Daughter of Lir (72 page)

He was the one who made chariots. That was what he had
become. Everything else had dropped away. King’s heir, warrior—he would not be
either of those again. Etena had made sure of that.

“I’ll stay in this country till autumn,” Eresh said. “By
then it should be safe enough to go back to my people—or I’ll beg your brother
to make it so. You’ll be riding by then, I hear. Would you be pleased to ride
with me?”

“To your country?”

Eresh nodded. “To the land of the two rivers, to the blessed
cities. We have no chariots there. A man who can make them would be honored as
a king, or as a living god.”

“Do you think I want to be a god?”

“Do you?”

Minas’ lips tightened. “No. No, I don’t.”

“Then you want to stay here?”

“No,” Minas said again.

“No need to choose now,” said Eresh. “But think on it.
There’s a world beyond this world of steppe and cities, and peoples varied and
wonderful, and sights—such sights!”

“Mountains,” said Minas, “made by men’s hands.”

Eresh nodded, delighted. “Just so. Wouldn’t you like to see
the truth of all the tales I’ve told you?”

“
I
would,” Ariana
declared.

Minas found that he was smiling. He never could keep a grim
mood where she was—or Eresh either, for the matter of that. But he only said,
“Come. They’ll be looking for us at the kingmaking.”

“Do you want to go?”

Emry was king now, and lord in Lir. Dias had gone to
Larchwood and taken it, and slain Emry’s brother Conory in the battle. The
Mother had consented then to be wife to a foreign king, a surrender that was,
Minas thought, anything but absolute.

And he had told Rhian at last what had been in his heart
since Emry’s kingmaking. They lay together in the early morning, warm in one
another’s arms. The sounds of Lir came softly into this room in the king’s
house, song of birds, people waking, a dog’s bark.

Rhian had not been angry or even shocked when he told her
what Eresh had said. She only asked the question that brought it all to a
single point.

“Do I want to go?” Minas ran his hand down the smooth line
of her back. “Yes. Yes, I want to.”

“Then go.”

He drew back. Her face betrayed nothing, even when he laid
his palm against her cheek. “And leave you here?”

“Would you do that?”

His heart clenched. But he said, “I would come back.”

“Would you?”

“Yes. Even,” he said, “from the dead.”

She shivered. “Don’t say that! If I went with you, would you
try to stop me?”

The leap of joy was so sudden, so strong, that for a long
moment he could not speak. He had to choke out the words. “You would do that?
You would come?”

“I should like to see mountains that men have made.”

His blinked at her. Then he glared. “Eresh told you! You
knew. You let me—”

She kissed him into silence. “Of course he told me. I was
almost out of patience, waiting for you to scrape together your courage. Will
you tell the kings at all? Or will they wake one morning and find us gone?”

“Emry I can tell. Dias . . .” Minas traced
slow spirals on her breast while he thought about it. Not that he had failed to
think before, but her presence cleared his mind somehow. “Dias might object. A
slave forced to labor for his masters, that’s one thing. A man of his free
will, making weapons for people not of the People—that’s called treason.”

“This country is very far away,” Rhian said, “and there are
many tribes and cities between. Nor do these cities look toward us for enemies.
They look south and west. We’re on the edge of their world—some would say we’re
beyond it.”

“What, I’m going beyond the world’s end again?”

She laughed softly, caught his hand and held it against her
breast. That was fuller, he thought, than it had been—when? A month ago? The
year before?

His rod was rising between them. She took it inside her.
“We,” she said. “We are going.”

“The mare? The grey herd?”

“If they will. And if not,” she said, “not.”

‘They’ll let you go?”

“I won’t let them stop me.”

A gust of laughter escaped him. “We’ll have to run away in
the night. You from the horses. I from my brother.”

“Far and far away,” she said. She gasped as he surged up and
round, braced on hands and knee. “What—”

But her body was thinking for her. She locked ankles about
his middle and drove him deep.

It was quick, but strong. He dropped, catching his breath at
the grinding of shards in his knee. But the rest was only ache. He was healing.
By the gods, he was healing at last.

o0o

Minas sat in his cart in the north pasture, glowering at
the herds of horses. One, with bridle and saddle-fleece, stood hipshot beside
him. It seemed hardly a worthy mount for a lord and warrior: an elderly white
mare with sagging belly and slack lip, sleeping in the sun.

