Red Country (24 page)

Flippancy was unlike him, however mild, however laborious. I stared in suspicion. Blandly, he met my eyes.

His own were swirling, fluxing, silver-gray shadows meshed in limpid sunlit gray, a woven, inward drift like sun-ribbons in rainwater, beautiful, bewitching, absorbing me. I was not looking into water, I was on the threshold of a lucent gray world, and ahead of me the depths were opening, opening like a curtain upon a magic realm peopled with shapes of light—

“Sellithar!”

The gray world exploded and expelled me, my cheek afire from a palpable, a savagely palpable slap. Zam was on his knees almost on top of me with hand drawn back to repeat the blow and overt terror on his face as he shouted, “Wake up!”

I was too stunned for wrath. “W-what? What do you—wake up? I am awake!”

“Don't yell,” he said harshly. “I had to hit you.” He was breathing hard. “Do you know nothing about aedryx? Letharthir, it's called. Spell-binding. We do it with our eyes. Sometimes we don't even know.” The terror had not faded. “But if you go under willingly, sometimes—sometimes you don't come back.”

He watched me like a hawk as I nursed my smarting cheek, still dazed, then, as his words sank in, finding anger cut short by fright. His eyes had seemed beautiful, attractive, mysterious. Never dangerous. I could not understand how I could have drowned under that limpid surface, but I could accept. My breath came short, my heart pounded as if I had been jerked back from the brink of a cliff.

Beside me he said, his voice rough and quick, “I never thought to warn you. Just supposed you were one of the immune ones. You've looked at me so often and nothing—Sellithar? Are you all right?” He sounded sharp to the point of being brutal, but his hand was very gentle, moving mine so he could see the reddened cheek.

For a moment, as in that gray world, all noises sank away, down to the thump of my heart. Then, with a sort of mental hiccup, I sat up, tried to smile, and said, “You paid that back with interest.”

“You are all right.”

He sank back on his heels with a sigh of relief. The world regained the equilibrium it had lost in that still, axial moment. He was saying, “I'd best make a start on the Sathellin,” I answered, “I must see to dinner. Tell me if you're too busy to come up.” Getting to my feet, I told myself it had been magic, only magic. It was over, and there was nothing to worry about.

By that same time two days later I was not worried about anything. I was paralytic with fright.

It began before breakfast, when, calmly mixing flourcakes, I had a taste of empathy as Zam had described it, a thought fragment driven by stress: a silent mind explosion that lit with blinding clarity a vast sweep of desert thick with tiny swarming figures and dust and then a shock-wave of horror that hurled the cakes from my hands and fired me toward the finlythes, shrieking, “Zam, what is it? Zam!”

A deluge of images cartwheeled over me, I was actually staggering sideways when my eyes cleared and Zam had grabbed my elbows, white eyes dulling his ashen face.

In fact he threw raw perception at me without so much as the convention of words.

“Oh, Zam, it's come! Oh, Four—”

I bit it off. The last thing he needed was a hysterical female on his hands. Think! I screamed at myself. Not panic, not, I told you so, not, What are you going to do?

“Beryx . . . ?” I just managed not to bleat.

“Neck-deep and swimming already.” He too had regained control. The one sign of stress was his rapid speech. “The murrain is worse, they've had to block the whole western border against fugitives. Kastir will break the cordon. And let the murrain across.”

“It's just a diversion!” My understanding was crisis fast. “It's you he wants and he knows the only way is to swamp you so he's threatened Assharral and invaded Hethria to distract you and maybe kill three birds at once. Zam, the dassyx, Assharral don't matter. It's us—”

“Assharral comes first.” With the same speed he shot it back. “I have to stop them on the Kemreswash. Then do something with the dassyx.” He was pale and stiff now, eyes midwinter bleak. “The devil of it is, the Sathellin want to fight. Every time I let them alone some start going back.”

