Moving Water (24 page)

Beryx's breath escaped on a single concussive sob. He collapsed on the bay's wither, it spun and reared and in horror I slammed my own beast in to back up Zem's brave snap on the bit.

The colt dropped and stood, Wreve-lan'x restored. Beryx straightened, as if crippled, face dripping sweat. Croaked at Zem, “Good lad.” Took a last look at the fire. Three long-drawn breaths. Then he wheeled his horse. “Now,” he said with that general's intonation, “sit down and ride!”

We parted the rhonur bushes like a stampede, rushing them breast-deep, cramming the colts to prevent a balk, we jumped whatever divided their formations, gate, ditch or fence, we took gullies as they came, we scattered a division of rhonur pickers and a hundred frantic dogs. Nursing my green and fiery steed to keep rank and survive obstacles, I wondered if Veth Gammas were garrisoned, what we would do if the cavalry overcame the fire in time to cut us off, how we could stop them following us down. Glanced at Beryx, and did not ask. The flared eyes, blind to all but the land ahead and poised for lightning-swift choice or change of course, the taut face warned me. You do not distract the pathfinder of a cross-country cavalry charge.

The rhonurs ended at a fence, a road-ditch, and we right-wheeled thunderously onto paven carriageway, Beryx roaring, “Whoa!”

Plunging, foaming, protesting colts cavorted everywhere, my chestnut passaged uncontrollably into a vertical yellow flank, Zyr still crooning “Oh, you beauty, you dream, you pearl. . . .” We looked back on a boiling black wall laced with red twinkles of flame, a diagonal swathe that bisected twenty rhonur fields, and a mob of farmers coming pell-mell with bawls of honest murderous rage.

Sivar let out a cracked laugh, but Beryx looked ashamed. “Didn't want to do it. Such a good crop. And ripe for harvest, too. But we can't explain. Come on. At the trot!”

Under the flank of the gnarled thumb nicknamed One-up, every soldier knows why, and Gjerven lay two thousand feet below us, a motley green of rice field and yam patch and pig wallow and swamp, broken by clusters of stilt-legged conical grass huts. Down to the left went the road at a steady one-in-four gradient, and Beryx pulled up.

“That'll do.” He fore-armed sweat from a white and purple face our career had not flushed. His eye was on a cluster of granite boulders that overhung the road. “If I can . . . just manage it.” And for the first time there was a flaw of doubt.

As Zyr and Karis whooped I thrust my colt against his bay and ordered, “Give me the bridle. Evis, carry on. Don't let them trot, they'll kill themselves!”

The clatter faded. Bloodthirsty shouts echoed from above. With an air of near desperation, Beryx shut his eyes and propped his wrist on the withers of the dancing colt.

Abruptly, it stopped. They are trained to halt at a double leg-squeeze. His torso had gone rigid, if his leg muscles spasmed the same way he must have near cut the colt's barrel in half. His face pulled out of shape. Then his eyes flew open, he gave a tremendous jerk and his lungs emptied in one explosive grunt.

The boulder clump disintegrated. Four small supports opened like an orange, the topmost monster tilted, tipped, slid, landed with a sonorous crunch that sank it a foot deep amid splintered paving stones. The road was completely blocked.

“Axyn . . . brarve.” It came on a long-drawn sob. “Not . . . unusual. 'Cept . . . the precision. Easier . . . tip it right down hill.” I jerked the bit viciously to still the skirmishing colt. He lay with his left arm on my shoulder a moment longer before he straightened up, and said on a breath of relief, “No hurry . . . for a while.”

There was no garrison, there was not a shadow of traffic on the road. Half an hour later we walked sedately out into Gjerven's steamy, marsh-rank atmosphere, and as he slapped off the first mosquito Beryx observed, “That's a good-looking swamp. We'll spell the colts.”

* * * * *

Walked, cooled, watered and caressed, they fell eagerly on Deve Gaz's famous earnn grass, we fell hungrily on the last Frimman provisions, and the mosquitoes fell ravenously upon us. Beryx grinned as he caught my eye. “Feel at home?” Then Evis produced Xhen leaves from his bottomless pack, and Zem and Zam lost the worshipful stupor that had lasted since the fire and burst out in chorus, “Sir Scarface, I'll do your hand!”

