The Complete Morgaine (118 page)

But he had felt the gate-force in his bones. He had stared into the void often enough to know it was hell itself that beckoned there.

He knew what made a man like Gault. He knew that there was, for himself and his liege, no honor such as the world counted it, and that the most irresponsible thing in the world was to have let a man of that company back there
escape alive, to bring pursuit on them, for if they should fall—Morgaine had told him—the deaths would be . . . everything: all that had ever been and might be. In this she was telling the truth as she believed it, though she had lied to him in lesser things. On this one item of faith he committed himself body and soul. He even hoped—in the secrecy of his heart—that God might forgive him. For all the murder, God might forgive him and forgive her, if it was somehow right, what they did, and they were not deceived.

But he wished with all his soul, that he could feel as keen a remorse as once he might have felt for the men he had killed back there. He could not find it again. There was only horror. There was keenest anguish—but that mostly for the horses; and very little for the men, even of his own kind. He was afraid when he knew that, as if something were slipping irrevocably away from him, or he from it, and he did not know his way back from this point.

 • • • 

“Where have we gotten to?” Morgaine asked their guide when they had come still a little higher up the road, up where the road bent again away from the dawn and toward the still-shadowed sky; and the fire below them was a rolling of white smoke across the tops of trees. “Can we get off this road and onto the old one?”

“It is not safe,” Chei said. His face by the dawning light was haggard and his hair wild, with bits of dead leaves stuck in it. His eyes held a feverish look, as well a man's might, which had seen what they had. “If you want ambush, lady, that is where to find it.”

“Where were they going before dawn?” Vanye asked harshly, for that was the thing that made no sense to him; it outraged him, that men had been so foolish, and he had had to pay them for it. He felt
that
, when he wished to Heaven he could feel something like conscience.

One of them, Mother of God, had been hardly more than sixteen; and tears stung his eyes, at the same time he could have struck anything in his path.

“I do not know,” Chei said. “I do not know.”

“We assume they had reason,” Morgaine said shortly. “We assume it was on this road and we may yet meet it, to someone's sorrow—do you understand me, Chei?”

“I do not know,” Chei protested, shaking his head.

“You took a great chance,” Morgaine said, “running for that horse back there in the woods. If not for that white shirt, you would be dead. Eight men are—lest they betray us. Do you still understand me, Chei?”

“Yes, lady,” Chei said in a faint voice.

“Are we yet off Gault's land? Where is his border?”

“I do not know.—It is truth! We fought north of here. My lord Ichandren—is dead. Gault's forces are on the road at night—God knows, God only knows,
lady, what they were doing, or where more of them are—That fire will draw them, but it will draw other attention too—God knows who, or whether they will think it an accident or set. It is Gault's land down there. His men would not burn his own land. Neither—” He hesitated a breath. “Neither have we ever fired the land we move in. That road will be Gault's when it has burned out. It will be black sticks and open to the eye, and it will be so much more land he can march through.”

It was indignation, that last. Vanye leaned on the saddlebow and frowned—it was a change in Chei's voice and bearing, was even daring of a Man toward a
qhal
who threatened him, and with corpses a-smolder in the forest to prove it. “What,” Vanye said, “‘we'? Friends of yours? And how will
we
fare with them?”

Chei's mouth stayed open an instant. There was a wild flicker in his eyes, only the briefest of moments. Then his glance settled from him onto Morgaine and back again. “The same as I,” he said. “They will kill us all, you on sight, me when they recognize me for one of Ichandren's men. Prisoners do not come back. But if we go back to the Old Road, they will take us for Gault's and kill us just the same.”

It was wretched enough to be the truth.

“And where are they?” Morgaine asked. “Close enough to cause that band of Gault's to ride at night? What are we going into?”

