Red Country (20 page)

Tears filled my eyes. Not merely for the dead, but for the cold-blooded waste, and the pain it was causing now. I dared not say, “It's not your fault!”

He swung back to me, fists clenched now too. “One troop did find a dassyk. They were at their limits. Most crawling. Some delirious, I should think. The Sathellin massacred the lot.”

I cried out, some meaningless sound. Bad enough that the enemy should practice inhumanity. It was too much that the same pitilessness should stain our side as well.

He was striding up and down, fists clenched, jaw rigid, eyes flaming from a papery face. Frenziedly I sought some word of comfort, anything, however banal, to soothe rather than exacerbate the wound. There was nothing. In desperation I snatched the kindling always left ready and clawed about for flint and tinder to start the fire.

At my elbow came a flash and a ripping crack. As I spun round the heap of sticks and kindling burst into climactic flame.

“There is,” he said behind me, “something I can do.”

He was still throttling the words down in his throat. The fire crescendoed, roaring skyward in a perfect pillar of flame, far greater than was physically possible with the scanty fuel, ripping into the air like a saw, the heat grew intolerable, the woodheap beside the fireplace suddenly ignited as well, I found my hands over my eyes, I backed away, crying unthinkingly, “Zam!”

The fiery pillar collapsed. The woodheap sank to a couple of small perimeter flames. He stamped them out with cold, judicious care, took the kettle, and with the same exaggerated concern positioned it on the stones. He did not speak, and after one glance at his thunderous profile I kept quiet.

The kettle boiled. I made tea. He took the cup. I began the breakfast flourcakes. A westerly drift woke sunlit glints in the finlythes' mass of cardinal green foliage, the morrethans on Fengthira's grave bowed and sprang like knots of vegetable fire. The world is beautiful, I thought miserably. All beautiful, except for us.

Zam looked round and said harshly, “We are real too.”

I could find no reply.

“It's in all of us. We can't get rid of it.”

He stood up. Some instinct deeper than reason made me say in a rush, “Let be for today. You won't punish the Sathellin—” Already it seemed a fact of nature “—and it will be worthwhile to see what Estar makes of this. There may be a scandal, they hate this sort of botch-up. It looks bad in the news and loses them face with the Confederacy. They may get rid of him. They may even cancel the whole thing. Wait till we see. I—meant to go hunting today.”

For a long moment he probed me with those gray eyes that now seemed more penetrating than Fengthira's own. Then he gave an abrupt shrug. “We can pretend, at least.”

* * * * * *

While he shepherded, I had combined half my girth lace and a piece of waterskin to fashion a sling. The stone-bag was simple, Karyx's salt pouch slung over a shoulder. Having watched me arm myself, Zam said, “We'll take this too,” and gathered a newly washed shirt from a branch nearby.

Down in the grass bay, he added suddenly, “We may as well ride. Never mind a bridle, I'll give you one of mine. Be easy. She'll do what you say.”

Protests forestalled, I stood helplessly as the grays circled up, he fixed his eye on first one and then another mare, and they walked over, docile as pets. “This one,” he said, and cupped his hand to leg me up.

His heave all but threw me clear over the offside. I clutched for mane, expecting the mare to lose her head, but she stood like a child's pony, merely turning to give me one quizzical, mildly astonished glance. “Use leg aids,” Zam instructed. “Say, Whoa, to stop. Do as she tells you, Fenglis.” And he turned to vault on his own horse.

In great trepidation I gave Fenglis a timid squeeze with my calves. She moved off instantly, docile and responsive, while I struggled to overcome the precarious absence of reins in my hands, stirrups to support my feet, anything at all between me and her rippling back. Lack of a saddle exaggerated her motion so I feared she would edge me forward, shoulder by shoulder, onto her neck, and my balance was quite lost, I clung with knee and thigh so the unfortunate mare must have felt she had a langu round her ribs.

Zam walked his own mare sedately ahead. Though he did not look back, I was sure he was using farsight as Zem had said, to see behind him as well.

Hethria opened round us, falsely soft and glamorous in the early sun, with the heat-haze only a gentle mist, and he quartered the landscape with a hunter's farsighted stare. I looked too, in hopes that a lydyr or two might yet be abroad. But next moment he had checked his mare, slid to earth, and started grubbing at the ground.

