She laughed. "When Chance wins, it isn't luck. No, I am not that concerned at having to lie on the ground for a few nights, Peter. It is this wild, dreamy feeling I have. I woke last night and went to the window for air, only to dream that I saw a misty giant moving across the stars as though he strode at the edge of the world. And the wind song haunts me. And I cannot settle at anything."
Over her head I could see Jinian, watching us and listening intently. I smiled at them both, trying to be light and unconcerned. "Well, that is the way with prophecies. I was told in the Bright Demesne we would go north, and the wind song sings of the north, and in Dindindaroo a ghost spoke to me of the north. Wild and dreamy, indeed, and reason enough for sleepwalking."
"Three times," said Jinian, surprising me with this echo of Chance. "Three times is Gaming. Who Games against you?"
I shook my head. "The minstrel learned the song in Learner. Perhaps there we'll find the root of it." Jinian frowned at this, as though she might weep, and I could not think why she should be so unhappy at the thought of Learner. Later I asked Silkhands, and she replied.
"King Kelver is to meet us in Reavebridge. He will take Jinian north from there, so she will not be able to go to Learner with us. She is undoubtedly disappointed at being left out of the mystery and its solution-if there is one." She sounded very offhand about it, as though it did not matter what Jinian thought. I thought it did matter. If Jinian were disappointed, so was I.
We traveled back through the Grole Hills, leagues of twisty road over which little black tunnel mouths pursed rocky lips, with gravel everywhere. It was the waste product left by the groles after men washed out the heavy metals which the groles don't use. Hooves on the gravel made an endless, sliding crunch, a monotonous grinding sound. There were a few dirty trees in the valley bottoms, so many gray dusters along the scanty water courses. Occasionally a bird would dip from one tree to another with a tremulous, piping call. The air was still, with no smell to it. Men called to one another across the valleys, long echoing sounds fading into silence, and we rode along half asleep with the endless crunch and jog.
Then, all at once, a shadow moved across us from the south, a chilly shade which removed most of the sound and color from the world. The crunch of gravel was still there, but far away as though heard through multiple layers of gauze. The call of the birds became dreamlike. We rode in a world of distance, of-disattachment. Something moved past us, around us, toward the north, and we heard a shred of music and a voice speaking inside us saying, "Kinsman, help." As soon as we heard the words a whip of air struck, and the quiet was gone. Dust swirled up around us, and we coughed, for the air was suddenly cold and smelled of storm.
Jinian gasped, "That was a wild, ill wind," leaning over the neck of her horse and trying to get the dust from her throat.
All three of us had tears running down our faces, all of us were crying as though utterly bereft. The voice we had heard had had no emotion in it at all, and yet we had heard it expressing a horrible loneliness and despair. It took us an hour or more to stop the tears, and I cried longer than the women did, almost as though the voice had spoken to me in a way it had not spoken to them. I was not sure I liked that idea or Jinian's compassionate glances toward me. That young woman seemed to understand too much about me already.
It was not long after that the dusk came down, soft and purple. Bird piping gave way to the oh-ab, oh-ab of little froggy things in the ditches. I heard a flitchhawk cry from the top of the sky, a sound dizzy with the splendor of high gold where the sun still burned. He made slow, shining circles until the darkness rose about him, and then it was night and we could go no farther. We talked then of the music, the voice, the wind.
"We must be sensible," murmured Jinian. "Things do not occur without purpose, without order, without Gamesense."
"If it is a thing which has occurred," said Silkhands, "and not some mindless ghost."
"A mindless ghost who calls us kinsman?" Jinian doubted. "Kinsman to us all," I said, "or to only one? And which one?"
"And asking our help," brooded Jinian. "How can we help?"
"We can do nothing except wait," I said. I did not even bother to seek the advice of Didir or the others-not even Windlow. I simply knew that whatever it was, it would return, and no amount of cogitating or struggling would make anything clearer. I knew.
So we ate the food which had been packed for us in Three Knob, and let our talk wander, and grew more and more depressed.
