The Gift (34 page)

Cadvan paused again. “And then I don’t know what happened. I thought perhaps I could destroy the Kulag, but that still left the third Hull, which seemed undiminished in its power, and I was already weary. I thought perhaps that Kulag rushing down on us would be the last thing either of us would see. Then there was a huge flame, and the Kulag crashed down in the path before us. The shock of the flame passed outward, and the third Hull was struck down, and its horse with it. And then you slipped off Imi and fell to the ground. I thought you were dead.”

Maerad stared at him in wonder. “Did you make the flame?” she asked.

“It was not of my making,” he said, looking at her strangely.

“Then maybe someone helped us, knowing us to be in trouble somehow,” she said. “But who could that be?”

“Who indeed?” said Cadvan. “But I think it more likely that the flame burst from you, answering our extremity.” He smiled gently at Maerad. “It had something of your wildness.”

Maerad sat silently for a while, struggling with amazement and doubt. “But I didn’t do anything,” she said at last. “I was just terrified.”

“No doubt,” said Cadvan dryly. “I will take care not to frighten you in the future! In all our minds there are secret places, which we know little of; and in yours most especially, I think.” He studied Maerad’s face gravely, and with a pang of surprise she thought she saw something like fear in his eyes. She looked down at the ground, unspeaking, and at last Cadvan stood up and looked around them. “We should leave here, and swiftly,” he said. “I don’t know how many others might be aware of this battle, and what else might pursue us here.”

Maerad stood up also, and Cadvan walked toward the dead Hulls. Overcoming a shudder of horror, she followed him. They lay twisted under their black cloaks. Cadvan lifted the edge of one of the cloaks with his boot and Maerad let out a gasp of surprise; underneath the cloak was nothing but dried bones. So it was also with the second corpse. “When the Hulls die, the spell that binds their bodies in this world is broken,” said Cadvan. “These should have been dead many hundreds of years ago.” He stood up again and leaned briefly against a tree, as if he were afflicted by nausea, and forced himself by pure will to approach the bodies.

He then came to the corpse of the third Hull, which lay farthest back down the track, and lifted the cloak with a stick. Maerad saw the skull grinning at her, and the bones settled down in a heap, making her jump; for a second she thought irrationally that it was still alive. Cadvan knelt next to it without touching the bones, and she saw he was looking at a silver ring on its finger, in which was set a black stone.

“It bears the sick moon,” he said. She saw that the black stone was carved in a semblance of a sickle moon, but subtly distorted, so it looked diseased. “The Nameless One has his Circles, even as the Bards. A twisted shadow of the Order. This one was from the strongholds of Dén Raven, and such has not been seen in this realm for many a long year. Not since the Silence.” His face was grim again. “It was said there were none left. Many things that the Light thought dead have been, it seems, merely asleep.”

He broke off a huge branch from a tree nearby and swept the bones and cloaks off the track until they were hidden beneath some brambles. The corpse of the horse he looked at sadly but did not attempt to move. “The animals that are forced to bear the Hulls suffer greatly.” he said. “Perhaps its death was a release for it.”

Unspeaking, they returned to their horses. Cadvan stroked Darsor’s proud neck, which was rimed with sweat. “Well done, greatheart,” he said. “You stayed where many valorous men would have fled.” He stroked Imi’s neck also, murmuring words in her ear; and the mare, who was still trembling with fright, calmed and snuffled his neck. “Indik chose well for you,” said Cadvan to Maerad. “This is a brave animal, of a courage beyond her stature. But now we must leave, and as fast as we can manage. By nightfall I want to be far from this place.”

They mounted and pressed forward, galloping swiftly through the woods, and the shadows of branches passed over them like the ripples on a rapid stream.

