'We won't follow where you're going,' he said. 'There's no need.'
At this, many of his knights sighed gratefully. But Lord Nadhru edged his horse closer to us and let his hand rest upon the hilt of his sword. To Lord Issur, he said, '
But what of the King's command that Sar Valashu and his friends leave Ishka?'
Again, Lord Issur pointed down into the bog. 'That is no longer part of Ishka. It belongs to no kingdom on earth.'
He turned to me and said, 'Farewell, Valashu Elahad. You're a brave man, but a foolish one. We'll tell your countrymen, as we will our own, that you died in this accursed place.'
There was nothing to do then but go down into the bog. I said farewell to Lord Issur, then urged Altaru down the hill. Master Juwain and Maram, with the pack horses tied behind their sorrels, followed behind me. And so, for a few hundred yards, did the Ishkans. They watched us through the wavering moonlight to make sure that we did as we had said we would.
The slope of the hill gradually gave way to more even ground as we rode down into the depression. And the heather beneath our horses' hooves gave, way to other vegetation: sedges and grasses and various kinds of moss. There was no clear line demarcating the bog from the land around it But there came a point where the air grew suddenly colder and smelled even more pungently of decay. There Ataru suddenly planted his hooves in the moist ground and let out a great whinny. He shook his head at the mist-covered terrain before us, and would not go any farther.
'Come on, boy,' I said as I patted his neck. 'We have to do this.'
Master Juwain and Maram came up to us, and their horses pawed the ground uneasily, too.
'Come on,' I said again. 'It won't be so bad.'
I tried to clear my feverish head as Master Juwain had taught me. Some part of the calm I achieved must have passed into Altaru, for he turned his head to look back at me with his great misting eyes. And then he began moving slowly forward, into the bog.
The other horses followed him, and their hooves made moist squishing sounds in the cold ground. It was strange, I thought, that although the ground over which we rode oozed with water, it seemed solid enough to look at. In few places were there actually patches of standing water. These almost black meres we avoided easily enough as we kept pressing forward. Our path through the bog, while not perfectly straight, was direct enough that I was sure we would soon be out of it.
I tried to keep us oriented toward the north so that we wouldn't lose direction in this trackless waste. After a while, I looked back to fix our position by the hill where we had left the Ishkans. Although it was hard to see very far, even in the bright moonlight, I thought I could make out their forms far off as they watched us from the top of the hill. And then a mist came up, covering us as it obliterated all sight of them. When it pulled back a few minutes later, the hill seemed barren of knights, or indeed, of any living thing. I couldn't even perceive the jagged rocks along the hill's crest. The hill itself seemed flatter and wider; it was as if the heavy air over the bog were like a spectacle maker's lens that distorted the world around us.
'Val,' Maram called out from behind me, 'I feel sick - it's like I'm falling.'
I, too, felt a strange, sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. It was something like the time Asaru and I had jumped off the cliffs above Lake Silash into the dark, freezing waters. It seemed mat the bog was pulling at us, pulling us down into the inconstant earth, even though at no point did its seeping water rise much above the horses' fetlocks.
'It will be all right,' I said as the mist slid along the ground and wrapped its gray-black tendrils around us. 'If we keep moving, it will be all right.'
And then, even as the mist opened slightly and I looked up at the sky, I knew that it would not be all right. For something about this accursed opening in the earth was distorting the sight of the very stars. The brightest of them - Solaru, Aras and Varshara - seemed strangely dulled and slightly out of place. I blinked my eyes and shook my head in disbelief. And the feeling of falling down into an endless dark hole grew only stronger.
'Maram,' I said. 'Master Juwain - there's something wrong here!'
I turned to tell them that we should stay close together. But when I peered through the swirling mist, I couldn't see either of them. And that was very strange because I had thought they were no more than ten yards behind me.
'Maram!' I called out. 'Master Juwain - where are you?'
I stopped Altaru and listened as carefully as I could. But the bog was quiet and deathly still. Not even a cricket chirped.
