Moving Water (21 page)

“Sir,” Evis urged as the post-house came in view. “I know we have to change, but I can make up a story. Love of—sir, you'll kill yourself!”

Beryx forced his back straight. Wiped his face. “Story's no good,” he muttered. “Got to cover tracks.”

We rode in unquestioned. In the same dreamy blindness of ostlers, post-master, pay-scribe, changed our beasts. Mounted. Rode out. I led his horse away down the empty road, while he flogged himself to fulfill the last terrible demands of the art.

When it ended Evis determinedly rammed his mount in and held Beryx up until the worst was over. Though his eyes remained shut, a hint of pleasure showed in his face.

“Did it,” he murmured. “Forgotten us. The whole lot.” A workman's pride in the conquest of a supremely difficult technical task.

As he said, “Can let go, Alkir,” Zam gathered up the bridle and announced in a small but determined voice, “Sir Scarface, you do the magic. I'll manage the horse.” And with a tiny, tickled grin, Beryx murmured, “All right.”

By late afternoon I had had enough. Over a rise one of Morrya's swift coastal rivers appeared, sparkling khaki and olive under its high-arched bridge, and I said belligerently, “There's cover down there. We'll halt.”

He did not demur. Merely whispered, with the sketch of a smile, “Headstrong as a general. And only a captain of guards.”

In the upstream shrubs and canebrakes a little glade opened on the bank. While we watered the horses Beryx, like Callissa and the twins, lay flat and immobile on the grass, but as I came over he began to sit up. I cut him off. “We're going to forage. Don't worry. We may not be aedryx, but no one'll see us to forget.”

The forage was motley. Two hens, corn-cobs, a helmetful of eggs, a burst waterskin which Sivar, with astonishing resource, had knotted up for Uster to fill, with more surprising skill, from an unsuspecting she-goat. Beryx hiccupped over the story. “Milked . . . upside down!”

He eyed the hens. I said, “I've savaged more of these with a dagger than you've got arts. We'll spit roast them—oh.”

“Oh,” he returned smugly. “At least you'll have to let me light the fire.”

“Flint and tinder,” Evis ruminated over a drumstick. “Spoons—pot—cups—salt—mint-tea would be good.” He was his old provident self. He eyed Beryx's bandaged hand. Few of us had yet outgrown the fascination of watching him eat with Axynbrarve, fowl fragments flicked deftly into his mouth.

 “Good practice,” he informed us. “Just needs delicacy. Which I lack.” Now he followed Evis' eye to the grubby linen, and shook his head.

“We'll do all that in Frimmor.” He lay back, head rubbed sensuously into the grass. “How I wish I didn't need sleep. I want to look at the sky.”

At sunset, to our unbelief, he woke fresher than we did. “You bounce back fast,” he explained, “when you're used to Ruanbrarx.” And night travel was easier, with only the post-house people to demand his arts.

I soon grew anxious about Callissa instead. The boys were all right, dozing in our arms at the walk, bouncing grimly stoical at the trot, but she was still taciturn, the cat clutched in her arm, her face growing more pinched with every mile. Such a ride was arduous enough for fit, healthy men. For a woman, used to the house. . . .

Second watch came and went. The traffic had vanished. I had grown jaded myself. When I glanced back, Sivar was shadowing Callissa's beast. Beryx slowed his horse on her other side, and I heard his almost humble, “Ma'am, will you let me help?”

“How can you?” Fatigue. Unflagging antipathy.

“If you let me, I can give you a Command.”

“Do something to my mind?”

“Ma'am . . . I won't read your thoughts. I won't—do anything you'd dislike.”

After a moment she said ungraciously, “If I must do this, I may as well save trouble for the rest.”

There was silence, while we all listened fearfully for another of his magic's punishing variants. But Callissa just asked fretfully, “Is that all?” And he returned with a smile in his voice, “Until it finishes, and you fall apart.”

When Valinhynga rose he called a halt. Too weary for talk we followed him from the road, crawled off our horses, picketed them and collapsed.

