Lord of the Changing Winds (43 page)

Bertaud did not want company, nor walls. He walked slowly up the road away from the river, toward the new desert, and then left the road and struck more directly up the sloping ground, welcoming the effort, the numbness of exhaustion that clung to him. The damp grasses yielded gently under his step, and he passed the small close-pruned trees of someone’s orchard. Stripped of fruit now, he guessed, by soldiers only too glad to supplement their hard bread and dried meat with better. He would give long odds someone had found the energy for that.

Beneath his feet, the soft grasses suddenly gave way to sand. A heartbeat later the heat hit him, forceful even in the dusk, striking upward from the sand. Bertaud hesitated. Then he went on, walking more slowly still. He came to a low wall made of flat, rounded stones, tumbled and cracked now as though time and sun and the power of the desert had worked on them for many years rather than a single afternoon. He put a hand on top of the wall and clambered stiffly over. He felt as though he’d aged a score of years in this one night, and might have rested on the wall for a moment. But in the end, he couldn’t settle: When he tried to sit still, he had too much time for thought. For the slow creeping terror to press through his weariness. So he went on quickly, looking for… he hardly knew what, or why one place would be better than another, for what he had in mind. Perhaps he was simply searching for a certain slant to the lengthening shadows. Or for an excuse to delay the closing moments of this interminable day.

In the end, he found himself walking down Minas Ford’s one street, its cottages bulking to either side. Sand had covered the cobbles. The houses that had stood so bravely against the Casmantian army had been broken by the desert the griffins had made with their last effort: Here a wall had buckled as stone shifted beneath it, there a roof had fallen… Bertaud walked slowly through the village and at last discovered the gate to the inn’s yard. He went through the gate. Tables still stood in the abandoned yard. Several had vases still poised on them, all their flowers dead and dried, at once absurd and desolate.

Bertaud sat down at a table. The light had nearly gone, now. The ageless stars shone overhead, hard and brilliant, with little of the trembling sparkle they would have had in a gentler sky. Bertaud looked up at them, somehow comforted by their timelessness. He found himself thinking of the stars above the lake at Tihannad and then, for some reason, of the wide sky of the Delta where he had spent those grim years of his early childhood. He had not thought of the Delta much at all in these latter years; he had quite deliberately refused to think of the Delta or his father’s house. Even after his father’s death, somehow even then he had not let his thoughts turn that way. Now he found he regretted that studied indifference. He wondered, for nearly the first time in his life, what he might have made of his inheritance if he had devoted himself to the Delta and not to Iaor’s court, and it seemed both amazing and reason for grief that now he would never have the chance to find out.

It was perhaps a little late to entertain such thoughts. And he could hardly regret the place he had made for himself with the king—or Iaor had made for him—or they had made together. In the end, that place had survived… everything.
That
awareness, for all he had been compelled at last to walk out alone into the desert, was surely of infinite worth. Bertaud looked deliberately down from the sky, focused on the surface of the table between his hands. He called, “Kairaithin?”

Then he waited.

The griffin came. He was hardly visible in the night, and yet his wings seemed to reach across the sky. Starlight slid off his beak, his talons; his eyes, filled with fire, shone more brightly than the stars. The rush of air through the great feathers of his wings made a sound like sand across stone.

As he came down, he took on human form so smoothly that at no point was Bertaud certain where griffin became man. But it was as a man that he walked forward, and as a man that he faced Bertaud.

“Anasakuse Sipiike Kairaithin,” Bertaud said softly.

The griffin considered him in silence for a moment. He said at last, “You did not call us to your battle. As you promised. Though you were defeated and faced death, or worse than death.”

Bertaud did not ask him what a griffin would consider worse than death. He already knew that it was the defeat, and the shame attending that defeat. He understood how a griffin might flee before superior force, but would never yield. This seemed perfectly natural. The griffin heart informed his own, so that it had become difficult to distinguish one from the other.

“I have been surprised many times by the actions of men,” Kairaithin said softly. “Not least this past day. Why, in your extremity, did you choose to loose my people from your hand?”

“If I had known that your people might have saved us, I might have called you,” Bertaud admitted. “But I thought it would cause your destruction for, probably, nothing… I did not know you could bring the desert with you through all that cold rain, not with any sacrifice. So it seemed insupportable to demand your help.”

Kairaithin lifted one narrow eyebrow. “And now?”

“Now… it seems still more insupportable to do anything whatsoever. I called you… to assure you that I will not call again. Not you nor any of your people.”

“What?” said Kairaithin drily. “In no exigency?” He paused. “Do you know, man, what will happen to my kind if they discover that for you they are only animals? That they may be commanded as easily as dogs or horses?”

“Yes,” Bertaud said.

“They would fight you to their deaths, if not to yours.”

“I know.”

“And if by some chance any of them survived it, and you not, they would spend every remaining spark of their lives doubting their own hearts and souls, which might be compelled to the will of another. Unlikely though it might be that another man with so unusual an affinity would have it woken by fire as yours was, they would fear that. So they would turn to hunting men, to their own eventual destruction.”

“I know. You must make very certain Kes does not heal any other men. Just to be sure no one else with this peculiar affinity is brought to this…” He hesitated. It hardly seemed a gift. “Power.”

