The Complete Morgaine (107 page)

By the second evening patience is rewarded. And at full stretch of the chain, in the night, the wolves and the survivors can reach truce, of sorts, while the terrible sounds proceed, of quarrels and the tearing of flesh and the crack of bone.

For the remaining nights, the wolves have leisure.

 • • • 

The horses stride into the world, the dapple gray and the white, in an opal shimmering, stride for stride. Their hooves touch the leafy mold of a forested hillside and their legs stretch, take their weight—like the riders, they are bemazed by the gulf, and chilled by the bitter winds.

The riders let them run. They have no knowledge where they are . . . but they have taken such strides before.

 • • • 

The sun came mottled through a grove of twisted shapes, saplings, trees, blighted as by some perpetual wind . . . such places as this, they had seen before, and they had passed gates before the one which hove up on the hill above them, still powerful, still baneful and flinging power into the heavy air.

The horses ran out their terror, slowed as the trees grew thicker, and walked a gentler course in a forest where, among the trees, stood stones half again taller than horse and rider together. They snorted their acquaintance with a foreign wind and the smell of this world, while the riders went in silence.

But in time they stopped of their own accord, and the riders only listened to the world, the whispering of wind and branch, and looked about them at this strangely twisted place.

“I do not like this,” Vanye said, and gave a twitch of his shoulders as he leaned forward against his saddle.

Horses dapple-gray and white, male and female, like the riders: Morgaine in black and silver, Vanye in forester's gray and green, her hair
qhal
-silver and his hair human-hued, pale brown beneath a peaked steel helm, wrapped round the rim with a white scarf . . . that was the look of them. They were lost, except for the road which led them—which they trusted they would find again: for
qhal
whenever they had built, had built much of the same pattern; and to leave the Gate and its confusion was the only thing that mattered, across such a gulf as that void at their backs, that cold nightmare which lay between them and a yesterday—Heaven knew how long lost.

They went armored and armed. Morgaine was liege and Vanye was liegeman; she was—what she was, and he was Man; that was the way of things between them.

“Nor do I care for it,” said Morgaine, and started the gray stud moving, a gentle, careful pace.

There was no retreat for them. That, they neither one mentioned. Vanye cast a quick look back, where the thin, spiral-twisted trees hid all view of that great span which was a
qhalur
Gate—little different than other gates they had seen, very like one he had known, in a land like this one—but this was not that land: he knew that well enough, knew it in the patterns of the rare leaves which grew in dispirited clumps at the end of limbs, lit by a wan and (he thought, and time proved) westering sun.

Although the gate behind them stood still powerful, and disturbed the air and worked at the nerves, it could not carry them back, and it could not carry them where they had now to go, or tell them their direction. For now, it was only downslope, from standing stone to standing stone, in a woods as unwholesome as the feeling in the air.

Life here—struggled. What had feet to flee, fled; what rooted, grew twisted and strange, from the trees to the brush, the shoots of which were tormented and knotted, the leaves of which were deformed and often curled upon themselves. And the horses laid back their ears and shook themselves from time to time, likeliest with that same feeling that made the fine hair stand up on the body and made the ears think that there was sound where no sound existed, until they had put more and more of the hill between them and the gate.

They rode in amid a jumble of stones and trees, finally, a leaning conspiracy of broken stone walls and twisted saplings none of which attained great age, but many of which lay rotten or broken by winds.

Vanye looked about him as his white mare danced and fretted beneath him, hooves ringing on half-buried paving in quick, nervous steps, echoing out of time to the pace of the iron-shod dapple gray. “This was a keep of some sort,” he murmured, and crossed himself anxiously, forgetting as he forgot in such moments, that his soul was damned.

“A great one,” Morgaine answered him, whether that was surmise or sure knowledge; and Vanye blinked and stared round him a second time as the horses moved and the ruin of walls unfolded. “We have found our road again.”

Hooves on stone. Buried pavings. Vanye conceived of the Road as a thing of all places, all gates, all skies: it was one Road, and the gates inevitably led to it.

