by Janet Morris
“I would speak to you. Will you hear me?” he said quietly, throwing his leg over the ledge.
“You know me,” I said.
“I know what I feel. There was a time when you would have spoken of your own accord. You must understand me. I know the hest, and the sort; and I know where hesting blends with shaping and becomes unnatural constraint. You yourself know the rules. Even Khys could not escape them. And many take helsars. The time is sorely beset.”
“I do not understand you,” I said.
“There are stars in the sky,” Sereth observed. “Once, I might have gone out among them. Khys felt it better that we be isolated. I cannot now hunt among the stars. Hear me, ci’ves,” he said, the shadow face turning to regard me, and then back to the stars over the Lake of Horns. “I might not wish to go. But I would like to regain the choice. I may set my will to that barrier. I cannot say. There is the Embrodming Sea, and what lies beyond. I have reclaimed you. I am reasonably content. In time, you will better recollect yourself. I will see to it. You are not as stripped of skills as you pretend. I invite you to take them up. I advise you to do so. We will all need what weapons we can muster. The helsar children roam the land. The law within will be greatly tested.”
He paused. I waited, lest my word cause him to retreat once more into his taciturnity. My hand found his thigh, lay there quietly. His finger traced a pattern along its back.
“Perhaps he is right to contain us,” he mused. “And perhaps your father is right. But I do not think so. The helsars have come to be, premature. We will have to deal with them, and the resultant strains upon owkahen. What Khys has done, right or wrong, is upon us. We are reaping his fruits. Storms rage upon owkahen, turbulence abounds. The wind from the abyss howls hungry. If we are not mature enough to limit shaping skills, they will destroy us. As they destroyed him. It was not I; I was chosen executioner, and pawn ongoing. It was not I, but owkahen. His own works destroyed him. He used the time coming to be like a bow. By will he notched the shafts of his conception, and at length, the tension being untoward, the bowstring frayed, snapped. The bow snapped back. And we are left to seek what we may.
“I have found it necessary to put restraints upon my own skills,” said Sereth, almost inaudibly. “I choose not to obviate space, when I might walk or ride or sail. I choose not to shape, nor to intrude upon the minds of others. I do this not because I am weak but because I am cautious. I enjoy my body. I would continue to inhabit it. We live in a world subsumed with natural stricture. I would have it no other way. I find it comforting that the sun rises and sets dependably. I like to know that the ground will not dissolve from beneath my feet between steps.”
His shadow face regarded me. “You have felt the backlash from imprudent twisting of those laws. It was you who first spoke to me of such dangers. Khys might speak even more eloquently, had he survived them. But he was mad, too long enfleshed. Though brilliant, he was mad. And no book of cautions is going to tame the helsar winds when they blow.”
And I saw him in my mind’s eye: Khys, who locked doors though none who might threaten him could be by such means obstructed; who wore stra, though none of Silistra could stand against that armory of mind the dharen possessed. And I saw the helsars, in their thousands, aglitter on the plain of Astria.
Shaking the phantoms from me, I tried to pierce the darkness that hovered around Sereth. Never had he spoken to me thus. My hand lay limp upon his thigh, cool upon his heat. I stared into the darker shadows where his eyes must be.
“Perhaps we will learn to contain our skills and use them lawfully,” I ventured. “Those who do not will be, by their own works, destroyed. Owkahen takes reparation from those who would rule it.”
He took a sibilant breath, spewed it out. “It might come to be,” he said with a voice like driven sleet, “that we destroy all the order on Silistra, and, like Khys, find ourselves bereft of choice, surrounded by chaos born out of our inviolability. It might be that with so many engaged in ordering the universe to please them, Silistra will become divested of sequentiality—a sphere where there is no certainty, no surety upon which a man can count. One must have a place to stand. It comes down to this: we either order our skills or be destroyed by the crux we engender.
“I would not have it so,” he whispered. “Nor would I attempt to legislate morality. Each must choose for himself. As long as I can recall, I have hested and sorted. I did not need Khys or a helsar to teach me, Man comes, of nature, to the sort and the hest. No more.
