In the Earth Abides the Flame (44 page)

After the desolation of the valley floor, the day's journey along the steadily deepening wadi was almost enjoyable. While not recovered enough to talk yet, the members of the Arkhimm at least took notice of their surroundings. Early in the morning they saw a small group of what at first looked like rabbits sheltering in the shade directly under the left and steeper cliff. As they drew nearer, however, Leith could see that, while they were the colour of rabbits, they looked more like short-eared, squat-nosed moles, a family of timid animals avoiding the sun.

Father and mother were there, along with three - no, four - children, chattering nervously at the approach of strangers. Once they decided these humans were no threat, the mole-like animals resumed nibbling on the sparse grasses that grew at the base of the cliff, glancing querulously upwards between bites.

'Dassies,' Wiusago said, almost fondly. 'Rock hyrax is their proper name, but that sounds too grand for such foolish animals as they.'

Now the wadi began to swing left, then right, so that the rising sun made highlights of rocky outcrops on the cliff faces, and in that light Leith could see trailing shrubbery of some sort growing from crags and crevices high above. The almost regular brickwork of the wadi walls, overlaid with the unexpected greenery, made the passage they now threaded seem like a secret lane between castle walls, or a dusty Instruian street meandering between faceless tenements.

From the left and from the right other wadi joined the main channel, as evidently all drainage in this area tended southeast. To the eyes of the northerners, in whose own lands the evidence of water abounded, it was almost incomprehensible that such great chasms as these wadi could be the work of water. The steady rains and brimming rivers of Firanes had created no works like these, yet here they were in this arid, seemingly waterless landscape. Could these chasms be a relic of a wetter time? Perhaps. But, more likely, the absence of ground cover made the rock, for all its apparent hardness, vulnerable to the cut and thrust of whatever water made its way here. Added to this was the infrequency, but great magnitude, of rainfall here on the desert margin. Wiusago had heard stories told of sudden thunderstorms in which the continuous roaring left its hearers deaf for days afterwards, of wadi full to overflowing with raging floods, of whole mountainsides eroded away in an afternoon. Wiusago did not believe them, he said, but Leith had his doubts about this.

Finally, in the middle of the day, the Crown Prince found what he was looking for. Here the sheer-walled wadi was perhaps three hundred feet deep, or more; and, high above the travellers, it admitted only a narrow sliver of light. Yet there was ample light to discover the little pool of water set deep in the wadi sandstone floor. Perhaps thirty feet by twenty, it cooled the very air around it. At its edge six tall cypress trees grew, gnarled with age, last remnants of a once-forested landscape, of a milder climate. It sat directly across their path.

With shouts of delight the travellers threw off their burdens, ran forward and plunged down the steepish slope into the pool. Even Te Tuahangata smiled as he emerged, his face cleaned of travel grime. 'You found your gueltas,' he said to Prince Wiusago, with thankfulness in his voice.

While the others enjoyed the discovery, drinking their fill, refilling their water-skins, shouting and laughing as though the mechanism of their tongues had simply required lubrication, Leith wandered away in search of solitude. For him there was little to celebrate in the finding of a scum-encrusted pond, when the bigger mysteries remained hidden. If the voice in his fire-dream came only to enslave him, where could he find release? Was there a voice that would declare him free? Or was his life one long abandonment to the whims of others?

Around a turn in the wadi he found two smaller pools, set perhaps ten feet down in the sandstone. Above him the sun was almost directly overhead, yet in a few places shone directly on the wadi floor. One of those places was the closer of the two pools, which sparkled prettily at the bottom of the light shaft. Two silent cypresses stood guard over this precious jewel.

Something scrabbled around at the very edge of the pool, at the bottom of a smooth, steep slope. Leith squinted against the light, and eventually made out that it was a dassie, a rock hyrax. Little more than a baby. He watched. It tried frantically to climb out from the gueltas, but could get only a little way up the slope before it tumbled back down to the water's edge.

All the while it made high-pitched, mewing noises of distress.

