Red Country (13 page)

“But I thought we already decided, love? Just tell your That and he can settle everything.”

“He is not my That!” I all but bellowed. “He belongs to Hethria, not to me!”

In the denial, I recognized truth. My face must have altered, and she read its message, for she abandoned frivolity.

“Very well, love.” She went to the heart of it with her startling ability to talk arrant nonsense, pay no apparent heed to the relevant factors, then produce a devastatingly accurate analysis. “You can't do it by yourself, and it is his country, and if he is a wizard he should be capable of saving it. You just have to tell him. It's the only thing you can do.”

“But I can't.” I heard my voice go flat. “After what I said to him. . . . Anyway, I can't get a message through. To any of them.”

“Nonsense,” she said briskly. She had aged very little, her hair was still tawny gold, but now her gray eyes sparkled in that barely lined face. “Once you make up your mind, you'll find a way. As for insulting him, it's good for men occasionally. Keeps them in their place.”

* * * * * *

Apart from driving me crazy, she did clarify my thoughts. By the time I reached the palace, I was sure my only hope was the aedryx. Before I was out of the bath, I knew there was no physical way to warn them in time. The Sathellin might carry a message, but they had to receive it, the messengers would have to locate Zam, who might be anywhere, by caravan even Assharral was three months away. And knowing Kastir, I was sure his plans would be under way long before. I almost gave in. My mother's words prevented me. I had to find a way.

I was in bed when it came to me. Scarthe. Mindspeech. No need for the Sathellin. I could tell Zam directly, mind to mind.

For a moment I faltered. That parting message of mine had been so fierce, so final, it would be more than humiliating to reverse.

I reminded myself that this was for Hethria, I was a wholly disinterested party, bent on saving a country by enlisting the only possible ally, it was not for his sake at all, it was for his land. The land, I amended. Sitting up in bed, I took a deep breath, and thought:
Zam.

There was no reply.

At first I told myself it was understandable, if not laudable, that rancor should delay his reply. Then that the chances of his reading anyone's thoughts, particularly mine, over a few short minutes, were astronomical, then that I had to keep trying, there was no alternative; then that if they did it so could I; then that the strength of my distress must surely get through.

Around midnight, I conceded defeat. Zam had said he and Zem “had the aptitude, but the skills have to be learnt.” On the evidence, it was reasonable to assume that hearing was an aptitude, but speech a skill. He might speak to me. I could not open a conversation with him.

Despair saw me off to sleep. Strangely enough, I woke with stiffened resolution, and almost at once had an idea.

Zam had put out that fire in the torjer grass, so it was reasonable to assume he would watch for other fires. He would use farsight in Hethria, if not in Everran. If I went out into Hethria, and lit a big enough fire, he would eventually notice it, with eye or mind. He would see who had lit it. And surely, with his attention caught, I could somehow get the message through?

But I was in Saphar, with Hethria half the country's length away.

It took till breakfast to solve that one, and longer to accept the solution. I have always loathed deception, from lies to political chicanery. More especially deception involving hypocrisy, and most of all, hypocrisy that involves kith and kin.

I sat over the table, twisting the strands of my undressed hair. Then half of my mind interrogated the other half. Are you in earnest or aren't you? Do you want to save Hethria or not?

Feeling somewhat as Harran must have, if, as the songs say, he did go to parley with the dragon, I dressed and went to find Kastir.

* * * * * *

He was naturally in his workroom. He received me with a courtesy somewhat chillier than usual, but by good luck all his scribes were elsewhere. I said at once, “I'm sorry, my dear, to have been so disappointing last night. It must have been the heat, or my being tired. Shall we discuss it again? Or do you have some plans that I can see?”

His face lit up, so instead of feeling guilty I felt positively abominable. “I knew you could never remain deaf to reason,” he said, in the nearest Kastir could come to joy. “It would have been beneath you. Completely out of character. Now, let me show you. . . .”

He jumped up and began to unroll designs, blueprints, maps, cost-sheets, schedules, all over the work-table, talking away in the highest animation, with most of it going past my ears. I was scanning the stuff from a quite different view.