“But the cavalry! Zam, if they get you it's all over! They'll—”

I dug the nails into my palms to gag the rest. If they captured Zam he knew, all too well, what they would do to him.

I turned on my heel, feeling heart race, nerves jump as if in the thick of a physical attack. “Breakfast. I'll bring it down. Then I'll collect slingstones. A lot of them.”

He had already turned away, but he looked back with a flash of that shimmering laughter in his eyes. “One thing about you, 'Thar. You leave ‘I told you so' for the facts.”

* * * * * *

He was at work before I took away the cups. An hour's furious effort to scatter the Kemreswash force before screaming hordes of illusionary Lyngthirans, five minutes collapse; two hours hectic labor to check or reverse the northern advance, then without pause a furious spell of forcing the Sathellin on east, after which he indulged in a quarter hour's collapse. After that a bout of Wrevurx intended to raise a sandstorm on the Gebros and cut communications, which failed, because the wind was a flat northerly gale, and because he collapsed in the middle of it with what I was quite sure was a heart attack.

Certainly, his heart did stop. He came round to find me pummeling his chest and sobbing, “Zam! No!” and bade me irritably to

The first order I obeyed, the second I refused. So I heard at once when he found the Kemreswash force had regrouped and camped. Paler than ever, he said, “They mean to march at night.” Then, at long last, he turned his attention to the troops headed for us.

First he used Fengthir on both commanders and sent their corps veering off in opposite directions. When the long, deathly trance ended, I said anxiously, “Did it work?”

He answered very grimly, “No.”

“The whole army has been warned,” he answered my mute stare. “They all know the target, and what to expect. The seconds-in-command roused their officers. Fengthir won't work.”

I dared not ask more. After a moment he shrugged and answered what was probably a silent scream.

“I'll have to try something else.”

So for the afternoon's work he deranged troopers, made horses unmanageable, and generally created havoc in the ranks. When I came down at sunset he was propped against a finlythe, limper than a wrung-out rag. After he had eaten, I assumed, he would resume work on the Kemreswash force.

So I was quite stunned when he levered himself to his feet, glanced west to the last glimmer of dusk, and said, “I suppose I'd best try to sleep.”

I gaped at him over the supper dishes. He met my eye with a sardonic look. “Didn't you know? You can't use Ruanbrarx at night.”

Something in my pose, or perhaps the mental yell of horror, made him check. Stumbling in half-controlled panic I began, “But surely Fengthir . . . or just read Kastir's mind to see what they'll do next . . . you don't have to see minds!”

“The whole army knows their orders,” he answered somberly. “Kastir is irrelevant.”

“Then the commanders—the officers!”

Now the look was definitely ironic. “On the march. At night. Before you can contact a mind, you have to locate the flesh.”

While I sat in appalled silence he turned and walked slowly, bent like an old man, up toward the cave.

* * * * * *

At dawn, finding the cavalry had regrouped, he fired a torjer belt in their path. When I brought down breakfast he was recovering, less from the exertion, I think, than the hurt. Knowing he would rather be left alone, I set out on a rather distracted food-hunt, and returned to find him in a positive fever, shaking all over because he was too spent to do anything else.

“The Sathellin,” he said despairingly, before I could ask. “Tricked me. Sent the women and children east and the men went to ground in the dassyx. Hid in the cisterns where I couldn't see them. Now the Estarians are in contact and the cursed fools won't retreat!”

I gasped, more than appalled. I was trying to prop him up against a finlythe, and perhaps that physical contact helped the image through.

A dassyk, caravanserai ablaze, the green farms trampled, roofed in the black smoke of burning helliens, under which tiny figures charged or ran or fought or fell, to writhe or lie terribly still amid the glint of broken weapons and the small, horribly vivid red splotches of blood. The broad sheen of armor masses, the flying blue of Sathel robes which glanced amid the steel or flickered in and out the alleyways, a bloody battle already in full swing.

