The Complete Morgaine (59 page)

Morgaine only looked at him, with that impenetrable stare, so that he wondered for a moment had there been searchers at all, or only inquiry.

But Morgaine had promised him; he thrust the doubt from his mind, effort though it needed.

“Jhirun,” Morgaine said suddenly. Jhirun swallowed a bit of bread as if it had gone dry, and only slightly turned her head, responding to her. “Jhirun, there are kinsmen of yours here.”

Jhirun nodded, and her eyes slid uneasily toward Morgaine, wary and desperate.

“They came to Aren,” Morgaine said, “hunting you. And you are known there. There are some Aren-folk who know your name and say that you are halfling yourself, and in some fashion they blame you for some words you spoke against their village.”

“Lord,” Jhirun said in a thin voice, and edged against Vanye, as if he could prevent such questions. He sat stiffly, uncomfortable in the touch of her.

“A quake,” said Morgaine, “struck Hiuaj after we three parted company.
There was heavy damage at Aren, where I was; and the Barrows-folk came then. They said there was nothing left of Barrows-hold.”

Jhirun shivered.

“I know,” said Morgaine, “that you cannot seek safety among your own kinsmen . . . or with the Aren-folk. Better that you had remained lost, Jhirun Ela's-daughter. They have asked me for you, and I have refused; but that is for now. Vanye knows—he will tell you—that I am not generous. I am not at all generous. And there will come a time when we cannot shelter you. I do not care what quarrel drove you out of Barrows-hold in the first place; it does not concern me. I do not think that you are dangerous; but your enemies are. And for that reason you are not welcome with us. You have a horse. You have half our food, if you wish it; Vanye and I can manage. And you would be wise to take that offer and try some other route through these hills, be it to hide and live in some cave for the rest of your days. Go. Seek some place after the Ohtija have dispersed. Go into those mountains and look for some place that has no knowledge of you. That is my advice to you.”

Jhirun's hand crept to Vanye's arm. “Lord,” she said faintly, plaintively.

“There was a time,” Vanye said, hardly above a breath, “when Jhirun did not say what she might have said, when she did not say all that she knew of you, and stayed by me when it was not convenient. And I will admit to you that I gave her a promise . . . I know—that I had no right to give any promise, and she should not have believed me, but she did not know that. I have told her that she should not have believed me; but would it be so wrong,
liyo,
to let her go where we go? I do not know what other hope she has.”

Morgaine stared at him fixedly, and for a long, interminably long moment, said nothing. “Thee says correctly,” she breathed at last. “Thee had no right.”

“All the same,” he said, very quietly, “I ask it, because I told her that I would take her to safety.”

Morgaine turned that gaze on Jhirun. “Run away,” she said. “I give you a better gift than he gave. But on his word, stay, if you have not the sense to take it. Unlike Vanye, I bind myself to nothing. Come with us as long as you can, and for as long as it pleases me.”

“Thank you,” Jhirun said almost soundlessly, and Vanye pressed her arm, disengaging it from his. “Go aside,” he said to her. “Rest. Let matters alone now.”

Jhirun drew away from them, stood up, left the shelter for the brush, beyond the firelight. They were alone. Across the camp sounded the wail of an infant, the lowing of an animal, the sounds that had been constant all the evening.

“I am sorry,” Vanye said, bowed himself to the ground, expected even then her anger, or worse, her silence.

“I was not there,” Morgaine said quietly. “I take your word for what you did, and why. I will try. She will stay our pace or she will not; I cannot help her.
That
—” She gestured with a glance toward the camp. “That also has its desires, that are Jhirun's.”

“They believe,” he said, “that there is a way out for them. That it lies through the Wells. That they will find a land on the other side.”

She said nothing to that.

“
Liyo
—” he said carefully, “you could do that—you could give them what they believe—could you not?”

A tumult had arisen, as others had arisen throughout the evening, on the far side of the camp, distant shouts carrying to them: disputes, dissents, among terrified people.

Morgaine set her face and shook her head abruptly. “I could, yes, but I will not.”

“You know why they have followed you. You know that.”