I woke with the sun in my face and a root in my back. Having remedied both, I found myself in a green-and-gold precinct, a clump of huge old kymman trees gone wild, their low-slung branches and thick ferny foliage completely hiding us from the road. I could hear it, though, within bowshot. Grind of wheels, bellowing calves, herdsmen's shouts. The low sun struck under the trees to catch a bit, a horse's eye, a dewy spider web, silver on a mounded back. I lay luxuriating in rest as you do only when very tired, idly counting the kymman's brown peanut-shaped fruit, feeling Callissa curled behind me, still asleep. The twins, I saw, somewhat startled, had burrowed into Beryx's cloak, into his very sides, I should think. He himself was awake, and looking past me. I rolled over, at the feeling in his eyes.

All over Frimmor and Morrya lythians grow wild. Acquainted with them from childhood, I hardly noticed. Now it seemed I had never seen one before.

It was a big bush, man high, twice as wide. The thin sappy stems and glossy serrated dark-green leaves were lost against other foliage, but the blossoms were staring bright, shaggy crowns that spread from the curly upper tips to the broad daggers of the petals' foundation, splashes of jagged vermilion, indescribably brilliant in sunlight upon a blue dawn sky.

Unplanted, I thought. Untended. Unwished for, undesired. And undeterred. I turned to Beryx, feeling for myself the joy and wonder and gratitude for earth's off-hand magnificence that had made his eyes glisten with tears.

After a moment he spoke. Even in mindspeech it was hushed. One word, but now I knew a fraction of what it meant.

He said,

* * * * *

We breakfasted, fully if not fillingly, in somebody's ferroth grove. The head-sized, green-and-orange-streaked fruit with their rich yellow pulp and black, loose, jelly-coated seeds, should really be eaten with a spoon, and the twins emerged daubed from head to foot, but much refreshed by the delightful task of assisting Beryx, the worst off of all, since he could not even grasp the piece he tried to bite. But hilarity faded swiftly on the march.

Evis had pressed for a wait till dark. Beryx replied, “No time.” We were in the Cessala, the unbroken thirty miles of caissyn farms that produce the spear-high purple sweet-grass whose stalks are crushed for sugar juice, and it was harvest, every farmer cutting or carting or burning off. Billows of black smoke severed Stirian Ven, the roadside fields were going up to heaven in red and yellow ranks of flame, or full of sooty harvesters who swung long hooked knives in the van of numberless pickers-up, stackers, and haystack-high bullock carts. The road itself was one long stream of them. The fires' heat distressed us all, but for Beryx they must have been purgatory itself.

After five miles I saw a lane that offered cover and veered my horse. He snarled,

In another mile Sivar had annexed Zem. In a second Evis was holding Beryx on the horse. After another two a post-house came in sight. Evis began, “Sir, we must tell a story this time, you can't—” and got a savaging of his own, a straightforward, brutal,

How he managed it I do not know. But he did, drawing one breath of triumph rather than torment before we were back in the flood.

That day if ever I profaned Math, for I cursed those bullock-drivers' simple existence, and they were innocent men. The sun climbed, reinforcing the fires, we were all awash with sweat, and still they came, one after another without so much as a breathing space as they plodded along beside their tall white teams, plenty of time to look about. Whistling, some of them, the final maddening iniquity. Blithely unaware that they were putting Beryx through a torture that would make kindness of the rack.

Around noon we found a farm track that ran into an unburnt field. This time I simply swung the troop aside and ignored his furious,

Round the first bend we halted, Amver and Dakis leaping off to catch and lower him, still impotently spluttering, into the meager shadow of his horse. The tall ranks of caissyn rustled overhead, the sun weltered in the narrow track, while we stood over him and mutely paid our dues to Math in the knowledge that this was borne for us.

For a good five minutes he simply lay there, every muscle limp, the scar staring purple in a bloodless face. Zyr clumsily wiped his forehead. Evis beat off flies. At last his eyes opened, dull black, drained dry.

Fraction by fraction, the green returned. His breathing crept up to the audible. He blinked. Then the thunder burst upon our heads.

