Everran's Bane (16 page)

Hazruan did its best to solace us. I learnt three fine sea-songs from the bard, and could have had other comfort if I chose. The Hazyk girls respect harpers, and find more subtle gallantries than, “Lie down, you pretty harlot,” very much to their taste. The trouble was, Sellithar would not let me warm myself.

* * * * *

The eighth morning Ragnor slitted his eyes at the sea a long time, the look of a Holmyx measuring a well-known and wicked bull he means to yard. Then he said abruptly, “Give it a try.”

He gave us his own war galley and chose the crew himself, weeding ruthlessly through brawny battalions. Then he swung up beneath the high, gaudily painted sternpost, laid a hand on the steering oar, and glanced along her seventy feet to the dragon head rearing with scarlet jaws and golden scales above her prow, the look of a man for a well-beloved sword. “Tie your ears on, Scarface,” he said. “If anything can get you there, it's
Beraza
.”

He had shipped five extra hands: “bailers.” As he nodded one hulk to the steering oar, Beryx jumped up. Ragnor said rudely, “When I'm gutting sharks with m'war spear, I'll let you know.” Beryx, with a grin, sat meekly down.

Ragnor took her out, the men rowing almost lazily, while she bucked crossways to the swell and the fine spray chased across her bows. Gradually the swells deepened. They put more power in their strokes. Two hours later the troughs were ten feet deep, Culphan Morglis lay over the sternpost, the ship was bounding like a maddened horse, and the bailers were working for their lives. Ragnor bellowed, “Give 'em a hand, harper! Good'n steady!” Shot a glance seaward and roared into the sea-roar, “Ready to tack!”

The rest is a blur of water and terror and unbroken singing that has permanently impaired my voice, from the green hill that sat on our bow as the stern whipped up to the incoming roller to the frenzy that succeeded it as the gale thrashed seas in on our quarter and the
Beraza
cork-screwed and leapt and dived and bucked like a lunatic net-float with no two planks the same way at once, while the keel groaned and the bailers worked like madmen and Ragnor fought the steering oar with every tremendous muscle and roared pitilessly, “Port! Starb'd! Heave! Hold! Send her! C'mon, harper, sing!” While the oars bent like lathes as the rowers soused head-under and came up spluttering, then sobbing like winded horses, and Morglis slavered over its escaping prey, while the salt got up my nose, down my throat, into my lungs—until they set the sail with three men hauled back from overboard, before I sang for those whole thirty-six hours while
Beraza
plunged and rolled her heart out as she ran under sail and oar slantwise to the unrelenting wind, first north-east up the outer width of Belphan Wyre, then north-west up the narrow inner arm to Tistyr's blessed mole.

Ragnor called in the rags of a whisper to a staring Quarreder, “Catch t'warp!” The crew collapsed where they sat. The white-coated dripping ship finally fell still. And Beryx, who had been baling in the thick of it with his right arm anchored over a thwart, got out of the bilge in the scraps of his crimson cloak, looked over to Ragnor, and quietly shook his head.

Ragnor grinned back, slumped over the steering oar, a frosted snowman with wine-red eyes. “Wanna say anything,” he whispered, “use that bard of yours. He's not too bad.”

Would you credit that, after Ragnor and his Haxyx rowed their hearts out to get us through the gale, we sat for six priceless hours while the Tistyr commander signaled Heshruan to be sure we were safe to admit? Quarred is permanently panicky about its border isthmus. Ridiculous, because, as Ragnor says, “If I did come, there's three hundred miles of coast to beach on. Why would I damn well walk?”

The clearance came at dusk. We hove the gold on a packhorse and ourselves on our beasts. Beryx lifted a hand to
Beraza's
blur on the inky water, and said evenly, “Ride.”

I am unlikely to forget that ride. Clear through the night, steering by the stars, up over Heshruan Slief till a huge ember-red dawn found me flogging the packhorse and Beryx flogging himself. I made him rest an hour by lying down and refusing to move. “And if you kick me, I'll make a song of it.” The packhorse lay down in the absolute height of noon, the whole Slief aquake in the heat and our mouths too dry to hear ourselves curse. We split the gold, turned the horse loose, and rode in search of a steading, which took all afternoon.