'Maram! Master Juwain!'
The shock of being suddenly alone was like a hammer striking me beneath my ribs.
For many moments, I had trouble breathing the dank, stifling air. Had both Maram and Master Juwain, I wondered, plunged into a quicksand that had instantly sucked them down without a sound? Had they simply vanished from the earth?
I felt the sweat beading along my skin beneath my layers of armor and clothing. My whole body felt icy cold even as I shivered uncontrollably. For a moment, I covered my forehead and rubbed my fevered eyes. Was I mad, I wondered? Was I ill to my death and forever lost in this choking mist?
'Altaru,' I whispered as I stroked the coarse, long hair of his mane, 'where are they?
Can you smell them?'
Altaru nickered nervously, then turned his head right and left. He pawed the sodden ground and waited for me to tell him what to do.
'Maram! Master Juwain!' I shouted. 'Why can't you hear me?'
There came a booming sound then as if the whole earth was shaking. It took me a while to realize that it was only the beating of my heart and not some gigantic drum.
And then Maram called to me - but not from behind me as I had expected. A moment later, the mist parted again, and I could see him and Master Juwain riding their horses barely twenty yards ahead of me.
'Why did you leave me?' I called out as I rode up to them.
'Leave you?' Maram said. He leaned over on his horse and grasped my good arm with his as if to reassure himself that I was really there. 'It was you who left us.'
'Don't play games, Maram,' I said. 'How did you get ahead of me?'
'How did you get behind us?'
Because I had no strength to argue, I just sat astride Altaru looking at him in relief. I had never thought that the sight of his thick, brown beard and weepy eyes could please me so greatly.
Then Master Juwain came over to us and said, 'There is something wrong with this place. I've never heard of anything like it. Why don t we tie the horses together and stay closer to each other now?'
Both Maram and I agreed that this was an excellent idea. With some rope that we found in one of the horses' packs, we tied the sorrels close behind Altaru, and the pack horses behind them.
'Let's go,' I said, not wanting to spend another minute there. 'We must have come at least a couple of miles. It can't be much more than that to drier ground.'
Again, with me in the lead, we moved off toward what I thought was due north. In places, the mist was so thick that we couldn't see more than ten feet in any direction.
The ground beneath us now was mostly of large, spongy mosses that made sucking sounds as the horses trampled over them. The air was cold and wet and smelled of dark scents that were strange to me. There were no animals to be seen or to be heard either. Even so, as we made our way across the drowned sedges and grasses and muck, I felt something following us. Although I thought that it couldn't be an animal -
and certainly nothing like a wolf or a bear -It had an uneasy sensation that it could smell me from miles away even through the thickest of mists. And then I closed my eyes for a moment, and I was certain of nothing at all. For in my mind, I could see gray shapes on horseback riding hard in our pursuit. I was afraid that Lord Issur had changed his mind after all, and was coming to murder us.
I pressed Altaru more urgently then; the other horses, tied to my saddle with short lengths of rope, quickened their paces. We rode in
near-silence for what seemed a long time. I couldn't guess how many miles we covered, for both time and distance in this terrible bog seemed to be different from that of the mountains and valleys in which I had spent my whole life. With every bit of sodden ground that we passed over, the sense that something or someone was following us grew stronger. I couldn't understand why we hadn't found the bog's northern edge and the safety of Anjo. And then, even as the mist thinned a little, Maram let out a cry of terror because he had found something else.
'Look!' he said as he pointed at the ground ahead of us. 'Oh, my -oh, my Lord!'
Now the moonlight seemed to wax stronger for a moment as it fell upon a form half-sunken into the mosses and muck. It was a man, I saw, or rather the remains of one. His bones, gleaming a dull white, were spread out along the ground. His eyeless skull seemed to stare straight at us, and his finger joints were gapped around the hilt of a great, rusted sword. Almost the whole of his skeleton was encased in a suit of slowly rotting, diamond-studded armor. Its hundreds of stones, although smeared with mud, still had some fire to them. They caught my eye with their sparkle even as Maram and Master Juwain drew up beside me.
