A Man Rides Through (86 page)

He studied her. "We could help."

She blinked at him. She could see that he was cold, but he didn't seem to feel it as badly as she did. He was still able to be worried about her.

"The practice might be good for us," he said casually. "And you look like it wouldn't hurt you to be reminded that Imagery has a few"—he searched for a description—"less bloody uses."

She grimaced. "I don't think I have the strength."

"Terisa," he said at once, "listen to me. You didn't kill anybody. You were trying to stop the killing."

He touched the sore place in her, the ache of responsibility. Stiffly, she said, "They died protecting me."

"But you didn't
kill
them. Their blood is on Eremis' head, not yours."

"No," she retorted. "Don't you understand? I didn't have to give him the chance to attack me. We could have gone around the intersection. Nobody had to die.
I
made that decision."

Like Lebbick, the men protecting her had died for nothing more than a ploy, a gambit—a move at checkers.

"That's true." Geraden practically smiled at her. "You struck back. You took the risk of striking back—and all risks are dangerous. Next time, you might want to choose your risks more carefully, so nobody has to face them except you. Us.

"But you were right. That's why we're here,
we,
all of us. Including those men who got killed. To strike back. If we aren't going to strike back, we should have stayed in Orison."

Choose your risks more carefully.

"In the meantime," he said as if he knew what her answer would be, "we can make ourselves useful. The Congery has curved mirrors they aren't going to need tonight. I can tackle one of them. And there's probably a flat glass to spare. If there isn't, you can try your hand at a regular translation, where you don't have to shift the Image."

As well as she could, she met his gaze. Sometimes she forgot how handsome he was. He had a boy's eyes, a lover's mouth, a king's forehead; the lines of his face were capable of iron and humor almost simultaneously. He lacked Eremis' magnetism—he was too vulnerable for that kind of attraction—but his vulnerability only made his strength more precious to her, just as his strength made his vulnerability dear. And he was so good at turning his attention to her when she needed it—

With one cold hand, she touched his cheek, ran a fingertip down the length of his nose. "I hope Master Barsonage is in a tolerant mood," she muttered. "I might make some pretty dramatic mistakes."

"Nonsense," scoffed Geraden happily. "After the mistakes I've already made, anything you can do wrong is going to be paltry by comparison."

Chuckling, he led her toward the open ground where the Masters were unpacking their mirrors.

When he explained what he had in mind to the mediator, Master Barsonage's harried look eased noticeably. "This is too good to be true," Barsonage said as he assessed the possibilities. "Something
must go
amiss. If neither of you cracks a glass—and I feel constrained to remind you that nothing of what we have can be replaced—perhaps Prince Kragen's Alends will be overwhelmed by sentiment against Imagery, and will feel compelled to throw a few propitious stones.

"Master Vixix." This was a middle-aged Imager with hair like roofing thatch and a face as bland as a millstone. "We require your glass." To Terisa, the mediator explained, "Master Vixix has shaped a flat mirror which shows a scene lost somewhere in the Fen of Cadwal. We brought it because a fen can be a useful place to drop trash and corpses. As a weapon, however, it has little value. Perhaps it would serve for you?"

Without waiting for an answer, he instructed another Master to unpack one of the Congery's normal mirrors for Geraden.

Soon the ground was cleared, the mirrors were set, and guards stood ready to carry away translated equipment and supplies. Nodding in satisfaction, Master Barsonage approached his own glass and said, "Very well. Let us begin."

Standing more beside the mirror than before it, he gave its focus a last touch, then began to stroke the edge of the frame with one hand while muttering words Terisa couldn't distinguish.

From the Image of Orison's ballroom, two sacks of flour and a side of cured beef flopped to the ground at Master Barsonage's feet.

Another Imager produced a cask of wine, which was greeted with a rough cheer by the nearby guards. The third began to spill a steady stream of bedrolls through his glass.

"You realize, don't you?" Terisa said to Geraden under her breath, "that I don't have any idea how to do this. I don't know what words to say, or how to move my hands, or anything."

His eyes sparkled as he faced the mirror which the Masters had unpacked for him. It showed an arid landscape under a hot sun, so dry that it seemed incapable of sustaining any kind of life, so hard-baked that the ground was split by a crack as deep as a chasm and wide enough to swallow men and horses. Despite his past, the Con-gery—or at least Master Barsonage—trusted him with that glass. Touching the convoluted mimosa wood frame delicately with the tips of his fingers, he smiled and said, "This may sound strange, but that isn't exactly a secret. It's one of the first things Apts learn—as soon as the Congery knows them well enough to be sure they're serious. Imagery doesn't depend on waving your hands the right way, or making the right sounds. It depends on talent. The rest—"

Interrupting himself, he came to look at Master Vixix's glass with her. In the gloom of evening, the Fen of Cadwal looked forbidding: dark and wet; unpredictable.

"Here," he said. "Move your left hand on the frame—like this." He showed her. "Gesture with your right hand—like this." He showed her. Then, without allowing her any opportunity for practice, he said, "While you're doing that, mumble these sounds." In her ear, he murmured a complex string of nonsense syllables.

"Most Apts," he commented, "work on things like this for a year, off and on. You ought to be able to handle it"—he gazed at her innocently—"almost immediately."