It was terrifying how accurate my guesses had been. On a practical level the plans were not only waterproof, they were fireproof. I could not fault them. Moreover, I had not underestimated their level of readiness. We could literally start whenever we liked.

“In fact”—he looked somewhat bashful—“last night, I intended asking you to come with me to Penhazad. If we had left today, we could have seen the first block down from the Gebros. The foundation stone, one might say.”

My heart stopped. He had looked fondly back to the plans, so he missed whatever might have been in my face.

Reverting to childhood, I thought, Surely the Four cannot sanction wickedness? Yet it had come uncannily pat. If I wanted to reach Hethria, the means was in my hand. All I had to do was prolong my deceit.

It seemed an eternity I wavered. Then I set my teeth. Gebasterne would have been better, Zam had said he warded Hathria's south, but I could not pick and choose, any more than I could indulge in scruples. There was frantic need for haste.

“If it comes to that,” I said airily, “we could still leave today.” I had to justify myself. “With a project so big, I think we ought to supervise all we can in person. You know what workmen are. Even your budget won't stand much pilfering on this workforce's scale.”

“Splendid!” It was actually an exclamation. “Sellithar, it will crown this moment to have you there.”

He kissed my hand, and somehow, I drove down my self-loathing and managed to produce a smile.

* * * * * *

Instead of using the old highway from Astil to Kelflase, and then along the Kelf down to the Kemreswash, we rode directly northeast from Astil by the maze of secondary roads which serviced new farms in the formerly deserted heart of Gebria. And still the way to Penhazad was too long for me.

To make it worse, Kastir was positively affectionate, requiring me to endorse my duplicity every second hour with discussion and consultation upon some doubtful aspect of the plans, and hopes and dreams for our future as well as Hethria's. My nerves were in rags when we crossed the last flat tilt of Gebrian ridges, stitched by wretched little holdings where optimistic migrants hoed among the stones, and ahead rose the gray walls of Penhazad, the pale hostile distances of Lyngthira, and between them, the serpentine labyrinth of muted green, dull black and duller gray trees, twisted channels, claypans and drytime waterholes, which comprise the Kemreswash.

There was no time for recuperation. The Gebros demolition crews had been hired, imported and waiting for a month, the gear was to hand, the arrangements made. They had only wanted Kastir's presence to begin. Next day, in the baking summer desert heat, crews and populace assembled, flags were hung out, speeches made. A band struck up “Forward, Estarians,” and a pallid, fiercely concentrating foreman gave me a ribbon-bedizened pick and assisted me up the scaffolding to the crest of the Gebros, where I would strike the ceremonial commencement blow.

With the pick in my hand I looked back into Everran, banners and gaudy clothes and sweaty excited faces, Kastir beaming from the shade of our temporary dais. Penhazad's walls were sunk in new houses, the roll of Gebria's ridges scratched or trodden or built upon as far as I could see. I looked down at the stone under my feet.

Big square paneled blocks of Saeverran granite, they had been cut and sledged and slung up here by the workmen of the second Berheage, seven kings before Beryx's reign. In its way, what I stood on was a legend too.

I had a brief urge to fling my pick into the crowd, assume a heroic stance and bawl, “In the name of the past, I forbid this!” Quickly, I looked away into Hethria.

The Sathellin roads hardly notched that wide-planed emptiness that stretched away to the horizon, serrated by the first sand-belt's distant dunes, almost obliterated by the heat-haze, so it all shivered savagely in a crystalline blur of air. Within that perimeter the land was rough and resolutely defiant, gibber-patches, forlorn desert oaks and clumps of istarel bush whose meager greens could not mask the soil beneath. It stared unblinkingly back at me, the raw Helkent color, one shade from the hue of freshly butchered meat. A live color, live as blood. I had the oddest fancy that it was not in Everran, with its swarming multitudes, but out there in the emptiness that the earth truly lived.

There was no time for fancies either. Not if I hoped to carry out my plan.

The pick produced a tiny spurt of stone-dust. The crowd cheered, the band brayed even louder, the now beaming foreman helped me down while the first shift raced each other up the scaffolding. Hammers, chisels, levers came into play. The chantyman struck up, on his flute, an old Everran building song, probably the one that heard the block hove into place. There was a pause; a quick heave, a rush of motion. And from the far side of the wall a heavy, echoless thud.

