We excavated the sweet onion bulbs, we pulled fat nullik pods and wild keva fruit from shrubs, felled a locust with a thrown stick, dug up grubs and honey ants, and having diligently harvested fifty square feet of ground, moved off into the south. “Hethox would circle,” he said, “but they’re nomads. We’ll leave something close to home.”
By noon we were back, the unlucky shirt abulge with anything from grasshoppers to long-podded ningu-seed, and my sling blooded on a three-foot wyresparyx that had scuttled from our path. Zam said urgently, “Get it, quick!” I cried, “I won’t eat that!” He exploded, “That or a lizard, what’s the difference? Imsar Math! Can you shoot or not?”
I clawed for a stone. The range was too long, automatically I clapped heels into Fenglis, she shot forward, I whirled the sling and hoped my childhood games would pay off. The wyresparyx cart-wheeled, I cried “Whoa!” Zam said, astounded, “You can shoot straight!” and I found sweet revenge in returning dulcetly, “I told you so.”
He did skin the thing, and showed me how to cook it too. Then we retired to the finlythes’ shade, and like all desert-dwellers took our well-earned midday sleep.
It was early evening when I woke. A light breeze dappled the finlythe shadows and sighed in the grass. The air had cooled, and Eskan Helken was entering its golden-red sunset range. Hethria stretched out below us, copper or old gold splashed with shadows of purplish indigo, sharp-edged on sand or stone, blurred among tree or bush, miles of silent, self-sufficient emptiness. Zam lay on his back, hands under head, watching it, and as I glanced at his profile, calm now, indeed relaxed, I thought that Hethria, the cruel, the unkindly, had nevertheless been a comforter to him.
Chapter VIII
As with all scandals, the disaster’s news had outstripped lightning, but Estar’s reaction was unusually quick, unusually vehement, and not at all what I had hoped. Zam came to supper that next evening looking more than usually grim, and announced, “The Assembly has met already. All Estar’s giving tongue.”
When I looked expectant, he grew grimmer still. “They don’t want to withdraw. They want revenge.”
“Revenge!”
“The news-talkers are howling about an outrage, one savage witch-doctor mustn’t stop the march of progress, thumb his nose at Estar, butcher Estarian soldiery. A new ‘pressure-group’—is that it? Mm. Has been formed. The Illuminists. They see me as the prince of darkness, and they want me stamped out. Diabolical rites—stronghold of sin—demons and succubi—I live on vampire bats and rule the wind with baby’s blood—no, I promise, I heard them saying it. Hethria groans under my evil spell. They’re pressing to send in the army and expunge this ‘blot on the fair light of reason.’ Then all will be well.”
I was appalled beyond speech. I stared at him, while he gazed down upon Hethria, a rather bitter set to his mouth. Presently he said, “Funny, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said between my teeth. “It’s Kastir.”
He turned to stare.
“I know how it’s done,” I said. “Twist the truth, make it sensational, supply the stories, pay the news-takers. Oh yes, that’s how Estar works. You can get anything, provided you make a big enough noise with someone else’s mouth.”
He was silent, clearly battling disgust. Then he said with iron determination, “Estar is nothing to do with me. My concern is Hethria. I certainly would not consider such methods as that.”
“We’re not,” I retorted, “in a position to consider them. But if the army invades Hethria—”
“Then Hethria will fight for itself. How would you water a corps, let alone an army, out here?”
“Yes,” I said in some relief, before I thought of the dassyx.
He said, “They have to find them first.”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly, and did not let myself add anything more.
* * * * * *
But he was abstracted all next day. The following morning he did not come to breakfast, and when he had not emerged by nightfall, I went up to the cave, thinking, Zam? Are you all right?
I tossed the night away, and was re-heating dinner the instant false dawn showed. Then I advanced on the cave, thinking dourly, If you’re too busy I can feed you, you needn’t even talk. . . . But he was already in the door. His hair stood on end, his eyes were black-ringed and bloodshot and unmistakably distraught.
