The Naming (25 page)

The forest stopped quite suddenly, and Maerad found, blinking, that they were looking over a land of rolling hills shaded with the purplish bloom of heather. The track wandered over the landscape ahead, and Cadvan told her that if they followed it, in time they would reach one of the Bard Roads that led to Ettinor, following the Milhol River. "For now," he said, "I think we will push on to Milhol. I wish to know how the land lies around here. And then we must decide what to do next."

The landscape they rode through was lonely and bare, swept by strong winds blowing down off the distant mountains, which humped blue on the eastern horizon. No trees grew there, apart from some stunted thorns, and every now and then they passed tumbled outcrops of gray weathered granite
blotched with bright lichens, purple and yellow and green and white. There were also other stones, which seemed to have been placed there by human hands: circles at the top of small hills that looked like massive broken crowns, some overthrown and broken, some still upright but leaning crazily like drunken men.

"These were here before Afinil, and date from the earliest days that humans walked this land," said Cadvan. "None now know what they signified; even in the days of the Dhyllin they were ancient and abandoned. They were set here by the hill people who lived many thousands of years ago. Some think that they mark the tombs of their kings and queens, and some think these are the places where they worshipped their gods. Some of them have curious carvings."

"And what do you think?" asked Maerad.

"I do not know," he said.

When dusk began to fall they were still far from habitation, and they found a dell away from the wind under one of the hills and made camp there. There was no sound except the sigh of the wind through the grass and the melancholy cries of plovers, and that night they did not take out their lyres, but talked quietly together. Maerad drew closer to the fire.

"It feels desolate here," she said.

"Yes," said Cadvan. "They call these the Hollow Lands. No
          

one has lived here in living memory."

"It was all so long ago and far away," she said. "But it's as if the land remembers people, nevertheless."

That night Maerad slept restlessly, and it seemed in her dreams she heard the sound of hoof beats far off in the night, searching for her, and all around were sinister shapes of men cloaked in black. She woke, shivering, and looked straight up into the star-strewn heavens, where the waxing moon rode high in a wrack of cloud. Cadvan lay close by, snoring lightly, and soon she slept again and dreamed no more.

Still they followed the path that had led them through the Weywood, and at midmorning the next day it suddenly dipped into swamplands. Here the going was slow because they had to pick their way through, fearing to lose the path altogether, and often the horses sank into mud past their fetlocks. Clouds of gnats and mosquitoes pestered them, and their discomfort increased as the sun got hotter. They pushed on for several hours, not stopping for lunch, and at last, to Maerad's relief, were past the bogs and back on solid ground. They stopped by a small stream for a late meal, and let the horses graze and drink.

"Now," said Cadvan. "Soon we will be among people again. I doubt that I'll see anyone who knows me, but still, it is worth taking precautions against Bard eyes." He thought for a while, and then said, "How do you fancy being my mute son, and I a ... boot maker, maybe, from near Pellinor, seeking help for his son's affliction in Ettinor?"

"Why not?" said Maerad, amused. "But do you know anything about boot-making?"

"At,
mistress," said Cadvan, winking in a rascally fashion. "You don't know what I know. My da was a cobbler, and his boots were much prized in Lirigon. And elsewhere, come to that."

Their disguise took a little time. Cadvan attended to Maerad first, making her place her hands on his shoulders, as she had when he scried her, and muttering a charm in the Speech. A brief flash of light passed before Maerad's sight, dizzying her for a second, and when she recollected herself, she looked down and involuntarily cried out. Her body had changed: she now looked like a boy, and her clothes were subtly different, roughly woven of undyed wool. Then Cadvan changed himself, which Maerad watched with fascination. Her eyes couldn't catch
 
the
 
moment of transformation, but it
 
seemed
 
that
Cadvan's face blurred; she blinked, and when she looked again he was different. His hair was red, and he had a red beard, and his features were heavier.

"Now the horses," he said, and she blinked again, for his voice also was deeper and rougher. "They are altogether too fine for such as us." He worked the charm again, and suddenly Darsor and Imi were two farm animals, Darsor with a walleye.

He turned to Maerad, passing his hands over his eyes. "This will last until sundown tomorrow," he said, "and will do well for us. I don't want to stay more than a night at Milhol. No Bard or Hull will recognize us now. But I must rest a little; it takes more to fool the eyes of Bards than other people. Look well at me, for you must remember what I look like."

