Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (28 page)

And that would be fine, he thought, as his breathing suddenly constricted, if she were the only one involved.

He forced himself to turn his eyes away.

“Now.” Ingold halted on the grassy open ground that lay between the edge of the camp proper and the guard line where the watch fires were being kindled. Here they were alone, camp and lines both fading into the featureless gray of the evening. The wind blew the cold rain-smell down around them, surging through the grass and over the bare patches of stony ground beneath their feet. “You told me this morning how you called fire at need last night. Show me what you did.”

Rudy gathered a few sticks together that had been dropped from the making of the watch fires and found a patch of dry ground. With his thumbnail he peeled enough dry bark to make a little tinder and sat cross-legged beside that small pinch of wood, his cloak wrapped about him. He relaxed his body and mind, shutting out the smells of the camp, the smoke and scent of wet grass, and the lowing of the cattle. He saw only the twigs and the bark, and how the stuff would catch. Smokier than last night's leaves, he thought. A little spot, like one made with a magnifying glass in the sun… a different smell from the leaves…

The fire came much more quickly than it had come before.

There was a hint of triumph mixed with anxiety in the glance Rudy gave Ingold. The older wizard watched the new flames impassively for a moment, then without moving put them out. He produced the stump of a candle from somewhere about his person and held it a few feet from Rudy's eyes.

“Light the candle,” he instructed.

Rudy did.

Ingold blew it out thoughtfully and regarded him for a moment in silence through the whitish drift of the smoke. Then he set it aside. From a pouch in his belt he fished a piece of string with a dangling bit of lead on it like a fishing-sinker. He held the string before him and steadied the suspended weight to stillness with his free hand.

“Make it move.”

It was like starting the fire, only different.

“Hmm.” Ingold gathered the plumb weight into his hand again and put it away without speaking.

A little ripple of evening wind stirred the grasses beside them. Rudy fidgeted, his mind shying from the implications of what he had done. “What is it?” he asked nervously. “I mean—how can I do this?”

The wizard straightened his sleeves. “You know that,” he said. “Better than I do.” Their eyes met and held. Between them passed the understanding of something known only to those who had felt what it was. There were not even words for it among those who did not know already. “The question is the answer, Rudy. The question is always the answer. But as to your Power, I'd say you were born with it, as we all are.”

We, Rudy thought. We. He stammered, knowing Ingold must be right, his mind fighting the nets of the impossible. “But—I mean—I never could do this before.”

“In your own world you couldn't,” Ingold said. “Or possibly you could—did you ever try?”

Rudy shook his head mutely, helpless. It had never occurred to him past his childhood. But unbidden images invaded his mind, images of dreams he had had as a very small child, before he started school. Things he was not sure whether he had done or only dreamed of doing. The memory of the need in him struck like an arrow, a need deeper than his love for Alde, a wordless yearning so deeply buried he had never sensed its loss in all his aimless life. The need for something they had taken away from him when he was far too young to fight back. And, like the child he had been, he felt the tears choke him.

“Never?” Ingold whispered, and his eye was like a dragon's that holds and reflects, a mirror that swallows the soul. In it Rudy saw his own memory of the spark leaping from the dried leaves, the dark, terrified gaze of deep blue eyes into his. He saw the scattered pictures from childhood dreams, and felt the utter grief he had felt when he had first learned that they were impossible. Ingold's voice held him like a velvet chain. “You have talent, Power. But even your little power is dangerous. Do you understand that?”

Rudy nodded, hardly able to breathe. “Will I—can I—” Was there some kind of etiquette about it, some way of asking? “Will the Power grow, if I learn how to use it right?”

The old man made a slight movement of assent, sky-blue eyes remote and cool as water.

“Will you teach me?”

The voice was now very soft. “Why do you want to learn, Rudy?”

He felt then for the first time the terrifying extent of the old man's power. The blue gaze pinned his brain like a spear, so that he could neither answer nor deny. He saw his own thoughts, stripped before that watching power, a mushy jumble of half-formed longings and a selfish, disproportionate indulgence of his own passing emotions, pettiness, indolence, sensuality, a thousand sloppy, stupid errors past and present, murky shadows he had turned his back on, probed by glass-edged light. “I don't know,” he whispered.

