As it was, it was morning before we set out. Murzy was in no condition to travel until then. Seeing takes a great deal out of one, particularly when it is done purposefully in this way, not merely allowing any random vision to happen into one’s head. One does it at cost, and one weighs the risk first, as Murzy had done.
The starlight glimmering on the envisioned map had marked our own position relative to the three-peaked mountain. We needed to go on south until we encountered the remains of an Old Road. Cat estimated two days’ travel, and about noon the second day I took off my shoes. It had been some time since I’d done any footseeing—and longer since I’d gone barefoot for any period of time, so my feet were sore by evening.
We struck Old Road early the next morning and turned west upon it, me leading, for it was virtually invisible under drifted soil and leaves and the growth of centuries. We would need to go a day’s travel west, Cat said, rubbing salve into my feet, which made them look even dirtier. If Footseer had not already been my proper Wize-ard nickname, I would have been called Jinian Dustboots by the end of that day. As it was, Dodie found she, too, could feel the road in her toes, so she was given the sobriquet. Dodie Dustboots. She seemed very proud of it.
In midafternoon we stopped to use the fragments again. The glimmer that was us was almost due south of the three-peaked mountain, and when the clouds lifted along about evening, we could see it. “Show us the garden of the Gardener,” Murzy demanded, and the fragment flowed up and down the slopes, stopping at last on the southern slope, about halfway up. Sighing, she let the image go, and we wearily prepared a sensible meal before curling into our blankets for the night.
“Do you think it’s really there?” Dodie asked me in a whisper, the firelight making a specter’s face of her, all black and orange.
“Who knows. The fragment showed us something.” “Maybe it’s only ruins.”
“Maybe.” Possible, I thought. If it were really there, why hadn’t the Gardener done something about the ever-encroaching shadow? Even as I thought the question, I knew the answer. Because whoever or whatever the Gardener was, it hadn’t been his job. Just as it hadn’t been the Eesties’ job. Just as it hadn’t been anyone’s. This started to make me angry and tense, so I set the thought aside and thought of Peter instead. “At the Old South Road City,” I said to him, wherever he might be. “My oath’s about run out, Peter Shifter. Please be at the Old South Road City.”
Silence and the stars. No point in crying about it. I put Peter out of my mind—mocking laughter from certain parts of my body—and went off to sleep.
We climbed north from the road the next morning. After a time we came upon a flattened, twisty trail through the trees, a place animals had walked for many years, zigzagging first east then west but always northward. We followed along it, noticing how it avoided the steep places and the rock outcroppings and how it made clever crossing use of narrow places in the streamlets. We had just stopped next to a fringe of tall trees to catch our breath when we all heard a tiny, shrill voice crying, “I tell you, the ground is shaking. There are feet coming, and not feet that belong here. No zeller trying to get through your fence, Gardener. People feet!”
At least that’s what I heard. The others, so they told me, heard only a shrill piping, rather like a bird’s inconsequent whistle. When they started to move on, I stopped them, whispering what I had heard into their cupped ears.
“Just behind this fringe of trees,” I said. “Shall I creep through to see what’s there?”
They clasped hands, all at once, without even conferring, and began to do Egg in the Hollow for me, making me as invisible as they could on short notice. I took this for an affirmative answer to my question and began sneaking through the underbrush, wishing I were Peter so that I could slither without making a sound.
As it was, things whipped about just a bit. I came out on the other side looking down into a small, flat-floored valley, trees all around and the three-peaked mountain staring down upon it from the north. Garden filled the entire valley, from rail fence on the north to rail fence on the south, fruit trees espaliered along a wall, great pots of flowers here and there, orderly rows of this and that. No. Mostly orderly rows of this and that. On the near side of the garden was a perfect jumble of plants, some with only their tufty leaves showing and the others walking about on their roots complaining in high, shrill voices about the overcrowding.