That night they stayed at Milhol, a small market town of two or three thousand people, with houses of several stories that almost met above the narrow cobbled lanes, cutting off the light. People looked at them as they walked through the narrow streets, and Maerad didn't like the glances, which she found distrustful and hostile. The streets stank of middens, and their gutters were full of rubbish, vegetable peelings, eggshells, and rotting refuse. It was not, she thought, comparing it to the well-tended gardens of Innail School, a particularly pleasant place. It reminded her forcibly of Gilman's Cot.

She didn't enjoy their stay at the evil-smelling inn either. It was run by a black-browed man in a greasy apron who admitted them surlily; he showed them to a mean little room with a tiny cobwebbed window and two lumpy pallets. To Cadvan's chagrin, he charged them more than twice what they had paid in Innail Fesse. They went to the taproom for dinner, because Cadvan wanted to sound out the locals on the conditions ahead of them, but they didn't stay long. The local talk was that the only real danger on the road was bandits.

Maerad woke before dawn. A cock was crowing somewhere in the distance, but that wasn't what woke her: she itched terribly all over. Scratching furiously, she sat up, and Cadvan stirred sleepily and then woke instantly. "What's the matter?" he said.

"Bedbugs," she hissed. "Or fleas. Or lice. I'm being bitten by
things."

"Probably bedbugs," said Cadvan. He inspected her dispassionately. "Look, one's bitten your nose."

"I hope they bit you too. Hard," she said, torn between irritation and amusement.

Cadvan sat up. "I don't think they did," he said. "Insects don't like me much. Too tough." He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and rubbed his hair with his fingers, so it stood all on end. "Well, they woke us early enough to get out of this place. So let's go."

Cadvan told her to put on her mail, so she dragged it out of the pack where it had lain since they had left Innail. Her neck prickled as she put it on, feeling its heavy coldness, and she fumbled at the sword that had hung from her hip, unused and almost forgotten, for days. Then they picked up their packs and left the room.

Downstairs the only sign of life was the cook in the kitchen, who was firing up the stove. He was disinclined to serve them breakfast so they left the inn, walking out into the cold air. Maerad felt unutterable relief at leaving that noisome fug and breathed in the fresh air deeply, although it was so cold it was like icy blades stabbing her lungs. She snorted plumes of steam out of her nostrils like a dragon.

They unstabled their horses and found a bakery farther down the street, where Cadvan bought two loaves of bread and some meat pastries. They ate the pastries on horseback as they trotted out of Milhol, their breath curling on the icy air. The gate was just opened, and two grimy guards looked at them suspiciously as they left. Cadvan gave them a cheery wave, to the guards' evident displeasure, and then they trotted briskly down the dirt road by which they had approached the town. In little under half an hour the road ran into another, this one of stone.

"This is the Bard Road to Ettinor. Here we can make up some lost time," Cadvan said, turning in the saddle. Imi and Darsor neighed and pawed the ground, and then leaped forward at a gallop. It seemed they were as glad as their riders to leave Milhol.

The sun rose soon after they met the Bard Road, lighting a dour country softened by heavy mists. They slowed to a trot, and Maerad began to look around her. Behind them the mountains still sat heavily on the horizon, and to their left Maerad could see the purplish hills of the downs in the distance, but all around them the land was flat as a floodplain. The Milhol River ran to their right, and it looked to Maerad as sullen as the landscape, with black reeds poking through its brown surface. There were few trees, and those she saw stood solitary, bent by the prevailing winds. The land was poor and rocky, grown with tussocks of tough grass and thistles and milkweeds. After sunrise they began to pass farmers heading to the markets of Milhol. They passed wagons of produce pulled by tired-looking ponies with rough hair and staring ribs, and the occasional wagon pulled by oxen; two or three times there was a woman walking with a heavy basket strapped to her back, out of which poked the heads of chickens, squawking in protest, or the nodding fronds of turnips or rutabagas. Cadvan nodded to each person they passed, but only once was his greeting acknowledged, by a young woman with a small, grizzling child pulling at her skirts.

"It's hard to scrape a living from this land," said Cadvan. "And it makes the people bitter. It was not always so. A
hundred years ago, this country was green and fertile. The people here have forgotten how to speak to the earth; they now take without giving."

The farther they drew from Milhol, the more seldom they saw people, and by late afternoon they no longer saw anyone at all and passed no more houses. They moved at a brisk trot, both feeling that the sooner they left this sullen country the better, and rode on after dusk until it was almost full night, guided by the light of the stars and the half moon. Only when they could travel no more did they draw to the side of the road and make camp. They huddled in the shelter of a great tree that looked as if it had been blasted by lightning and lay riven in two twisted halves. Cadvan sat still, listening, for some time, and then decided to light a fire. "I hear nothing for miles around," he said. "I think we will be safe enough. But I think we should keep watch tonight."