"All day I have thought of Dazzle," Silkhands said. "When the Ghoul came with his train, the death's heads reminded me of her. Reminded me she may still be alive, there beneath Bannerwell in the ancient corridors. But she is likely dead, young as she was. There are so few old ones of us, Peter. Windlow was old, but he is gone. Himaggery and Mertyn are not old. There are so few old. I was thinking I would like to be able to grow old…"
I tried to make her laugh. "We'll grow old together, sweetling. When you are so old you totter upon your cane, I shall chase you across the hearth until you trip and roll upon the rug." It was evidently not the right thing to say, for she began to weep, the same strong, endless flow of tears we had experienced earlier.
"Will any of us come to that time? Life in Vorbold's House is sweet! Need I lose it in some Ghoul's clutches, be arrow shot by some Armiger at Game? I think of all I knew when I was a child, and so few are left, so very few…"
After that, I could only hold her until she went to sleep, then roll myself in my blankets and do the same, conscious all the while of Jinian's silence in her own blankets across the fire. I knew she had heard each word. And in the morning she told us that she had.
"I did not mean to intrude," she said, flushing a little. "But I have keen hearing, and a keen understanding of what is going on. We are all feeling terribly sad, lonely, and lost. We began to feel so when the whatever-it-was happened yesterday. We must not make the mistake of thinking those emotions are our own."
She sounded very like Himaggery in that instant. I was amazed.
Silkhands shook herself like a river beast coming out of the water, a single hard shudder to shed a weight of wet. "You're right, Jinian. Always good for the instructress to be taught by her student. Well. It is wise and perceptive of you, no doubt, and good of you to tell us so firmly. I am beginning to melt from my own misery."
"You and Peter and I," said Jinian, pouring herself more cider and taking another crisp, oaty cake from the basket, "feel the same, but I know my only reason for sadness is that the two of you have planned to share something in which I was to have no part, that you would go on to an adventure without me. Well, so I have decided I will not let you go on without me. I have heard your story, read your book, felt your wind, heard your music. I know as much of all this as you do. So I will not be left behind."
"But King Kelver will be in Reavebridge," objected Silkhands.
"So," said Jinian. "Let him be in Reavebridge." And we could get nothing further from her, even though Silkhands tried to argue with her several times that morning.
All day we waited for something to happen, another silence, another voice. Nothing. We rode in warm sunlight, bought our noon meal from a farmwife-fresh greens, eggs, and sunwarm fruit just off the treesand came down to the banks of the Boneview River at sunfall. We were grubby and dusty, and the amber water sliding in endless skeins across the pebbles could not be resisted. We were in it in a moment, nothing on but our smalls, pouring the water over us and scrubbing away at the accumulated dust, when it happened again.
First the silence. River sounds fading. Bird song softening to nothing. Then the fragment of melody, tenuous, fading, at the very edge of hearing. Kinsman, help.
Just there the river ran east and west in a long arc before joining the northerly flow. We were near the bank, looking down the glittering aisle of sunset beneath the graying honey glow of the sky. Against that sky moved the shape of a man, moving as a cloud moves when blown by a steady wind, changing as a cloud changes. Tim
e did not pass for us. We watched him against the amber, the rose, the purple gray, the vast swimming form filling the sky until stars shone through its lofty head, arms and legs moving in one tortuous stride after another, slow, slow, inexorably walking the obdurate earth toward the north. Fragments of mist shredded the creature's outline only to be regathered and reformed, again and yet again, held as by some unimaginable will, some remote, dreaming consciousness expressed as form and motion. The idea of this came to all of us at once so that we turned in the direction it moved, toward the north, to stare beyond the lands of the River Reave to the mighty scarps of the Waenbane.
"A god," whispered Silkhands.
I thought not. Or not exactly. Something, surely, beyond my comprehension, and yet at the same time something so familiar I felt I should recognize it, should know what it was-who it was. There was something tragic about it, pathetic for all its monstrous size. We were silent, in awe for the long time that darkness took to cover it. Then
"Are we going there?" demanded Jinian. "Where it is going? North?"
"Peter and I," began Silkhands wearily.
"All of us," said Jinian. "I won't be left out, Silkhands. I won't."
