Moving Water (13 page)

My words must have touched some deep chord, for Beryx opened his eyes. Glazed, deep-sunken, colorless, they wandered over our faces. Reached Callissa's. His muscles twitched, he tried to sit up.

“I beg your pardon, ma'am.” His voice was thick, vague, but full of open dread. “I am going. I—it was just for a moment.” He strove to get a hand under him, the wound pinched, he caught his breath. “. . . know this is a respectable house. But I don't have plague. I'm not drunk.” His head must have spun, he tried to clasp it and prop himself and ended in a heap with a silent gasp as the wound quite winded him. In despair, he dragged the good arm over his head. The words came from under it. “Only a wound . . . promise. If you could wait . . . just a moment more.”

Over him Callissa's eyes met mine. My feelings must have been plain, for she ducked her head. Wondering savagely what woman had thrown him out of her “respectable house,” I took him by the shoulder and said as gently as I could, “You don't have to go. You don't have to go anywhere.”

After a while he relaxed, or at least lay loose in the chains. I said rather wildly, “That's something we can do. I'm going for that key.”

* * * * *

I set out up the hill, I clearly remember that. The pure light of false dawn on the first three streets, early workers going by, I saw all that. I am not precisely sure where fact and perception diverge. The fact is that the sun rose to find me, empty-handed, back at the Treasury gate.

I tried again. I think I tried five times in all, before I gave in and went raving back downstairs, to find Beryx raving too.

To me it is fever's most loathsome aspect, worse than the physical indignities, because it breaks the locks of the mind and breaches the last privacy, leaving you without so much as awareness' censorship. Beryx was no exception. He tossed and turned and cried out at the wound's stabs and tumbled his life out before us whether we would or no.

Some was incoherent. Some was unintelligible. Some was history. I caught names I knew, Th'Iahn, Lossian. But most centered round Everran, the dragon, his wife, and someone called Harran who had been involved with them. His wife's name was Sellithar. Sometimes he called Callissa that, sometimes Thassal, sometimes he thought she was the innkeeper who had thrown him out sick. A woman of Everran. That was what had burnt it in. Sometimes he thought I was Harran, sometimes a certain Inyx who must have been the phalanx-commander, for Beryx had still not forgiven himself for letting the dragon massacre Inyx's men. Sometimes he thought I was the dragon itself, and that was worst of all, for he confused Everran and Assharral and tried to bargain with me to save us from Everran's fate.

Three days it went on. The wound was still swelling, big as an apple now, and Callissa wadded his armpit, for if his arm brushed the swelling he would scream uncontrollably. The watchers came and went, and gradually they assumed the look I knew I must be wearing. A grim, unresigned despair.

* * * * *

The third night he was still tossing, muttering, shivering, as he had when we covered him, cooled him, fanned him, tried to feed him broth, to speak to him. But words and movement were little more than intention now. Callissa sat on her heels over him a long time, her haggard, sharpened face a copy of his. Then she muttered, “It can't be worse,” and looked up at me.

“Alkir.” Her tone scared me. I had heard commanders go into a lost battle sounding like that. “Boil water. A lot of it. Get some clean cloths. Send somebody for linseed oil and oatmeal, and find me a knife. A very sharp knife.”

I gulped. She snapped, sharper than her face, “I'll draw it up with hot poultices. Then cut it.” Her voice assumed the common note of repressed despair. “It won't stop the fever. But it's all I can do.”

For the linseed oil and oatmeal I went myself, expecting to be turned back before I raided our own house. It felt alien, part of another life. I regained the vault to that sound most evocative of battle mornings, the whit! whit! whit! of someone whetting a knife.

Sivar's dagger had been selected as the thinnest. Krem was watching a big pot on the brazier while Karis tore up cloths. Callissa mixed the meal and oil, directing us in curt, brittle sentences to drag the brazier closer. “He'll kick,” she warned. We ended with me kneeling on his wrists, Sivar, the heaviest, clutching his ankles, and the rest twisted somehow in between.

