Exile's Gate (4 page)

But the qhal he could not
understand. They would guard his sleep, fend away the wolves, do him
whatever kindnesses pleased them: they would do no terrible thing until
they had brought him to the gate, or to their own lands. There was no
limit, then, no mercy such as the wolves would have shown.

"He might be a murderer,"
Vanye said, at the fire with Morgaine, sitting on his heels in that way
that years out of hall made comfortable enough for him. "But so am I,"
he added with a shrug. "Whoever put him there—God requite."

"He will run," Morgaine said.

"Not with that foot. At least tonight. God in Heaven,
liyo
—"

Vayne hugged his arms about
him, in the scant warmth of the fire they risked, and shook his head,
and cast a glance toward the dark lump that was their guest, lying just
beyond the firelight. It was a fair, green land they had left the other
side of the gate. Their friends were aged and gone, a kinsman of
his—was dust, he thought, for he once had thought the gates led only
between lands; but now he knew that their span was years and centuries;
and knew that if he looked up away from the fire he would see the
too-abundant stars in no familiar pattern, the which sight he could
not, this moment, bear. The breath seemed choked in him.

"We do not let him free,"
Morgaine said harshly. The fire shone on the planes of her face, winked
redly from the eyes of the dragon sword. It had not left her side. It
would not, this night.

"No," he said. "That I do know."

He felt cold, and bereft,
and victim of a cruel choice which was Morgaine's doing—that she asked
everything of him, every possession, every kinship, every scruple, the
sum of which choices brought him here, where men fed each other to
wolves.
I
had every
thing I thought that I had dreamed of. Everything was in my hands
—
honor, kinship, a home that was mine
—
within the arrhend. There was peace
—

But Morgaine would have
gone on without him. And with her, the warmth in the sun would have
gone. And no one could ever have warmed him again, man or woman,
kinsman or friend. The essential thing would have left his life, and
beyond that, beyond that—

He had ridden into that
dark gulf of the gates—it had been this morning, a bright meadow, a
parting with his cousin, last save Morgaine herself who could speak the
language of his homeland, last save Morgaine who knew his customs, knew
the things he believed, remembered the sights of home. And it was
already too late. Was dust, between two strides of the horses that bore
them.

He shivered, a convulsive
twitch as if a cold wind had blown over his back; and he bowed his head
and rubbed the back of his neck, which the warrior's braid made bare.
Honor demanded. Honor, he had back again. But he did not put off the
white scarf, which made him
ilin,
a Claimed
warrior, soul-bound to the liege he served; and when he asked himself
why this was, his thoughts slid away from that question as it did from
the things Morgaine tried to explain to him, how worlds circled suns
and what made the constellations change their shapes.

So he thought, listening to
the wolves, thinking that they were not alone, that this world had
touched them already. They had in their care a man who depended on them
for life, and who in someone's estimation had deserved to die by a
terrible means.

He wished that he knew less than he did, or had seen less in their journeying.

"We cannot leave him; Heaven knows we cannot make speed carrying double. And Heaven knows—fever may take him by morning."

Morgaine stared at him, a
flash of her eyes across the fire, out of a brooding silence. So he
knew he had gotten to the heart of her thoughts, that she dismissed his
worry for their guest as shortsighted, the matter of one life. She
weighed it against other things.

"We will do what we have to," she said, and beneath that was:
I
will do, and you will, or our ways part.

There was always that choice. It was knowing that, perhaps, that made him choose to stay within
ilin
-oath
and keep himself from other, more damning choices. He could not take
another direction, in a strange land and outside the law he knew. And
where was honor—when a man chose a woman, and refused to leave her even
for his honor's sake; and a liege, and must not desert her, else he had
no honor at all; and that woman and that liege lord, being one and the
same, would never turn left or right for his sake, being bound by an
oath still more dreadful than his.

He had no wish to serve
what she served. Serving her, he served that terrible thing, as much as
a man could and hold out any vestige of hope for his soul. Being
Kurshin, and Nhi, and honorable, he sought after absolutes of law, and
right; and that truth of hers, which killed the innocent and shattered
law and right, shimmered beyond all his horizons, stark as the sword
she bore—
here is absolute truth, man, here is truth beyond truths, which makes all justice void.

Morgaine understood it.
Morgaine did all that she did for that thing she served, did all that
flesh and blood could do, woman or man; and took so little care for
herself that she would not eat or drink, at times, would forget these
things if he were not there to put food into her hand and to protest
that he, he, being a natural man, needed rest even if she did not. He
distracted her from her pursuit from time to time. And so few things
could.

He gave her such comfort as
he could, and they were not even lovers, Heaven knew and few guessed.
They had shared a blanket in the beginning with her sword between,
lately without so much as that caution to stay them; which was
intolerable and gave him the more reason to chafe at this unwanted
guest, and the demands of his own stubborn honor.

"I think," Vanye said quietly, "that he has no love of qhal."

"He is human," Morgaine said with a shrug. "And we do not know who left him to die."

I am not qhal,
she was wont to insist, as long as he had known her—for in his own lost land the qhal were dreaded and damned;
halfling
had
been Morgaine's ultimate admission to him, when at last he won a little
of truth from her, none so many days ago as their time ran.

Now she let the implication
of qhalur blood pass without a protestation. Perhaps she was
preoccupied; perhaps she finally believed him enough to give up the
lie—that pretense which had begun perhaps in kindness on her part and
lasted in doubt of him.

Was that the last test, that I should ride this gate with you? But did you doubt me,
liyo,
that I would keep my word?

"Go, rest," she told him, brushing the last crumbs of their dinner into the fire. "I will watch a while."

