Red Country (25 page)

“Don't worry, 'Thar.” All trace of despair or exhaustion had vanished. His voice was steady, comforting, impossibly sure. “Whatever happens, they won't reach you.”

He caught me so much by surprise, touched so unerringly on the fear I had never allowed myself to face, that my eyes filled with uncontrollable tears. “I'll make dinner,” I gulped. “And after that you're going to sleep. All night.”

* * * * * *

Next morning the dassyk battle was over. The Sathellin no longer resisted, they were being swept east in abject rout, except for one force in the thick of a fighting retreat. “Karyx,” said Zam, and I felt a brief surge of pride. Before I looked at his face and forced myself to ask, “And the others?”

I saw him set his teeth.

“The Kemreswash force are already east of us.” He lifted his face to the west. “If it were only a month later, I could have tried a flood. But the rain isn't there. And to make it would cost too much.”

My heart twinged. So speaks the commander of a beleaguered garrison when the siege reaches the point where he must husband every ounce of his reserves, merely to survive.

He looked round at me, so tired I could almost watch his calculations, whether to tell me something or not, whether I would more likely break if the news came later, or now. My thoughts must have answered. He said, “The cavalry are close behind.”

Down by the well the saeveryrs chuckled, the only life in a still, sultry, storm-thick dawn. I looked down over the rock parapet to the desert's infinity, back to the small circle of familiar things he had called home. Then I said, “Zam . . . you could always act like a general, if you aren't one. You could retreat.”

“Kerym Iswyre.” The idea came as brilliantly as the glare off those miles of salt. “Let the cavalry arrive here and find nothing. They won't know what to do. You could rally the Sathellin there. We could get there, even now, two of us on horseback could do it easily. And if it's nearly as big as Assharral, not all Estar could find you in there. The fight could go on.”

For a moment the shadow lifted from his face. His overactive mind shot to a yet higher pitch, empathy brought me a flash of thought so fierce and complex I instinctively clapped hands to my ears. He said, “I'm sorry,” and shook his head.

I drew in my breath. The strain of crisis inflames the most placid, and I was never that. “Why not?”

He looked away, about the brightened grass, the remnant of the vines, the morrethans so bright on Fengthira's grave. “What would happen,” he said, “if they came up here?”

The image may have been transmitted. I saw the cave ransacked, the aivrifel splintered for the sake of the hazian gems on its frets, the morrethans uprooted, possibly the grave itself desecrated, Fengthira's bones flung to the indifferent air, the cavalry's boots. I bit my lip, hard.

Before the reaction had passed emotion, he said, “Not the most important. If I fall back to Kerym Iswyre, nothing will stop Kastir going straight into Assharral.”

My fists clenched in irrational denial. But he was right. A handful of Sathellin pent in the salt wastes might survive, might irritate the enemy. They could never check his advance.

I took a deep, deep breath. “Zam?”

His head lifted again. I said it without stress or emphasis.

“You'll have to kill them. It's that or have the Sathellin massacred . . . Assharral invaded . . . yourself killed . . . Hethria lost. Zam? It's a Must.”

He stared at me, unseeing. His eyes were deep-sunken and bloodshot and the light writhed in them now, a furious, incessant dance of power. Or distress. He said quietly, “'Thar, go down and fetch up the horses. Bring any food in walking distance as well.”

Still I tried to keep my voice quiet. “Zam—won't you do it? Before it's too late?”

He had dropped his head back in his arms so the reply was muffled, but its resolution was pure granite.

“It's not too late yet.”

* * * * * *

I foraged for most of the morning, then brought the horses up and turned them into the pocket, before I went back, to find him stretched out in a dead faint. I hesitated, if you can believe it, over whether to revive him or let him come round of himself, and finally decided the latter would be kinder, which when he woke did not please him at all.

“Half a day lost,” he said with the iciness anyone else would have turned to rabid rebuke. “And the blighted sandstorm all to do again.” It was intended for the cavalry, and he set about it without waiting to eat, which, as I told him, was the root of the second collapse in mid-attempt.