The scene grabbed at Leith's throat like an ambush. The pitiful dassie was trapped, unable to get away. It could be part of the family we saw earlier this morning, he thought. Even though he knew the thought was unreasonable, he hung on to it as though immersed in some kind of madness. It had been abandoned, left here to die in the hot sun by those who loved it but could not help it. And all that remained for the poor dassie to do was to struggle in vain against its fate.

Something snapped in Leith.

'No! No!' he cried, scrambling down the slope. He must save it, return it to its family.

Something had to be done about this, some attempt made to change a world where such things could be allowed to happen by powerful forces who spoke in reasonable voices about hurting things for their own good. He worked his way towards the terrified animal, which backed away from him in fear. The sun reflected fiercely in the water-lens of the pool, and in a moment Leith was drenched with sweat.

'Come here,' he said encouragingly, and held out his hand. The tiny creature cowered away from him, consumed by terror. 'Come on,' Leith said, in as gentle a voice as he could muster,

'don't you know what's good for you?'

Then everything happened at once. A shadow crossed between Leith and the dassie. He looked up to see a huge winged shape wheeling above him. The dassie let out a terrified scream, suddenly cut off. Leith whirled around, expecting to see the animal in the clutches of a predatory bird; instead all he could see was the dassie itself, rigid in the throes of death.

'What? What?' Leith cried in agony of spirit, as though he witnessed his own death.

The tiny animal did not move.

'Wake up; please wake up,' he whispered pleadingly with it. Still it did not move.

'I've killed it,' Leith said quietly; then he cried out: 'I've killed it!'

The cry contained all his soul.

When the others, startled by the cry echoing around the canyon walls, came across the scene, it took them some time to work out what had happened. Distraught, in some inner torment, Leith could tell them nothing. The dassie they took and laid to rest under a rocky shelf.

'What's up with him?' Kurr asked gruffly, obviously concealing concern.

'We all need a rest,' the Haufuth said gently.

The old farmer grunted. 'We haven't got time for rest.'

'But we may not be able to go on at this pace. I'm still somewhere in the mountains of Firanes, my old friend. I haven't caught up with Instruere yet. I can hardly believe that Mahnum and Indrett were rescued, and I just want to sit down and have a good long talk with everyone, and something to eat.'

'But you persevere. You don't end up making strange noises at dead animals. The boy's too weak.'

'Kurr, you've been toughened by life. We've learned things about your youth you perhaps would not have shared with us. Would you have Leith go through such things as you have?

Isn't the point of all this we're doing so people like him won't have to go through those things?'

Kurr pursed his lips, but said nothing.

'In fact, he is going through a greater hardship than you ever did. He is a different person than the one who left Loulea months ago. He will be a man before this is over. Perhaps he grapples with issues you have not had to face.' He paused, then looked shrewdly at the hollowed face of his friend. 'Perhaps with issues you refuse to face.'

Kurr opened his mouth to reply, but the Haufuth stopped him. 'If we haven't got time for rest, we haven't got time for discussions like this. This valley is a hard place, my friend. Speak harshly of another only if you will allow others to speak harshly of you. Now, come!' And with that the village headman took up his pack and made to continue on their journey.

This man is changing, Kurr reflected, his anger tempered by the truth he had heard. Leith is changing. One of us needs to remain the same!

Later that afternoon the wadi emptied out into a large, shallow depression, the cliffs on either side vanishing to become part of an escarpment running away east and west. Ahead of them lay a shimmering emptiness, which through the early afternoon resolved itself into the last tiling any of them expected in this place, the bone-dry pit of torment.

A lake.

The lake - if in truth it was a lake - stretched fully fifty miles from north to south, though it varied with the seasons: in what passed for winter it expanded to cover immense salt flats that lay to the east, quadrupling its size. It occupied a large depression, in shape more like a horse's trough than anything else. This trough contained a unique substance not quite liquid, not quite solid, a combination of alkaline water and extremely caustic soda. The mixture was obviously deadly, as the shore was littered with the corpses of small birds which had, for the most part accidentally, alighted upon it.