“I can’t hold them,” he said. “I can’t stop them. The cursed femaere’s swamping me.”
With a superhuman effort I bit back questions to thrust the plate at him; but he put it aside with the back of his hand and strode jerkily down the slope, then up again, at which my control burst.
“Who? What? Why? If you won’t eat, for the Four’s love, tell me what it is!”
“More raiding parties.” He stopped then, tearing a hand back through his hair. “Hundreds of them. They’re coming through the Gebros everywhere the wall’s gone, I turn one back and there’s another behind. And five or six more get by to north or south while I’m busy with the first—then they collide with each other and remember their orders and all come on again. Imsar Math, it’s like a rat-plague. They’re running over me!”
He dashed the hand raggedly at his eyes. With a rending pang of guilt I cried, “I should have guessed—of course he’d use numbers, it’s his greatest strength—oh, if I’d only thought!”
“Not your fault.” He was absently brusque. “I just have to find another way. No, they’re not coming here. They’re aimed at the dassyx.”
My breath stuck on a gasp. “Stop them! You have to stop them! Once they get a bridgehead—any bridgehead—”
“I can’t stop them, I have to move the Sathellin!” He was little calmer than I.
“Yes, you can! Never mind Commands, kill them—stop them once and for all!”
His hand dropped. He stared at me as if I had grown a tail. Then he said with verjuice bitterness, “Do you ever learn?” and stalked back into the cave.
After overcoming that, I was in such a state I contemplated bursting in to bludgeon him back to sense. At any moment it seemed the horizon would sprout a dusty twinkle of spears, the enemy would be upon us, and he would probably let himself be killed rather than kill. He and I and Hethria would perish together, and with us, Everran, my family, Karyx, his men. . . .
I could think of no argument fit to move him. At last, in despair, I applied the most elementary form of logic: that if a proposition is insoluble in its present shape, you must change its form to one where it is.
I fairly ran up to the cave, burst in crying, “If you won’t kill them, make Kastir recall them—” and stopped.
The lamp, bright in that relative gloom, showed me Zam, cross-legged against the inner wall, staring straight before him, motionless. But he was breathing, his whole torso in motion to each enormous, protracted, roaring breath, his muscles trembling like a cable under strain, sweat streaming down his face, saturating his robe, his features contorted, his eyes white, blinding pits.
I shrank back, covering my own eyes as if I had carelessly looked straight into the sun. Then with a wild leap of joy I thought, He’s changed his mind. He’s doing it.
Stealing peeps at him I waited, first scared, then fascinated, then awed, finally terrified. Whatever his mind was at, it did not seem that any flesh and blood could withstand such strain.
After a time, regaining my wits, I went to build up the fire, set the kettle to simmer. And at last, as on that night three years ago, his breathing eased, and he melted into collapse.
Revived by tea, he gave me a somewhat sardonic look. “If they call me a sorcerer, I may as well earn the name. I didn’t kill anyone. I put a wall of fire across Hethria, from the Helkents to Kemreswash. It’s six feet high, it doesn’t move, and it won’t go out.”
“But—but—”
“No fuel. It’s
Pellathir. Illusion.” He drained the cup. “All I need now”—a long, long breath—“is to keep it there.”
And he did, for the most interminable two days in my experience. By the end I was reduced to prayers that something, anything, would happen, before he killed himself.
* * * * * *
In a back-handed way, the Four answered me. The fourth morning he tottered out, looking as if risen from the dead, to say, “The femaere ‘learnt his lore’ sure enough. When the mirror signals came back he told them it was just wizardry and promised three gold ingots to the first man brave enough to put his hand in it and see. For three gold ingots Estarians will do anything.” He sank down by the fireplace and promptly fell fast asleep.
How I bore it till he woke I have no idea, still less how I contrived to feed him without a howl of, “What are you going to do?” But I must have been screaming it in his mind, for at last he looked up and said wearily, as if to some maddeningly reiterated question, “I have to think of something else.”
