Moving Water (39 page)

That, I suppose, was in truth their wedding feast. There can seldom have been one more bizarre or less worthy of the event, but of the happiness it launched there could be no doubt. Next day they were blazing rather than merely shining, and it was a blaze that did not cool. It warmed everyone around them, it spread through the first salvings of Zyphryr Coryan, it radiated out over Assharral, changing, softening, quickening the renewal, down to the scruffiest urchin re-mustering pigs in a Gjerven swamp. Fuelling Beryx's inexhaustible energy, his joy in doing what he was bred for: exercising all his natural gifts, not merely to maintain but to reconstruct an entire realm.

Assharral needed it all. It takes longer to build than to destroy, and longer yet to rebuild what has been ruined. Some things can never be restored. The Morhyrne's cone now sags like a hunchback's hump. They still boat round the lava on the harbor road, waiting till it is cool enough to begin tunneling. Bridges will always span it in many central streets. And south Morrya will be desolate for the rest of my life. It took the first blast's full impact: every tree felled for a hundred miles, live things incinerated within thirty, asphyxiated within fifty, the earth within seventy miles shrouded under pumice and lava clots and ash.

With time and patience the other provinces will be healed, sometimes improved. But nothing can restore the bloodline of the imperial stud mares, slaughtered with their unborn foals, nor refound the school of the Climbrian dancers, wiped out to the youngest recruit. Or resurrect the human dead, all dear to someone, who lie in so many unknown graves. And it will take longer than the reclamation of Morrya to wash the salt from fields in so many human hearts.

More than once in those first months I wanted to echo Moriana's wail of “But where do we start?” So many things crying, This first. We were lucky, for the land's sake, to begin just before the Wet, and unlucky for the sake of its folk. I cannot tally the miles I rode in the rain as lieutenant-at-large, racing the plague into squalid refugee camps, organizing shelter, food, medicine, then kicking over the wheels in town and village and farm, trying to reconcile the die-hards who abhorred Beryx with the bloodhounds who only wanted Moriana's head. Mayors and governors, fencing posts and seed corn, returned fugitives, renegade soldiers, discharged priests, town plans and ownerless milking cows; Gjerven farmers persuaded to repopulate Morrya and give the Ulven room. And I had only to tidy the edges and prepare for the great new plans: tax changes, a dismantled religion, a new government.

To Beryx it was all an incentive. “I love building,” he told me once. “And I've never had such a chance. In Hethria we started at dirt, and in Everran I left before the fun really began.” From which I assume he defined “fun” as twenty-five hours work a day on Assharral, with extra minutes found for Moriana, and some spare seconds allotted to such mundane necessities as food and sleep.

Moriana worked with him, hour for hour. They could rarely be pried apart, even after their quarrels, which flared over a clause in the new constitution or a civil appointment, some high-handed action in her old manner or a disputed precept in Math, his treatment of some balky underling or an unacceptable part of her aedric apprenticeship. I walked in on the end of more than one storm: the room littered with hurled books and broken inkpots, an official seal poised like a slingstone in Moriana's hand, a pile of shattered plates and an overset table vibrating from Beryx's mindspeech, at a volume that would shake Zyphryr Coryan. <
Use your HEAD, for once!>

Sometimes she would heed. More often she would yell back. The time I recall best she bawled like a maddened tree-cat and threw.

The seal caught him on the cheekbone and ricocheted onto an intact cup. In the silence I heard the fragments come to rest, fall by ticking, diminishing fall.

Then in a foam of dusty white skirt she whirled out onto the balcony, gripping the carven lily balustrade till I thought the stone would crack. Glaring, rigid to her fingertips, over the half-patched prospect of Zyphryr Coryan.

I had the wit to stand stiller than the stone. My slanted view showed me Beryx's shoulders. I listened to his breathing, distinct as the fall of cup shards, alone amid the scattered reports and requisitions of a new order, strewn under the painted cupola of a once-formal reception room.

Then he took his own five strides to the door and slid his arm tightly round her waist.

For a moment they were both utterly still. But then I heard her sigh. Her fingers relaxed. Intuition rather than information told me she had leant back in his arms, laying her head against his chest. And I heard her whisper, barely audible.

 “How can you bear this? Any of this? Anything to do with me?”

“Because you came back.” He had dropped his cheek forward on her hair, his shoulders relaxing too. “Because you could laugh. After everything.”

I would have withdrawn, but I feared the shift of a dust-grain under my boot would break the spell.

“Because you took the brave way. Not to run. Even at the end. Because you chose to live with it. To make amends.”

She made a rueful noise in her throat. Her hands lifted and disappeared and I knew she had clasped them over his. Together, silent in the noonlight, they looked out over Assharral.

Before I could creep backward, ease away, she spoke again.

“They still hate me.”

He did not reply. I did see his arm tighten, in a way she must have felt in every rib.

“They think—they say—I'm not sorry. I'm happy. Instead.”

He turned his head to give me a half-profile. His voice belied what that look said.

“You have
no
need to weep and wail and put on sack-cloth. I never wanted that. I never expected it.” Her body must have transmitted surprise to equal mine. He shook her lightly and I heard the smile wake beneath that determination, implacable as an avalanche. “You were and you are a Morheage. Arrogance was bred in you.”

She made another sound, between a snort and a sob. He shook her again. “Crawling over my feet—or theirs—doesn't matter. What matters is what you do to fix the damage. And there, the Four know, you're filling the cup over. I see that's Morheage as well.”

This time it was more laugh than sob. “So
you
say. But you've been besotted all along.”

“So I have.” The faint amusement faded. “But the rest will need time, Aihi. A lot of time. You know that. They have to let the hate out as well as leave it behind. They'd need that, however sorry you looked.”

