One riddle solved. When he did not continue, I went on myself.
“The Phathos said the dream meant I should look for help in the east. For Everran. You know what’s happening there?”
“I do now.”
Subduing the shock, I thought, Then you know the rest. And then embarrassment swamped me as my mind, with thought’s unruly speed, replayed my calculations as we mounted, my jibes to the Phathos—fight a war with Sathellin? Bury the Confederacy in sand? And I knew he shared the recollection and I could not stop it. It is impossible to think any way but candidly, and thoughts cannot be masked like speech.
“Don’t mind that,” he said. It could have been approval. “You’re managing far better than most people. When they first meet an aedr they’re usually too panicked to think, let alone plan to make some use of us.”
“And,” he went on, “you were quite right about Hethria. Sathellin couldn’t fight a war.”
I stared into the dark. Only as it crumbled did I see what a tower I had built on the promise of a dream, on the foundation of vague, irrational hopes.
“I think,” he said beside me, “that I should send you on to Assharral. They have the numbers and the army and the experience for this. And Beryx would never deny a ruler in your situation. Especially a ruler of Everran. It’s still very dear to him.”
The campfires opened ahead of us, low red stars under the heavens’ stars. A little wind sighed over the desert, cold through the hairs that had risen, prickling, bristling, on my scalp.
“You mean—he’s alive?”
“Beryx?” At last I had produced a reaction. “Of course. Beryx is the Assharran emperor.”
When I found myself clinging to the saddle pommel with the mare halted and his arm upholding me, my first words were pure mortification, impossible to suppress. “I never do this, ever, ever! And that makes twice in the one night!”
“It’s rather much when Once-upon-a-time suddenly turns into Now.”
This time his stolidity was a relief. I took slow deep breaths and waited for the swimming in my head to stop.
Just as I decided I could retrieve the reins, he removed his arm, and I never bothered to say, “Thank you, I can manage now.”
As the horses moved forward, he returned to the point. “Indeed, I think I’d best take you to Assharral—” He broke off. Then showed symptoms of awkwardness at last. “I mean—I do know the roads. You could do it alone, but it would be slower, and riskier. And a caravan’s much too slow.”
I took breath. Bit back outrage, refutation, assertions of independence and adequacy, furious cries of “I’m not a child, nor a useless female!” Yells of “I can look after myself!” Thought in despair that it was pointless to bridle my tongue with an aedr, who could read my thoughts, who knew I was thinking this. . . . “Oh, Four take it!” I cried, and began to laugh in sheer exasperation. “This is ridiculous!”
“I’m sorry.” In default of laughter, he did sound a shade contrite. “If it consoles you at all, I can’t help myself. We had empathy, we could read our parents’ thoughts in our cradles. It was how Beryx found us. Most aedryx only use thought-reading, Scarthe, when they want. We have no choice.”
Such is the speed of thought, our horses could not have gone five strides before I had passed from, Four, how unfair life is, why was I denied that gift, what would any ruler give for it, to, But imagine the fear and distrust and calculation with which everyone must react to him, the same way you did, and he’s aware of it all, to, And think what is in people’s minds, imagine being exposed to all the greed, hate, lies, pettiness, having it pushed at you whether you want it or not, to, Four, the poor devil, to, Who am I calling poor—I snapped that off and opened my mouth.
“Thank you,” he said politely. “But I’m used to it. Just try to carry on as if it doesn’t happen. That’s the kindest thing you could do.”
I choked down further outrage and confined myself to noting, with relief, that we were almost into camp.
It was a malicious pleasure to watch his effect on the Sathellin, not to mention the change in their attitude towards me. They were not obsequious, no Sathel could manage it. But for the first and only time someone held Vestar while I dismounted, the caravan master came in person to ask Zam to his fire, carefully widening the invitation to me, and the whole camp buzzed with what you could only call nervous respect. Small wonder, I thought, as I sipped my mint-tea and listened to the caravan master walking on verbal eggs. How do you cheat a warden who can read your very mind?