The burn had filled in and was drying. Soon it would be fit to meet the air. Gingerly flexing the wrist, he remarked, “I'll be glad to have this back.” He glanced at Callissa, stonily packing cups. Then he asked suddenly, “Ma'am, does that brown horse pull too hard?”

I saw surprise, a fleeting softness in her eyes. Then they hardened. Chilly courteous, she replied, “I can manage, thanks.”

With a silent sigh Beryx turned his eye on the colts. When he said, “We'll give them a bit longer,” my heart sank, for I knew we would go on that night.

He lay back in the grass. A series of shuffles edged the right arm under his head. The twins moved closer, rancor woke in Callissa's eye. Parceling up his medical kit, Evis glanced at those drowsy green eyes, still open, absently content. Paused. With sudden decision put by his pack and hunkered closer too.

 “Sir,” he began. “Krem—why—did it upset you so much?”

I closed a mouth open to call him off. An aedr's resilience is more wonderful than his arts, and I had seen those green eyes wake. Resigning myself to the mosquitoes, I lay down and drifted off to Evis' first steps on the road I was traveling myself.

* * * * *

If that night's going was safe, it was woefully slow. Gjerven is far wilder than Frimmor, and most of its cultivation is rice, which means paddy fields, which mean irrigation channels and mud. Which is hard on any horse. Moreover, we had ridden hard on a half-day's sleep, and we were flagging ourselves. I doubt we managed ten miles' actual advance before Beryx called a halt.

“No use overdoing it,” he said softly, while I waited to see the current lair. “Yet.” Despite full night vision I could find only the vaguest blur ahead. He clicked to his horse. We waded one more slushy channel, mounted an earthen dyke. Grass cones bulked against the stars, I caught the cluck of sleepy hens, a pig's grunt, hissed in horror, “It's a village, we can't—” and he cut me off. “It belongs to the ferryman. He's sleeping on the other bank.”

“For the love—you mean there's a river here? What if the Lady finds us? If we're caught against that—”

“Alkir, Alkir.” He was laughing under his breath. “You just magic up fodder and stabling for these colts.”

It was actually a Gjerven farmstead, five or six huts in a stockaded compound, hens and pigs loose on the bare-trodden earth, even that rarity, a Gjerven cow, which we instantly milked. The horses were dispersed in a couple of lean-tos with liberal helpings of the ferryman's doubtless precious earnn hay. We climbed into a hut, lit the usual Gjerven mosquito repellent of two dung-cakes on a clay saucer, and after staring fixedly across the sluggish brown ribbon beyond the stockade, Beryx came in and remarked casually, “The punt just broke its tow pulley. No crossings today.”

Despite his confidence mine was an uneasy sleep, ended near sunset amid the bustle as the others ate, packed or went off to saddle up. “Have a kanna,” said Beryx, cross-legged beside me, and took another bite at the creamy crescent of peeled fruit hovering before his mouth. “All we could find.”

Then the physicians descended. As Zem untied the bandage and Zam opened a Xhen leaf, Callissa materialized to snap, “That bandage wants changing. Isn't there another one somewhere?”

Evis gulped and delved hastily in his pack. Callissa tied it on, cut short Beryx's thanks, and stalked away, just as Karis tumbled up the steps.

“Sir, sir, she's found us! There's half a hundred savages out there with nothing on but their hats!”

Beryx's face showed a hint of vexation. “Drat,” he said, as I bounded up. He let the kanna drop and strode to the door. Then his shoulders shook. Strung for instant perilous action I was enraged to hear him remark, as if at a parade, “I love those Gjerven helmets.” Pure mischief entered his look. “I wonder if. . . .”

His eyes fluxed, crystalline green and white. Reaching the door, I was in time to see the enemy breast the stockade, an unexaggerated fifty Gjerven warriors, complete with wooden spears and warpaint and towering white and crimson headdresses, a most impressive battlefront. Before the forehead band of every headdress snapped.

“Best battle I ever won,” he chortled, as the phalanx disintegrated into a yelling gesticulating wreck. “Come along. It now behooves us to depart.”

