Exile's Gate

by C. J. Cherryh

  No, he had wit to think, but not much beyond that. Her arms clenched about him. Her mouth met his. There was precious little more to do, surrounded by enemies, under arms, with no rest to be had and no leisure to spend unwary.

  There will never be a time, he thought, in a chill of panic, and held her the tighter, as she held him, in an armored grip become harsh and desperate, with nothing of gentleness about it. Everyone else has failed her. Too much she has lost, too many dead—For that reason she armed me more than herself, gave me her chiefest weapon; and what did it win us but calamity to our friends, and rage at each other?

  They slept finally, turn and turn about, on the sloping, stony ground where the brush afforded them cover. He watched her as she slept. He wished—but there was no hope.

  Only they managed to heal what was torn, there was that much.

  Morgaine waked him toward dawn, a shadow between him and the day. He heard her voice telling him there was breakfast and he murmured an answer, rolled over and favored an aching arm, holding it across him.

  "We should move," she said, "a little ways this morning."

  "Oh, Heaven," he moaned, and bowed his head between his knees, arms over his neck.

  She did not stay to argue. She went back to sit on her saddle, where she had laid out a cold breakfast on the leather wrappings they used for foodstuffs, knowing matters would go her way.

  He followed, and sat down on the grass, and ate in silence no different than other silences.

  And did not give way to temper, or venture in headlong.

  "Liyo," he said when he was toward finishing: "Listen to me. This enemy of yours—whoever he is. You think he will run. But a man will not run, who thinks himself winning. No one can be that cautious."

  She said nothing. It was not a frown on her face, only thought.

  "Let them lose us," he said. "Let this Skarrin marshal some defense against us. Let him think he has turned us. A man in power—he will not want to give up what he has. He will go nowhere at all. In the meanwhile we will learn this land, we will go slowly—we will gather strength, rest, find a way to him—am I not right?"

  Her lips made a taut line. There was warfare in her eyes, unbelief and consideration. "Possibly. Possibly. But being wrong, Vanye—"

  "What will a man do who is cornered? He is far more apt to use the gate at Mante and escape us."

  He argued for their lives, for sanity and safety.

  And she gathered that thing into her lap in silence, the sword, that weapon which was constantly beside her, day and night, and which gave them no peace.

  "Liyo, you drive this man and you force this man, and what will he do? You will unseat him: his own vassals will question his power; or you will make him desperate—you always strike too hard, liyo,—listen to me: you know no moderation with your enemies. You give them no choices and while they have no warning, that serves you well—but you have no subtlety in the field. You are the kind of lord who loses lives—forgive me." His heart beat hard and he gazed up into her eyes in a dread of the things he had to say with brutal force, that the numbness of recent sleep let him say without stumbling, and the quiet of the dawn let her hear without preventing him. "If it were an army with us I should never question you: if you told me to go against any odds, then, I would do that, and trust there was good cause. But you have no army. You have one man. And he is bound, liyo, to cover your back and your side, as long as he can; and he will do that. But he is one man, all the same, and someday, if you keep on as you are, you will lose him, because he will die before he lets you go down first."

  The frown had deepened on her face. There was storm in her eyes. "I can guard my own back. I need no fools to kill themselves, plague take you, I have had enough of fools to fling themselves in my way—"

  "It is your back I am talking about."

  Her breath came hard. His own did. "And I am talking about fools," she said. "Bron's sort. Chei's sort. Arunden, for another." Her enemies saw that look. It had been a long time since she had turned it on him. "Ten thousand men at Irien, who would not hold where I told them to hold, no, they must get to the fore of me, because I am there and their damnable pride makes them do what no lord could order them to do in cold blood, if it means charging a wide open gate—"

  "That is what you are doing now. That is what I am objecting to, liyo. Do you not see it?"

  There was shock in her eyes, and outrage, a shake of her head. "Thee is—"

  "I am telling you that you are wrong. I do not do that often. And you do not want to hear me because you suppose I do not want the same thing that you want. But that is how much I love you: I do not know enough to understand all the why of the things you do, but I stake my soul that you are right; I have sworn to go on with or without you, liyo, and if that is true, then listen to me, will you listen, if you do not think me an utter fool?"

  "I am listening," she said in a different and milder voice.

  "Be the wind. Do not make our enemy afraid. If he hears reports what happened south of here, he will use his power. He has men to send. He has ten thousand things to try before he is out of resources. He will not run at the first whisper of war. He will attack. And we will be the wind again and go find him in his lair."

  "So easily. Did thee ever take Myya?"

  Heaven! she has a sharp edge when the swords are out.

  "No," he said reasonably, quietly. It is tactic. Lord in Heaven, she knows only the attack, never defense, even with me. "But then, I was one man. They did not take me. And if I had aimed at the Myya-lord's life, I would have taken him, do you doubt it?"

  She thought on that point, long and long, with that worried line between her brow.

  "Liyo, they are all about us. They are watching the road. All we need do is stay quiet, and I do not think, I cannot believe that the rumor of a rumor will send this qhal-lord running with his tail tucked. No. Being a man used to power, he will likeliest strike first at his own folk, to subdue any disloyalty, and only then think of us; and when he hears we are only two—"

  "With a gate-weapon. That is what we may well face if he has time to marshal his strength. Whatever he has, he will use."