Yet he seemed just enough. He made conversation, however superfluous, about the trip, the loading, the weather further west, prospects for the season ahead. If there was no kindness, no merriment, nor was there any hint of oppression or exploitation. A fair ruler, I decided, if a stern one. One you might not love, but could probably trust.
His reputation came in useful, too. Rising from the fire, he said casually, “I shall go on ahead of you. Escorting the princess Sellithar.” And though the caravan master shot me a boggle-eyed glance, I knew neither he nor any other soul in the caravan would breathe a word of scandal; would indeed rigorously keep themselves from the slightest thought of it.
* * * * * *
We left at dawn, which revealed why he had not used a stirrup the previous night. His gray was a young dry mare, and he rode not merely bareback but bridleless.
He did not have to see me looking, of course. Leading the way out of camp, he said over his shoulder, “Wreve-lan’x. Beast-mastery. Another art.” He glanced briefly at the caravan, uncoiling its sluggish snake of pack-beasts and black turbans and thin red dust, thence out to the sand-dunes and up at Eskan Helken, robed in the lilacs and hyacinths of Hethria at dawn. Then his eye moved to Vestar.
All my touchy pride reviving, I broke out, “She’ll keep up with yours perfectly well!”
He said, “We’ll go, then,” and clicked a canter from the gray.
How I wished, before sunset, to have left that unsaid! It is one thing to hurry at your own pace, or to dawdle with a caravan. It is quite another to match someone moving at their speed, with a better horse, used to the country and—no, I have to admit it, it was a fact—with better endurance than yours.
By noon my legs felt like wet string. By mid-afternoon I would have died sooner than ask for a halt, but I was ignobly praying—again I must admit it—that he would read my mind, favor my weakness, however galling its admission, and call a stop.
An hour later I was convinced he meant me to work out the proof of my false bravado to the end, that he was cruel, vindictive, the most odious man I ever had the misfortune to come across, that I would sooner die than ride another day with him, that I would go on alone and let Hethria kill me and Everran take its chance.
Vestar was flagging, I could feel the sogginess grow in her responses, compounded by the flop of my tired weight. All around Hethria glared at us, treeless, waterless, dust-red undulations of rock and sand cavorting under the heat haze and the mirage and the pitiless, draining sun. In late afternoon, when the sun itself had lost its sting, the heat remained, pouring back out of the oven-heated ground.
Though she too was dark with sweat, the gray mare showed no sign of distress. Curse you, I thought to her rider’s obdurately upright back, if I had a knife I’d stick it into you. . . . He glanced round. Then swung from the road into the untrodden desert to its south.
Autumn storms had made a temporary oasis in a claypan, already fringed by quick-responding grass and every kind of herbage, even a couple of desert figs in flower. Flights of brilliant gweldryx were mirrored on teal-blue water as they fled irately from our advance; a furry lydyr shot under an istarel bush, a big wyresparyx lizard scuttled on crocodile legs, tail throwing spurts of sand. I was past attention. I did not argue, let alone attempt to help when he watered the horses, unsaddled Vestar, slung down the saddlebags, collected firewood, and set a tiny traveler’s kettle to boil.
I was still flat in the sand when he brought a cu
p of steaming-hot mint tea. Shamefully, I could not produce so much as a token denial of its need.
He had not spoken all day, and silence endured when I was fit to join the routine of making camp: gather more wood, pool our food, choose bed spots and unroll the cloaks a desert night demands. Our silence melted us into the greater silence of Hethria, making its hush oddly companionable.
The sun sank, the air cooled at last. An odd bird or animal crept back to the water, emboldened by our quiet. It was restful to lie beyond the fire’s range and watch the last splendid reds and golds die from Eskan Helken, its domes turning rose-black before they vanished in the dark. Fifty miles away, I estimated, watching them under my heavy eyelids, and into weariness and wounded self-esteem crept a shadow of pride.
“Fifty-five,” he said from across the fire.
No doubt, I thought savagely before I could help myself, it would have been sixty-five but for me.
