Exiles Gate com-4

by C. J. Cherryh

  And perhaps, he thought, a scrupulous Kurshin man would regard the contents of that little container as witchcraft too.

  "What is that?" Chei asked warily, as he finished his cup.

  "For the sores. It is the best thing I have. It will not let the wounds scab, and it takes the fire out."

  Chei took the box and opened it, taking a little on his fingers and smelling of it. He tried it on the sore on the inside of his knee, his lip caught between his teeth in the patient habit of pain; but soon enough he drew several deep breaths and his face relaxed.

  "It does not hurt," Vanye said.

  Chei daubed away at himself, one wound and the other, the blanket mostly fallen about him, his drying hair uncombed and trailing water from its ends. Vanye took a bit on his own fingers and covered the patches that Chei could in no wise reach, those on his shoulders, then let Chei do the rest.

  "Why?" Chei asked finally, in a phlegmy voice, after a cough. "Why did you save me?"

  "Charity," Vanye said dourly.

  "Am I free? I do not seem to be."

  Vanye lifted a shoulder. "No. But what we have we will share with you. We are in a position—" He drew a breath, thinking what he should say, what loyalties he might cross, what ambush he might find, all on a word or two. "—we do not want to make any disturbance hereabouts. But then, perhaps you have no wish to be found hereabouts—"

  The man said nothing for a moment. Then he reached inside the blankets to apply more of the salve. "I do not."

  "Then we do have something to talk about, do we not?"

  A pale blue stare flicked toward him, mad as a hawk's eye. "Have you some feud with Gault?"

  "Who is Gault?"

  Perhaps it was the right bent to take. Perhaps the man in his turn thought him mad—or a liar. Carefully Chei took a fresh film of salve on his fingers and applied it, and winced, a weary flinching, premature lines of sunburn and pain around the eyes. "Who is Gault?" he echoed flatly. "Who is Gault. Ask, what is Gault?—How should you not know that?"

  Vanye gave another shrug. "How should we? I know great lords aplenty. Not that one."

  "This is his land."

  "Is it? And are you his man?"

  "No," Chei said shortly. "Nor would I be." He lowered his voice, spoke with a quickening of breath. "Nor, unlike you, would I serve the qhal."

  It was challenge, if subdued and muttered. Vanye let it fly, it being so far off the mark. "She is my liege," he said in all mildness, "and she is halfling, by her own word. And in my own land folk called her a witch, which she is not. I should take offense, but I would have said the same, once."

  Chei occupied himself in his injuries.

  "It was this Gault left you to die," Vanye said. "You said that much. Why? What had you done to him?"

  It was that hawk's stare an instant. There was outrage in it. "To Gault ep Mesyrun? He lives very well in Morund. He drains the country dry. He respects neither God nor devil, and he keeps a large guard of your kind as well as qhal."

  "Tell me. Do you think he would thank us for freeing you?"

  That told. There was a long silence, a slow and evident consideration of that idea.

  "So you may reason we are not his friends," Vanye said, "and my lady has done you a kindness, which has so far gained us nothing but an alarm in the night and myself a few bruises. Had you rather fight us to no gain at all? Or will you ride with us a space—tillwe are off this lord gault's land?"

  Chei rested his head in his hands and remained so, sinking lower with his elbow against his knee.

  "Or do you mislike that idea?" Vanye asked him.

  "He will kill us," Chei said, and lifted his face to look at him sidelong, head still propped against his hand. "How did you find me?"

  "By chance. We heard the wolves. We saw the birds."

  "And by chance," Chei said harshly, "you were riding Gault's land."

  The man wanted a key—best, it seemed, give him a very small one. "Not chance," Vanye said. "The road. And if our way runs through his land, so be it."

  There was no answer.

  "What did you do," Vanye asked again, "that deserved what this Gault did? Was it murder?"

  "The murder was on their side. They murdered—"

  "So?" Vanye asked when the man went suddenly silent.

  Chei shook his head angrily. Then his look went to one of entreaty, brow furrowed beneath the drying and tangled hair as he looked up. "You have come here from the gate," Chei said, "if that is the way you have come. I am not a fool. Do not tell me that your lady is ignorant what land this is."