Tight-lipped, Callissa took the cloths from Zyr. Plunged them in the boiling pot. Wrung them out, wrung her hands. Slapped one on Karis' shield, turned the oil and oatmeal onto it, whipped the other atop, came swiftly across, and more swiftly pulled the steaming bundle tight over the tumor of the wound.

Given time, no doubt he would have kicked. Luckily for us all, he fainted instead. The first time, that is. And by the last he was too spent to struggle much. With open nausea Callissa hurled away the poultice, rapped at Amver, “Knife,” and knelt at his back, frowning thunderously, hand trembling as she positioned it for the stroke.

The blade shivered in the shaky light. Her brow came out in sweat, the frown became a grimace. I thought she had lost her nerve. But then she drew a long breath and slashed.

It was a good cut. Horizontal, plumb from the swelling's forward edge to end plumb with the other side, dead center across the pit, with the rib to stop it going dangerously deep. I remarked all this later. At the time all I saw was a thick yellow jet that spurted up in the firelight before Beryx's convulsion all but threw me off his wrists.

Callissa dropped the knife to fling her weight on his shoulders, Amver landed on his hip. When the brunt of it passed she panted, “Turn him . . . flat.”

It would have been easier to turn him inside out. Then she made us bend him to and fro till I thought we would break his back. But every twist sent another ooze of yellow matter into the straw and made her growl with relief, so I kept quiet. And at last one particularly noisome clot vomited something black and she fairly squeaked, “That's it!”

Everyone but me deserted their posts. I knelt panting on Beryx's wrists while she extricated it from the pus, gripping it in a scrap of cloth. Long as a thumb-joint, it was wickedly serrated, the blunt end jagged like a snapped arrowhead, coated in some secretion grainy as lizard-skin.

“That's it.” She was hushed this time. “It must be . . . the dragon-sting.”

There was a pause filled only by the braziers and deep-drawn breaths. If we never saw a dragon, we had had an illustration of their powers. Now, here, tangible, was part of the thing itself.

* * * * *

After the cleaning up I went outside. It was second watch, almost midnight. Tramping across squeaky marble floors to the gate I looked down on Zyphryr Coryan, idyllic under a full-blown moon, tranquilly asleep. Only from the Morhyrne's shoulder stared a single, unblinking light.

“He's asleep,” Callissa greeted my return. I hugged her, starting to babble, and she cut me short. “The fever hasn't changed.”

I recall feeling insulted, outraged, incredulous. “It must have!”

“It hasn't.” Her hair was wet strings, her face sagged, she was almost trembling with fatigue. “I can't help it.” Tears were very near the surface. “I've tried everything I know.”

He was doubled up under a blanket, motionless, but his face was a death-mask, and I needed no touch to feel he was still burning unquenchably as his own mirth. Around me was silence. Hope deferred is not so sickening as victory snatched from between your very hands.

I said stubbornly, “We'll wait a while.”

I think I slept, for I was sitting in the straw when Sivar's touch recalled me to a muted, “Sir? Morning watch.” His tone told the rest.

I stood up, looking to the roof as men do when earthly resorts fail. Where, I thought, is this Math? Or his own Sky-lords? Will nothing, nobody give us any help?

I turned to find Callissa at my elbow, a fanatic glare in her eyes.

“The witch. Fengthira.” He had raved of her as well. “She might be able to do something. She must!”

Looking at Beryx, I thought, This is surely a Must? Then I remembered.

“She's in Hethria.” I was too tired to snap. “Too far.”

“Then think of something!” she nearly screamed at me. “Think!”

I rubbed a thumb over my brows. Something nagged in my mind's depth. Thinking. Speaking. Lathare. Mindspeech. He had spoken to her from Assharral. But he was an aedr. We were not.

Callissa's stare was a needle-point. “You have,” she said fiercely. “You've thought.” The others clustered behind her, tense and mute, but only she knew me well enough to read by expression alone.

“It won't work,” I said. “He could speak to her. We can't.”

“Oh, rot you, Alkir!” She stamped her foot, tears on her cheeks. “Try it! Try at least!”