'Look!' Maram said again. He pointed to the nearby skeleton of a horse lying down among the mosses. 'How long do you think this knight has been here?'
I looked at the style of the armor, particularly at the aventail that hung down from the back of the knight's helmet, and I said, 'Perhaps a hundred years - perhaps more.'
'Why do you think he came here?'
'That's hard to say.'
'What do you think killed him, then?'
I studied the knight's armor, looking for any sign that it had been pierced or crushed.
I shrugged my shoulders, then shook my head.
'Do you think he got lost?' Maram asked, 'Do you think he ran out of food and starved to death?'
There was a note of near-panic in his voice, and Master Juwain took hold of his arm and gently shook him. He said, 'There are some things it's better not to ask and better not to know. Now let's leave this place before we unnerve each other completely.'
Although Maram quickly agreed to that, he was already so unnerved that he didn't even suggest looting the knight of his armor, as I feared he might. We rode hard then for an hour or so. At those rare moments when I could see the sky, I tried to steer by the stars. But they kept shifting about in strange new patterns that didn't make sense to me. Master Juwain suggested trying to fix our position by the bright disk of the moon, and this I tried to do. But then, some miles from the spot where we had left the knight, I looked up to see half the moon missing as if some great beast had taken a bite out of it. I shook my head in disbelief, and sat there on top of Altaru blinking my eyes.
'Perhaps it's only an eclipse,' Master Juwain said to encourage me.
I looked at him and smiled as I shook my head. And then, as Maram let out a shriek of terror, I looked up at the sky again, and the moon was completely gone.
'Let's ride,' I said. 'Let's find a way out of here before we all lose our minds.'
And so yet again we set out in a direction that might have been north, south, east or west - or some entirely new direction that would take us nowhere forever. We rode hard for what seemed many hours. There was nothing to do but listen to the splashing that the horses made and breathe the chill air. Once, the stars returned to their familiar positions within their ancient constellations, and more than once, the full moon again burned a silvery circle through the black sky. We might have taken comfort from this bright disk, but then, as we were gazing up at it, a dark shape like that of a dragon or an impossibly huge bat flew straight across it. And then a moment later the moon vanished, and the mist closed around us like a wet, gray shroud.
'Val,' Maram said to me in a low voice, 'I'm afraid.'
'We all are,' I told him. 'But we have to keep going - there's nothing else to do.'
And then, seeing that my words had done little to cheer him, I nudged > Altaru closer to him and gripped his hand in mine. I said, 'It's all right -I won't let anything happen to you.'
As we rode on in silence over the socking mosses, I was very afraid that the pain and fever of my wounded side would soon set me to screaming. But even worse than this throbbing agony was the sensation of something squirming in my head, clawing my eyes from inside. I could still feel something or someone following us through the mist. And something else - It felt like a vast, black, bloated spider - was watching us and waiting for us even as it somehow called us toward the darkest of places at the bog's very center. The more I tried to evade this dreadful thing, the closer I seemed to be drawn to it - and Maram and Master Juwain with me. It was only a matter of time, I thought, until it seized me and tore me open to suck out my mind.
Before fear maddened me completely, I tried to use my mind to reason our way out of the bog, Hadn't we been traveling through it for at least twelve hours? Shouldn't we men have covered at least forty miles and not merely the four or five miles of the bog's true width? Were we moving in circles? Was the black, rippling mere to our right new to us or one that we had left behind many miles ago? And if we kept the mountains of the Shoshan Range always to our left - during those rare moments when the mist lifted and we could see them - shouldn't we have long since found our way into Anjo?
'Val, I'm so tired,' Maram said to me as our horses stepped through a patch of sodden grasses. He waved his hand in front of his face as if to dispel the mist nearly blinding us. ' Will this night never end?'
No, I suddenly thought, the neverness of night has no end.