“Get rid of Kastir!”
I yelled it instantly. Then I caught myself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I know you won’t—can’t.” I could not bear to suggest another sandstorm, more illusion. “Are there any other arts?”
He made a one-handed throwaway gesture. Then his eye turned to the morrethans blowing on Fengthira’s grave, and as he looked I saw his face gradually harden, till it had the structure of granite itself.
I did not ask. But after a moment, he answered me.
“Tomorrow they’ll have the first dassyk.” His eyes grew remote. “This could never have happened if we hadn’t built them. But the made can be unmade. Once it’s back as it should be, Hethria can fight for itself.”
“You mean wreck the dassyx? All of them? But even an aedr—how?”
“Quite simple.” The bleakness in his eyes approached tragedy. “Axynbrarve. It’s an Art. To act without hands. That’s how the dam that waters the dassyx was built.”
I gasped. Then I said unsteadily, “You mean—if you smash the dam . . . there’ll be no water for the channels. . . .”
“And the dassyx will be uninhabitable.”
“Beryx built it,” he went on at last, very softly. “He wanted to open the roads. Roads are for carrying ideas. But these are carrying Ammath.”
I too had a sense of desecration, strong as when I looked down on the Gebros with the pick in my hands. Then I came to reality. “But you’ll kill the Sathellin! They can’t live without water out there!”
He moved his head an inch. He sounded quite cool now.
“The cisterns will see them through until the storms begin. And most of the dassyx are watered from the little downstream barrages. Only the three westernmost stages use the primary dam.”
“The Estarians will use cisterns too.”
“I can break them open.”
Though he spoke with grim determination, it was a determination covering pain. He paused. Then he said passionately, “Breaking things to save things—they’ll drive me to Ammath!”
Before I thought, I had laid my hand on his and said, “Don’t. It has to be done. For Hethria’s sake.”
He looked down on our joined hands in a way that made his skin burn against mine. In an access of embarrassment I tried to take rather than snatch my hand away. But whatever he felt, it had not been repulsion. He shook his head and said, “Yes. It’s a Must.” Then he looked at me, eyes grave and steady. “I’m glad you reminded me. They do exist.”
“Good.” I strove for easiness. “Now?”
He squared his shoulders. Then he paused. “But for Beryx’s sake . . . first—look here.”
I looked, and his eyes dilated, the irises woke, and the pupils flared open on another crystal, miniature world.
It was a Hethrian gorge, contorted gold and crimson rock, but with a most un-Hethrian growth of tree and plant-life in the defile’s chasm, a cool, luxurious green welt, splashed with the staring white trunks of femaerel, the desert helliens, pieced by the jewel flicker of birds, the low, dappled passage of beasts. And at its heart ran a long, long, sinuous waterhole whose tourmaline opulence ended against the mossy old cords of giant tree trunks that composed a barrage dam.
Zam’s voice said, literally in my ear,
But it has to be done. I tried to make it as gentle as possible. It’s a Must.
I was back by the fire in Eskan Helken, those gray eyes fixed on me in a haunted, questioning stare.
“Not wanton,” I said. “And not waste.”
He hesitated a moment longer. Then he averted his face, changed his posture to sit cross-legged, and drew the prolonged opening breath.
Perhaps it came directly from his inner vision, perhaps not. But as I waited that picture seemed to reassemble, to draw closer, enveloping me, cool, tranquil, more lovely in the shadow of its imminent doom. I felt the kindness of the shade, smelt the water, the thick, rich scent of forest humus that I had never smelt in my life. I heard the medley of bird-calls, the lazy sough of foliage, I was looking closely at some species of hellien with an enormous lydsith fern in its lowest fork, silver-green paws of leaf shining faintly in the forest gloom—
I jerked as if shot, I know now Zam had jerked simultaneously. There was a flash of three giant tree-trunks bursting in a rain of splinters as their shattered ends leapt in the air amid the pent water’s sudden, bestial roar. . . . Then a long, rending, ripping disintegration as the cords parted in one continuous shear and the dam front buckled outward with the sound of its fracture lost in the ear-shattering bellow of water on the loose.