“Now,” he said, touching my cheek, the shorn lock that flopped there, “do you understand why I would not hear of Khys’s will, or Estrazi’s? If I must be responsible for my actions, they will be in my sight right. Always have I done it thus. I know no other way.”
I kissed his fingers as they played upon my lips.
X: In Deference to Owkanen
In the predawn I left them, soundless. I stood over them a time, where they were melded by the shadows into some many-legged creature not of my acquaintance. I thought sure my breath would wake them, roaring down through my nose. And what I would say, when they caught me, I conjectured. Almost, I lay back down beside them.
As one embarked upon a nightmare, I got gear from the wardrobe. At any moment I expected a hard grip upon my shoulder. And then their anger. The breeze of my painfully slow movements raised every fine hair upon my body. But I had gained the hall. And then I ran, fittings in hand, down the rear stairs, my breaths barbed and my mouth full of tongue.
One comes, inevitably, to the great doors with their inlaid golden beasts. I took an alcove, therein garbed myself in the tunic and cloak, and belted the light blade about my hips. And I congratulated myself, Sereth is the lightest of sleepers. Chayin has desert ears.
The guards at the open doors dozed—all but two, who had found amusement with each other. They did not look up.
Out I walked between those bronze doors twice the height of a man. My bare feet trod the cold stone steps. The evening bristled with Brinar chill. Wirur, constellation of the winged hulion, glittered faintly in the coming dim.
Upon the ways were a great number of threx, strung on ropes, their gear piled before them, as is Parset custom. There were, of course, no saddle-packs or saddles. That, also, is Parset custom.
I chose a young-seeming male who slept upon his feet, He slept no more when I started toward him. He gave me scrutiny, his pointed ears flattened. Then he snorted softly and tipped them to my croon. He did not know me. He snapped his huge teeth together. But he was interested. I have, with animals, some small skill.
Out from the Lake of Horns in the first outpouring of dawn I rode him, bareback. His stride was clean and fast, his manners and mouth soft and sweet. We could not, I adjudged, shifting my knees lower on his barrel, gain the trees before true day. Where my thighs had clutched him, the hair was dark and sweating and the sweat frothed white. Not by true day, I thought, leaning forward, low upon his neck. I hoped, as I urged him for speed, that those who watched for hulions atop the tower would not see, or in seeing, mark only the threx, running breakneck toward the encircling trees.
We did not make the trees by true day. But we were not much later within the dappled dark-light they filtered.
I drew him up. We rested, blowing stentorian breaths. I sluiced froth and sweat from under my legs. In that air a fog streamed from us, not dispersing. The tree trunks were immense. The first branches started far above my mounted head. The day seemed hardly noticeable; the cool Brinar light, weakly piercing the tree cover, had not even the strength to dry the leaves.
I kicked him moving, lest he be done ill by standing and steaming in the damp. He snorted. The night water showered us from above. I did not mind.
I gave the nameless threx his head. I did not know where I was bound. I had run from Sereth. I had not run from Khys when the opportunity presented itself, nor from Chayin, though I had had many chances, nor even from Dellin so long ago on the road to Well Arlet.
I wi
shed I could cry. I wished also that the young threx was possessed of a less protruding backbone.
I had not thought I would get this far.
The green-dark deepened. The threx lowered his muzzle to the ground and sniffed rumblingly as he picked his way.
I had run from none of them, but I had run from Sereth.
The evening past had yielded much. They had meted out justice, in their fashion.
They had returned to M’tras his ijiyr. He had thanked them, and played for them a dark and explorative piece that ended unresolved. He had said that the power source, self-contained, would last a thousand years.
“And then what?” had said Sereth soberly.
Chayin and Dellin had laughed. M’tras had not, but only placed the ijiyr again in its case.
Then did Sereth and Chayin give to them the threx they had appropriated. Sereth had spent some time searching a gentle beast for M’tras. Such are not too common among tiasks and jiasks.
M’tras looked upon the beast warily. He clicked and muttered something in his own language. The stars were only rising above the lake. The fattened moon, just clearing the trees, was smeared with blood.