'Where are we?' he asked. 'Why can't we find our way out of here?' Master Juwain, riding beside him, touched his arm to steady him. But he had no answer for him, and neither did I. I had no answers for myself, and no hope, either. My command of direction, on which I had always prided myself, seemed to have abandoned me utterly. I could neither see nor sense my way out of this forsaken place. Perhaps there was no way out even as Lord Issur had said. Soon, we would all slip off our horses and have to rest. We might awaken, once, twice, or even twenty more times to continue our journey into the endless night. But in the end, our food would run out and we would weaken beyond repair we would fall into the sleep from which there is no awakening, even as the poor knight had. And then we would die in this desolate bog -I was as certain of this as I was of the fever eating through my side into my mind. Perhaps someday another knight would find our bones and behold the fate that awaited him. At last, I slumped forward in my saddle and threw my good arm around Altaru's neck to keep from myself plunging down into the wet earth. And then I whispered in his ear, 'We're lost my friend, we're very lost. My apologies for bringing you here. Now go where you will, and bring yourself out, if you can.'
I closed my eyes then, and tried to hold on to his thickly muscled neck as the long column of it vibrated with a sudden nicker. He seemed to understand me, for he nickered again and surged forward with a new strength. Master Juwain's and Maram's sorrels, tied to him along with the pack horses, followed closely behind him. As I felt the rocking of Altaru's great body, my mind emptied and I drifted toward sleep. I was only dimly aware of him pausing before various meres and sniffing the air as he circled right or left and wound his way across the squishing mosses. My only thought was to keep hold of him and not let myself fall into the bog.
How long we traveled this way, I couldn't say. The heavy mist devoured both moon and stars. The darkness of the night seemed ever to deepen into a blackness as thick as ink. Although I knew that the fever must be working at me, my entire body felt as cold as death, and I couldn't stop shivering.
On and on we rode for many miles. I fell into a sleep in which I was strangely aware that 1 was sleeping. I dreamed that Altaru somehow found true north, and I felt the ground beginning to rise beneath us. And then this horse that I loved beyond all others let loose a tremendous whinny that shook me fully awake. The mist fell away from me. 1 opened my eyes to see both moon and stars and the jagged
mountains of the Shoshan rising up to the west. Behind us - we all turned to look - the hazy bog steamed silver-gray in the soft light. But ahead us, a mile away on top of a steep hill, a castle stood limned against the glowing sky. Maram called out that we were saved, even as I let out a cry of joy. And then I finally let myself slip from Altaru's back, and I lay down against the hard, rocky, sweet, beautiful earth.
Chapter 9
We were awakened from our sleep by the sound of trampling horses. With the sun dipping low toward the high mountains to the west, I guessed that we had slept all through the day and into the late afternoon. A mile behind us, the bog waited like a sea of dark green. In the clear daylight, it didn't seem nearly so threatening. Ahead us, however, up through the valley toward the castle on the hill, a small company of knights rode straight toward us across the rock-studded heather. There were five of them, and they seemed more worrisome. As I stood to greet them, I grasped the hilt of my sword because I didn't know their intentions.
'Who are these men?' Maram whispered to me as he stepped over to my side.
'Where in the world are we?'
The knights drew closer; I saw green falcons emblazoned on their shields and surcoats. I searched my memory for the lore that my father's heraldry master had taught me. Hadn't the Rezu clan, I wondered, taken the green falcon as its emblem?
'We must be in Rajak,' Master Juwain confirmed. Rajak, I recalled, was the westernmost duchy of Anjo. 'These must be Duke Rezu's men.'
The five knights rode straight up to us. As they drew nearer, I saw that only their leader wore the two diamonds of a full knight in his ring. He wore a suit of mail, even as I did, and his hand rested on the hilt of his sword. He had a sharp face and sharp eyes that flicked back and forth from our tired horses to our mud-spattered garments. He gazed for a long moment at my bandaged arm and even longer at the emblem that I wore.
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