I had no heart to watch the next one go. Reaching Kastir, I said, “My dear, it was so hot up there, I believe I'll rest a while. Perhaps, later on, I'll take a ride down Kemreswash. I may even,” archly, “find a better site for your dam.”

Kastir was all solicitude. “And perhaps,” he agreed indulgently, “so you might.” I rested a token quarter of an hour. Then, taking advantage of the town holiday to conceal my strangely early departure, I rode under the deserted gate arch and back into Hethria.

I had ridden Vestar, and I pushed her hard despite the heat, keeping to the high hot hard going beyond the channels' edge. We must have traveled a good eight miles, and she was completely blown, before I found what I sought. It was another torjer belt, spiny, shock-headed, misleadingly green tussocks that ran southeast along the arm of an anabranch as far as I could see. And the wind was north.

Sweating and blowing, Vestar waited gratefully in the shade of a low-hanging black-trunked morglin tree. I took out flint and tinder and set to work.

Burning torjer grass is spectacular. It burns hot and hard, with fearful billows of black smoke, while the resin cracks and pops above the fire's roar, and huge banners of flame flap from the kindled tussock tops. I had lit it on a quarter-mile front, but it spread as it went, and soon the smoke was augmented by circling clouds of prey-birds, morglis, rienglis and morvallin, all alert for game that would be flushed out by the flames. My heart bled for the lydyrs that shot past with a
ffft!
of terror, blinded by daylight, the tiny grass birds who delayed to the last instant before they shot up into the raptors' claws, the desert pigeons' explosive horizontal
clap!
of wings, the running quail, the lizards, the very grasshoppers who were judged worth a pounce. I tried not to think about the frogs, nestlings, flowers, grass and seeds which could not flee at all. It has to be done, I told myself. Or they'll all disappear.

The fire blazed, the smoke blew, through and over the screaming, pouncing birds. Nothing else happened. I stared till my eyes ached into the billowing black, aching to see something, to hear something, shaky with fatigue and heat and strain, jerking the bit to subdue Vestar's nerves as I thought wildly, Come on, rot you, come!

At last I had to move my lookout to stay with the front of the fire. I cantered along the anabranch to a knoll of cracked, stratified, gray and iron-red stone so sharp that the shod Vestar flinched, and from that vantage I stared again.

Still nothing. The smoke had unrolled ahead of the flames, a black distress signal monstrous enough to read in Assharral. Smoldering ashes steamed in the fire's wake. A whirlwind charged across them to spatter me with ash, kicking coals everywhere, and I thanked the Four there was nothing else close enough to burn. My throat was parched; I was too desperate to yield to despair. You must try again tomorrow, I told myself. It was too sanguine to expect anything so soon. . . .

The beat of hooves was barely distinguishable from the fire. When I spun round he was at the very knoll foot, a sweating foaming saddleless bridleless gray horse passaging under a blue-robed black-turbaned rider who bellowed up at me, “You started that on purpose, you bitch!”

Thankfulness erased the insult. I tumbled off Vestar and dragged her helter-skelter down the knoll after me, crying in a hoarse rag of a voice, “Oh, Zam, thank the Four you've com—”

The gray eyes were there, the luminance, the aedric motion. But these eyes were full of a reckless impish laughter forcefully reminiscent of Beryx's, a laughter that was their owner's basic response to life. I knew before he pulled down his turban, grinned at me, and said, “I'm glad I came too. But actually, I'm Zem.”

The disappointment was too much. Hot, scarlet, disheveled, ash all over me, I stood clutching the mare's rein and stared up at him, incapable of speech.

His eyes narrowed. Then he sprang down from the mare.

“Princess Sellithar, in a lather and less a waterskin, can't say a word, wouldn't do this for mischief, must have wanted to find us rather definitely fast. Have a tot of this.” He thrust a water-bottle into my hand, hot from its sojourn on a shoulderstrap under his robe. “Then you can try to talk. Zam's over on the Axairan border. Clear to Assharral. I'll have to do instead.”