“No sign of men,” he murmured.

“Perhaps there are none,” Morgaine answered him. “Or perhaps there are.”

He took nothing for granted. He gazed about him with a warrior's practiced eye, looking for recognizable points, things by which he could make order out of this jumbled buff and white stone. These flat stretches, these narrower places were the foundations of houses, craftshops, warehouses. People—uncountable
numbers of people would have dwelt in such a place, and plied their crafts; but how much land must they till, how feed so great a number in so rough a land, except they take their provender from war and tribute? It did not suggest peace.

He tried to imagine these ruins near him as they might have stood, bare foundations rising into forms which (he could not help it) very greatly resembled the keep and the barracks and the guesting-house of Ra-morij of his birth, in distant Andur-Kursh, a courtyard cobbled and usually having a standing puddle down the middle of it, where the scullery dumped its dirty water. It was gray cobbles in his vision, not the buff stone under the mare's hooves—was an aching touch of home, however cruel it had been in his living there.

He remembered other crossings of that gulf they had just passed, the night he had looked up to see two moons, and constellations strangely warped; that night he had first looked on a sea of black water, among drowning hills; a dawn that had risen and showed him a land unwalled by mountains for the first time in his life, horizons that went on forever and a sky which crushed him beneath its weight. He blinked this ruin about him clear again, in its desolation; and the cries of birds brought back keen memory, a presentiment of danger in the sea and the omen of the gray gulls, and the threat of moons unnaturally large.

A third blink, and it was forest, and they were black ravens that cried, and the stones held no present threat.

Behind them was dust, friends were long dead, and all they had known was changed and beyond recall, although the pain of parting was for them as recent as this morning and keen as a knife. He tried to be wise as his liege and not to think on it.

But when they rode over the shoulder of that hill, the ruin and the forest gave way to barren plains on their right hand, and sunset on their left. A wolf cried, somewhere beyond the hills.

Morgaine let slip the ring of her sword-belt, letting the dragon-hilted weapon which rode between her shoulders slide down to her side.

It had a name, that sword:
Changeling.
His own nameless blade was plain arrhendur steel. Besides his sword he had a bow of arrhendur make, and a quiver of good arrows, and a stone next his heart, in a small gray pyx, as a great lord had given it to him—as memory went, it had been very recent. But the worlds shifted, the dead went to dust; and they were in a place which made that small box no comfort to him, no more than that ill-omened blade his liege handled, on the hilt of which her hand rested.

Birds rose up from that horizon, black specks against the setting sun at that hour when birds would flock and quit the field; but not birds of the field, nothing so wholesome, gathered in hills so barren.

“Death,” Morgaine murmured at his side. “Carrion birds.”

A wolf howled, and another answered it.

 • • • 

They were there again in the twilight, yellow-eyed and slope-shouldered, and Chei ep Kantory gathered himself on his knees and gathered up the weapons he had, which were a human bone in one hand and a length of rusty chain in the other; he gathered himself to his feet and braced his back against the pole which his efforts and the abrasion of the chain had cut deeply but not enough. The iron held. The food was gone, the water-skin wrung out to its last drops of moisture.

It would end tonight, he thought, for he could not face another day, could not lie there racked with thirst and fever, listening to the dry rustle of wings, the flutter and flap and the wafts of carrion-stench as a questing beak would delve into some cranny where flesh remained. Tonight he would not be quick enough, the jaws that scored his armor, the quick, darting advances that had circled him last night, would find his throat and end it. Falwyn was gone, last but himself. The pack had dragged Falwyn's body to the length of the chain and fed and quarreled and battled while Chei sank against the post that was the pivot and the center of all his existence. They had worried the armor to rags among the bones; the ravens helped by day, till now there was nothing but the bones and shreds of flesh, too little, perhaps, to content them.