"King Kelver…"
"Devils take King Kelver. I'll spend my whole life weaving an alliance for King Kelver, warming his bed, bearing his children, but not until I've done something for myself. I won't be left behind."
She brushed aside Silkhands' expostulations as though they had been cobweb concerns of no matter. I stifled laughter to see her, so sturdy and independent, so determined not to be left out. Oh, I understood well enough that feeling of being shut up in others' lives. "Let be, Silkhands," I said. "King Kelver will no doubt wait."
"He is to meet us in Reavebridge," Silkhands retorted, obviously annoyed. "He will not be pleased. Nor will your brother be pleased, Jinian. I have heard of the black rages of Armiger Mendost."
"Leave Mendost to me," Jinian said. "He knows how far he may push me and how far he may not. He has no other sisters, but I have other brothers who are fond of me and not overfond of Mendost. They know his black rages, too, and have reason to undo him if he proves unreasonable."
I thought, Aha, she is not so manipulable as I had assumed. And this led me to other thoughts and wonders about Jinian so that for a moment I forgot the giant, forgot the mysteries of our journey, only remembering it all when we had dressed ourselves and gathered at our fire. Then it was only to search the starry sky and wonder whether the misty form still walked north beneath its cover or whether it had come to rest in some far, high place-and in what form. Across the fire, Jinian sat crosslegged with the little book tipped to catch the light of the flames. She was so deep in it that I had to speak to her twice before she heard me.
"What are you finding there, student? You look like a newly named Thaumaturge, trying to figure your life pattern from perusing the Index."
She thought seriously upon this before answering me. "It is not unlike that, Peter. I am taking what you have told me, and what is in this book, and what I have seen and heard, and making an imagining from them."
"A hypothesis," I said. "That is what Windlow called it. A hypothesis; an imagining which might be true."
"Yes." She chuckled, a little bubble of amusement. "Though I had thought of it rather more like a stew. A bit of this and a bit of that, all simmering away in my head, boiling gently so that first one thing comes to the top then another, with the steam roiling and drifting and the smells catching at my nose." She wrinkled that nose at me, making me think of a pet bunwit. "A tasty stew, Peter. Oh, I am eager to go north and see what is there!"
"The song spoke of danger, Jinian. You have been at risk of life once on my account already."
"Well, but it was exciting in a sort of nasty way," she said. "And very surprising. I think I'm more ready for it now, knowing that wonderful things are toward. And, if danger comes, well, it is no little danger to bear children, either. And no one much concerns themselves about that."
Silkhands had retreated into an aggrieved silence which I did not interrupt. When we had lain down to sleep, I did ask, "Will those of Vorbold's House hold you accountable that Jinian chooses to make King Kelver wait upon her pleasure?"
She sighed, turned, and I saw the firelight gleaming in her wide eyes. "Not they, no, Peter. King Kelver himself may spend annoyance on me, but who am I to tell Jinian she must do this or that. The negotiations were complete; she agreed; now she says yes-but-wait-a-while. Who knows who will hold any of us accountable. Do not let it worry you." And she closed her eyes.
When we dropped off to sleep, we were three blanket bundles around the fire. When I woke in the morning, I sat there stupidly, unable to count fewer than four, startled into full wakefulness by a harsh cry from the riverside. There were two monstrous birds drinking from the ripples, spraddle-legged, long necks dipping. Birds. Yes. Two man heights tall from their horny huge feet to the towering topknot of plumes which crowned them, screaming greeting to the morning like some grotesque barnyard fowl, and the fourth blanket bundle across the fire had to be whoever-or whatever-brought them. I began a surreptitious untangling of arms and legs only to be greeted by a cheerful, "Ah, awake are you?" and a small round man tumbled out of the fourth roll of blankets to stand above me, yawning and stretching, as though he had been my dearest friend for years. I saw Jinian's eyes snap open to complete awareness, though Silkhands made only a drowsy umming sound and slept on.