“No.” He sounded expressionless as ever. “I was hurrying to make Cruin Los. This waterhole. That was far enough.”
A jolt of indignation sat me up. He forestalled me.
“There was no point in talking till you felt better about it. And most of it didn’t need to be said.”
“Curse you!” I had erupted before I could stop myself. “How dare you! Read my feelings—let me eat my words and then stew all day in my own juice—‘wait till I felt better’—sit there till you thought I wouldn’t bite your head off and then patronize me like—like—oh, I could strangle you!”
He said resignedly, “I did wait, yes. It hasn’t seemed to help.”
“Oh!” I could hardly think, I was so furious at succumbing to fury, and a fury that was unwarranted, unreasonable, when he had been attempting tact and I was in the wrong and it was my own fault and I could not even admit that.
He did not apologize, explain, try to appease me. He would not quarrel either. He simply got up and walked away.
* * * * * *
We rode mute all next day, I in deepest dudgeon, he probably aware of speech’s futility, and we rode more slowly, so I seethed away, refusing to demean myself by shouting that I could go faster, that I would not be coddled, further enraged by the certainty that he knew what I felt. I could not even sulk in privacy.
In the same cold silence we camped, he apparently unaffected, I absorbed in trying to stop my thoughts. I was still engaged in this fruitless exercise when I realized he had risen to his feet beside the fire, staring toward a red glow in the south.
After quick deductions, quicker adjustments, and the decision to disparage Hethria, I said, “What in the Four’s name is there to burn out here?”
“Hethox,” he replied cryptically. “Down on Xathan Syr. The big grass-belt. And a hunting fire. It will burn till it finishes the torjer—the spiny grass—and they have to shift their ground.”
“So?”
“So then there’ll be tribes at odds. Skirmishes. People killed.” The tone remained passionless. “I’ve told them fifty times, and they never heed.”
I stoppered mental conjecture with verbal inanity. “What are you going to do?”
He took his time to answer. You would, I thought, stuffing speculations back into mental limbo. Hurry up!
“If there was rain about,” he said at last, “I could divert it there. Or if there was wind, I could blow the fire back on itself. What I should do is use a Command and make them beat it out themselves. But it only frightens them silly, and doesn’t teach them anything.”
My mouth opened and shut. Swamped in wrath over his empathy, I had never thought to wonder if an aedr had other powers.
“Yes,” he said. “I can do any of those things.” I still could not speak. “Wrevurx, the weather words, give power over rain and wind. The Commands are lower level arts. They only affect minds. Wreviane, the fire art, isn’t as easy for me as for Beryx, because he’s Heagian. But I think I can manage this.”
My mind reeled under this barrage of gibberish, to recoil on stronger grievances.
“No.” He sounded a little weary. “You needn’t wait while I ride over there to fight it, or go to muster help. You won’t have to help me, either. Ruanbrarx, they’re called. Mind acts. I’ll put it out from here. With my mind.”
Before I had rallied to resent that speech’s innuendo rather than its content, he had sat down with his back to me, head on hands, elbows on knees, and begun to breathe.
Breathe? In that dead hush of night-time Hethria it was like the approach of a storm; each successive breath was held longer, exhaled longer, developing a rasp, a choking roar that first alarmed, then cowed, then positively terrified me. A dozen times I thought he had had some sort of seizure and leapt up to run with vain but basic human instinct to his help. The most fantastic terrors assailed me. He would throw a fit, strangle himself, die, I should be left alone in the wild, or accused of murdering him, I should have to plead innocence to the Sathellin, to Beryx himself, who in this light became an ogre of legendary size. You must remember that I had never before seen an aedr use the Arts. Though they are called mind-acts, they involve more than the mind.
My panic has left no idea of how long it went on. Unconsciously I had crept closer, the Four know why, to his back. It was there I found myself, mouth dry, bathed in sweat, heart pounding like a hammer-mill, when the dreadful breathing slowed, diminished, and he seemed to fall apart, slumping and then rolling sideways to lie limply in the sand.