We cantered with expedition east along the river bank, back into the mud and the enveloping dark, unlawfully requisitioned another ferry punt somewhere downstream, and again turned north. “I like Gjerven,” Beryx announced into the splashy, mosquito-ridden dark, and laughter tinged his voice at my grunt of disgust. “Zyr, if that pearl of yours really can outrun the wind, you might try to catch a pig before we camp.”

Zyr did not catch a pig. He did find Vyrlase, the end of Stirian Ven, whence the highway fans in a score of tracks to the border forts. “Excellent,” approved Beryx, headed for the easternmost path. “Now we can get along a bit.”

At that I found my voice. “But surely we should go west? The further east the wider Stirsselian gets, and the worse—”

I stopped. The guards had never crossed Stirsselian, but barrack-tales would have painted it luridly enough.

“Alkir,” he chided, “you're getting old. How did you last go to Phaxia?”

My jaw dropped. Evis muttered, “I'll be—” Obsessed with crossing at the narrowest possible part, I had forgotten the Taven, the engineers' marvel whose creation Mavash decreed when we invaded Phaxia: fifty miles of timber-cord causeways and pontoon bridges set just where Stirsselian turns salt, spanning tidal channels and clethra sloughs and evil black mud in one bold slash. The road that had borne an army into Phaxia, supported and provisioned it and brought its survivors back.

Evis asked eagerly, “Sir, will it be safe? It's been a good six years—”

Beryx replied calmly, “It looked all right last week.” Evis, recovering, burst out, “Then all we have to do is ride!” With a chuckle, Beryx agreed. Adding a silent parenthesis,

Sometime in third watch it began to rain, a steady Gjerven downpour that would probably persist for days. While I thanked providence we were off Frimmor's open uplands, Beryx said, “Good cover,” and Sivar grumbled, “Wish I'd kept me cloak.” But it had no bite. Recalling that night in Thangar, I almost managed to find a smile myself.

* * * * *

Chafed, sodden, chilled, we finally stowed the horses and snugged down in the thick Gjerven regrowth to wait for dawn. We were on the edge of the Astyros, the stringently maintained mile of cleared land that provides a glacis for the border forts. I said in Beryx's ear, “If I remember right, Salasterne's about three bowshots to the left. The next's Colne Clethra, about five miles west. Three-hundred man garrisons. Watch-towers every half mile.” I felt him nod. “The Taven began about halfway between those two forts. There was a big heagar tree just by the first causeway.” I could see it still, a glossy green hulk that shaded a hundred yards of ground, bastion-thick trunk supported by secondary roots dropped from the boughs, wounded or resting soldiers in their nooks, trunk aflutter with hundreds of votive rags. “We'd stick a trophy there when we got leave, to be sure of getting it again.”

The gray light was broadening now, creeping horizontally across a shrunken world under a low weeping sky. As Stirsselian itself hove into view I felt a familiar sourness in my mouth.

You could not see much. The curse of Stirsselian is that you never can. There are no landmarks, no lookout heights, nothing to raise you above the swamp miasma for so much as the illusory relief of a view. From where we lay, the Astyros' tumbled stretch of stump holes, dug-out roots, newly slashed or uprooted regrowth, ran head on into an olive-green and jungle-gray wall. Clethra trees, so uniform in height that not a head topped the rest to give you some estimate of their depth, so thick no light picked out the groves, straight-ranked and impenetrable as a close-order phalanx front. It does not show hostility. It has no need. It rests upon its strength.

Beryx blew a mosquito off his nose. Evis parted more leaves. Then he twitched, showering us all. “Sir . . . sir, you did say watch-towers? Then what in heaven's name are those?”

A trumpet had called in Salasterne, lowering dark and idle behind its lofty stockade under the moontree's limp black dangle of rag. At the sound, the desolation before us came to life.

“Ten . . . fifteen . . . twenty.” Imperturbably, Beryx tallied them up. “Must be cursed uncomfortable, roosting out there.”

He was not looking at the watch-towers. He was studying the troop-cordon, posted in pentarchies less than twenty yards apart, right along the Astyros. They had been masked by the rubbish. Now they rose, beating hands, huddled into drenched brown and green field cloaks, cursing the weather, the fire, the orders and each other with the fine munificence of disgruntled soldiery as they struggled to make their breakfast fires. When they moved I could see the tent-like protuberance above each left shoulder. They were archers, and they had slept with their bows.