The Golden Sword (9 page)

Besha shook her head, mute.

“Did you count upon us, returning, to intercept the thieves? Surely you did not think to catch them, upon inferior mounts, when they had such a lead?”

What could be seen of Besha’s face was as purple as her feathers.

“Speak, tiask,” Chayin urged. “Your cahndor awaits an explanation. What circumstances are there that could possibly excuse such negligence?”

Besha shifted her considerable weight about in the saddle. When she finally spoke, her voice quivered with temper ill-restrained.

“We awoke,” she said, “to find them gone, shortly before sun’s rising. So stealthily was it done that the sentries raised no alarm. Restless through the night, it was I myself who discovered the theft, and roused these others to give chase.”

“Who were the sentries?” Cold as the peaks of Mount Opir was Chayin’s voice, and as forbidding.

There was a movement among the feather-trapped tiasks, and five urged their mounts forward.

“You,” snapped Chayin at the foremost of the five. “Is that how you dressed to stand your watch?”

“No, Cahndor.” The tiask’s head was so sunk upon her chest that her voice was only a distressed whisper.

He waved at the remaining four who had stood the posting.

“And the rest of you! Were you perhaps so bedecked at your posts?”

The four hesitantly admitted that they had not been so accoutered.

“How long did it take you, tiask, making ready to give chase after our enemies?” he demanded of the tiask he had first questioned.

The answer was unintelligible.

“Speak louder, that your brothers and sisters may hear you
_i
” the cahndor commanded.

“Perhaps an enth,” the tiask repeated, toneless.

“You shall, all five, go about your duties naked as the crells than whom you are little better. A set’s time will you bear this chastisement.” He waved:them back to the others with evident disgust.

Hael, upon my left, rubbed his jaw with his hand, that his mirth might not peal unrestrained over the silent congregation.

Chayin turned his attention back to Besha.

“I still have not heard why there are no jiasks among you. Could it be that there is such a rivalry between tiask and jiask that it obtrudes even upon the performance of tasks of this magnitude?” he said, dorkat toying with yit.

“I sought my own in the confusion of the moment,” Besha said clearly. Her tone admitted no error. I could feel her gaze upon me. Guanden stamped and snapped the air as the shifting breeze brought him the scent of his mistress.

“Can you assure me the speedy return of these beasts to their stalls, tiask? I would minimize this ignominy before the people of Nemar.”

“But give to me that which is mine, and I will gladly return home, my cahndor. That you set a crell upon Guanden is all that prohibits my departure.” Besha raised up her lade, once again pointing it at my chest. Nude and chaldless and filthy, my station was obvious to the tiask. Upon impulse I slid the recurved short blade from my saddle sheath and hefted it in my hand. Hael shot me a warning look. Besha’s head bobbled.

“This is no simple crell.” The dharener spoke for the first time. “She is a skilled northern forereader whom I hold for questioning and eventual disposition back into the lands whence she came. She is my charge, and none are to touch her but by my order.” What scheme had Hael in his head, that he would speak for me?

“Spawn of apths!” spit Besha, her temper beyond her control. I watched her calm herself. “Perhaps the northern forereader, who has misplaced her chald, who is armed as a tiask and naked as a crell, might be petitioned to get herself from the back of my threx!”

Chayin inclined his head and indicated, stern-faced, that I might ride the steel-blue female he led.

Throwing my leg over Guanden’s back, I slid to the ground, sword still in hand. I handed Guanden’s reins calmly to Besha, conscious of the stillness and the tiasks’ eyes upon me. It was harder to turn my unprotected back to her and walk unconcerned those few steps to the steel’s side. Chayin extended the reins to me, and I grasped them and mounted. It was a relief to be free of Guanden’s constant testing. The steel stood calmly under me, eyes half-closed.

“Attend me at mid-meal, tiask,” said Chayin with a motion of dismissal.

Besha regarded us for a moment. Then she wheeled the red threx, and leading Guanden beside her, raced away toward the appreida upon the horizon.

All was confusion as the tiasks and jiasks apportioned the recovered threx between them. Chayin dismissed the men also, and there were left only the dharener, the cahndor, and I upon the sparse-grassed rolling plain.

