Red Country (6 page)

Nor were there problems at Gebasterne for a private citizen. From a weaver who catered for desert hunters I bought a blue robe and a black turban, from a market saddler a big waterskin to hang over Vestar's wither above my saddlebags. Then I went in search of a caravan.

One was due off next day. I found the master in his arched caravanserai room, propped on an elbow among his packs as he sipped mint-tea amid a babble of merchants sealing consignments, Sathellin discussing firewood prices, townsmen, agents and a stray hunter or two wanting a start on his way into Hethria. When they dispersed, I asked to join the caravan.

He said, “Alone?” I nodded. He gave me a flinty look. “And where would you be going?”

I returned an equally flinty look and a reply in the true Sathel manner.

“Traveling.”

That cut his questions short. He made sure my beast and gear were fit for the trip, and charged me fifteen gold rhodellin for “conveyancing.” Next morning, after a short but acrid contest with my turban, I joined the mile-long string of pack-beasts and side-saddle riders filing through the main gate of Gebasterne, took a last look at the guards' green Everran livery, the Gebros' height receding into the northern distance, and turned my face to the red levels spatched with meager dull green tussocks and scrawny trees that vanished into a horizon of surging red dunes. Hethria.

* * * * * *

Though most of it was a howling desolation, plains of gibber stones and huge shifting sandhills that in the old days must have been perilous, it was also a country of hot color and many unfamiliar animals and plants, and unless you leave the Sathel roads there is no danger now. Every three days you are sure to find a dassyk, a staging-point, with its toll house and caravanserai and market and the ring of irrigated farms fed from immense underground cisterns, into which covered channels pour the water of Kemreswash. They made bright green islands in the desert red, shaded by subsidiary oases of life and sound in the innumerable groves of hellien trees. Not the short-lived staring white desert breed, but the lovely big river helliens whose bark echoes the subtle red shadings of Gebria, growing lovelier against their subtle gray-green foliage.

The Sathellin were still planting them: everywhere saplings rose amid the giants of five and six generations back. A Sathel—kindly for a Sathel—informed me in their terse way, “Use 'em for the salt. Irrigation brings it. Trees suck it up.”

The dassyx themselves were an agreeable surprise; not dirty, smelly, beggar-ridden desert fleapits rife with poverty and lassitude, but clean, vital centers built on a common plan with the efficiency of a military encampment, full of busy people doing a job with minimum fuss and maximum effect. Someone, I thought, had spent much time on them, someone with a clear sophisticated planner's mind untrammeled by either advice or precedent.

I am not at all sure when I saw the rocks. Traveler's time is a river, running unsegmented between ripples of routine and the road's endless bed. I know they came after the gorges, monstrous defiles in the glaring red and gold rocks of Hethria, and after some of the ranges, whose rust-red and indigo dulled in comparison, and which annoyed me with their impression of ancient, ancient places stubbornly intruding into the present world.

The rocks emerged, not from a range's chine, but as a single bulge on the northeast horizon. Gradually they increased to a hump, then a cluster of humps. Then they swelled to gigantic mushroom domes with colors that deepened from pale pink and lilac pastels to the glaring rusted-blood shades of Hethria at close quarters. They were certainly the oddest sight of the journey, and eventually I asked a Sathel about them.

He gave me a sidelong look, said “Eskan Helken. Red Castle,” and instantly walked away.

My heart leapt. However ignominiously, I had to admit that after all, Eskan Helken was a place, a fact. Perhaps, so soon, so simply, the dream's promise would be fulfilled. Who knew what was up there, or what use it would be? Who cared?

I was so elated as to forget my principles and seek hearsay about the place from other Sathellin, but none would say anything more. It drove me to vain speculation, then to vexation. Sathel brusqueness always irritated me, but this suggested more than discourtesy; it was nearer information willfully denied. When we were close enough, I resolved, I would explore Beryx's “Red Castle” for myself.

* * * * * *

The road ran within five or six miles of the cluster's southern side, and we chanced to make a second-night halt near the closest point. I waited till men and beasts were busy with food, then I saddled Vestar and rode casually eastward until a sandhill would mask my approach. I had an idea the Sathellin silence might not stop at words.