“Kerrothar.” Two or three tubers landed on the clean shirt in a shower of soil. “And that's an emsparyx hole.” He dug enthusiastically with something I recognized as my carefully smoothed, hardened and sharpened cake-mixing stick, said, “Ha,” and pounced while I was still stifling howls of, “Not with that!” He glanced up. “Come down, Sellithar. There are vaxy bulbs here too.”

We excavated the sweet onion bulbs, we pulled fat nullik pods and wild keva fruit from shrubs, felled a locust with a thrown stick, dug up grubs and honey ants, and having diligently harvested fifty square feet of ground, moved off into the south. “Hethox would circle,” he said, “but they're nomads. We'll leave something close to home.”

By noon we were back, the unlucky shirt abulge with anything from grasshoppers to long-podded ningu-seed, and my sling blooded on a three-foot wyresparyx that had scuttled from our path. Zam said urgently, “Get it, quick!” I cried, “I won't eat that!” He exploded, “That or a lizard, what's the difference? Imsar Math! Can you shoot or not?”

I clawed for a stone. The range was too long, automatically I clapped heels into Fenglis, she shot forward, I whirled the sling and hoped my childhood games would pay off. The wyresparyx cart-wheeled, I cried “Whoa!” Zam said, astounded, “You can shoot straight!” and I found sweet revenge in returning dulcetly, “I told you so.”

He did skin the thing, and showed me how to cook it too. Then we retired to the finlythes' shade, and like all desert-dwellers took our well-earned midday sleep.

It was early evening when I woke. A light breeze dappled the finlythe shadows and sighed in the grass. The air had cooled, and Eskan Helken was entering its golden-red sunset range. Hethria stretched out below us, copper or old gold splashed with shadows of purplish indigo, sharp-edged on sand or stone, blurred among tree or bush, miles of silent, self-sufficient emptiness. Zam lay on his back, hands under head, watching it, and as I glanced at his profile, calm now, indeed relaxed, I thought that Hethria, the cruel, the unkindly, had nevertheless been a comforter to him.

As with all scandals, the disaster's news had outstripped lightning, but Estar's reaction was unusually quick, unusually vehement, and not at all what I had hoped. Zam came to supper that next evening looking more than usually grim, and announced, “The Assembly has met already. All Estar's giving tongue.”

When I looked expectant, he grew grimmer still. “They don't want to withdraw. They want revenge.”

“Revenge!”

“The news-talkers are howling about an outrage, one savage witch-doctor mustn't stop the march of progress, thumb his nose at Estar, butcher Estarian soldiery. A new ‘pressure-group'—is that it? Mm. Has been formed. The Illuminists. They see me as the prince of darkness, and they want me stamped out. Diabolical rites—stronghold of sin—demons and succubi—I live on vampire bats and rule the wind with baby's blood—no, I promise, I heard them saying it. Hethria groans under my evil spell. They're pressing to send in the army and expunge this ‘blot on the fair light of reason.' Then all will be well.”

I was appalled beyond speech. I stared at him, while he gazed down upon Hethria, a rather bitter set to his mouth. Presently he said, “Funny, isn't it?”

“No,” I said between my teeth. “It's Kastir.”

He turned to stare.

“I know how it's done,” I said. “Twist the truth, make it sensational, supply the stories, pay the news-takers. Oh yes, that's how Estar works. You can get anything, provided you make a big enough noise with someone else's mouth.”

He was silent, clearly battling disgust. Then he said with iron determination, “Estar is nothing to do with me. My concern is Hethria. I certainly would not consider such methods as that.”

“We're not,” I retorted, “in a position to consider them. But if the army invades Hethria—”

“Then Hethria will fight for itself. How would you water a corps, let alone an army, out here?”

“Yes,” I said in some relief, before I thought of the dassyx.

He said, “They have to find them first.”

“Yes,” I said reluctantly, and did not let myself add anything more.

* * * * * *

But he was abstracted all next day. The following morning he did not come to breakfast, and when he had not emerged by nightfall, I went up to the cave, thinking,
Zam? Are you all right?

The reply was prompt, quick and harried, the answer of a man too beset to spare an instant's attention.

