Exile's Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  "Cursed and damned!" The mailed priest's sword wheeled and came down at Arrhan's neck. Vanye swung his sheathed sword up and struck the blade up, then kicked the priest sprawling in the smoking grass, the priest howling and writhing instantly with the heat of it. "Damned!" he shouted, "Damned!"—scrambling up and after his sword.

  Arunden brought his foot down on the blade as his hand reached the hilt, pinning it to the blackened ground.

  "Is this your help?" Morgaine asked dryly. "I shall do without, my lord Arunden."

  "You will take what I give!"

  "I said that I was Gault's enemy. I have told you what I will do, and where I am going, and I will have done it before Gault spreads the alarm to his masters if you do me the grace to do what I have said. I should take that advice, my lord, if it were my lands bordering Gault. But far be it from me to say what a free Man should do. That is your choice—to help or hinder."

  "Do not listen to her," the priest cried, and snatched up the sword Arunden's stride released.

  Arunden turned and interposed his arm at the same time Vanye bared steel; and grasped the priest's sword-hilt in his hand and wrenched it away, disarming the man and flinging the sword far across the grass. "My lady," Arunden said. "Take my advice. I will not argue strategy with you. I will go with you myself, with ten of my men. My lieutenant will go south and close the road, others east and west and advise the other clansmen. Ichandren's skull is bleaching on a pole at Morund, and it is only my word and yours that tells my warders these lads are still human or that he is. I can vouch for you, and get you to Tejhos-gate never touching the Road. My word carries weight in these hills with bands beyond this one—there is no one says I am one of Gault's minions—ha? Ha, priest who eats my food and warms at my fire? Take the curse off. Off, hear?"

  "God remembers," the priest muttered, and made a sign, half with an eye to Arunden.

  "Well enough," Arunden said. "See? We are friends."

  "Liyo," Vanye said in his own language. "There is no mending this man. You will regret any good you do him. And much more any help he gives. Do not have any part of his offer."

  Morgaine was silent a moment, in which Arunden stood looking up as solemn and sober as he had yet been.

  "You will not regret it," Arunden said. "Time will come, you will need us, my lady—you will need someone the other clans know, a man they will listen to."

  "Then prove it, now," Morgaine said. "Send messengers to the clans and prevent Gault from your land and from the southern gate. Three of your men can manage our safe-conduct. But all this land will regret it if Gault learns what I am about, he or his neighbors; and if one of Gault's men reaches that gate in the south and brings help from Mante—do me that grace, lord Arunden, and I will freely own myself in your debt."

  Arunden's face darkened, suffused with a flush. He gnawed on his lip and raked a hand back through his disordered hair, where it had come loose from its braids.

  "Whoever commands that position," Morgaine said, "will command the south. When that gate dies—you will feel it in the air. When it dies you will know that I have kept my promise; and you will sit as lord at Morund. That I offer you—that and anything you can take and hold. The south will need a strong lord. I will have those three men you offer. I will send them back to you when I have cleared your lands. My own, I keep!"

  She wheeled Siptah then and rode, as Arunden stood open-mouthed and with a thousand hostile and avaricious thoughts flickering through his eyes. Vanye did not turn away from him. "Go with her," he said to Chei and Bron, who had moved up beside him; and the brothers turned and rode after Morgaine, leaving only himself facing Arunden and his folk.

  "My lord," Vanye said then sternly. "Your three men."

  Arunden came free of his astonishment and called out three names, at which Vanye inclined his head in respect to Arunden. "I trust," Vanye said, without a trace of insolence in his tone, "that your men can track us."

  Then he whirled about and rode after Morgaine and the ep Kantorei.

  "Damned, who defies the priest of God!" the priest shouted after him. "Cursed are ye—!"

  He cast a look back. No weapons flew. Only words. Ahead of him Morgaine waited on the slope, Bron and Chei on either side of her, dim figures among the ghosts of tall trees.

  "Was there trouble?" Morgaine asked him as he reined in.