At close quarters the rocks rose sheer from the sand, solid stone masses taller than Asterne, more massive than any human tower, bitten into capes and coves and welded together like the lobes of a liver or brain. It was the last hour of sunset, and the light softened them to the true Helkent color, a kind of liquid, golden-fired cornelian. I rode slowly along, craning up at their summits, wondering if Beryx had indeed come here, and why?

The other riddles revived. What more did he want to “learn,” what had he already learnt, and from whom? And if he had come back, did he stay? As bones picked clean atop one of those towers? Or—abruptly one of the legends recurred to me, that aedryx lived longer than humankind. Out in Hethria it seemed unnervingly plausible. Perhaps he was watching me from one of those eyries even now.

Expulsion of this fancy took such effort that I had ridden upon the grass-cove before I noticed. Then I pulled up hard, and jerked Vestar's head from her eager snatch at the grass.

It was a broad-mouthed bay set deep amid the domes, and it was all grass, clear up to the bay head: fresh grass, emerald-bright against the rock walls that were now gored with shadow like twilit blood, though the last sun still laid lines of molten gold along their crests. The mare tugged at her bit. I sat staring, hardly able to credit my eyes. Not sand and scattered herbage and scrawny desert trees, but a pelt of grass. Lush, fresh, long grass, so long it was running like grain under the wind.

Naturally I rode in. There would be a spring to feed this phenomenon, and I was interested to find its site. We made our way up the western wall, and at the bay head I was gratified to find a deep oblique cleft in the rock, with seepage gleams on its stony floor. It struck me that it would be still more interesting to find the spring's true head.

Dismounting, I dropped the reins. Vestar instantly began to feed, but I knew she would not go far. I started into the cleft.

It was longer than it had looked. For what seemed hours I slipped and clawed and scrambled upward, propelled by gathering eagerness, for now it seemed likely I had found the gate into Eskan Helken itself. When a small voice whispered that I might find more than I had bargained for, I ignored it. There was no point in idle imaginings.

The cleft opened. Red-gold light bathed a little rock cup clearly made by human hands, laid a solid golden sheet upon the contained water, glistered like gold-leaf on the enveloping ferns. The fountainhead. I turned about and gasped, seeing all Hethria laid out below.

It was a minute or two before I recollected my surroundings, and then it was to recognize a mistake. This was not the actual springhead. I was at the base of a V-shaped pocket which rose to the real battlements of Eskan Helken, a pocket rich in vegetation, even a couple of tall finlythe trees halfway up, and at the very top rose a low mound of yet richer greenery, worked with the tapestry of flowers.

I climbed up. Hethria lay out below me, a desert metamorphosed by evening to a fairytale red country of gold and liquid fire. But soon its impact faded under that of the pocket itself.

I am not susceptible to atmospheres—Zathar used to say my hair would lie flat in the cave of Maerdrigg's kin—but something about that little oasis in the rocks' ward impressed even my rational mind. It was not simply the silence of Hethria, which had lapped the caravan from our first day beyond the Gebros, a vast sea about a passing boat. This was a more potent quiet: a listening, aching emptiness, an awareness of loss and vacancy, a stillness all but sentient. I found myself minded of graveyards, whose hush is not tranquility but a vacuum crying the absence of the dead.

When that image came to mind I almost stopped. Then I shook myself, surveyed the grass slopes, the rocks abrim with light, told myself not to be everything I most despised, and went on.

The springhead was beside the mound, a still tinier cup bedded among huge old untended plants of mint. So I knew someone had lived there, before I turned to the mound and made out, under fallen beams and a creeper's profusion of black and scarlet bloom, the ground-plan of a house.

It was lost now, only humps and mounds to mark its dissolution, under the rampant vines. The wind had dropped. The spring ran without a sound. No birds came to drink. Hethria, the outer perimeter, was utterly quiet. There was a cave behind the creepers, but I did not go in. Telling myself that I had found the spring, that Beryx was naturally not here, there were no wizards, and that whoever had lived here could no longer resent or gainsay my visit, I went to look at the flowers.