If you ever doubted he had led an army, you would have known then. At the mere preamble every drillmaster I ever knew would have wept and confessed himself hopelessly outclassed. For range and scope and unfaltering flow of invective I never heard its equal, but it was the tone that put it far beyond a drillmaster's scope. Sheer awful authority, descending to annihilate us in god-like wrath.

When the pulverizing finished, he had finally got his breath. Then his face changed. With ludicrous horror he exclaimed, “Oh, dear! Oh, drat! I've done it again!”

The contrast was too much. We held our ribs and fell about. With tears of laughter in his eyes Evis gasped, “Oh no, sir! Don't regret it—just hope I can remember a bit!” I could feel the grin stretch my own face as I added, “No, sir, I'm grateful to be taught my place. I'll never call myself fit to chew out a defaulter again.”

“But,” he wailed, “I'm not supposed to do that anymore!” At which Evis patted his shoulder, saying kindly, “Never mind, sir. It was an education. Now you just relax and get your wind.”

It was all he would delay for, and afternoon was worse. Never have I been so thankful as when the carts thinned and the caissyn fields tailed off into the foothills of the Frimmor range.

There is an inn at the pass foot. Since he fainted clean away after the final cart, Sivar was free to dart into its kitchen and annex a fistful of cups and a mighty kettle of mint-tea, from which we all recruited our strength. As we rode off I glanced back to see a sooty child, clearly a scullion, gaping after us. I glanced at Beryx, and kept quiet. One child could hardly prove dangerous, and he had driven himself hard enough.

Frimmor range is just a winding climb among the tawny coastal hills, and traffic was blessedly light. Beryx reached the crest with strength in hand for a last view of Morrya, patches of opulent black soil, lush cultivation and lusher natural greenery spread into the smoke haze, steaming under the humid sun.

“So rich,” he said under his breath. “So much potential. How could you want Ammath, when you owned a province like that?”

“Isn't Everran,” I asked, “like that?”

He came to himself. “Everran was poor land,” he answered. “A lot of it desert, most only fit for hethel trees and grapevines. Nothing like this.”

“Was,” I thought. Everran, supreme happiness, had been deliberately, irrevocably put behind him. A sacrifice. At least two of the Phathos' cards had spoken truth.

We changed horses at the post-house on the crest. This time he wobbled out in the yard and personally chose every horse, the selections of a cavalryman. And chosen, I noted with foreboding, for stamina above all else.

he agreed without looking at me.

* * * * *

Frimmor is just high and dry enough for grain, chiefly fed to the ubiquitous milking herds and more ubiquitous pigs. Most of Assharral's cheese and bacon come from us. The crops patch into the rolling red-and-yellow-green landscape with its dirt tracks to each whitewashed farm, the earth tank and cultivation and selected groves of shade-trees, the paddocks grazed by phalanxes of red or roan milking cows. A quiet, prosperous, mellow land. I had never coveted its kindness, till I saw it through Beryx's eyes.

Sunset, fading golden to prettify our stubbly faces and mistreated clothes, found us at the bypass for Tengorial. Stirian Ven makes no concession to towns. In its path, it goes through, otherwise it goes past. Callissa eyed the faded sign with her first show of life. Evis eyed it too. Hungrily.

“Sir,” he suggested, “if we asked for dinner at a farm . . . couldn't you make them forget?” Evis is not one to let weapons, however unusual, rust in his hand.

Beryx weighed it. Then he said, “The next useful cover, two of you can go and ask a farm for whatever they'll give. If it's not enough, don't press them. We'll try somewhere else.”

On or off the road, Frimmor has little cover. We ended under a stand of tall silvery hisgal whose boughs offered little more than midday shade, and the very grass beneath had gone for travelers' fires. Beryx slid off and lay flat, leaving it to us. When Karis and Krem brought back a bucket of milk, a cooked ham and a wheel-sized cheese, he roused to blot their tracks, but then he lay back again, a shadow in the dusk. And we were so hungry it was a shameful time before we remembered him.