Irregular dull-pink blotches dappled the grey lake surface like ghastly exhumations of blood, now sun-dried. These blotches were colonies of some hardy plant growth which, unbelievably, could survive the life-choking soda. Interrupting the pink blotches, large soda-rimmed craters testified to the violent escape of foul vapours from deep beneath the surface.

The fiercest of winds could raise only small ripples in the glutinous waters. Above the lake surface superheated air shimmered, through which could be made out steaming volcanoes lined along the far side of the lake. As the air spread away from the lake centre it carried the awful, acrid stench of soda to the desperate travellers hurrying past her lethal shores.

This was perhaps the foulest of all the places Leith had seen on his adventures, more ominous than the forests of Widuz, more forbidding by far than the gloomy heights of Rhinn na Torridon, home of decaying castles, more inimical even than the depths of The Pinion, for all its cruelty and despair. There was something dispassionately efficient about the violence permeating this valley, something opposed to life itself brooding over - or in - these foetid waters.

It was late in the day when disaster struck. Perhaps they would have been wiser to have rested during the heat of the day, though the wadi had provided such effective shelter the travellers decided to press onwards. It had seemed a sensible decision at the time.

Whoever placed himself at the head of the group found it difficult to determine where land ended and lake began, so grey and solid-looking was its surface; but the crust of soda was treacherously thin in places. The Escaignians, who were taking their turn leading, stayed well away, so they thought, from the water: but not far enough. From near the rear of the Arkhimm, dust-choked, dehydrated and weary beyond the power to express it, Leith heaid a cry of fear, then a soft splash. One of the Escaignians broke through the grey soda crust of the lake and fell, hands, knees and face, into the sulphurous ooze beneath.

Gentle hands pulled him free of the clinging ooze and carried him to the relative safety and shelter of an overhanging wind-carved rock. But it was already too late for Bright-eyes, and everyone knew it.

On his horribly burned face, arms and legs rose angry red blisters, which coalesced and turned black while they watched helplessly. The Haufuth tried pouring a flask of their precious water on the dreadful burns, but this only brought forth terrible screams from the doomed man. The flesh on his extremities seemed literally to melt away before their horrified eyes. Leith turned to his brother, a question forming on his lips. In the face of such suffering, Leith forgot his suspicions of his brother, and was prepared to ask his help but, as if Hal read his mind, he shook his head to answer the unspoken question. There was a tightness to his brother's face and neck, as though he was fighting against something - and losing. His face seemed carved from stone, a featureless copy of the volcanic rock to the right of the cursed path through this cursed land. Leith even tried the voice of fire, calling out for help in his head, a form of prayer, he supposed; but no answer came to him, no vision came to their rescue.

No hope of a miracle, then.

Leith had never watched a man die in such terrible agony, and with the foreknowledge that he was dying. It was a dreadful thing. 'He has been boiled alive,' said Phemanderac sadly. 'It would have been better if we had not pulled him out.'

Though he had known the bright-eyed man less than three weeks, the Loulean youth felt responsible for the man's suffering as if it was a personal failure on his part, as though there was something he ought to be doing, but was not doing it. He remembered the swift moments he and Bright-eyes shared on the way to the Water Chamber, as the man who now writhed on the path before them led him to rescue the Company from the rising waters. He recalled the Escaignian telling them how he tired of the darkness of his hidden home. He remembered his last words had been about freedom.

As the evening set in he wished it would end quickly, but it did not. Worst of all, worse than the screams, the ragged breathing of burned lungs, worse than the horrific wounds, was the knowledge there was nothing they could do.

Bright-eyes did not talk; indeed, near the end he could not. If it had been me, Leith admitted to himself, I would be begging everyone to do something. But in spite of the man's brave silence, his suffering was obvious. Long before they finally closed the eyes of the corpse and began to look for a safe burial site, Leith had begun to ask why. Why? The two other deaths -

Wira and Parlevaag — 1 can under' stand. The nobility of their sacrifices were precious gifts to us. But this? A life taken by the whim of the Most High. The Escaignian died without ever revealing his name. Did he matter that little? Leith could not believe in divine love here in this godforsaken place. There was no sense of purpose here, no plan, only wildness, danger and fear.