Red Country (23 page)

“Only because you were never trained. Imsar Math, to pick up so much at a first attempt. . . . With empathy, the most you catch is flashes, words or phrases, usually just when they emphasize. Upset or something. We—I—the first unbroken, even sensible transmission I ever heard was Beryx's. And we were born aedric, we did it from birth.”

He shook his head. “That,” he said with conviction, “is remarkable.”

“It is?” I was dazed, absurdly proud. “You mean I'm an aedr too?”

“No, you just have some aptitude.” With his usual tactless regard for truth he squashed me instantly. “But you might be able to learn.”

“Teach me then.”

“No.”

“Why not?” I fired up instantly. “You said it has to go between opposites, and we are, you said I have the aptitude, so why not?”

“Because Ruanbrarx isn't just aptitude. For the Commands, even the Sights, you have to go through Phare. And I won't use that on you.”

“Oh, won't you? I'm not good enough, I suppose? Just what is this sacred Sight that I'm not fit to—”

“You don't understand, you have it wrong way round. Phare is called
the
Sight because it's the first step in Ruanbrarx. Sight into a mind. Your own mind.”

“I don't see what's so wonderful about that.”

“No,” he said grimly. “Because you never saw all of your mind. No one can do it alone, because there are things in there we won't let ourselves look at. Someone has to take your will and make you look, whoever does it sees as well. And you know. And it hurts. Except for teaching, Phare is outlawed. It's one of the Black Arts. I went through it as a child, and that was bad enough. Beryx says it nearly destroyed him when he began. Do you really want to know the absolute truth about yourself? And have me know it as well?”

After staring foolishly, I said, “Oh.”

“Yes, oh.” The grimness eased. “But you can try Scarthe on me as much as you like. I don't mind. It'll be good practice for you.”

Having digested the patronage, I tried next afternoon. Unhappily, the season's first storm had just broken on the Helkent above the heads of the Kemreswash, and Zam, turning it back over the Holym watershed, blasted me into complete unconsciousness.

This is a reconstruction, since I remember nothing till I came round with him splashing water in my face and saying in the closest I had seen him to open fury, “
Not
when I'm using Wrevurx, you little fool!”

Had my head not been coming apart I would have taken instant and fierce exception to the address and pointed out that I had no way of knowing, he had not warned me, he had granted permission, and I was not little, my head came above his chin. As it was, I could only bear his ministrations with an occasional groan, and having recovered, quarrel with him for turning a storm into Holym when he had refused to move them around Hethria. Which led to an exchange of personalities over the supper dishes, and two storms allowed to sweep the length of the Gebros the next day.

The next one formed just to our north. After watching it for a while, Zam said, “I think I'll turn that. It won't miss us by much. And the spring's very low.” He considered my belongings. “You'd best move all that into the cave. Firewood too.”

Choking protests at high-handed orders and lordly idleness, I asked, “Can I come and watch?” He retorted, over an armful of firewood, “There'll be nothing to see.”

In the unconscionably long time needed for Nothing I avenged myself by tidying a good deal of the cave, before the never-stale spectacle outside drew me to the door. When Zam stumbled in, wet through already, from the glassy gloom rent by flashes and crashes, gusts of rain-wind, and the throat-catching, heart-catching smell of rain on hot dry earth, it caused a storm to rival the elements'. We had a splendid time trumpeting at each other through the thunder until the door cascade invaded us and forced a temporary truce to rescue things from the floor.

Ankle-deep in mud, I remembered something I had tidied, and called, “Zam, what's this?”

He splashed over. “The crest, or the cloth, or what's inside?”

“What's inside, first.”

He peeled back the frail, shimmery gray cocoon. Lustrous red wood and more lustrous red hazian gems flashed against the lamp. As I stared, breath lost, he said, “‘Seven honeys.' Aedric music. An aivrifel.”

Gently, he touched the long twin necks, the globular sounding drum, the seven strings that breathed a singing whisper above the storm.

“It belonged to Maerdrigg's grandfather, Darrhan. The brocade is from his house. Ker Eygjafell. It came to Havos with the first Fengthira. Her mother was concubine to Maersal, Maerdrigg's eldest son. The crest—” As he turned a fold to the lamp I saw that what I had taken for rows of stiff, stylized flames were actually tusk-like teeth. “—belonged to Hazghend. Which was founded by Vorn. The Tooth.”