“That's no answer.”

Rudy tried desperately to think, to express more to himself than to the old man that terrible need. This, he understood suddenly, was what Gnift did to your courage, your spirit, your body, making you understand your own truth before you could manifest it to another. He understood then why Gil trained with the Guards, understood the bond of commitment and understanding that lay between Ingold and the Commander. And he knew he had to answer and answer right, or Ingold would never consent to be his teacher.

But there is no right answer! the other half of his mind cried. It's nothing—it's only that calm. It's only knowing that it's right, and I have to do it. It's only that I wasn't surprised when I could call the fire. But it's different for everyone, everything.

And suddenly Rudy knew, understood, as if something had been turned within him and the truth of his own soul had focused. Tell the truth, he told himself. Even if it's stupid, it is the truth. He whispered, “If I don't, nothing will mean anything. If I don't learn—about that—there won't be any center. It's the center of everything, only I didn't know it.”

The words made sense to him, though they were probably utter Greek to the wizard. He felt as if some other person were speaking through him, drawn out of his immobilized mind by the hypnotic power of that depthless gaze.

“What's the center?” Ingold pressed him, quiet and inescapable as death.

“Knowing—not knowing something, but just knowing. Knowing the center is the center; having a key, one thing that makes sense, is sense. Everything has its own key, and knowing that is my key.”

“Ah.”

Being released from that power was like waking up, but waking up into a different world. Rudy found he was sweating, as if from a physical shock or some great exertion. He wondered how he could ever have thought Ingold harmless, how he could ever have not been half-afraid, awed, loving the old man.

Dryly amused fondness briefly crossed the old man's face, and with slow illumination, Rudy came to realize the vast extent of Ingold's wizardry, seeing its reflection in the potential of his own. “You understand what it is,” the wizard said after a moment. “Do you understand what it means?”

Rudy shook his head. “Only that I'll do whatever I have to. I have to do it, Ingold.”

At that, Ingold smiled to himself, as if remembering another very earnest and extremely young mage. “And that means doing whatever I tell you to,” he said. “Without question, without argument, to the best of your ability. And only you know what that best is. You will have to memorize thousands of things that seem to have no meaning, foolish things, names and riddles and rhymes.”

“I'm not very good at memorizing stuff,” Rudy admitted shamefacedly.

“Then I suggest that you get good, and quickly.” The eyes turned cold again, distant, and in the clipped, decisive tone Rudy could feel once more the flash of that terrible power. “I am not a kindergarten teacher; I have my own work. If you wish to learn, Rudy, you will learn as and how and when I choose to teach you. Is that clear?”

For a split second, Rudy wondered what would happen if he said, What if I can't? But if the question was the answer, the answer would surely be. Then you can't. It was entirely his choice. And though he would be as friendly as before, Ingold would never mention the subject again.

Rudy saw his own future, made suddenly clear, and what the commitment would mean: a change, enormous, all-encompassing, irrevocable, and terrifying, in everything he was, everything he would do or be. The choice was being thrust violently into his shaky, unprepared hands, a decision that he must make, could never back out of, and would never, ever be able to make again.

How come stuff like this always happens to me?

The question was the answer. Because you want it.

He swallowed hard and found his throat aching with strain. “Okay,” he said weakly. “I'll do it. I'll do the best I can, I mean.”

Night had fallen around them. Ingold folded his arms, a dim, cloaked shadow against the distant glitter of the camp lights. Thin, translucent ground mist had risen, and the sounds and smells of the camp were obscure behind them; Rudy had the sense of being isolated in a wet, cold world of nothingness, as if he had been kneeling there in the damp grass for hours, wrestling with some terrible angel.

And he had won. His soul felt light and empty, without triumph or anxiety, as if he could drift upon the wind.