They were lavishly kind: fresh packhorse, food and drink, demands that we sleep. Beryx looked at the western sky. In a lilac dusk the new moon hung, slim and cruel as a sliver of steel. He said, “Can't,” in a whisper, and tottered out to his horse.

Only image-shards remain of that night. Flogging my innocent beast for slowing while I slept. A servant's arm around me when I woke. Beryx swaying drunkenly, chin on chest, reins knotted round wrist, against a sheaf of stars. Falling off in a wide red cloudless dawn, pulling Beryx after me, insisting, groggy but adamant, “New moon come. No use get there dead.”

Woken with a vile headache, drenched in sweat by the implacable sun, I recall watering the horses in somebody's earth-tank. Riding on. The Helkents rising higher and higher, a red rampart in the east, and at last the road up to where Quarred and Everran meet. Staggering into the border-post to meet soldiers whose determination ran to drawn swords. Quarred border was closed for the night.

Perhaps it was fortunate, if only for the sake of this song. We slept on the border-post floor. Four, how I slept. As the first sun dyed the Lynghyrne, we were eating stale bread as we climbed to the saddle of the pass.

Thank the Four that Everran does not bother to ward its march. The saddle topped and Bryve Elond engulfed us, a long trough of silvery leaves over twisted stumpy black trunks, our own elonds at last, our own red mountains reared above. Everran, tenuous fawn, filled the V ahead. Beryx looked up, a stick man on a starven horse, and an immense golden-crowned indigo-shadowed thunderhead lit his dreamy smile.

Then he straightened with a jerk. A shape had plummeted from the cloud, so high it was toy-like, a mere blotted silhouette, but one you would never mistake. Four-legged, serpent-backed, winged with sails, trailing a sting of tail.

Next instant Beryx was by the packhorse, snatching the halter as he ripped out words. “Ride! You left, you right. Harran, back down the pass. If it chases you, jump off the horse.” The servants fled. He tore madly at the pack bag and I forced my muscles to slide me down, drive me round to the other side.

He snarled, “Get out! Go!” My fingers shook as I whipped the pack off, tore at the buckles, he ran a few feet and tumbled the gold onto the ground, I copied without knowing why, he slapped his horse savagely on the rump and as it snorted away he snarled again, “You raving idiot—go!” I hit my own horse across the nose—and then it was too late.

Hawge's circles had grown faster and faster, lower, smaller, tremendous piston wingbeats expressing more than simple rage. Then fire shot from its nostrils and lashed along the ground. The grass ignited, the elonds went up in fiery fusillades. We and the horses and servants were yarded, walled in rails of flame.

Beryx took five paces back from the gold. I found myself at his shoulder. The dragon thundered round its trap, braked with a slam, spun and dropped, right in front of us.

This time it did not waddle. It came like a stalking cat, chin on the ground, spine sunk between the shoulders and then arching up, eyes like burning phosphorus. Only this back rose thirty feet high, the tail that lashed behind covered fifty feet in a sweep, and even the ripple of those huge shoulders was lost behind the lamps of eyes.

Straight over the fire they looked. Straight through the fire they came. They were brighter than the flames. They were bigger than the flames. They were opening, widening, there was nothing left around them, nothing existed but facetted, sentient, thought-obliterating crystal green...

A clear, hard, human voice said, “I have brought your gold.”

My sight cleared with a pop. Hawge was right on top of us, crouched to spring, eyes on a level with mine. Beryx stood unflinching, head up, looking straight back—only later did I remember it—into that deadly gaze.

Hawge snorted. Red-hot derision does not cover it. Flames struck the ground, ricocheted and shot twenty feet in the air.

its breath was fire ripping through helliens,

Beryx spoke clearly, precisely. “I can get it back.”

Hawge hissed: the cut of a giant whip.

“Give me,” Beryx persisted, clearly, steadily, still not looking away, “five days.”

Hawge spat. Then the upper lip lifted in gigantic parody of a human sneer, and the eyes altered from fury to a vicious malevolence.

it whispered,

It leapt straight at and over us with a sixty-foot bound caught in the air by the first colossal wingbeat and driven upward on a roar like a wounded earthquake in its throes.

