The Complete Morgaine (112 page)

“Then why am I?” Chei asked harshly, with no little desperation.

“You are not,” Morgaine said. “You are a considerable inconvenience.”

It was not what Chei had, perhaps, expected. And Morgaine took a slow sip of tea, set the cup down and poured more for herself, the while Chei said nothing at all.

“We cannot let you free,” Morgaine said. “We do not care for this Gault; and having you fall straightway into his hands would be no kindness to you and no good thing for us either. Quiet is our preference. So you will go with us, and somewhere we shall have to find you a horse—by one thing and the other I suppose you are familiar with horses. Am I wrong?”

Chei stared at her, somewhere between incredulity and panic. “No,” Chei said faintly. “No, lady. I know horses.”

“And our business is not truly needful for you to know, is it? Only that it has become yours, as your safety has become conditional on ours—as I assure you it is. We will find you a horse—somewhere hereabouts, I trust. Meanwhile you will ride with Vanye—as soon as you are fit to ride. In the meanwhile you eat our food, sleep in our blankets, use our medicines, and repay us with insults.” All of this so, so softly spoken. “This last will change. You have naught to do today but lie in the sun, in what modesty or lack of it will not affect me, I do assure you. You do not move me.—How wide are Gault's lands? How far shall we ride before we cease to worry about his attacking us?”

Chei sat there a moment with a worried look. Then he bit his lip, shifted forward and pulled a half-burned stick out of the coals to draw in the dirt with it. “Here you found me. Here the road. Back here—” He swept a wide, vague area with the stick. “The gate from which you came.” The stick moved on to inscribe the line of the road running past the hill of the wolves, and up and up northward. “On either side here is woods. Beyond that—” He gestured out beyond the trees, where the river was, and where meadow shone gold. “The forest is scattered—a woods here, another there, at some distance from the road.”

“You are well familiar with this lord's land,” Morgaine said.

The stick wavered, a shiver that had no wind to cause it. “The north and the west I know. But this last I do not forget. I watched where they took us.” The stick moved again, tracing the way, and slashed a line across the road. “This is the Sethoy, this river. It comes from the mountains. A bridge crosses it, an old bridge. The other side of it, northward across the plain, lord Gault's own woods begin; and his pastures; and his fields; and there is his hold, well back from the old Road. In the hills, a village. A road between. He has that too. There are roads besides the Old Road, there is a track goes across it from Morund and up again by the hills; there is another runs by Gyllin-brook—that runs along these hills and through them, up toward the village. None of these are safe for you.”

“Further over on either side,” Morgaine said, and moved around the fire to
indicate with her finger the left and the right of the road. “Are there other roads?”

“Beyond the western hills.” Chei retreated somewhat from her presence, and used his stick to trace small lines.

“Habitations?”

“High in the hills. No friends of any strangers. They keep their borders against every outsider: now and again the lords from the north come down and kill a number of them—to prove whatever that proves. Who knows?”

There was perhaps a barb in that. Morgaine did not deign to notice it. She pointed to the other side. “And here to the east?”

“
Qhalur
holdings. Lord Herot and lord Sethys, with their armies.”

“What would you counsel?”

Chei did not move for a moment. Then he pointed with the stick to the roads on the west. “There. Through the woods, beyond Gault's fields. Between Gault and the hillmen.”

“But one reaches the trail by the old Road.”

“There, lady, just short of Gault's woods. I can guide you—from there. I
will
guide you, if you want to avoid Gault's hold. I want the same.”

“Where are
you
from?” Vanye asked, the thing he had not said, and moved close on the other side. “Where is your home?”

Chei drew in a breath and pointed close above Morund land. “There.”

“Of what hold?” Morgaine asked.

“I was a free man,” Chei said. “There are some of us—who come down from the hills.”

“Well-armed free men,” said Vanye.

Chei's eyes came at once back to him, alarmed.

“Are there many of your sort?” Morgaine asked.

