The anguish in his voice caused Bemossed to leave Taitu's side and approach Falco. A deep understanding shone from Bemossed's face, and he looked at Falco as if he wanted to help him, too. Seeing this, Falco held up his hand and said, 'Go away, healer! I don't deserve your miracles. If you only knew what
I
have done. The truth is, whipping wasn't punishment enough for my
real
crimes.'
He took out of his pocket a single gold coin and pressed it into Bemossed's hand. Then he shuffled across the room to open the door.
'You'd better go now,' he said. He looked over at Taitu, who had now managed to sit up against the headboard of the bed. 'Thank you for saving my son's life.'
When he opened the door, however, there came a flurry of feet against muddy earth and I heard a boy's voice call out: 'The Hajarim healed Taitu! The Hajarim healed Taitu!'
I traded a quick, cutting look with Kane. Short of running after this eavesdropper and putting him to the sword - and perhaps everyone in the village - there was no way to keep the secret of what Bemossed had done.
We said farewell and hurried out to the cart. As my friends mounted their horses and Bemossed joined me on the cart's seat, a dozen villagers came out of their huts and in from the fields to watch us pass by. No one tried to stop us or even speak to us. They only stared at Bemossed, some in wonder, but some in loathing, too.
I feared for Falco, but even more for Bemossed, and us, that the Red Priests would inevitably learn of what had happened here. And so as quickly as we could, we left the clump of mud huts far behind us.
The cart's wheels ground and squeaked along the potholed road. Late in the afternoon, the farmland gave out into a rougher terrain of scrubland dotted with pools of stagnant water and bramble patches. I saw no good place to abandon the cart that would keep it hidden, and so Maram suggested that we simply burn it. But the smoke, I thought, might attract attention rather than repelling it. And so we journeyed on, into the early hours of the evening.
And then, perhaps ten or twelve miles from the village, just as it was growing dark, we came into a stretch of forest. Kane found an old path leading off the road through the trees. The horses struggled to pull the cart down this narrow, rocky strip, and it was an even harder work to get the cart off the path and cover it with a tangle of undergrowth. If anyone pursued us, the cart's tracks would certainly give it away. But at least it wouldn't stand by itself in some field like a colorful beacon announcing what we had done and where we had gone.
We took from the cart only those supplies that we would need for a long, hard ride. Liljana regretted leaving behind a large, cast iron oven that she had acquired along the way, and Maram told her that she had become spoiled. In our search across Hesperu, I thought, we all had, for we had never gone without food or suffered through a rainy night without a roof to protect us. After we had put aside our Hesperuk garb and donned tunics, trousers and traveling cloaks - and gathered up our weapons - it came time to consider one of the most daunting problems that faced us.
'Bemossed,' Kane said, pointing at the man we had bought as a slave, 'can't ride.'
Bemossed stood stroking the neck of Little foot, the gentlest of our horses. If he took any insult from Kane's words, he did not show it.
'He
can
ride,' I said. 'I've taught him.'
'So, one lesson only. He might be able to sit on that gelding without falling off, but he can't really
ride.'
'He'll
have
to,' I said. 'We'll help him - there's no other choice.'
I looked at Bemossed and smiled, even though I felt heavy doubt pulling at me. I regretted that he had to take his second lesson at night, in the middle of a mosquito-infested wood, but there was no help for it.
'At least we'll have a bit of moon to light our way,' I said as I gazed up through the trees at the glowing sky.
'Perhaps it would be better,' Master Juwain said, 'if we rested and continued on at dawn.'
I shook my head at this. 'When Morjin learns that we entertained King Arsu,
he
won't rest. And neither will Lord Mansarian and the Red Capes.'
We mounted our horses then, but we did not ride very quickly, for it was dark in the forest and Bemossed had a hard time of things. I had to show him again how to set his feet in the stirrups and hold the reins. His unease communicated to Littlefoot, who nickered nervously and seemed ready to buck Bemossed off his back. It pained me, and all of us, that walking seemed the only pace that Bemossed could safely get out of Littlefoot that night. I told myself, though, that Bemossed was learning quickly and that tomorrow would be a better day. I told myself, too, that any pace at all was a good one if took us away from our enemies.