When I looked at Zam he had regained his breath. He was staring into nothing, a lost, stricken deadness in his eyes. Then he said under his breath, “Math . . .” and buried his face in his hands.
I let him be, aware it was the sympathy he preferred, and after a while he sat up and finished the thing by breaking the cisterns. This time, a watcher from outside, as it were, I saw the strange, fearful whiplash of his torso as each blow expelled his breath on a ferocious grunt, as it must have when he broke the dam. In both action and expense, I thought, Axynbrarve was as fearsome as the other Arts.
Afterwards he sat in silence for a long time. Then he got up and said dully, “Let’s take the horses and go somewhere.”
* * * * * *
That it was the hottest part of the day in the hottest part of the hottest season in the hottest land available did not seem to worry him at all. Fenglis and I plodded along behind, she with head adroop, I feeling the dingy skirts of a once-smart green habit grow irremediably thick, damp and gritty with her sweat, while the dust-devils pirouetted and the heat-haze shuddered on the horizon and the sun kicked up off the stones in palpable blasts of furnace heat, and Eskan Helken reeled like some fantastic red umbrella cluster in the mirage. But however absently Zam rode, he kept his direction. Presently I found we had described a huge circle and were headed back to the grass bay, a low green scallop at Eskan Helken’s foot.
Fenglis mended her pace. Zam did not glance round as we drew abreast, but a moment later he said suddenly, “If you must destroy things, it’s better to destroy a dam than a man. It’s not a living part of Math.”
“It fed a lot of living things. And it was made by men. It was a—a great achievement.” I strove to express what I had felt for the Gebros: respect for men’s works that are greater than their makers, that outlast the maker’s life.
“Yes.” He sounded unhappy, even guilty. “But Beryx will understand.”
I did not ask, Are you sure? since he patently was not. He lifted his head. Then he repeated my own words back to me.
“In any case, it had to be done. It was a Must.”
The towers of Eskan Helken loo
med over us, eliciting my perennial response of wonder at their colors, their bizarre shapes, the sheer surprise of their presence, stuck up like stone mushrooms from the level sands. Their folds were suave, rose-black red now, their prominences glaring Helkent cornelian, ready to change for evening as they changed the day around, yet never changed at all. How old were they? I wondered. Old enough to dwarf the spans of men, to dwarf life’s very span on earth.
For once I did not resent this survival of the past. It was comforting to think they would outlast me, as they had outlasted the dam, as they would probably outlast all humanity’s puny works, that if Kastir ruined all Hethria he would be unable to alter them.
I glanced at Zam, confidently expecting to find my thoughts had been shared. But he had checked his mare, and was staring at the ground just by her near hoof.
As I followed his glance he sprang off, bent quickly, and with infinite care gathered something up. He cupped it in his hands a moment before he turned to me, saying, “Look.”
I jerked back instinctively before I realized that the monstrous beetle thing with its goggle-eyed head and thick jointed legs and carapace was only a shell, ash-pale, translucent, split from head to tail along the top.
“A vannor skin.” His eyes were alight with something akin to joy. “Singing wings. You hear them in summer, everywhere. They only live one season. Just sing and lay their eggs and die. But the eggs hatch into this.” He turned the shell in his palm. “And it lives underground for years and years, waiting the right time to come out.” His voice had softened. “Years and years. Then out, one season flying, and p’ff!”
Blankly, I stared from him to the skin and back.
“Like the dam.” He was puzzled to find I had not shared his vision’s leap. “All that time waiting. Being something. Just to turn into something else that was its life’s real purpose. And then die.”
Though I did not want to mar his consolation, the parallel seemed inexact. “But . . . this laid eggs. Before it died.”
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