“I care nothing for their beliefs. I will not.”

He thought of the falling towers of Ohtij-in:
only a hand's breadth closer to the sea.
Jhirun had laughed, attempting humor. Somewhere the child was still crying. Among the rabble there were the innocent, the harmless.

“Their land,” he said, “is dying. It will come in the lifetime of some that are now alive. And to open the Gates for them—would that not—?”

“Their time is finished, that is all. It comes to all worlds.”

“In Heaven's good name,
liyo
—”

“Vanye. Where should we take them?”

He shook his head helplessly. “Are we not to leave this land?”

“There are no sureties beyond any Gate.”

“But if there is no other hope for them—”

Morgaine set
Changeling
across her knees. The dragon eyes of the hilt winked gold in the firelight, and she traced the scales with her fingers. “Two months ago, Vanye, where were you?”

He blinked, mind thrust back across Gates, across mountains: a road to Aenor, a winter storm. “I was an outlaw,” he said, uncertain what he was bidden remember, “and the Myya were close on my trail.”

“And four?”

“The same.” He laughed uneasily. “My life was much of the same, just then.”

“I was in Koris,” she said. “Think of it.”

Laughter perished in him, in a dizzying gap of a hundred years. Irien: massacre—ancestors of his had served Morgaine's cause in Koris, and they were dust. “But it
was
a hundred years, all the same,” he said. “You slept; however you remember it, it was still a hundred years, and what you remember cannot change that.”

“No. Gates are outside time. Nothing is fixed. And in this land—once—an unused Gate was flung wide open, uncontrolled, and poured men through into a land that was not theirs. That was not
theirs,
Vanye. And they took that land . . . men that speak a common tongue with Andur-Kursh; that remember
me.
”

He sat very still, the pulse beating in his temples until he was aware of little else. “I knew,” he said at last, “that it might be; that Jhirun and her kindred are Myya.”

“You did not tell me this.”

“I did not know how. I did not know how to put it together; I thought how things would stray the Gate into Andur-Kursh, lost—to die there; and could not men—”

“Who remember
me,
Vanye.”

He could not answer; he saw her fold her arms about her knees, hands locked, and bow her head, heard her murmur something in that tongue that was hers, shaking her head in despair.

“It was a thousand years,” he objected.

“There is no time between Gates,” she answered him with an angry frown; and saw his puzzlement, his shake of the head, and relented. “It makes no difference. They have had their time, both those that were born to this land and those that invaded it. It is gone. For all of them, it is gone.”

Vanye frowned, found a stick in his hands, and broke it, once, twice, a third time, measured cracks. He cast the bits into the fire. “They will starve before they drown. The mountains will give them ground whereon to stand, but the stones will not feed them. Would it be wrong,
liyo
, would it be wrong—once, to help them?”

“As once before it happened here? Whose land, shall I give them, Vanye?”

He did not have an answer. He drew a breath and in it was the stench of the rotting land. Down in the camp the tumult had never ceased. Shrieks suddenly pierced the heavier sounds, seeming closer.

Morgaine looked in that direction and frowned. “Jhirun has been gone overlong.”

His thoughts leaped in the same direction. “She would have had more sense,” he said, gathering himself to his feet; but in his mind was the girl's distraught mood, Morgaine's words to her, his dismissal of her. The horses grazed, the bay mare with them, still saddled, although the girths were loosened.

Morgaine arose, touched his arm. “Stay. If she has gone, well sped; she survives too well to fear she would have gone that way.”

The shouting drew nearer: there was the sound of horses on the road, of wild voices attending. Vanye swore, and started of a sudden for their own horses. There was no time left: riders were coming up their very hill, horses struggling on the wet slope.

And Jhirun raced into the firelight, a wild flash of limbs and ragged skirts. The riders came up after, white-haired lord and two white-haired house guards.

Jhirun raced for the shelter, as Vanye slipped the ring of his longsword and took it in hand: but Morgaine was before him. Red fire leaped from her hand, touching smoke in the drenched grass. Horses shied: Kithan—first of the three—flung up his arm against the sight and reined back, stopping his men.