“I shall. You may be quite confident. I shall tell her the truth, I think. That will constrain her more strictly than any limitation I might otherwise employ.”

Bertaud nodded. “I called only you. I constrained only you. None other guessed?” he asked, to be sure.

“No, man. So you may be easy,” the griffin said, with some irony. “Only I have been brought to heel by the strength of your command.”

Bertaud tried not to flinch visibly. He said after a moment, “It’s in the nature of a horse to yield to its rider. It’s even in the nature of a wolf to respect the limits a man may put on its hunting. But I know… to submit to anyone’s rule is utterly against the nature of your kind. Do
you
understand… how terrible a thing it is for a man to force against its nature a creature of his calling?”

“Is it?”

“It would break my heart,” said Bertaud, very simply.

Kairaithin’s proud face tightened. “So I should be glad to trust my freedom and the freedom of the People of Fire and Air to your gentle sensibilities, man? Is that what you expect of me?”

“No,” said Bertaud. “I don’t expect that at all. I know very well that you would spend the long years of your life doubting your own heart and soul.” He met the griffin’s fiery black eyes. “You should take your true form,” he added after a moment. “I think you would be quicker so. You will need to be quick. Because if I… if I feel the blow coming, I don’t think I will be able to let you deliver it.”

Kairaithin stared at him.

Bertaud shut his eyes and waited.

A long moment passed. Far longer than should have been necessary. Bertaud opened his eyes.

Kairaithin sat before him in griffin form, like a great cat, lion tail wrapped neatly around taloned front feet. His neck was arched, his head tucked in toward his chest, his ferocious beak pointed at the ground. The feathers behind his head ruffled in the desert breeze. He looked massive and dangerous and heraldic and, somehow, indecisive.

“Do you think,” Bertaud asked him, “that this is an offer I will make twice? Do you think I have endless nerve? Because I promise you, you are mistaken.” His voice shook; he bit the last word off sharply.

No
, said Kairaithin, softly. His voice slid delicately around the edges of Bertaud’s mind.
I do not expect that at all.

Bertaud stared into the griffin’s eyes, then looked away. His hands, lying empty on the table, moved slowly across its gritty surface. He gathered up a small handful of red dust and let it run through his fingers. For a moment, he looked only at the faint glitter of dust in the starlight. He did not speak. He could not think of anything to say. The infinite sky arched over them both.

I will trust your sensibility, man
, Kairaithin said. His tone was harsh and proud, as though it was defiance he expressed.
You will not call. You will not put your will upon me. Upon any of my kind.

“No,” said Bertaud.

I will spend the years studying ways to kill you, in the case you should prove false.

“I’m sure you will.”

The griffin said, more gently,
I will not expect you to call. I will not wait for the moment. I will not live in dread of the sound of your voice speaking my name.

Bertaud bowed his head. Then he looked up. “I won’t speak it. I swear to you. I won’t see you again.”

No.

“That will break my heart. But in… in a better way.” Bertaud opened his hands, a gesture of release.

Kairaithin was gone. The night seemed suddenly, bitterly, empty.

But Bertaud still lived to endure it. So even the bitterness, he thought, was something to cherish. And the promise of years to come during which the bitter loss might—would surely—transmute to a gentler memory. He took a slow, deep breath of the dry desert air, and left the ruined inn to the sand and the sleepless wind, to go back to life and to his king.

J
os found her sitting on a twisted red rock where the highest pasture had once been. There had been a tree where the rock now stood; there had been a spring that had welled from the earth and spilled away toward the lower pastures. Neither tree nor spring remained.

Kes was sitting with her knees tucked up and her arms wrapped around them, looking into the desert sky. Its beauty pierced her like a spear; she wanted to mount the heights and fly through air so crystalline and pure that the light of the myriad stars might shatter it. She wanted to fly west until she overtook the sun, then pour herself into its molten light; she wanted to shred her body into fire and wind and dissolve into the desert. But she stayed where she was. She had not known why she waited, until Jos came to her.

He came forward and stood at the base of the rock. He was tall enough, and the rock short enough, that their faces were nearly at a level. His eyes shone with starlight. Kes knew that her own glimmered with fire.

“You always liked this place.” Jos glanced around, sighed, and leaned against the twisted rock where Kes sat. “Now only the lie of the land is the same. You can’t even tell where the spring used to be.”

“I still like it.”

“Do you? Is it the same in your eyes?”

“No. Not the same.”

“No.” He paused. “I have brought your sister to see you. I thought… it seemed like a good idea. She doesn’t… You know, Kes, she hasn’t seen you since, well. Not from the time you went into the desert, till the Safiad’s little play this evening. You might… try to be kind.”

Kes slipped off the rock, blurring through the little distance that separated its top from the sand. She noticed only afterward that Jos had put a hand up to help her down; he lowered it slowly.

Then Tesme came forward out of the dark, walking carefully over the unfamiliar ground, and Kes had attention only for her.

“Kes?” Tesme said. She did not run forward to embrace her sister. Her tone was tentative, almost doubtful. She was wearing a plain undyed dress, the sort of thing she might have worn to visit the horses and would not normally have put on to go away from the house; her hair was bound back with a simple twist of wooden beads. Her face was thinner than Kes remembered, with faint new lines at the corners of her eyes. There was a bandage around her left wrist, and she moved stiffly. She did not smile. “Kes?”