He glanced at my face. “Mm. Not legends, no, any more than Beryx. Ker Eygjafell was in your own Tirien Resh. Hazghend may be a country now, but first it was an aedric line. Vorn's line. Maerdrigg's murderer. And his youngest son.”

“Maerdrigg was real? But . . . all the stories—apparitions, and hauntings, and walking on the wind—”

“Harpers' fancies. But somewhere, there is a grain of truth.” He shivered suddenly. The storm had chilled the air, and he was still drenched with both sweat and rain. “Even Lossian was originally flesh and blood. Not the ghostly Soul-hunter, but Th'Iahn's grandson. A Heagian, just as Beryx is.”

“A Heagian?”

“Flame-line. An aedric House.” His hand returned to the aivrifel's glossy wood. “Harran used to play this, when he was here. Can you?”

“
Harran
used to. . . .” I recovered my wits. “Me? I'm a princess, not a harper. Can you?”

He shook his head, a brief shimmer of laughter in his eyes. “Music doesn't come out of a stone, and my line is Stiriand.”

“What on earth do you mean? How can your line be the North, and what does a stone have to do with it?”

“Stiriand was another line, and its last leader was Fylghjos. Granite-eyes. My father was the living image of him.”

“And are you?”

“I have my mother's eyebrows.” Fine, slightly winged, tawny brown. “And her hair.”

Also brown, when dry. Recalled to priorities, I said, “Here, rub it with this turban. Otherwise you'll catch a chill.”

* * * * * *

The storm departed, leaving that gorged, luxuriant moistness so rare in desert air, painting Eskan Helken's sunset more spectacularly than ever, giving the upper spring a voice at last, a rapid, breathy tinkle like the call of a bird, and depriving us both of a dry bed.

“Confound it,” said Zam as he tried to beat cave-floor mud off one boot while the other sank deeper still. “We'll smoke ourselves out of here with a fire, and we'll die of lung fever in the mud. And we don't have lydel tails to hang ourselves up in a tree.”

“Make a fire outside, sit by it while it dries some ground, shift it to dry more, sleep where it was,” I said. “Don't aedryx ever condescend to commonsense?”

That night the stars were dimmed by a full moon that silvered Eskan Helken into a magic garden gemmed by the last of the rain, transformed Hethria to an enchanted ocean, and roused the saeveryrs over the well to concert pitch. “Silly little birds,” I said, resentful of their clacking, clattering intrusion in the quiet I had come to love.

Zam replied in mindspeech.

Because those fit in,
I thought back, unsurprised that he should question the as yet unthought.
The saeveryrs don't.

he returned.

If he made one, I retorted, you can sing it then.

He whistled it instead, on the very threshold of breath, and the churring of the birds died away as if they listened too. And that music did fit, becoming one with the spring and the rocks and with Hethria, listening under the moon.

* * * * * *

For the next few days storms came thick and fast, often three or four in sight together, blundering along like noisy majestic black bulls, and mostly to our west, which I did my best to ignore. Then I took a pot of tea to the finlythes and found Zam on what could only be called the rampage, striding up and down and glaring westward too.

“The fools,” he spun round on me. “Three days' rain to brighten the ilienlythe and they think they can start a farm!”

“Who?” I enquired. “Where?”

“The Estarians”—he used the deliberate, spaced enunciation of rage—“have declared Hethria open for settlement. A couple of thousand imbeciles with a hoe and half a dozen brats and a bag of seed and a plough-ox—the rich ones—have promptly run through the holes in the Gebros and pegged the Hethmel into five-acre plots, and are now wondering where they'll find wood to build the house!”

“But—they can't!”

“You know that. I know that. They don't.”

I put the tea down. “Of course you'll have to send them back. Drink this first.”

“For once you're right.” Gloomily, he settled against a finlythe trunk. “Imsar Math, this early in the season, the storms could cut out and give us another month of dry. They'll finish the water in half that time. Then they'll die out there like cattle that follow the ilienlythe too far. I have to chase them back. It's a Must.”