  "My back is unfeathered," he said, and refrained from crossing himself. He felt more anger than distress.

  "He is not much of a priest," Bron said. "No one regards him. It is only words."

  "Well we were out of here," Morgaine said, "all the same." And motioned Bron and Chei to lead. "Vanye?"

  Vanye drew Arrhan to a walk beside Siptah as Chei and Bron led them out of the misty clearing and in among the trees.

  "Do we have the escort?" Morgaine asked.

  "He did not refuse it," he said. "I said they should find us on the trail."

  "Good," Morgaine said. Then, in the Kurshin tongue: "Did I not tell thee? Power. Arunden does not know what I am. He thinks he knows, and fills in the gaps himself. At least it is honest greed. And it is rarely the first rebel in any realm who ends by being king. There will far worse follow."

  He looked at her, troubled by her cynicism. "Never better?"

  "Rarely. I do not put treachery past him—or the priest."

  "The three he is sending?"

  "Maybe. Or messengers he may send ahead of us and behind."

  He had reckoned that much for himself. He did not like the reckoning. He thought that he should have forced a challenge and taken off Arunden's shoulders all capacity for treachery.

  He was not, he knew all too well, as wise as Morgaine, who had improvised a use for this man: but Arunden, last night, had touched on an old nightmare of hers: he had felt it in the way she had clenched his hand at the fireside.

  They would not listen, she had said of that moment human lords had broken from her control; because I am a woman they would not listen.

  And ten thousand strong, an army and a kingdom had perished before her eyes.

  That was the beginning of that solitude of hers, which he alone had breached since that day. And what they had almost done in the night was very much for her—Heaven knew any distraction was a risk with that burden she carried, dragon-hilted and glittering wickedly against her shoulder as she rode, and trust was foreign to everything she did—trust, by her reckoning, was great wickedness.

  So he was resolved, for his part, not to bring the previous night into the day, or to be anything but her liegeman under others' witness, meticulous in his proprieties.

  Wet leaves shook dew down onto them as they maintained their leisurely pace and refused to give any grace to Arunden's laggard men. A fat, strange creature waddled away from the trail and into the brush in some haste, evading the horses' hooves: that was all the life they saw in the mist. Trails crossed and recrossed in the hollows, along ravines and up their sides, in this place where Men seemed to have made frequent comings and goings.

  Eventually the sound came to them of riders behind them on the trail. Morgaine drew rein. The rest of them did, waiting in a wide place on the shoulder of a low hill.

  "They took long enough," Morgaine said with displeasure. She slipped Changeling to her side and adjusted and put up the hood of the two-sided cloak the arrhendim had given her; wrapping herself in gray—gray figure on gray horse in the misty morning; and in the next moment one and the next and the third rider appeared through the thicket across the ravine. They seemed unaware until the next heartbeat that they were observed; then the leader hesitated to the confusion of his men and their horses.

  "Well we are no enemy," Vanye said under his breath as the men came on ahead, down the slope and up again toward them.

  "Lady," the older of the three said as he reined in, and ducked his head in respect, a stout man with gizzled braids and scarred armor.

  "My thanks," Morgaine said grimly, leaning on the saddlehorn. "I will have one thing: to
go quickly and quietly. I want to find the road where it enters qhalur lands, and that with no harm to anyone, including yourselves. I do not need to say the other choice. Ride well ahead of us. When we come to the road, your duty is done and you will return to your lord. Do you question?"

  "No, lady."

  She nodded toward the trail, and the three rode on into the lead at a brisk pace. Her glance slid Bron's way, and to Chei, as she reined the gray about; and last she looked to Vanye.

  "If they do not cut our throats," he muttered in the Kurshin tongue, and stayed close by her as they rode. The riders ahead had already hazed in the mist, and Bron and Chei were hindmost on the narrow trail. "Bron," he said, reining back half a length. "Do you know those three?"

  "The one is Eoghar," Bron said, "and the others are his cousins—Tars, they call the dark one; and Patryn is the one with the scarred face. That is all I know, m'lord—no better and no worse than the rest of them."