Chayin raised his hands behind his head and kneaded the muscles where his neck met his shoulders, He sighed deeply. The uritheria upon his bicep writhed lifelike in umbers and others. The Shaper’s cloak, thrown back from his arms, rustled softly in the stiffening breeze.

Tears of laughter squeezed from Hael’s eyes, and great roars of mirth shook his large frame. The dharener leaned forward upon his saddlegrip for support, convulsed with amusement. Chayin only stared after the fast-receding line of threx. There was no humor in him at this turn of events. His eyes were narrowed, and he still rubbed his right shoulder.

“If they tear like that through the web-weavers’ appreis, I will be graced by the company of the First Weaver,” he remarked dryly.

“I would have given much to see her face,” Hael chortled.

“We will see it at mid-meal. For me, that will be more than soon enough. What prompted you,” he asked the dharener, “to so twist the truth as it pertains to this crell whom I have given you?” And he started Saer at a swinging walk toward the appreida.

Hael sighed, wiped the tears from his eyes, and kicked Quiris into motion. My mount followed of her own accord, quiet, head down, easy-gaited.

“I but opened an alternative path for us concerning her, should we choose to travel it. She did,” reminded Hael, “strike down the Menetpher who might have laid me lifeless upon the field of battle. I could not see her helpless before Besha’s anger. Perhaps my expressed interest will stay the tiask’s hand, although yours would surely have had that effect.” His, tone was wry. “Have you ever,” he continued, “seen another upon Guanden’s back?”

“No,” Chayin allowed, “I have never seen it, before this day. I had hoped that I might continue to see it, but she was remarkably restrained.”

“That probability,” Hael confided, “occurred to me also. However, that which is meant to be will come in the fullness of time. Those things destined to meet cannot be held apart indefinitely.”

“Like a certain sword and specific flesh.” And Chayin finally smiled, his white teeth bared just an instant.

It was a slow and easy pace we kept across the stony-soiled barrens of Nemar. As we neared the appreis of the web-weavers, there appeared before us an old, old man, in the middle of the cobbled way between the weavers’ tents. He was shaking his fist and jumping up and down in agitation. Upon his shoulder danced his webber, itself so old that some of its sensory hairs were white.

Chayin winced when he first spotted them, but made no move to avoid this new confrontation. He headed us straight for the slight, wizened figure, and halted so close that I could see the filmy membranes that seemed to be permanently across the old man’s eyes. The grizzled webber on his shoulder stared at me with emerald eyes and clicked its sable mandibles together. It was as wide across as my body at the waist, and two of its eight legs were wrapped about the weaver’s throat.

“I cannot allow it!” the old man screeched, a raspy whisper of a scream. “I cannot allow it! Chayin! Is that you?” He came close and peered up into Chayin’s face. “Can you not control your people? Would you like to come in and see? See what they have done with their curses and their clatter and their awful thumping of the ground? Would you?”

Chayin reached down and put his hand upon the old man’s arm. “Calm yourself, Tenager. You will put a snarl into the weave yourself. This is sorely disturbed.” And it was true. Colorless fluid dripped from the webber’s underside, and its leg hairs were stiffly extended.

“My boy, you must do something about controlling your army! There is a place for peace and quiet upon this land, and it is here! Let them race elsewhere. Who will stand the reparations? Who, I ask you? Twice in one day is too much to bear!” And the webber upon his shoulder clicked to uphold him.

The old man’s noise had drawn several other web-weavers to the doors of their appreis. They stood there, blinking in the daylight, with that elsewhere look upon them so common to their trade. Each had been wrenched from that inner world of beauty that is the domain of webber and weaver. Silent, they only watched us. It is said that among themselves they might not speak a single word for years unending.

Chayin was still soothing, leaning down to whisper in the old man’s ear. What he suggested calmed the old weaver visibly, and he scuttled off to the shade of the nearest doorway, pushing a young weaver girl within.

The cahndor straightened up. We rode forward. When I looked back, I could still see one of them staring after us.