M’tras’ uncertainty had been a palpable taste to us all. How strange and terrible and crude we seemed to him, great bloodthirsty animals riding upon their like.
“Just assert yourself,” Dellin advised, mounting his own beast. When he had it settled, he took M’tras’ threx by the head stall.
Sereth helped M’tras mount. We watched them as they departed. Dellin, anxious to be off, still held M’tras’ beast when the dark consumed them. They went gladly to the Liaison First’s upon the plain of Astria. The last we sensed of them was their relief, floating back like scent upon the breeze.
Though Sereth knew of Khys’s hest and their intention, he did not speak to them of helsars.
He had spoken to them of the Silistrans trapped upon the space worlds, orphaned by Khys’s barrier. I had given little thought to them—the wellwomen, the telepaths, the teachers, and the dharen’s agents. Dellin and M’tras and Sereth and Chayin had long discussed them.
It was then that it came to me, while I strove to separate Sereth’s silhouette from the lakeside night as he stared longingly after Dellin and M’tras. I caught taste of him then; that shield for a splintered heartbeat of time crumbled by his need. How greatly he envied them, unbound and free, off upon whatever errands they chose. And I saw his life as he perceived it—and I saw that although in a sense he had won his freedom, he considered it putative. Sereth, child of owkahen, had served his master well, that he might win surcease, and had become even further bound. I shared my thought in a moment of privacy with Chayin, and he upheld me.
“It has been before us all along,” he agreed, lying amid the cushions, his membranes attesting to the strength of his conviction. “We saw, but we did not realize. Both of us, who love him, failed to see.” And what we had overlooked—that he was in a sense Estrazi’s hest that all the fathers had long sought, all that Khys so long obstructed—most discomfited us.
He is hase-enor: of all flesh. In my research, during my early pregnancy, I had not neglected him. Sereth, who bears every bloodline upon Silistra, had been of use to me in my criticism of Khys’s genetic policies. It is Sereth who is first-come to time and space, presage of what the future might hold, should all be free on Silistra to mix their blood.
Chayin and I are both catalysts forced upon the time. Sereth is natural to it. He is owkahen’s son. To sons, fathers have been known to set tasks, and ultimately to show favor. Should the son prove worthy, it is often so, between fathers and sons.
Upon that determination, I knew what I must do. I showed him Khys’s most secret charts and papers. He was unconcerned with them. He had, he said, just come from seeing Carth. Carth, he assured me, would live. His eyes were far indrawn. He had been long among the wounded and maligned.
It was then that he adjudged us both lacking in compassion, and I sensed in him the distance the time had put between us. Before, he had not met my father. It seemed to me, hearing his words, that we might never span the gulf of our divergent heritages. All of Khys’s knowing words came back to me. I rubbed the seal upon my left breast and let my eyes drink of him, for that drink would have to last me long.
He watched me, sidelong, but made no attempt to aid me up from out of that particularly female pit of self-abasement into which I had fallen. And Chayin, angered, rose up and left, growling that he must see to his child. I had seen the child, in the arms of that well-woman who bore Sereth’s seed. Sereth seemed to barely recollect her. I had asked of her disposition and been told that she was destined for Nemar, crell to the cahndor.
The threx stumbled, his forefoot caught momentarily in an exposed root. I patted him reassuringly, and urged him forward. His shoulder, under my hand, twitched and quivered, but he quickened his pace.
The hulion’s roar stopped the threx so suddenly I grabbed his neck for support. I cautioned him to silence, slipping off his back.
The hulion, roaring repeatedly, appeared between the trees. The threx, affrighted beyond sanity, waited no longer. Even as those gold-gleaming eyes fixed upon it, it reared screaming upon its hind feet. The reins, jerked from my hand, flapped wildly. I made one abortive jump for them. A steel-shod hoof creased my skull. My vision became particles of light. I felt no pain.
When I felt again, it was a great rough tongue scraping my arm.
When I saw at last, I saw a face. That face loomed against darkness. I put my fingers to my right temple, encountered another’s there.