Helplessly, I scanned the vault. “I don't,” I said feebly, “know how. . . . What to say.”

“It doesn't matter what you say!” She could not have been more passionate were it Zem or Zam's life at stake. “Ask what we do, how we break the fever, will she come, anything! Just get through to her!”

My eyes returned to the roof. Then I shut them. “To speak you have to be taught.” Despairingly, I thought it, a forlorn signal into space:
Fengthira, how do we break the fever? What do we use?

Amver shrieked and spun like a top, Beryx almost left the floor. Karis and Sivar fell writhing, clawing their ears, Callissa dropped as if heart-shot, the night burst open on a cacophony of screaming children, dogs, fowls, birds, horses, cattle, cats, the very city tottered, my head exploded and I had no perception of what might have been a very Sky-lord's signal, only a residue of meaning as the aftermath resonated shatteringly in my skull: <
SALGAR, THA DOLT!
>

Groaning, gasping, praying, we picked ourselves up. My mouth had not shut before Callissa was shaking me, reeling drunkenly, babbling unmindful of all else.

 “Salgar, she said! The trees down by the harbour, at Tyr Cletho, you know, you know! Alkir, wake up! The clethra bark, you
know!
You told me about using it in Phaxia! Oh, wake up, you great gawping clot!”

No doubt I woke. I must have, for later there was horse-sweat on my trousers and salt mud to the top of my boots. So I must have been to Tyr Cletho, the tiny inlet where no boats moor because of the knotted, ever-encroaching arches of the clethra roots which clamber out over the reeking mud under their mushrooms of olive-green foliage and slippery, splintery, mud-gray trunks. Clethras which are the only trees to grow in fresh water or salt, whose bark was accidentally found to be a swamp-fever cure during the last months of the war. Too late, for most of us.

I have an image of Callissa babbling to a breathless audience as she stews it on the brazier, the bitter reek that infiltrates the sweat and smoke and fever-rancid air. Of our first tussle with Beryx, when we tried to make him drink, and with the dregs of his strength he kept whispering, “Yeldtar. No,” and pulling his head away until Sivar held his nose, waited for the gasp and tipped the cupful down his throat. Which nearly ended it all when some found the windpipe as well.

At some time I see Evis enter with a face steeled to confront death, saying, “Second day-watch.” Remaining to watch, on tenterhooks with the rest. And then Callissa weeping quietly in my arms while Sivar and company hover grinning stupidly, patting her back, saying, “There, there,” and Beryx lies in the straw behind us, wraith-like and limp as ever, but with the first dew of sweat beading his skeletal face.

* * * * *

His recovery was nothing short of supernatural. Conscious that evening, eating like a young morval in two days, on his feet in a week, back to health long before we had regained normality. I thought it was his aedric will, for what he had survived would have killed a normal man. But when I knew him better I found I had been misled by his maiming, and the impression he gave of a big man past his flower of strength. If he was thin, he had been honed by the very arts which demanded such fearful physical exertion. The thinness of the triple-tempered sword-blade, which can dispense with mass.

After two days of behaving like a wildcat with a litter, Callissa calmly abandoned us, saying, “You won't kill him now.” I rediscovered my troops. The watch dwindled to a night sentry and daily visitors, the bonds forged by crisis gradually relaxed. Only I was uneasily aware that, however we scattered, we had become a cadre of sedition in Assharral's docile midst.

It did not keep me from the Treasury, if I waited my turn on watch. I remember that night he had shaved himself for the first time, and was ridiculously prideful over this small feat. When we settled down I asked one of the many questions simmering in my mind.

“Who was the real Fylghjos?”

His eyes stilled, midnight green. Presently he said, “An aedr. Of the Stiriand line. Th'Iahn's time. One of the first followers of Math.”

When he did not continue, I said, “You thought I was him.”

His eyes went quite blank. No doubt it was pastsight, for he revived with a little grin.

“I was out of my mind, after all. And coming in without that surcoat, you looked the image of him.”