Red Country
Page 21
“The price. The price of Hethria. Asthyn don’t kill, they can’t. But they take, take, I don’t know how to say it. Life. Spirit. Power. They’ve lost their own, and they crave it, the way we crave wine. They would have hunted the Estarians for it. It would have been worse than murder. So I made a bargain. When Hethria was free, they could have the power they wanted. Mine.”
I could not breathe. He went on, hurrying now.
“An aedr has more than a man, there’s no comparison, it’s a raindrop to a dam—they agreed. Now—it’s time.”
I heard myself whisper, “The price. . . .”
He looked at me then. “It’s better. I used a Black Art. I’ve fallen into Ammath.”
At that the full meaning dawned on me. I screamed.
He yelled, “Shut-up-and-go-in-the-cave!” I shrieked back, “No!”
He gave a short, furious gasp and spoke past me to the thing beyond the fire. “Wait a moment.” His voice was taut, shaking. He was terrified himself and unable to hide it all. “Let me settle this.”
He got up, grabbed my elbows with hands that bit to the bone, literally ran me to the cave and shoved me violently inside, yelling, “Now stay there and be quiet!” And as my feet took root, my tongue locked, I knew he had used a Command.
Squaring his shoulders, he turned away. Then he spoke again to the shape in the firelight, and the tremor in his voice made him sound like a small boy, struggling desperately to maintain self-control.
“I would like,” he said, “to choose my own—place?”
I could just see the shadow. It did not seem to move, I heard nothing, but Zam nodded stiffly, once. Then he said, “Good-bye, Sellithar,” and walked away from the door, out of my sight.
There was no sound outside. There was no sound inside, except the thunder of my blood and breath as I fought, gagged and bound more surely than with ropes. The struggle almost burst my lungs, red spots swarmed across my sight. Yet when the intangible bonds slackened, loosened, fell away, I would have resumed them, for I knew what that loosing meant.
Had all the Dead been massed outside together I would have trampled the lot. Before the Command gave I had staggered forward, and as it vanished I was running, full pelt out onto the slope where nothing showed now but moonlight, red embers, the shadow of the silent rocks, scanning it all in one lightning sweep before I spun with breath in my throat to shriek his name, cut off as I saw the dark shape upon Fengthira’s grave.
Zam was stretched face down across its center, arms outspread, body straight, laid down among the morrethans so carefully he had not crushed a single flower. He was still warm. But I could not find so much as the echo of a pulse.
* * * * * *
What I did first I cannot remember. Beat my breast, perhaps, tore my hair, all the classic acts of grief. Certainly I ripped out every morrethan in armslength, for they were there next day, shredded to bits. Nothing answered, nothing stirred. Hethria’s panorama lay out under the moonlight, tranquil, indifferent; and now its silence was the silence of a tomb.
When I looked at Zam again the moon had come round to light his face, and it wore the impassivity of the dead, so different from the impassivity of life, which is the mask of the active, conscious mind. Thinking that, I remembered his mind which had been so intricate, so accomplished, so full of living power, and that brought a blast of rage, the rage against destruction I had felt at the fall of the Gebros, the breaking of the dam. But now its intensity took me clean out of myself so that before I knew it I had stood up and screamed.
I did it with the full force of my lungs and the whole weight of the fury’s impetus, with such force it tore my throat and seemed to disembowel the night. The echoes plunged against the pocket walls and ricocheted out over the desert to infinity, at any other time I would have been terrified. But there was no room for terror. I had found a purpose for the rage that was consuming me, and I did not utter empty sound, I screamed a name.
Before the echoes died I did it again, and again, and again, and each scream fed the fury rather than slaking it, gifting me with superhuman strength. I could have gone on forever, tearing the night to shreds with the manic will of a child in a tantrum, and like a child in a tantrum I found a vicious pleasure in the act. But I knew what I was doing. I had felt the quality of that silence deride my tantrums before, tolerantly waiting for them to blow themselves out. See, I challenged it, if you can tolerate this.
By moonlight it was even less perceptible than by day. There was no eddy in the air, no warning turbulence. Just one moment, the moonlight. And the next Fengthira, a phantom’s paradigm, standing by her grave.
I stopped screaming, and with perfect composure waited to regain my breath. When she spoke I shook all over, but mostly it was at the strangeness, for the speech of the dead has still less resemblance than mindspeech to that of the tongue. It is flat, inflectionless, blocks of pure meaning printed directly into your brain.
“Him,” I said, and pointed at Zam. “I want him back.”
Nor does expression play on the faces of the dead. Nevertheless, she conveyed puzzlement.
I said, “You taught him. He followed your rules. I want him back.”
