The Golden Sword

by Janet Morris

“Take it,” Raet said, pushing it hard toward me, while his fingers played upon the knee of his crossed legs. The ball was suddenly closer, a small distance. I evened it.

  “I will not.” And my words were for Estrazi, as I tried to send the fiery ball toward the greatest among the Shapers.

  “You will, in the fullness of time,” said Estrazi kindly. The blazing blue-white form regained the middle between us. “Look what you do, with so much ease before us. Remember. When you are ready, it is yours.”

  I shook my head. I would not.

  “So that I can be a better plaything for Raet, a more efficient instrument of your designs?” I took my eyes from the ball for just a moment, to look in my father’s eyes.

  “Surely,” he said, and the jagged crystal ball, unimpeded, hit me in the head and exploded within my brain. It illuminated within me every crevice and dark place of hiding. I shrank from the blinding light, but not even my spirit cast a shadow in that cruel glow. I writhed and rolled to be free of it, and heard my own voice, screaming.

  And I opened my eyes, to see Hael peering down, the mid-pole of the apprei rotating with his head as its center. The distance between us became less and less, and the rotation of the world slowed and ceased.

  Hael only knelt above me, his face but scant inches from mine. I could see grains of sand entrapped in his wiry black beard, cracks where the desert wind had scoured his full lips dark and deep.

  “I had thought you entrusted with the chaldra of the soil,” he said softly, wiping my forehead with a cool cloth. So close I could see the pink tongue dart in his mouth, he peered into my eyes.

  “I was with my father,” I said, unthinking. My mouth would not form a clear word. The lamplight flickered over the apprei walls, which sighed and groaned in the dim.

  “You were, in truth, elsewhere. We will be within the appreida by sun’s rise. Three days you have been unconscious, with precious little breath moving in you. And yet I found this, here by your side, when none have been within but I. I have not left this apprei between the time I last examined you, when there was no such thing here, and just now, when you with your screaming roused me to look again.” Hael held in his hand a blue-white pulsing, jagged-edged. It nestled innocent in his palm, glowing. I could not see the black filaments within it from this distance, but I knew they were there, floating, waiting. I shuddered. I would have run, had I had the strength to move.

  “You do not know it! Do not hold it so, against your naked flesh. Wrap it in something, tas-, parr-, apth-hide. Put it away! Wrap it and put it in the deepest pocket of the roomiest saddlepack among the Nemarsi, and make sure that it lies not near the flesh of man or beast!” My words came out of me a hissing croak.

  Hael dropped the crystal. It bounced, upon the Parset rugging and rolled toward me. I stopped it, unmoving.

  “Get the skin!” I demanded, not taking my eyes from the blue-white helsar. Already it brightened, close to me. That it was mine, I had no doubt, nor did it. That I had somehow brought it with me, against my will, was impossible. It was here because somewhere inside me I wanted it.

  The dharenex of the Nemarsi, rushing to do my bidding, dropped a thick apth wrap over the glowing helsar and made it fast. He then picked the thing gingerly up by the thongs and packed it carefully in his own saddlepack with great attention to its position. Only when it had been finally seated among the bladders and Eiraziers, pincers and pillows, rolls and wraps of his store, and the lace lashed tightly shut, did he turn to me.

  Sitting cross-legged by my head, he offered me water, lifting my head that I might drink.

  “Why? What is it?” he finally asked me. We were both suddenly aware that it was not as a dharener he had done my will, nor as a crell had I ordered him.

  “Call it a toy, if you will,” I answered him. “A toy of a race such as is your Tar-Kesa, and nothing to be held in the human grasp. Give it to him, upon his altar, if you will. I amsure the receipt of it would bring him pleasure.” And I was sure. I met Hael’s eyes steadily, demanding his recognition.

  “You do not believe in Tar-Kesa?” he said to me, in question form.

  “On the contrary.” I steadied my voice, that it might somehow match my gaze, rather than my quaking heart. “I know he exists. I respect and revere him. I do my best to keep his laws, and out of his way.” I tested my arms’ strength, gauged it sufficient, and sat up, drawing my knees around me. The creamy Parset web-cloth slid down to bunch across my thighs. I was not cold.