Revived from that, he tried to chase the Kemreswash force out of camp with a plague of snakes, but they were inured to illusion now, and set out jauntily, trampling serpents as they went. “Laughing,” he said into the dusk.

He sounded lifeless. My heart turned over and before I could help it I wondered, Will he give up?

“No,” he answered. “I can't.”

I did not speak. I merely thought,
Soon it will be too late.

He sounded more adamant than any granite. “Not yet.”

* * * * * *

For five more days he struggled, and the situation worsened daily. I ran up and down with food and tea, foraged in panicky dashes, piled slingstones in strategic spots about the walls, tried to sharpen my kitchen knife, racked my brains for other means of defense, all of it in that dreadful half-life when your true being is focused somewhere else. Battle itself could not rack the nerves as does watching from the sidelines. But this was worse, for the struggle was invisible, fought on the mind's field. I could see only the blows' effect on the defense.

That was the worst of all. Zam was literally driving himself to collapse, over and over, every day and a good part of each night, using every Art he knew as he tried to deter or delay or baffle each army in turn, with illusions, with diversions, with sandstorms, thunderstorms, wind and fire, with Commands exerted on their minds. And each time he was vanquished by the sheer weight of numbers he opposed. As the days passed I found myself waking with fists and teeth clenched, mind insisting, He must kill them. He must.

I dared not suggest it again. I could only watch and wait, while disaster grew ever surer, closer, and I choked down my feelings at the sight of one man trying to stop three armies single-handed, stubbornly refusing to use the sole weapon that would avail him, with the weapon to hand, and the shackles of principle binding him more surely than chains.

* * * * * *

When I finished foraging the sixth day he was resting, if you could call it that, after yet another failure. I knew it had failed, without need to ask. But as I looked at him I thought, Soon it won't need Kastir's armies to finish this. He'll kill himself.

The rock walls contracted, closer than the walls of the queen's hall had those years ago. I fought the feeling off. Silently I asked for another report.

It came in images, with the odd explanatory word. A wide sweep of desert, scattered Sathellin parties, on the western horizon a broad low cloud of dust. The eastern desert, the verge of Assharral. The shore of a salt lake big as a veritable sea, with black dots crawling outward from its shore. The labyrinthine channels of Kemreswash, a square of palisade and planted spears, a peculiar whiteness about the eastern sky.

I waited. When no more came, I said it aloud. “The cavalry. Tell me, Zam, please. How far?”

He would not answer for a long time. I let my silent persistence drum at him, and at last an image formed. A sweep of torjer tussocks, two cavalry camps, picketed horses, the smoke of fires. And beyond them, as if I looked from behind the troops, high on the shivering horizon, Eskan Helken's towers made a red blotch in the haze.

At that all my pent strain and terror burst. “You have to kill them!” I burst out. “It's not just Hethria now—it's them or us!”

Another storm was brewing in the adjacent north. The first gust of wind lifted his matted hair, but nothing else moved. He sat against a finlythe, knees pulled up, arms clasped about them, head laid sidelong on top, and his eyes were alive, furiously, convulsively alive, in a death-mask of a face.

He said on a sort of sigh, “There are thirty thousand men out there. Are you proposing I should kill them all?”

“Not all, no! Just enough to show you can. Just the cavalry, they're the danger, once they get here it's the end of everything. You'll see—when a few die, the rest will balk. Estarians'll do a lot for three gold ingots, but they won't do that!”

His eyes did not waver. “They'll be executed for cowardice if they withdraw.”

Words died on my lips. Then I set my teeth. “Kill them, then. You must.”

“And the reserves on the Gebros?”

“Them too, if they come!”

“And go on killing as they come, until I empty Estar? Until every man, woman and child of them is dead?”

It was the donkey's choice, as Kastir would describe an argument carried to absurdity, and it drove me to absurdity too. “Yes! Yes! Kill every last one if you have to! And you do have to—you must!”

He said quietly, “You have lost your wits.”

It was all I needed to do exactly that. I plunged to my feet and screamed at him like the veriest harridan.