This time the effect was sadness.
“Oh, yes, there is. Did you—do you—follow Math?”
“You know what I mean!”
“You taught it to him. It’s because he believed you that he did this instead of fighting like any sensible man. He’s gone now, because of it. I want him back.”
“Bah! If I can’t reverse reality, what are you doing here?”
I caught a hint of amusement, dry, remote.
“I don’t give a broken fiel if I’m pert or on your grave or chopping logic or standing on my head. I want him back.”
“So don’t feed me any moonshine about tampering with reality. You were responsible. You give him back.”
“You told him about Math, and he believed you, and tried to abide by it. So he wouldn’t let Hethria be ruined, and he tried to save it without bloodshed, because Math says killing is also destruction of reality, and that’s Ammath. So he tried to save reality both ways and that’s how he made this stupid bargain and destroyed himself. And if that’s Math, then anyone who follows it is just what I thought he was—a barking lunatic!”
The moonlight flicked. Another shape was beside her at the grave foot. The moon leached the coppery hair, the violent green eyes, but I recognized the toss of that backflung mane, the thin, aquiline, volcanic face. In the speech of the Dead this voice retained expression. Harsh, vitriolic, perilous.
My heart quailed. Then I set my teeth. I must fight, I thought. If I have only a tongue and a temper, that’s what I’ll use.
“Who are you,” I flashed back, “to say I can’t?”
The laughter was recognizable too. Harsh and deadly as the voice.
My breath came so sharply I all but choked. With just such a wild plunge of the heart have I recognized a flaw, a culpable flaw, in an opponent’s deployment at chess.
“Good,” I said. “You can defend it then.”
“Math,” I said. The rage filled me, buoyed me, made a razor of my wits. “It means Good, doesn’t it? Then tell me this. How can what’s defined as good cause its followers to avoid evil, respect reality, spare their enemies—and destroy themselves?”
Silence. Then,
“Oh, it was surely a bargain! But is it Math?”
Silence again.
“That’s Good, is it? The best you could dream up for Good is something that saves its enemies and sees its servants dead?”
More silence.
“Answer me! Is it Math, or not?”
Still silence.
“Either it is, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, I want him back!”
“What?”
It was Th’Iahn who—spoke. I got out one word before I gagged on the shock.
“I didn’t! You horrible blood-sucker—!”
“It wouldn’t! It would have been overrun and destroyed and—”
He swung his arm again. As if my eyes swung with it Eskan Helken revolved around me in the moonlight, towers and walls and bastions of silent, rose-black, impregnable, everlasting rock.
The fire died in my mouth. My own memories crashed down on me while I stared at him like a dumbstruck sheep. Eskan Helken in the evening light, Zam staring up at it, peace, regained serenity, in his face. Eskan Helken reeling in the noonday haze, and my own thoughts telling me, those towers will outlast you, as they outlasted the dam, as they will probably outlast all humanity’s puny works. If Kastir ruins all Hethria he won’t be able to alter them.
“B-but—”
It came out a strangled sheep’s cough, and the shade moved with it as if I had slipped a leash.
“But Hethria—it isn’t just Eskan Helken, it’s the whole land, it’s—”
I staggered back, one step, two, in another he would be at my throat and I had no defense—and in my panic I shouted like a child a last instinctive excuse. “I don’t follow Math!”
Then I stumbled another step and tried to get my hands up in vain reflex to protect my throat.
And the shade brought up like a dog back on the leash.
I stood gasping as if I had run and he might have gasped too if he had breath. But every second he did not fly at me was a breathing-space for more than air. It gave me time to think. To understand what I had done. To rally my wits.
When it worked, my voice came out the merest husk. I said, “I did what I thought—was a Must.”
Fengthira was silent. But my spine shrank all but double under Th’Iahn’s glare.
“I tried to protect Hethria. I tried to get him to protect it, yes. And by my laws—I wasn’t wrong.”
Fengthira’s shade shifted, slightly as a shadow never touched by wind.
“But you—you follow Math.”
Neither of them moved, but the air seemed to leap and tingle as if lightning ran between us and the strike almost stopped my heart.
“So never mind what I did. Let’s consider what you did. You’re Asthyn, and you took the bargain—he called you to hunt souls, and you came! And you took him as the price! You tell me what’s Good about that!”
The moonlight had curdled round us. There was a flicker, like heat-haze, like fire-haze, in my sight. But no words came into my head.
“He followed your laws,” I shouted. “That’s what killed him. Now explain to me why you, who invented the thing, and you, who passed it on to him, and both of you, who took advantage of it when he broke the rules and fed you—fed you—now you won’t follow the laws yourselves!”