Fear, then. True fear. “Fewer than there were,” Chei said at last. “My lord is dead.
That
is my crime. That I was both armed, and a free Man. So once was Gault. But they took him. Now he is
qhal
—inside.”

“Is that,” Vanye asked, “the general fate of prisoners?”

“It happens,” Chei said, looking anxiously from one to the other side of him.

“Tell us,” Morgaine said, shifting position to point at the road where it continued. “What lies ahead?”

“Other
qhal
. Tejhos. Mante.”

“What sort of place?” Vanye asked.

“I have no knowledge. A
qhalur
place.
You
would know, better than I.”

“But Gault knows them.”

“I am sure,” Chei said in a hoarse small voice. “Perhaps you do.”

“Perhaps we do not,” Morgaine said softly, very softly. “Describe the way north. On the old Road.”

Chei hesitated, then moved the stick and drew the line northward with a large westward jog halfway before an eastward trend. “Woods and hills,” he said. “A thousand small trails. Above this—is
qhalur
land. The High Lord. Skarrin.”

“Skarrin. Of Mante.” Morgaine rested her chin on her hand, her brow knit, her fist clenched, and for a long moment were no more questions. Then: “And what place had Men in this land?”

Unhesitatingly, the stick indicated the west. “There.” And the east, about Morund. “And there. Those in the west and those who live in
qhalur
lands. But in the west are the only free Men.”

“Of which you were one.”

“Of which I was one, lady.” There was no flinching in that voice, which had become as quiet as Morgaine's own. “You are kinder than Gault, that is all I know. If a man has to swear to some
qhal
to live—better you than the lord that Skarrin sent us. I will get you through Gault's lands. And if I serve you well—believe me and trust my leading when you come near humans, and I will guide you through.”

“Against your own,” Vanye said.

“I was Gault's prisoner. Do you think human folk would trust me again? There have been too many spies. No one is alive who went through Gyllin-brook, except me. My lord Ichandren is dead. My brother is dead—Thank God's mercy for both.” For a moment his voice did break, but he sat still, his hands on his knees. “No one is alive to vouch for me. I will not raise a hand against human folk. But I do not want to die for nothing. One of my comrades on that hill—he let the wolves have him. The second night. And I knew then I did not want to die.”

Tears spilled, wet trails down his face. Chei looked at neither of them. His face was still impassive. There were only the tears.

“So,” Morgaine said after a moment, “is it an oath you will give us?”

“I swear to you—” The eyes stayed fixed beyond her. “I swear to you—every word is true. I will guide you. I will guide you away from all harm. On my soul I will not lie to you, lady. Whatever you want of me.”

Vanye drew in a breath and wrapped his arms about him, staring down at the man. Such terms he had sworn, himself,
ilin
-oath, by the scar on his palm and the white scarf about the helm—outcast warrior, taken up by a lord, an oath without recourse or exception. And hearing that oath, he felt something swell up in his throat—memory of that degree of desperation; and a certain remote jealousy, that of a sudden this man was speaking to Morgaine as his liege, when he knew nothing of her; or of him; or what he was undertaking.

God in Heaven
, liyo,
do you trust this man, and do you take him on
my
terms—have I trespassed too far, come too close to you, that now you take in another stray dog?

“I will take your oath,” Morgaine said. “I will put you in Vanye's charge.”

 • • • 

“Do you believe him?” Morgaine asked him later, in the Kurshin tongue, while Chei lay naked in the sun on a blanket, sleeping, perhaps—far enough for decency on the grassy downslope of the riverside, but still visible from the campfire—sun is the best thing for such wounds, Morgaine had said. Sun and clean wind.

Not mentioning the salve and the oil and the matter of the man's fouled armor, which there was some salvaging, perhaps, with oil and work.

“A man swears,” Vanye said. “The oath is as good as the man. But,” he said after a moment, kneeling there beside the dying fire, “a man might sell his soul, for something of value to him. Such as his life.”

She looked at him for a long time. “The question then, is for what coin, would it not be?”

“He believes,” Vanye said, “in witchcraft.”