Then Ingold smiled and was nothing but a shabby little man in a stained and rusty brown robe. “That,” he said pleasantly, “is what I shall expect of you at all times. Even when you are bored, and tired, and hungry; when you're afraid of what I tell you to do; when you think it's dangerous, or impossible, or both; when you're angry with me for prying into what you consider your trivial personal life. You will always do the best you can; for only you understand what it is. God help you!” He stood up, shaking the damp grass and stray twigs from his rough robe. “Now get back to camp,” he said, not unkindly. “You still have your shift of watch to stand.”

Cold wind keened down the foothills, whining in the canyons surrounding the refugee camp that lay strung out along the road. It flattened Rudy's little fire to thin yellow streamers that paralleled the ground and sent chill fingers through cloak and tunic and flesh, searching out his bones. The first hard, mealy, little flakes of snow had begun to fall.

Alde had not come.

Rudy knew why and was sorry. What had happened last night had changed things between them. That, too, was irrevocable; if she was not his lover, she could no longer be his friend, either. And, good daughter of the Church that she was, she would be no wizard's woman.

He would miss Minalde. His body hurt for her, but the longing was deeper than that, a loneliness, a need for her company, for the sound of her soft voice. It brought home to him with a painful little stab that he was now an outsider, as he would be an outsider for the rest of his life. In this world, or in his own, he had cut himself off from all hope of communication with those who did not understand. It would be worse when he went home—that much he knew already. But having seen the center, the focus, the key of his own life, he knew there was no way he could not pursue it. Even when he left the peril-fraught world of the Dark and returned to the electric jungles of Southern California, he knew he would be driven to seek it there. And he knew that somehow, some way, seeking, he would find.

The wind stung his face, carrying with the snow the mourning of the wolves. Behind him he sensed the camp slipping into its dark sleep, and the endless road behind him, down the foothills and out onto the plains, marked on both sides by a broken chain of watch fires.

He cast his mind back to his interview with Ingold earlier in the evening, trying to recall that reflected glimpse he'd had of his own mind, or soul, or the center of his own being. The memory was hazy, like the memory of intense pain. He could recall seeing it, but could not call back clearly what it had been—only the grip, the cold, of Ingold's thought on his, and the clear certainty, for the first time in his life, of knowing what he was.

He hadn't known then that it would cost him Minalde. He hadn't known it would cost him everything that he was, for that was what it amounted to. But if the question is the answer, it wouldn't have mattered if I knew or not. He only knew that if he had turned away, he would always have been sure that he'd had it within his grip and let it go. He knew that he couldn't have let it be taken from him a second time.

The fire crackled, the wood sighing as it broke and fell. Rudy took a stout branch and rearranged it. The shower of ascending sparks glittered like fireworks among the spitting snow. He huddled deeper into his cloak, then glanced back in the direction of the camp. By the renewed light of the fire he could see a dark figure walking toward him, wrapped from head to heel in fur. Her black cloud of hair blew about her in the wind, and the firelight, when she drew near him, laid blue and golden shadows across her violet eyes.

“Be still. Let your mind be silent. See nothing but the flames.” The hypnotic smoothness of Ingold's voice filled Rudy's mind as he stared at the brightness of the Guards' campfire by which he sat. He tried to push aside his own chasing thoughts, his fatigue and need for sleep, and his wondering about the White Raiders he thought he'd glimpsed, dogging the line of march. He tried to think of nothing but the fire, to see nothing but the little cluster of sticks, transfigured by the flames and heat. He found that the less he tried to think of something, the stronger it crowded back.

“Relax,” Ingold said softly. “Don't worry about anything for the time being. Only look at the fire and breathe.”

The wizard turned away to speak to a middle-aged woman who'd appeared on the edge of the Guards' encampment with a sickly-looking young boy in tow.

Doggedly, Rudy tried to obey his last instructions. The cold, overcast daylight was fading out of the sky again, the eighth day from Karst. Voices bickered distantly along the line of the road as thin rations were handed out. Far off he heard the castanet-click of wooden practice swords and the harsh bark of Gnift's sarcasm blistering his exhausted students. Somewhere he heard Alde singing and Tir's little crowing voice joining in, making baby sounds of joy. A feeling went through him such as he'd never known before, a desperate tangle of yearning and relief and affection, and it distracted him hopelessly from the matter at hand.