Silence again.
“It’s really quite simple, isn’t it?” Suddenly, as for the last grapple in a chess match, the heart was bursting in my throat. “It’s nothing to do with me. Either you follow Math, or you don’t. If you don’t, you’re hypocrites and your Math is a lie. If you do, this isn’t Math and you can’t go on with it. Not without condemning yourselves. It’s your principle, not mine. So just tell me—do you follow Math?”
Silence yet again, lengthening, lengthening. I stood with my head up, trying to appear defiant, feeling the exaltation dwindle to terror, to despair. I had staked everything on a phantasm, and even among phantoms it was impotent. I had lost.
Slowly, slowly, the shape of Fengthira began to move, coming forward along the side of the grave. I turned as she advanced, so we ended still facing each other, she at Zam’s head, I at his feet. For a moment her form wavered forward as if she would have touched him, and could not.
She paused. The breath quivered like a fountain-top in my throat.
The moonlight whirled so I dug the nails into my palms to steady it. Dimly, I saw Th’Iahn’s shadow come to her side.
said that harsh voice,
There was such cold, threatful potency in that voice now, my heart shrank in my breast.
My heart was pounding so wildly it seemed to shake me on my feet. Fengthira’s words rode above my ears’ inner roar.
Her presence weakened, and revived.
Now there was irony, cold, inhuman, freezing my blood.
Beside her Th’Iahn growled, the growl of a beast scenting blood.
My knees shook. I said, “I’m—sorry I was—rude. But—I wanted him back.”
Her shape faded, those arrogant facial planes melting back into the moon. Beside her, Th’Iahn’s voice spoke a phrase I had heard Zam use, and thought a kind of oath. Now it was a command, delivered unwillingly, with the elemental heat of his frustration showing through.
He said,
Then they were both dissolving, grown transparent, dislimning, gone. The moonlight was only light. Down the hill a saeveryr, roused by some shifting beam, churred drowsily and stopped. And between my hands, flesh and blood, warm, tangible, living reality, Zam stirred and groaned.
Chapter XI
It was false dawn, the pallid light that steals under the stars to usher in the true dawn’s splendor, before Zam opened his eyes.
I had sat by him all the rest of the night, not daring and in any case unable to move him from the grave. Yet it had not seemed long. There were so many emotional arrears to make up: a fortnight’s crisis, a week’s dread, then the night’s climactic terror to get over, the winding down from that battle frenzy, and the reaction to overcome. Not to mention the progress to believing he was safe, before assurance could fruit in something that bore no relation to “
relief.” And then the corollaries to realize: that the struggle for Hethria was truly over, it was really victory. And then the springing of pure joy that slowly settled into sure, final tranquility.
After that, I could have sat there forever. I was perfectly content. The war was over. The last battle had been my own, and I had not only won it, I had brought away the spoils.
* * * * * *
For a long time after they opened, his eyes were still blank as a baby’s. The dawn had risen, in huge sweeps of gold and copper and jubilant crimson, when I saw them focus. He was tracking the silver leaves on a morrethan twig that sawed to and fro on the light morning wind, six inches from his nose.
I said very softly, “Zam.”
He blinked. After a pause, his eyes moved. Failing from that angle to see more than a piece of my skirt, he rolled laboriously on one side. And then he stared with a blankness that harrowingly, unnervingly recalled the eyes of the Dead, stared till I could bear it no more.
I put a hand on his shoulder. It was reassuringly solid and warm. He said in blurred, slurry mindspeech,
The joy was overtaking me. I could not restrain an idiotic, involuntary smile. “I’ve been here all the time.”
His eyes narrowed as he struggled with some unmanageable fact. At last he put out a hand and felt timidly, fearfully, at the earth under him, the morrethan stalk, the cloth of his robe. Then he said, stunned beyond amazement, “I’m alive.”
The smile kept bursting out of control. I said, “Yes.”
His eyes had been leaden, inert. Slowly they thawed to their true limpid gray. The irises began to weave. There was a long silence while his mind presumably resumed function. Then he evidently gave up hope of reasoning it out, for he turned on his back and said helplessly, “How? Why?”
“I made them give you back,” I said.
He blinked. I stood up, to find my muscles stiffened almost rigid. “Can you sit up?” He tried, but his limbs were rigored worse than mine. “Stay there. I’ll go and make some tea.”
It may be impossible to fly while doing so, but that was the sensation. I even found myself singing, or at least humming Harran’s catch for the saeveryrs, and down by the well they churred saucily in reply. When I brought the tea Zam had sat up, but he still looked so befuddled I decided to let explanations wait.