Now “turnip” is a word we use for any kind of bulbous-rooted edible plant. There’s no one plant called “turnip,” just as there’s no one tree called “willow.” It’s either webwillow or gray willow or grease willow or some other kind. So it’s either blood turnip or sour turnip or swamp turnip. These turnips weren’t any of those. They were big, fat, white with a blue belt and with great fluffy tufts of leaves coming out of their tops. At the bottom they were bifurcated, trifurcated, multifurcated into rooty legs or leggy roots on which they wandered about in a rather desultory way, sometimes tripping each other out of what seemed to be sheer ill nature.
One of them stood at the feet of a very tall being wearing a green robe, shrilling out, “Feet, I tell you, Gardener. People feet.” A slit in one side of the turnip seemed to serve for a mouth, and there were several eyelike protuberances on its body.
“Well, and so?” said a deep bass voice, rumbling like a distant roll of thunder. “People feet. So?”
The Gardener was half again as tall as I, not so slender as to seem unnatural but still quite skinny. He had a gaunt, blank face which looked as though he did not often use it for anything. And when I stood up, brushing the leaves off my shirt and undoing the invisibility spell with one gesture, he did not seem at all surprised. “People feet,” he repeated as though it had been some kind of incantation. “Well.” His face had no expression at all.
“I am one of the people,” I shrilled in close approximation of turnip talk, then lowering my voice and addressing the Gardener in common language. “Can you understand me?”
He confronted me with no change in his face, not so much as a furrow between his eyes indicating he had heard me. “Can you understand me?” I asked again in the vegetable language.
He nodded, rather distantly, as though acknowledging a stroke of wind. There, I heard that, he seemed to indicate, without giving any appearance of intending to continue the conversation.
“People, people,” shrilled the turnip, rushing away among his fellows, shrieking as he went. “Come see, come see. It’s people.”
Murzy came through the trees, the others following, and we all stood there in various states of amazement as the turnips gathered. I looked about curiously to see whether there were any other talking roots or ambulatory bushes, but these seemed to be the only ones. Which seemed a good-enough fact with which to start a conversation, I thought.
“Can you tell me how these beings came by the power of speech?” I shrilled in turnip talk.
The Gardener said not a word, but all the turnips began talking at once. They had always had it. No, they had not had it until after they started eating shadow. No, they had had it since the enchantress gave it to them, many centuries ago. The outcry was so great it was some time before I noticed that the Gardener was shaking his head, over and over. I gestured for silence, quelling the outcry by threatening to roast and eat several of them if they didn’t hush. They subsided with a grumpy babble.
“I gave them speech,” said the Gardener in his tumbling voice. “I crossbred them with the Sensible plant.”
“I don’t know the Sensible plant,” said Cat wonderingly. “Where may it be found?”
“It cannot be found,” the Gardener replied. “It is extinct. Sensibly. It was parasitic upon other plants, and when it became conscious of its own nature, it chose to become extinct rather than continue to be what it was. A pity, I felt, though exemplary from an ethical point of view. So I preserved some of its qualities in these turnips, though their parasitism has been carefully controlled. They eat only soil and shadow. Not
foreseen, precisely, but useful nonetheless. Actually, shadow makes quite good mulch. For them.”
I considered that while shadow seemed lethal to animal life, it had not, in fact, seemed to have any effect upon plants.
“Have you come to get us?” cried a turnip. “It was foretold that people would come to get us and when that time came, we could go to seed!” There were cheers, cries of encouragement, and three of the turnips began a dance that I could only interpret as frankly erotic.
“I have forbidden them to seed,” said the Gardener. “As it would have upset the ecological balance between light and shadow to have them sucking up shadow at every turn. They’re greedy, as you can see. Despite the overcrowding, still they insist on overeating and becoming fat. If 1 were not who I am, I would be tempted to eat them myself.”
“Who are you?” said Murzy, coming closer to him. “Who are you, Gardener? Are you creature of Lom? Son of mankind? What are you?”