  “What harm could it do, this god’s toy?” the dharener pressed me.

  “It could engage you in its teaching, forever and ever. It could drive you mad. It could suck all the life from you without your notice, pleasantly, so that you went more and more to its use and your death. Is that sufficient?” All truth and no lies had I told him. But the helsar was so much more; a primal catalyst, the seed of a universe yet unborn. I rubbed my hands on my arms, loving the feel of flesh against itself. I have a horror of being without this tactile sense of being, and I had been three days removed from my body and its needs.

  Hael shook his head from side to side, hand wandering in his beard.

  “How do you know all this? Do you know the thing’s use and purpose, and what is to be gained from it?” His black eyes were keen, the nictitating membranes flickering back and forth in his excitement.

  “Ask Tar-Kesa,” I suggested. “What I know of it, I have told you. It could do you great harm.” I did not tell him that another’s attempt to use the helsar could put me in very real danger. Doubtless the link was already made between us. I could feel it, warm, waiting at the edge of my perceptions, I had no choice now; I must use what I could of my Mi’ysten skills. Perhaps I had been fooling myself, since my return, that I could do without them. If one is the first of a group of children to learn to walk upright, one does not return to crawling for the sake of the group. One walks upright, and is sooner apprised of danger and better able to meet it.

  The dharener stood abruptly. I could hear the whispered voices of the jiasks as they began dismantling the apprei around us. We faced each other in awkward silence. I could feel his mind gently probing. I snapped up my best Mi’ysten shield, smooth and shining. There it had been child-weak, useless. Here it was more than sufficient. Hael pursed his lips. I reached out through the shield and met his, in my own turn testing. Day-Keeper he was, and adequate. I saw there a great agitation and .intricately wrought defenses, about what seemed to be, in part, concerned with me. To read what is consciously hidden, one must get the thought to the surface.

  “If you try the helsar, dharener, see that your sorting is strong and free from fear,” I advised him softly. And there it was. What I had sought, he considered in his excitement. Monitoring my mind while I lay unconscious, Hael had seen more than he would have chosen.

  “The key, then, is in the sort?”

  “You must have the sort to get there,” I conceded. “Sort” is a forereader’s term for the stochastic process, for isolating the probabilities available from a specific moment in time.

  The jiasks had one of the apprei walls rolled and were starting upon another. The night showed clear and star-flecked, the moon nearly full and low over the Sabembes. Hael snatched up his saddle and hefted it upon his shoulder. The fully distended packs almost dragged the ground.

  “Walk before me,” he ordered. I did this, through the jiasks kneeling about the stra framework of the apprei, toward the large darker shadows that must be the hobbled threx. There was hard, stony ground under my bare feet, and mountains towered both to my right and my left. Hudged us to be well north of the dead sea, where the tail of the great Yaica range parallels the Sabembes.

  There was a great thudding and snorting and clinking. Chayin, phantom upon his dark-dappled Saer, circled the plunging beast around us. Moonlight sparked off my father’s cloak in the darkness. Foam from the animal’s tossing head sprayed my arms and face; small stones from his hooves pelted my naked legs as he danced in place.
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  “Bestir yourself, brother, or we shall miss our only opportunity for bloodletting this night!” And he laughed down at us while Saer walked a dozen steps upon his hind legs, wheeled him toward the north star Clous, and was gone.

  “What mean you, Chayin?” Hael called to the empty air. “Fool,” he groaned softly, his free hand on my back, guiding me among the threx. As he threw the saddle over Quiris’ back and cinched it, I asked what was in my mind.

  “Did the sword really break upon the square?”

  Hael grunted and thrust his knee against Quiris’ black belly as he tightened the straps around the threx’s distended middle. The animal let out its breath in a whoof, and Hael got the girth a hand’s length tighter.

  “It did,” he said his back to me. It shattered into splinters. But for that, the throw was the same. Small chance, that such could be the case. Even another woman was forthcoming to replace the one we moved to the ebvrasea’s square. The time is deathly tight.” He moved around the threx to fasten the breastband to the cinch rings.

