The Golden Sword

by Janet Morris

  “Even now they sneak stealthily through the webweavers’ appreis with their loot. This is the place where we will meet them, upon the plain, when the sky is greened before sun’s rising. It is as I have seen it. We are only early enough to rest the threx. We wait here.”

  I heard Hael sigh softly. His body seemed to slump slightly in the saddle. We walked the threx and waited.

  When the jiasks were all among us, Chayin set them to likewise walking their beasts in circles. He would not suffer them to dismount and charged them to maintain their readiness. Then he himself dismounted and crawled to the top of the stony rise and lay there, his head nestled upon his arms, watching.

  After a time, we went to join him, leading Saer and Quiris as close as we dared to the ridgetop and tethering them to the scraggly harinder bushes that grew there in relative profusion. No harinder bush or even puny boulder was upon the plain below us. Nothing moved. I lay between Chayin and Hael, looking over the rise. I knew stinging embarrassment for the cahndor. He would be much shamed before us all if no foe appeared upon the plain. An enth passed, and still nothing stirred upon the silent expanse before us. No yit squeaked nor friysou cried. The sky was lightening, a presaging green haloed the peaks. The jiasks whispered and grunted behind us. There was much restlessness among them. Another enth passed. I wondered why Hael did not speak, put a stop to this ugly farce.

  “There!” Chayin whispered. I sighted along his outstretched arm and could barely see a dust cloud rising. At first I thought it just a trick of anxious eyes, a quiver in the predawn light. Hael pulled himself forward an arm’s length, as if that short gain would bring the distance into clearer focus. A thousand breaths did I take, and still the dust cloud grew upon the horizon. Hael wriggled back the short distance he had gone from us. His face as he looked past me to meet Chayin’s eyes was painful to look upon in his joyous relief. He reached his left hand across me and grapsed Chayin’s shoulder, his fingers making valleys in the Shaper’s cloak the cahndor wore.

  “Let us go down and do battle, brother!” the dharener said, and suiting action to words, hastened down the slope in a crouch.

  Chayin put his hand upon my arm. “Go with him. May your gol-knife quench its thirst this rising.” And he pushed me gently before him toward the others.

  As I mounted Quiris, and Hael swung up behind me, I entertained thoughts of death. Perhaps I could slay the dharener, make away upon the threx in the confusion of battle. The helsar was in Quiris’ pack. But I knew, somehow, that I would not.

  Silent were the jiasks as single file they made their way over the rise and down the slope, together waiting in the dark pool of shadows at its base. Soundless, recurved swords of stra and steel were drawn and held low, that the glint of them might not warn our approaching victims. And still the dust cloud enlarged and the greening moved higher and higher in the sky, until the dust had dark shapes within it, and those shapes resolved themselves into mounted threx, a dozen or more.

  And whispered orders formed the five pairs of jiasks into a spear point, with the cahndor and dharener at its tip. So close they were that I could see they carried neither spear nor shield, and still the cahndor did not stir his waiting men, though his arm was raised pointing to the sky. As I raised my eyes to his hand, that I might see the signal given, another thing, and strange, did I see. A M’ksakkan egg-shape glowed silent, like some speeding creamy comet across the sky: a Liaison’s ship surely, for no other may fly the gravitic-drive that hovers through the skies of Silistra. And yet there was no port in the Parset Lands for such a craft, and none due north, from whence it came. It danced for a moment motionless over the plain, then veered northeast and was gone. Chayin’s hand came down. As one, the jiasks of the Nemarsi swept down upon their prey.