They grew on a sort of bed raised from the hill-slope, a dozen desert plants with silver gray leguminous leaves and clusters of the most amazing blooms. At each blossom's center a silky, grape-black spot capped the knot of the two petals, which resembled a vertically set double-pointed canoe. But those petals were a shade like living ruby, brighter than heart's blood, the very essence and idea of Red.

I had gone on my knees to examine them, marveling at the bizarre shape, the juxtaposed colors, the sheer wonder of such flamboyance on the dowdy gray plants, and had just decided to pick one in case a Sathel could identify it, when I perceived, and recognized, the nature of their bed. Six feet long, four feet wide, raised a foot or so above the ground.

I was kneeling on a grave.

At times the most rational of us lose our heads. I jumped up and backed away, I only just managed not to turn and run. Then my eyes lifted from the flowers.

He was facing me across the grave. He wore a blue desert robe and black turban, pulled down to hang in loops about his neck in the Sathel way. A young man about my own age, clean-shaven, with untidy light-brown hair, a square jaw, and gray eyes so air-clear and pure they seemed to come right out of his sunburnt face.

I did not think, a ghost, a wizard, Beryx, salvation, how did he get here, is he dangerous? I could not think at all.

Heartbeats went by, and I heard every one. My heart was a giant drum right up in the base of my throat; it was so loud I thought the very walls of Eskan Helken must begin to shake.

“Her name was Fengthira,” he said.

The silence parted to receive his voice, and closed again behind it; I had a stupid fancy that it welcomed his speech as much as it would have resented any words of mine.

“The flowers are morrethans. Desert fire. We planted them for her.”

My tongue moved at last, uttering the first words, sensible or not, that rose to mind.

“Your eyes,” I said stupidly, “are gray.”

Though they were so clear as to seem transparent, that clarity was an illusion. They were actually translucent, clear but depthless, and light moved in them like the patternings of air made visible.

“No, I'm not Beryx,” he said.

I think I choked.

He watched me impassively. Then he said, “I don't live here. One of us just comes up each moon to tend the grave.”

That time I know I choked. It is more than eerie to have your questions answered before they reach mental words.

“I saw your mare,” he said. “But it's no matter. With you, Fengthira wouldn't mind.”

Insult exploded me back to reality. “Do you know who I am?”

He answered matter-of-factly, “The princess Sellithar.”

I may have gulped. I certainly could not speak. Inscrutable as the very rocks, he waited through my struggle to collect myself.

“And just who”—I did achieve belligerence—“are you?”

“I am warden of the roads,” he answered, “for southern Hethria. My name is Zam.”

I almost burst out laughing. “
That
isn't a name!”

He did not smile. “My twin brother,” he said, “is Zem.”

“This-and-That!”
I was hiccupping against laughter I could feel would quickly, despicably, become hysterical. “What sort of idiot would call—”

“You admired my father's design for the staging-points, I believe.”

He spoke without anger, affront, defensiveness. After a moment he added, still dispassionate, “Perhaps you should sit down.”

“No!” Shock had to be eased somehow. “I never faint! Do you take me for some screeching kitchen-girl? And how do you know—you spied on me—how could you, I never said that to a single soul, I—who are you?
What
are you? What are you doing here?”

“I told you all that. I suppose what you want to ask is, How do I know what you think? That comes from being an aedr. It's one of our arts. Reading thoughts.”

He must have been able to move very fast when he chose to move at all. I came round sitting on the grass, propped against his shoulder, while he used one dripping turban end to lave my face. His shoulder was solid as a rock. His hands were a workman's, a soldier's, square, rough-skinned, knurled by calluses from shield, sword, pick and axe. As I swam up out of darkness that cool, maddening voice was saying, “. . . just shock, after a deal of strain. You've no cause for shame.”

I was never so blazingly angry in my life. First at behaving like some weak-kneed noblewoman, second for the betrayal of Kastir and all my principles by such a surrender to the irrational; third, and worst, that it had happened in front of him. Lastly because, however sensible you may be, when a woman faints she does expect a man to show concern if not a little panic, at the least to ask how she feels. And not to calmly diagnose the causes before, additional insult, he reads your mind to anticipate your private judgment of the lapse.