Exile's Gate (6 page)

"Lord in Heaven," Vanye
murmured then, sickened at what he saw—not least was he affected by the
quiet of the man sitting there on the grass and taking full account,
with trembling hands and tight-clamped jaw and a kind of panic about
his eyes, what toll his ordeal had taken of his body—great, deep sores
long festered and worn deep in his flesh. Wherever the armor had been
ill-fitted, there infection and poison had set in and corruption had
followed, deepening the sores, to be galled again by the armor.
Wherever small wounds had been, even what might have been insect bites,
they had festered; and as Chei pulled the padding beneath the mail
free, small bits of skin and corruption came with it.

It was not the condition of
a man confined a day or even a few days. It bespoke something much more
terrible than he had understood had happened on that hill, and the man
sat there, trembling in deep shock, trying stolidly to deal with what a
chirurgeon or a priest should attend.

"Man—" Vanye said, rising and coming over to him. "I will help."

But the man turned his
shoulder and wanted, by that gesture, no enemy's hands on him, Vanye
reckoned—perhaps for fear of roughness; perhaps his customs forbade
some stranger touching him; Heaven knew. Vanye sank down on his heels,
arms on his knees, and bit his lip for self-restraint, the while Chei
continued, with the movements of some aged man, to peel the leather
breeches off, now and again pausing, seeming overwhelmed by pain as if
he could not bear the next. Then he would begin again.

And there was nothing more
than that, that a man could do, while Vanye watched, flinching in
sympathy—Lord, in Ra-morij of his birth, a gentleman would not
countenance this sort of thing—chirurgeon's business, one would murmur,
and cover his nose and go absolve himself with a cup of wine and the
noisy talk of other men in hall. He had never had a strong stomach with
wounds gone bad.

But the man doggedly,
patiently, worked out of the last of it, put his right leg down into
the water, and the left, and slipped off the bank, to lose his balance
and fall so suddenly that Vanye moved for the edge thinking he had gone
into some hole.

Chei righted himself and
clawed for the bank—held on in water only chest deep as Vanye gripped
his forearm against the grass. Chei was spitting water and gasping
after air, his blond hair and beard streaming water, his teeth
chattering in what seemed more shock than cold.

"I will pull you out," Vanye said.

"No," Chei said, pulling
away. "No." He slipped again, and all but went under, fighting his way
to balance again, shivering and trying to pull free.

Vanye let him go, and
watched anxiously as the prisoner ducked his head deliberately and
rubbed at ingrained dirt, scrubbing at galled shoulders and arms and
body.

Vanye delved into his kit and found the cloth-wrapped soap. "Here," he said, offering it out over the water. "Soap."

The man made a few careful
steps back to take it and the cloth; and wet it and scrubbed. The lines
about the eyes had vanished, washed away with the dirt. It was a
younger face now; tanned face and neck and hands, white flesh
elsewhere, in which ribs and shoulder-blades stood out plainly.

More of scrubbing, while
small chains of bubbles made serpentines down the rapid current. There
was danger of that being seen downstream. But there was danger of
everything—in this place, in all this unknown world.

"Come on," Vanye said at last, seeing how Chei's lips had gone blue. "Come on, man—Chei. Let me help you out. Come
on,
man."

For a moment he did not
think the man could make it. Chei moved slowly, arms against his body,
movements slowed as if each one had to be planned. The hand that
grasped Vanye's was cold as death. The other carefully, deliberately,
laid the soap and the cloth in the grass.

Vanye pulled on him, wet
skin slipping in his fingers, got the second hand and drew him up onto
the grass, where Chei might have been content to lie. But he hauled
Chei up again and drew him stumbling as far as the blanket, where he
let him down on his side and quickly wrapped him against the chill of
the wind, head to foot.

"There," Vanye said.
"There—stay still." He hastened up again, seeing Morgaine standing
halfway down the slope, there by the horses: and recalled a broken
promise. He
had
left her sight. He was shamefaced a second time as he walked up to speak to her.

"What is wrong?" she asked, fending off Arrhan's search for tidbits. There was a frown on her face, not for the horse.

He had turned his back on
their prisoner again. But: "He is too ill to run," Vanye said. "Heaven
knows—" It was not news that would please her. "He is in no condition
to ride—No, do not go down there, this is something a man should see
to. But I will need the other blanket. And my saddlebags."

She gave him a distressed
look, but she stopped with only a glance toward the man on the bank, a
little tightening of her jaw. "I will bring them down halfway," she
said.
"When
will he ride?"

"
Two days," he said, trying to hasten the estimate; and thought again of the sores. "Maybe."

It was a dark thought went
through Morgaine's eyes—was a thought the surface of which he knew how
to read and the depth of which he did not want to know.

"It is not his planning," he said, finding himself the prisoner's defender.

"Aye," Morgaine said quietly, angrily and turned and walked uphill after the things he had asked.

She brought the things he asked back down to him, no happier. "Mind, we have no abundance of anything."

"We are far from the road," Vanye said. It was the only extenuation of their situation he could think of.

"Aye," she said again.
There was still anger. It was not at him. She had nothing to say—was in
one of her silences, and it galled him in the one sense and frightened
him in the other, that they were in danger, that he knew her moods, and
her angers, which he had hoped she had laid aside forever. But it was a
fool who hoped that of Morgaine.

He took what she gave him
and walked back to the bank, and there sat down, a little distance from
their prisoner—sat down, trying to smother his own frustration which,
Heaven knew, he dared not let fly, dared not provoke his liege to some
rashness—some outright and damnably perverse foolishness, he told
himself, of which she was capable. She scowled; she was angry; she
did
nothing
foolish and needed no advice from him who ought well to know she was
holding her temper very well indeed, Heaven save them from her moods
and her unreasonable furies.

