The Shasht War (46 page)

Normally Thru would meditate with the first cup of tea. He could feel the power within his body, and renewed it spiritually before eating the last meal of the day. Thru had picked up the habit at Highnoth. Simona had been learning the ways of Highnoth, too, and she had come to like this moment when they were alone, in peaceful meditation rather than conversation. She had learned how to take hold of her appetite and control it. Even though she was terribly hungry, she was learning to disregard it in a way she had never managed before. She felt herself growing stronger every day she lived with Thru Gillo.

On this day, though, he was agitated and meditation was impossible. His news was too important.

"I saw smoke coming from chimney at Hilltop."

"Damn!" She felt her face go red immediately. It was unladylike to curse, so her mother had always taught her. But now the fear had returned to her heart like a hammer. "They are still hunting us?"

Thru was not downcast.

"We are strong, well fed. We have food. We will survive even if we leave this place."

Simona thought of the snow-covered mountains outside with dread. Thru had told her about his life in the small cave in the hills just to the east of Beegamuus. Just surviving in such conditions would take everything they had.

"I will be ready," she heard herself say. Thru had exerted some magic of his own. Her will had been strengthened by this time spent with him.

Struck by the same concern, they both turned to look at the loom. His first attempt at "Men at War" was there, while hanging on the wall beyond it was the first piece, another of his series of great "Chooks and Beetles."

The work had gone slowly at first, until he grew familiar with the feel of the linen thread instead of the slightly stiffer fiber thread from waterbush. The pattern, of course, was an old friend and these chooks were even more crazed than usual while the beetles were filled with a sinisterness that was both amusing and a little frightening. The piece was both funny and yet spoke of the seriousness of the chooks' annual war in the fields against beetles and other insect pests.

The new piece, "Men at War," was perhaps a third completed. He had filled in the helmeted heads of the three men, leading the charge, with a forest of spears behind them. They wore simple steel helmets, and the rendering of the steel was still a problem. He had worked with black, white, and grey, and had had some success, but was not yet satisfied. The faces were contorted with hate, the eyes blazed with fury. Thru had seen enough fighting with men to have caught perfectly the terrible beauty of war.

"We will leave the work. Let them look at it before they destroy it."

"Destroy it?" Simona stood up, aghast. "We can't leave the 'Chooks and Beetles.' It is too beautiful." Indeed, Simona had never seen such skill with material. Thru's work was a masterpiece, as detailed as if he'd painted it with oils and tiny brushes.

He shrugged. With a weary smile he said, "Thank you, Simona for your pure heart and the love you have for the work. I am sad to leave it, but when we leave here, we will carry only food and some tools. Believe me, after we have gone ten miles we will not want to be carrying an extra ounce, let alone the full weight of the mat."

"At least, let us hide it."

"But then it might serve no purpose if no one ever found it. If we leave it where it is, then whoever pursues us will find it. Perhaps they will take it back to those who command them. Then it will force them to contemplate it, even if only for a few moments."

She stared at him for a moment and then she understood.

"Yes, I see."

Let the men who drove this hateful persecution, let them see this beauty. Let it fill their heads with its strange images, the leering chickens, the huge, ominous insects. Let them react as they would. Even if they burned it, they would still have the image of it in their minds. They would know that Thru was no less than they, that indeed he was more alive than they were, more connected to the Spirit that inhabited all the world than they with their ridiculous, cruel God of blood sacrifices.

They ate their meal with the usual hungry gusto. Living like this, cold most of the time, fueled a hearty appetite. As always Simona finished the last scrap, thinking she could eat the whole thing over again twice and not be full.

They cleaned up, scouring the plates with sand then wiping them with hot damp cloths. Thru lit two lamps and took up the weaving, and Simona came and sat beside him, and they talked of what they would have to do.

Even though he knew that his work was doomed, Thru put all of his passion into laying more lines of his portrait of human warriors.

To sit like that, as they had most nights since arriving up here on the mountaintop, was enormously comforting. She realized that it might not be so comfortable again for a long time. She marveled internally at how she'd adapted to this hard life.

She felt as though she'd become the wife of a good-hearted craftsman. Except, of course, that they did not make love like man and wife; however, Simona secretly had begun to wonder what it would be like. She had seen Thru naked, knew that he was just like men in those regards. Just looking at his body excited her, with the hard muscles so tightly defined on chest and shoulders. At times of frustration Simona would find herself aching to know what it was like to make love, to be gripped in the heat of passion. At times she thought that she would die without ever knowing it. Sometimes these feelings made her snap angrily at Thru or behave coldly, though she knew he deserved far better, and always ended up feeling guilty and remorseful.

And she had often reflected that Thru was better to her than most men would ever have been. He was thoughtful, unfailingly kind and patient. Without him she knew she could not have survived on Beegamuus. Someday, she hoped she could repay him, somehow. But she did not like to think about the future. Too many threatening clouds hovered on that horizon.

She put her hand up to the "Chooks and Beetles" hanging on the wall.

"It makes me sad to think that someone might destroy this beautiful thing."

Thru did not seem fazed by the idea.

"If it makes them think, even for a moment, about what they are doing, then it will have repaid me for the labor of making it."

"What will we do about the donkey?"

"Well, we can't take it through the deep snow. We can wear snowshoes and make good time. The donkey will have to go back with the men. Don't forget, the Red Tops don't have snowshoes. They are probably digging a path through the snow to get here."

Simona nodded. She didn't want the men to get even the donkey. But it would solve the problem of the donkey's feed, which had been worrying her. There wasn't enough for the whole winter, not at the rate Thru was feeding the animal.

"They must hate us very much to go to such trouble."

"They need their hate. It gives them their strength. Without it they would have nothing."