Once past the web-weavers’ appreis, of which there must have been a hundred, the collection of ambiguous shapes upon the horizon separated themselves and became perhaps a thousand appreis of varying sizes. I was shocked to see so many. Here and there, towering stone edifices pointed spires to the sky, and between the appreis many cobbled ways extended in geometric perfection. The threx’s metal-shod feet rang against the stones. To my far right stood an imposing structure hewn from the solid ornithalum face of a cerulean cliff that loomed sheer and forbidding a nera high into the skies of Nemar. The appreida covered the whole valley floor between those cliffs in the east and the craggy feet of Mount Opir and the Yaicas in the west. Upon those feet I could see great patches of cultivated fields, bright green, yellow, and a brownish purple, and the irrigation ditches of stone that fed them. In the center of the valley was a large and obviously manmade reservoir. I had never seen it upon any map.

I recalled that once there had been no valley here to connect to the Sldrr in the north. This depression had been blasted from the mountains in that terrible explosion that boiled away the Parset sea and made desert out of much of the surrounding land. A long time gone since then, more than twenty-five thousand years, but the cliffs recollect the event, as does the still, dry sea to the south.

“The summer quarters of the Nemarsi, Miheja.” Chayin used the crell name he had given me upon the desert. He veered Saer sharply to the right, taking an easterly thoroughfare, the surface of which was riotous with stylized stone mosaics.

“You ride upon the Way of Wings,” Chayin said, his pride unconcealed. “Only the Way of Tar-Kesa eclipses its beauty!” And as I looked around me at the great winged beasts upon the avenue, I realized that the apprei panels, grown larger and more ostentatious, repeated this theme of flying beasts. Not only of this world were those creatures who danced beneath the threx’s hooves. Uritheria was there also; and Cathe, winged slitsa; and the ei-jos, the five-named human spirit, was limned in fire tones against the blues and creams of the way. I raised my head to speak of its beauty to Chayin, and tapestried pyramids leading in greater and greater magnificence to the thrice-towered keep hewn into the ornithalum cliff left me wordless.

“Is it as beautiful as the keeps of Astria?” Chayin asked.

I had to admit that it was.

“How can you bear to leave it to roam the desert, Cahndor?”

“We summer here, take the autumn in the east, the winter in the south, and the spring upon our lands in the west. To own a thing, one must make use of it. We are never all in one place, but most of us make the yearly pilgrimage. If I knew not the welfare of the south with my own eyes, how could I presume to see to it?”

Looking at the imposing appreis of priceless web-weave, I tried to imagine tiered foundations empty, stra stanchions, some as big around as my waist, collapsed, and the valley deserted but for a handful of stone buildings, watercourses, and the half-wheel of pictorial ways spreading from the, eastern cliffs across-the valley floor.

“Do all the Parsets do likewise?”

“Menetph, Itophe, Coseve, and even decadent Dordassa still retain that much grace of spirit,” he informed me.

There were the noises of gregarious life, and children upon the ways. Masked and concealingly dressed women stared at us. Men in gossamer jewel-toned cloaks leaned together against stachions and whispered as we passed. Some stopped what they were doing entirely to watch. For the first time since I had sorted for my future, I felt again captive.

I was afraid—afraid that I had not truly seen, and thus that the events upon which I waited would not come to be. It is a forereader’s fear. I deep-read Chayin. Perhaps it was his doubt I felt, for his affliction made him ever doubtful. Perhaps it was his fear, and not my own. Forereader’s illness brings one tenors of one’s own creation, masquerading as owkahen, the time-coming-to-be, through which the forereader ever sorts the safer, snore fertile path.

And as I reached into the cahndor’s mind, he was himself busy sensing. His mind had sought the dharener’s while Hael attempted to penetrate the helsar.

We stood in one another’s subjective present, invader and invaded all at once. I broke the link.

Hael reached over and gently slid the blade from my saddle scabbard. His face was guarded.

“You will not need this, among the crells,” he said. The wind from the abyss carried his words to me. I shivered under the bright hot sun.

The threx crossed a wide bridge of dressed ornithalum as we made our way into the cerulean court before the cliff.

Before the first of a hundred broad steps up which one might mount to the palace of Nemar North, Chayin halted the threx. Atop a grisly scene of a wounded dorlcat rended by friysou, armed men with short storm-blue capes crowded around to attend their cahndor. Among them was a tiny woman, covered all over but for her bejeweled bulging child-belly. Just left of the steps was a sheer high wall that had set in it two barred rectangular openings, each twice a man’s height and wide enough for three threxmen riding abreast.