“Ah.” He drew a long, gnarly hand across his face, seeming to be in some confusion. “After all this time, who can say, person? Does it matter? I am here. The garden is my task. To grow and hybridize and combine. To seek out new things and try them. To set out into the world those things which seem advantageous. To destroy the others.”
“And the turnips? Are they advantageous?”
He was given no time to reply. A tumult broke out among the turnips as one called, “Shadow. Shadow by the fruit trees!”
We looked up to see several questing flakes settling along the wall, around the roots of the trees there. A mob of turnips began to rush toward them. Once at the shadow’s edge, they dug themselves in, roots flipping soil like some digger-toads I have seen, squirming into the dirt like little corkscrews. Soon nothing was to be seen except the tufts of leaves, and every inch of the shadow perimeter had a turnip planted adjacent.
“By Towering Tamor,” whispered Bets. “The shadow’s shrinking.” So it was. Fading. Shrinking. Dwindling. Within moments it was gone and the turnips began to uproot themselves once more with an air of complete though somewhat petulant satisfaction.
The Gardener had regarded this display with no change of expression. Now he reverted to Murzy’s earlier question. “Advantageous? I really don’t know. They are company, of a sort.”
“Would you mind dreadfully if we borrowed some of them?” I asked. “We would find them most advantageous. There is rather more of the shadow about than is generally considered useful.”
The Gardener seemed puzzled by this. “There has seemed to be more than usual. However, that may be only a local phenomenon. The Shadow Tower is close by. I had wondered if perhaps there were a leak.”
Cat, with her usual passion for both getting and giving information, set about bringing the Gardener up to date while I wandered off among the turnips, recruiting several hundred of them with ridiculous ease. They tumbled over one another in their eagerness, and I had some trouble choosing the stoutest and strongest as those best suited to the trip. Since their power of locomotion was not of a protracted or speedy kind, we considered how to get them where we were going and decided on a kind of narrow-wheeled vehicle halfway between a barrow and a cart. The Gardener very kindly helped us build two of these—which I resolved to exchange for a well-built wagon and some wateroxen at the earliest opportunity—and helped load the volunteer turnips into these conveyances.
“Would you mind,” he asked when we were ready to depart, “if I came with you? I haven’t been outside for some time. If there is indeed an imbalance, as your teacher person suggests, I should be aware of it.”
I thought “imbalance” was rather a slight word for the threat that hovered over us all but could see no reason why this strange being should not come with us. Soon we were returning the way we had come, with the turnips riding at ease in the barrows, exclaiming shrilly at every turn in the trail. When we rested for the night, it was in a circle of them with still others dotted among us, ready to suck up any shadow that came upon us in the night. And so our travels went, with us staying to the sunny valleys where we could for the turnips’ sake, stopping at every streamlet for a good drink, and making more progress than one might suppose, given the awkward nature of the barrows.
Two nights later, the Sending came.
We heard it casting about in the sky, crying my name like a lost child, high and far in the star-pierced dark, “Jinian, Jinian.” I knew it was Sylbie’s voice almost immediately, though the timbre was nothing like. Something in the intonation, perhaps. I told the others who it was, and their faces turned cold and stern. We gathered ourselves promptly, setting up Wize-ardly defenses and protections. The turnips were planted away from us, the Gardener set to stand among the trees. The rest of us set ourselves in a fire-centered circle with seven little fires burning around us, waiting what would come.
`Jinian,” it called, still casting east and west, high above us in the northern air. It had gone far to the north in seeking me and was now on our trail of return. “Jinian.”
“Only a girl, isn’t that what you said?” Margaret asked. “Little more than a child herself?”
“A year younger than I,” I answered. “She bore Peter’s baby in Betand, a Shifter baby who had been haunting the town. Bryan is the baby’s name.”
“Bryan is now a motherless child,” whispered Murzy. “No live creature casts about so among the clouds, riding the moonlight in that way. No, she is dead, poor Sylbie, sent by an evil creature to find you, Jinian.”