They slept soundly, huddled together under the blankets, but in the middle of the night Thru awoke, hearing the wolves crying again. They were back at the den on Small Hummock Mountain, and they were calling back and forth with other wolves, much farther south and perhaps to the west as well, though Thru could not be absolutely sure of that because of the distance.

He rose, put on his outer leggings, boots, and tunic and went out to watch and listen more carefully. The moon was high in the sky and three quarters full, and by its light he quickly retraced his steps to the crag. Too dark to attempt climbing the quick way, he simply trudged up the long route. At the top he stilled his own breathing and listened intently.

For a while there was nothing but silence, then he caught it again, a faraway howling, wolves farther north than Small Hummock, deeper into the hills. He'd seen that pack once, there were seven wolves, but he did not know where they denned, except somewhere much farther south.

While he strained to hear the distant cries, he studied the northern approaches to Mount Beegamuus. Under the moonlight the dark slopes of the high ridge were dappled with brilliant streaks of snow, while the valleys were rivers of darkness under the trees.

How long would they have? He had packed food, warm clothing, and the most essential tools. Even a bundle of dry pine twigs. In the morning they would set off, and head east, back into the hills that he'd explored before. The cave would serve the two of them. Not a comfortable life after living in Beegamuus lodge, but they did not have a choice. At least they had food and snowshoes.

The snow in the stream valleys was very deep now. The Red Tops would have a difficult march getting up to Beegamuus. While they struggled along, he and Simona would go the other way, southward, then curve around to the west on the Yellow Canyon River until it reached the wider river valley. Then they would strike out down the river. By his calculations that would take them to the edge of the country where he had lived when he first entered the hills. He knew those hills well enough.

Then a motion on the ridge caught his eyes, and his heart sank. Coming over the high mass of the ridge was a light, a torch. Another joined it, and another, and more. Beneath the torches he could just make out a dense struggling mass of men, wielding shovels, digging their way through the drifts. By the Spirit, there was an army of them! When the count reached twelve torches, he turned and hurried back to the lodge. The Red Tops had decided not to wait until daylight. The enemy really wanted to make sure of them.

Simona came awake in a moment and they hurriedly packed the rest of the food they planned to take plus all the blankets and an ox hide that Thru had rolled up and tied in a tight roll. They boiled hot tea, ate meal biscuits, and washed them down with the tea, then set off.

When it was all on her back, Simona realized just how heavy it was going to be. Flour, beans, the meat barrel, it all added up. She took a breath and renewed her determination. She would survive.

Thru had the escape route worked out in his head. They went out down the east chute, a steep little vale that opened onto a rock-filled canyon, deeply drifted with snow.

The drifts were crusted and firm, they had no difficulty in staying on the surface in their snowshoes and made relatively good time considering their burdensome packs.

Thru wondered how the Red Tops would pursue them here. If they didn't have snowshoes, it would take them a long time to get down this streambed. The moon fell below the horizon, and movement became more difficult for the final hour before dawn. The stars glittered brightly in the vault above in the bitter cold. Red Kemm was below the horizon.

Dawn found them on the lower slopes of Small Hummock Mountain at the opening of the Yellow Canyon, so named because of the ocher sandstone that lined its northern side.

They were well beyond Simona's family zob now, on land that belonged to another family, the Zempatti clan. Their big house was at the far end of the Yellow Canyon, where it opened out into the valley of the River Esk. Simona had been to Zempatti zob several times when she was a girl. The Zempattis were good friends of her parents. However, the big house would not be open at this time of the year. Elgh Zempatti was a lay deacon of the pyramid. He had to be in the city for the festival season.

Thru asked Simona questions about the land ahead, especially the crossings of the River Esk.

"There are two bridges that I know about. One carries the Emperor's road, and it has a guard post all year-round, because they collect taxes on that bridge, and the other is a bridge on the road to Yamich, a small village."

Thru was impressed. "You must have been observant when you were young."

"You don't know what it's like to be shut up in the purdah wagon. I always wanted to know everything about the places we visited. When we went to Zempatti, there was more purdah than in our own home. So I was not allowed outside the house and the women's garden. It has a high wall, and any woman of noble birth found outside it has to be impaled and her remains cremated and scattered in the wind. It says so right on the wall, carved there by the men who built it."

Thru's eyebrows rose involuntarily, as they did so often when Simona told him about the strange way of life called purdah. To have one half of the population permanently locked indoors, restricted and kept almost useless, struck him as fundamentally insane. It was so strange that he could not comprehend why men would live this way.

They halted to eat some hard biscuit with cheese and dried herbs. They washed it down with water from the stream; Simona broke the ice with a rock to get to it. The water was so cold that it stung her hands at first, but she warmed the tin cup against herself until the water could be drunk.

While the cold was still causing an ache in her throat, she marveled at herself for a moment. Here she was talking of purdah and she was outside all restrictions, wearing men's clothing and accompanying a single male. Not exactly the way of life her mother had brought her up to enjoy!

She laughed. Thru's eyebrow rose in question, but she couldn't tell him what she was thinking.

"It's nothing." She put her mittens back on. "You said we would turn west here, and go down the Yellow Canyon."

Looking due west they could see the canyon wind through the foothills, on its way to join the river in the broader valley beyond. Much farther away, silhouetted against the strengthening light of dawn, were the hills on the far side of the Esk.

"That is where we go, to those hills."

Simona nodded. "I have never been that far, I don't even know what they're called. I do know that Shesh lies beyond them."

"Yes, I have seen it from those hills. We have a long walk ahead of us."

Now they went on up narrow trails cut in the same yellow sandstone that they saw glowing ahead of them in the early morning light. The canyon was steep-walled and stark. The river splashing its way down a bed strewn with boulders and slabs of the same rock buried under snow. Dense thickets of alder grew here and there in the valley, making it almost impassable in places.