  "He might use it by the time we could get there. We can not go there with enough speed. And we would be spent. So let him lay his plans. We can turn them."

  She let go her breath, and slid Changeling between her knees, hands on the quillons that were the dragon's arms, resting her head against the hilt.

  Very, very long she rested there—thinking, he knew, thinking and thinking.

  He rested too, arm on knee and chin on arm, wondering where her thoughts were going, into what nooks that she would report to him, unraveling all his arguments, going far beyond him, telling him new and terrible things.

  Then she lifted her head. "Aye," she said. "But it is a fearful risk, Vanye."

  All along, he had used argument like weapons in drill—one tactic, the next, the next in despair that any would suffice: only now he heard what she was saying and realized it was agreement.

  Then, as always when he had won some lesser point, the doubts came to him. What he truly, at the depth of his heart, yearned for, was for his liege to bring up some miracle, some assurance that she knew precisely how to get into Mante and overcome their enemy.

  Knowing that she had no such resource, and that she surrendered her instincts for berserker attack, to his for stealth and stalking, against an enemy of her own kind—

  It was as if a weight had come down on him, of the sort that he was not accustomed to bear. And perhaps some of it had left her shoulders. She gazed at him with an expression he could not read, but a less anguished one—perhaps thinking, perhaps planning again, at a range still beyond him.

  He earnestly hoped so. For when it came to qhal, he had no idea at all of their limits.

  Chapter 12

  The riders gathered again in a place near the road, and Chei leaned on the saddle of the big roan, weary, and feeling the weight of the mail on his s
houlders, in a dizziness in which his very body seemed diminished, the light dimmed, the voices about him become strange, calling him "my lord" and speaking to him with courtesies. The qhal who served him were not confused. Certainly a few of the humans with him measured the difference in his stature and saw his apparent youth and thought treasonous thoughts, but had they lifted daggers against him, there were enough of his own folk about him to protect him, and there was the captain of Skarrin's warders, who was bound, under present and ironical circumstance, to protect him.

  They were a few more than twoscore—of all that company that had left Morund-keep, of the levies; and ten—those men of Skarrin's who had joined them at Tejhos-gate. The rest were dead or scattered or wounded too severely to continue; and it had needed at least half a score men to leave in charge of the wounded, but he had left six and bidden them stay camped where they were for fear the hillmen might hit them on the way back to Morund. That was how desperate things had become.

  This open sky is madness, Chei thought. The open blue above them, the land laid open to any witness, shivered through his nerves as if he lay naked to his enemies, though he remembered fighting in such land before, in times that humans had come deep within the plains. Something deep as instinct pulled him in two directions, and feared nameless things.

  Most of all, the one he would have turned to for advice was not there, and whenever he turned and looked about him he missed that face, which shifted and changed from silver-haired to red to palest gold like some reflection in troubled water: Pyverrn. Jestryn. Bron. The void ached in him, in a place where the voices could not reach, a point at which all memory found anchor. Qhiverin-Gault-Chei, all alone among the men who followed him, longed for a familiar haven, even if the nature of it confounded itself between stone walls and the closeness of forest—

  But his enemy, the enemy which lay hidden somewhere in this place, did not shift like sun on water: of him, of her, of the man he was and the man who pursued, he could not think clearly at all: it was like trying to look at the sun itself, a glare in which no shape was distinguishable.

  "The troops from Mante are coming south to meet us," he told his followers, as he paced the red horse along the roadside, where they formed up. "The captain affirms that. We will have reinforcements. And we will not close with our enemy, now we know what we face." The red horse shifted under him and he curbed it, riding it back and forth past his listeners, silver-haired and dark, qhal and human. "But there are other ways. Those of you who have been loyal to me—I will reward after this. Count on it. Those of you who are human I will gift with land. Do you hear me? For those of you who follow me, I will give you the holdings of every man who fled. I will have it known how I pay loyalty—and deserters. We will settle this business, we will settle it on our terms, and give Mante's troops the leavings. Our enemies have gone into the land, that is what they have done; but they do not know their way—and we do. I want this pair. I want them. Need I say how much?"

  "I have found a place," Vanye said, when they found each other after scouting afoot up and down the area, the gray horse and the white left in hiding the other side of the hill.

  "Good," Morgaine said, wiping her brow, "because there is nothing in the other direction."

  It was a place they rode to then, where the rains had washed beneath a sandstone cap, and where still a little water ran in a sandy bed, folded on either side by hills and closed round by thorn and a scattered few trees.

  And no better place to hide indeed had they found.

  It was cold rations and not so much as fire to boil water, but it was rest; it was respite from the pace they had set, and it was a chance for the horses to recover their strength, if it meant walking afield and bringing grass to them to keep them hidden.

  So he did, and curried them both till their coats shone, did a bit of work with Siptah's left hind shoe, and afterward lay in the sun and slept, while Morgaine worked at the horses' trail-worn gear. Then it was turn about while she slept, and after that a leisurely supper of cold sausage and cheese and waybread.