  Barely had I time to steady my seat after, Quiris’ first leap and ready the gol-knife in my hand, before we were’among them. Crouched low on Quiris’ neck, that I not impede the dharener’s longer blade, I found my knife of use first upon the gaping mouth of a threx who sought to clamp his jaws around my arm. Its pupils glowed gold and huge in white-walled eyes rolling in that deathly head. I split its nostrils, and it reared away in agony, giving the cahndor clear strike at his opponent’s armorless chest, which he made with the ease of a man slicing cheese. The first rays of the sun color-glowed the plain and fired the sparking swords, and the whole world was blood-soaked. I saw for a moment the fallen jiask before I followed him, tumbling upon the corpse as Hael’s mount kicked out with both hind feet at a new tormentor and whirled to meet an attacker coming up from behind. I disengaged from the corpse, up and running, lest I be trampled by the beasts as they tried to savage one another. I saw a riderless threx, unable to escape, so close-quartered was the fighting. His lifeless rider was wedged, head dangling down, between two live combatants’ threx. He had no top to his skull, and the gray pulp dripped upon the feet of the fighting men. Somehow I made my way to its far side, and, unthinking, squeezed behind Saer’s rear. I had just grabbed the mounting strap when I heard a great singing above my head. Chayin’s sword snicked the head from a man whose own blade was in mid-strike at my back. I dodged the free-falling weapon and caught it in my right hand by the blade near the hilt. I looked up and grasped Chayin’s arm as it was extended, to me, and he all but threw me upon the riderless threx’s back. Our eyes met for a moment. He laughed his joy and turned away, still smiling, to seek a new foe. I grasped the threx’s back with but the strength of my knees and thighs, the stirrups being so far too long I could not even use the strap loops. I grabbed the reins caught around the saddle grip just as the great dun beast reared and brought his steel-shod hooves down upon the neck of another threx, who thought to get him by the throat. And I saw Hael, badly pressed by two foes, Quiris bleeding. I slammed the flat of the short sword against the threx’s rear, and he fairly jumped upon the back of the nearest attacker’s threx. The man’s head turned, and I saw his startled expression as I plunged the gol-knife in my left hand into his throat, while his sword arm was raised to parry Hael’s blow. The quarters were too close for the short sword to have helped me, though I still held it in my bleeding right, along with the threx’s reins. The gol-knife was gone now, somewhere below in the dust, in a dead man’s neck.

  Hael, free to engage properly his opponent, skewered him with dispatch. He brought Quiris head to tail with my dun threx. I looked around me. I saw only Nemarsi still mounted. I searched for Chayin, seeing Saer was among the riderless, and felt a great relief when I spied him standing upon the ground over a lifeless form. He was speaking, it seemed, to a threx. I could hear his coaxing tone but not his words. The dust slowly settled. Everywhere the jiasks were catching up the riderless animals. I did not see Marshon, the jiask who had taken me to wash in the jer, among them. Hael’s eyes were fastened upon the threx I rode.

  “A Menetpher!” Chayin called out, holding high a blooded blade.

  A sardonic smile appeared upon Hael’s full lips. His cloak and beard were white with dust. I looked away from him, at the corpses. I counted fifteen. There was much blood upon the moving jiasks, but no telling whether it be theirs or their victims’. One limped slowly among the dead. Another, holding a useless arm, stood staring at the body of the jiask Marshon. The sun’s rising was ruby mist upon the land. Hael still stared around him, smiling. Chayin snatched up the dragging reins of the steel-blue threx he was stalking and led her toward us. The men’s voices were growl and hiss in their throats, and many shook their heads to and fro as they collected threx, weapons, and chalds from among the fallen. If a Parset dies in battle with an enemy of his peer group, his chald is returned to the Day-Keepers by the enemy, that his death may be entered upon the Day-Keeper’s Roll. Those possessions upon him at the time of his demise are retained by his killer. There would be a formal rebuke and presentation of these Menetpher chalds to the Menetpher Day-Keepers, for the traditional truce surrounding threx meets had been broken. The Nemarsi who had died victorious in battle fared better
. Their effects would be shared between those in the tribe with whom they had sipped blood. If, however, the Menetphers had triumphed and left no clue as to the identity of the assassins, all the worldly goods of the fallen would have been thrown out upon the sand. In mysterious death among the Parset tribes, there is no beneficiary. Thus do they keep murder from their backs. Only if a man is willing to take up the chaldra, the responsibilities and family of another, does he raise arms against him other than in war. It the death is unseemly, such as death at the hand of a chaldless, or while pursuing some immoral end, then also are all worldy possessions of one so slain cast away, serving no one, that all trace of his ignoble memory be lost forever and ever, and even his, name be scoured away by the desert. Such are the Day-Keepers’ laws upon the Parset Lands.

  Hael still smiled, like a proud father at his son’s first chalding.

  “Does death so amuse you, dharener?” I asked him. He grunted.

  Chayin, mounted once again upon Saer and leading the steel-blue threx, joined us.

  My arms were shaking uncontrollably. I pressed them against me.