  "Well when we are quit of them," Chei said for his part, "but just as well we have them now. In that much Arunden told the truth."

  The rain began to fall again, a light, chill mist that alternately blew and clung. The noon sun had no success with the clouds, nor was the afternoon better. Streams trickled in the low places they crossed; the rounding of a hill gusted moisture into faces and down necks, and showed the wooded flanks of further hills all hazed and vague.

  It was steady progress they made, but not swift, and Morgaine chafed in silence—Vanye knew that look, read the set of her mouth and the sometime impatient glances at the sky, with frowns as if she faced some living enemy.

  Time, he thought. It was time and more time lost.

  "How far is it?" she had asked Chei early on; and: "Two days," Chei had said, "down to the road again." Then: "Maybe more."

  Now their guides halted, waiting for them on the trail, all wrapped in their cloaks and with their horses back-eared and unhappy in the blowing mist.

  "We should make camp," their leader said—Eoghar, Bron had named him. He had a wretched look, a pained look, squinting against the rain that dripped off his hair, and Vanye recalled the last night, and the campfire, and the amount of drink that had passed even before they quit the gathering.

  "No," Morgaine said, and, "No," again when Eoghar argued the weather and the horses and the slickness of the rocks and the slopes. "How much worse does it get?" she asked then, looking at Chei and Bron, who had ridden up close behind them.

  "More of the same," Chei said, himself in worse case, having only his blanket for a cloak, and its gray fibers beginning now to soak through. "No worse, my lady. Certainly no better."

  Only looking at him and at Bron did Morgaine's frown go from annoyance to a more complex thing—worry, Vanye thought. But: "Move on," she said to Eoghar and his cousins.

  "Lady," Eoghar protested, and his mustached lips shut themselves and the voice faded into something very like fear at whatever look Morgaine then sent him. "Aye, lady." And Vanye took his hand from the sword-hilt as three wet and unhappy men turned their horses about and kept going down the exposed and down-sloping trail.

  To Morgaine he ventured no word, knowing her moods well enough, that a black anger was roiling in her, and he knew well enough what kind of look had likely set the men moving.

  Yet she delayed a moment, looking back at Chei, and there was worry again. "Are you bearing up?" she asked.

  "Well enough," Chei said, and drew a little breath, straightening in the saddle. "My lady."

  It was not gratitude shone in Chei's fair eyes, with rain-chill whitening his face and the water running from his hair. It was something like adoration.

  Vanye lowered his head and kept his eyes on the trail as they rode after their guides, gazing down on the tops of trees and the depths of a ravine that fell away beside Arrhan's sure, careful steps.

  He did not know why that expression of Chei's should trouble him so. It was not the look of a man with a woman he wanted. He had seen it—he recollected—in chapel, candlelight off painted wood, face after identical face—

  He did not know why that image out of childhood and Church came back to him again and again, stronger than the world around him, of gray mist and mist-grayed pines and slick granite, or why he thought then of Chei when he had first come to them, that fevered, mad glare that had nothing to do with the clean-faced, earnest youth who spoke so fair to Morgaine and looked at her since this morning as if she were some saint.

  But he understood with a little chill of fear—knowing that behind Morgaine's careful question, that kindly, out of the ordinary question to Chei when she was otherwise distracted—Morgaine was indeed disturbed.

  I am not virtuous, she was wont to say, again and again to him, warning him. I cannot afford to be.

  And again, in the night: How can you love me?

  And this morning: I lie; thee knows I lie; tell him—

  It was fear he felt in her, that was what moiled in his stomach at the moment; it was a rising sense of panic, between her acceptance of Chei for his sake and Bron for Chei's sake; and the changes between himself and her; and this priest and this cursed gift from a hedge-lord. It was no time to think of such things, riding on a high trail in the company of men they could not trust, in a land which might offer ambush: he was derelict to think of anything but where they rode and what things the forest might tell him and the attitudes of the men in front of them But it was not in the forest that he felt the danger. It was beside him, in Morgaine's silence, in the way she looked at Chei and at him.