Aihi,my stunned mind repeated. The abbreviation, the deepest Assharran love-name, for Aiahya: Beautiful one.

Both of them had grown entirely still. I almost imagined I could hear them breathe.

I did hear her sigh, before the shift of her skirt told me she had moved in his grasp. A wind drew up over the balustrade and the smells of lava-dust and mud and newly planed timber came with it, ruffling the mingled blackness of their hair, sheeny as water in the sun.

Then, with a different inflection, she murmured, “Were you always like this?”

“Oh, no.” He had caught the shift as well as the sense. He sounded just too bland. “When I was a king, I had to be serious.”

“Serious?”
It was nearly outrage. “You?”

“All those people, you see. There all the time. Depending, relying on you. Expecting, if there's a crisis, that you'll meet their expectations. Be twice as pompous as them.”

“And of course you were?” Now laughter breathed through that lovely, teasing voice.

“Oh, dear.” I could hear the grin. “I only slipped up once. Shocked my hearthbard speechless. I made a joke when the dragon came.”

“Beryx—!”

“It just slipped out, I swear. . . .”

“Just slipped out, oh, yes. The way they did with me?”

She tried to turn. He pinned her firmly to his chest.

“Certainly not. Now, I'm an aedr, and we don't care what we say. The crazier the better. So, my erstwhile empress, you can forget any hopes of standing on your dignity.”

The eye-corner visible over his shoulder kindled to dangerous gold flecks. She lifted her gaze and then her hand to the seal's bruise on his cheekbone. Then she said demurely, “So you really earned this, didn't you?”

I felt my own breath stop. And I felt the moment he started laughing out loud, then flung his arm wide so she fell back in his grasp laughing harder still, while I shot out of sight-range and prepared to crunch up to the doorway as they came inside, the light back on them, restored to happiness' equilibrium. Ready to work again.

* * * * *

Even in the Wet I could feel Assharral responding to that joyfulness, like plants when the year turns and the sun's stride lengthens, and every green thing answer with leaf and bud and flower. The rhythm quickened as the Wet receded. When the real sun fell into step with ours there were times when, bone-weary, I sang on the road.

So I came back from a trip to Darrior, head full of half-raised buildings and burgeoning plans, lungs full of the smell from burnt-out fields under short, new green grass. We were still quartered in Ker Morrya, since our old house was under the lava flow. At the door I met the good smell of stew and a riotous welcome from the twins, but from Callissa an oddly constrained smile.

Still full of euphoria, I left the advance to her. We were in bed, our feet in a swathe of moonlight, an eygnor's song on air that tingled with the newborn Dry, when she said in a small, braced, constricted voice, “Alkir?”

And when I answered, “What is it?” she said, “I—want to go away.”

When I could speak, I said, “Where? How? Why?”

“Not from you,” responded the voice on my arm. “And I know we're happy here and it's not that I don't want to stay and I know you do. And I don't want to go back to Frimmor. Not now.”

Despite this disorderly advance I knew she had been nerving herself to this a long time, that it demanded courage, and the knowledge it would be unwelcome made her more afraid.

I drew her closer and said, “I won't eat you, love. Where do you want to go? And why?”

She took a deep breath and charged.

“Hethria,” she said.

This time I was struck quite dumb. She turned over and began speaking quickly, hurrying in her attack.

“I know you'd rather stay because of Beryx and they'll soon be mending the army and they'll need you if there is a war with Phaxia and you were born in Assharral, but Fengthira told me she's going back to Eskan Helken soon, they can manage here now, and she can't bear too many men for too long, and once she goes—” She stopped dead. Then flung herself. “It's the twins.”

Thinking I understood left me further confounded. The small earnest voice ploughed on.

“It took me a long time to—admit what they are. But they are. We have to make the best of it. And even if they're not as important as Beryx thinks, the start of a new cycle and the first aedryx to grow up in Math, and all that—whatever they are—they shouldn't be denied the chance to—be that. Just like anyone else. And Fengthira's the one who must teach them, we all know that.” I didn't, I thought, wondering how far this had gone behind my back. “But she won't stay here. Even for them. So—so—I thought”—her voice had dwindled—“we—should go to her.”

Hethria. Sand and Sathellin. No army. No resurrection and perhaps consummation of the life begun at fourteen, when I walked away from my father into a barracks, into another world. No share in my new lord's achievement as it came to flower. Idle my remaining life away, deny my nature, as Beryx had denied his when he renounced Everran. But he had Assharral now. And all to fulfill nature in my sons.

It was selfish, base, instinctive, and I could not help it. I said, “But do you want to go—yourself?”

“Not really,” she said at last. “But the twins. . . .”

With thought's celerity I considered sending them and staying myself, coercing Fengthira into staying, Beryx into teaching them, refusing to let them learn at all. Now I knew how he had felt, caught between integrities and being pulled apart.

“Love,” I said. “You've rather . . . sprung this on me. Could it wait a little? Give me time to think?”

I had not deceived her. It was a defeated, lifeless voice which responded, “Whatever you want.”

* * * * *

I thought, and thinking took the edge off life. When I reported next day, and Beryx jumped up from the plans and scribes and advisers and objectors, exclaiming, “Fylghjos! How did it go?” When Moriana added in warmest welcome, “Alkir! At last!” And I was instantly embroiled in the current quarrel which thereupon climaxed in a hail of flying inkpots, until Beryx shook her by a handful of hair, commanding, “Quiet, shrew,” and she said, “Shan't. Alkir can settle it.” And he said, “A word from me gets us precisely nowhere,” and she said, “Alkir, the standard. He wants to use Everran's stupid shield and vine and we should keep the moontree, it belongs to Assharral. Tell him he's wrong.”