Well of Shiuan

by C. J. Cherryh

  He wished that Ela’s-daughter had escaped them when she had run-or better still, that they had missed each other in the fog and never met.

  He shifted to his other side, and stared into the blind dark, remembering home, and other forests, knowing that he had entered an exile from which there was no return.

  The Gate behind them was sealed. The way lay forward from here, and it occurred to him with increasing unease that he did not know where he was going, that never again would he know where he was going.

  Morgaine, his arms, and a stolen Andurin horse: that comprised the world that he knew.

  And now there was Roh, and a child who had about the foreboding of a world he did not want to know-his own burden, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter, for it was his impulse that had laid ambush for her, when by all other chances she might have ridden on her way.

  Chapter 5

  “Vanye.”

  He wakened to the grip of Morgaine’s hand on his arm, startled out of a sleep deeper than he was wont.

  “Get the horses,” she said. The wind was whipping fiercely at the swaying branches overhead, drawing her fair hair into a stream in the darkness. “It is close to dawn. I let you sleep as long as I could, but the weather is turning on us.”

  He murmured a response, arose, rubbing at his eyes. When he glanced at the sky he saw the north flashing with lightnings, beyond the restless trees. Wind sighed coldly through the leaves.

  Morgaine was already snatching up their blankets and folding them. For his part he left the ring of firelight and felt his way downslope among the stones of the ruins, across the narrow channel and up again to the rise where the horses were tethered. They snorted alarm at his coming, already uneasy at the weather; but Siptah recognized him and called softly- gray Siptah, gentler-mannered than his own Andurin gelding. He took the gray and Jhirun’s homely pony together and led them back the way he had come, up again into the ruins.

  Jhirun was awake. He saw her standing as he came into the firelight, opened his mouth to speak some gentle word to her; but Morgaine intervened, taking the horses. “I will tend them,” she said brusquely. “See to your own.”

  He hesitated, looking beyond her shoulder to Jhirun’s frightened face, and felt a deep unease, leaving her to Morgaine’s charge; but there was no time for disputes, and there was no privacy for argument. He turned and plunged back into the shadows, making what haste he could, not knowing against what he was racing, the storm or Morgaine’s nature.

  Dawn was coming. He found the black gelding a shadow in a dark that was less than complete, although the boiling clouds held back the light He freed the horse, hauled firmly on the cheekstrap as the ungentle beast nipped at him, then in his haste swung up bareback and rode back with halter alone, down across the stream and up again among the trees and the ruins.

  He was relieved to find Jhirun calmly sitting by the dying fire, wrapped in her brown shawl, eating a bit of bread. Morgaine was doing as she had said, tending to Siptah’s saddling; and she bore Changeling on her shoulder harness, as she would when she judged the situation less than secure.

  “I have told her that she is coming with us,” Morgaine said, as he alighted and flung the blanket up to the gelding’s back. He said nothing, unhappy in Morgaine’s intention. He bent and heaved the saddle up, settled it and reached under for the girth. “She seemed agreeable in the matter,” Morgaine said, seeming determined to draw some word from him on the subject.

  He gave attention to his work, avoiding her eyes. “At least,” he said, “she might ride double with me. She has a head wound. We might give her that grace-by your leave.”

  “As you will,” said Morgaine after a moment. She rolled her white cloak into its oiled-leather covering and tied it behind her saddle. With a jerk of the thongs she finished, and gathered up Siptah’s reins, leading the horse toward the fire, where Jhirun sat.

  Jhirun stopped eating, and sat there with the morsel forgotten in her two hands. Like something small and trapped she seemed, with her bruised eyes and bedraggled hair, but there was a hard glitter to those eyes nonetheless. Vanye watched in unease as Morgaine stopped before her.

  “We are ready,” Morgaine said to her. “Vanye will take you up behind him.”

  “I can ride my own pony.”

  “Do as you are told.”

  Jhirun arose, scowling, started to come toward him. Morgaine reached to the back of her belt, a furtive move. Vanye saw, and dropped the saddlebag he had in hand.

  “No!” he cried.

