “You can take a little walk now, Rolf. I’ll catch up when I’m through.”

  “What’s the matter? Hey, why pull away?’’

  She looked at him steadily and pulled away even a little farther. “How can you ask that?”

  “Well, but the curse may have expired by this time.”

  “Or it may have grown more powerful. I’ll not risk it again. It was easy enough for you, you didn’t have to feel your own body... changing. Don’t try to touch me.”

  And he had to admit, with an unwilling sigh, that she was right.

  Several more nights of travel passed without notable incident. Nightly a bird came to them, bringing news of how the rival armies had maneuvered the day before. Duncan, the birds reported, was receiving from his wizards ever-stronger omens of the importance of Ardneh to the West, and of Rolf’s mission for Ardneh. The Prince had dispatched a cavalry force to overtake Rolf and act as his escort to wherever Ardneh wanted him to go. But the Western cavalry detailed for the job had been intercepted by strong Eastern patrols, who were also converging upon the area, and forced to fight. John Ominor was now thought to have taken direct command of the main Eastern army in the field, though if so he was careful to stay hidden in his tent at night, out of sight of birds.

  On another night, one of drizzling rain, Rolf and Catherine came to a stream wider than any they had met so far. Squinting into the murky dark, Rolf found he could not tell if the far bank was thirty meters distant or three hundred. At the moment no bird was with them to act as guide. The river flowed roughly to the north, but as soon as Rolf began to follow its bank in that direction a sudden hard feeling of wrongness, almost a sickness, came over him. When he stopped, the malaise subsided, only to return full force when he would have gone on again. Catherine felt nothing, but he could scarcely walk. Only when he reversed himself and followed the stream south did the sensation leave him. His puzzlement ended a hundred meters upstream, where what he first took to be a very odd-shaped stone in his path revealed itself on examination to be one end of a large metal object, almost completely buried.

  Since Ardneh had apparently led them to it, he and Catherine set to work with knife and hatchet to dig the thing out of the hardened earth. They had not got far before they realized they were uncovering a small boat, made of Old World metal, uncorrupted by whatever ages it had lain under the ground. In an hour or so they had the craft dug out; it proved to be practically undamaged and perfectly usable, of a handy size for two passengers. Oars or paddles there were none, but a little groping in the dark turned up a couple of branches suitable for poles if the water were not too deep. Rolf took it for granted that his proper course was still to the north, downstream. They loaded their little gear into the boat and put out into the river, finding it fairly swift and shallow. Before dawn they had made, while resting their feet, several more kilometers toward their still unknown goal.

  That day they spent mostly in the boat, tied up to the shore under a sheltering overhang of bushes. For the first time in days Rolf spotted a reptile; but the enemy was cruising deep in the remote southern sky, and there was no reason to think it had seen them. Toward evening Rolf took a couple of fish with a whittled spear, and at sunset Catherine cooked them over a small fire. The food in their packs was beginning to run low.

  That night, drifting north again over moonlit water, Rolf felt the conviction begin to grow in him that he was nearing the end of his journey
.

  The river wound its way north among the grassy hills of a land that seemed utterly empty of intelligent life. Near the end of their second night on the water they drifted past the mouth of a tributary creek, and Rolf obeying a sudden powerful impulse turned the boat into it. Poling the boat upstream was difficult, and the creek soon became so shallow that the boat scraped bottom frequently. Rolf and Catherine emptied it of their belongings and let it drift free, back to the larger stream that would carry it away from their path.

  By now it was light enough for reptiles to be out, but Rolf decided to push on. Brush growing along the watercourse offered some concealment, and he had the sense that some conclusion was imminent, the feeling that it would not greatly matter if some reptile saw them now. Suspiciously he tried to analyze this feeling, and decided that it came from Ardneh and was to be trusted.

  The water offered a path in which they would leave no trail. They waded on up the stream, which was only four or five meters wide here and not much more than ankle-deep.

  “Why should the water be so cold?” Catherine asked him. Rolf frowned, realizing that she was right; the land was deep in summer, and such a little stream did not have depths to hold a chill. Unless it was the outflow of some deep lake...

  A final meandering of the stream between its gentle banks brought them round a little hill, and he understood. The creek vanished unexpectedly into a hillside hole, a tunnel-mouth with a ledge at one side just above the water level.

  He stood with Catherine before the tunnel-mouth for a little time, and then said: “This is where we are to go.”He felt her shiver beside him; chill air emerging from some underground depth, flowed almost imperceptibly around them, and their breaths steamed despite the growing radiance of the rising sun. “Come,” he said, and loosened his sword in its scabbard and moved forward. Here the water narrowed and deepened quickly and he climbed out of it to take the dry ledge that emerged from the hillside beside the stream.