“It's you who's crazy and you have been from the start! You wouldn't avenge Zem, you wouldn't kill Kastir, you wouldn't stop the troops or turn the storms or get help from Beryx or pull out of here—over and over I've told you what would happen and you ignored it and now see where you are! The country's overrun, the people you're supposed to save are being slaughtered, Kastir has Everran and his command again, there's an army on your doorstep, Assharral that belongs to your supposed—friends!—is at risk, I'm at risk, you're at risk—Hethria's fallen apart like a mud hut in a thunderstorm and it's too late to save it any other way. And all you can say is, ‘You've lost your wits!' Oh, if I only had! But even then I wouldn't sit and watch Hethria torn to pieces for the sake of a few cursed principles—for the sake of your crazy, useless, nonsensical, milk-and-water Math!”

His head came up. His eyes shot a single warning flash. He said with brutal clarity, “Be quiet.”

“I won't! I can talk sense if I'm not allowed to act on it!”

“You do not”—he bit off each word—“talk sense at all. You talk scurvy pragmatic politicians' filth. And I will tell you once and for all, I'll have my throat cut before I deny Math.”

“And you'll see those fiends out there cut mine, no doubt! And my family's. And Karyx's family and all the rest of them. Let the rivers run blood, so long as your principles are dry!”

His face went harsh, stiff, and deadly dangerous. He said, almost silkily, “Must I make you quiet?”

He could do it. He would.

With a gigantic effort, I forced myself to be calm. My voice came out cold as his.

“I will be quiet in a moment. I've one last thing to say. I thought you were an aedr. That you could do anything. That,” I choked, hearing it in Zem's laughing, teasing, mortal voice, “you were invulnerable. The truth is, you have no power. You hide behind Math, you say it forbids you to do things—but really you can't do anything at all!”

He came to his feet in one smooth lunge and his eyes took fire as I had seen them in the throes of Ruanbrarx, molten, phosphoric white. He put out a hand, pointing down the slope.

“Go down there.” He spoke softly, silkily, with a wholly terrifying gentleness. “I am going to do something now. And I would not want you hurt.”

From pure innate contrariness, I balked. His eyes flamed. A giant's fist gripped me, turned me about, and literally catapulted me down the hill.

I cried, of course. Crouched among the well ferns, cursing the blithely indifferent saeveryrs, I cried with rage, and fright, and chagrin, and grief, for myself and Zam and the Sathellin and Hethria, because he had not had the sense to accept necessity in time, because I had driven him to the-Four-knew-what folly with a blatant lie, because I had let my stupid, vicious tongue run away with me once too often. Because we would die in the next day or two, and die estranged.

The storm rumbled away in the north, louder, louder, with unnerving pauses between the thumps, and Eskan Helken lay in the shadow of its burgeoning, deathly, eerily quiet. I dropped my tears in the well till they ran dry. Then I sat a while, in an effort to compose myself. Then I faced my own bitter necessity at last.

Then I got up and began to clamber, step by step, back up the hill. Whether he threw me out or incinerated me or we both died tomorrow, one thing was imperative. I had to apologize.

Head down, I plodded by the last ferns, the gully fold, the furrows left by ancient garden plots, on to the finlythes' shade. Zam was not there. He must have gone to the cave. I lifted my head, unnecessarily gauging the distance, and stopped. Something was happening, above me, on the path.

The sun was low enough to reach under the northern cloud, and though the storm loomed over Eskan Helken the pocket itself still blazed with sweltering afternoon light. In weird contrast to that airborne turmoil of dazzling white and bulging black, the green foliage and coppery rock were lit vividly but normally, stark above their shadows, precise and sharp. There was no dust to blur the air. The wind had stopped. Not a leaf tapped on the finlythes, not a stalk bent among the grass. Except for that one place, everything lay breathless in the storm hush, which is tense with threat as well as expectancy.

Whatever was going on up there was not heat-haze, as I had at first supposed. Yet there was a sort of eddy in the air, a turbulence, a swirl of transparency, vaguely reminiscent of the whirlpool in Zam's eyes.