He was good humored, that one, bearded a little, almost bald, dressed in a bizarre combination of clothing which led me in one moment to believe he had been valet to an Armiger, or that he was a merchant, or perhaps a madman escaped from keepers and let loose upon the countryside. His boots were one purple, one blue, his cloak striped red and yellow (part of an Afrit's dress) and he wore a complicated hat with a fantastic horn coming out the top, all in black and rust, Armiger colors. Aside from these anomalous accoutrements, he wore a bright green shirt and a pair of soft zellerskin trousers, an aberrant combination, but perhaps not insane.
"Allow me to make myself known to you," he said, stooping over me where I lay in the tangle, taking my hand in his to pump it energetically. "Vitior Queynt. Vitior Vulpas Queynt. I came upon the fading gleam of your fire late in the night and thought to myself, Aha, I thought, Queynt, but here is company for tomorrow's road and the day after that, perhaps. Besides, who can deny that journeys move with a speed which is directly proportional to the number traveling? Hmmm? Four move at least one third faster than three, isn't that so? And a hundred would move like the wind? Ah, hmmm. Ha-ha. Or so it seems, for with every additional traveler is more to distract one from the tedium of jog, jog, jogging along. Isn't that so? Ah, to be alone upon the road is a sadsome, lonesome thing, is it not? Well, I'll get breakfast started."
Still talking about something else, he turned away to pick up a pot and take it to the river for water, to return, to build up the fire and put the pot to boil, never stopping in all that time his talk to himself or the birds or the river running. I struggled out of my blankets at last and set myself to rights, deciding I did not need to shave myself after a quick stroke at my jaw. I joined our odd visitor at the fire.
"Those… birds?" I asked. "Are they… I mean, what kind are they?"
"Ah, the krylobos? Surely, surely, great incredible creatures, aren't they? One would not think they could be broken to harness, and, indeed, they have their tricks and ways about them, pretending they have broken a leg, or a wing-not that they use their wings for much save fruit picking and weaving nests-and lying there thrashing about or limping as though about to die, and then comes the predator with his hungry eyes full of dinner, and then old krylobos pops upright with plumes flying and swack, swack, two kicks and a dead pombi or whatever. I've seen them do gnarlibars that way, be the beast not too mature or fearsome bulky. Ah, well, the one on the left is Yittleby and the one on the right is Yattleby. I'll introduce you later so they know they cannot pull any tricks
on any friend of old Queynt's. How do you like your egg?"
He had an egg, only one, between his square little hands, but that egg looked enough to feed us four and several fustigars beside.
"They-they laid that?" I asked, awed.
"Oh, not they, young sir, no indeed, not they. Why, Yattleby would be ashamed at the allegation, for he is a great lord of his roost and his nest and would not bear for an instant such an imputation. No, it is Yittleby who lays the eggs, and Queynt who eats them, from time to time, except when Yittleby goes all broodish and demands time to hatch a family, which is every other year or so and during that time old Queynt must simply do without his wagon, hmmm? Nothing else for it but do without. How do you like your egg?"
I suggested to him that I would be happy to eat egg in any form he cared to offer it, and then I went off into the bushes to think a bit. I sensed no danger in the man, no hostility, but Gamelords, what a surprise! I thought of calling on Didir, but rejected the idea. Was he Gamesman or not? Might he detect-and resent-such inquiry into his state of mind? Better leave it for now, I decided, and wandered back to the fire, stopping on the way to look at the wagon he had mentioned, peaceably parked beneath the trees and as odd a collection of derangement as the man himself. It had a peaked roof and wheels as tall as my shoulder, windows with boxes of herbs growing beneath them, and a cage hung at the back with something in it I had never seen before which addressed me gravely with "has it got some thrilp? some thrilp?" before turning head over tailless behind to hang by one foot. No tail, I thought. The krylobos had none, either. Nor, of course, did Queynt, which told me nothing at all.
Jinian was waking Silkhands, murmuring explanations in her ear as I rejoined them. The krylobos were picking nuts from the trees with their wing fingers, cracking them in the huge, metallic-looking beaks which seemed to have some kind of compound leverage at their hinge. Pop, a nut would go into the beak, then crunch, as the bird bit down, then crrrunch as it bit down again and the nutmeat fell into the beak or the waiting fingers. "Kerawh," said one of them conversationally to the other. "Kerawh, whit, herch, kerch."
The True Game Page 47