  "Beyond the gate—" Vanye considered a second time. It was a man's life in the balance. And it was too easy to kill a man with a word. Or raise war and kill a thousand men or ten thousand. There was a second silence, this one his. Then: "I think you have come to questions my lady could answer for you."

  "What do you want from me?" Chei asked.

  "Simple things. Easy things. Some of which might suit you well."

  Chei's look grew wary indeed. "Ask my lady." Vanye said.

  It was a quieter, saner-seeming man Vanye led, wrapped in one of their two blankets, to the fireside where Morgaine waited, Chei with his hair and beard clean and having some order about it once he had wet and combed it again. He was barefoot, limping, wincing a little on the twigs that littered the dusty ground. He had left all his gear down on the riverside—Heaven knew how they would salvage it or what scouring could clean the leather: none could save the cloth.

  Chei set himself down and Vanye sat down at the fireside nearer him than Morgaine—in mistrust.

  But Morgaine poured them ordinary tea from a pan, using one of their smaller few bowls for a third cup, and passed it round the bed of coals that the fire had become, to Vanye and so to Chei. The wind made a soft whisper in the leaves that moved and dappled the ground with a shifting light, the fire had become a comfortable warmth which did not smoke, but relieved what chill there was in the shade, and the horses, the dapple gray and the white, grazed a little distance away, in their little patch of grass and sunlight. There was no haste, no urgency in Morgaine.

  Not to the eye, Vanye thought. She had been quiet and easy even when he had come alone up the hill bringing the cups, and told her everything he could recall, and everything he had admitted to Chei—"He knows the gates," Vanye had said, quickly, atop it all. "He believes that is how we got here, but he insists we lie if we do not know this lord Gault and that we must know where we are."

  Morgaine sipped her tea now, and did not hasten matters. "Vanye tells me you do not know where we come from," she said after a moment. "But you think we should know this place, and that we have somewhat to do with this lord of Morund. We do not. The road out there brought us. That is all. It branches beyond every gate. Do you not know that?"

  Chei stared at her, not in defiance now, but in something like dismay.

  "Like any road," said Morgaine in that same hush of moving leaves and wind, "it leads everywhere. That is the general way of roads. Name the farthest place in the world. That road beyond this woods leads to it, one way or the other. And this Gate leads through other gates. Which lead—to many places. Vanye says you know this. Then you should know that too. And knowing that—" Morgaine took up a peeled twig to stir her tea, and carefully lifted something out of it, to flick it away. "You should know that what a lord decrees is valid only so far as his hand reaches. No further. And I have never heard of your lord Gault, nor care that I have not heard. He seems to me to be no one worth my trouble."

  "Then why am I?" Chei asked harshly, with no little desperation.

  "You are not," Morgaine said. "You are a considerable inconvenience."

  It was not what Chei had, perhaps, expected. And Morgaine took a slow sip of tea, set the cup down and poured more for herself, the while Chei said nothing at all.

  "We cannot let you free," Morgaine said. "We do not care for this Gault; and having you fall straightway into his hands would be no kindness to y
ou and no good thing for us either. Quiet is our preference. So you will go with us, and somewhere we shall have to find you a horse—by one thing and the other I suppose you are familiar with horses. Am I wrong?"

  Chei stared at her, somewhere between incredulity and panic. "No," Chei said faintly. "No, lady. I know horses."

  "And our business is not truly needful for you to know, is it? Only that it has become yours, as your safety has become conditional on ours—as I assure you it is. We will find you a horse—somewhere hereabouts, I trust. Meanwhile you will ride with Vanye—as soon as you are fit to ride. In the meanwhile you eat our food, sleep in our blankets, use our medicines, and repay us with insults." All of this so, so softly spoken. "This last will change. You have naught to do today but lie in the sun, in what modesty or lack of it will not affect me, I do assure you. You do not move me.—How wide are Gault's lands? How far shall we ride before we cease to worry about his attacking us?"