The focus of her anger knew
nothing of it—was enclosed in his own misery, shivering and trying,
between great tremors of cold and shock, to dry his hair.

"Give over," he said, and tried to help. Chei would none of it, shivering and recoiling from him.

"I am sorry," Vanye muttered. "If I had known this, Lord in Heaven, man—"

Chei shook his head, clenching his jaw against the spasms a moment, then lay still, huddled in the blanket.

"How long," Vanye asked, "how long had you been there?"

Chei's breath hissed between his teeth, a slow shuddering.

"Why," Vanye pursued quietly, "did they leave you there?"

"What are you? From where? Mante?"

"Not from hereabouts," he
said. The sun shone warm in a moment when the wind fell. A bird sang,
off across the little patch of meadow. It meant safety, like the horses
grazing above them on the slope.

"Is it Mante?" Chei demanded of him, rolling onto his back and lifting his head, straining with the effort.

"No," Vanye said. "It is
not." And reckoned that Mante was some enemy, for Chei seemed to take
some comfort in that, for all that his jaw was still clamped tight.
"Nor anywhere where they treat men as they treated you. I swear you
that."

"She—" The man lay back and shifted desperate eyes toward their camp.

"—is not your enemy," Vanye said. "As I am not."

"Are you qhal?"

That question took the warmth from the daylight.

"No," Vanye said. "That I
am not." In Andur-Kursh the fairness of his own brown hair was enough
to raise questions of halfling blood. But the one who asked was palest
blond; and that puzzled him. "Do I look to be?"

"One does not need to
look
to be."

It was, then, what he had feared. He thought before he spoke. "I have seen the like. My cousin—was such a man."

"How does he fare?"

"Dead," Vanye said. "A long
time ago." And frowned to warn the man away from that matter. He looked
up at a motion in the edge of his vision and saw Morgaine coming down
the hill toward them, carefully—a warlike figure, in her black and
silver armor, the sword swinging at her side, either hand holding a
cloth-wrapped cup she was trying not to spill.

Chei followed his stare,
tilting his head back, watching her as she came, as she reached the
place where they sat and offered the steaming cups.

"Thank you," Vanye said, as he took his cup from her hand, and took Chei's as well.

"Against the chill,"
Morgaine said. She was still frowning, but she did not show it to Chei,
who lay beneath his blanket. "Do you need anything?" she asked,
deliberately, doggedly gracious. "Hot water?"

"On the inside of him will serve," Vanye said. "For the rest—the sun is warm enough when the wind falls."

She walked off then, in
leisurely fashion, up the hill, plucked a twig and stripped it like
some village girl walking a country lane, the dragon sword swinging at
her side.

She was, he reckoned, on the edge of a black rage.

He gave Chei his cup and
sipped his own, wrinkling his nose as he discovered the taste. " 'Tis
safe," he said, for Chei hesitated at the smell of his. "Tea and
herbs." He tasted his again. "Febrifuge. Against the fever. She gives
us both the same, lest you think it poison. A little cordial to sweeten
it. The herb is sour and bitter."

"Qhalur witch," the man said, "into the bargain."

"Oh, aye," Vanye said,
glancing at him with some mild surprise, for that belief might have
come out of Andur-Kursh. He regarded such a human, homelike belief
almost with wistfulness, wondering where he had lost it. "Some say. But
you will not lose your soul for a cup of tea."

He had, he thought when he
had said it, lost his for a similar matter, a bit of venison. But that
was long ago, and he was damned most for the bargain, not what
sustenance he had taken of a stranger in a winter storm.

Chei managed to lean over
on his elbow and drink, between coughing, and spilled a good amount of
it in the shaking of his hands. But sip after sip he drank, and Vanye
drank his own cup, to prove it harmless.

Meanwhile too, having
considered charity, and the costs of it on both sides, he delved
one-handed into the saddlebags and set out a horn container,
intricately carved.

And perhaps, he thought, a scrupulous Kurshin man would regard the contents of that little container as witchcraft too.

"What is that?" Chei asked warily, as he finished his cup.

"For the sores. It is the best thing I have. It will not let the wounds scab, and it takes the fire out."

Chei took the box and
opened it, taking a little on his fingers and smelling of it. He tried
it on the sore on the inside of his knee, his lip caught between his
teeth in the patient habit of pain; but soon enough he drew several
deep breaths and his face relaxed.

"It does not hurt," Vanye said.

Chei daubed away at
himself, one wound and the other, the blanket mostly fallen about him,
his drying hair uncombed and trailing water from its ends. Vanye took a
bit on his own fingers and covered the patches that Chei could in no
wise reach, those on his shoulders, then let Chei do the rest.

"Why?" Chei asked finally, in a phlegmy voice, after a cough. "Why did you save me?"

"Charity," Vanye said dourly.

"Am I free? I do not seem to be."

Vanye lifted a shoulder.
"No. But what we have we will share with you. We are in a position—" He
drew a breath, thinking what he should say, what loyalties he might
cross, what ambush he might find, all on a word or two. "—we do not
want to make any disturbance hereabouts. But then, perhaps you have no
wish to be found hereabouts—"

The man said nothing for a moment. Then he reached inside the blankets to apply more of the salve. "I do not."

"Then we do have something to talk about, do we not?"

A pale blue stare flicked toward him, mad as a hawk's eye. "Have you some feud with Gault?"

"Who is Gault?"

Perhaps it was the right
bent to take. Perhaps the man in his turn thought him mad—or a liar.
Carefully Chei took a fresh film of salve on his fingers and applied
it, and winced, a weary flinching, premature lines of sunburn and pain
around the eyes. "Who is Gault?" he echoed flatly. "Who is Gault. Ask,
what
is Gault?—How should you not know that?"