They did not stop until midafternoon, passing out of the woods into empty grasslands in which sometimes there was the evidence of a farm long abandoned: a row of trees which once made a windbreak, or an orchard grown wild, or even the remains of a house, its roof collapsed and its walls crumbling, overgrown with ivy or weeds so it almost looked like a small hill or natural thicket. The path through the woods faltered and then petered out altogether, and they pushed on westward toward a dark blur on the horizon that looked like a hedge or a wall, picking their way through tussocks of rough grass and occasional dried stands of reeds. Maerad felt very exposed; there were few trees to conceal them. She was still shaky with the aftershock of their battle with the Hulls, and felt a great inner weariness, next to which her physical fatigue seemed almost a relief. Also, at the back of her mind, was a troubling thought. If Cadvan was correct, she had killed a man and a horse. Although she was moved by no pity for the Hull, nor remorse of any kind at killing it, she felt again that strange fear of herself that had nagged her at intervals since Cadvan had first told her about the Speech. It was, in part, because she felt no volition over her powers — if they were so, she added to herself, still dubious. What if something went wrong, and she blasted something she didn’t want to? Was it fear she had seen in Cadvan’s face? Could he possibly be afraid of
her
? Beneath her doubt was something else, something more disturbing; the sense of her own power, however inchoate, gave her a strange thrill, a sense, even, of
joy.
. . . But her mind flinched away from those speculations, and she concentrated on keeping up with Cadvan and not falling off Imi from sheer tiredness; and she kept her hearing alert for any signs of pursuit. But she heard nothing.

They had gone about twenty miles when at last Cadvan called a halt. They lunched hastily in a miserable copse of trees. As soon as she dismounted, Maerad doubled over with agonizing cramps in her stomach. Cadvan took her hands. “What’s wrong?”

“Cramps.” Maerad hissed through her teeth. She clutched herself and curled into as small a ball as possible. For a second Cadvan looked worried, and then he laughed with relief.

“Is that all?” he said. “Come, I know Silvia packed the remedy in your pack.” He took Maerad’s bag off Imi’s saddle and rummaged through it until he found the little bottle of elixir. He gave Maerad a dose. She grimaced at the bitter taste, but the cramps subsided, and presently she sat up again, feeling more clearheaded, and looked around. The blur before them had resolved into a stone wall, about ten or fifteen feet high, and they were now riding northward alongside it. Cadvan said the Westwall ran for leagues, marking the border of Ettinor Fesse from the wilderlands beyond. “There are no gates,” he said, “but the wall has been ill-maintained for many years, and many parts are crumbled. We should find a way through it soon.”

About five miles on they found what Cadvan was seeking; here a huge, woody ivy had forced apart the stones, and the thick wall had collapsed into rubble. They dismounted and led the horses through, and then looked over a landscape even more desolate than the one they had left: barren moors barely covered with straggly turf, falling away from their feet down into a rocky valley. Through the valley ran a river, and Maerad saw the darker vegetation of trees running along its length. Above them were huge swags of gray clouds, and the wind was turning chilly, presaging more rain. The sun was low in the sky, bleeding long streaks of dull orange along the horizon. Maerad thought of the bright inns they had left far behind, and felt utterly miserable.

“The Hutmoors,” said Cadvan briefly. “We’ll head down there, to the Usk, and follow it until we are too weary to go farther. Soon it winds westward.”

Too tired to ask questions, Maerad followed him down the rocky hill. The rain held off and they crossed the river, here shallow and wide, with many stones trailing long green beards of river weed. They followed it even after nightfall, guided by the light of the full moon, until Imi was stumbling with weariness and even Darsor’s head drooped. Then at last Cadvan called a halt, and they made a cheerless camp with no fire under an old willow, huddling against a rocky shelf that offered at least a crude shelter against the freezing wind. That night, despite their danger, they kept no watch.

Maerad was so tired she had trouble going to sleep. She ached all over and her mind hummed like a harp string on the point of breaking. She lay on her back, staring up into the sky. The moon was now vanishing under a shroud of dark clouds, and she could smell more rain on the wind. The fear that was her constant companion rose within her, a blackness flooding through her breast.
Who am I?
she asked herself again, uselessly. The empty night returned no answer.

For many days they traveled over the moors, following the course of the river and keeping as close as possible to the trees. They saw no animals of any kind, and heard nothing but crickets and frogs or the harsh call of an eagle high overhead. The going was slow, as the land was covered with little ridges and gullies, and they frequently came across strange pits, as if at some point the ground had been violently upturned. The ground was strewn with boulders of quartz and granite that threatened to turn the horses’ hooves.