  “And were you so sure it would break, to take such a chance?”

  “Am I so sure of you, that I do not bind you?” he retorted. It was true. He had not restrained me. My hands were free.

  The dharener’s head appeared above Quiris’ back, and he regarded me sharply.

  “I had to judge the truth of the board. How else but to test it?”

  “And if you were wrong, if the yris-tera was wrong, what then? Do you love the truth so much, or your brother so little?”

  “It might have been better, had I been wrong,” Hael replied in a strange tone, and came around to Quiris’ head, with the double-bitted head gear in hand. “You have seen how he is, how the jiasks are around, him. And he is in one of his better times. A man should not live with such pain, His agony touches us all. Our destiny lies in his hands, and those hands support him forever dangling from the edge of the abyss. One day, soon his grip will weaken, and he will fall. It is my charge to see he does not take the whole of the Nemarsi with him!”

  “I do not understand,” I said as he finished checking straps, boosted me up forward of the saddle, and swung up behind me.

  “Chayin is a forereader,” he continued, turning Quiris on his haunches and setting him at a run after Chayin’s dust trail, just visible far ahead like low-riding fog. “He suffers from the forereader’s disease. When he underwent Tar-Kesa’s testing and took the cahnclor’s sword, he had not yet had a woman.” Foreseeing ability first becomes obvious at puberty, never before, and often not until some little while after. “Once he was invested, nothing could be done, for the chosen of Tar-Kesa is all-knowing.” He sighed and shook his head. “There was no peer from whom he could receive instruction. Therefore, he did not receive it.”

  I considered this. I had never heard of a male forereader. I had been taught that male drives and the passive surveillance of the forereaders were mutually exclusive. I knew well enough what agony an untutored forereader’s life could be, for I had been called a latent, and schooled sufficiently to protect myself, should the talent come tardy upon me. Even with years more training that I had received, working forereaders face always the grim specter of forereader’s disease. One in seventy, it is said, succumbs to it and goes irretrievably mad. Now I knew why I had gotten such a chaotic reading from the cahndor; such confusion, such fear and hate. He saw only violence around him.

  The neras passed under Quiris’ pounding tripart hooves, and soon we were close enough to Chayin to shout across the distance. Hael charged him to halt and wait for the jiasks to catch up. This the cahndor was willing to do. In the high moonlight, Saer was white with foam and dust.

  “Know you,” said Hael in my ear, “the book of Khys?” as he slowed Quiris to a walk. The threx’s muzzle seemed to graze the ground in front of me. He blew dust clouds with his heaving breath. It had been a mad pace Hael set to catch his brother, who had so great a start, upon a threx carrying a lesser burden.

  I shook my head. I had not delved deeply into the Ors Yris-tera, which holds the true wisdom of the board game.

  “The dayglass was upon the board of catalysts, and within aspect of a human piece, the woman. Thus it works, through her, the will of the First Weather. In the citing of this arrangement of pieces, Khys said that in such times a material sign is always given at the outset. And it likens that sign unto starlight. It seems to me that what we have apth-wrapped within my saddlepack is such a material sign.”

  I could see Chayin’s face, limned by the moonlight, as he leaned his forearms upon the grip of his saddle, watching us. I felt a stab of compassion for him. He and I faced similar struggles, both with powers we did not want and information we could not use, and for neither of us was there any alternative. A male forereader was surely as alone as a Shaper’s daughter on Silistra. And for our questions it seemed to me then the Day-Keepers had no answers. Somehow, seeing him and knowing, I felt less lonely. He struggled to resolve the law within and the stimulus from without, as did I. I sat straighter up before Hael upon Quiris’ back. I sent a gentle probe of strength and comfort, deeper than the cahndor would consciously feel.

  The threx greeted one another. I have often wondered that such high-pitched sounds can come from out of those great beasts.

  “I asked you if you saw yourself upon the board of catalysts, “ Hael reminded me softly. Saer slobbered upon Quiris. Quiris stamped, tossed his head.

  “Perhaps. But one cannot know it,” I said.