“Bastards,” he taunted them, but his voice was a croak like the birds', no more distinct. His legs shot pain through the tendons, his sight came and went. He did not know why he went on fighting. But he would not let them have his life unscathed, not do what ep Cnary had done, passing his food and water to Falwyn, to sit waiting for his death. Ep Cnary had lost a son at Gyllin-brook. It had been grief that killed him as much as the wolves. Chei grieved for a brother. But he was not disposed to quit. He worried at the chain hour by hour of his days, rubbing it back and forth on the post; he had strained himself against that limit to lay hands on the rusty links which wolfish quarrels over Desynd's body had pushed a hand's-breadth nearer: with his belt he had snagged it, some relic of a previous victim which was now his defense and his hope of freedom. He battered at the post now with all the force his legs and his failing strength could muster, and hoped that his weight could avail to snap it where he had worn it part way through; but it stood firm as the rock in which it was set: it was weathered oak, and it would not break.

The black-maned wolf moved closer, jaws agape, a distraction. It was always the notch-eared one that darted to the flank. He had seen this before, and knew her tricks. He spun and swung the chain, and notch-ear dodged: Black-mane then, and the gray one—he gave them names. He taunted them with a voice that rasped like the ravens'. “Here, bitch, try again. Try closer—”

They came in twos and threes this time. He turned with his back against the pole, his right foot failing him, swollen in the boot and the chain, a lifeless
thing at the end of his leg. It was that which the wolf caught, driving in with serpent-quickness, and he swung the chain at it, jabbed down onto its shoulders with the jagged bone and felt it snap on tough hide and bone. Jaws closed on his armor at knee and elbow, teeth snapping in front of his face and a wolf dodging with a yelp as he swung the chain in the limited range he had. The pack closed about him in a snarling maelstrom, out of which the flap of wings, the thunder of riders—he saw them in a whirling confusion, the pale horses, the gleam of metal, the pale banner of hair a-flutter in the wind—

—back, then, to that moment. The wolves shied away, their grip leaving him, all but the gray bitch, and a sword flashed, the rider of the white horse leaning from the saddle to strike—

He cried out then, falling against the post, which did not belong on that river-bank. It began again. He fell, and the riders, afoot, walking their horses across the debris of bones, came to take him to torment. That was the worst cruelty, that he was lost in a dream wherein the end began it all again.

 • • • 

The man fought him. Well he might, though there was little strength left in him. “Have care!” Morgaine cried as the chain swung, but Vanye jerked his head out of the way, guarded himself against a knee-thrust, and with the press of his weight and a twist at the arm, disarmed the wild-haired, armored man of the chain he wielded. It did not end the fight, but he had the man, then, beyond any dispute, gripped in both arms and carried struggling to the ground.

“Be still,” he said in his own language, for the man was human. “Be still. We are not your enemies.”

That did no good. “We are not here to harm you,” Morgaine said in the
qhalur
tongue. And in the human: “Hold him still.”

Vanye saw what she was about and edged further from the post, dragging the struggling man with him and drawing the ankle chain taut between the man and the post, as Morgaine took that small black weapon of hers and burned it. A smell of heated metal went up. One link reddened and bent under the pull, and the man writhed and fought his hold, but Vanye freed a hand and laid it on his cheek, shielding his vision from what a man of simple beliefs might not want to see, while iron sparked and sputtered and parted.

“There, man, there. You are free of that.”

“Tie him,” Morgaine said, being the crueler and the more practical of them both.

“I must,” Vanye said, and patted the man's face and shared a look with him, one glance into blue and desperate eyes that sought—perhaps—some hope of him, before he took the man in both his arms, wrestled him over face down and sat on him till he could work loose one of the leather thongs from his belt and tie his hands behind him.

After that, the man seemed sane, for he stopped fighting and lay inert, only turning his face out of the unwholesome dirt, his cheek against the ground, his eyes open and staring elsewhere as if nothing that proceeded could interest him further.

He was thin, beneath the armor. There was filth all about, a stench of death and human waste and wolf. Vanye got up and brushed himself off, and bent to drag the man up to his feet with him.