“I know who is responsible for this Sending,” I told them. “Huldra, the witch. More than a Witch, however. One who has studied the art.” They shivered, as I had known they would. There are things the sevens hate, among them those who study the art for evil’s sake, spilling blood as if by right.
“She is more Peter’s enemy than mine, but Dedrina Dreadeye is mine, and she stands beside Huldra,” I went on.
At this there was general consternation, for it was the seven who had captured the daughter, Dedrina-Lucir, the one I killed with the Dagger of Daggerhawk. We had no further time to think about it. High above, the Sending called out triumphantly, ` Jinian,” and plummeted down upon us only to recoil from the circle of fire and land wearily outside it on the meadow grass.
“Jinian Footseer,” it cried in a high, inhuman voice. “I bring word from Huldra, sister-wife of Huld, mother of Mandor. Peter is held fast and will shortly begin to die a long death if you come not to the Ice Caverns where the hundred thousand lie and submit you there to Huldra.” The specter drooped in the starlight, white as a peeled branch, its voice becoming human once more. “Bryan,” it wept. “Bryan.”
Cat had already started Dream Chains to Bind It to hold the Sending where it was. Bets was busy with her book of charts, judging where we were and how long it might take us to come south. We had figured it several times before, but we had been farther north and east then. I simply stood there in a state of shock, unable to move or think or say anything. Peter. Did they really hold Peter? How could they? My loving, Shifterish Peter. Murzy put one hand on my shoulder and said three hard, sharp names. The world steadied and I became icy calm.
I waited until Dream Chains to Bind It was finished, then asked the wraith, “Where is Bryan? Where did you leave him?”
“Sleeping,” cried the wraith. “Sleeping in his crib in the gatehouse of the Bright Demesne. The crying we used to decoy Peter outside was only pretense. Bryan lies sleeping.”
I found myself coldly hoping that either Mavin or Thandbar had been at the Bright Demesne and had been conveniently located when Bryan had wakened.
“We’re going to have to use her to carry the message back,” said Murzy. “There’s no way to get around it.”
“Can we limit it?” asked Sarah. “Dissolve her as soon as the return message is given?”
“Limit it, and send her by a route north of here,” said Cat. “So that the Witch cannot find where we are.”
“Why limit her suffering?” I asked. “She be
trayed Peter.” Immediately there was a pain in my head and I gasped with it. “No. No, I didn’t mean that,” I said. There’d been a sharp, revelatory gleam in my mind, like a sword of light. Oh, Gamelords, I had been acting as though there were some bao here, something that could be taught. There was nothing, only a wraith. It could suffer, but it could not learn, and to impose suffering on something that could not learn was . . . was a bad thing, I told myself, wondering where I had learned it. Evil. The purest kind of evil. “Let us do as Cat suggests. Let’s limit it.”
So they began to weave Dream Chains to Bind It into a complex thing, a fabric, a basket, a holding that would untie all knots as soon the return message was delivered. They ended the spell with Inward Is Quiet, the same one I had used on the creatures at the Sanctuary, and I felt ashamed to have felt anger toward the pathetic thing.
“What message?” I asked. “Don’t let Huldra hurt him!”
“I think it unlikely she’ll hurt him much, girl. Not until you arrive. Then, likely, she’ll try to kill you both, but we won’t allow that. Come now. Don’t fall apart like this. You’ve been endangered before and known him to be endangered without going to pieces. Stand yourself up her and deliver the message. It must be in your voice; you can trust Huldra to check whether you sent the reply yourself, and she must not know we are with you.”
So I stood and delivered. “The Sending finds me fourteen or fifteen days’ travel from the Ice Caverns. Jinian will come as she is bid.” Actually, we felt the distance was something like ten to twelve days’ travel, but we had decided to overstate the time it would take, both to mislead the Witch and to allow for accidents on the way.
The End of the Game Page 57