  Chei sat there a moment with a worried look. Then he bit his lip, shifted forward and pulled a half-burned stick out of the coals to draw in the dirt with it. "Here you found me. Here the road. Back here—" He swept a wide, vague area with the stick. "The gate from which you came." The stick moved on to inscribe the line of the road running past the hill of the wolves, and up and up northward. "On either side here is woods. Beyond that—" He gestured out beyond the trees, where the river was, and where meadow shone gold. "The forest is scattered—a woods here, another there, at some distance from the road."

  "You are well familiar with this lord's land," Morgaine said.

  The stick wavered, a shiver that had no wind to cause it. "The north and the west I know. But this last I do not forget. I watched where they took us." The stick moved again, tracing the way, and slashed a line across the road. "This is the Sethoy, this river. It comes from the mountains. A bridge crosses it, an old bridge. The other side of it, northward across the plain, lord Gault's own woods begin; and his pastures; and his fields; and there is his hold, well back from the old Road. In the hills, a village. A road between. He has that too. There are roads besides the Old Road, there is a track goes across it from Morund and up again by the hills; there is another runs by Gyllin-brook—that runs along these hills and through them, up toward the village. None of these are safe for you."

  "Further over on either side, " Morgaine said, and moved around the fire to indicate with her finger the left and the right of the road. "Are there other roads?"

  "Beyond the western hills." Chei retreated somewhat from her presence, and used his stick to trace small lines.

  "Habitations?"

  "High in the hills. No friends of any strangers. They keep their borders against every outsider: now and again the lords from the north come down and kill a number of them—to prove whatever that proves. Who knows?"

  There was perhaps a barb in that. Morgaine did not deign to notice it. She pointed to the other side. "And here to the east?"

  "Qhalur holdings. Lord Herat and lord Sethys, with their armies."

  "What would you counsel?"

  Chei did not move for a moment. Then he pointed with the stick to the roads on the west. "There. Through the woods, beyond Gault's fields. Between Gault and the hillmen."

  "But one reaches the trail by the old Road."

  "There, lady, just short of Gault's woods. I can guide you—from there. I will guide you, if you want to avoid Gault's hold. I want the same."

  "Where are you from?" Vanye asked, the thing he had not said, and moved close on the other side. "Where is your home?"

  Chei drew in a breath and pointed close above Morund land. "There."

  "Of what hold?" Morgaine asked.

  " I was a free man," Chei said. "There are some of us—who come down from the hills."

  "Well-armed free men," said Vanye.

  Chei's eyes came at once back to him, alarmed.

  "Are there many of your sort?" Morgaine asked.

  Fear, then. True fear. "Fewer than there were," Chei said at last. "My lord is dead. That is my crime. That I was both armed, and a free Man. So once was Gault. But they took him. Now he is qhal—inside."

  "Is that," Vanye asked, "the general fate of prisoners?"

  "It happens," Chei said, looking anxiously from one to the other side of him.

  "Tell us," Morgaine said, shifting position to point at the road where it continued. "What lies ahead?"

  "Other qhal. Tejhos. Mante."

  "What sort of place?" Vanye asked.

  "I have no knowledge. A qhalur place. You would know, better than I."

  "But Gault knows them."

  "I am sure," Chei said in a hoarse small voice. "Perhaps you do."

  "Perhaps we do not," Morgaine said softly, very softly. "Describe the way north. On the old Road."

  Chei hesitated, then moved the stick and drew the line northward with a large westward jog halfway before an eastward trend. "Woods and hills," he said. "A thousand small trails. Above this—is qhalur land. The High Lord. Skarrin."

  "Skarrin. Of Mante." Morgaine rested her chin on her hand, her brow knit, her fist clenched, and for a long moment were no more questions. Then: "And what place had Men in this land?"

  Unhesitatingly, the stick indicated the west. "There." And the east, about Morund. "And there. Those in the west and those who live in qhalur lands. But in the west are the only free Men."

  "Of which you were one."

  "Of which I was one, lady." There was no flinching in that voice, which had become as quiet as Morgaine's own. "You are kinder than Gault, that is all I know. If a man has to swear to some qhal to live—better you than the lord that Skarrin sent us. I will get you through Gault's lands. And if I serve you well—believe me and trust my leading when you come near humans, and I will guide you through."

  "Against your own," Vanye said.