She stared back at him, unwilling to believe that he was making fun of her—and unable to think of any other interpretation.

"Try it," he urged, as if half a hundred guards and most of the Congery weren't watching her. "Go on."

His smile seemed to promise that nothing would harm her.

Quickly, so that she wouldn't be paralyzed by self-consciousness, she approached the flat mirror.

Move your left hand on the frame
—
like this.
No, more
like this. Gesture with your right
—that was wrong, try again—
with your right hand
—
like this.
At the same time. And
mumble.

Working hard to remember the syllables Geraden had told her, she forgot for a moment what she was trying to accomplish.

With a roar like a cataract, rank swampwater began to rush over the edge of the frame onto her feet.

Startled, she jumped back.

Instantly, the translation stopped.

The Masters and most of the guards were laughing; but Geraden's grin was too full of approval to hurt her. "I'm sorry." He chuckled. "I didn't mean to embarrass you. This is just one of those situations where if you know what you're trying to do it gets harder."

Terisa looked down at the muck on her boots. Croaking in hoarse astonishment, a frog hopped away across the hard dirt. Despite the chill, her cheeks and ears were hot from the laughter of the spectators. Balanced between indignation and mirth, she rasped, "I hope you can give me a better explanation than that."

Her tone made him serious at once. "The words and gestures don't have anything to do with translation. They're for your benefit— to help you concentrate in a particular way. When you're first learning, they help by forcing you to think about them instead of translation. And when you've learned, they help—sort of by force of habit. After enough repetition, they put you in the right frame of mind almost automatically.

"But if I told you all that first, you would think about
how
you were concentrating, instead of actually concentrating. It would be harder. Now that you know what the right frame of mind is, you'll have an easier time getting yourself back there."

He made sense. She knew him well enough to know that he wasn't trying to make fun of her. She ought to laugh—

But she had seen men die today. And she had every intention of killing Master Eremis. She was in no mood to laugh at anything.

Deliberately, she went back to the mirror and began to clear her mind so that she could shift the Image, transform the Fen of Cadwal into the ballroom of Orison.

Before long, Prince Kragen arrived in person to discuss the question of his supplies with the Tor. By that time Terisa had already succeeded at bringing a stack of groundsheets through from the ballroom—and no one was laughing. The guards and the Masters were all hard at work, preparing to feed and shelter six thousand men for the night.

Prince Kragen observed that he had no alliance with Mordant. And without an alliance he certainly couldn't entrust his army's supplies—in effect, his army's ability to function—to a group of men who were historically his enemies, in addition to being notoriously crazy.

The Tor observed that if the Alend army continued to carry its own supplies, and continued to try to keep up with the forces of Orison, it would reach Esmerel no better able to function than if it had lost all its supplies.

Prince Kragen observed that it would not hurt Alend to let Orison meet Cadwal first and test the High King's mettle.

The Tor observed that two separate armies of six thousand men each would pose a trivial problem for High King Festten's twenty thousand, compared to a united force of twelve thousand.

Prince Kragen acquiesced. He also accepted the Tor's invitation to supper. Behind his tone of doubt and his dark glower, he looked positively happy.

That night, wrapped in their blankets and an oiled groundsheet, Terisa allowed Geraden to apologize again. "I know you were right," she sighed eventually. "I just don't seem to be very resilient. All those men laughing— That's something else Master Eremis and my father have in common. They like to jeer."

"But you showed them they were wrong," Geraden countered. "None of them has ever seen a woman with talent before. Most of them have never taken a woman seriously before. Until this evening, there was a chance they wouldn't back you up, if you ever needed them.

"Now you've got their attention. The whole camp is talking about you. What you did in the intersection was good. The only problem with it is, it was too abstract to have much impact. Nobody could
see
what you accomplished. Here—" He hugged her. "Here you've got hundreds of witnesses. You're a Master. And the Masters are doing something useful, something vital. For a change.

"Terisa"—in the dark, he sounded like Artagel, eager for battle—"we're going to beat that bastard."

She hoped he was right. But she seemed to have lost the ability to laugh. For that reason, she wasn't sure.

The next morning, she and Geraden, with Master Barsonage and the other two Imagers, worked like mill-slaves to return Orison's equipment and virtually everything the Alend soldiers had carried to the ballroom. Then, guarded by a detachment of fifty horsemen, they had to drive the Congery's wagons furiously to catch up with the armies.

In some ways, that drive was harder than the translation. So much translation was a mind-numbing exertion: it sapped her strength until she felt too weak to stand; it ground her spirit down to the nub. But it wasn't dangerous. All she had to do was maintain the Image-shift, and be sure that none of Orison's inhabitants wandered into the ballroom at a bad time, and keep the glass open while guards pitched bedrolls and food sacks and cooking utensils through it.

On the other hand, the drive to rejoin the armies was distinctly dangerous.

The obvious danger was to the wagons themselves, to the mirrors they carried. From Broadwine Ford, the armies left the relatively smooth Marshalt road to turn west-southwest toward Esmerel, and the way to Esmerel wasn't particularly well maintained because it wasn't particularly well used. As soon as the wagons passed the small, clustered village around the inn which served the Ford (from a sensible distance, to avoid the danger of floods), the roadbed became much rougher.