“Does thee not, now?”

Vanye lifted his shoulders, a small, uncomfortable movement, and shifted his eyes momentarily toward the dragon sword, which had never left her side, not in all this perilous day. Its ruby eyes gleamed wickedly in the gold hilt; it reminded him of that stone which he carried against his own heart, a foreign, a dangerous thing. “I have never seen any witch-working. Only things
qhal
have made, most of which I can manage—” A sense of dislocation came on him, a sense of panic, fear of what he had become, remorse for the things that he had lost. “Or I have become a witch myself,” he murmured. “Perhaps that is what witchcraft is. Chei ep Kantory would think so.”

There was a great deal, he thought, on Morgaine's mind. But for a moment he had distracted her, and she looked at him in that way that once had made him vastly uncomfortable. Her eyes were gray and clear to the depths of that gray like the devouring sea; her lashes were, like no human and no
qhal
he had ever seen at such range, dark gray next the lid and shading to pale at the tips, and that shading was on her brows but nowhere about her hair, which was altogether silver. Halfling, she had said. Sometimes he thought it true. Sometimes he did not know at all.

“Thee regrets?”

He shook his head finally. It was the most that he could say. He drew a great breath. “I have learned your lesson,
liyo.
I look around me. That is all. Never back.”

Morgaine hissed between her teeth and flung a bit of burned stick, that with which Chei had drawn the map. It was more than her accustomed restlessness.
She rested with her arms about her knees, and shifted to hunch forward, her arms tucked against her chest, gazing into nothing at all.

He was silent. It seemed wisest.

It was their lives she was thinking on. He was sure of that. She was wiser than he—he was accustomed to think so. He missed things, not knowing what he should see, things which Morgaine did not miss. She had taught him—skills which might well horrify their prisoner: the working of gates, the writing of
qhal
, the ideas which
qhal
held for truth—who swore by no god and looked (some of them) back toward a time that they had ruled and (some of them) forward to a time that they should recover their power, at whatever cost to the immortal souls they disavowed.

Qhal
in most ancient times had taken Men, so Morgaine had told him, and changed them, and scattered them through the gates, along with plants and creatures of every sort, until Time itself abhorred their works and their confusing what Was, and mixed all elements in one cataclysmic Now—the which thought chilled his much-threatened soul, and unhinged the things Holy Church had taught him and which he thought he knew beyond any doubt.

Qhal
had taken Men to serve them because they were most
qhal
-like . . . and thereby the ancient
qhal
-lords had made a dire mistake: for Men in their shorter lives, multiplied far more rapidly, which simple fact meant that Men threatened them.

In his own land, in Kursh and Andur, divided by the mountain ridge, the snowy Mother of Eagles—there
qhal
had been reduced virtually to rumor, hunted for the most part, tolerated in a few rare cases—so frost-haired Morgaine had been tolerated by the High Kings a hundred years before his birth, while in his own ruined age even his own hair had been too light a brown for Nhi clan's liking. And in this place—

In this place,
qhal
had adjusted that balance.
The lords from the north come down and kill a number of them
—Chei had said of
qhalur
raids on the hillfolk. To prove whatever that proves. Who knows?

Vanye knew. He knew it along with the other things that a man like Chei would not, he hoped, comprehend. That understanding of callous murder, that perspective which allowed him to fathom
qhalur
motives—seemed to Vanye a gulf like the gulf of life and death, the knowledge that everything behind them was dust.

What became of your cousin? Chei had asked. But he could not answer that either: he could explain to no one, except the likes of lord Gault, behind whose human eyes, Chei had said, resided a
qhal
—

—an old one, Vanye thought. Or one wounded or sick to death. A
qhal
who had learned a single way to overcome humankind, by the gates and the power they had to conserve a dying mind in a body not its own.

Qhal who use the gates
, he thought suddenly, and felt a touch of ice about his heart.

“Liyo,”
he said. “If
qhal
are using the gates here—what will prevent them going where they will?”