And at that distance he faced Morgaine. He shouted a word in his own tongue at her, in an ugly voice, and then in a shriek of desperation: “Stop them, stop them!”

“From what,” she asked, “Kithan?”

“They have murdered us,” the
qujal
cried, his voice shaking. “The others—stop them; you have the power to stop them if you will.”

There was ugly murmuring in the camp; they could hear it even here: it grew nearer—men, coming toward the slope.

“Get the horses,” Morgaine said.

Two lights appeared behind the screen of young trees, lights that moved; and a dark mass moved behind them. The halflings turned to look, terror in their faces. Vanye spun about, encountered Jhirun, seized her and thrust her again toward the shelter. “Pick up everything!” he shouted into her dazed face.

She moved, seized up blankets, everything that lay scattered, while he ran for the horses, adjusted harness, that of their own horses and Jhirun's bay mare as well. The stubborn gelding shied as he started to mount: he seized the saddlehorn and swung up in a maneuver he had hardly used since he was a boy, armored as he was: and he saw to his horror that Morgaine had made herself a shield for the three
qujal,
they at her back, the mob advancing not rapidly, but with mindless force.

He grasped Siptah's reins, leaning from the saddle, and spurred forward, through the
qujal,
reined in with Siptah just behind Morgaine.

She stood still, with him at her back; and faced the oncoming men afoot. Vanye stared at what came, panic surging in him, memory of the courtyard—of a beast without reason in it.

And in the torchlight at the head of them he saw Barrows-folk, and Fwar . . . Fwar, his scarred face no better for a dark slash across it. They came with knives and with staves; and with them, panting in his haste, came the priest Ginun.

“
Liyo!
” Vanye said, with all the force in him. “To horse!”

She moved, questioning nothing, turned and sprang to the saddle in a single move. He kept his eye on Fwar in that instant, and saw murder there. In the next moment Morgaine had swung Siptah around to face them, curbing him hard, so that he shied up a little. She unhooked
Changeling,
held it across the saddlebow.

“Halflings!” someone shouted, like a curse; but from other quarters within the mob there were outcries of terror.

Morgaine rode Siptah a little distance across the face of the crowd, and paced him back again, a gesture of arrogance; and still they feared her, and gave back, keeping the line she drew.

“Fwar!” she cried aloud. “Fwar! What is it you want?”

“Him!” cried Fwar, a beast-shout of rage. “Him, who killed Ger and Awan and Efwy.”

“You led us here,” shouted one of the sons of Haz. “You have no intention of helping us. It was a lie. You will ruin the Wells and ruin us. If this is not so, tell us.”

And there arose a bawling of fear from the crowd, a voice as from open throat, frightening in its intensity. They began to press forward.

A rider broke through the
qujal
from the rear: Vanye jerked his head about, saw Jhirun, a great untidy bundle on the saddle before her, saw the dark arm of the mob that had broken through the woods attempting to encircle them; Jhirun cried warning of it.

In blind instinct Vanye whirled in the other direction—saw a knife leave Fwar's hand. He flung up his arm: it hit the leather and fell in the mud, under his hooves. Jhirun's cry of warning still rang in his ears.

The mob surged forward and Morgaine retreated. Vanye ripped out his sword, and fire burned from Morgaine's hand, felling one of the Barrowers. The front rank wavered with an outcry of horror.

“Angharan!” someone cried; and some tried to flee, abandoning their weapons and their courage; but weapons were hurled from another quarter, stones. Siptah shied and screamed shrilly.

“Lord!” Jhirun cried; Vanye reined about as Shiua came at them, seeking to attack the horses. The gelding shied back, and Vanye laid about him with desperate blows, the
qujal
striking what barehanded blows they could.

Vanye did not turn to see what had befallen his liege; he had enemies of hers enough before him. He wielded the longsword with frenzied strength, spurred the gelding recklessly into the attackers and scattered their undisciplined ranks, only then daring turn, hearing screams behind him.

Bodies lay thickly on the slope; fires burned here and there in the brush; the mob broke in flight, scattering down the hillside in advance of Siptah's charge.