In a pang of pure horror I snatched his wrist. But the pulse was there, hammering fast and thunderously as my own. I sprang up to run for the kettle, already filled for breakfast, water to dash in his face—but before I could reach my feet he said faintly, rather flatly,
By the time the fire roused he had sat up, groggily wiping his face. The new flames showed me the trembling wrists, the slick streams of sweat on his jaw, the great black patches on his robe, the sag of limbs and trunk that denote a man stripped of physical strength. I shot back to his side, pushed him flat, and snapped, “Lie down, idiot!”
He went down with a thump, unable to help himself, and I yanked the closest saddlebag to push under his head. Sounding a little plaintive, he said,
I was looking full in his face when he spoke, and the hair lifted on my neck. For his lips had not moved.
And I suddenly found I had been inching back as if my limbs had assumed a life of their own, that my fingers had stiffened, by some age-old reflex, into the evil sign.
For a moment those gray eyes were no longer opaque, and what they revealed was grief. Simple human hurt. Then he spoke aloud, just audible, with such effort I understood why he had not done so before.
“I am not a . . . sorcerer.”
A pell-mell surge of thought recalled the full implications of his empathy, constructed from that brief reaction how he must feel about all the distrust, fear, outright terror that ordinary people must inflict on him, showed me an aedr’s power was equal fortune and curse. And I understood that here, if nowhere else, he was vulnerable. To have him at my mercy, I need only continue showing fear.
Even at thought’s speed the realization hardly formed before it spawned refusal, and the refusal its corollary of pity that I hid more swiftly than I had ever thought in my life.
“I know that,” I said.
* * * * * *
We did not speak again until the tea was drunk, we had eaten, and he was sitting up, apparently recovered and safe inside his usual impassivity. I had been looking into the south, now lit only by stars, reflecting that he was a better ruler than I judged. He could have lost his temper with the Hethox. With those powers he could have meted out some fearful punishment. Yet he had mended their damage, and withheld so much as their just deserts. It must take a great capacity for patience and kindness, I thought, not only to pardon the crime but to
right the damage yourself, and at such a fearful cost. . . .
“I’m afraid you have it wrong,” he said. “It’s Hethria I really care about.”
I goggled anew as I envisaged that vast, useless, hostile waste which surrounded us, merely waiting in its unforgiving way for our one mistake which would offer it its revenge.
“The Hethox can take care of themselves,” he said. “They’ve done it for thousands of years. But a fire like that isn’t just inefficient, wasteful, killing far more game than they can eat. It destroys the land for a decade or more. This has been a wet autumn.” I gulped again. “Plants had come up down there that don’t shoot in forty years; it would have been a good breeding season for birds and animals; even the waterbag frogs would have woken up. Now that’s ruined. Not to mention that, if a sandstorm comes through before the torjer recovers, that part of Hethria will just lift up and blow away. Destruction. Wanton waste.” His quiet tone made it a blasphemy. “Hethria would be a beautiful country, without men.”
I thought of the Sathellin.
“Roads. Caravans. Farms. Water from Kemreswash. Salt. My father taught us how to check it. Now that it’s stopped, Zem and I are taking care they don’t expand. Roads, yes. Settlement, no.”
Puzzled, I wondered, Why?
He said flatly, “It would be too much. There are roads because Beryx wants them, but they strain the natural balance already. More farms would mean more irrigation, more salt, too many ignorant farmers to compensate. The ruin of what soil Hethria does have. A real desert, where nothing could grow. It shan’t happen. Not if I can help it.” And, said that hint of steel, I will.
My eyes returned to that horizontal horizon, blackness unbroken by any hill, building, natural or man-made resource, and the thought burst up: But what a loss, what a waste, a life devoted to shepherding nomads and restraining savages, denied all the grace and comfort of civilization, the mere pleasure of running water and green grass!
And with an aedr, it’s not merely a waste, it’s criminal. Those powers could make him a general, a great engineer, a city builder, a ruler, a nation-founder. He could have wealth, rank, power, his choice of human felicity—
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