The weather continued cold and gray, with freezing showers of rain or sleet that passed as suddenly as they appeared. But the wind was constant: a punishing stream of cold air that whistled ceaselessly through the ridges and stones. The endless browns and grays began to fill Maerad’s mind with a stupor of boredom. She was troubled by cramps, and was grateful many times for Silvia’s elixir, and for the medhyl, which they drank sparingly each morning, to ward off their weariness. Now more than ever she longed for a bath and washed herself shivering at the end of every day in the cold water of the Usk. At night they camped without fire, huddling against the chill, which fell heavily as soon as the sun set, and they spoke quietly to each other, feeling that loud voices would echo for miles in the noiseless wolds.

The silence grew more oppressive each day, until Maerad started to wonder if she could bear it. She began to feel as if they were ants crawling on an endless plain under an endless sky, to some unimaginable, pointless end.

On their third night in the Hutmoors, Cadvan consented to Maerad’s entreaties for a fire. It was a laborious task in the damp wind; the wood wouldn’t catch, and whenever a feeble flame began to leap from the wood, the wind would blow it out. When the flame had died for the fourth time, Maerad asked Cadvan why he wouldn’t use magic. Crossly, he said, “I will not use what you call magic at my whim, like a cheap magician doing tricks for children. Have you not heard anything I’ve said about the Balance?”

Maerad subsided, abashed, and at last Cadvan got a fire going, and they had a hot meal for the first time since leaving Ettinor. Cadvan made an herb tea that warmed Maerad down to her toes, and some of the chill left her bones.

“It’s horrible country, this,” she said. “I doubt that anyone has ever lived here. They’d die of despair.”

Cadvan looked at her keenly. “You feel the lament of the earth,” he said. “It is heavy with sorrow. But it’s not evil, although none will travel here. I have never crossed these moors before, and I have ridden widely from the north to the south, and over the mountains far past the Forsaken Lands. It’s said the Dead walk here, questing over the moors for their lost brethren, so tied by their sorrows they cannot pass the Gates.”

Then he told her that once the region known as the Hutmoors had been as populous and fertile as Innail. “Then it was known as the Imbral, a great kingdom that stretched across the whole of northeastern Annar,” he said. “It was famous for the courtesy and beauty of its people, who made fair towns of whitewashed stone, with arched courtyards in every house, where fountains trembled in the sun under perfumed trees. They still build houses like that in the Suderain, far in the south, where Saliman lives. They have grilled windows of marvelous intricacy, and towers topped with domes of gold and silver and bronze that catch the sun in the morning and evening; but in the north such arts have long been abandoned. This was a country of rich pastures and abundant fertility; Dhyllic vines are still remembered in proverb by winemakers. And here the Dhyllin lived, watching the stars from their towers, or making songs in their great halls, or forging things of great beauty and power, for they delighted in all the arts of the hand and the eye and the ear; and none have yet surpassed their skills.”

Maerad looked around her at the bleak hills, rising dark above them under the star-strewn sky. In the Hollow Lands there were still signs of habitation from many thousands of years before, but here there were none: no ruins, no weathered stone bearing the sign of a human hand. There were not even ridges betraying the sunken edges of walls like the ones she had stumbled over in the Forsaken Lands near Gilman’s Cot. Cadvan’s story was hard to believe, except that it now seemed to her that the wind did lament; at the edge of hearing, she thought she could catch the sound of far-off sobbing, or a thin wail. She dismissed it as fancy. “What happened?” she asked blankly.

“We now walk over the site of a great battle,” said Cadvan. “This was the last stand of the Alliance: the massed armies of Imbral, and of the realm of Lirion in the north. They met here with the forces of the Nameless One. Fair and desperate must have been their banners, and bright their swords; the songs say that their spears twinkled in the sun like numberless stars, and their ranks stretched farther than the eye could see. Here gathered the flower of the Dhyllin peoples: Recabarra, the mighty Queen of Lirion, in her chariot sheeted with burnished steel that was said to outshine the sun; and Laurelin, last King of Imbral; and many others whose names are now legends of the distant past. And here they were overwhelmed. Recabarra was taken hostage, to die in torment in the dungeons of Dén Raven; and Laurelin’s sword was broken, and the Nameless himself hacked off his head and held it high in the air, and laughed as the blood splashed his face.”