As he kindled a flame with his flint, Maerad saw that Cadvan had his own face back again. "Cadvan!" she said. He looked up in surprise. "You're back!"

"And so are you," he said, squinting through the darkness. "I may say, it's some improvement. I was a little too convincing in making you an idiot boy." The fire sparked into life and he tended it, swiftly building the flames. "We'll wear our own faces for a couple of days. It's risky, but I haven't the energy to disguise us, unless there is great need."

They continued through the dismal countryside for the next two days, traveling all day as swiftly as they could and keeping watch at night. They saw no one else on the road. Gradually the landscape began to change; the river carved itself into a ravine that grew deeper and deeper, and ridges began to shadow them, rising to sharp shoulders of bare rock that dropped to sheer cliffs. Little waterfalls fell straight down the cliffs, gathering in shallow pools of rock slimed with green, and stunted
pines straggled up the rough slopes. Cadvan looked warily around him, and as they rode, Maerad began to be uncomfortably aware of the sharp clop of the horses' hooves on the road, which echoed loudly off the rocks.

"These are the Broken Hills. Bandit country," said Cadvan. "Use your hearing."

Maerad pushed her awareness out into the hills. She heard the wind whistling through teeth of rock, the scuffle of claws on loose stones, the cries of hunting birds, and the death screeches of little animals, but nothing human. Very high above them she occasionally saw a pair of birds circling on the wind. "Eagles," said Cadvan briefly. "They are not birds of the Dark. They seek their prey." Nevertheless, she couldn't throw off the feeling of menace, which gathered all day as the country became wilder and the road began to push through gorges of rock, the sides leaping sheer from them on either side. But still the land was empty, and she heard neither footfall nor hoofbeat all day. The silence itself seemed threatening.

That night they camped slightly off the road under an overhang of rock. They lit no fire. The horses stamped and circled, cropping the tough, bitter grass, and they sat in silence, looking out into the road and the rocky horizon on its other side cutting off the stars with blades of darkness. They were, Cadvan told her, now less than two days' ride from Ettinor. "If our luck holds, we'll be well past it in three days or so," he said. "But I don't trust these hills. It is altogether too silent here."

"We're not going to Ettinor?" asked Maerad, thinking of Helgar and other Bards at Innail.

"By no means to the School," he answered. "We'll cut around it through the Fesse, and after that we'll leave the road for a while. After Ettinor the road runs along the Aleph River, straight to Norloch. I think we have to stay off roads as far as possible from now on; if the Dark suspects that you are the One, as I fear it might, it will be using every resource it has to find you."

Just before dawn the temperature dropped sharply and it began to drizzle. Maerad and Cadvan started early simply to get the blood moving in their frozen limbs. In the dismal light before dawn the landscape looked even more dreary than it had the day before. Maerad was beginning to feel exhausted after the punishing pace of the past few days, and she felt a deeper tiredness, which was of the spirit rather than the body, and harder to resist. Imi no longer walked with a spring in her step but plodded on, doggedly keeping up with Darsor, who stepped out as proudly as before. Jogging along on Imi's back, Maerad felt miserable; her hands were numb with cold, her cloak flapped damply around her knees, and her face felt raw with windburn. She tried not to think about a bath or a hot roast, although images of both kept rising in her head; they made the present moment even worse. The drizzle continued through the morning, and then settled into a steady rain. They stopped for a hasty lunch, and after that the rain lifted and was replaced with a freezing wind that cut through their clothes, chilling them to the bone.

Cadvan was still alert, continually checking around them, but Maerad was too cold to care and rode on in a stupor of misery. She was taken by surprise when he halted, lifting his hand to signal that she should stop too. "Listen," he said.

Maerad started and guiltily sent out her hearing. Under the thin whine of the wind she could hear hoof beats in the distance. It sounded like a single horse, heading toward them. She turned questioningly to Cadvan.

"I think it is about a mile in front of us," said Cadvan. "A solitary traveler in these lands must be a Bard. And I cannot disguise us now; this close, that spell would be sensed." He looked across at Maerad. "We will have to pretend we are simply
travelers. If it is a Hull, which is unlikely, don't look surprised or shocked; it will most likely be wrapped in a glimmerspell, and you would not know, if you were not a Bard."