“War,” Chei said, “war, lady, beginning with that fire down there and eight men dead. If things had settled to any truce before—Gault will lay that fire to the account of human folk, and human folk will know that when they see the fire. Up there in the hills they will know it, and they will move down to strike while they can, while Gault's men are occupied putting it out—Gault knows
that
too; and he will throw every man he can spare out toward the hills to prevent it. That is the way things are. We must go up, by the remote trails, we must keep moving by night, and hope we do not have to give account of ourselves—there will be ambushes laid on every road Gault's men will take.”

It seemed like the truth. It seemed very much like the truth, after so much of deception and mistake.

“Should we believe you?” Morgaine asked. “You are twice
wrong
, Chei.”

“I do not want to die.” Chei's voice trembled. He leaned forward in the saddle, shirt-clad shoulders taut in the chill wind. “Before God, lady—if we go the way you want we will run head-on into ambush. I know that I have been wrong. I have no excuse, except I hoped we could go faster, except—I lied—how well I knew the land down there. Here, truly, here is the place I know. I have lived to get here. And I will not, on my life, be wrong again. I swear it to you.”

“We dare not tire the horses,” Vanye muttered. “
Liyo
—whatever we meet, we cannot push them now.”

Morgaine looked at him. For a moment there was that look in her eyes he knew and dreaded—that impatience that would kill them. Then reason returned.

“I know a place,” Chei said very quietly, “not far from here, to camp.”

 • • • 

It was a place well-hidden among the trees, where a spring broke from the rocks of the hill—not a great deal of water, Vanye saw as they rode in, but sufficient. He climbed down from the saddle, finding suddenly that his very bones ached, and that the mail weighed far more on his shoulders than it had when he had put it on two days ago. “Let me,” he said, catching up Siptah's reins while Morgaine dismounted: the gray stud had decided on war with the stolen bay gelding, and his ears were back and his movements full of equine cunning—not outright challenge, but going toward it, in little increments of aggression that meant all three of their horses unsettled.

“He hates that horse,” Morgaine said, and reached and jerked at the gray's chin-strap, turned his attention and rubbed the nose the stallion offered her like a maid's fat pony. “I will take him in hand, no mind. It is Arrhan has him disturbed.”

A heat came to his face. It was as close to reproach on that score as she had come, and it flew straight to a sore spot.

While Chei, wisely, drew his horse well off out of reach in the little clearing among the pines—for pines they were, at last a tree like trees of Andur-Kursh; and a little scraggle of grass among the rocks.

But the while he unsaddled the mare, Vanye shot glances Chei's way, past Arrhan's shoulder—“Heaven knows,” he said to Morgaine, “what is in that gear he has gotten along with the horse.”

“We will find out,” Morgaine said quietly, the while she took down Chei's armor, which Siptah had carried this far. “He will have his own gear to carry when we ride on, that much I know.—Hush, hush.” She reached and smothered a nicker from the gray stud, and gave several sharp tugs at the halter-strap. “Do not thee make us trouble, thou.”

The Baien gray muttered and shook his head and Arrhan fretted beside him. “It is the fighting,” Vanye said. “Among other things.”

“It is the other things,” Morgaine said, and looked at him in a way that, vexed as she was, said that nature was what it was—the which stung twice over.

“I will be rid of her.”

“I did not ask.”

More than Chei's horse was inconvenient. He clenched his jaw and took off the mare's saddle and rubbed her down from head to foot, the while Morgaine did the same for the gray and put him in better humor.

Then Chei came walking over, bringing the saddlebags which belonged to the bay.

And with a harness-knife in his hand.

Chei lifted that hand and held it out hilt-foremost, letting the saddlebags to the ground. “I do not think you want me to have this,” he said; and as Vanye reached out and took it: “Search the bags if you like. Or myself.”

Vanye stood staring at him. It was a point of honor Chei put in question.

“Do that,” Morgaine said, having no compunction in such things.

Or because her liegeman hesitated.

“Come with me,” Vanye said to Chei. That much courtesy he returned, not to shame the man. He took him aside, against the rocks, and ascertained, to their mutual discomfort, that there was no second knife.