But he was not glowering at the chief and queen of the grey
herd, who had let it be known that she would consent to carry the broken man.
He was glowering mostly at himself, for the flutter in his belly and the
clenching of something that, he had begun to suspect, must be fear.

Was his spirit broken, too, that he should be afraid to
mount and ride an ancient mare?

There was no crowd here, at least, to watch and jeer. It was
only his kin: Rhian and Emry, Metos and Aera. Metos was paying no attention to
him at all. He was inspecting one of the cart’s wheels, muttering to himself.

Minas swallowed. His throat burned with bile. His hands were
cold. “Now,” he said to Emry: crisply, he hoped, and not in a dying fall.

Emry did not laugh at him. The strong arms lifted him. He
reached almost blindly for the mare’s mane, catching hold, pulling himself up.
His muscles were as weak as an infant’s. Emry had to raise him like one, and
settle him on the broad back. The mare sighed vastly but made no other move.

Minas shifted very carefully. His knee was throbbing; but
then it always did.

He was tall again. He was a rider, however feeble. He
straightened his back and breathed deep. His head, his shoulders came up. He
turned his face to the sun.

Its light poured into him. He had not drunk sunlight
since—gods, since he was a prince on the steppe. He gave it a scrap of the
sunrise song, though it was nearly noon. The sun did not seem to care.

He was grinning so broadly his cheeks hurt. The mare was
signally unimpressed, but she consented to amble down the field.

It was small, a child’s step, but it was a beginning. He
barely even minded that Emry had to help him off as well as on, and carry him
to the cart, and lay him in it as if he were an infant. He had been less than
that before. Now that he had begun, he would be a great deal more.

o0o

Minas told Dias after much thought, and in a way that
might have been foolhardy, but it proved that he was a man again. Dias had been
in Larchwood, making it and its Mother his own, but he had come back to Lir on
his way toward the southern cities. Minas met him on the road, riding one of
his own duns—a much less quiet mount than the old mare who had been carrying
him. But he would not ride before his brother’s warband on a mare, even the
queen of the Goddess’ greys.

The dun was a sensible enough soul, for a stallion, but
Minas’ weakness made him uneasy. He was difficult to settle; he danced and
snorted, shying at shadows. At sight of Dias’ warband, he reared and struck the
air.

Minas clung grimly to the stallion’s mane, and prayed that
his balance would not fail; for he could not grip with his knees.
Fool
, a small voice sang in his head.
Fool, fool, fool.

The gods were kind. He did not tumble ignominiously to the
ground in front of his brother. The dun came to a snorting, head-tossing halt,
glaring challenge at Dias’ grey.

Dias’ glare was hardly less ferocious. “What in the gods’
name are you doing?”

“Meeting you,” said Minas, not too breathlessly. “Welcome
again to Lir, my brother.”

Dias took him in, from unraveling plait to thickly bandaged
knee, and shook his head. “Even for a dead man, you’re mad.”

They paused by the roadside, ostensibly to make themselves
beautiful for the entry into the city. But Dias had set Minas a test. “Come
down and sit,” he said, “and we’ll make you fit to be seen.”

Minas eyed the ground. It was grass, and soft enough, but he
had yet to dismount without hands to catch him. No one here was going to do it,
that was obvious.

He gritted his teeth. The dun for a miracle was steady.
Somehow he got his leg over and slid. His good knee held for a moment as his
foot touched the grass, then buckled. He sat rather more abruptly than he had
meant to.

“Idiot,” said Dias. He sat on the grass beside Minas.
“You’ll break yourself again.”

“I will not.”

“You will.”

Men of the warband—not the boys who served them, but the
warriors themselves—brought gifts: a comb, a coat, a pair of leggings. They
laid each gift at Minas’ feet, not speaking, but offering a smile or the warmth
of a glance.

Dias began to work the knots and snarls out of Minas’ ruddy
mane. “Don’t you ever comb it?” he asked.

“There’s never time,” said Minas.

“Never inclination, you mean to say.”