  The motion was sudden, the girl walking, the sweep of Morgaine’s hand, the streak of red fire. Jhirun shrieked as it touched the tree beside her, and Vanye caught the gelding’s bridle as the animal shied up.

  Morgaine replaced the weapon at the back of her belt. Vanye drew a shaken breath, his hands calming the frightened horse. But Jhirun did not move at all, her feet braced in the preparation of a step never taken, her arms clenched about her bowed head.

  “Tell me again,” Morgaine said softly, very audibly, “that you do not know this land, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter.”

  Jhirun sank to her knees, her hands still clenched in her hair. “I have never been further than this down the road,” she said in a trembling voice. “I have heard, I have only heard that it leads to Shiuan, and that was before the flood. I do not know.”

  “Yet you travel it without food, without a cloak, without any preparation. You hunt and you fish. Will that keep you warm of nights? Why do you ride this road at all?”

  “Hiuaj is drowning,” Jhirun wept. “Since the Wells were closed and the Moon was broken, Hiuaj has been drowning, and it is coming soon. I do not want to drown.”

  Her mad words hung in the air, quiet amid the rush of wind, the restless stamp and blowing of the horses. Vanye blessed himself, the weight of the very sky pressing on his soul.

  “How long ago,” asked Morgaine, “did this drowning begin?”

  But Jhirun wiped at the tears that spilled onto her cheeks and seemed beyond answering sanely.

  “How long?” Morgaine repeated harshly.

  “A thousand years,” Jhirun said.

  Morgaine only stared at her a moment. “These Wells: a ring of stones, is that not your meaning? One overlooks the great river; and there will be yet another, northward, one master Well. Do you know it by name?”

  Jhirun nodded, her hands clenched upon the necklace that she wore, bits of sodden feather and metal and stone. She shivered visibly. “Abarais,” she answered faintly. “Abarais, in Shiuan. Dai-khal, dni-khal, I have told you all the truth, all that I know. I have told everything.”

  Morgaine frowned, and at last came near the girl, offering her hand to help her rise, but Jhirun shrank from it, weeping. “Come,” said Morgaine impatiently, “I will not harm you. Only do not trouble me; I have shown you that . . . and better that you see it now, than that you assume too far with us.”

  Jhirun would not take her hand. She struggled to her feet unaided, braced herself, her shawl clutched about her. Morgaine turned and gathered up Siptah’s reins, rose easily into the saddle.

  Vanye drew a whole breath at last, expelled softly. He left his horse standing and went to the fireside, gathered up his helmet and covered his head, lacing the leather coif at his throat. Last of all he paused to scatter the embers of their campfire.

  He heard a horse moving as he turned, recoiled as Siptah plunged across his path, Morgaine taut-reining him to an instant stop. He looked up, dismayed at the rage with which she looked at him.

  “Never,” she hissed softly, “never cry warning against me again.”

  “Liyo,” he said, stricken to remember what he had done, the outcry he had made. “I am sorry; I did not expect-”

  “Thee does not know me, ilin. Thee does not know me half so well as thee trusts to.”

  The harshness chilled. For a moment he stared up at her in shock, fixed by that cold as Jhirun had been, unable to answer her.

  She spurred Siptah past him. He soug
ht the pony’s tether, half blind with shame and anger, ripped it from its branch and tied it to his own horse’s saddle. “Come,” he bade Jhirun, struggling to keep anger from his voice, with her who had not deserved it. He rose into the saddle, cleared a stirrup for her, suddenly alarmed to see Morgaine leaving the clearing, a pale flash of Siptah’s body in the murk.

  Jhirun tried for the stirrup and could not reach it; he reached down in an agony of impatience, seized her arm and pulled, dragged her up so that she could throw her leg over and settle behind him.

  “Hold to me,” he ordered her, jerked her shy hands about his waist and laid spurs to the gelding, that started forward with a suddenness that must have hurt the pony. He pursued Morgaine’s path, only dimly aware of branches that raked his face in the passage. He fended them with his right hand and used the spurs a second time. One thing he saw, a pallor through the trees, fast opening a lead on him.