He shifted his eyes to their guest, in the shadows. "If he has need of anything, wake me; do not go near him."

"I have no such notion,"
she said, and slid the pan into her saddlebag, there by her side, as if
they could leave in the morning with their guest as weak as he was. But
it was only prudence. They had not survived this long by leaving gear
behind, if attack came on them. "If he has need of anything in your
watch," she said, "you will wake me, the same."

"He is one man," Vanye said with a little indignation, and she frowned at him.

"Wake me," she said, being unreasonable on the matter.

So this land had frightened her too. And she grew irrational in little things.

"Aye," he said, and shrugged. It was little enough concession.

He loosened his armor, and
wrapped himself in his cloak, wrinkling his nose from the stink the
cloth had taken on from its little contact with the man, and thinking
that he might never have it clean again.

In the morning, in the
daylight, after sleep, he thought, the man might be reasonable—Heaven
help them, they had no means to deal with a madman.

He must see what could be done to salvage the man's gear—as long as they were not traveling.

But for his part he was
very weary, and his bones ached. So with his liege, he thought; but she
had thinking to do, and he had none—it was Morgaine chose their way,
Morgaine who decided matters, it was Morgaine who told him what he
should do, and therefore he did not worry about that—only about the
little matters—the horses, the gear, and how they should do what
Morgaine had set them to do. And he was content enough with that
arrangement.

Morgaine threw her own
blanket over him as he lay there, a little settling of added warmth, in
the which, his head pillowed on Arrhan's saddle, he relaxed. She patted
his ankle as she let down the blanket, a gentle good night, a comfort
at which he sighed, and thought after that, staring into the dark—for
she had a way of doing that to him—that perhaps that gesture of hers
had been intended for more than that, that if not for the damnable
matter of their uninvited guest, if not for this world that threatened
them and set them to sleeping turn and turn about, in their armor, that
cursed, familiar burden which seemed to settle on heart and soul, with
all its habits of fear—

So close they had been to being lovers. So very close.

He sighed again, but not
for the same reason, and tried with all his mind to go quickly to
sleep, with that good sense he had learned on this trail—that unbroken
sleep was precious as food and water, and very often harder come by.

A hard lump pressed beneath
his armor, against his heart. He felt after the chain which held it and
pulled it loose for his comfort . . . careful of the case, for it was a
perilous thing within, more perilous still as near the Gate as they
were camped. The stone in it might tell him the way to another Gate. It
might find another stone of its kind which was near enough. That was
the virtue in it, which held so much else of danger.

It had been a parting-gift,
from a man he had begun to love, one he had wished had been his father.
But in Morgaine's service there were only partings—and deaths. Only the
small stone and the white horse, these he owned, besides his gear, both
of which he knew for foolishness and dangerous vanity—a mare, and white
at that; and a stone which marked him equal to a qhal-lord—and reminded
him of the arrhend.

That land they had traded
irrevocably for this one, where the gates themselves threw out power
enough to misshape the trees and make all their vicinity unwholesome.

It was that lost, beautiful
forest and another, less wholesome, which haunted his sleep. He dreamed
that Morgaine had left him and he could not overtake her.

He dreamed of a ride
wherein he had seen a dragon frozen in the snow, beyond which time
nothing had been ordinary in his life. For the most part, he thought,
folk chose to be where they were born, with familiar dangers. It might
be a terrible place or a good one, might be love or hate that came to
them, they might have their freedom merely by turning their faces from
what they knew and walking straight ahead—yet they would not go, not
though the place where they were would kill them. He might have been
such a man as that. He had hovered for two years close about the region
of his exile, when he was eighteen and an outlaw, despite his danger:
he had imagined nothing beyond that.

Till Morgaine had found him.

She had shown him things
which made no sense in the world he knew. And like the dragon which
perished, bewildered, in the snow—he had known he was out of his
element from the moment he had begun to follow her.

Therefore he dreamed of
endless following. Therefore he walked with his fist clenched on the
stone; and lay bewildered, wondering where he was; and where Morgaine
was; and was terrified until he had found her, a familiar shadow,
beneath the ancient and twisted tree, in more starlight than any world
he had yet seen.

He drifted off again. The
horses remained quiet. The wind blew and rattled the branches, and
there was no sound that did not belong.

But—a brief darkness then;
and a snap like a burning log, that brought him out of his sleep
reaching for his sword, aware first that Morgaine was at his left and
that their guest was to his right and moving, staggering to his feet
and reeling away among the trees at no slight speed. Fire burned in the
leaf mold. That was the result of Morgaine's weapon: he knew it well
enough—knew that was the sound that had waked him; and he scrambled up
sleep-dazed as he was and overtook the man before he had gotten as far
as the horses he strove to reach—overtook him and seized him at the
shoulders, bearing him down in a crash to the leaves at the very hooves
of the gray warhorse.

The gray reared up with a
challenge and Morgaine's whistle cut the dark. "Siptah!" she shouted,
as Vanye shielded his head with his arms, the prisoner with his body,
and the iron-shod hooves came down, flinging dirt and leaves into his
face and clipping his shoulder, thunder of hooves all about them as the
warhorse scrambled over them, missing them with every stride but one.
The prisoner beneath him did not move.

"Is thee hurt?" Morgaine was asking. "Vanye, is thee hurt?"

Vanye gathered himself up
off the man and caught his own breath in great frightened gasps,
looking up at his liege, who had caught firm hold of Siptah's halter
rope. He flexed the shoulder as he rose and thanked Heaven the hoof had
clipped only leather and a mail shirt.