  "I was Gault's prisoner. Do you think human folk would trust me again? There have been too many spies. No one is alive who went through Gyllin-brook, except me. My lord Ichandren is dead. My brother is dead—Thank God's mercy for both." For a moment his voice did break, but he sat still, his hands on his knees. "No one is alive to vouch for me. I will not raise a hand against human folk. But I do not want to die for nothing. One of my comrades on that hill—he let the wolves have him. The second night. And I knew then I did not want to die."

  Tears spilled, wet trails down his face. Chei looked at neither of them. His face was still impassive. There were only the tears.

  "So," Morgaine said after a moment, "is it an oath you will give us?"

  "I swear to you—" The eyes stayed fixed beyond her. "I swear to you—every word is true. I will guide you. I will guide you away from all harm. On my soul I will not lie to you, lady. Whatever you want of me."

  Vanye drew in a breath and wrapped his arms about him, staring down at the man. Such terms he had sworn, himself, ilin –oath, by the scar on his palm and the white scarf about the helm—outcast warrior, taken up by a lord, an oath without recourse or exception. And hearing that oath, he felt something swell up in his throat—memory of that degree of desperation; and a certain remote jealousy, that of a sudden this man was speaking to Morgaine as his liege, when he knew nothing of her; or of him; or what he was undertaking.

  God in Heaven, liyo, do you trust this man, and do you take him on my terms —have I trespassed too far, come too close to you, that now you take in another stray dog?

  "I will take your oath," Morgaine said. "I will put you in Vanye's charge."

  "Do you believe him?" Morgaine asked him later, in the Kurshin tongue, while Chei lay naked in the sun on a blanket, sleeping, perhaps—far enough for decency on the grassy downslope of the riverside, but still visible from the campfire—sun is the best thing for such wounds, Morgaine had said. Sun and clean wind.

  Not mentioning the salve and the oil and the matter of the man's fouled armor, which there was some salvaging, perhaps, with oil and work.

  "A man swears," Vanye said. "The o
ath is as good as the man. But," he said after a moment, kneeling there beside the dying fire, "a man might sell his soul, for something of value to him. Such as his life."

  She looked at him for a long time. "The question then, is for what coin, would it not be?"

  "He believes," Vanye said, "in witchcraft."

  "Does thee not, now?"

  Vanye lifted his shoulders, a small, uncomfortable movement, and shifted his eyes momentarily toward the dragon sword, which had never left her side, not in all this perilous day. Its ruby eyes gleamed wickedly in the gold hilt; it reminded him of that stone which he carried against his own heart, a foreign, a dangerous thing. "I have never seen any witch-working. Only things qhal have made, most of which I can manage—" A sense of dislocation came on him, a sense of panic, fear of what he had become, remorse for the things that he had lost. "Or I have become a witch myself," he murmured. "Perhaps that is what witchcraft is. Chei ep Kantory would think so."

  There was a great deal, he thought, on Morgaine's mind. But for a moment he had distracted her, and she looked at him in that way that once had made him vastly uncomfortable. Her eyes were gray and clear to the depths of that gray like the devouring sea; her lashes were, like no human and no qhal he had ever seen at such range, dark gray next the lid and shading to pale at the tips, and that shading was on her brows but nowhere about her hair, which was altogether silver. Halfling, she had said. Sometimes he thought it true. Sometimes he did not know at all.

  "Thee regrets?"

  He shook his head finally. It was the most that he could say. He drew a great breath. "I have learned your lesson, liyo. I look around me. That is all. Never back."

  Morgaine hissed between her teeth and flung a bit of burned stick, that with which Chei had drawn the map. It was more than her accustomed restlessness. She rested with her arms about her knees, and shifted to hunch forward, her arms tucked against her chest, gazing into nothing at all.

  He was silent. It seemed wisest.

  It was their lives she was thinking on. He was sure of that. She was wiser than he—he was accustomed to think so. He missed things, not knowing what he should see, things which Morgaine did not miss. She had taught him—skills which might well horrify their prisoner: the working of gates, the writing of qhal, the ideas which qhal held for truth—who swore by no god and looked (some of them) back toward a time that they had ruled and (some of them) forward to a time that they should recover their power, at whatever cost to the immortal souls they disavowed.