  Soul-bound: that was in-oath, and he had strained the terms between them. Morgaine’s loyalty lay elsewhere, to a thing he did not understand or want to know: wars of qujal, that had ruined kingdoms and toppled kings and made the name of Morgaine kri Chya a curse in the lands of men.

  She sought Gates, the witchfires that were passage between world and world, and sealed them after her, one and another and another. His world had changed, he had been born and grown to manhood between two beats of her heart, between two Gate-spanning strides of that gray horse. The day that he had given her his oath, a part of him had died, that sense of the commonplace that let ordinary men live, blind and numb to what terrible things passed about them. He belonged to Morgaine. He could not stay behind. For a stranger’s sake he had riven what peace had grown between them, and she would not bear it. It was that way with Morgaine, that he be with her entirely or be numbered among her enemies.

  The trees cut off all view; for a wild moment of terror he thought that in this wilderness he had lost her. She rode against time, time that divided her from Roh; from Gates, that could become a fearful weapon in skilled hands. She would not be stayed longer than flesh must rest-not for an hour, an instant. She had forced them through flood and against storm to bring them this far-all in the obsessive fear that Roh might be before them at the Master Gate, that ruled the other Gates of this sad land-when they had not even known beyond doubt that Roh had come this way.

  Now she did know.

  Jhirun’s arms clenched about him as they slid on the down-slope. The pony crashed into them with bruising force, and the gelding struggled up another ridge and gained the paved road, the pony laboring to keep the pace.

  And there to his relief he saw Morgaine. She had paused, a dim, pale figure on the road beneath the arch of barren trees. He raked the gelding with the spurs and rode to close the gap, reckless in their speed over the uncertain trail.

  Morgaine gazed into the shadows, and when he had reined in by her, she simply turned Siptah’s head and rode, sedately, on her way down the road, giving him her shoulder. He had expected nothing else; she owed him nothing.

  He rode, his face hot with anger, conscious of Jhirun’s witness. Jhirun’s arms were clenched about him, her head against his back. At last he realized how strained was her hold upon him, and he touched her tightly locked hands. “We are on safe ground now,” he said. “You can let go.”

  She was shivering. He felt it. “We are going to Shiuan,” she said.

  “Aye,” he said. “It seems that we are.”

  Thunder rolled overhead, making the horses skittish, and rain began to patter among the sparse leaves. The road lay in low places for a time, where the horses waded gingerly in shallow water. Eventually they passed out of the shadow of the trees and the overcast sun showed them a wide expanse where the road was the highest point and only landmark. Rain-pocked pools and sickly grasses stretched to left and right. In places the water overflowed the road, a fetid sheet of stagnant green, where dead brush had stopped the cleansing current.

  “Jhirun,” said Morgaine out of a long silence. “What is this land named?”

  “Hiuaj,” said Jhirun. “All the south is Hiuaj.”

  “Can men still live here?”

  “Some do,” said Jhirun.

  “Why do we not see them?”

  There was long silence. “I do not know,” Jhirun said in a subdued voice. “Perhaps they are afraid. Also it is near Hnoth, and they will be moving to higher ground.”

  “Hnoth.”

  “It floods here,” Jhirun said, hardly audible. Vanye could not see her face. He felt the touch of her fingers on the cantle of the saddle, the shift of her grip, sensed how little she liked to be questioned by Morgaine.

  “Shiuan,” Vanye said. “What of that place?”

  “A wide land. They grow grain there, and there are great holds.”

  “Well-defended, then.”

  They are powerful lords, and rich.”

  “Then it is well,” said Morgaine, “that we have you with us, is it not, Jhirun Ela’s-daughter? You do know this land after all,”

  “No,” Jhirun insisted at once. “No, lady. I can only tell you the things I have heard.”

  “How far does this marsh extend?”

  Jhirun’s fingers touched Vanye’s back, as if seeking help. “It grows,” she said. ‘The land shrinks. I remember the Shiua coming into Hiuaj. I think now it must be days across.”

  “The Shiua do not come now?”

  “I am not sure the road is open,” Jhirun said. “They do not come. But marshlanders trade with them.”