  It was the last of the cordial they shared, the last sweet taste of arrhendur honey.

  They watched the sun go down over the hill in a film of cloud and silken colors, and they sat a while under a golden twilight, leaned shoulder against shoulder and watched the horses drink from the rill and eat the forage he had gotten for them in places he did not think cutting would be evident.

  He was content. Morgaine leaned back against the hill and smiled at him in her turn, one of her rare, kindly smiles. The quiet, and the brief, fond glance of her eyes set his heart to racing as if they were both be-spelled. Twilight touched her slanted cheekbones, touched her gray eyes and silver hair and the edges of the mail of her over-sleeves, the black leather, the buckles of her armor, and—like a watchful familiar, the dragon-sword lying beside her against a stone. Its ruby eyes winked red and wicked.

  I am here, it said. I never sleep.

  But it was familiar to him too. Like Morgaine—her silences, the little shifts of her expression which he could read or thought he read—as now he read something in her level, continual stare which had the silence of the night about it, and the dying light dancing in gray, qhalur eyes and a face every line of which he knew in his sweetest and most terrible dreams.

  "How long," she said at last, "does thee think to camp here?"

  He frowned as he found himself suddenly back in an argument he had thought he had just won. "Liyo, do not think of it. Do not think of when. Stay camped, do nothing. Do not move or stir: let the enemy do that, that is my counsel in the matter."

  "Until winter sets in?" A frown leapt to her eyes. "It—"

  "A few days, for Heaven's own sake. A few days. Five. I do not know."

  He had not wanted debate with her. He found his muscles gone tense, his breathing quickened; and she dejectedly flung a pebble into the little rill that ran at their feet.

  Fret and fret, she would; she could not stay still, could not delay, could not rest, as if no other thought would stay in her head.

  "We cannot wait here for the snows."

  "God in Heaven, listen to me. Let them move. Let us find out what they will do. That is the purpose of this."

  "In the meanwhile—"

  "God help us. Tomorrow—tomorrow I will scout out and around."

  "We will," she said.

  "You can stay in—"

  "We can gain a few leagues north. That is all. If the next camp is not so comfortable, then the one after—"

  He rested his brow against his joined hands. "Aye."

  "Vanye, I take your advice—we go slowly. We let the horses build back their strength. But we dare not be further from that gate than we can reach—whatever the lord in Mante decides to do."

  "Let him! Whatever he will do, let him! He will come after us. He will try us. He will not bolt."

  "We are risking everything on that. Thee knows."

  "Why?" he asked. "Tell me why this lord should leave his people?"

  "It is possible that they are not his people."

  He had thought that he had the shape of things, in this strange war that stretched from land to land, with curving horizons and stars too few or too many and moons that came and went. He tried to make a wise answer to that, so she should not think all her teaching wasted.

  "You mean that he might be a human man, in qhalur shape."

  "It is the name," she said.

  "Skarrin?" It had no qhalur sound. But there were qhal who had uncommon names.

  "It is a name in a very old language. I do not know where he should have heard it. Perhaps it is all chance. Languages have coincidence. But this, on a qhal—this name: there are among the gate worlds, a kind older than the qhal. And such of them as survive—are very dangerous."

  "What are you saying—older than the qhal? Who is older?"

  "Older than the calamity the qhal know. Did I ever say it had only happened but the once?"

  He said nothing. He sc
arcely understood the first calamity, how the qhal had made the gates and made time flow amiss, till Heaven set matters straight again, or as straight as matters could be, where gates remained live and potent, pouring their magics (their power, Morgaine insisted, do not be superstitious) into worlds where qhal survived.

  "Thee does not understand."

  He shook his head ruefully. "No."

  "I do not know," she said. "Only the name troubles me. A name and not a name, in that language Skarrin means an outsider. A foreigner."

  The dark was gathering. The first stars were out. He crossed himself against the omen, whatever it should mean.

  "My father," Morgaine said, "was one such."

  He looked at her as if some chasm had opened at his feet, and all of it dark. She had named comrades from before his time—from before he or his father before him was ever born.

  Of kin she had never spoken. She might have risen out of the elements, out of moonbeams, out of the tales of his people.

  I am not qhal, she had said time and again. And at one time: I am halfling.

  "Are you saying this Skarrin—then—is kin of yours?"

  "None, that I know."

  "Who was your father?"

  "An enemy." She cast another pebble into the darkening water, and did not look at him. "In a land before yours. He is dead. Let it rest."

  He would not have trod on that ground for any urging.

  "He was qhal, to your way of thinking," Morgaine said. "Give it peace. It has no significance here. Anjhurin was his name. You have heard it. Now forget ever you heard it. This Skarrin is no one I know, but my name might warn him, changed as it is."

  He took in his breath and let it go again, stripping a bit of grass in his fingers, looking only at that. And for a long time neither of them spoke.

  He shrugged. "I will scout out tomorrow," he said, to have the peace back, to ease her mind, however he could. "When I go for forage. There might be something over the hills."