I tossed the night away, and was re-heating dinner the instant false dawn showed. Then I advanced on the cave, thinking dourly,
If you're too busy I can feed you, you needn't even talk. . . .
But he was already in the door. His hair stood on end, his eyes were black-ringed and bloodshot and unmistakably distraught.

“I can't hold them,” he said. “I can't stop them. The cursed femaere's swamping me.”

With a superhuman effort I bit back questions to thrust the plate at him; but he put it aside with the back of his hand and strode jerkily down the slope, then up again, at which my control burst.

“Who? What? Why? If you won't eat, for the Four's love, tell me what it is!”

“More raiding parties.” He stopped then, tearing a hand back through his hair. “Hundreds of them. They're coming through the Gebros everywhere the wall's gone, I turn one back and there's another behind. And five or six more get by to north or south while I'm busy with the first—then they collide with each other and remember their orders and all come on again. Imsar Math, it's like a rat-plague. They're running over me!”

He dashed the hand raggedly at his eyes. With a rending pang of guilt I cried, “I should have guessed—of course he'd use numbers, it's his greatest strength—oh, if I'd only thought!”

“Not your fault.” He was absently brusque. “I just have to find another way. No, they're not coming here. They're aimed at the dassyx.”

My breath stuck on a gasp. “Stop them! You have to stop them! Once they get a bridgehead—any bridgehead—”

“I can't stop them, I have to move the Sathellin!” He was little calmer than I.

“Yes, you can! Never mind Commands, kill them—stop them once and for all!”

His hand dropped. He stared at me as if I had grown a tail. Then he said with verjuice bitterness, “Do you ever learn?” and stalked back into the cave.

After overcoming that, I was in such a state I contemplated bursting in to bludgeon him back to sense. At any moment it seemed the horizon would sprout a dusty twinkle of spears, the enemy would be upon us, and he would probably let himself be killed rather than kill. He and I and Hethria would perish together, and with us, Everran, my family, Karyx, his men. . . .

I could think of no argument fit to move him. At last, in despair, I applied the most elementary form of logic: that if a proposition is insoluble in its present shape, you must change its form to one where it is.

I fairly ran up to the cave, burst in crying, “If you won't kill them, make Kastir recall them—” and stopped.

The lamp, bright in that relative gloom, showed me Zam, cross-legged against the inner wall, staring straight before him, motionless. But he was breathing, his whole torso in motion to each enormous, protracted, roaring breath, his muscles trembling like a cable under strain, sweat streaming down his face, saturating his robe, his features contorted, his eyes white, blinding pits.

I shrank back, covering my own eyes as if I had carelessly looked straight into the sun. Then with a wild leap of joy I thought, He's changed his mind. He's doing it.

Stealing peeps at him I waited, first scared, then fascinated, then awed, finally terrified. Whatever his mind was at, it did not seem that any flesh and blood could withstand such strain.

After a time, regaining my wits, I went to build up the fire, set the kettle to simmer. And at last, as on that night three years ago, his breathing eased, and he melted into collapse.

Revived by tea, he gave me a somewhat sardonic look. “If they call me a sorcerer, I may as well earn the name. I didn't kill anyone. I put a wall of fire across Hethria, from the Helkents to Kemreswash. It's six feet high, it doesn't move, and it won't go out.”

“But—but—”

“No fuel. It's Pellathir. Illusion.” He drained the cup. “All I need now”—a long, long breath—“is to keep it there.”

And he did, for the most interminable two days in my experience. By the end I was reduced to prayers that something, anything, would happen, before he killed himself.

* * * * * *

In a back-handed way, the Four answered me. The fourth morning he tottered out, looking as if risen from the dead, to say, “The femaere ‘learnt his lore' sure enough. When the mirror signals came back he told them it was just wizardry and promised three gold ingots to the first man brave enough to put his hand in it and see. For three gold ingots Estarians will do anything.” He sank down by the fireplace and promptly fell fast asleep.

How I bore it till he woke I have no idea, still less how I contrived to feed him without a howl of, “What are you going to do?” But I must have been screaming it in his mind, for at last he looked up and said wearily, as if to some maddeningly reiterated question, “I have to think of something else.”