  Morgaine considered that, her gray eyes thoughtful and not entirely pleased. And in all their long riding she had no word save to Jhirun.

  By noon they had reached a place where trees grew green at a little distance from the road. The storm had blown over, giving them only a sprinkling of rain as it went, to spend its violence elsewhere. They drew off to rest briefly, on the margin where the current had made a bank at the side of the causeway, and where the grass grew lush and green, a rare spot of beauty in the stagnant desolation about them. The watery sun struggled in vain to pierce the haze, and a small moon was almost invisible in the sky.

  They let the horses graze and rest, and Morgaine parcelled out the last of their food, giving Jhirun a third share. But Jhirun took what she was given and drew away from them as far as the narrow strip of grass permitted; she sat gazing out across the marsh, preferring that dismal view, it seemed, and solitude.

  And still Morgaine had spoken no word. Vanye ate, sitting cross-legged on the bank beside her, finally having decided within himself that it was not anger that kept her silent now: Morgaine was given to such periods when she was lost in her own thoughts. Something weighed upon her mind, in which he thought he was far from welcome.

  “She,” Morgaine said suddenly, startling him, softly though she spoke, “was surely desperate to come this road alone. For fear of drowning, says she; Vanye, does it occur to thee to wonder why out of all the years of her life, she suddenly set out, with nothing in preparation?”

  “Roh can be persuasive,” he said.

  “The man is not Roh.”

  “Aye,” he said, disturbed in that lapse, avoiding her eyes.

  “And she speaks what we can understand, albeit the accent is thick. I would I knew when she comes, Vanye. She surely did not have her birth from the earth and the fog yesterday noon.”

  “I think,” he said, gazing off in the direction Jhirun stared, ahead, where the forest closed in again, great trees overshadowing the road, “I think her folk are surely in that hold we passed, and Heaven grant they stay there.”

  “They may be looking for her.”

  “And we,” he said, “may come into trouble on her account, or what is more likely-she will meet it on ours. Liyo, I ask you earnestly, send her away-now, while she is near enough home she can find her way back.”

  “We are not taking her against her will.”

  “I suppose that we are not,” he agreed, not happily. “But we are on a t
rack they cannot mistake.”

  “The horses do confine us to the roadway,” she said, “and this land has shown us one fellow-traveller, and not a breath of others. It occurs to me, Roh being ahead of us, it would be simple for folk hereabouts to choose some place of meeting to their advantage. I do think I saw a shadow move this morning, before you came down the trail.”

  Cold settled about him-and self-anger; he remembered his reckless ride, how she had turned her back to him and stayed silent when he had joined her. He had taken it for rebuff. “Your sight was clearer than mine,” he said. “I was blind to it.”

  “A trick of the light, perhaps. I was not sure.”

  “No,” he said. “I have never known you prone to visions, liyo. I would you could have given me some sign.”

  “It did not seem good then to discuss it,” she said, “nor later, with our guest at your back. Mind, she met us either by design or by chance. If by design, then she has allies-Roh himself, it may be-and if by chance, why, then, she feels herself equal to this ugly land, and she is not delicate. Mind thy back in either case; thee is too good-hearted.”

  He considered this, which he knew for good sense, and he was ashamed. In all the time that they had ridden this land, he had felt himself lost, had forgotten every lesson of survival he had learned of his own land, as if any place of earth and stone could be utterly different. Blind and deaf he had ridden, like a man shaken from his senses; and little good he had been to her. She had reason for her anger.

  “Back there,” he said, “this morning: I was startled, or I would not have cried out.”

  “No more of it.”

  “Liyo, I take oath it was not a thing I would have done; I was surprised; I did not reckon-I could not believe that you would do murder.”

  “Does that matter?” she asked. “Thee will not appoint thyself my conscience, Nhi Vanye. Thee is not qualified. And thee is not entitled.”

  The horses moved, quietly grazing. Water sighed under the wind. His pulse dimmed awareness of all else; even the blood seemed dammed up in him, a beating of anger in his veins. He met her pale eyes without intending to; he did not like to look at them when she had this mood on her.