“The madmen!” he groaned. “If I try to get them out they'll be slaughtered. But they can't hope to hold against that. Oh, Imsar Math, if I were only there. . . .”

“You mustn't. That would be insane. It's probably just what Kastir wants.” I tried to keep panic from my voice. “But you could help from here. The Estarians. You can kill some, can't you?”

“No.” He was slumped against me, spent and overwrought beyond composure, but there was nothing distrait about his voice.

“Not kill,” he said after a moment. Then he heaved himself up. “But help, yes.”

So for the rest of the afternoon Estarian companies were forever marching smartly away from the fighting, only to be intercepted by officers and wheeled back, to be turned away again. . . . But it was an unequal struggle. They were so many that he was literally swamped. When darkness fell he sank back against the finlythe, and said in a thread of mindspeech,

If only Zem were here, I thought wildly. If only I had never led him to his death, never had that crazy idea. . . .

It came with a snap.

My laughter was the febrile release of strain. “Thank you so much!” I cried, and anticipated him. “No, I won't yell. I know what you mean. Rest until you've had dinner, at least.”

If I had little sleep that night it was certainly more than he managed, for he spent most of the time in vain attempts to glimpse the battle and vainer attempts to intervene. Kastir had already taken the point of the night lulls. His troops attacked without torches, and the fires were all put out.

Next morning Zam was positively haggard. He spoke only once, as he drank his tea. “They're getting killed out there. And there isn't even a moon.”

The Kemreswash force had not only made thirty miles in the night but had sent detachments south to join the battle for the dassyx. Zam's morning attempt to check them with a sandstorm was a complete fiasco, thanks to the gibbers of Stirghend, which flank Kemreswash on both sides for two hundred miles, and which reduced his efforts to a few scuds of stinging sand.

Thence he turned to the dassyk battle, which was moving east as the Sathellin were driven back by the superior numbers that threatened them on either flank, and which swamped him in turn. I heard all that at sunset, in abbreviated chunks of mindspeech that could not hide the urgency of the threat.

When he fell silent, I said, “Zam?” My voice sounded small and shrunk. “The cavalry. Are they marching at night?”

Neither exhaustion nor mindspeech could conceal his awareness of what the answer meant.

* * * * * *

That night he burned another torjer belt, and then, a cruelty which must have pained still worse, he fired the helliens round the next series of dassyx. But their flames showed only Sathel corpses and Estarian garrisons. The battlefront had already passed, driving on into the east, and dawn showed it had drawn perilously close to the Sathel refugees ahead.

“There are just too many of them.”

He was slumped against a finlythe, shoulders hunched, head sunk in his arms, robe wringing with sweat that owed nothing to the afternoon heat. For the first time there was a hint of desperation in his voice.

“Karyx,” I said. “He's out there somewhere, isn't he? Zam, speak to him. Give him command of the Sathellin. He's a soldier, he—you could help. He might be able to rally them.”

“Rally them for what? They're not soldiers, they're outnumbered. Their only hope is to disengage, get completely clear of the enemy. And they won't do that.”

I opened my mouth. He forestalled me. “Where is there to go if they do?”

The silence answered us both. Nowhere but the desert, to run with a relentless enemy at their heels till they did the very thing he was trying to prevent at all costs. Precipitated the whole disaster over the borders of Assharral.

I bit my lip to keep the words inside. Chewed my lip, tried not to look at him, not so much as to think, What will you do now? What
can
you do now? Zam, for the Four's sake!

Muscle by muscle, he straightened up.

“Pellathir,” he said. “I'll send a wing of Phaxian cavalry into the southern troops. It won't take long. Then I can get back before dark to the dassyx.”

And by then the Kemreswash force would have marched again, and the dassyk battle might well be over, the fugitives overtaken . . . but if the cavalry were let be they would come on again, faster than ever. Panic shot up in me. It was impossible, no single mind, not even an aedr's, could hope to stem this flood. . . .