Minas smiled, then yelped as Dias resorted to force.

There was a sort of peace in this comfortable bickering of
brothers. Minas had not had it in far too long.

And he was about to give it up again.

He said it straight, as a warrior did. “When the moon comes
to the full, I’m leaving Lir.”

Dias’ hands paused, a brief mercy. “We’re wintering in
Larchwood,” he said. “But we’ll ride a fair quarter of the earth before we stop
there.”

“The young men will be glad of that,” Minas said.

“That sitting chariot of yours,” said Dias, “would be better
than the back of a horse. Though if you want to ride—”

“I’m not riding with the People,” Minas said.

There was a silence. Dias’ fingers went on with his tangles,
blindly maybe, and none too gently.

“I’m going with the foreigner,” said Minas. “He asked me to
ride with him to his own city, far away in the south.”

“Because you can make chariots.”

Minas shrugged.

“That’s all anyone wants you for. Except us. You’re our kin,
our brother.”

“I’m dead.” Minas shifted, careful of his mending body.
“I’ve promised Emry I’ll come back. I make you the same promise. But, brother,
there’s a whole world I haven’t seen. I can’t be a warrior now; I can’t conquer
it. But I can ride in it, and in time I’ll walk.”

“You told Emry? You waited to tell me?”

Minas twisted until he could see his brother’s face. “That’s
why,” he said. “You’re angry.”

“Because you didn’t tell me,” snapped Dias, “not because
you’re going. Damn your eyes, brother! Don’t you know me better than that? I
can see your spirit dying in the city, shriveling little by little. Thank the
gods you’re getting out of it.”

Minas gaped at him.

“We can’t live in cages,” said that astonishing man. “Nor in
cities, either, unless we’re of a mind to kill our souls. These cities, they’ll
feed us and defend us and make us unimaginably rich, but we won’t live in them,
not for any longer than we absolutely must. We’re Windriders, brother. Even
you, who call yourself a dead man.”

Minas closed his mouth. “Rhian is coming with me. And
Ariana. And . . . she’s not telling me, but I think—there will
be another in the spring. I suppose she’s afraid I’ll forbid her to go.”

“Will you try?”

“No more than you will.”

Dias’ smile was not as steady as it might have been. “I know
better. Stay alive, will you? Or no more dead than you are now. I’ve mourned
you once. I don’t intend to do it again until we’re both appallingly old.”

“We’ll die together,” Minas said, “with a skin of kumiss
between us, and a chariot under us, and the wind of the morning in our faces.”

“May the gods make it so,” said the king of chariots.

On the day that Minas left Lir, he went out in the dawn
with his brother Dias beside him, his arm about those broad shoulders, hobbling
painfully—but walking, after a fashion. They went to the place where the temple
had been, and stood on the hill amid the ashes of the women’s world.

This was their world’s end, Minas thought. He sang the
morning song of his People, calling the sun into the sky and the light to the
earth, and the gods’ blessing on every living thing. It was Dias’ gift to him,
to perform the king’s office at his last sunrise in this city.

Dias carried him away from the fallen temple—much against
his will, but he was a weak thing still. They went not to the king’s house but
to that in which Eresh had spent his days in the city, down toward the southern
wall. The caravan was forming already. Men were hitching oxen to the slow heavy
carts, heaping them with baggage.

Minas’ cart was there, and his duns, and the White Mare; and
a pair of greys tethered behind—mares, the pick of the Goddess’ herd. A dark
grey foal ran at the heel of one, with a bright imperious eye and a look about
her that reminded him vividly of his daughter.

Dias moved to lower Minas into the cart, but a large grey
body intervened. A fourth mare stood there, white as the moon. She was not the
old queen, but one of her daughters. Her neck was nigh as lofty as a
stallion’s, and her eye was royally proud. She would carry him, it said, and he
would endure it, mere mare though she might be.

He flushed. Her rebuke had a sting like the lash of a whip.
He bent his head as humbly as a prince of the People could manage, and let
himself be lifted onto her back.

She had soft paces, that one, but with a hint of fire in
them. If he laid too firm a leg against her, she snapped at it. He would ride
her subtly, or he would suffer her wrath.