  “She sits upon Guanden, proudest possession of the tiask Besha, and fastest among Nemarsi threx, and she wonders why I find the situation amusing. I would have been far from amused had we returned home and found thirteen of our best stolen from under our very noses.” Hael chuckled aloud.

  For a moment, I was with the helsar. The battle had excited it, even wrapped away within Hael’s pack. It had made use of some of the life energy lost in battle. It was warmer, closer. Then it was gone. But I marked it stronger.

  “And Besha this way comes,” said Chayin in a distant tone. I searched his face. Now the veil was surely upon him. His eyes stared, enraptured at what only he could see, while he wiped great toothmarks of neck with a cloth sticky with dark salve. He must have used it first upon his own arm and shoulder, and upon a place high over his eye. Through the gel upon his skin one could almost see the blood clot and dry.

  “There is no solution for what is between us,” he said solemnly to me, proferring the cloth. I took it and wiped my slashed right hand, where I had caught the sword in mid-fall. I wondered again what the cahndor envisioned “between us.”

  I rubbed the cool salve upon a long slash running diagonally down my right side from collarbone to breast. I did not-recollect how I had come by it.

  “This cloak of yours twice saved me,” Chayin muttered, as if only now remembering.

  I did not answer, but handed the healing cloth to Hael, who had greater need of it than I. A wound of some depth upon his chest bled copiously, though he had pressed a strip of cloth to it. I moved to dress his cut, and the Day-Keeper urged Quiris forward and let me attend him.

  “How did you determine them to be Menetphers?” Hael winced as I peeled away the cloth adhering to his wound.

  “By this.” He handed Hael a blade he had taken upon the field. “And also did I remember a face among them, from the battle of Macara last. They wore little that would mark them in their perfidy.” I could hear the pride in Chayin’s voice, that the time had upheld him.

  Hael grinned at his brother, sharing the cahndor’s triumph. His flesh quivered with pain under my hand. He examined the blade peremptorily and secured it in his saddle sheath. I slid my own blade into a similar scabbard upon Guanden’s saddle. The threx tossed its head, and its long bristles rattled. Most threxmen keep neck bristles close-trimmed; one might otherwise lose an eye should the beast throw his head high. But Guanden’s brown bristles were as long as my forearm, and each was beaded, so that they rattled and flopped as he moved. He bared his teeth and snapped irritably at Saer. He was an ill-tempered beast, always shifting on his feet, never easy on the bits.

  There was much jabbering among the jiasks, all mounted now, all leading recaptured threx. Upon one was draped the body of Marshon. Another, the beast whose nose I had so savagely slashed, bore a similar burden. Two Nemarsi dead. Among the victors there was not one unscathed, but only three seemed seriously wounded. They clustered their mounts around us.

  “They are all ours!” exclaimed the one whose arm hung useless, blood still streaming down his shoulder despite a salve-soaked bandage. His face was very pale. “Upon what did they ride from Menetph? Think you that like some star-trader they left us their useless splay-footed mounts in exchange for the best of ours?”

  There was general dissent at this, and unease in their anger.

  “They chose well,” put in another, whose flesh seemed near unmarked. “Surely there is nothing left in the appreida worth putting one’s pack upon!”

  I did not mention what I had seen floating high over the plain, and then speeding northeast.

  “Let us get them home safely, that there be once again threx worth riding among the Nernarsi,” Hael suggested. “Where there are some Menetphers, there may be more!”

  And Chayin slowly raised his head. He regarded the men gathered close around him as if they were strangers. Then he nodded and urged Saer through their midst, the threxmen making way for him. He still led the steel-blue female by hèr. reins. Hael’s eyes caught mine, and we threaded our way through the confusion engendered by so many riderless mounts on leads. The jiasks would have no easy time forming up with so many skittish beasts to control.

  Guanden effortlessly gained Saer’s left. I had him so tightly held that his jaw rested against his chest. My arms ached from his constant pulling. Hael, upon Chayin’s right, sent me some hand signal I did not understand, but seemed to be satisfied when I kept Guanden even with the others.