I intended to ride without much rest straight for the Khal Arrak pass, perhaps sixty miles away. After a while, however I saw that the terrain between here and there was too rough, and would ruin the horses. Worse, Bemossed had no legs for riding, a couple of hours before dawn, when his muscles began cramping along his thighs, I looked for a good place to stop. We came to a stream cutting the road and flooding it; no one, it seemed, had ever bothered to build a bridge here. We moved off into the woods and made camp near the stream's banks. Mercifully, few mosquitoes came out to bite us, not even at daybreak, when I moved over to where Bemossed slept on a pile of leaves and shook him awake.
'Is it time already?' he asked me, yawning. 'It seems that I just closed my eyes.'
He stood with difficulty, and limped like an old man over to Liljana, who handed him a cup of hot coffee. She had arisen an hour before, taking scarcely any rest, just so that she could make him a hot meal of egg pie and maize bread.
We ate quickly as the sun filled the forest with a warm, green-tinged light. The leaves of the oaks and dogwoods about us began to glow, and many birds chirped out their songs. It did not take us long to break camp, for we had not made much of one in the first place. It was a bright day promising much sunshine, and I dared to hope that we might reach the mountains safely by the end of it
Just as we readied to mount, though, Maram let out a cry and jumped away from his horse. He grabbed at his leg and shouted, 'It burns! It burns!'
I feared that he, too, had taken a cramp - or even that a poisonous snake had crawled into his trousers and had bitten him. He continued shouting and jumping about as if he had been dropped down onto a bed of coals, even as he pulled frantically at his trousers. Finally, he managed to undo them and pull them off over his boots. He cast them away from him. He stood there half naked, and I saw that the skin along the outside of his leg
had
been burned as if seared by the sun.
'What happened?' I cried, rushing over to him. Everyone else made a circle around us.
'It is my firestone!' he said.
Maram usually carried his red gelstei secreted in a long pocket sewn into the leg of his trousers. Now we all watched as this cast-off garment began to smoke and smolder. A few moments later, it burst into flames. It didn't take long for the fire to consume the wool. In the center of the ashes, glowing brightly, the hot, crimson crystal burned against the ground.
'What did you do?' I asked him.
'Nothing!' he said. 'I haven't even
thought
of using it for a thousand miles.'
'Then what made it come alive?'
My question almost needed no answer. Even so, Master Juwain pointed at the seething firestone and said, 'It is Morjin.'
It seemed that Morjin's power over the Lightstone - and therefore over our gelstei - had grown. It seemed that we no longer needed to wield our sacred crystals in order for him to take control over them.
Daj went to fetch a spare pair of trousers from Maram's saddlebags, and Maram dressed himself again. He stood looking down at the red gelstei, which still poured forth a ferocious heat.
'Oh, my poor flesh!' Maram said, rubbing his leg. He bent to hold his hand above the radiating firestone. 'My poor, poor crystal - how am I to hold it?'
He might as well, I thought, have tried to grasp a heated iron. 'I'm afraid you might have to abandon it,' Master Juwain said.
'Abandon my
gelstei?
No, no - I can't do that.'
'You can't carry it with you, either.'
Maram stared at the burning stone. 'It will cool - you'll see. It
must.'
We waited a few minutes, but the firestone lost none of its torridness. Neither, it seemed, did it grow any hotter. 'We must ride,' I said to Maram. 'Ride now.'
'No, I can't leave it behind. What if some boy wandering through these woods found it? What if
Morjin
did?'
This objection persuaded all us that we could not simply leave his gelstei burning on the ground here. As we had been told, it might be the last remaining firestone on Ea.
'We won't leave it,' Kane called out. He went over to one of the packhorses and lifted off a waterskin. And emptying its contents on the ground, he went over to the stream, where he bent down to scoop into the skin handfuls of sandy mud. He laid the waterskin on the ground next to the firestone, and he used a rock from the stream to push the firestone point-first down into the opened neck of the mud-filled skin. We waited a while longer, and although the leather skin grew warm, it seemed that the firestone was not hot enough to burn through sand and consume its container. Kane stowed it back on the horse, and he said to Maram: 'If it gets any worse, it will burn the beast and not you.'