  “Perhaps one cannot know it, but one can surely do no better than one expects, either,” he answered, sidling Quiris against Saer until my knee brushed Chayin’s and we were but handbreadths apart. The cahndor’s face, previously abstracted as he toyed with his reins, changed when his eyes met mine. I dropped my gaze, wondering what part I played in the endless traps and tortures his mind made for him, what horrific futures incessantly threatened.

  His hand under my chin raised my face to his, but he spoke to Hael, and his eyes searched the dark terrain over which we had just passed.

  “Here they come. Good. We will need everyone. If you have a weapon within your pack you might choose in battle, get it out now. We will catch us some threx with sun’s rising, I think.”

  Hael said nothing.

  The cahndor reached back and unlaced one of his own packs and pulled forth two short golknives. He put one in his belt and handed the other toward me, almost absently. Hael reached around me to take it. Chayin snatched it back.

  “Not for you. For her. She will not use it upon me. She must use it, though! So I have seen it!” And he pointed at me.

  “No, Chayin,” said Hael gently. “You cannot arm a crell. And what against?”

  The first of the jiasks sighted us and slowed his beast to a walk. I could make out the forms of three others.

  The blade was still in the cahndor’s outstretched hand. The moon played tricks upon his face, and he had but dark holes for eyes. He leaned back in his shadow, tossing his head like an apth with sand in its ears. Then, once more he offered the blade, and his voice was strong and sure and clear.

  “It is no matter what you think, Hael. I am apprised of what is to come, and in time you will be also. You shall not gainsay me. It is your life I would protect.”

  I took the gol-knife. Hael did nothing, but I could feel the muscles cord in his arms. The jiasks were almost upon us, with their uncanny silence. It would be better to show an armed crell to them than open discord. Hael would rather take the chance that I would turn upon him than expose Chayin’s indisposition to the cahndor’s death-sworn men.

  “Arm yourselves, and make all haste. Look well about you, for our enemies steal triumphant through the night. Upon your lives I charge you. Regain what is rightfully ours!” And he jerked Saer cruelly around and sped off toward the north. Quiris, anticipating his master, leaped to follow. Hael did not stay the threx’s headlong flight, but turned to peer behind him into the dark. My gaze followed his, and I saw the k
notted jiasks milling in a circle; then the circle became a line of twos, and that line followed in our dust. Hael reined Quiris into an easy lope, fast enough to keep Chayin in sight, yet slow enough that the leading pair of jiasks soon came abreast of us. Quiris tossed his head and fought restraint, his ears flicking.

  “Is the veil again upon him?” the jiask upon Hael’s right shouted.

  “I know not,” Hael called back. Quiris leaped a shadowed depression before us that did not suit him, I was thrown violently forward at his jarring impact upon the far side. I hugged the threx‘s neck, and Hael’s hand upon my shoulder gave me aid as I righted myself. If I had fallen, then, with the jiasks’ mounts racing to pace us, I would have been pummeled lifeless by those metal-shod thundering hooves.

  “Keep as close as you can, but not upon us! Be ready!” ordered the dharener, and his flat hand came down hard upon Quiris’ croup, and the black sprang away from the other threx as though they stood grazing upon sweet jer grass.

  I had not imagined Quiris capable of such speed. The night roared around us as he strained to catch Saer. But it was not so easy to draw abreast of the cahndor. Slowly we gained upon him. I could see Chayin’s arm rise and fall upon his mount’s bunched quarters. Almost imperceptibly we closed the distance, Quiris’ superior stamina telling as the ground blurred by. A northern threx would have died of burst lungs long before Saer’s rider slid him to a halt atop a rock-strewn rise in the cold moonglow.

  “Another nera, and I would have caught you!” called Hael as he brought Quiris alongside.

  “I know it,” Chayin allowed, his eyes searching the flatlands ahead. Nothing bigger than a pandivver could cross that open ground unseen in the bright clear night. “Back down the slope, that they will not see our outline!”

  Hael did this, and set our sweat-slicked threx walking in a long ellipse that he might not injure its legs standing still while so badly overheated. Chayin paced us.

  “Only some few enths remain until sun’s rising, and the appreida is but thirty neras from here at the most. Where is your enemy, Chayin?”