"But won't a Hull know we're Bards?" asked Maerad uneasily.

"He probably won't look that closely, in this weather," said Cadvan. "But it would be well to veil yourself."

"Veil myself?" Maerad stared at him. As she watched, the air around Cadvan seemed to dim. It was barely perceptible, and she felt, rather than saw, the difference.

"Think of a shield around you, hiding you," he said. Maerad shut her eyes and concentrated. She opened them again and looked inquiringly at Cadvan.

"Yes, that's it," he said. He inspected them both, then pulled his hood farther down over his face. "I think we look miserable enough to pass for peasants," he said. "But Darsor will not do." He spoke to the horse, who snorted and pawed the ground but then slumped himself. Maerad blinked in surprise: the proud Darsor now looked goosenecked and swaybacked, and he walked with a slight limp. Cadvan patted his neck. "A master actor, this horse," he said.

"This time I could be your lunatic daughter," said Maerad. "If that would help." She messed up her hair, trailing tresses across her face in witch-locked tangles, and adopted a slack-jawed expression.

Cadvan laughed grimly "I'm beginning to think that in some respects your education was quite thorough," he said.

They continued at a slow walk. Maerad was now alert, forgetting the cold entirely, and she monitored the hoof beats until they entered her normal range of hearing. She felt a vague sense of evil, a feeling of desolation and malice that grew as the hoof beats drew closer. Her heart beat faster and faster. Then, more suddenly than she expected, the horseman appeared a
hundred feet or so before them, coming at a slow trot around a ridge of rock.

He was cloaked heavily in black and wore high black boots with sharp spurs. He rode a big-boned bay horse, which continually threw up its head, champing on a cruel bit.

Maerad knew immediately the rider was a Hull. The horse's eyes were circled with white and its sides were flecked with white foam streaked with blood. The Hull's face was entirely shadowed by its hood, but Maerad saw with a shudder that the hands on the reins were shriveled and white and bony, like those of a mummified corpse, and it wore a ring of dull silver that clasped a black stone. She gulped and plodded on with Cadvan, closer and closer to the Hull, although she felt that Imi's steps were full of loathing, and the animal threatened to shy.

After what seemed an age they drew level. Now Maerad's heart was hammering against her ribs, and her tongue was dry in her mouth. She could not have said anything, even if she had wanted to. The rider halted, blocking their way, and her stomach lurched with fright. She looked down at its hands, although the sight of them sickened her, and saw the black stone of the ring was carved into the semblance of a grinning skull. Cadvan stopped, as if it were a courtesy, and spoke. "Good day, sir," he said pleasantly. "Mighty hard weather for a ride."

The Hull stared at him, and now Maerad could see a bony nose and eyes burning like red embers within the shadow of the hood. "It is indeed," it said, and its voice seemed to come from a great depth. "Only the foolhardy venture forth on this route."

"Aye," said Cadvan. "Or the desperate." He indicated Maerad with an inclination of his head. "My daughter, sir, has been mad these last three months, and I go to Ettinor to ask their help."

Maerad obligingly goggled at the Hull. She found that if she
unfocused her eyes the Hull looked almost like a Bard or a fine lord in a long cloak, which was easier to bear than the grim figure she otherwise saw.

"There might be help in Ettinor for such as you," said the Hull sneeringly. "Or there might not."

"I seek no favors, sir, that I can't pay for," said Cadvan. His face was blank, eager to please, and a little foolish. "But I wonder, sir: have you seen bandits farther up the road? I feared at first that you were one of them, begging your pardon, but we've seen none so far, though others warned us of them."

"The bandits have been purged," said the Hull. "They became a nuisance."

"Well, then, that's good news, and no mistake," said Cadvan. There was a short pause. "Well, we've a way to go." He urged Darsor on. "A good day to you, then, sir."

Slowly, as if it did so reluctantly, the Hull moved aside to let them pass. Maerad put her head down and followed Cadvan, keeping her mind as blank as possible. She couldn't stop her hands from shaking. As she drew level, the Hull's head suddenly rose, and it hissed as if it were about to say something, looking straight at her. She could feel it probing her mind, as if sickly tentacles crept over her, and the gorge rose in her throat. Without thinking she threw herself forward over the pommel of her saddle, letting out a high, tearing scream, as she had heard a lunatic woman wail once in Gilman's Cot. She filled her mind with nightmarish images of a giant spider, and then of a manyheaded snake, and the Hull's fingerings withdrew with a snap, as if in distaste.