I stood quaking, knees unstrung, mind a quag of unpent fright. Beryx turned around.

“You fatuous oaf.” His voice came out a note high, with the fine tremor of a fraying string. “You raving imbecile. You utter incompetent! You risked the pair of us! You should have...” he broke off. Walked unsteadily to the roadside, and was violently and comprehensively sick.

He had recovered by the time we caught the horses, whose panic made them nearly as dangerous as Hawge. I helped scoop up the gold. “Bring it along,” he said huskily, struggling astride his beast.

I cried, “Where are you going?” and he looked down at me. His eyes were quite black, but this time it was not rage.

“Saphar,” he said.

* * * * *

Down Ven Elond I just kept him in sight. I was seething with questions: Why had the maerian been unguarded, who could dare to rob a dragon's den, how was it done, how did he escape, how could Beryx hope to find him if the dragon could not? I had recalled a thick red-crusted slash under Hawge's right eye. I wanted to know how Beryx had looked in those eyes and not been paralyzed like a mouse, how their conversation had jumped so impossibly and what steps were missed and how Saphar came into it. Aslash, I thought in forlorn hope. Aslash will know.

In Aslash square Beryx slid down, ignored cries, greetings, questions, told the air, “Get me another horse,” and walked straight, as by willpower, toward the governor's house. The governor met him halfway, his soldier's aplomb reduced to a frightened mask.

Beryx whispered, “How?”

“Last month the gold ran out. General's sent messages for you, sir—two, three times a day. The dragon flew two days ago. Came back yesterday. A terrible noise... like the Helkents had fallen down. It flew off. So high we lost touch—”

“Saphar?”

Beryx was just audible. The governor's voice shook.

“Sir, no one's been able to raise them since... the dragon flew.”

Beryx turned away. In death itself he will not look like that. The governor caught his arm. “Sir, for the Four's sake, I'll send scouts, messengers, you can't go on like—”

Beryx freed himself as if unconscious of it. “Horse,” he said to the ground. “Now.”

Aslash signaled ahead. We had relays at Khatmel, Tirkeld, Asvelos, we rode in two-thirds of a day what I had managed in two. I covered the last miles neither asleep nor awake, a pair of legs attached to a horse. Whatever sustained Beryx, it was not flesh and blood.

The road dipped, rose, dipped, rose a last time and slid down to Azilien. Our horseshoes thumped on the verge, clattered on the paving. I did not want to think why they were so loud, any more than I wanted to look up.

Beryx rode onto the bridge. Drew rein: and slowly, so slowly, lifted his eyes.

Like the Perfumed Vale, Saphar had been slashed with fire. Smoke still wreathed feebly about its terraces, but it did not conceal the huge welts of ruin that crisscrossed the city, wider than houses, slashing in rubble and embers across streets, ripping contemptuously through walls, burning up chains of thatch, and reducing major buildings to heaps of fallen stone. People moved among the ruins, slowly, aimlessly, in the uncanny quiet. Some looked at me, and looked away: not in rejection but in blank disinterest.

I heard Beryx take a slow, deep breath. I knew where his eyes were. I had looked already, and the heart was ice in my breast.

The palace had taken the full brunt of Hawge's wrath. Most of it was roofless, much of it had burnt. Every tower was a truncated heap. A plume of smoke trailed from the Treasury. I knew how the gardens would look. Crazy fragments of wood, fabric, stone, had been strewn broadcast under the impact of the blows. Hawge must have used its tail, over and over, with the most deliberate malice, a child smashing another's dearest toy. What crowned Saphar was not a builder's gay extravaganza, but a trashy wreck.

I think we walked up through the town. I know we walked under Berrian's arch, for it was intact. Tugging and kicking and clambering over the rubble in the gatehouse, I could feel that eye, a mute, burning indictment on my back.

Beryx went straight to the queen's rooms. They were silent, a hideous tangle of crumpled wood. He searched quickly, efficiently, you would think rationally, unless you saw his eyes. I trailed like a shadow, with as much mind of my own.