  I might have then made for the northeast, upon the fastest of the Nemarsi threx. If I could outdistance them, I might go free. Chaldless, but free. And Hael would have the helsar. I sighed and tried to find a comfortable position. My knees and thighs were rubbed raw from the constant friction against the leathers. I spent a time adjusting the straps so I might get some purchase from their loops, which afforded me a better seat but gave my raw skin another surface to chafe against. It had somehow become full morning. I looked around me at how the summer sat upon the northern Parset Lands. It was not as forbidding a sight as the dead sea bottom in the desert, but was precious little green. Even the sky had to it a yellow tinge. In back of us the jiasks gave up upon forming, and led their charges single file toward home. Mount Opir was, mist-enshrouded to the west.

  There was only the snort and thud, creak and jingle of loping threx under saddle. Nothing else. Neither Chayin nor Hael spoke. The cahndor was again abstracted, sunk somewhere within, loose and easy upon his mount. He and Saer were long familiar, and it almost seemed that as he gave more and more of his attention to his thoughts, just that much more care did Saer use in seeking out the smoothest and safest route. The reins flapped untouched from the sa.ddlegrip, and Saer judged the way, nose in the dust.

  I was shaking. My mouth was dry and my heart struggled to free itself of my confining chest. During the battle, I had been only cold, and in a very slow time. It had been as if I watched myself, and the sound was so far away. Not now. I could yet see the bodies back there upon the sand. Nemarsi take no prisoners. They have no word for “prison.” Their only word for captive is “crell.” They were careless of life, these people, more careless than I found seemly. And I thought of Chayin, and his affliction, and Hael’s astounding statement that his “charge” (a strong word he used for it, with meaning near to “commitment”) was to keep the Nemarsi safe from their cahndor. And I had killed a man, for the first time in my life, with my own hand. A part of me raged, a portion wept, and somewhere else deep in me was a strong thing that had grown stronger.

  Sparse grass was under the threx’s hooves. Mountains rose high and impassable to the west and east. We rode in silence.

  My mind, drifting free, found Sereth crill Tyris. I sorted for a way that would lead me to him. The probabilities fanned out before me; scenes from time not yet realized, only a handful I could use. I chose among them and set my will in motion, that my choice a
nd no other’s manifest in real time. Thus does one hest the time-coming-to-be and make it one’s own. I sensed the helsar again. It was interested in my choosing. There was death upon that altered path thus opened before me, but in such a harmonic position that I felt it not discordant. There had been death upon all the usable futures. It was only a matter of proximity. At that time, I thought it all so simple.

  Simple to take that which might be and alter its balance? Estrazi once said to me of hesting that the weakness is always in the conception, never in the power. But one cannot hear without ears.

  Feeling confident that events would turn to my advantage, I began to consider the intricate relationship between Tar-Kesa and the yris-tera. I raised my head and spied, above Guanden’s bobbing bristled head, the Nemarsi appreida, its banners breeze-rippled on the horizon. And from that direction was a dust cloud fast approaching.

  I leaned over and touched Chayin on the arm. He jumped. I pointed, and he nodded, grinning. Hael had also seen.

  When their individual forms were discernible to us, Chayin reined up and waited.

  Hael queried him as to this.

  “I would not meet Besha too close to the web-weavers’ appreis,” he said solemnly, rubbing the back of his neck with a dust-powdered hand. It was the first time I really looked at him in daylight. His skin was the color of strong-brewed rana, his form was lithe though not truly spare. There was no hint of the veil about him. He leaned to me. It was the first time I had seen him grin but in battle. I gathered this meeting had some of that same flavor to him.

  “In the middle. Upon the red threx in the front. See her? The owner of your mount seems anxious to find him. I expect she will be effluent with gratitude to have him back.” He straightened up and spat over Saer’s shoulder. His hands were crossed upon his saddle-grip.

  Besha, from a distance, was an imposing feather-draped figure. As the threx bore her closer, it seemed to stagger under her bulk. Fully as wide of shoulder and thigh as any man, she sat the beast with a stiff, imperious manner that caused her beaded feather trappings to flop rattling about. As the band of ten tiasks bore closer and dropped to a walk, consternation could be seen among them. Besha, blade in hand, rode straight up to Chayin, only stopping her red threx when the beast was nose-to-nose with Saer. This close, Besha’s imposing figure seemed more due to a general rotundness of figure upon ponderous bones than the feathered helmet and cape she wore. The purples and greens were startling in the tan-to-brown landscape. Behind her, I could make out the dark shapes that must be the web-weavers’ appreis. Such are always upon the outskirts of a community. Untutored minds are a discomfort to webbers and weavers alike.