“I would like,” Chei said, staring past him while he searched, “to borrow a razor. I would like to shave. I would like to have a knife to defend myself. I would like to have the blanket that came with this gear. I lost yours in the woods. I am freezing.”

“Take the blanket,” he said; and, finding nothing: “As for the razor—” He thought more of the man's suicide with it, and discarded the idea. It was not the choice of a man so determined to live. Nor was the choice which had brought him back to them—mere cowardice, in a man who had survived what this one had. “I will lend you mine.—I will search the rest of the gear, understand.”

“I did not doubt it,” Chei said.

 • • • 

Smoke drifted up in a general haze about the hills; Vanye perched low on the rocks to see what he could of the direction of the fire, and climbed down again to Morgaine's side, where she worked. “Our cookfire will draw no notice,” he said.

“Is it burning east?”

“East and quickly east. There is a great deal of undergrowth. I do not think they will be able to stop it till it comes to open fields.” It still troubled him, about the burning; and most, the thought of the horses haunted him. “They may not get
through
those roads if the wind shifts. Nothing may.”

Morgaine said nothing for the moment, as she stirred a little salt into the meal. Then: “Would we could assure that.”

Vanye dropped down to his heels and rested his arms on his knees, thinking of that map Chei had drawn for them, how far they had come and how far there was yet to go, northward to a place called Tejhos, where a gate stood, and into a land utterly
qhal
.

And never quite did Chei leave his attention, as he was under Morgaine's observation from where she sat working.

It was a stranger that emerged from under that blond thatch of hair and
straggling beard. With one of their cooking-pans full of water from the trickle of a stream that served them, with the borrowed razor, the lump of soap, and Morgaine's tortoise-shell comb, Chei had washed his hair and braided the sides of it and the crown of it, which the sun was drying to its straw color; and sat thereafter leaning forward and doggedly scraping the lathered beard off.

It was a lean face, sun-darkened above and a little paler where the beard had covered it. It was a well-favored face, and unexpectedly young—hardly more than two score years, if that: nothing of madness about it, nothing but a young man of whom no one would expect an older man's experience, and who showed a meticulous if oddly timed determination to present a better appearance to them. Chei was shivering the while, wrapped in his blanket as far as his waist, in the thin shirt above, and scraping his skin raw with a keen razor and cold water, his wet braids dripping water onto his shoulders and adding to his chill.

Perhaps it was his new freedom, given a horse, given the wind of his own hills blowing on his face.

A man of Andur-Kursh could understand such a feeling . . . who knew he would never come to his own highlands again; who found something familiar in the chill of the wind and the smell of pines and the manner of a young man who for some reason had recovered his pride again—and perhaps his truthfulness.

Chei came back to them, to return the razor and the pan and the comb, bringing his blanket with him and settling with a shiver at the tiny fire.

“Here,” Vanye said, and offered him his own cup of tea—receiving a look of earnest gratitude in return, so natural an expression, of a face so changed and eyes so strangely shy of them now Chei had restored what must be his proper self—

—A golden meadow . . . a parting. His cousin riding away, last friend, save his liege.

And there was something so like himself in this young man who attached himself to them, whose glances toward him were earnest and worried and wanting—perhaps nothing more than friendliness. A man could grow that desperate.

He remembered—remembered his house, and his brothers, and being the bastard son, gotten on a Chya prisoner in a Nhi house and lodged under the same roof as his father's heirs. Generally both his brothers had tormented him. More rarely his middle brother had mitigated that. And to him, in those days, that had seemed some sign that brother secretly loved him.

Strangely—in their last meeting, there had been something of that left, small as it had always been.

Now it was that desperate gesture Chei had made, that glance directed at
him, which touched that recollection: see, this is myself, this is Chei, am I not better than what you thought of me?

It ached, deep as an old wound. On so small a thing, his heart turned around and found the man no threat at all—which was foolish, perhaps; he told himself so. He was always too forgiving; he knew that of himself, that his brothers had set that habit in him—a foolish conviction that there was always the hope of a hope of something changing, a misguided faith which had kept him in misery all those years.