“What will you do?”

“Sandstorm. If I can.”

It was too nearly Can't. The winds had swung north, the sand was wet in many places, the storms got in the road and had to be bullocked about like heavy, clumsy wagons in the midst. He was at it all day, with a faint for interval, and I took dinner down to the finlythes to find him prostrate, panting like an overheated dog, soaked from head to toe in sweat and too spent to talk.

When he could sit up, I pulled the robe off him. Then I fed him, and only then asked, “Did it work?”

“Don't know. Can show you how it looked.”

“It's too dark.”

“Not Pharaone. Phathire. Past-sight. And a direct transfer.” A note of pride entered his voice. “Zem and I invented this. Give me your hand.”

I checked in earnest, but he had already captured it. A tingle shot up my arm, and I was busy scolding myself for acting like a half-baked girl, trying to conceal both fault and rebuke and generally covered with confusion, when he said with a hint of impatience, “Never mind all that. Shut your eyes.”

I shut them. Then I hastily opened them. Then I shut them more hastily yet, for the transposition of mental and physical vision made my mind plunge dizzily awry.

The mental image firmed, brightened, widened to half a horizon. I was somewhere on the crest of the Gebros, about noon, looking east, and clear to the zenith, the sky across that eastern prospect glowered a livid, contused red, unnatural, horrible, a gigantic maw intent on swallowing the world.

Out over the diminished earth toward it stretched a crazy quilt of embryo farms with tents and hoe-scratches and family possessions dumped in the corner of pegged allotments, and all over this meager plot ants scuttled about, gesticulating or herding together in panic, bundling up their goods, moving off toward the west. A wind was already up. Along the ground beneath me the sand of previous inundations skittered and skipped, furling, lifting, driven in skeins and helical ribbons upon the moving air.

“Fengthira used to call them terrephal,” Zam said in the dark beside me. “Sand dancers. Should it do?”

I shivered and said, “It should.”

* * * * * *

It did far, far more than we had bargained for. When the wind dropped five days later it had blown the committee clean out of Gebria, the settlers were cowering behind the Gebros or lost and buried with their farms, and the news had been and gone in Estar. A week later Kastir was redeemed from his chains to be appointed Interim Committee Chairman, the generals were rumbling, and every news-talker, pressure-group, hot-head and Hethrian investor was demanding blood. Zam's blood.

“‘Arrogant witch-doctor', ‘foul enchanter', ‘devil-raiser', ‘magic murderer', ‘presumptuous sorcerer', ‘blot on lovely Hethria', ‘stone in the path of progress', ‘mortal insult to Estar', ‘eliminate, expunge and exterminate', ‘forever and a day'. They really,” observed the sorcerer, disposed full length under the finlythes with a most inapposite shimmer of laughter in his eyes, “have a remarkable vocabulary when they're roused.”

“It's no joke,” I warned. “What are you going to do?”

“Wait till they show their hand. With your Kastir in charge the plan is so secret even he doesn't know it. He had himself hypnotized again.”

“Zam. . . .” I stared at him. “It's serious! Can't you guess? All those troops massed in Gebria, all this fuss about you. Kastir in command, and he uses pre-emptive strikes. He'll come for Eskan Helken, see if he doesn't.” I looked rather wildly about me. “A smart assault party could get up here with scaling ladders—the cleft's wide open—we don't have a catapult, a bow, a spear, a sword to our names! Zam, if an army gets up here, we're dead!”

“Be calm. With water in the Hethmel, I can still make them run in circles for a month. Then they'll have to retire for new boots. And if they did get here . . . I can block that cleft in twenty heart-beats with Axynbrarve. If they try to climb I'll use Pellathir again. Illusion. The rocks will melt under their hands. They can sit down there and gnash their teeth till their water finishes. It won't trouble the ‘sorcerer.' Or you.”

“But Zam! You mean you won't do anything?”

“Mm. I shall pull all the Sathellin east into the Gevveth till they're just short of Assharral, and break every cistern and wipe off every road as they go. And if this army does march, I can raise a sandstorm that will grind their noses flat on their faces and teach them to see out the back of their heads.”