  Perhaps she mused on things the two of them had done and promised and said to each other, in the thunderous dark.

  Nothing seemed now so simple or so clean now as then. He did not know what he should have done differently this morning or how he could have protected her or what he ought now to do.

  Persuade Chei and his brother to leave them, that was the first thing, before worse happened.

  But to cast them out in these hills, when Chei was known to have been in qhalur hands, and when both of them were known to have ridden with Morgaine kri Chya—that would be a death sentence for these two, for these honest, too-young men who had neither lord nor family to protect them, and not, he sensed, the ability to wrest power unto themselves.

  Honest men, Morgaine had said.

  Chapter 8

  The rain came down in wind-borne mist by sundown, under skies flickering and glowing with lightnings, as they rode within the shelter of a rocky retreat which had not, perhaps, been a streambed until the rain fell, but which now had a waterfall spilling off the heights above the cut and boiling white along the rocks to yet another falls.

  There was a sheltered camp here, Chei and Bron supported the guides in that assertion, and Vanye was only glad to hope for the overhanging cliff face Bron described or anywhere out of the wind. "There is no way out of the place but one," Bron had admitted, "but with your weapons no one could force it from the front or from above."

  Vanye had had second thoughts at that description, and looked at Morgaine: warfare in world and world and world had taught him half a score of ways to attack such a place; Morgaine surely knew as many more. But Morgaine had made no objection except a misgiving glance, wet and miserable as the rest of them in this storm that mixed cold mist with the breaths they took.

  Now they rode in the last of the light, into this narrow place where a waterfall thundered above the rain, and where some previous user had left standing a woven brush-work against the rock. He did not like the look of it; but the horses were spent after rough going on the slick trails, they were chilled to the bone, and the whipping of the wind up the heights and the scattering of water off pine boughs in soaking drops, threw water at them so many directions there was no fending it off: it ran down necks and got under cloaks clenched in numb hands; and that brush shelter beckoned with the promise of dry ground and rest and respite.

  But: "No," Morgaine said then, ready to refuse it after all, "no more of guesting—"—at which Van
ye's heart both sank in weariness and resolved itself she was altogether right. But: "It is a hunter-shelter," Chei said. "I do not expect anyone is there."

  "Find out," Morgaine said to Eoghar, and with more zeal than he had done anything in the last hour, Eoghar spurred his horse up the bank to hail the place and then to dismount, draw his sword, and look into it.

  Eoghar turned then and waved to them to come ahead, murky flash of his sword-blade in the dark. Vanye gave a sigh of relief and guided Arrhan carefully after Eoghar's cousins, to have an eye on them and keep his sword between them and Morgaine, should they have any notions of treachery in this dark hole.

  But when they had come up and dismounted beside the shelter:

  "One cannot hear in this place," Morgaine objected, the last of them still ahorse, her voice thinned by the roar of the water pouring down and running over rock. "I do not like this."

  Vanye looked up at her from across Arrhan's rain-wet saddle. "Aye," he said hoarsely, knowing a second time she was right, but he felt the weight of the mail on his back and the cold of water down his neck and soaking his boots and breeches. It was her second quibble with this place. He respected her instincts; but there was in him a heart-deep vexation—Heaven save us, liyo, you have three men you can trust, he thought to shout at her.

  But there were Arunden's three, and those men large and strong, and if they would not mutiny in the night, they were bound to if she bade them go on now.

  And he, God help them, had to enforce her orders, or she had to do murder on them; and he was not sure he had a fight left in him—

  "Do we ride on, liyo?" he asked with a deep and weary breath.

  She glanced back, a shifting of her eyes toward Chei and Bron, who were already taking gear off their horses in the lightning-flashes and the mist, Chei trying in vain to keep the sodden blanket from flying in the wind, his cloth breeches wet through in places where it had blown as he rode. They were spent, man and youth both thin and worn, both recent from wounds, both vulnerable to chill and staggering with exhaustion.