His assurance, however, did not console Maram, or any of the rest of us. Maram said, 'I always hoped that if I faced Morjin again, I might burn him with my stone's fire. But now I'm afraid he's coming to burn
me.'
I was afraid of this, too. I began to sweat as a familiar and dreaded sensation stabbed through my spine into my belly. It was like being devoured inside by a ravenous snake.
Maram looked straight at me then, and so did Kane and Master Juwain. Bemossed did, too. His soft eyes filled with a grave knowing as he said to me, 'This poison that Morjin put in your blood burns you and bonds you to him, doesn't it, Valashu?'
'Yes,' I said, 'it does.'
Bemossed stepped up close to me; he set his hand upon the scar on my forehead as if to cool the fever that always tormented me. 'He is drawing nearer, now, isn't he?'
I nodded my head as everyone looked at me. I felt Morjin's desire to destroy me driving through my navel, even as the point of Maram's firestone had pierced Kane's waterskin. A terrible pressure inside me bruised my organs and built hotter and hotter.
'He has found me,' I said. 'Either he or his droghul.'
'Then let us ride,' Kane said, 'and see if we can reach the mountains before him.'
There was nothing to do then but mount our horses and try to outdistance the enemy I felt pursuing us. Whether this might be a single droghul hunting by himself or Morjin riding with Lord Mansarian and two hundred Red Capes, I could not say. Neither could I tell how far behind us they might be.
'All right,' I said to Kane, 'let us ride.'
And so we set out up the road leading north, toward the great, snowcapped peaks of the Crescent Mountains that shone in the distance many miles away.
The horses' hooves beat a thudding tattoo against the earth as the trees along the narrow road flew by. I soon saw, however, that Bemossed could not hold this pace. Twice his foot popped out of his stirrup, which confused and angered his usually gentle horse. As we were bounding down a rough, turning stretch of road, he lost the reins altogether and in desperation threw his arms around Littlefoot's neck to hold on for his life. I called for a halt then. I waited while Bemossed collected his senses and his breath. I rode over to help him reposition himself and take up the reins again. Then I set forth at a slower pace.
I heard Maram mutter to Atara, 'Ah, but it's going to be a long day.'
For two hours we rode through the forest, until it gave out onto an expanse of farmland. The road turned toward the northwest; as the Khal Arrak lay to the northeast, we had to ride off the road to find little lanes between the fields and sometimes cut straight across them. More than one farmer shook his hoe at us and shouted curses at us for trampling his cabbages. I worried that we attracted too much attention. I felt our enemy drawing ever closer - even as the pressure inside me built ever more painful, and hotter and hotter.
'We must ride faster,' I turned to tell Bemossed. 'You must try.'
He nodded his head at this and said, 'It still seems wrong to burden this beast this way, but I will try.'
'Your horse is named Littlefoot,' I told him. 'And he is no beast but a great being who is
proud
to bear you. If you do your part, he will do his.'
He grasped his reins and patted Littlefoot's neck with a new resolve. And for the next hour of the day, beneath the hot noon sun, he managed to hold a canter without once losing his stirrups or reins.
And then we came into a torn, treeless country of poor soil that looked to have been overfarmed. Hesperus sometimes torrential rains had eroded the slopes of the hills rising up toward the mountains. We had to cross many gullies and slips of silt and stones. This demanded skillful horsemanship, but as we were riding over a particularly broken patch of ground, Bemossed clenched his reins too tightly and caused Littlefoot to whinny and rear up. He lost his balance then and flew off onto the ground. Although he took no injury from this fall, he barely managed to roll out of the way in a frantic effort to keep Uttlefoot's driving hooves from crushing him. After that, he did not want to ride anymore. I felt him, however, steeling himself to climb back into his saddle and master this difficult art.
Master Juwain, I saw, was having a hard time of things, too. The work of getting across the gullies caused him to gasp, as if drawing in breath was a strain. This surprised and worried me. He had always seemed to me as tough as tree bark. Even in the heights of the Nagarshath range of the White Mountains, where the air is the thinnest on earth, he had climbed up through a terrible terrain as if he possessed the lungs of a much younger man.