I tried to raise my head. The hand would not allow it. The scraping of that dry abrasive tongue upon my flesh ceased. I peered at the circle of light that seemed to belong to the hands. After a time, it coalesced into a familiar pattern of tone and feature, behind which the blackness undulated queerly. I continued to peer. Then I knew what I saw, and closed my eyes to the blur.
I heard an entwining of sound.
“Little one, look at me.” It was a number of times he said it, before I could disentangle his words from Santh’s plaintive mutterings.
I opened my eyes. The new day’s light, bounding and rebounding off the thinning foliage, played upon them like running water. Santh sat with his forelegs tucked between his hind, his wedge-shaped head lowered, his ears cocked askew. And before me also was Sereth, squatting down with his hand upon my brow.
“Do you not think,” I said slowly, “that we would all fare better apart?”
“If I thought that,” he said, “I would not be here.”
“And how did you find me?”
“Santh.”
“He serves you,” I said, raising my head and letting it fall. The world wheeled in stately procession, with my eyes as axis of its languid rotation.
He laughed. “Ask him.”
From Santh I received a greeting. And a question formed of allegory. Hulion thought is not as man thought. They are not symbolizers such as we. I saw a light she-hulion, and marked her as Santh’s mate. I saw her, and him also, engaged in their mating ritual. And then, superimposed, the tawny one, fleeing his dominion. And the thought was full with heat, and the courting customs of his kind. If he had bespoken me as a man, the question might have been: “Why do you flee him? Is it thus?” But it was a hulion’s question, subsumed with acceptance and harmony, and the love of the chase.
I could not gainsay his truth. I turned my face into Sereth’s hand and wept, at last.
“There is much left undone,” he said, his callused fingers tracing my brow, “Sit up.”
I once more lifted my head. The forest spun liquidly. I lay back upon the mulch of moldering autumn, content to rest, with his hand upon me and Santh’s mutters like settling rocks in my ears. It was beyond my power to do more.
“Sereth,” I said, “I cannot.” I had spoken clearly. My own ears heard the words loud and strong. But Sereth did not hear them. He leaned close. I could count his lids’ lashes, judge
the widened pupils of his dark eyes.
“Speak again, ci’ves,” he whispered, as the scar upon his cheek took life and crawled off his face to encircle his neck like some hideous band of restraint.
He put one palm over my eyes, his other cupping the back of my neck. It was only then, as sensation, identifiable pain, coursed over me, that I realized I had been without it. Now, as my back and ribs throbbed and my left leg demanded attention, I was terrified, for I had not heretofore felt them. My whole self shrunken inward with fear, I assayed the drawing up of my damaged leg. I heard him grunt. He removed his hand from my eyes. Santh, paw before paw, stretched himself full length, yawning.
“Where were you bound?” he asked. Now, only, was there trace of anger upon him. It rode his voice, cowled in relief. With his aid I sat, my left leg stretched out straight.
“I do not know,” I said, regarding the swollen knee. Below it was a bandaged gash, but that was of little moment. I put my own hands upon it, closing my eyes. What I sought, I received. Under my palms the flesh cooled and subsided. “I do not know,” I repeated, folding the leg experimentally.
“We will meet Chayin,” he said quietly. His gol-knife excavated the mulch between his legs as he squatted there. “I will not be pleased if you make such wanderings your practice. I know you have been long sequestered. You will get enough destinationless wandering, across the Embrodming.”
“If you would avoid my father’s service,” I said to him, “do not again take me up.”
“We will go first with Santh. I have something to share with you. Then to Astria. You may bring in your hest there. In Port Astrin we will take ship—Chayin’s best, and a picked Menetpher crew. The men of Menetph are excellent sailors.”
“If it is your will,” I said, putting weight gingerly upon my left leg. Sereth and Santh rose as one. I looked between them, taking a testing step. My work held.
“You can ride?” He disbelieved, critically.
And it was upon hulions, Santh and Leir, who was waiting amid the trees, that we rode to that mountain holy place priested by hulions. It is of their deity and deification, and not man’s; therefore the mountain has no name. It is but one of many in that cragged fastness where no man dwelleth: hulions rule the impenetrable west.